Author Archives: paul.fraser@sfmagazines.com

Meanwhile . . . .

I will appear here again at some point in the near future but, until then, I’m currently posting individual story reviews at a new site, sfshortstories.com—it’s the same boredom, but in smaller doses.
When I’ve read a complete magazine or anthology’s worth of material, I’ll cross post those reviews here, along with any ancillary comments about the cover, non-fiction, editor’s choices, etc.ill appear here again at some point in the near future but, meanwhile, I’m posting individual story reviews at a new site, sfshortstories.com—it’s the same boredom, but in smaller doses.

rssrss

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction #249, February 1972

Summary:
This is one of the best issues of F&SF I’ve read. Not do you get the Hugo and Nebula winning Goat Song by Poul Anderson, but also The Elseones by Dennis O’Neil, and good work by Kit Reed, Pamela Sargent, Dean R. Koontz, and James Tiptree Jr (her first F&SF appearance). Recommended.
[ISFDB link] [Archive.org copy]

_____________________

Editor, Edward L. Ferman; Assistant Editor, Andrew Porter

Fiction:
Goat Song • novelette by Poul Anderson +
Dog Days • short story by Kit Reed
Gather Blue Roses • short story by Pamela Sargent
The Elseones • short story by Dennis O’Neil +
Cosmic Sin • short story by Dean R. Koontz
Painwise • novelette by James Tiptree, Jr.
Ecce Femina! • novelette by Bruce McAllister

Non-Fiction:
Cover • Bert Tanner
Books • by James Blish
Coming Soon
Cartoon
by Gahan Wilson
Films • by Baird Searles
The Asymmetry of Life • science essay by Isaac Asimov
Editor’s Note

_____________________

I stumbled upon this issue while reading one of the stories (Painwise by James Tiptree Jr) for my last review (Terry Carr’s second ‘Best of the Year’ volume) and noticed it also contains one of the year’s best stories, the Hugo and Nebula winning Goat Song by Poul Anderson (which Carr overlooked or just didn’t like—it’s not even in his “Honorable Mentions” list). I was curious about the story and, before I knew it, I’d read not only the Tiptree and the Anderson stories, but the entire issue. It helped that they are an almost uniformly good bunch of tales and, in particular, those who liked the mythical parts of Anderson’s previous contribution to the magazine, The Queen of Air and Darkness (F&SF, April 1971), will probably like the Anderson even more, given that Goat Song is even more of a myth-story than Queen (I originally described the story as a Greek myth, until I realised I know little if anything about that subject—but, according to Wikipedia,1 it seems my guess was correct).

The story itself opens with Harper, a poet and bard who is mourning the death of his partner (variously named in the story, “Blossom-in-the-Sun,” etc.) with his friends in the wilderness, while waiting for the Dark Queen to pass by. She is the immortal representative of a computer called SUM, which rules this far-future Earth, and also stores the souls of the dead for resurrection in the far future:

The car draws alongside and sinks to the ground. I let my strings die away into the wind. The sky overhead and in the west is gray-purple; eastward it is quite dark and a few early stars peer forth. Here, down in the valley, shadows are heavy and I cannot see very well.
The canopy slides back. She stands erect in the chariot, thus looming over me. Her robe and cloak are black, fluttering like restless wings; beneath the cowl Her face is a white blur. I have seen it before, under full light, and in how many thousands of pictures; but at this hour I cannot call it back to my mind, not entirely. I list sharp-sculptured profile and pale lips, sable hair and long green eyes, but these are nothing more than words.
“What are you doing?” She has a lovely low voice; but is it, as, oh, how rarely since SUM took Her to Itself, is it the least shaken? “What is that you were singing?”
My answer comes so strong that my skull resonates, for I am borne higher and higher on my tide. “Lady of Ours, I have a petition.”
“Why did you not bring it before Me when I walked among men? Tonight I am homebound. You must wait till I ride forth with the new year.”
“Lady of Ours, neither You nor I would wish living ears to hear what I have to say.”
She regards me for a long while. Do I indeed sense fear also in Her? (Surely not of me. Her chariot is armed and armored, and would react with machine speed to protect Her should I offer violence. And should I somehow, incredibly, kill Her, or wound Her beyond chemosurgical repair, She of all beings has no need to doubt death. The ordinary bracelet cries with quite sufficient radio loudness to be heard by more than one thanatic station, when we die; and in that shielding the soul can scarcely be damaged before the Winged Heels arrive to bear it off to SUM. Surely the Dark Queen’s circlet can call still further, and is still better insulated, than any mortal’s. And She will most absolutely be recreated. She has been, again and again; death and rebirth every seven years keep Her eternally young in the service of SUM. I have never been able to find out when She was first born.  p. 13-14

In their ensuing conversation Harper tells her he wants SUM to resurrect his partner; she tells him that is impossible but agrees to take him to see the computer.
The middle part of the story takes place in SUM’s underground fortress. Here, Harper is put to sleep for a time while the The Dark Queen is subsumed into SUM and her gathered data downloaded. Later on Harper is woken and given an audience with the computer and, after some back and forth, he gets SUM to agree to the resurrection of his lover in exchange for his service as its prophet. There is one condition however: he must walk out of the complex without looking back at his beloved, who will join him at some point in the journey.
There is an excellent and suspenseful passage that tells of this journey and (spoiler), of course, he fails at the last hurdle:

Was that a footfall? Almost, I whirl about. I check myself and stand shaking; names of hers break from my lips. The robot urges me on.
Imagination. It wasn’t her step. I am alone. I will always be alone.
The halls wind upward. Or so I think; I have grown too weary for much kinaesthetic sense. We cross the sounding river, and I am bitten to the bone by the cold which blows upward around the bridge, and I may not turn about to offer the naked newborn woman my garment. I lurch through endless chambers where machines do meaningless things. She hasn’t seen them before. Into what nightmare has she risen; and why don’t I, who wept into her dying senses that I loved her, why don’t I look at her, why don’t I speak?
Well, I could talk to her. I could assure the puzzled mute dead that I have come to lead her back into sunlight. Could I not? I ask the robot. It does not reply. I cannot remember if I may speak to her. If indeed I was ever told. I stumble forward.
I crash into a wall and fall bruised. The robot’s claw closes on my shoulder. Another arm gestures. I see a passageway, very long and narrow, through the stone. I will have to crawl through. At the end, at the end, the door is swinging wide. The dear real dusk of Earth pours through into this darkness. I am blinded and deafened.
Do I hear her cry out? Was that the final testing; or was my own sick, shaken mind betraying me; or is there a destiny which, like SUM with us, makes tools of suns and SUM? I don’t know. I know only that I turned, and there she stood. Her hair flowed long, loose, past the remembered face from which the trance was just departing, on which the knowing and the love of me had just awakened—flowed down over the body that reached forth arms, that took one step to meet me and was halted.
The great grim robot at her own back takes her to it. I think it sends lightning through her brain. She falls. It bears her away.
My guide ignores my screaming. Irresistible, it thrusts me out through the tunnel. The door clangs in my face. I stand before the wall which is like a mountain. Dry snow hisses across concrete. The sky is bloody with dawn; stars still gleam in the west, and arc lights are scattered over the twilit plain of the machines.  p. 26-27

Another robot stops him battering his head to a pulp on the closed door. SUM tells him that, now he is the computer’s sworn enemy, he will be a source of useful information.
The last section tells of Harper’s madness, and then the revolution he starts during the Dark Queen’s next visit: he cuts off his resurrection bracelet, smashes it with an axe, and encourages others to do the same.
This lyrically written tragedy is a very good, near excellent piece, and I can see why it won Hugo and Nebula Award—but not why Terry Carr left it out of his anthology. (PS I found it surprising that, as per the introduction above, (a) this was written several years previously and (b) was bought by a men’s magazine. I would have thought it was far too literary a piece for that latter market.)

One of the more offbeat stories in Harry Harrison & Brian W. Aldiss’s Best SF: 1971 was The Cohen Dog Exclusion Act by Steven Schrader (Eco-Fiction, 1971), an ‘if this goes on’ story about dog fouling—so it was a bit of a surprise to come across another piece about the same subject from the same time period: Dog Days by Kit Reed:

He found it hard going; traffic had stopped moving some weeks before, which meant he had to vault rusting Volkswagens and climb over taxi bumpers to get to the other side. Abandoned automobiles took up so much room that the dogs were confined to the sidewalks, and by this time they were thick with ordure, studded with an occasional carcass and whorled with traces of scenes of gallantry or carnage, depending.
Since the mayor’s announcement, Sanitation had been put on the extermination detail, and there seemed to be no keeping up with the problem after that. The program was in its fifth week now, and the damnable thing was that conditions seemed to be not better but worse. The strays had mushroomed in number, and in addition to everything else, a number of humans had taken to using the sidewalks and the parks as toilets as part of a radical movement designed to prove some kind of point.  p. 45

This odd, dark satire goes on to show us more of this dystopian society, and also limns the husband’s ambivalent attitude towards the couple’s dog. In a surreal ending (spoiler) the extermination teams arrive at their house one evening, and the wife has a choice to make . . . .

Gather Blue Roses by Pamela Sargent is a slow burn piece that has the narrator remember her childhood as the daughter of a concentration camp survivor who would occasionally leave her family to be alone for short periods of time:

By the time I reached my adolescence, I had heard all the horror stories about the death camps and the ovens; about those who had to remove gold teeth from the bodies; the women used, despite the Reich’s edicts, by the soldiers and guards. I then regarded my mother with ambivalence, saying to myself, I would have died first, I would have found some way rather than suffering such dishonor, wondering what had happened to her and what secret sins she had on her conscience, and what she had done to survive. An old man, a doctor, had said to me once, “The best ones of us died, the most honorable, the most sensitive.” And I would thank God I had been born in 1949; there was no chance that I was the daughter of a Nazi rape.)
By the time I was four, we had moved to an old frame house in the country, and my father had taken a job teaching at a small junior college near by, turning down his offers from Columbia and Chicago, knowing how impossible that would be for mother.  p. 48-49

As the story progresses the narrator and her brother start school, and we find out that (spoiler) she experiences other people’s pain—she is an empath of sorts, to put it crudely.
This is a short, minor piece, but a quietly evocative and effective one.

The Elseones by Dennis O’Neil3 is about a man who meets a woman called Elvira at a religious Crusade at Madison Square Gardens. As their relationship develops we find out that the narrator is an “Elseone,” someone who has the ability to get things from people without payment (as Elvira notes when they get free hotdogs from a vendor shortly after they meet). During the story we also see various people tell the narrator that his “B’raja” is damaged. He also has strange dreams:

Then sleep, and another alien experience, a dream.
Warm sand between my forked toes, I squatted on the marge of a crimson sea, a vista of breakers capped with pink foam dwindling to a horizon hidden in ocher mists. And I was saying in a language native to me a word meaning both serenity and soon, a strange, garbled syllable—chanting it in rhythm with the beat of the waves . . .
I was awake: without being conscious of it, I had been staring at the splash of light on the ceiling from the mercury vapor lamp outside my single window, a bluish rectangle like a phantom television screen. In it, I saw—and recognized—a vast, savage wilderness, and I saw and recognized people I’d never met in cities I’d never been to—Atlanta, London, Budapest, Shanghai: people sitting and lying on beds in dank, anonymous chambers. I blinked: the vision vanished.
I got up, crept into the chill, foul-smelling hall, down the stairs. From somewhere on the bottom landing came a crooning of garbled syllables, meaningless yet recognizable, similar to my dream-chant.  p. 56

It soon becomes apparent (spoiler) that the narrator is an alien who has been stranded on Earth for some considerable time, and who is waiting for collection/rescue by “Servants” long after a conflict that exiled him and his kind to Earth (one of his interlocutors remarks at one point that “they’re close, well within this universe”). The story climaxes with a scene of thwarted transcendence.
This latter passage, and the story’s general description of his mental and emotional state (feelings of dissociation and detachment that will probably be familiar to city dwellers) prove to be an effective mix, and I enjoyed this a lot. It has some similarities with Moore’s The Children’s Hour, and if you like that, you’ll probably like this.

After a run of more serious stories there is some light relief in the fast-moving and wise-cracking Cosmic Sin by Dean R. Koontz (a jobbing SF writer at the time, not the superstar he is now). This has as its hero Jake Ash, who has a body chemistry that makes it possible for him to function as a “doorway between probability lines.” The story begins with a Probability Policeman and two aliens jaunting into his bathroom:

They looked like two enormous heads of cabbage, each somewhere near four foot in diameter, though one was slightly larger than the other. They were leafy and gray, with eyes, nose and maw half hidden in greener clumps of leaves. The larger of the two hung from my shower rail by two ropy tentacles while its other two appendages waved quietly at me, like seaweed stirred along the floor of the ocean. Creepy. You know? The smaller one stood on the closed lid of my toilet, its four tentacles bunched and stiffened beneath it, like legs. Both of them watched me with the prettiest blue eyes I’d ever seen and made—as I listened more closely—very soft, gentle mewing noises, like kittens.
They didn’t seem to want to eat me, strangle me, or suck my blood. If anything, they appeared to want to be cuddled and petted.
Just the same, I kept my eye on them.  p. 72

The policeman explains that the aliens are two of a breeding quartet, and that the other two have disappeared to make pornographic sensie films. This is considered a sacrilegious act by their species, so they want his help to find the pair. The story continues with an aeroplane flight to the house of another “receiver” like Ash, and the eventual rescue of the cabbages, although they are further complications at the house of a local “sender.” The plot is ramshackle and on the light side, but the enjoyment here is in the story’s breezy style, one liners, and general humour.

Ecce Femina! by Bruce McAllister begins with an Army veteran called Mac returning from the war in “Cam” (Cambodia?) to his home in Emerald Hills. There are various hints that the relationship between men and women has profoundly changed in this future:

I kept walking and staring at the sign. When my neck started aching, and I finally looked down, I was at the tract’s eight-foot cinder-block wall.
It was covered with writing in red spray paint.
.
WHOS GOT OSCAR MEYER CLASS? WE DO! YOUD BETTER!
CHAPTERS UNITE SHOOT E9 TONIGHT!
BEWARE OF DOGGIES AND
.
I kept walking. The writing seemed endless.
.
SEE ORGAN LA FAY ON SATURDAY!
RALLY YOU MOTHERBROTHERS!
WE ARE THE WOMEN’S LEAGUE
THE RIDERS OF THE NIGHT
WERE ORNERY BROTHERMUCKERS
WED RATHER BITE THAN—

Mac is then accosted by a chapter of female Hells Angels, who question him on the outskirts of town, and laugh at his plans to return to the garage/filling station he once owned.
When he finally gets to his destination he meets the new owner, Jack, who turns out to be a physically intimidating, cigar chomping woman who eventually wrestles and bear hugs him into submission (her and the Hell’s Angels apparently use a—presumably steroid—drug called E9).
The rest of this piece is a tedious and overlong tale that has the Hell’s Angel’s gang repeatedly turn up with men they have captured (and possibly castrated—there is talk about “Oscar Meyer” patches gained by the Angels for unspecified acts). One of the men is eventually kept by Jack (after a few more wrestling matches) and (spoiler) the end of the story sees her and the captured man leave the area. Mac later receives a photograph of them together with a baby.
I have no idea what this story supposed to be about or what the message is, and I note in passing that this is the only piece in the issue that squarely fits into “the future as present” category described by James Blish in his book review2 (see below). It is also the worst. When I think about the sub-optimal nature of much current SF (often concerned with the political, cultural and personal concerns of the present), I suspect there may be a link between this subject matter and the general quality of the work produced.

I’ve already read the Tiptree in the Carr ‘Best of the Year’ volume for 1972, so the following comments are a cut and paste for the convenience of anyone that hasn’t read that review previously.
Painwise by James Tiptree, Jr. (F&SF, February 1972) has a great hook opening (and one similar to John Baxter’s The Hands in New Writings in SF #6, also reviewed here):

He was wise to the ways of pain. He had to be, for he felt none.
When the Xenons put electrodes to his testicles, he was vastly entertained by the pretty lights.
When the Ylls fed firewasps into his nostrils and other body orifices, the resultant rainbows pleased him. And when later they regressed to simple disjointments and eviscerations, he noted with interest the deepening orchid hues that stood for irreversible harm.  p. 350

The protagonist is wired to experience pain as colour and, as he completes his repeated missions to observe aliens (who variously mutilate or torture him), a boditech mechanism called Amanda puts him back together again.
Eventually there is a battle of wills between him and Amanda—he wants her to provide conversation—and he eventually realises that their mission is overdue and she is faulty. At this point Amanda malfunctions and he is marooned in space.
The second part of the story sees him picked up by a starship occupied by three aliens, a bushbaby like creature called Lovebaby, the butterfly-like Ragglebomb, and the python-like Muscle. None of them can stand the pain experienced by the universe’s creatures (they are empaths/telepaths) so they use him to go and get them the foodstuffs they desire. Initially he complies, but then stops helping them when he realises they are not going to take him back to Earth.
In the final part of the story (spoiler) he hears the phrase “snap, crackle and pop” from their descriptions of the sounds picked up on one of the planets. He knows this is Earth, so he recites a long list of enticing foodstuffs to encourage them to go there.
The story ends with him back on Earth, where he suddenly experiences a massive amount of pain. When he empathically transmits this to the other three they all try to get back to the shelter of the ship. For whatever reason, he makes the decision to stay rather than leave with them.
This is an original, entertaining, and trippy piece, but it appears to get off to a false start (the Amanda section), and I’m not sure that any of the rest of it bears close examination.

•••

This issue’s Cover is by Bert Tanner, another good piece from this impressive artist.3
Books by James Blish opens with a review of Science Fiction: The Future by Dick Allen, and a categorisation similar to one I’ve seen earlier (made by P. Schuyler Miller in his review of Terry Carr’s Best Science Fiction of the Year #2):

Part two, “Alternative Futures,” is subdivided into “The Present as Future” and “The Future,” which neatly separates works exaggerating current dilemmas from stories which, for the most part, offer real alternatives or have no sociological significance.  p. 36

He also reviews Tactics of Mistake by Gordon R. Dickson:

I would guess [that Tactics of Mistake and The Genetic General] were responses to the late John W. Campbell’s final new policy for his magazine, which was to emphasize heroes who set out to accomplish something and by gum succeeded at it.  p. 37

. . . and The Flame Is Green by R. A. Lafferty:

Like this author’s Fourth Mansions, the intent of the work this far seems to be that of a spiritual pilgrimage through symbolic events, another journey toward the Grail; but unlike the previous novel, the symbolism does not seem to be systematized, the protagonists and antagonists don’t fall into well-defined groups, and their motives are either cloudy or are not given at all. The net effect is that of a writer hypnotizedly beating his way deeper and deeper into a purely private world which threatens in the end to become entirely meaningless to anyone else, and perhaps even to himself.  p. 39

I see I’m not the only one who sometimes bounces off of Lafferty.
The final review is of the collection The Lost Face by Josef Nesvadba, which Blish discusses in some detail:

More characteristic is the volume’s title story, the gimmick of which is the discovery and use of a technique of plastic surgery which allows a dead man’s face to be superimposed upon that of a living man. Inexorably, the recipient finds himself driven, mostly but not entirely by circumstances, into living the life of the donor.
Superficially, this might be taken as a parable of the fatal power of the assumption that things are what they seem, but I think also that Nesvadba is re-using here the theme of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, that contrary to Nineteenth Century assumptions, the brain is at the mercy of the body (as concentration-camp experiences and the later development of brainwashing have since gruesomely proved). It is powerfully and circumstantialy told, and also brings off a difficult technical feat: The author tells you the ending first of all, and then leads you back to it, by which time it has completely changed from ordinary melodrama to a situation packed with irony.  p. 40

Blish concludes by saying that Nesvadba is “well worth your attention.” Given that I’ve had this book sitting on my shelves for forty years, I’ll take his advice.
Coming Soon promises Love is a Dragonfly by Thomas Burnett Swann (a novella or “short novel”) in the next issue (he had previously published The Manor of Roses and the novel The Goat Without Horns in the magazine), and a number of big names in future issues: John Christopher, Frederik Pohl, Gene Wolfe and Anthony Boucher, plus a special James Blish issue in April.4
The Cartoon by Gahan Wilson is an amusing one about tombs and Egyptology.
Films by Baird Searles begins by dismissing a movie called The Peace Game (which sounds like a pretentious bore) before going on a Trojan kick with two movies, The Trojan Women and Helen of Troy, both of which sound like they are worth a watch.
The Asymmetry of Life by Isaac Asimov, like most of his essays, starts off with a good anecdote:

Only yesterday (as I write this) I was on a Dayton, Ohio talk show, by telephone; one of those talk shows where the listeners are encouraged to call in questions.
A young lady called in and said, “Dr. Asimov, who, in your opinion, did the most to improve modern science fiction?”
I answered, after the barest hesitation, “John W. Campbell, Jr.”
Whereupon she said, “Good! I’m Leslyn, his daughter.”  p. 106

Following this there are six deadly dull pages explaining mirror-image molecules (I assume this is another way of describing optical isomers). If ever an essay called out for diagrams this one does—half my degree was in chemistry and I could barely follow some of this:

All enzyme molecules are proteins. Protein molecules are made up of chains of amino acids which come in some twenty varieties. All twenty varieties are closely related in structure. In each case there is a central carbon atom to which are attached: 1) a hydrogen atom, 2) an amino group, 3) a carboxyl group, 4) any one of twenty different groups which may be lumped together as “side-chains.”
In the case of the simplest of the amino acids, “glycine,” the side-chain is another hydrogen atom so that the central carbon atom is attached to only three different groups. For that reason, glycine is not asymmetric and is not optically active.
In the case of all the other amino acids, the side-chain represents a fourth different group attached to the central carbon atom, which means that the central carbon is asymmetric and that each amino acid, except glycine, can exist in two forms, one the mirrorimage of the other. And, in fact, each amino acid exists in living tissue in only one of the two forms; and the same form is found, in each case, in all living tissue of any kind.  p. 113

I hope no-one was driving or operating heavy machinery while reading that.
The article finishes by discussing enzymes, the stuff of life, and a possible non-conservation of parity (if I recall correctly, Asimov states all enzymes are all levo- and not dexorotatory, left not right handed).
The short Editor’s Note at the end of the Asimov article mentions that, unknown to the magazine, and as the result of a misunderstanding with his agent, Fritz Leiber’s The Price of Pain Ease (F&SF, November 1971) had previously been published in book form before it appeared in the magazine.

•••

This is one of the better issues of F&SF I can remember reading. Not do you get the Hugo and Nebula winning Anderson story, but all the other fiction bar the McAllister is good or better.  Recommended.  ●

_____________________

1. Goat Song’s Wikipedia page says the “story has strong parallels to the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice”

2. Kit Reed’s Dog Days superficially fits into the “future as present” category but the ending is so surreal that it also fits the “no sociological significance” criteria of the other category.

3. As the introduction to his story hints, Dennis O’Neil went on to be a big wheel in the comics industry. Our loss. His Wikipedia page is here.

4. Bert Tanner did some striking artwork for a number of other issues of F&SF, most of which were double page spreads like this:

He also did a number of single page covers for Venture, F&SF’s sister magazine, which, oddly enough, were not up to the same standard. His ISFDB page is here.

5. The James Blish special issue is reviewed here.  ●

rssrss

The Best Science Fiction of the Year #2, edited by Terry Carr, 1973

Summary:
This is a disappointing follow-up to Carr’s debut, with around half the stories not up to ‘Best of the Year’ standard: Carr seems to have a penchant for work without a decent plot or other arc that provides structure or a point.
The best material comes from Joe Haldeman and Gene Wolfe (the novellas Hero and The Fifth Head of Cerberus), Ben Bova and William Rotsler (the novelettes Zero Gee and Patron of the Arts), and Robert Silverberg (the short story, When We Went to See the End of The World).
There is also good work from C. M. Kornbluth & Frederik Pohl, Naomi Mitchison, and James Tiptree Jr—and a decidedly peculiar introduction by Terry Carr.
[ISFDB page]

Other reviews:1
Cy Chauvin, Amazing, March 1975 p. 117
David G. Hartwell, Locus, #153, 30th December 1973
P. Schuyler Miller, Analog, December 1973, p. 165
Uncredited, Vertex, December 1973, p. 11

_____________________

Editor, Terry Carr

Fiction:2
The Meeting • short story by C. M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl ∗∗∗
Nobody’s Home • short story by Joanna Russ
Fortune Hunter • short story by Poul Anderson
The Fifth Head of Cerberus • novella by Gene Wolfe +
Caliban • short story by Robert Silverberg
Conversational Mode • short story by Grahame Leman
Their Thousandth Season • short story by Edward Bryant
Eurema’s Dam • short story by R. A. Lafferty
Zero Gee • novelette by Ben Bova +
Sky Blue • short story by Alexei Panshin and Cory Panshin
Miss Omega Raven • short story by Naomi Mitchison
Patron of the Arts • novelette by William Rotsler
Grasshopper Time • short story by Gordon Eklund
Hero • novella by Joe Haldeman
When We Went to See the End of the World • short story by Robert Silverberg +
Painwise • novelette by James Tiptree, Jr.

Non-fiction:
Honorable Mentions • by Terry Carr
Introduction • by Terry Carr

_____________________

The Meeting by C. M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl (F&SF, November 1972)3 initially seems like a mainstream story, opening as it does with Harry Vladek attending a PTA meeting at a special school his son attends for his psychological and developmental problems. Here he talks to several of the other parents about their children and the school. and then the meeting commences:

Mrs. Adler was tapping her desk with a ruler. “I think everybody who is coming is here,” she said. She leaned against the desk and waited for the room to quiet down. She was short, dark, plump and surprisingly pretty. She did not look at all like a competent professional. She looked so unlike her role that, in fact, Harry’s heart had sunk three months ago when their correspondence about admitting Tommy had been climaxed by the long trip from Elmira for the interview. He had expected a steel-gray lady with rimless glasses, a Valkyrie in a white smock like the nurse who had held wriggling, screaming Tommy while waiting for the suppository to quiet him down for his first EEG, a dishevelled old fraud, he didn’t know what.
Anything except this pretty young woman. Another blind alley, he had thought in despair. Another, after a hundred too many already. First, “Wait for him to outgrow it.” He doesn’t. Then, “We must reconcile yourselves to God’s will.” But you don’t want to. Then give him the prescription three times a day for three months. And it doesn’t work. Then chase around for six months with the Child Guidance Clinic to find out it’s only letterheads and one circuit-riding doctor who doesn’t have time for anything.
Then, after four dreary, weepy weeks of soul-searching, the State Training School, and find out it has an eight-year waiting list. Then the private custodial school, and find they’re fifty-five hundred dollars a year without medical treatment!—and where do you get fifty-five hundred dollars a year? And all the time everybody warns you, as if you didn’t know it: “Hurry! Do something! Catch it early! This is the critical stage! Delay is fatal!” And then this soft-looking little woman; how could she do anything?
She had rapidly shown him how. She had questioned Margaret and Harry incisively, turned to Tommy, rampaging through that same room like a rogue bull, and turned his rampage into a game. In three minutes he was happily experimenting with an indestructible old windup cabinet Victrola, and Mrs. Adler was saying to the Vladeks, “Don’t count on a miracle cure. There isn’t any. But improvements, yes, and I think we can help Tommy.”
Perhaps she had, thought Vladek bleakly. Perhaps she was helping as much as anyone ever could.  p. 5

The story pivots in the final section, when Vladek returns home and his wife tells him to phone Dr Nicholson. During the subsequent conversation we learn that Nicholson—mentioned earlier—is not connected with the school but is (spoiler) a surgeon offering to transplant the brain from an child who has been badly injured in a car accident—and who won’t survive—into their son. After the call the couple go upstairs to watch their son sleeping in his crib before they make their decision.
The choice most readers would make here is the obvious non-eugenics one, i.e. do not proceed with the operation—but they don’t have to deal with the burden of a child like Tommy (as Kornbluth did4), and may not realise that there is a Trolley Problem here (whatever choice is made, a child dies, so opting for the status quo isn’t necessarily any better than going ahead with the switch). I must admit it messed with my head for a while until I thought it through and decided on the status quo, largely based on the idea that people shouldn’t have to shoulder the burden of another’s bad luck (or at least not to a life-altering extent).
This is a thought-provoking piece, and I suspect John W. Campbell would loved to use this one in Analog to push his readers’ buttons.

Nobody’s Home by Joanna Russ (New Dimensions #2, 1972) opens with the story’s female protagonist Janina meeting a friend in the middle of a series of teleport booth jumps. We learn from their conversation that this future not only has teleportation, but enhanced intelligence and polygamous group marriage.
After the pair finish talking Janina continues on to her group home, where we are introduced to her family members (which include their unrealistically precocious children). Some of the family teleport in from around the world as she catches up on the family gossip, but most of the conversations are utterly vacuous:

“The best maker of hand-blown glass in the world,” said Chi, “has killed in a duel the second-best maker of handblown glass in the world.”
“For joining the movement to ceramics,” said Use, awed. Jannina felt a thrill: this was the bitter stuff under the surface of life, the fury that boiled up. A bitter struggle is foreseen in the global economy. Good old tax-issue stuff goes toddling along, year after year. She was, thought Jannina, extraordinarily grateful to be living now, to be in such an extraordinary world, to have so long to go before her death. So much to do!  p. 24

Presumably this is one of the aspects of this future society that is alluded to in the title—that, and the fact everyone seems to be perpetually travelling.
What little complication the story has arrives in the form of a new family member called Leslie Smith, who does not have enhanced intelligence, and is socially clumsy. When she joins them for dinner that evening it does not go well.
At this point I was puzzled as to the point the story was attempting to make—and then it lost me completely by ending with Janina telling one of the children a creation myth. Mystifying.5

Fortune Hunter by Poul Anderson (Infinity #4, 1972) is set in the near future, and has a media creator (“sensies”) coming to the end of an assignment in one of the few remaining natural spaces in this future overpopulated Earth. He doesn’t want to leave, so he plans to seduce one of the female rangers who comes to his temporary shelter for dinner. He hopes that, if he is successful, they will marry and he can stay on as her assistant. His plan fails.
The last part of the story sees him at home in the violent and overpopulated city where he lives with his wife. When the couple watch the footage he has taken in the park they see that it isn’t his best work. He explains that he was “too involved in the reality.” but privately realises that he was distracted by his plan to marry the ranger and discard his wife.
This is okay, but the protagonist’s plan isn’t convincing, and it’s essentially another gloomy early-70s eco-disaster story.

The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe (Orbit #10, 1972) is a story that is highly regarded by some,6 perhaps because it is an early genre example of literary fiction (I’ve seen a more specific reference to Gothic fiction) fused with SF. In service of the former the story is set on the colony planet Sainte Croix (which has a sister planet, Sainte Anne), a place that feels like a slightly steampunk version of French Indochina—many of the place names are French, there are references to past “French-speaking days,” there is slavery (including a trade in children), and there are robotic machines as well as human lamplighters. All very decadent. (And, although much of this suggests a connection to the Vietnam War—ongoing at the time of the story’s publication—this doesn’t appear to be the case.)
There are also multiple literary (Virginia Woolf, etc.) and mythological (Cerberus, the Styx, etc.) references in the text, and a significant lack of fast genre thrills—if anything, the text demands the reader’s full attention for the images or passages that suggest much more that is immediately apparent.
The story itself largely relates the childhood memories of the narrator (he is later identified as “Number Five” by his father) who, with his brother David, lives in a bordello called La Maison du Chien (on account of the statue of Cerberus, the three-headed dog outside the property), both of whom are tutored by a cybernetic machine called Mr Millions.
After some establishing scenes with Mr Millions—the lessons with him take place against the backdrop of their house and the town library, and include hints about shape-shifting aboriginals on the sister planet Sainte Anne (who may or may not have learned how to mimic humans and may or may not be extinct)—the boys are individually summoned by their rather distant father late one evening for the first of a long series of interviews.
While these (mostly offstage) interviews are in progress other events take place, such as the night where Five sneaks up onto the roof of the bordello and hides from a party of patrons watching a fireworks display. There he is caught by an elderly woman who seemingly floats above the ground (we later find she uses an anti-gravity unit to help with an unspecified disability), and she takes him below to her office to question him (she descends down the centre of a circular stairway at one point). When they talk Five discovers that she is his aunt and, in among some conversation about their family, they discuss Veil’s Hypothesis (this posits that the inhabitants of Sainte Croix are descendants of aboriginals from Saint Anne who mimicked humans). After seeing an old photo (perplexingly so) of his mother, he returns to his room. That night his father injects him with drugs before he is questioned, something that is the norm thereafter.
Following a number of subsequent drug-fuelled interviews Five has a temporal fugue, and awakes one day to find it is winter, and that he is in poor health (the constant use of drugs has affected him badly).
Five then meets a girl in the park called Phaedria, whom he befriends (we later learn she is destined for “marriage or sale”). At the same time his father talks to him about his inheritance and scientific inclinations, and tells Five that he will in future answer the door of the their establishment. Then (spoiler), a visitor from Earth called Marsch arrives at the bordello, looking for a “Dr Veil” (of Veil’s Hypothesis). Five realises from Marsch’s conversational comments that he, Five, may be a clone, and also that his aunt is Dr Veil! He also learns that Mr Million is a “ten nine unbound simulator”—a machine that can host a copy of a human brain (Mr Million later reveals to Five he is a copy of his great-grandfather, who died during the imaging required to make this copy of him).
The next long section obliquely reiterates and confirms a lot of the information that has already been hinted at or disclosed, and starts with Phaedria, Five, and David putting on a number of plays in the local town:

[That] is all I can now remember of our first performance, except that at one point some motion of mine suggested to the audience a mannerism of my father’s and there was a shout of misplaced laughter—and that at the beginning of the second act Sainte Anne rose, with its sluggish rivers and great, grassy meadowmeres clearly visible, flooding the audience with green light.  p. 82

(Later, just before Five (spoiler) murders his father/clone—presumably in revenge for the treatment he has suffered—much is made of the greenness of Marsch’s eyes. That said, the aboriginal strand of this story proves something of a red herring, or at least it is in the novella version—I believe the novel’s other two parts are about/narrated by aboriginals).
Five’s fugues subsequently become more frequent, and at one point he awakes from a dream of being in a boat piloted by a dead man (presumably this is Charon and/or his father, and they are on the River Styx) to find himself in the middle of a burglary that he, Phaedria and David have planned to fund their theatrical productions. After working their way down through floors of fighting dogs and slaves, the three get to a strongbox in an office, only to find it guarded by a seemingly sick but surprisingly aggressive four-armed slave. During a fight to overcome him, there is other information (and images) that suggests Five’s true origins:

There is one other thing to tell about that incident—I mean the killing of the slave—although I am tempted to go on and describe instead a discovery I made immediately afterward that had, at the time, a much greater influence on me. It is only an impression, and one that I have, I am sure, distorted and magnified in recollection.
While I was stabbing the slave, my face was very near his and I saw (I suppose because of the light from the high windows behind us) my own face reflected and doubled in the corneas of his eyes, and it seemed to me that it was a face very like his. I have been unable to forget, since then, what Dr. Marsch told me about the production of any number of identical individuals by cloning, and that my father had, when I was younger, a reputation as a child broker. I have tried since my release to find some trace of my mother, the woman in the photograph shown me by my aunt; but that picture was surely taken long before I was born—perhaps even on Earth.  p. 96

There is more of this later on:

A young male, a sweeper, was brought to the [slave] block. His face as well as his back had been scarred by the whip, and his teeth were broken; but I recognized him: the scarred face was my own or my father’s. I spoke to him and would have bought and freed him, but he answered me in the servile way of slaves and I turned away in disgust and went home.
That night when my father had me brought to the library, for the first time in several nights. I watched our reflections in the mirror that concealed the entrance to his laboratories. He looked younger than he was; I older. We might almost have been the same man, and when he faced me and I, staring over his shoulder, saw no image of my own body, but only his arms and mine, we might have been the fighting slave.  pp. 97-98

Eventually the story comes to the anti-climactic murder scene: Five goes to see his father/clone with the intention of killing him but Marsch unexpectedly turns up. During the subsequent conversation there is the revelation that the family has been cloning itself for many years to improve the strain’s “self-knowledge.” Five eventually gets rid of the green-eyed Marsch by accusing him of being an aboriginal (which, given his green eyes, he probably is).
The rest of the story (the murder scene takes place off-stage) is told by the current day Five, who, it turns out, is narrating the story from prison. After nine years he is finally released and goes back to the house, which he has inherited from his aunt.
This latter section, after dodging what would have been the climax in a more conventional story, makes for a pretty flat ending.
In conclusion, I’m not actually sure the above account gives much of an idea of what the story is really like: it is a complex piece whose many layers and subtle clues will reward careful reading. But it also seemed to me quite a nihilistic, violent, and ultimately pointless piece. For all of the heavyweight literary artillery it deploys, the story doesn’t actually seem to say anything concrete about the constantly alluded to issue of identity. Still, well worth a look to experience what is one of the more complex literary SF stories.

Caliban by Robert Silverberg (Infinity #3, 1972) sees a man taken from the present into a future where everyone looks the same apart from him:

Let me tell you I felt out of place. I was never touchy about my looks before—I mean, it’s an imperfect world, we all have our flaws—but these bastards didn’t have flaws, and that was a hard acceptance for me to relate to. I thought I was being clever: I said, You’re all multiples of the same gene-pattern, right? Modem advances in medicine have made possible an infinite reduplication of genetic information and the five of you belong to one clone, isn’t that it? And several of them answered, No, this is not the case, we are in fact wholly unrelated but within the last meta-week we have independently decided to standardize our appearance according to the presently favored model. And then three or four more of them came into my room to get a look at me.
[. . .]
In the beginning I kept telling myself: In the country of the beautiful the ugly man is king.  p. 118

Most of the story is about the man’s sexual experiences in this strange future world but, no matter how much various women desire him, he can’t get over the fact that he doesn’t look as perfect as the others. Eventually he convinces his doctors to change him so he looks as perfect as they are but (spoiler) he awakes from the operation to find that everyone has changed to look like him.
A mordantly amusing and ironic (if minor) tale about, I suppose, alienation.

Conversational Mode by Grahame Leman (New Writings in SF #20, 1972) is a story in the form of keyboard terminal conversation between a Nobel prize winning scientist who has been committed to an asylum after a nervous breakdown, and a psychotherapeutic program:

where am i?
.
TO START CONVERSATION U MUST ENTER ‘START’ ON THE TERMINAL KEYBOARD AND WAIT FOR THE INSTRUCTION ‘READY’ ON THE DISPLAY AT THE FOOT OF YOUR BED ф
.
Start
.
0321/42 READY ф
.
who are you?
.
HARDWARE IBM 490/80; SOFTWARE JOHN S HOPKINS PSYCHO-THERAPEUTIC PROGRAM XIXB, WRITTEN IN PSYCHLAN VII DIALECT 324 (SEE MANUAL IN YOUR BEDSIDE CUPBOARD); MIDDLEWARE MACHINE-INDEPENDENT OPERATING SYSTEM CALTECH PIDGIN XVIII (SEE MANUAL IN YOUR BEDSIDE CUPBOARD) ф
.
what do i call you?
.
U MAY DECLARE A NAME IN PLACE OF THE STANDARD ‘START’ ENTRY ф TO DECLARE A NAME, ENTER ‘DECLARESTARTNAME:’ FOLLOWED BY A NAME OF NOT MORE THAN TEN CHARACTERS ф
.
declarestartname: boole; query AOK?
.
BOOLE DECLARED AOK ф
.
where am i, boole?  pp. 124-125

.
The back and forth between the patient and the computer (which would have seemed dated before the advent of webchat) gives us some background detail about his world and shows the totalitarian nature of his confinement. It’s okay I guess, but it’s mostly wordplay.

Their Thousandth Season by Edward Bryant (Clarion #2, 1972) is one of his ‘Cinnibar’ stories, a series set in a city of the future. This one opens with a number of media types at a party: Tournalmine, a successful actress, Francie, Sternig, etc. Most of the story, in between the various sex scenes, concerns Sternig and Francie’s relationship breakup and (spoiler) how they eventually get back together again—possibly a recurrent event due to the ability of these people to have their memories edited:

“Can’t remember? Or won’t?”
“Can’t,” [Sternig] says. “I think it’s can’t. I’m not really sure. I have my mind sponged periodically. Don’t you?”
Tourmaline nods. “Occasionally. As seldom as I can. I prefer to keep as many memories as possible. Otherwise I tend to repeat my mistakes.”
“In time,” says Sternig, “we all repeat.”
“Some of us more often than others.” She gestures across the hall. “Francie goes to the sponge once a year, maybe more. I suspect her of monthly visits, even weekly.”
“I suppose she doesn’t like her memories,” he says.  p. 151

This is okay, I guess, and, if you are interested in the dysfunctional emotional lives and ennui of jaded near-immortals, you’ll probably like it more than me.

Eurema’s Dam by R. A. Lafferty (New Dimensions #2, 1972) is about an idiot savant called Albert, who is a genius inventor:

Even his mother had to admit that Albert was a slow child. What else can you call a boy who doesn’t begin to talk till he is four years old, who won’t learn to handle a spoon till he is six, who can’t operate a doorknob till he is eight? What else can you say about one who put his shoes on the wrong feet and walked in pain? And who had to be told to close his mouth after yawning?  pp. 158-159

We then see the various adventures (and misadventures) Albert has while growing up: he makes a smarter copy of himself called Danny, which goes off with his girlfriend Alice; he solves the problem of smog and teenagers; he makes a hunch machine; and so on.
Eventually he wins the Eurema trophy (named after synthetic Greek goddess of invention) and gives a disconcerting speech:

“Eurema does not look like that!” Albert gawked out and pointed suddenly at the trophy. “No, no, that isn’t her at all. Eurema walks backward and is blind. And her mother is a brainless hulk.”
Everybody was watching him with pained expression. “Nothing rises without a leaven,” Albert tried to explain, “but the yeast is itself a fungus and a disease. You be regularizers all, splendid and supreme. But you cannot live without the irregulars. You will die, and who will tell you that you are dead? When there are no longer any deprived or insufficient, who will invent? What will you do when there are none of us defectives left? Who will leaven your lump then?”
“Are you unwell?” the master of ceremonies asked him quietly. “Should you not make an end of it? People will understand.”
“Of course I’m unwell. Always have been,” Albert said. “What good would I be otherwise? You set the ideal that all should be healthy and well adjusted. No! No! Were we all well-adjusted, we would ossify and die. The world is kept healthy only by some of the unhealthy minds lurking in it. The first implement made by man was not a scraper or celt or stone knife. It was a crutch, and it wasn’t devised by a hale man.”
“Perhaps you should rest,” a functionary said in a low voice, for this sort of rambling nonsense talk had never been heard at an awards dinner before.  pp. 166-167

Eventually his hunch machine suggests to him that, rather than serving mankind, he can take advantage of them.
This Hugo Award co-winner (Best Short Story 1972, along with the Kornbluth & Pohl piece above) is a pleasant enough read, and is occasionally amusing, but it rather drifts to a halt at the end. Perhaps Lafferty’s whimsical story telling is an acquired taste.

Zero Gee by Ben Bova (Again, Dangerous Visions, 1972)7 is one of his ‘Kinsman’ series of stories featuring the eponymous astronaut, and it opens with a group of Air Force guys and press reporters discussing Kinsman’s forthcoming mission in orbit with an attractive Life magazine photographer:

“I know this mission is strictly for publicity,” Calder said, “but Kinsman? In orbit for three days with Life magazine’s prettiest female? Does Murdock want publicity or a paternity suit?”
“Come on, Chet’s not that bad . . .”
“Oh no? From the stories I hear about your few weeks up at the NASA Ames center, Kinsman cut a swath from Berkeley to North Beach.”
Tenny countered, “He’s young and good-looking. And the girls haven’t had many single astronauts to play with. NASA’s gang is a bunch of old farts compared to my kids. But Chet’s the best of the bunch, no fooling.”
Calder looked unconvinced.
“Listen. When we were training at Edwards, know what Kinsman did? Built a biplane, an honest-to-God replica of a Spad fighter. From the ground up. He’s a solid citizen.”
“Yes, and then he played Red Baron for six weeks. Didn’t he get into trouble for buzzing an airliner?”
Tenny’s reply was cut off by a burst of talk and laughter. Half a dozen lean, lithe young men in Air Force blues—captains, all of them—trotted down the carpeted stairs that led into the bar.
“There they are,” said Tenny. “You can ask Chet about it yourself.”
Kinsman looked no different from the other Air Force astronauts. Slightly under six feet tall, thin with the leanness of youth, dark hair cut in the short flat military style, blue-gray eyes, long bony face. He was grinning broadly at the moment, as he and the other five astronauts grabbed chairs in one comer of the bar and called their orders to the lone bartender.  pp. 171-172

The rest of the opening becomes progressively more risqué as the group discuss the problems of zero gee sex—and then Kinsman is told that the third member of the crew will be another woman. Intended, presumably, as a chaperone.
The rest of the story takes place in orbit, and largely concerns the interplay of the three characters, Kinsman, Linda (the photographer), and Jill (the other astronaut). Kinsman spends a considerable amount of time and thought trying to get Linda in the sack, something that is made easier when Jill eventually gives him a free run.
Notable moments during this section are the scenes where Kinsman and Linda are EVA during sunset, and when Linda reveals that she had a baby when she was younger but gave it up.
The story ends, of course, with Kinsman (spoiler) wanting more than just casual sex from Linda, but she isn’t interested.
I thought this was a pretty good story that was well told, but it seems pretty dated nowadays and I doubt it will satisfy anyone. People will either take issue with Kinsman’s sexism (which will also be taken as the story’s and the author’s sexism—nowadays these viewpoints are all too often represented as the same thing, all based on a reader’s subjective impression of the text), or they will be entirely unconvinced by Kinsman’s change of heart (why would a man who has had so many women suddenly go all doe-eyed over Linda?) I’d have to concede that the latter feels like a liberal writer’s feminist cop-out, although without it there wouldn’t be much of a story.

Sky Blue by Alexei Panshin and Cory Panshin (Amazing, March 1972) follows up Alexi’s appearance in last year’s volume with a collaboration with his partner Cory.
The story opens with a spaceship getting lost, after which the pilot wrecks the engines trying to solve the problem before killing himself. Three of the passengers bemoan their fate:

Being lost so suddenly was as painful and frustrating to Triphammer and Puddleduck as an interrupted fuck.
Suddenly their answers were of no use to them. Oh, it hurt.
Triphammer, Puddleduck and Mount Rushmore were the highest huddle of all. They gathered by a candle in one room. Triphammer paced frantically, Puddleduck nodded at appropriate moments, and Mount Rushmore loomed. Harold looked out through the curtains into the universe.
Triphammer said, “Oh, losings. Screamie! The action, pop-a-dop.” Her face could not contain her regret.
Puddleduck nodded. “Misery,” he said.
“Misery,” said Mount Rushmore.
Harold said, “There’s somebody walking by outside.”  p. 204

A tenticular alien has arrived. Harold, the son of Triphammer and Puddleduck, is not incapacitated by fear like they are and manages to communicate with the alien, who then changes into an old man to calm the parents down. The alien then points out its nearby home world, and says the humans can use it.
The humans (spoiler) subsequently trash the planet looking for something called The Third Thing, so they put Harold (now called Sky Blue) on an orbiting moon to ambush the Landlord Thing (the alien) when he returns. Sky Blue shoots the alien when he turns up but does not kill him.
The Landlord Thing then tells Sky Blue to heal the planet, which he miraculously does. Sky Blue’s parents then arrive to tell him about the reversal of all the harm they have done, and how the material they’ve mined has vanished. Sky Blue tells them they have been given a second chance, and then he leaves with the Landlord Thing.
If you want an ecological fairy tale told in sub-Laffertyesque cutesy with added random events, then this will be right up your street. For me, it was the joint worst story in the anthology along with the Russ.

Miss Omega Raven by Naomi Mitchison (Nova #2, 1972)8 is an account of an uplifted raven (the bird’s intelligence has been experimentally increased) who goes from Omega to Alpha in her flock:

This way each took orders and gave orders, each pecked in punishment and was herself pecked; it was the same with the husbands. Only the most beautiful, the bravest, the top raven Alpha Corax, gave orders. Nobody pecked him. He led the flock to roost or to hunt. He watched and warned for enemies and sometimes attacked. His beak was sharpest.
But I was lowest of the low. She—the other unmated—pecked me and I had to accept this, jumping away from food, not pecking back. All that was in the deep part of me. I could not escape being how I was. There was no choice. But also I was angry and that anger was in the other part of me driving me to plan. That part of me thought of a future in which I would not be pecked. I knew I was becoming ugly. My feathers were draggled. I was thin, for I always got the worst share, either of flesh or eggs or the rarer grain and nuts. No wonder I was a pecked on with nobody to peck. Had God-man made me this? If he had not made me something other I could not have questioned what I was.  pp. 217-218

I thought this story, though short and slight, was an interesting and intriguing piece.

Patron of the Arts by William Rotsler (Universe #2, 1972) initially tells tell us about the life of Brian Thorne, a wealthy patron of the arts in our near future. Thorne is married to a younger woman, Madelon, and they have an open relationship. This latter, along with some of the other background detail, makes this world seem a little like an extrapolated version of the 1960s or 1970s.
Then Michael Cilento comes on the scene. Cilento is an artist who creates “molecular constructs,” works of art that are part holographic image and part emotional transmitter. Trent attempts to commission a construct of Madelon from Cilento, but the latter refuses, saying he will do it for nothing.
The next part of the story (spoiler) sees Trent learning of the pair’s travels, and their affair. But not, as normal, from Madelon. Eventually, the construct is finished, and Trent goes to view it:

It drew me from the doorway. Everyone, everything was forgotten, including the original and the creator with me. There was only the cube. The vibrations were getting to me and my pulse increased. Even knowing that pulse generators were working on my alpha waves and broadcast projectors were doing this and sonics were doing that and my own alpha wave was being synchronized and reprojected did not affect me. Only the cube affected me. All else was forgotten.
[. . .]
The figure of Madelon sat there, proudly naked, breathing normally with that fantastically lifelike movement possible to the skilled molecular constructors. The figure had none of the flamboyance that Caruthers or Raeburn brought to their figures, so delighted in their ability to bring “life” to their work that they saw nothing else.
But Mike had restraint. He had power in his work, understatement, demanding that the viewer put something of himself into it.
I walked around to the back. Madelon was no longer sitting on the throne. It was empty, and beyond it, stretching to the horizon, was an ocean and above the toppling waves, stars. New constellations glowed. A meteor flashed. I stepped back to the side. The throne was unchanged but Madelon was back. She sat there, a queen, waiting.
I walked around the cube. She was on the other side, waiting, breathing, being. But in back she was gone.
But to where?  p. 252

Trent then finds out, of course, that she is leaving him for Cilento, which sets up the story’s neat closing line:9

The cube is more than Madelon or the sum of the sum of all the Madelons who ever existed. But the reality of art is not the reality of reality.  p. 254

If this story has a weakness it is in attempting to convey the effect of art of the viewer or listener (this is nearly always a shortcoming in stories about music, for example), but it’s still a pretty good piece, and a worthy Hugo and Nebula Award finalist (I thought it was a winner).

Grasshopper Time by Gordon Eklund (F&SF, March 1972) begins with an alien or mutant called Angel (we learn later his mother was human, his father something else) who finds two young children in the desert. He takes them back to his cave and there he learns (partially by telepathy, partially by listening) that their parents were recently shot and killed. Strangely, they aren’t grieving.
After a week or so Angel and the girl go to collect wood, during which he ends up having to save her from a man who attacks her. He also picks up from the man’s mind that people are looking for the children, and that search parties will shortly arrive in the area of the cave. Then he and the girl find some baby rabbits whose mother is dead, so they take them back to the cave.
Days later Angel senses the search parties in the area are beginning to leave but, at one point when he is distracted by Sarah showing him a picture she has drawn on the cave wall, Richard is shot. Angel rushes outside and fights with the man (in a somewhat confusing scene). Later we find Angel was shot and badly injured but has subsequently regenerated.
Sarah then leaves him because he can’t die. He looks at her painting once more before also leaving the cave.
This, like a number of stories I’ve read by Eklund, is a competently told piece but the (sometimes almost random) events and situations that unfold in this do not sum to a normal story. Barely okay.

Hero by Joe Haldeman (Analog, June 1972)10 is the first of a handful of ‘Forever War’ stories11 that appeared in Analog in the early to mid-1970s (and which were eventually fixed-up into the Hugo and Nebula Award winning novel of the same name).
The story—told from the cynical viewpoint of one of the grunts, Private William Mandela—gets off to a cracking start with a sergeant showing a squad of soldiers an “Eight Silent Ways to Kill” film—which uses brainwiped criminals as subjects. During the subsequent Q&A it becomes apparent that the soldiers are being trained to fight an alien race called the Taurans, and that this is a very different army:

“That’s the important thing.” He stabbed a finger at the screen. That’s why those eight convicts got caulked for your benefit . . . you’ve got to find out how to kill Taurans, and be able to do it whether you have a
megawatt laser or just an emery board.”
[. . .]
“Any more questions?” Nobody raised a hand.
“OK.—tench-hut!” We staggered upright and he looked at us expectantly.
“Screw you, sir,” came the tired chorus.
“Louder!”
“SCREW YOU, SIR!”
One of the army’s less-inspired morale devices.  p. 278

After this eye-opening beginning (well, it was in the mid-seventies) the surprises come in an almost constant stream: we find out that Mandela is in an elite conscripted army (the UN Expeditionary Force recruits all have IQs of over 150) formed to fight a war with the alien Taurans at relativistic distances; marijuana is legal; casual sex between the co-ed recruits compulsory; and then, just as all this is sinking in, they shoot off on a three week trip to Pluto (at a constant 2g) for advanced training.
This next part of the story is a riveting read that combines a brutal training regime (armoured spacesuits, live ammunition and capital punishment) and a brutal environment (there is a lot of science involved in staying alive at just over zero K). But, despite their training, some of them die in accidents.
After a number of war games, some of which are lethal (three more die in the final exercise) they move to Stargate, where they do some construction work before jumping to the system where they will attack a Tauran base.
The concluding part of the story (spoiler), which covers the combat operation, sees them dodging a missile attack on the way down to the planet that houses a Tauran base: there, they find that the terrain is similar to South American jungle (so much for all that training on Charon). Then, when they end up killing a group of upright herbivores (they discover this from the stomach contents of one of the corpses), several of the platoon’s Rhine-sensitive personnel develop everything from headaches to fatal cerebral haemorrhages (the creatures are obviously telepathic and their dying transmissions have proved lethal to some). Finally, when they reach the base and discuss the plan of attack, Potter (Mandella’s partner) starts arguing with the sergeant about unnecessarily killing all the Taurans. This becomes academic when the sergeant triggers a post-hypnotic battle command:

I hardly heard him, for trying to keep track of what was going on in my skull. I knew it was just posthypnotic suggestion, even remembered the session in Missouri when they’d implanted it, but that didn’t make it any less compelling. My mind reeled under the strong pseudo-memories; shaggy hulks that were Taurans—not at all what we now knew they looked like—boarding a colonist’s vessel, eating babies while mothers watched in screaming terror—the colonists never took babies; they wouldn’t stand the acceleration—then raping the women to death with huge veined purple members—ridiculous that they would feel desire for humans—holding the men down while they plucked flesh from their living bodies and gobbled it . . . a hundred grisly details as sharply remembered as the events of a minute ago, ridiculously overdone and logically absurd; but while my conscious mind was reflecting the silliness, somewhere much deeper, down in that sleeping giant where we keep our real motives and morals, something was thirsting for alien blood, secure in the conviction that the noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters . . .  pp. 332-333

The final scenes are realistically grisly, especially when it becomes apparent that the Taurans have no concept of hand to hand fighting (for those who were around at the time, there may be echoes of the My Lai massacre).12
In general, this was a much darker and more cynical story than I remembered and, although it is very good or better for most of its length (and an exemplar of how traditional SF was being remade by the New Wave in the early seventies), it tails off a little towards the end. Still, a more than worthy Hugo finalist, and I’d probably have put it at the top of my list.

When We Went to See the End of the World by Robert Silverberg (Universe #2, 1972) is his second story in the volume, and another in which he continues to channel his inner Robert Sheckley. This one has a couple at a party who describe their recent time-travel trip to the end of the world—and then the other couples talk about their trips there, all of which are different:

“How long ago did you do it?” Eddie said to Nick.
“Sunday afternoon. I guess we were about the first.”
“Great trip, isn’t it?” Eddie said. “A little somber, though. When the last hill crumbles into the sea.”
“That’s not what we saw,” said Jane. “And you didn’t see the crab? Maybe we were on different trips.”
Mike said, “What was it like for you, Eddie?”
Eddie put his arms around Cynthia from behind. He said, “They put us into this little capsule, with a porthole, you know, and a lot of instruments and—”
“We heard that part,” said Paula. “What did you see?”
“The end of the world,” Eddie said. “When water covers everything. The sun and the moon were in the sky at the same time—”
“We didn’t see the moon at all,” Jane remarked. “It just wasn’t there.  p. 343

Meanwhile, in the background, we learn a lot about the current state of the world and its many ongoing catastrophes: earthquakes, mutant amoeba, cholera outbreaks, presidential assassinations, etc. (My favourite line from the story is, “It looked like Detroit after the union nuked Ford.”)
The irony of time-travelling to the end of the world when it is happening around you is highlighted in the closing lines of the story:

Nick and Jane discussed where they would go for their next vacation. “What about going to see the end of the world all over again?” Jane suggested, and Nick laughed quite a good deal.  p. 349

Pretty good.

Painwise by James Tiptree, Jr. (F&SF, February 1972) has a great hook opening (and one similar to John Baxter’s The Hands in New Writings in SF #6, reviewed here last week):

He was wise to the ways of pain. He had to be, for he felt none.
When the Xenons put electrodes to his testicles, he was vastly entertained by the pretty lights.
When the Ylls fed firewasps into his nostrils and other body orifices, the resultant rainbows pleased him. And when later they regressed to simple disjointments and eviscerations, he noted with interest the deepening orchid hues that stood for irreversible harm.  p. 350

The protagonist is wired to experience pain as colour and, as he completes his repeated missions to observe aliens (who variously mutilate or torture him), a boditech mechanism called Amanda puts him back together again.
Eventually there is a battle of wills between him and Amanda—he wants her to provide conversation—and he eventually realises that their mission is overdue and she is faulty. At this point Amanda malfunctions and he is marooned in space.
The second part of the story sees him picked up by a starship occupied by three aliens, a bushbaby like creature called Lovebaby, the butterfly-like Ragglebomb, and the python-like Muscle. None of them can stand the pain experienced by the universe’s creatures (they are empaths/telepaths) so they use him to go and get them the foodstuffs they desire. Initially he complies, but then stops helping them when he realises they are not going to take him back to Earth.
In the final part of the story (spoiler) he hears the phrase “snap, crackle and pop” from their descriptions of the sounds picked up on one of the planets. He knows this is Earth, so he recites a long list of enticing foodstuffs to encourage them to go there.
The story ends with him back on Earth, where he suddenly experiences a massive amount of pain. When he empathically transmits this to the other three they all try to get back to the shelter of the ship. For whatever reason, he makes the decision to stay rather than leave with them.
This is an original, entertaining, and trippy piece, but it appears to get off to a false start (the Amanda section), and I’m not sure that any of the rest of it bears close examination.

•••

Terry Carr’s Introduction is an odd piece about the cancellation of the Apollo space program in 1972. Carr notes that the American public has lost interest in this, and (eventually) states that any future programs must relate more directly to the people. But he takes a odd route to get to that point, first by judging the delayed launch programming against other TV entertainment like the Mary Tyler Moore show, and then by making flippant suggestions about how they could make the coverage more interesting:

So imagine, if you can, how much more interesting those routine transmissions from space could be if, say, a couple of the astronauts began to kibitz about getting vasectomies after they splash down. Or if, nearing the end of a long orbiting mission, one of them confided to Houston Control that he’d had a nocturnal emission.
For that matter, how the ratings might perk up if one of those bored and boring news analysts were to say “I’m going to do something I promised myself I’d never do. I’m going to go take a leak while we’re waiting.”  p. x

Bizarre, or puerile, or both.
Honorable Mentions by Terry Carr is a page of story recommendations (presumable the also-rans that didn’t make it into the book).13 I guess if Carr had a larger volume than this 370 pp. Ballantine paperback—a Dozois bug-crusher for instance—several of these would also have also been selected. Looking at the list I’m not sure this would have improved the overall quality. I’m particularly surprised that Poul Anderson’s Goat Song (F&SF, February 1972) a Hugo and Nebula winner, and obvious crowdpleaser, isn’t in this book or on that list.

•••

After a good start to Carr’s ‘Best of the Year’ series last year, this is a disappointing follow-up, with much of the first half containing stories that are average at best (by the time I finished the Panshin story, I wondered what on Earth was going on). The remainder of the book pulls out of the dive but that still leaves us with, by my count, five stories that deserve to be here (out of sixteen), four I wouldn’t quibble about, and seven that shouldn’t have been included.14
Part of the problem here is that Carr seems to have a penchant for non-story stories, i.e. those without a visible plot or other arc that gives them some structure or point, and which don’t appear to bring anything else to the table.  ●

_____________________

1. Cy Chauvin (Amazing, March 1975) opens his review with this comment:

Terry Carr and Donald Wollheim used to edit The World’s Best SF series for Ace Books, generally considered for many years the best of the ‘best’ collections. Now both Carr and Wollheim have left Ace and started best-of-the-year collections of their own. Carr’s is easily the better of the two. He has managed to steer a course between the more conservative, traditional—and I’m afraid occasionally stodgy—tastes of Wollheim, and the experimental and too often mainstream mixture of prose and poetry that turns up in the Harrison-Aldiss Best SF (the other longest running best of the year series).  p. 117

Fair comment perhaps, although I’ve only read one Wollheim volume, for 1976, and I thought that was better than the Carr. I’d add that perhaps Carr drifted too far towards Harrison and Aldiss in this volume but, on reflection, I don’t think many of Carr’s story choices are too experimental or New Wave: they’re just not very good.
Chauvin goes on to say:

Of course, ‘best’ collections are still no substitute for the actual original publications themselves, no matter how ably edited, since no reader’s and editor’s tastes will ever completely agree. I, for instance, cannot understand why Carr failed to include Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hugo-winning novella “The Word For The World is Forest” in his collection, or even on his list of Honorable Mentions.

As for the stories themselves, he seems lukewarm about the Panshin (“unsubtle ecological message,” “simplistic moralizing”), but thinks the Russ a “very strong” story about a Utopian world where “all the problems have been solved except that of the human condition.” He adds:

Russ has that rare ability to drop the reader into a strange future world and just let him figure out what is going on, without resorting to explanatory lectures or other artificial devices. She relies instead on realistically-placed dialog and description, and makes the story a puzzle that the reader has to put together. There are certain rewards gained by doing this, and I don’t think Russ makes her stories “difficult” or obscure for their own sake; there is as much reason and logic behind what she makes difficult and obscure in her stories as there is in what she makes easy and clear.  p. 117-118

Chauvin likes the first of the Silverberg stories better than the second (“a much weaker effort”). He thinks the Tiptree and Eklund stories will bear rereading, and that Haldeman’s Hero is “a solid meaty novella,” although it does not need to be an SF story. He finishes by rating the Wolfe as “excellent,” and the Lafferty, “fair.”
It’s an interesting, and perhaps illuminating, review. Worth reading.

P. Schuyler Miller (Analog, December 1973) says this volume is the best of the ‘Bests’ he has read so far (his review of the Carr volume is followed by one of Forrest J. Ackermann’s).
He notes that five of the stories come from three of the field’s magazines (Amazing, Analog, and three from F&SF) and eleven come from original anthologies (but, surprisingly, only one from Again, Dangerous Visions). Miller says that:

The theme of most of the stories—and perhaps Terry Carr is saying that this is the theme of most present-day science fiction—might be called “Our world and welcome to it!” The stories project all too visible forces and trends in our own society into the near future.  p. 165

He adds later:

[These] stories, in one way or another, are about ourselves. You can think of them as distorting mirrors reflecting the present, or as plane mirrors showing what may be.  p. 165

Miller excludes the Wolfe from the above categories (“the best story in the book”), and the Haldeman (a cruder, more cynical extension of Heinlein’s ‘Starship Troopers’”), Tiptree, Jr., and Bova. He also omits the Mitchison, Panshin and Eklund stories at the end, which takes him up to about half the book—so probably not “most of the stories” then. Oh well.
His two favourites apart from the Wolfe story are Anderson’s Fortune Hunter, and William Rotsler’s Patron of the Arts, but he thinks “there isn’t a bad story in the book.” Some people are easily pleased.

The uncredited review in Vertex, December 1973 praises Carr’s author choice but then has this:

Our only disagreement with Mr. Carr is his obvious leaning towards the “new wave’’ type of fiction, and his apparent abhorrence of anything which smacks of plain, old-fashioned story telling. If that’s your bag (new wave), this is your book.  p. 11

They have a point about the aversion to “storytelling,” old-fashioned or otherwise.

2. These were the results from our group read poll (11 voters/33 votes):

3. The editor’s introduction to the Kornbluth & Pohl story in F&SF states:

Cyril Kornbluth died in 1958, still a young man, but now that Fred Pohl is writing sf again we have this new story (based on notes made while Kornbluth was alive) to add to a memorable body of work under the most famous collaborative byline in sf.  p. 5

According to Mark Rich’s book, C. M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary, there were more than notes left:

Frederik Pohl, 1958, May 23: letter to Mary Kornbluth (SU). “Harry Altshuler turned up a story of Cyril’s called The Meeting which he turned over to me. I suppose you’ve read it—it’s about a PTA meeting at a thinly-disguised Berman School. Harry diligently sent it out to half a dozen markets or so, but there’s one obvious possibility he missed—The New Yorker—so so I’ve banged it out to them, just on the chance.” Although Pohl obviously thought it worth trying in that market, it was the only one he tried. (Chapter 28 footnote 7.)

Later on, Pohl spoke to Mary Kornbluth about revising several unsold mainstream stories into SF ones:

“It occurs to me that some of the non-science-fiction shorts might be reworkable into science fiction—assuming they won’t sell in their present form. This has the definite advantage, assuming I do the reworking, of building up the inventory of Pohl and Kornbluth collaborations, to the point where we might be able to get Ballantine to do a collection. But The Meeting doesn’t, offhand, seem like an easily adaptable one.” (Chapter 29)

4. The Kornbluths had a child, John, with similar problems. According to Mark Rich’s biography:

His story “The Meeting” was about a PTA meeting at a school that was essentially Berman School, which John had been attending. (Chapter 28)

One wonders what dark night of the soul led to the writing of this story.

5. It wasn’t just me that was baffled by Russ’s story: the half-dozen people who bothered to comment in our Facebook group read thread were equally baffled, bar one person, who didn’t explain further. Read their comments for yourself.

6. In Jo Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugos, Gardner Dozois says that Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus is “one of the best SF novellas every written.” Rich Horton echoes this with his comment that it is “one of the most amazing SF novellas ever.” This may be a widespread view on the literary side of the field, but I’m not sure that the story was viewed quite so glowingly elsewhere (e.g., it was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards but won neither, and was #3 in the Locus Poll for that year—the usual caveats apply about award winners being partly determined by work availability, author popularity, zeitgeist etc.)

7. Ben Bova’s Zero Gee is the only story from Harlan Ellison’s major anthology Again, Dangerous Visions that makes it into Carr’s volume this year. I wonder if that is because Carr didn’t want to use too many stories that people would have seen or if, like me, he just wasn’t that impressed with the vast bulk of it.

8. As I’ve noted before, Harry Harrison encouraged Naomi Mitchison (aka Lady Haldane) back to writing SF after her 1962 classic Memoirs of a Spacewoman. He first published her in The Year 2000 anthology (1970), and then in all four of the Nova volumes (Mary and Joe in the first volume, also 1970, was an extract from the previously mentioned novel). There were later stories in Peter Weston’s Andromeda #1, and a couple of other anthologies. Her ISFDB page is here.

9. Well, that was the last line in the Universe #2 version of Patron of the Arts (and reprinted in Nebula Award Stories #8), but the Carr anthology uses a version which appeared in Vertex #1, April 1973 (and which also appears to be the first four chapters from the subsequent novel). This latter version adds three pages of text where the couple go missing, and then suggests that another of Climento’s works is a portal to an alien planet. I’m not sure this adds to the original novelette, and probably spoils it a little (it turns a story about love lost into the start of an interplanetary adventure). It certainly doesn’t make me want to pick up the novel version.

10. Haldeman’s story was one of at least two stories that Ben Bova published in Analog in 1972 (another was Frederik Pohl’s The Gold at Starbow’s End) which showed that the magazine was under new management.

11. The stories that originally formed Haldeman’s The Forever War novel were: Hero (Analog, June 1972), We Are Very Happy Here (Analog, November 1973), This Best of All Possible Worlds (Analog, November 1974) End Game (Analog, January 1975). However, I believe that We Are Very Happy Here was replaced by You Can Never Go Home (Amazing, March 1975) in later versions of the novel. This latter story was the original darker and more dystopian version of the story (the beginning and end of both stories are similar—about 10% of the length, according to Haldeman in the author’s note that accompanies You Can Never Go Home).

12. The Wikipedia page on the My Lai massacre, the mass murder of unarmed South Vietnamese civilians by U.S. troops in 1968, is here.

13. The Honorable Mentions list is:

Conway, Gerard F.: “Funeral Service,” Universe 2, Ace, 1972.
Eklund, Gordon: “Stalking The Sun,” Universe 2, Ace, 1972.
Moon, Brian: “Catholics,” New American 15.
Neville, Kris: “Medical Practices Among The Immortals,” Galaxy, September 1972.
Pangborn, Edgar: “Tiger Boy,” Universe 2, Ace, 1972.
Pohl, Frederik: “Shaffery Among The Immortals, Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1972.
Robinson, Frank M.: “East Wind, West Wind,” Nova 2, Walker, 1972.
Rocklynne, Ross: “Ching Witch!” Again, Dangerous Visions, Doubleday, 1972.
Russ, Joanna: “Useful Phrases For The Tourist, Universe 2, Ace, 1972.
—“When It Changed,” Again, Dangerous Visions, Doubleday, 1972.
Silverberg, Robert: “Now + n, Now — n,” Nova 2, Walker 1972.
Tiptree, James Jr.: “Filomena & Greg & Rikki-Tikki & Barlow & The Alien,” New Dimensions II, Doubleday.
—“The Milk Of Paradise,” Again, Dangerous Visions, Doubleday, 1972.
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr.: “The Big Space Fuck,” Again, Dangerous Visions, Doubleday, 1972.
Wolfe, Gene: “It’s Very Clean,” Generation, Dell, 1972.

14. There would normally be a table below giving the contents of all the ‘Best Of’ anthologies and all the award nominees, and what my choices for the year would be, etc.—but I don’t have the time, inclination, or energy to do this at the moment. I’ll try and get to it when I review one of the other 1972 volumes (both the Harrison & Aldiss and the Ackerman look promising).  ●

rssrss

New Writings in SF #6, 1965

Summary:
This volume has the longest story in the series so far, Keith Roberts’ novella (and the first part of the novel of the same name about a telepathic gestalt) The Inner Wheel. There are two other good stories apart from the Roberts, John Baxter’s The Hands (a neat SF horror tale), and Robert Presslie’s The Day Before Never (a story about an Earth invaded by aliens that has a New Wave-ish edge).
There is also work from William Spencer (an early VR story), E. C. Tubb, Ernest Hill, and John Phillifent (John Rackham), and a new design for the paperback cover.
[ISFDB link] [Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:1
Joachim Boaz, SF Ruminations
Andrew Darlington, Eight Miles Higher
Terry Jeeves, Vector #36, p. 20-21
Roddy Williams, Death Robots From Mars
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, John Carnell

Fiction:2
The Inner Wheel • novella by Keith Roberts ∗∗∗
Horizontal Man • short story by William Spencer
The Day Before Never • novelette by Robert Presslie
The Hands • short story by John Baxter +
The Seekers • short story by E. C. Tubb
Atrophy • short story by Ernest Hill
Advantage • novelette by John T. Phillifent [as by John Rackham]

Non-fiction:
Foreword • by John Carnell

_____________________

The next volume of New Writings in SF that should have been reviewed here is #5 but, as I read Keith Roberts’ novel The Inner Wheel two or three months ago, this one got read first.
Roberts’ novella (and the first third of the similarly titled novel), concerns a telepathic gestalt (the “Wheel” of the title). The story is pre-Pavane Roberts, when he was still occasionally writing stories based on typical SF tropes like these, but this doesn’t stop him stretching his writer’s muscles—as you can see here from the deliberately inchoate beginning:

“See for us and tell again . . . Where is he . . . ?”
“Getting on a train . . .”
“Tell us what you see. Where is the train . . . ?”
“In a station, where do you think . . . ?”
There are hammers and whips and pincers.
“WHERE IS THE TRAIN?”
“T-Tanbridge. Please, THE STATION IS TANBRIDGE—”
There are flickerings. “Gently,” say the voices. “Gently. Tell us what you see . . .”
“I . . . There are roses. The platforms are covered with them. The . . . train is green. The sky is very bright blue. Everything is quiet, nobody moving about. The coach stands in its bay. I see the sunlight lying across it and on the platforms. It lies in s-squares on the platforms, on the footbridge. There is a breeze now. A piece of paper blows and skips; the roses sway. I hear the little thorny sound of leaves scratching together. Please, no more . . .”
Somewhere there might be giggling. Somewhere there might be rage. “Tell us about him . . .”
A lens moves, seeing but unseen, examining textures of glass and wood and leaves. The station is haunted in the hot, still afternoon.
“He is . . . sitting in the train. In the front seat, just behind the driver’s cab. He is . . . tall. He is . . . dark. His hair is dark and rather long. It hangs across one eye. His face is thin. His eyes are very blue. His hands look . . . strong. Well kept, bony. Square nails, white half-moons where the cuticle is pushed back. He uses a good aftershave—”
The giggling again. “You like him . . .”
“Leave me alone—”  p. 11-12

After a couple of pages of this the point of view switches to that of the watched man, Jimmy Stringer, and we learn about his life:

Jimmy remembered [. . .] the studio back in town. Light filtering through inadequate windows, littered drawing boards, filing cabinets top-heavy with drifts of paper and card. The yellowing fluorescents, their tubes flyblown; electric cords, cellophane-taped here and there to the edges of desks, that fed tired Anglepoise lamps from a medusan confusion. It was a place where you could work and work and see your dreams give up and curl at the edges and realize the ad game was a machine, a bloody machine that sorted the heavyweight souls from the middleweight, the middleweight from the lightweight, the lightweight from the souls that didn’t rate at all. The man who sat at your elbow painting in the shine on endless successions of brightgreen lawn mowers had been a Prix de Rome.
An element, an aspect of existence. Further back, buried in the impossible matrix of time, were others. His father . . . only the image of him was fading, losing itself under a rippling and a hotness; the glaring, hopeful, hopeless time people call adolescence. Stringer rubbed his face. Adolescence is the time you want freedom. You take it, snatch it, eat it, maybe, before the folk round you grab it back. Nobody can help you. Not then. Least of all a tired old man trying to come to terms with life.
So he’d shucked his father off and gone to London to learn how to be a Great Artist with capital letters, and maybe there’d been times over the years when he’d thought the old devil wasn’t too bad after all; he’d just breeze back home one day and say hello. But the day had never come. Instead, there was a telegram. It told him the thing he’d planned on doing, it wouldn’t get done now. It told him he’d run out of tomorrows.  pp. 14-15

Roberts worked for a large part of his life as a commercial/advertising artist, and the passage shows his artist’s view and possibly some of the personal aspects of his life.
Later, we find out that Stringer has inherited a large amount of money from his father’s estate and is now, due to a strange compulsion, on the train to a town called Warwell. When he gets there, everyone he speaks to in the town is “nice,” and he soon settles. He starts having strange dreams, though:

The dream was always the same. Always vague, impossible to grasp afterward, a thing of sensation only, an affair of mounting pressures that rose and rose to wake him, once, nearly screaming. After that the pressures eased, but he still knew of their existence, the way you can know of something in a dream without seeing or hearing. The Wheel, as he thought of it, was the central part of the nightmare, and he himself was at the centre of the Wheel, on or in its hub, sensing it move, feeling the thunder of it in his long bones. The Wheel so massive that size itself seemed an indecent, foul thing. And somehow, too, the hub was Warwell, its houses and its church. But the Wheel was useless; it moved, it ground, but it ground nothing. Its turning was aimless, the threat of it was simply in its being.  p. 22

He also senses things going on under the surface of the town, and there are strange coincidences, such as the night he goes out walking and thinks he could do with a dog for company—along comes a unaccompanied hound; then, alone in a pub, he wishes for some company—and in come a dozen people, all of who chat to him.
Matters come to a head when he is out in his car and a woman called Anne runs across the road. Stringer sees she is obviously distressed, and not just at her near escape. He takes her to the hospital to get her minor wounds attended to. Then, when he is taking her home, she asks to stop at a pub to use the loo, only to disappear through a back door.
That night Stringer has a dream about taking the train from from Tanbridge to Warwell, and a vast decay overcomes everything: the train, his car, Anne. He realises that the dream is to do with the Wheel, and that this was why Anne was running. The next day he goes looking for Anne in the town, and sees Boschian visions:

Watching the skeletons. Talking and laughing, shopping, eating. Drinking coffee in the Tudor Room and the Buttery, cleaning windows, driving cars, sitting in buses, pushing prams. Other skeletons lay in the perambulators, little grisly things that mewed and writhed. He sat on a seat outside the town hall, wiped his forehead, saw sweat on his hand. He clenched his fists; he was trembling. He asked himself, What’s the matter with me? Have I gone crazy?
It was all he could do to stop himself yelling, telling the people, didn’t they realize, didn’t they know they were all bone and slime, they were getting older, they were dying . . . He put his face in his hands, tried to stop the shaking.
Feeling the traffic grind and grind like one great wheel, seeing the fish eyes roll, hearing the bird gabble of skulls, tongues clacking inside the bone . . . He felt he was going to pass out again or vomit on the path.
God, he’d never felt like this since . . . when? His mind groped for a parallel. Warwell, the river and the valley, church spire and town-hall cupola thrust up from a writhing of goblins and demons, a medieval maggot heap . . . Away from the Starr, he knew the world was good; there were grass and trees and high, quiet roads. He had to get away. He was halfway to his hotel, scurrying to pack his bags and pay his bill, when he realized. Knew suddenly and with complete sureness that he wasn’t going crazy.
[. . .]
Quick now, think. For God’s sake, think…The skulls, the bones, the flaring light . . . Something Germanic, Die Brücker, the Blue Riders? No, older than that, further back. Holbein? No, not Holbein at all. Bosch . . .
And, by God, that was it. Old Hieronymus, the Adamite. The Millennium, incarnation of all evil, writhing, pallid . . . He’d studied it once for a holiday task, reached the stage where he could look through the painter’s eyes, see the world and its people as the master had seen them all those years ago. Now he was seeing them again.
A chain of logic had completed itself without his direction. The fantasies that had swamped him, rose bowers that had glowed, sweet organic nestling of river against town—these things he had been shown, as now he was seeing their obverse. Somebody, something, had tried to lull him with women and talk and drink and beauty, bright canvases, all of them, dangled in front of his face; and it hadn’t worked. He’d gone on searching and prodding [. . .] and he’d touched the makers of the dreams and they were frightened. He’d touched them through Anne.  p. 38-39

When Stringer realises these visions are being sent to him by the Wheel, he fights back, and goes to the places in town the senders don’t want him to go. Then he sees Anne in the distance, and follows her in his car. When he catches and interrogates her, he learns two names of the group that form the Wheel, Albert and Paul. When Stringer later meets another two in a pub—one of whom is Hazel, a disturbing young woman—he discovers to his cost Hazel that has telekinetic powers when he is badly beaten with a plank of wood when he later gets out of his car in the hotel car park.
The last part of the story sees Stinger meeting the members of the Wheel, the gestalt, where he tries to buy Anne’s freedom. But their leader Paul refuses, saying she is their eyes, and he tells Stringer to be gone by the end of the week. The final confrontation at the town fair (shades of Ray Bradbury) is exciting but not entirely convincing (the gestalt finally decide to spare both their lives and let them go).
Overall this is a bit of a mixed bag: the descriptive writing is very good and, at times, I found it completely immersive; what is less good is the motivation of the characters, the not entirely convincing plot that flows from this, and some of the melodrama. Nonetheless, there is a technical ability on show here from Roberts which shows, at times, that he was a talent head and shoulders above nearly all of the other new writers of his generation.

Horizontal Man by William Spencer begins with Timon in a virtual reality where he surfs numerous waves until he finishes the sequence:

At last, unbelievably, the scene faded, greying out from his sense channels, and leaving him back in the recording control room. He was himself again.
Timon gibbered and snuffled with pleasure. His shrivelled, shrunken body trembled, almost writhing with satisfaction, on the pillowy, contoured couch that supported his frail spine.
[. . .]
Timon viewed with some distaste the thick ropelike duct which was connected to him somewhere in the region of the navel, and which supplied all the sustenance that his feeble body required. Outside his range of vision was the flexible cable entering the top of his head, which provided the rich flood of sensory data that went into the illusory world created in his mind by the recording.  p. 77

Timon then discovers that he can’t go to sleep for another five hours (the VR machine’s programming) and so has to select two more experiences (which are a chess match, and an evening out with a date at a dancing performance/orgy). When he eventually wakes from these he fortuitously manages to get his finger stuck in the sleep button, which prevents him waking up again.
Later (spoiler), a machine trundles along and fixes the problem, and in the process changes Timon’s memory drum from Universe 23c to d, the implication being that Timon is destined to live endlessly in these virtual realities.
This all feels rather clichéd after so many later VR stories (this seems an early entry in the sub-genre, or at least the “trapped in VR” sub-genre), but notwithstanding that it’s just not that convincing, and it’s also the first of a number of stories in this collection that rely on a surprise or shock ending.

The Day Before Never by Robert Presslie3 begins with the narrator driving across a post-alien invasion Europe to get to the Latvian capital Riga. When he arrives we get an explicit look at the devastation wreaked by the invaders:

For one more time I cursed the Barbarians and their abominable glazers. There were immense vacant lots where they had used their bigger glazers to reduce whole streets of houses to a ghastly flux of molten stone and flesh.
[. . .]
A group of humans had been caught as they had sidled round one of the corners. Now they were smeared there for eternity. Or until the Barbarians decided to raze the building completely. Some were fused shallow reliefs on the ancient stone. Others hadn’t been so lucky. Not for them the quick, unfelt death. The glazer beams—powered by God-knows-what—had caught them in motion. The terrible grimace on an oldster’s face told the agonies of every minute of life he had left to him after an arm and a leg had been fluidly bonded to the house. There was half a torso here, a grisly fraction there. The worst I saw before I passed the building was the girl. About fourteen or fifteen to judge by the nubile breasts laid bare by a glazer’s freakish heat. If it hadn’t been for the breasts I would never have known it was a girl who hung against the wall, headless, suspended only by the strips of flesh-and-silicon compound that stretched upwards from her shoulders.  p. 93

He eventually arrives at an inn where he plans to meet a resistance contact and, when he meets her, we find about a bomb plot organised to rid Earth of the aliens. This only happens, however, after she forces him to have sex with her so she can ensure he is not one of the Barbarians wearing a human body suit (apparently there is one part that doesn’t work properly). Eventually they get around (spoiler) to triggering one of a number of bombs in a co-ordinated worldwide explosion intended to cause a resonance in the Earth’s surface that will destroy the aliens.
All this is told in a convincingly grim manner, and at a fast pace—which helps to compensate for some of the less convincing plot shenanigans at the end of the piece (the fact that the aliens have human suits, the bombs and the “resonance effect,” etc.). The story’s gritty realism, along with the downbeat ending, made me realise that New Writings in SF wasn’t entirely a continuity New Worlds (I’m talking about the Nova Publications’ version edited by John Carnell), and that it was also doing its small part in expanding the boundaries of the genre.

The Hands by John Baxter has a gripping start:

They let Vitti go first because he was the one with two heads, and it seemed to the rest that if there was to be anything of sympathy or honour or love for them, then Vitti should have the first and best of it. After he had walked down the ramp, they followed him. Sloane with his third and fourth legs folded like the furled wings of a butterfly on his back; Tanizaki, still quiet, unreadable, Asiatic, despite the bulge inside his belly that made him look like a woman eight months gone with child; and the rest of them. Seven earth men who had been tortured by the Outsiders.  p. 113

When the group are debriefed about their captivity we learn that the aliens on Huxley are shape-changers who can alter their form at will. The (sometimes humanoid) aliens altered the crew’s bodies, and one of them, Kolo, had the ability to control them by snapping his fingers.
The rest of the story sees Binns go out for a walk with his minder (eventually—Binns soon spots him and says they might as well walk together). However, Binns is in a slightly dissociated state, and spends most of the time listening to an inner voice saying unexpected things to him.
The final scene in the park (spoiler) brings this strange body-horror story to a climax: Binns feels compelled to kill his minder—his spare hands strangle him while his original hands hold him close. Then Binns meets up with the rest of the group, and one of his spare hands snaps their fingers. . . .
This has a great last line, and the almost dream like inevitability is chillingly effective. This is a pretty good story, and it would definitely be on my short list for a ‘Year’s Best’.

After a strong start to the anthology, the remainder of the stories are a lacklustre lot. The Seekers by E. C. Tubb uses most of its space for a setup in which several crew members of a starship indulge their obsessions: painting, VR gaming under a dream cap, engineering, writing, etc. There is also some background information about the dead captain (he committed suicide), which includes a comment he made about how space-faring humans were “rats scurrying among the granary of the stars.”
This (spoiler) resurfaces at the end of the story, where the remaining crew land on an alien planet where there is a single cube-shaped structure. Inside, each of the men finds his idea of heaven:

Delray found it next.
He came shouting over to the others and glared at what rested between them.
It was naked satiation.
It was the euphoria of combat, the thrill of physical violence, the tease of mental struggle. It was his own deep, dark heritage of type and it opened before him like a flower within whose petals was to be found all he had ever sought. He sank into it and into an eternal enervating dream.  p. 132

The structure is, of course, a trap.
This is one of those stories that has a contrived set-up aimed at delivering a climactic scene: a one-trick story.

Atrophy by Ernest Hill opens, like a lot of these NWISF stories seem to, with the narrator plugged into some sort of device. It’s not entirely clear what this one does, but Elvin gets bored of it—as well as nagged out of any further use by his wife, who warns that he needs to stop using it so much or he’ll “atrophy.” Consequently, he later uses the IT (another machine, but one which appears to be for brain stimulation rather than entertainment) to earn some “approvals.” Elvin earns these by engaging intelligently with a computer:

“Think!” IT ordered.
“Damn the Unions,” he thought. “And the management. They don’t have to do this. IT is only for the Workers.”
“Phit! Phit! Phit! A proposition containing an expletive is a random digression!”
“Give me a chance,” he complained. “I haven’t thought of a proposition yet!”
“Think!” The red light glowed.
He was about to answer “Rats!” But this was probably an expletive and a double correction would automatically register non-Approval on this, his 97th card.
“Cats!” he said, in a moment of inspiration. To his surprise, the red light transfused into green. It glowed brightly.
“Go ahead!”
“Cats” was as good a subject as any. Simple really.
“A cat,” he said, “is a small furry creature with four legs, a head at one end and a tail at the other.”
“Phit! Phit! Phit!”
“What is it now!” He depressed the “Correction” button. How many corrections was this? How many did IT allow? He had forgotten.
“Description is correct, but mode of expression borders on to the facetious. Generic term for four-legged creatures required.”
“Quadrupeds!”
The green light glowed brightly. He was pleased that IT approved. Must do better.  p. 141

This goes on for three and a half pages before Elvin gets his approval.
The rest of the story sees him at work, which appears to involve Elvin monitoring various light sequences on a control board that monitor a nuclear reactor. During this there is another long scene where he detects a faulty electronic foreman. He then goes home and finds his wife has left him for a Thinker, so he takes extra shifts at work to distract himself.
Long story short (spoiler) Elvin detects another faulty “foreman” and, when he contacts the Management this time around, he finds the man atrophied. Elvin takes manual control and makes the calls and warnings that need to be made, and saves the day. When a representative of Management arrives he tells Elvin that it was a false alarm but promotes him to Thinker, anyway. When Elvin returns home he finds Meryl has come back, and she rewards him with sex.
Maybe there are some readers that will appreciate the energy and compulsive detail of this future world but this seems a slight piece to me, and I’m perplexed as to why there were so many mid-1960s SF writers fixated on these unlikely future dystopias.

Advantage by John T. Phillifent begins with Colonel Jack Barclay waking up and telling his orderly-robot to leave Mr Caddas for another thirty minutes before he is roused. (“He has had a bad night.”) It materialises that Barclay is a martinet who is in charge of building the infrastructure on the colony planet of Oloron, and we find out what role Caddas—a whiney, weedy, neurotic type—has in the operation when the pair go on a daily inspection after breakfast.
During the tour Caddas complains of pains in his arm and head when they are at one of the building sites. Barclay quickly questions him, and then orders work on the site to stop: the supervisors subsequently discover a robot hoist whose excessive load would have crushed one of the engineers. A similar situation occurs later when Caddas feels a prickling sensation, and they discover that an engineer was about to go into a conduit from a hot reactor. (I don’t know about you, but I think this project is overdue a visit from the HSE.4) Needless to say, Barclay has kept the knowledge of Caddas’s talents to himself, and the project is correspondingly ahead of schedule.
The story’s main plot complication comes when (spoiler) Barclay gets word that the planet is to be visited by a three person observation team, one of whom is a woman. Barclay, as you might expect, has certain views about this latter fact which he lays out to his second-in-command:

“There’s a certain class of female, Dannard, for whom the very thought of an isolated community of hard-working men, out on a frontier, has a dreadful fascination. Two classes, rather. One’s the sympathetic, mothering kind. I needn’t describe the other. Either is a pain in the neck. You’d better make her your special care. Let the other two make their own way.  p. 170

The woman, the unlikely named “Miss Dahlia Honey,” turns out to be an old flame of Barclay’s, and is maternally drawn to the bleating Caddas. Her welcome attention not only seems to mute his ability, but her later interference also brings him into the orbit of the medical staff, something that Barclay avoided lest they discovered his abilities. There are one or two other twists and turns during the rest of the story but Caddas eventually leaves with Honey.
This is a (very) old school tale, filled with cardboard characters in an unlikely, unconvincing future but, that said, it’s well told, and readable enough. It only just scrapes that two star rating, though, and I’m not sure why I rated it that high—possibly because Barclay doesn’t get his way at the end.

•••

The Cover for this paperback edition5 is the first of a new design, and one I quite like (probably because #9, with a similar layout, was one of my early paperback purchases). The art isn’t very good though.
The only non-fiction (other than the short story introductions) is the Foreword by John Carnell: he says the Keith Roberts story is “outstanding,” and then goes on about telepathy, etc. at great length:

Have you ever been thinking or speaking of someone whom you have not seen for a long time, when the telephone or doorbell rings or you walk round a corner—and there they are! Or received a letter days afterwards? (You could have been thinking about them at the time they were actually writing the letter to you.) Telepathy? Clairvoyance? Empathy? Some people are more “sensitive” to the phenomenon than others. Whatever it is, it is a form of mental communication and we know very little about it, if anything at all. It is even possible that somewhere along the evolutional tree of Mankind we managed to lose some of these developing mental powers, just as our sense of smell has deteriorated and our teeth become a liability rather than an asset, and our eyesight requires artificial aids.
Despite the fact that we now know the constituent parts of the human brain, can measure it, probe it, operate upon it, electrically stimulate it and even analyse some of its aberrations, this fantastic piece of biological machinery is still largely a mystery and we are not at all sure of its capabilities. It may be that the psi powers are developing, not diminishing, but, if so, we have a long way to go before we can understand them.  pp. 7-8

Carnell had obviously been quaffing Campbell’s psionic Kool-Aid at Loncon (the 1965 Worldcon).
The last part of the foreword notes that the Presslie and Baxter stories lean towards the macabre; the Hill and Spencer are stories of the far future; and that the Tubb and Rackham will appeal to those interested in interplanetary travel.

•••

This is probably the best volume of New Writings yet, with the John Baxter story, the long Roberts tale, and the Presslie all worth reading.  ●

_____________________

1. Boaz says that Robert’s The Inner Wheel “exudes gothic dread laced with attempts at recurrent poetic images and a New Wave vibe,” and that it is a “mood piece that takes a little too long to come together.” Jeeves agrees with the latter, saying “it is the half way mark [before] Mr. Roberts hit his stride, chucked out the nouveau rubbische and got up steam.” He says earlier on that “it starts off in the sickening (to me) style which throws everything and the kitchen sink, then rambles all over the place occasionally meeting a story on the way.” (I get the impression Jeeves likes plain stories told plainly.)
Williams says it is “the best story [in the book] . . . a highly poetic and stylised piece, reminiscent of Sturgeon’s ‘More Than Human’.” Darlington is the third person who mentions its poetic nature, saying it is “self-consciously poetic . . . its prose straining for profundity, and almost achieving it.” (I don’t personally think The Inner Wheel is poetic, it just has good descriptive prose with some decent images—something that would have stood out against the utilitarian writings of most other SF writers of the time.)
As for the rest of the stories, the favourite seems to be Baxter’s The Hands. Boaz says that, although the ending is a “cop-out” it is a “keeper”; Williams says, “it hangs in the mind like a stubborn dream”; Jeeves found it “truly gruesome”; and Darlington says “there have been many fine stories concerning aliens taking over human beings, but Australian writer John Baxter adds the grisliest touch yet in this return from a far star.”
The story liked least seems to be the Hill. Boaz: “I experienced a sense of atrophy reading this story”; Williams: “unmemorable”; even Jeeves fingers it as the “weakest,” although he generally thought that all the stories in the book (bar the Roberts maybe) were “well executed treatments or twists of old themes.”
The remainder of the stories fall between these two poles: Presslie’s story is described by Boaz and Williams as “bleak,” and Darlington observes that it “[anticipates] some elements of the New Wave with its casual cruelty and sexual content.” The Spencer and Tubb, while receiving mixed notices (and the Rackham even more so), got off easier than I expected.

2. The star ratings for my first read of this anthology (many moons ago) are as follows (my new rating is in brackets for easy comparison):

The Inner Wheel • novella by Keith Roberts ()
Horizontal Man • short story by William Spencer ()
The Day Before Never • novelette by Robert Presslie ()
The Hands • short story by John Baxter (+)
The Seekers • short story by E. C. Tubb ()
Atrophy • short story by Ernest Hill ()
Advantage • novelette by John T. Phillifent [as by John Rackham] ()

I’m surprised that I liked the Hill story (and another check of my notes reveals it’s the only story of his I’ve rated above mediocre), and underrated the Presslie and Baxter—although I think I can see why (possibly the body suits and downer ending in the Presslie, and the dreamlike vs. naturalistic progression in the Baxter).

3. Robert Presslie contributed a number of stories to UK magazines in the 1950s, so it’s interesting to see a writer from this generation stretch himself in this piece. Unfortunately he would only appear once more (in the next volume of New Writings in SF) before he stopped writing. If he was capable of stories like this then that is a pity.
Presslie’s ISFDB page is here, and there are informative webpages from Andrew Darlington here, and Greg Pickersgill & David Redd here.
I note that Presslie was born in Aberdeen, so presumably he is a Scottish writer.

4. The HSE is the UK government’s Health and Safety Executive.

5. I nicked the original unretouched scan of this cover from Alan Fraser’s page on Pinterest. If you are interested in 50s and 60s UK book covers (there are a lot of interesting paperback covers below the UK SFBC ones) you should really check his page out.  ●

Edited 30th January 2021: added Andy Darlington’s comment about John Baxter’s The Hands, which is buried in the index at the end of his essay.
Edited 12th November 2021 to show that Kolo in “The Hands” is an alien, and not one of the crew as I previously thought (thanks to Ed Chang for the correction).

rssrss

New Worlds SF #158, January 1966

Summary:
A much better issue this time around with good stories from Roger Zelazny (Love Is an Imaginary Number is an elegant, telegraphic piece about a man who introduces progress in many alternate worlds, and his escape from the people who would stop him), and David Masson (Mouth of Hell, a well described story about an exploration team investigating a huge hole and their slowly revealed discoveries). There is also a good effort from E. C. Tubb (Anne, ultimately an affecting piece about a space fighter pilot and his sentient ship).
There is also a novelette from Charles Platt, and the conclusion of editor Michael Moorcock’s The Wrecks of Time, which has some good images and scenes but doesn’t save the novel.
The non-fiction includes a ‘How to Write’ article from John Brunner, and an interesting letter from Ivor Latto.
[ISFDB page][Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:1
Christopher Priest, Vector #38 (February 1966), pp. 26-27

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
The Wrecks of Time (Part 3 of 3) • serial by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
The Failures • novelette by Charles Platt
Love Is an Imaginary Number • short story by Roger Zelazny +
Mouth of Hell • short story by David I. Masson +
Anne • short story by E. C. Tubb

Non-fiction:
Cover
Interior artwork • by David Kearn, James Cawthorn
Editorial: The New Prism • by Michael Moorcock
The Case • poem by Peter Redgrove
Next Month
Them As Can, Does
• essay by John Brunner
Thot Provoking Belly Laughs • book reviews by James Colvin
Letters to the Editor

_____________________

The third and final part of The Wrecks of Time by Michael Moorcock starts with all of the major characters having newly arrived on E—Zero. There is then an argument between Maggy and Steifflomeis about the “Principals,” and the fact that their presence may affect the activation of this simulation. Later there is a stand-off between Faustaff and Orelli’s men, but Faustaff, Nancy and Ogg eventually leave in an aircar.
During the ensuing journey they travel through a world that appears to still be in process of forming—there are many anachronistic objects that appear, a Baiera tree from the Jurassic period, a brand new 1908 Model T ford, etc. Nancy and Ogg also feel uncomfortable, as if their minds are changing to make them fit this world, but Faustaff remains unaffected.
In the next chapter, Faustaff wanders off on his own to what looks like a vast garbage dump:

All history seemed to have been piled together at random. It was a mountain of treasure, as if some mad museum curator had found a way of up-ending his museum and shaking its contents out on to the ground. Yet the artifacts did not have the look of museum-pieces. Everything looked absolutely new.
Faustaff approached the heap until he stood immediately beneath it. At his feet lay a near-oval shield of wood and leather. It looked as if it belonged to the fourteenth century and the workmanship seemed Italian to Faustaff. It was richly decorated with gold and red paint and its main motif showed an ornate mythical lion; beside it, on its side, was a beautiful clock dating from around 1700. It was of steel and silver filigree and might have been the work of the greatest clockmaker of his time, Thomas Tompion.2 Few other craftsmen, Faustaff thought abstractedly, could have created such a clock. Quite close to the clock he saw a skull of blue crystal. It could only have been fifteenth century Aztec. Faustaff had seen one like it in the British Museum. Half-covering the crystal skull was a grotesque ceremonial mask that looked as if it came from New Guinea, the features painted to represent a devil.
Faustaff felt overwhelmed by the richness and beauty—and the sheer variety—of the jumble of objects. Somehow it represented an aspect of what he had been fighting for since he had taken over the organisation from his father and agreed to try to preserve the worlds of subspace.  p. 14

There are more striking images and scenes in the next chapter, when Faustaff passes a column of Orelli’s men, seemingly in a daze, and wearing a variety of costumes: Roman soldiers, priests, women. When he later finds Orelli in the cathedral, he realises why they were dressed the way they were:

[It] was the life-size crucifix behind the altar which drew his attention. Not only was it life-size but peculiarly life-like, also. Faustaff walked rapidly towards it, refusing to believe what he already knew to be true.
The cross was of plain wood, though well-finished.
The figure nailed to it was alive.
It was Orelli, naked and bleeding from wounds in his hands and feet, his chest rising and falling rapidly, his head hanging on his chest.
Now Faustaff realised what Orelli’s men had represented—the people of Calvary. They must certainly have been the ones who had crucified him.
With a grunt of horror Faustaff ran forward and climbed on the altar reaching up to see how he could get Orelli down. The ex-cardinal smelled of sweat and his body was lacerated. On his head was a thorn garland.
What had caused Orelli’s men to do this to him? It was surely no conscious perversion of Christianity; no deliberate blasphemy. Faustaff doubted that Orelli’s brigands cared enough for religion to do what they had done.
He would need something to lever the nails out.
Then Orelli raised his head and opened his eyes.
Faustaff was shocked by the tranquillity he saw in those eyes. Orelli’s whole face seemed transformed not into a travesty of Christ but into a living representation of Christ.
Orelli smiled sweetly at Faustaff. “Can I help you, my son?” he said calmly.
“Orelli?” Faustaff was unable to say anything else for a moment. He paused. “How did this happen?” he asked eventually.
“It was my destiny,” Orelli replied. “I knew it and they understood what they must do. I must die, you see.”
“This is insane!” Faustaff began trying to tug at one of the nails. “You aren’t Christ! What’s happening?”
“What must happen,” Orelli said in the same even tone. “Go away, my son. Do not question this. Leave me.”
“But you’re Orelli—a traitor, murderer, renegade. You—you don’t deserve this! You’ve no right—” Faustaff was an atheist and to him Christianity was one of many religions that had ceased to serve any purpose, but something in the spectacle before him disturbed him. “The Christ in the Bible was an idea, not a man!” he shouted. “You’ve turned it inside out!  p. 20

Moorcock would return to this idea in his Nebula Award winning novella, Behold the Man, in New Worlds #166 (September 1966).
These two chapters are, however, the peak point of the novel, and it returns to its previous level after this, with Faustaff spending the remainder of the time seeing or intervening in various other surreal scenes that resemble magical or mythical performances (he saves a naked blonde woman from a Black magic ritual and sees Ogg, dressed as a white knight, fight with Steifflomeis). Eventually, Maggy takes Faustaff to see the Principals:

They stood on a vast plateau roofed by a huge, dark dome. Light came from all sides, the colours merging to become a white that was not really white, but a visible combination of all colours.
And giants looked down on them. They were human, with calm, ascetic features, completely naked and hairless.
They were seated in simple chairs that did not appear to have any real substance and yet supported them perfectly. They were about thirty feet high, Faustaff judged.
“My principals,” Maggy White said.
“I’m glad to meet you at last,” Faustaff told them. “You seem to be in some sort of dilemma.”
“Why have you come here?” One of the giants spoke. His voice did not seem in proportion to his size. It was quiet and well-modulated, without emotion.
“To make a complaint, among other things,” said Faustaff. He felt that he should be overawed by the giants, but perhaps all the experiences that had led up to this meeting had destroyed any sense of wonder he might have had otherwise. And he felt the giants had bungled too much to deserve a great deal of respect from him.  p. 40

I suspect by now many readers will feel the same way about the novel. Anyway, the Principals shuffle off to deliberate and, when they come back they tell Faustaff that their ancestors left Earth millions of years ago to travel the universe. When they came back to Earth they found a decayed society, and so created the simulations in an attempt to reproduce the civilization that produced them.
Faustaff then gives them a lecture on their failed experiment, comments on their morality, and suggests that they should develop their own pleasures (art, entertainments, etc.). They readily agree to move all the simulated worlds out of the sub-spatial bubble and into real space (and interconnect them).
This is completely unconvincing, but it does produce a good final image of all the other worlds appearing in the sky of E-Zero, their atmospheres merging to form an envelope around all the planets (apart from the nuked E3), and golden bridges of light forming between them.
In conclusion, this final part of the novel is probably worth reading for a few striking images and scenes, but the plot is as silly as in the first two instalments.

If I wasn’t droning on at great length in these reviews, and was writing waspish one-liners instead, then “A failure” would be the short review of The Failures by Charles Platt.3  Although this is supposedly set in the future, it is essentially about swinging 1960s London’s social and sexual mores.
The story begins with the protagonist Greg, a member of a successful beat group, The Ephemerals, picking up a woman called Cathy Grant, who he gives a lift home (while driving fast and recklessly). After she turns down the offer of dinner (a previous engagement) we join her in her flat (which she shares with a pet monkey) for some ennui:

That was when one tired of it all; when the novelty had gone, when each sophisticated, well-dressed, successful man said the same things in the same boring way, no matter how polished a conversationalist.  p. 61

Greg performs with his band that night, and the next day phones Cathy to arrange to take her out that afternoon. First though, he has lunch at “a small Greek café near Kilburn”:

He liked to eat there, because he could usually escape recognition, and because the food was good: real meat, home-baked bread. It was a small place, not very clean, and the workers from that area were usually the only people there. Tough, leathery old men, sitting over a sandwich and cup of tea; women, plump from too many children, waiting to buy take-away bags of food from the counter: pies, sandwiches, anything cheap. These were the people left behind by the affluence spiral; unskilled, often of sub-normal intelligence. In spite of their poverty, though, they possessed a certain natural assurance and equanimity that Greg almost envied. They came from a rigid, unchanging society; people who had never known any state other than poverty and who accepted it as being their only way of life.  p. 64

Sociology 101.
The story continues with the couple going to Greg’s houseboat and then spending the afternoon water skiing in the estuary. When Cathy says she needs to be back be nine, Greg is annoyed and, after he drops her off, waits outside her flat.
When a man arrives and, an hour later, leaves, Greg follows him to a pub and finds out, when he confronts him, that the man, Jamieson (a) is a “good friend” of Cathy’s, (b) is a Thalidomide sufferer (he has two prosthetics over his foreshortened arms), and (c) was a one-time post-doc Sociology student. After this latter revelation, Jamieson delivers a one-page data-dump about overpopulation, the space race, resources and expansionary capitalism before he eventually leaves.
The rest of the story has Greg take Cathy out again, this time to a dive/squat in Notting Hill, where they meet an unwashed and aggressive marijuana user called Tony. Cathy gets a high before she leaves with Greg, but (spoiler) later on in the story, after dodging an invitation to see Greg play, she returns to the area, bumps into Tony, and sleeps with him. Cue the bad sex writing awards:

She looked into his eyes and felt weakened, the tiny pupils in the ghostly pale irises boring into her, unblinking. She let herself go down into his arms and the odour of his body seemed to close around her. He circled his arms over her and she felt the tense, strong muscles; he rolled on to her and kissed her roughly, and it was as if she was falling backwards, losing touch with the world. With a sudden cry she gave way to him and clutched at his hard, tanned body, needing him and what he stood for, opening herself to him, losing a reserve that she suddenly realised she had never lost before.  p. 77

Later on there is a argument between Cathy and Greg about what is going on, a melodramatic encounter where she says that she makes wealthy men happy, self-identifies as a “whore” and a “slut,” and invites Greg to call her a bitch or slap her, before he finally leaves. Later on, when Greg gets a telephone call from Cathy saying their relationship is over (I wasn’t aware it had started), he jumps in his car to drive to her flat, but his reckless driving catches up with him this time around and he crashes the car, breaking another motorist’s arm. Greg then flees into the crowd, where he sees Jamieson, who wails that Cathy has gone to live with Tony (Jamieson has lost his prosthetics at this point and is waving his stubby arms/hands around). Greg continues on to Cathy’s flat, kicking a blind beggar on the way and, when he gets there, he finds a party in progress. Greg briefly talks to an out if work astronaut before going up to the party that’s happening in her (looted) flat. Cathy isn’t there and, after passing a woman holding a dwarf, he ends up in a room where Cathy’s pet monkey is sitting on its own:

It had no way of understanding what had happened; it only knew that somehow Cathy had gone away and left it. Without her to provide for it, it would soon sicken and die.
It pulled and bit at its chain, then crouched back into the corner, chattering senselessly.  p. 85

I guess the point of this one (and ignoring the terrible soap opera and melodrama) is that we are living in an overpopulated hell-hole, and that our lives are pointless There was quite a lot of this New Worlds/New Wave miserablism in the sixties and early seventies, and I could never understand why anyone would bother writing this kind of story. Misery likes company, I guess.

Love Is an Imaginary Number is the first of a handful of stories4 that Roger Zelazny would contribute to the Moorcock incarnation of New Worlds, and it is a poetic tale told in elegant and telegraphic prose, as can be seen from its opening passage:

They should have known that they could not keep me bound forever. Probably they did, which is why there was always Stella.
I lay there staring over at her, arm outstretched above her head, masses of messed blonde hair framing her sleeping face. She was more than wife to me: she was warden.
How blind of me not to have realized it sooner!
But then, what else had they done to me?
They had made me to forget what I was.
Because I was like them but not of them they had bound me to this time and this place.
They had made me to forget. They had nailed me with love.
I stood up and the last chains fell away.
A single bar of moonlight lay upon the floor of the bed chamber. I passed through it to where my clothing was hung.
There was a faint music playing in the distance. That was what had done it. It had been so long since I had heard that music. . . .
How had they trapped me?
That little kingdom, ages ago, some Other, where I had introduced gunpowder—Yes! That was the place! They had trapped me there with my Other-made monk’s hood and my classical Latin.
Then brainsmash and binding to this Otherwhen.  p. 86

The rest of the tale is kinetic chase sequence that has the narrator flee through many different worlds. During this we find out what his crimes were during a fight he has with one of his pursuers:

I gestured and his horse stumbled, casting him to the ground.
“Everywhere you go, plagues and wars follow at your heels!” he gasped.
“All progress demands payment. These are the growing pains of which you speak, not the final results.”
“Fool! There is no such thing as progress! Not as you see it! What good are all the machines and ideas you unloose in their cultures, if you do not change the men themselves?”
“Thought and mechanism advances; men follow slowly,” I said, and I dismounted and moved to his side. “All that your kind seek is a perpetual Dark Age on all planes of existence. Still, I am sorry for what I must do.”
I unsheathed the knife at my belt and slipped it through his visor, but the helm was empty. He had escaped into another Place, teaching me once again the futility of arguing with an ethical evolutionary.
I remounted and rode on.  p. 89

This is pretty good piece, an accomplished blend of style and story, and I’m puzzled as to why this appeared in New Worlds rather than an issue of F&SF, where it would have earned the author considerably more money and have been a natural cover story.
This is a story that I’d have in my hypothetical Best of the Year collection.

David I. Masson returns this issue after his stunning debut in September (Traveller’s Rest) with a story that would be one of five he would publish this year (three of them would appear consecutively in this issue and the next two). Mouth of Hell is, like his first story, set in an unusual world, although it seems similar to ours:

When the expedition reached the plateau, driving by short stages from the northern foothills, they found it devoid of human life, a silent plain variegated by little flowers and garish patches of moss and lichen. Kettass, the leader, called a halt, and surveyed the landscape while the tractors were overhauled. The sun shone brightly out of a clear sky, not far to south for the quasi-arctic ecology was one of height, not latitude. Mosquitoes hovered low down over tussocks below wind-level, beetles and flies crawled over the flowers. Beyond a quarter-metre above the ground, however, a bitter wind from the north flowed steadily. The distance was clear but it was difficult to interpret what one saw, and the treeless waste held no clues to size. Ground undulations were few. There were no signs of permafrost beneath. After a time a fox could be made out trekking southward some way off. Some larger tracks, not hooved, showed by the edge of a bog pool. If one wandered far from the vehicles and men, the silence was broken only by the thin sound of the wind where it combed a grass mound, the zizz and skrittle of insects, the distant yipe of fox or other hunting animal, and the secretive giggle of seeping water. Here and there on the north side of a mound or clump traces of rime showed, and a few of the pool edges were lightly frozen.  p. 93

Initially there are only subtle indications of differences (the names of some of the team, the constant wind from the north, the permanent thunderstorm to the south, a herd of “greydeer” that they hunt, etc.) but it eventually becomes apparent that they are on an ever-steepening slope—but are already below sea level. When the gradient increases to the point that they can’t take their tractors any further their leader, Kettass, orders them to make camp.
After a discussion of the situation a team of three volunteers is sent ahead on foot, and the next section of the story follows Mehhtumm, ’Ossnaal and Ghuddup as they continue down the ever increasing slope using their “sucker gloves”:

The tilted horizon terminated in a great roll of clear-edged cloud like a monstrous eel, which extended indefinitely east and west. The ground air, at any rate, was here free of the gale, but the rush of wind could be heard between the thunder. The atmosphere was damp and extremely warm. The rock surface was hot. What looked like dark, richly-coloured polyps and sea-anemones thrust and hung obscenely here and there from crannies. The scene was picked out now and again by shafts of roasting sunlight funnelling down brassily above an occasional cauliflower top or through a chasm in the cloud-curtain. Progress even with suckers was slow. Mehhtumm got them roped together.
An hour later the slope was 70°, with a few ledges bearing thorn bushes, dwarf pines, and peculiar succulents. The torrents had become thin waterfalls, many floating outwards into spray. A scorching breeze was wafting up from below. Two parallel lines of the roller cloud now stretched above them, and the storm seemed far above that. The smooth, brittle rock would take no carabiners. A curious patternless pattern of dull pink, cloudy lemon yellow, and Wedgwood blue could just be discerned through the foggy air between their feet. It conveyed nothing, and the steepening curvature of their perch had no visible relation to it. Altimeters were now impossible to interpret, but they must clearly be several kilometres below sea-level. Crawling sensations possessed their bodies, as though they had been turned to soda-water, as Ghuddup remarked, and their ears thrummed.  p. 98

These physiological symptoms (spoiler) are nitrogen narcosis (of which they are unaware) and this eventually leads to disaster: ’Ossnaal has a fit and, when Mehhtumm tries to organise himself and Ghuddup to rescue him, the latter cuts his rope and continues down the hole. After securing ’Ossnaal, Ghuddup starts climbing to get help, only to later hear him fall.
After this attempt Kettass leads another team of three down the hole—this time with oxygen supplies—but another man falls, and the expedition is abandoned.
The story then moves forward five years in time to a point where the “authority” has built two VTOL (vertical take-off or landing) craft to explore the hole, and Kettass is on board to film and commentate. This expedition discovers that the hole is 163km wide and the base is 41km below sea level. They also see glimpses of lava at the bottom. But although the expedition is initially successful, a freak accident causes the loss of one of the craft.
The final section takes place thirty years later, where Kettass, now a septuagenarian, goes with his extended family on the pressurised cable railway that runs down the Terraces (the Western side of the hole) to within 700 metres above the oozing magma at the base.
The story concludes by remarking that Kettass did not live long enough to take the tourist rocket down Jacob’s Ladder (the Eastern side), or the North Wall lift.
I thought this was a pretty good story and, although not as good as his debut, it’s ‘Best of the Year’ worthy. I liked the descriptive writing, the slowly revealed physical environment, and the unconventional arc of the story (the two postscript sections probably shouldn’t work, but they do).

I haven’t been a fan of E. C. Tubb’s work in the Compact Books version of New Worlds so far (which strike me as fairly typical examples of the kind of story that I thought Moorcock was trying to get rid of) but I quite liked Anne. This one opens with a space fighter pilot called Argonne—expected to fight to the death—having fled a battle with the alien Hatachi. His apprentice is dead—his body disrupted in to a red mist inside the craft—and Argonne’s own legs are pulped. His ship is screaming with pain, but he can’t do anything to help as he can’t move.
The next section of the story has him wake in a room with his legs healed, and a woman called Anne standing by his side. After Argonne speaks to Anne for a time they leave the room and find themselves in a garden, seemingly instantaneously. When he thinks of winter, they arrive on a snow world, and then they finally end up on a beach.
There are a couple more dream scenes like this until the one where he has a hand to hand fight with a Hatachi—then his dream merges with the reality of his previous situation on the ship. He wakes up to find himself still badly injured, with a dream cap having slipped off his head. He then realises that the ship had, even though he couldn’t help her, put the cap on his head so he wouldn’t suffer the pain of his injuries. The last section is quite affecting:

But he was not sorry that the ship had failed—that the dream-circuit had been broken. He would not have liked to lie in the safe, snug world of illusion when the ship had nothing of comfort. It is bad to die alone.
Argonne had lived a solitary, dedicated life and it was natural for him to have followed ancient custom. The personalising and naming of weapons is not new. He looked at the four letters mounted above the instrument panel. “Anne,” he murmured. “With an e.”
The girl he had never had, the wife he would never get, the dream he would never know again. The ship he had tried to save by running from those who would hurt her.
Anne!
Who had shown him Heaven.
This time he did not try to blink away his tears. They belonged. For around him something beautiful was dying.  p. 112

•••

The Cover, by the look of it, is another piece of eye-catching zeitgeist from the photographic agency.
The Interior Artwork comes from regular James Cawthorn and a new artist David Kearn. Kearn would only appear in the magazine on this one occasion and, initially, I thought that this piece was by Keith Roberts (who contributed covers to the magazine from issue #163) but the signature doesn’t look like his.
The New Prism by Michael Moorcock is a somewhat lofty editorial that discusses how religion is being replaced by science before it moves on to discuss how SF may the tool best suited to view this “new prism”. Personally, I’d argue that most SF has little, if anything, to do with science.
The editorial also has this description of historical SF:

In sf, for nearly two-thirds of a century we have despaired. We have produced a literature of despair. We have produced a literature that might, in itself, be vital, but which has reflected that despair in works of an apparently cynical or hopeless nature and where we have supplied answers they have been confused.
This was natural in a century that has produced world wars, insane political creeds, H-Bombs; but the time has come when we are beginning to stop worrying about it and starting to worry what we’re going to do about it.  p. 4

And this of current and/or future SF:

There is an increasing atmosphere of positive and hopeful thinking in the world of art (and even in the political sphere). Young artists, in particular, seem to be fed-up with simply expressing how fed-up they are. They accept, like scientists and politicians, that things are bad, but they’re trying to work out how things can be made better.  p. 4

I’d suggest that both those descriptions are highly debateable—in particular the latter, given that future issues of New Worlds had more than their fair share of gloom (for a current example see Platt’s story above).
The Case by Peter Redgrove is a new feature for the magazine, a long poem (seven pages). It has a short introduction that mentions a schizophrenic boy who suffers from hysterical blindness and whose mother is dead, but the rest of it is mystifying. I assume the poem describes his inner vision of a garden, and his relationship to his dead mother, absent father, and God. I wasn’t really sure what this is about.

The usual Next Month filler in this issue has a fairly stellar list of names “due to appear soon,” a mixture of established British names (Aldiss, Ballard, Brunner, Moorcock), established American names (Zelazny, Merril) and a number of up and coming new writers (Masson, Jones, Platt, Collyn). That sounds like the successful mix I remember from my previous fragmentary reading of the magazine.
Them As Can, Does by John Brunner is one of those advice-to-new-writers essays you see every now and then in the SF magazines—when the editors have finally lost their patience with the rubbish they see in their slushpile:

So you had an idea for a science fiction story .
So after considerable effort you got it down on paper.
So you mailed it to John W. Campbell and sat back to await the cheque, and no cheque came—just the MS, with a note on the rejection slip informing you of the existence of International Reply Coupons and intimating that if you want the next story returned you’d better enclose some. So you chewed off an eighth of an inch of fingernail and sent it (the MS, not the piece of nail) to Michael Moorcock, and it came home again, and you sent it in desperation to a fanzine and it came back from there, too.  p. 113

I’m not sure that any of the advice proffered in this article (ms preparation, plotting, length and structure, characterisation, dialogue, etc.) will make any difference to the standard of submitted material, and it always annoys me a little that editors waste precious magazine space on something that applies to a minority of readers. That said, there are a few interesting snippets, including one about Brunner’s own work:

The first story I ever sold to Astounding stemmed from a single sentence in Cliff Simak’s Time Quarry; much of the material in Telepathist derived from the key element of Peter Phillips’s Dreams are Sacred.  p. 114

The first book reviewed by Moorcock (as by James Colvin) in Thot Provoking Belly Laughs is Bill, the Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison (serialised in New Worlds #153-155), of which he says:

If you didn’t have the pleasure of reading [this recently], it might be enough to tell you that running it did wonders for the magazine’s subscription list.  p. 121

After he describes it as “wonderfully vulgar” and “influenced by Catch-22,” he concludes that it is an American novel in the traditions of Mack Sennet (who?), the Marx Brothers, and Mad magazine.
After this Moorcock reviews another of his own novels (there were two or three in the last column), The Fireclown, beginning with some background information:

[This] was written two or three years ago, I believe; around the time he was writing The Sundered Worlds and his Elric stories, yet it is untypical of this period. The first few pages, describing the Fireclown himself in his underground cavern, addressing a Hugo-esque rabble, are written in his familiar style, but then the writing becomes rather dull and both plot and style (though there are one or two other colourful and original scenes scattered here and there) seem vaguely reminiscent of Disraeli’s Coningsby.  p. 122

He goes on to say that this “futuristic political novel” is minor Moorcock and not as ambitious as his other work.
The other three books reviewed are anthologies. The first one is Rulers of Men, is edited by Hans Stefan Santesson and, although Moorcock didn’t like all the stories, he found that this was:

A memorable and readable collection with the same distinctive and attractive atmosphere that Fantastic Universe used to have. Winey—mellow—quite clever. Not ‘thot-provoking’, particularly, but not intrusive, either.  p. 122

Next up is A Century of Great Short Science Fiction Novels, edited by Damon Knight. Moorcock says that the Wells (The Time Machine) and the Stevenson (Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde) are worth rereading but laments that Knight edited Capek’s The Absolute at Large (although he doesn’t say why).
As for Gulf by Robert Heinlein, we are reminded that Moorcock hasn’t seen a story by this writer that he didn’t dislike at least a little bit:

[This] hasn’t the sense of conviction one receives from the preceding writers, but it is good commercial sf and fluently written, about the first superman and what it means to be a superman in a world of ordinary people. A bit tedious, after a while. If, as the book claims, Heinlein has exerted a revolutionary influence on the field, I don’t know quite what it is, but if it’s what I think it might be I don’t think it’s fair just to blame Heinlein.  p. 123

I do wish Moorcock would stop inserting these gnomic observations into his reviews—what do you think the the influence is?; if not him, who?
Also mentioned are Sherred’s E for Effort (“good mood,” “well-written”). McKenna’s Hunter, Come Home (“cardboard characters,” but “one of the best I’ve read in contemporary American science fiction.”).
Moorcock finishes with this about the publisher of the last two books:

Gollancz seem to be improving, judging by the above pair, but they’ll have to make a big effort this year to make up for all the bad, bad books they published last year.  p. 123

The final anthology, New Writings in S-F 6, edited by John Carnell, “arrived too late for a proper review” (I think Moorcock covers it in a subsequent column).

Letters to the Editor come from two readers. The first is (future contributor) Michael Butterworth, who wants short fiction and not novels, and suggests that “every form of art” should appear in New Worlds’ pages. His letter then spirals out to “tales” vs. “stories,” and that the former will offer readers a “uniform whole” (no, me neither).
The other letter is a long and interesting one from Ivor Latto, who asks why so many of the stories in New Worlds deal with death (of men, planets or races) and why new writers seem to be the culprits. The whole letter is a worthwhile read so I’ve pasted it in above. If by now you are too bored with this post to read it, the best line in it is:

[If] I felt like being flippant, I would suggest that, as Analog is the engineers’ sf magazine, then New Worlds is the undertakers’ magazine.  p. 125

•••

This issue gets off to a lacklustre start, but the rest of the issue has two better than good stories (Zelazny, Masson) and one that isn’t bad (Tubb). The non-fiction material, as ever, picks up some of the slack.  ●

_____________________

1. Christopher Priest (Vector #38, February 1966) opens his review by saying that Moorcock/Colvin’s serial “concludes on a far stronger note than I would have suspected from the first two episodes.” He adds:

In a way, it typifies the kind of story New Worlds, at its present stage of development, tends to stress. On the surface of the story there is a fairly straightforward plot, which suffers only from an artificiality of construction. The writing is competent, and at times works up some strong images. (The timeless world of E-Zero with its formless agglomeration of ‘new’ history stands out in this context). Beneath the superficial plot the author is implying another kind of image: one of reversal of character and motivation. The story is not totally satisfying in itself, but it will make for unobjectionable reading and, if the reader wishes to seek a meaning which is a little deeper than mere plot, he will find it.  p. 27

I think that wildly oversells it.
As for the short stories, Priest recommends Masson’s Mouth of Hell “unhesitatingly,” saying “it is quite unlike anything I have read before”; Zelazny’s Love is an Imaginary Number is “not totally to my own taste”; Tubb’s Anne is “a simple story, very well written”. He appears to like Platt’s story least (for reasons that seem not dissimilar to mine):

The Failures is an extrapolation of a few contemporary trends, but apart from this says very little. The sentiments expressed are naive and clumsy, and the action and locale of the plot are limited by their close resemblance to mainstream writing.  p. 27

Moorcock’s editorial is “long and intelligent;” Brunner’s how-to writing guide is “good,” and Priest adds that “this feature alone is worth the half-crown.” (Priest, as a budding writer at the time, would think that wouldn’t he?) He concludes by noting that Moorcock/Colvin seems to be “mellowing.” I can’t say I’ve noticed.

2. Moorcock’s detailed description of the Tompien clock in the scrapyard/dump scene makes me wonder if it’s his advertisement in the “Wanted” section of the classifieds:

3. For those of you who are interested in SF writers as failed futurologists, there is an interesting description of the future Notting Hill in Platt’s The Failures:

The route took them through Notting Hill Gate; it was still a slum area. Everyone knew it, but there was no money to do anything about it, and few people really cared, least of all those who lived there. These were the dregs, the unproductive population: the old, crippled, moronic, criminal, and anyone else who preferred dirt and semi-starvation to work. The advertising campaigns passed them by, the fads and fashions had no appeal. These people were non-consumers, uncared for and forgotten.  p. 71

The average Notting Hill house price as of October 2020 is £1.74 million.

4. The five Zelazny stories that were published in New Worlds during the mid-sixties were:

Love Is an Imaginary Number (ss) New Worlds SF #158, Jan 1966.
For a Breath I Tarry (nv) New Worlds SF #160, Mar 1966.
The Keys to December (nv) New Worlds SF #165, Aug 1966.
In the House of the Dead (ex) New Worlds Speculative Fiction #173, Jul 1967; extract from Creatures of Light and Darkness (Doubleday, 1969).
The Last Inn on the Road [with Dannie Plachta] (ss) New Worlds Speculative Fiction #176, Oct 1967.  ●

Edited 11th October 2020: rewrote and expanded summary.

rssrss

New Worlds SF #157, December 1965

Summary: Apart from Langdon Jones’ story Transient, this is another lacklustre issue for fiction. Moorcock’s editorial gives an informative account of the 1965 Worldcon in London.
[ISFDB page][Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:1
Christopher Priest, Vector #37 (December 1965), p. 20

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
The Wrecks of Time (Part 2 of 3) • serial by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
Transient • short story by Langdon Jones
J Is for Jeanne • short story by E. C. Tubb
Further Information • short story by Michael Moorcock
Dance of the Cats • novelette by Joseph Green
To Possess in Reality • short story by David Newton
A Mind of My Own • short story by Robert Cheetham –
Ernie • short story by Colin R. Fry –

Non-fiction:
Cover
Interior artwork
• by Harry Douthwaite, James Cawthorn
Conventions and Conventions • editorial by Michael Moorcock
Looking Back • book review by Langdon Jones
No Characters • book review by R. M. Bennett
Dr. Peristyle’s Column • Q&A by Brian W. Aldiss [as by uncredited]

_____________________

This issue leads off with the second part of Michael Moorcock’s The Wrecks of Time, which I found even less interesting than the first—probably because much of this section sees Faustaff talking to people about events happening off-stage.
This instalment begins with Steifflomeis pointing a gun at Faustaff’s head when they are interrupted by the arrival of a helicopter carrying Cardinal Orelli (there is no explanation as to how he found the pair in the middle of nowhere). After some chit-chat Orelli takes the two men back to his camp, and Faustaff sees that the Cardinal now possesses a disruptor—acquired from one of the D-squads. Orelli also has two of the D-squad men, who appear to be in suspended animation:

As they talked, Steifflomeis had bent down and was examining one of the prone D-squaders. The man was of medium height and seemed, through his black overalls, to be a good physical specimen. The thing that was remarkable was that the two prone figures strongly resembled one another, both in features and in size. They had close-cropped, light brown hair, square faces and pale skins that were unblemished but had an unhealthy texture, particularly about the upper face.
Steifflomeis pushed back the man’s eyelid and Faustaff had an unpleasant shock as a glazed blue eye appeared to stare straight at him. It seemed for a second that the man was actually awake, but unable to move. Steifflomeis let the eyelid close again.  p. 7

After a bit more of this they depart through a portal for Orelli’s base on E4, a huge cathedral in the centre of a vast ice plain, the latter the product of a previous disruption. There they conduct tests on the D-squad men in Orelli’s lab, and discover they are androids.
Just as things are getting interesting Faustaff is “invoked,” i.e. bodily transferred, back to his headquarters in the E1 version of Haifa. Here he catches up on the current situation, which is that a new Earth, E-Zero, is forming, and tensions are rising between East and West on E1, with war imminent. When Faustaff goes home for a change of clothes he finds Maggy Smith waiting for him, and she tells him that all the E worlds (of which there have been thousands so far) are “simulations.”
When the war starts on E1, Faustaff evacuates his team to E3. There he finds out from Mahon and Ogg that the situation is worse than he thought—E13 and E14 have been destroyed as well as E1—and Orelli and Steifflomeis have joined forces. Orelli’s cathedral on E4 has also disappeared. Meanwhile, Mahon’s teams have found a cottage used by Steifflomeis which contains strange equipment.
Faustaff, Nancy and Mahon decide to drive to the cottage, and when they arrive they surprise Orelli before Stefflomeis and Maggy also appear—at which point they are all whisked off to E-Zero.
This is a lacklustre instalment of a story that mostly has Faustaff running around finding out stuff. It’s just not dramatically engaging.

Transient by Langdon Jones has what seems to be a man waking up in a hospital. Eventually (spoiler) we find out that he is a male chimpanzee whose intelligence has been artificially uplifted, but only temporarily. The realisation that he will shortly lose his new found intelligence makes the chimp cry, and he explains his emotional reaction to the doctor:

“I speak your language, I understand what I am and what has been done to me. And for the first time I come alive. You don’t understand that; you have had intelligence all your life; you don’t know what it’s like to be as I was. I see how shallow was the life before this moment. You do see, don’t you? Intelligence is intelligence, no matter what form it takes, or how it was created. Do you think I want to go back and live in the shadowed world I used to inhabit? And yet I am not happy as I am. How could I be when I can look at my wife, whom I love—yes, love—and yet whom I find as being something so far beneath me as to be laughable? And yet at the same time, the thought of returning to that state of mindless half-life fills me with dread.
“And I—and I—don’t—I . . .”  p. 39

This is pretty good as far as it goes, but its five pages overly compresses its Flowers for Algernon story arc.

J Is for Jeanne by E. C. Tubb is another short piece, which starts with a woman telling a man called Paul about a recurring nightmare:

The dream was always the same. There were lights and a hard, white brightness and a soft, constant humming which seemed more vibration than actual sound. There was a sense of physical helplessness and the presence of inimical shapes. But, above all, was the ghastly immobility.  p. 41

When she sees a specialist called Carl, he speculates that her dream may be about the future (Dunne is name-dropped in this section, Freud in the psycho-babble in the first). Eventually there is a confrontation between Jeanne and Paul that reveals (spoiler) she is actually a malfunctioning computer, and that Paul is a troubleshooter:

“I thought for a minute she was going to be a stubborn bitch but she came through like a thoroughbred. I tell you, Carl, I should have been a ladies’ man. I can talk them into anything—well, almost.”
Carl made a sound like a disgusted snort.
“All right,” said Paul. “So you’ve got no romantic imagination. To you this is just a hunk of machinery.”
“And to you it’s a woman.” Carl repeated his snort.  p. 48

This is one of those dreary stories where the writer keeps the mystery going by keeping back any information that the reader can use to figure out what is going on—until they are ready to produce the reveal.

Further Information by Michael Moorcock is his second ‘Jerry Cornelius’ story and a sequel to Preliminary Information in New Worlds #153 (August 1965). Its random or inconsequential plot is a big step towards the type of fully blown New Wave story the magazine would later run (mostly in its large-size issue incarnation).
This one starts conventionally enough though, with a long action sequence that has Jerry, Miss Brunner and several others arrive on the Normandy coast to storm Cornelius’s father’s house (now owned by Jerry’s brother Frank). There are lots of SF gadgets on display as Jerry and his team fight through the fortified house’s defences (stroboscopic towers, needle guns, LSD gas, nerve bombs, etc.) and there is the odd deadpan remark as well so, initially at least, the story is in territory adjacent to the James Bond movies.
Later on however, after they manage to pin down Frank, events become rather more random: Jerry leaves the fight and the house to find his sister, Catherine. When he gets to her cottage bedroom Jerry finds Frank there and, in the ensuing needle gun duel, their sister is killed. During a later interrogation of Frank (who is captured during the skirmish) by Miss Brunner, she finds out that the microfilm they seek is supposedly in the vaults.
When Jerry and Miss Brunner go looking for the film they can’t find it, and then find out they are trapped by the guards outside. Cornelius turns on the stroboscopic towers to aid their escape, and they make it to the cliffs where they jump into the sea. Cornelius briefly comes to in a boat, and then awakens fully in Sunnydale Nursing home.
This story appears to  consist of a number of random situations through which pass a number of arch and/or disinterested characters: this is pretty standard for the ‘Jerry Cornelius’ stories, and explains why I never had much time for them. I note in passing that the story has a permissive sixties feel (e.g. drug and genital references, etc.).

Dance of the Cats by Joseph Green sees the return of Silva de Fonseca from Tunnel of Love (New Worlds #146, January 1965), and opens with him and his movie making partner, Aaron Gunderson, trying to obtain a permit to film the cat people on Episilon Eridani. The government bureaucrat is ready to grant their request—as long as they keep their eyes on another man, Danyel Burkalter, the son of a circus owner who has used his father’s connection to bypass the official to get a permit.
Burkhalter next appears in the story when the de Fonesca and Gunderson land next to his spaceship on Epsilon Eridani—where the pair clock him for a lothario and braggart—and again at the end when they (spoiler) stop him from abducting the cat people’s priestess and her dancing troupe.
In between these two events this old school SF story examines an alien society of ruling cat people and subservient dog people. Key to this relationship are the cat-people’s famous dancers (who the pair are there to film) whose performance, Aaron later discovers, is the prelude to a telepathic flight to the dog people’s settlement where the cat people feed on the latters’ life energy:

“Eat, Oh travellers! Drink, Oh travellers! Feast, Oh travellers! Feast!”
The ground was rushing upward. He sensed the entire tribe of Cat-people diving with him. Somewhere ahead he felt the woman who led them reach the ground, and abruptly the sense of communion with her was gone. He was alone, but it did not matter now. Close beneath him in the darkness, like flickering rosined torches in ancestral castle halls, bright concentrations of life-force—energy—pleasure awaited his coming. As he drew close he realized the lights were Dogpeople. His headlong rush slowed as he neared them and he exerted some not-understood means of control and veered away from the first one, a male, moved on past the next, an old woman, passed the next, already taken by a companion, and reached a young girl, nubile, strong, and sullenly acquiescent. He entered her quickly, and possession had something of the sensual pleasure of sex, the taste of ambrosia, the pounding excitement of triumph in battle. The total emotional experience was the most pleasing he had ever known, and he ignored the dimly sensed resentment in his captive. He revelled in this new and unexplored wonderland without conscious feeling, without thought, without consideration.  p. 84

The two men put a stop to these rapey shenanigans after they save priestess and before they leave the planet.
This is competently done, but the psi gimmick is unlikely and contrived.

To Possess in Reality by David Newton starts in a typical fairy tale setting, with unicorns and castles, and princes with lutes . . . and then:

Far, far away beyond, the icewhite mountains a dragon roared . . . And yet not a dragon’s roar! A spaceship slid down to the meadow upon a pillar of noisy sunlight. In the dead silence which followed the cutting of the engines the cracking of the rocket-tubes as they cooled was clearly audible on the highest coign of the Castle. The Prince, without a second’s hesitation, gallantly leapt into the unicorn’s saddle and cantered across to the ship. The Lord watched his future son-in-law’s courage with pride, his handwringing daughter with love, awe, fear, hope and despair.
As the unicorn crossed the shrivelled grass-circle to the tail vanes of the vessel its milky paws inked with ash.  p. 95

After Xavier, the spaceship pilot, is welcomed by the Prince he goes to the castle for a meal (and some light flirting with the princess). After a night there he returns to his ship and tries to fix his spacial position before realising that, when he jumped to escape the alien fleet, he actually jumped into an atom of his own memory. A later romantic complication with the princess forces Xavier to jump back to the normal world (taking the princess with him).
There then follows an anti-climactic section where, after his initial success with the princess, Xavier hits a rough patch. His analyst tells him he has lost his dream.
The story finishes with a massive spacefleet arriving over the Earth—but it isn’t the aliens that Xavier fled from previously: the Prince has come to rescue his Princess (although how a fairy tale prince in one of Xavier’s brain cells manages to develop a space drive to jump out of his mind is not explained).
This is readable enough but the world-in-an-atom trope is not convincing.

A Mind of My Own by Robert Cheetham is narrated by the “Sensitive” of a Sensitive/Traveller empath pair (the former stays in Earth while the latter explores other planets). After this setup we hear about the about Mike the Traveller’s explorations, and then about a woman, Juline, who becomes his lover (the Sensitive narrator vicariously experiences their relationship):

When Juline came to work at the Centre, every man in the place attempted to court her. She was a tall, graceful girl with glistening red-gold hair. Her eyes, as I remembered so often through Mike’s eyes, were a brilliant green, and her heart laughed easily along with her lovely mouth. She had every free man at her feet.
And she chose Mike, surrendering to him quickly and wholely.
We—that is—Mike was stunned by his good fortune, and at first treated her with the deference one has for a fragile ornament. This did not last long, however, as his natural virility gained the upper hand and his attitude became more one of the dominating male. This was a good thing, for Juline had been too wild and free all her life, used to worship and supplication. She needed a strong arm, not only to support her, but also to direct her. Under this new treatment Juline flowered, and it became apparent to the rest of the field that she was very much Mike’s woman.  p. 108

Needless to say (spoiler) an alien kills Mike on his next exploration trip. The narrator is subsequently plagued with doubts that his jealousy delayed his warning to Mike about the beast—but then he realises that Juline would never be interested in “a wizened, egg-bald, four foot tall Sensitive like me!”
There is probably the seed of a better story here, but (even excepting its dated attitudes3) this is pretty poor beginner’s piece that has a number of typical flaws (tell instead of show, weak twist ending, etc.).

Ernie by Colin R. Fry is this writers third and last appearance in New Worlds4 and it opens with the narrator, a “rocketman,” losing all his money at a casino, fighting with the bouncers, and getting thrown into the street. There he is offered a job as a supervisor in an etherium mine on Luna. En route he meets two (mutant) dwarves also destined for the mines: one of them, a hunchback, tells the narrator he is going there to get revenge.
In the remainder of the story we see that the dwarves/miners are treated worse than animals:

They could get into cracks and crevices where you or I would hesitate to send a dachshund after a rabbit And they had tough hides They could stand up to scrapings against those rough, sharp rocks that would give you or me septic cuts. They just got scratched. Eventually, of course, they got a lot of scratches and some of them did go septic. Then the doctor certified them as incurable, and the welfare officer killed them humanely in the gas chamber just outside the camp. There was even a priest who used to come in from Moon City and hear their last confessions, if he was wanted. Allen had that place really well equipped.  p. 113

The story ends with a fight between the vengeful dwarf and another of the miners, but we never find out what the dispute was about.
This is not only a unlikely story (does anyone think that a human race capable of flight to the moon will use manual labour rather than machines for mining?), but a pointless and needlessly unpleasant one (and it seems typical of new writers who, when they little to say, or no real story to tell, substitute edginess, violence, or nihilism instead).
I note the use of the word “shit” on p. 114, the first usage I think I’ve seen of this word in the magazine.

•••

The anonymous Cover looks like another random psychedelic swirl from the photographic agency—but I like it anyway, and it’s better than the last two covers.
There are two pieces of Interior artwork this issue: one is by Harry Douthwaite, and the other is from James Cawthorn.
Conventions and Conventions, Michael Moorcock’s editorial, begins with a report on the recent Word Science Fiction Convention in London:

The mood of this year’s World Science Fiction Convention, held over the August Bank Holiday in London this year, was perhaps a trifle less convivial on the whole and a trifle more business-like than previous conventions held in this country, but what marked it was the interest shown by writers, readers, publishers and editors in the improving of the overall level of the field. Complacency and cynicism were both markedly absent; literate, realistic opinions and suggestions were very much there. There were very few who disagreed that the field could not do with extra sophistication, though, sadly, weary cries of ‘Shame!’ were heard, notably from John W. Campbell, editor of Analog (which won this year’s Hugo again) who spoke for some length at the opening discussion (‘Science Fiction, the Salvation of the Modern Novel’), telling us that Homer was a simple Bronze Age barbarian who told a good story and that no-one read him for the poetry—or, indeed, because of the poetry. Luckily, the voices of hope predominated, principally in the shape of Miss Judith Merril, Mr. Brian W. Aldiss and Mr. Harry Harrison. Hope was, in fact, fully restored by John Brunner’s erudite talk on certain marked aspects of science fiction, a talk which we hope to reprint in a slightly abridged form in a later issue.  p. 4

Moorcock then adds that the field is jettisoning “some of its less attractive cargo” but doesn’t give any details. Later he gives an account of a lively panel:

On the last day, Monday, a panel of politics in science fiction found John W. Campbell advocating slavery as a reasonable system (‘There are always bad masters—like the fool of a farmer who beats a good horse to death—but . . .’) and what he called ‘benevolent dictatorship’. The panel soon developed into a discussion between Mr. Campbell and John Brunner, who make excellent opponents, and, with some interesting opinions coming from the floor, showed that whilst the majority of people there disagreed with Mr. Campbell, he had certainly succeeded in provoking an interesting discussion.  pp. 4-5

Moorcock concludes his con report by stating that it was “an extremely satisfying and stimulating convention,” lists a number of the writers who attended, and says that the exceptionally large attendance shows how popular SF has become.
The rest of the editorial discusses the second issue of Brian W. Aldiss’s and Harry Harrison’s critical magazine SF Horizons #2, in particular Brian W. Aldiss’s article:

[Aldiss] takes three writers, Lan Wright, Donald Malcolm and J. G. Ballard and uses their work to show what is right and what is wrong with the British scene. His criticism is positive and thoughtful and his tendency to make fun of the afflicted quite often has you laughing in spite of yourself. We might point out that we only approve of making fun of the afflicted when the afflicted appear to wish their own afflictions on everyone else.  p. 123

He concludes by saying that SF Horizons is “still the most stimulating magazine of its kind ever to appear in the sf world.”
Looking Back is a long book review by Langdon Jones examining Dandelion Wine, which begins with a look at the nostalgia sub-genre:

Bradbury has received a lot of unfavourable criticism, even from such balanced sources as my colleague, James Colvin, a great deal of which I think is completely unfounded. In general, Bradbury’s critics attack the escapist element in his writing. A glance at a few American sf and fantasy books should be enough to demonstrate that the easiest way of cashing in is to write about the Good Old Days.
[. . .]
This tendency is, granted, unhealthy, but at the same time, quite understandable. The trouble is, from the writing point of view, that this tendency is likely to produce badly written stuff, which gets by purely on the overwhelmingly sickly sentimentality and nostalgia it contains. However, the critics of this backward-looking genre are likely—like Mr. Colvin—to be misled into criticising every single work that contains these elements.  p. 119

In his subsequent examination of the book (which he describes as a “curiously heady brew”) he also has a go at another group of readers:

There are, as I have discovered, some very, very literal people in this world. Those who would rather spend their time crabbily counting up the halfpennies of logic whilst ignoring the fluttering riches of meaning, I advise to keep well away from this book and this author. Those who would prefer the transparent but sweaty engineer working frantically on his logical machinery while blue-scaled Venusian lizards batter down the papier-mache door will not feel at home in Green Town with its solid, but distorted perspectives. In parenthesis I would point out how strange it is that this kind of reader will often condemn an author’s work on the grounds of non-realism over some trifling technical ‘error’ that isn’t really an error at all, while the stuff that they are fond of reading is as unreal (in an imaginative sense) as it possibly could be.  p. 120

The whole review is worth reading, both for its description of the book (which I haven’t mentioned here), and the related contextual comments (two of which I’ve shown above).
No Characters by R. M. Bennett is a short review of the collection Somewhere a Voice by Eric Frank Russell. According to Bennett it is a mixed bag with a couple of good stories (the title story and I Am Nothing), and he expected better from this author.
Dr. Peristyle’s Column has more reader questions and Aldiss’s waspish answers. This is his reply to Betty Pierce of Diss, Norfolk, when she asks why writers try to give her more than a story:

A prize question, and your scribe is floored by it. I suppose the answer is that there are writers who write for the likes of you, madam, but the good ones hope to avoid you. In your ideal world, publishers would presumably publish only synopses of the stories they received. A true writer’s answer to you would be, possibly, that the interest never lies entirely in a story but in the details of how it happened and who it happened to, and also whether what happened had different effects on all concerned. Many writers, too, are as interested in how to tell what happened as in what happened; and they may be the individuals who are more interested in their subject matter than their readers.  p. 125

So—insult your questioner, mischaracterise what they want, and end with waffle. I think this is the last Peristyle column, which is probably for the best as a little of this kind of thing goes a long way.

•••

Another poor issue for fiction, with Editor Moorcock contributing most of the chaff. At least the non-fiction is interesting.  ●

_____________________

1. Christopher Priest takes over the magazine review duties in Vector #37, January 1966 (Graham Hall reappears in later issues to co-host the department).
Priest begins by saying that Colvin/Moorcock’s serial “has latent plot gimmicks and pseudoscientific paraphernalia” but “it reads quickly and well”; Jones’ Transient “is similar to Keyes’ “Flowers for Algernon”, but it doesn’t create the same poignancy or character-identification that that classic short story did.” Tubb’s J for Jeanne is slight, and Green’s Dance of the Cats “straight SF” and “very good of its kind”. Newton’s To Possess in Reality is “difficult to describe without giving away too much” but “a few fantasy cliches come off the worse in the process.” Cheetham’s A Mind of My Own is “a trifle,” and Fry’s Ernie is a “somewhat sadistic story” that is “a bit too callous, but makes its point.”
The story Priest liked least appears to be Michael Moorcock’s Further Information:

This is a pointless story with esoteric footnotes, awkward and unnecessary sex and a quite obscure plot.
Not recommended.  p. 21

Priest concludes:

A fair issue, not properly representative of the average quality.  p. 21

2. I’d always thought of Joseph Green as an Analog writer who occasionally slummed in New Worlds, but checking his early publication record shows him to be very much a protégé of John Carnell (this list of stories is partially from Galactic Central):

The Engineer (ss) New Worlds Science Fiction Feb 1962
Initiation Rites (ss) New Worlds Science Fiction Apr 1962 [Loafers]
The Colonist (nv) New Worlds Science Fiction Aug 1962 [Loafers]
Once Around Arcturus (nv) If Sep 1962
Life-Force (ss) New Worlds Science Fiction Nov 1962 [Loafers]
Transmitter Problem (ss) New Worlds Science Fiction Dec 1962 [Loafers]
The Fourth Generation (nv) Science Fiction Adventures (UK) #30 1963
Fight on Hurricane Island (ss) Argosy (UK) Jun 1963
The-Old-Man-in-the-Mountain (nv) New Worlds Science Fiction Jun 1963 [Loafers]
Refuge (nv) New Worlds Science Fiction Jul 1963 [Loafers]
Haggard Honeymoon (nv) (with James Webbert) New Writings in SF #1 1964
The Creators (ss) New Writings in SF #2 1964
Single Combat (ss) New Worlds Science Fiction Jul/Aug 1964
Treasure Hunt (nv) New Writings in SF #5 1965
Tunnel of Love (ss) New Worlds Science Fiction Jan 1965 [Silva de Fonseca]
The Decision Makers (nv) Galaxy Science Fiction Apr 1965 [Allan Odegaard (Conscience)]
Dance of the Cats (nv) New Worlds Science Fiction Dec 1965 [Silva de Fonseca]
Birth of a Butterfly (nv) New Writings in SF #10 1967

Most of Green’s later stories were in F&SF and Analog (although there were also another three in New Writings in SF).

3. I notice that the character’s attitudes towards women in this 1960’s magazine issue are probably worse than in the majority of the 1940’s and 50’s magazines I’ve read. Apart from the passage about Juline from the Cheetham story (“Juline had been too wild and free all her life, used to worship and supplication. She needed a strong arm . . . to direct her,” etc.), Nancy in the Moorcock serial only ever appears when Faustaff wants fed or to get his leg over, and there is also the “bitch” comment in the Tubb story.

4. Colin R. Fry’s ISFDB page is here: three stories published in New Worlds during 1964-65, and one in Fantastic in 1965.  ●

rssrss

New Worlds SF #156, November 1965

Summary: A mix of mediocre and average work, relieved by only the Platt story (and to a lesser extent by the Pratchett). Moorcock’s serial looks as if it is another potboiler like last year’s The Shores of Death.
[ISFDB page][Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:1
Graham Hall, Vector #36 (November 1965), p. 11

_____________________

Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
The Wrecks of Time (Part 1 of 3) • serial by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
The Music Makers • short story by Langdon Jones
Until We Meet • short story by Colin Hume
Time’s Fool • short story by Stuart Gordon [as by Richard Gordon]
Night Dweller • short story by Terry Pratchett
50% Me, at Least • short story by Graham Harris
Cultural Invasion • short story by Charles Platt

Non-fiction:
Cover
Interior artwork
• by James Cawthorn
The Santa Claus of the Atomic Age • editorial by Michael Moorcock
Paperbacks • book reviews by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
“Sorry About the Sound Effects, Daddy.” • book reviews by Hilary Bailey
Cosmonauts on Venus • film review by Alan Dodd

_____________________

This issue opens with another serial from Michael Moorcock, whose last was The Shores of Death just under a year ago—although this one, for whatever reason, is under his James Colvin pseudonym.

The Wrecks of Time begins with a short introduction (or maybe it’s just a blurb) that sets up fifteen quite different parallel Earths which exist in a “subspatial well”. After this we meet the protagonist, Professor Faustaff, driving across the American desert in a Buick convertible. He picks up a young woman called Nancy, who is wearing only a bathing suit (she was dumped by a trucker for not performing sexual favours):

He grinned at her and she grinned back, her eyes warming. Like most women she was already attracted by Faustaff’s powerful appeal. Faustaff accepted this as normal and had never bothered to work out why he should be so successful in love. It might be his unquestioning enjoyment of love-making and general liking for women. A kindly nature and an uncomplicated appreciation for all the bodily pleasures, a character that demanded no sustenance from others, these were probably the bases for Faustaff’s success with women. Whether eating, boozing. smoking, love-making, talking, inventing, helping people or giving pleasure in general, Faustaff did it with such spontaneity, such relaxation, that he could not fail to be attractive to most people.  p. 7

After this (tell instead of show) it isn’t long before they kiss.
Later on in their journey Faustaff gets a call on his private radio stating that Earth-15, the last of the series of alternate Earths, is unstable. Faustaff’s team also tell him that they have discovered a D-squad tunnel in Faustaff’s area (the D-squad are the people who are responsible for the instabilities that have taken place on some of the parallel Earths, and have resulted in the destruction of some of them). Faustaff becomes wary of Nancy.
They eventually stop at a motel, get a room, and go to the restaurant to eat. Faustaff, a giant of a man, has a similar appetite and eats four steaks. There is one other customer in the restaurant, a mysterious man called Steifflomeis, who speaks briefly to the couple and is obviously going to reappear later in the novel.
The chapters that follow this don’t advance the story much. Faustaff leaves his motel room naked later that evening, and takes an “invoker” from his car into the desert. Here he communicates with one of his team on E-15, and a man called George tells him about the D-squad attack, the resultant casualties, and that their “adjustor” is partially damaged (this is the device that Faustaff’s side use to counter the instabilities the D-squad cause). Faustaff says he’ll arrange for E1’s adjuster to be sent to them.
Faustaff and Nancy get up the next day and drive to Faustaff’s HQ in San Francisco. After Faustaff meets his team and gets an update he takes a new recruit called Bowen to E1 (the latter’s induction lecture is a data dump about Faustaff’s father discovering the alternate Earths, and how they are being destroyed by the D-squads).
Then E15 is attacked again. Faustaff goes there and has various adventures, which include seeing an unexpected D-squad attack by helicopter. The D-squad eventually destroy the already damaged adjustor, and Faustaff orders an immediate evacuation. His team’s portal collapses, and Faustaff only just manages to escape himself by using the “salvagers” one (another group with access to portal tech who scavenge anything useful from the sites of instabilities) before E15 is destroyed.
The first part finishes with the scavenger team who rescued Faustaff on E15 leave for E3—but they won’t take him along (which seems rather inconsistent), so Faustaff wanders off into the wilderness rather than put himself at the mercy of another scavenger boss, Orelli.
When Faustaff later stops to sleep, he awakes to find Steifflomeis sitting there waiting to kill him—but not until there is a lot of exposition. Steifflomeis not only reveals that he is (probably) working for the D-team, but also cheerily reveals himself as a nihilist who thinks the humans on all the various planets would be better off dead.
This is the first part of a mediocre potboiler based on made up pulp science (and not even particularly imaginative science at that), which was most likely hacked out at a fast pace to either (a) fill a hole in the magazine or (b) get its editor some extra cash. I note in passing that it has more of a sixties’ feel (the casual promiscuity, etc.) than its contemporaries and predecessors.

The Music Makers by Langdon begins with a lead violinist called David having an intense and emotionally painful experience as his orchestra plays a concerto on Mars. Afterwards he discusses the performance with the similarly affected Maxim Blacher, the conductor, who goes on to dismiss the audience as “peasants”.
Later, the pair go outside onto the Martian surface for a walk (where, atypically, the environment is blue-coloured rather than red). There the pair have a deep conversation about music and what it communicates, their poor opinion of the masses, and whether the extinct Martians would have a similar view of humanity. Blacher eventually goes back inside, leaving David on his own.
David then decides to play his violin, and the story ends with (spoiler) him hearing Martian music which fulfils him to the point that he realises that there is no point in living any more. As he dies, he sees Martian players moving towards the dome, and realises what they are going to do.
This is passably done but, as with most stories about music, it struggles to describe its effect on humans:

The urge came again, just like the end of the Berg; a desire for an unknown fulfilment that bloomed within him. It was a desire that could never be expressed in words; the price of his music. A perpetual irritation, it had been with him for most of his life. Music was just not enough. Sometimes, when he listened to the climax of a Bach fugue, he felt that he was approaching something—something big and incomprehensible. But he never attained it. He was like a drowning man, clasping the weeds at the side of a river, pulling himself half from the water and then slipping back again. He wondered what would happen if he ever found what he was looking for.  p. 61

The ending sounds a bit snobbish:

The Martians didn’t know what they were up against; a wall of philistinism, a defence inconceivably powerful. A nasty shock was in store for them. He wondered what the outcome of the contest would be; he just could not see victory for the Martians.  p. 66

Middling Jones and, if I recall correctly, not up to the standard of next month’s Transient or last year’s I Remember, Anita.

Until We Meet by Colin Hume2 begins with a man watching waves splashing on jagged rocks until he suspends the motion. Then a woman called Sylvia appears and they begin a conversation that occurs first against this backdrop and then various others (the stars, a ballroom, etc.). The subject of their discussion is the fact that they have spent thousands of years trying to meet in real life.
This goes on for a bit until the man wakes up in his dingy room, whereupon he reflects that he doesn’t need dream girls as he has a wife called Christine. He then looks out of the window and sees Sylvia in a distant window. He doesn’t recognise who she is, and she isn’t looking at him. It seems as if it will be a few more years before they are on the same page, if ever.
This feels a little like a variant of an “I woke up and it was all a dream” story. It’s an okay read as far as it goes but is very slight.

Stuart Gordon follows up his debut in New Worlds #152 (A Light in the Sky) with Time’s Fool. This has the Marquis de Sade transported through time so he can be quizzed by academics about his life and philosophy so they can come to a decision about the accuracy of his reputation. This inquisition takes place on a television program compered by a cheesy host (an unnecessary and irritating part of the story):

A cacophonous fanfare of some raucous instrument sounded, De Sade saw some mechanical monster, spherical and studded with openings, swoop down out of the ceiling and hover in the air in front of his face. It was humming slightly. Wallace motioned for him to keep still.
A young man with an idiotic face came on stage and began announcing the programme. De Sade disliked him immediately.
“Ladies—and—gentlemen! Your favourite tri-di station presents your favourite programme—Man or Monster! This week, who do we have . . . wait for it, ladies and gentlemen.” Spotlights caught de Sade full in the face, and he blinked angrily, feeling that he was made to look a fool.
“Yes, folks, believe it or not, this week our guest is the Marquis de Sade!” The announcement finished on a highpitched scream, and an impressed ooohh came from the audience. The young man continued: “As you all know, folks, the Marquis was born in 1740, and died in . . . well, it would hardly be fair on the Marquis to spill it, would it?”  p. 78

At the end of the story (spoiler) he returns to his own time with no memory of the trip.
Readers who know nothing (or next to nothing) about de Sade (such as myself) will know more by the end, and may come to the conclusion that the portrait painted by history is not accurate. This is more of a history documentary than a story, but it’s okay for all that.

Night Dweller by Terry Pratchett (the second published story by the sixteen-year-old) concerns the interplanetary creatures that live in our solar system:

Space is an ocean. I remember that now as I watch the armada of blue Nisphers sailing down against the solar wind. They are heading for the sun, to bask safely in the golden shallows. Even they flee from the storm.
Besides the low sighing of the Nisphers there is only the ever present hiss of space. No squeaks or squeals or grunts that mean the teeming life of the firmament itself. We are only just past the Pluto orbit and the Ear has been silent for days.  p. 83

Donovan, the narrator, is a member of a spaceship crew that is hunting for a creature known as the Night Dweller:

Above the chart-table, which serves me as a desk, hangs a framed parchment. I know its message by heart.
‘It has a soul that hungers for warmth, yet warmth would kill it. For it is not of a sun or a space, a place or a race, but a hatred, a coldness, a deeper blackness slinking in the sunless shadows. It is the dweller in the darkness. And, because it is not of them, it hates all the creatures of the golden shallows and the light that is blessed.
‘Undreamt of, it waits in its misery and cold loneliness, and in its hatred it howls at the stars.’
Those are the last words of the Fragment—it has no other name. It was written, sweated into stone, by the survivor of a dead race. The rest of it tells of the manner of their death, and of something that howled at the stars.  p. 84

The rest of the story is an account of the men on board (two have volunteered rather than face the death penalty, one suffers from a terminal disease, etc.) and their mission to kill the creature with a nuclear weapon.
It’s an effective mood piece with some atmospheric passages but, unfortunately, it just stops.

50% Me, at Least by Graham Harris has the narrator coming out of his coma in the hospital to find that (a) he has been in a traffic accident and (b) that the surgeons have given him a replacement artificial leg and arm. Initially he struggles to understand the doctor:

“You’re a member of Appen?” asked the doctor, his whole being, white and mingled with nothing and everything, gently lowered to the level of Bob Forton’s eyes.
“Am I? er—what?” Forton asked, wondering if he were the only patient in the room.
The teeth disappeared for a moment behind a skin full of hair.
“Robert Forton,” said the teeth once again, more slowly, “You remember what happened?”  p. 90

There is a lot more of this (it is rather overdone) before the story eventually moves on to Forton falling in love with the nurse. He is initially baffled by her cool response to his advances, but this is explained in the story’s denouement (spoiler), which reveals that he is actually a malfunctioning robot.
A beginner’s story that should probably have stayed in the slushpile.

Cultural Invasion by Charles Platt is a distinct change of pace from his last story in New Worlds #152, the Ballardian Lone Zone. This one, an amusing farce, begins on a Russian spaceship returning from the first moon landing, and when one of the cosmonauts prematurely fires the retro rockets they land in England, midway between the villages of Willy-in-the-Mud and Leyton.
The arrival of the re-entry capsule initially interrupts a courting couple, but soon involves an extensive list of characters including a local farmer, a drunk cyclist, a school-teacher, etc., all of whom end up involved in various mishaps (and who all end up squabbling and fighting with each other to the point that the Russian landing craft is ignored). The events in the narrative are summed up when PC Plod arrives towards the end of the story:

Constable Brown thought for a moment. He still wrote nothing in his notebook. “What exactly has been going on, here?” he asked [. . .].
Smith took a deep breath. “There’s a man who claims his daughter’s been assaulted, a young lad ran off in a Land Rover, there’s a drunkard staggering about claiming Farmer Knight rammed his car, Farmer Knight himself is worked up about his damaged fields, and on top of that, there’s a Russian space ship up there, and some woman who I suspect to be in collusion with the people inside . . .”
“Let’s have one thing at a time, sir,” the constable interrupted. “What was the registration number of the stolen vehicle?  p. 115

This is, by contemporary standards, probably rather unsophisticated stuff—but I imagine it would have gone down well at the time, and I enjoyed it.
It also has the benefit of a line that sums up British weather:

In this part of the world, it was usually raining, and when it wasn’t, it looked as if it would do very shortly. p. 100

•••

The Cover for this issue is uncredited, and there is only one piece of Interior artwork by James Cawthorn for Moorcock’s serial.
The Santa Claus of the Atomic Age by Michael Moorcock discusses, to begin with, The Selected Works of Alfred Jarry. His comments about this book confirm the impression I have that he (probably like a number of other SF editors of the time) would have been happier running a modernist or post-modernist literary magazine:

[Bit] by bit, here and there, we are beginning to shake off the limiting conventions of sf and expand the field, seeking new subject matter and new techniques, trying to produce, to use that crude phrase we so often fall back on for want of something better, a more lasting ‘sense of wonder’. What Jarry has done can be done again—in the terms of today. It may be some time before the sf field produces its Jarry, but the moment will come when sf will explode into something that will produce many works of lasting importance. If this means a rejection on the part of the writers of most of the conventions of sf, then the rejection must be made. We must progress, must adapt or die. The growing general interest in and understanding of symbolism and surrealism encourages us to hope that the old philistinic cries of ‘Obscure!’ and ‘Bad Taste’ will soon cease to be heard for good. The work of men like Jarry must be made to look as conventional as the work of Cervantes, Swift, or H. G. Wells. Jarry created Ubu, whom Cyril Connolly has called ‘The Santa Claus of the Atomic Age’. It is up to us to create a whole range of mythological figures not only for the Atomic Age, but also for the Space Age.  p. 3

Moorcock then goes on to say:

A little paradoxically, considering all we’ve said, this issue contains a selection of fairly conventional sf stories, primarily by young writers.  p. 3

This sentence highlights a long-running dissonance between the editorialising in New Worlds and what the magazine actually presents to its readers. Over time, and with the advent of the larger format magazine in 1967, this mismatch disappeared.
The rest of Moorcock’s remarks are about the writers in this issue and their work, and include comments about his own pseudonymous serial (see my further comments about his self-referential remarks below) being “straightforward stuff” with “a freshness of approach and idea.” He also mentions that Pratchett first published at age 14 and is now 16, and that Graham Harris has published two SF novels.
Paperbacks by Michael Moorcock (under his James Colvin pseudonym) is mostly taken up by reviews of Penguin’s release of five new titles: Fifth Planet by Fred Hoyle and Geoffrey Hoyle “convinces on a superficial level most of the time”; Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. is “thoroughly recommended as above-average sf” (although Moorcock says it’s not much better than Vonnegut’s contemporaries, like De Vries and Southern—who?).
The Space Merchants by C. M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl gets a more detailed examination:

In New Maps of Hell, Kingsley Amis saw fit to say that The Space Merchants by Pohl and Kornbluth (Penguin, 3s. 6d.) had ‘many claims to being the best science fiction novel so far’. Amis’s tastes must be limited, for though this book is slickly-written, fast-moving and fairly mature in its outlook, its main target—the advertising world—is an old, tired target and no really original shots are fired at it.
[. . .]
Is it ‘satire’? Since the fears it expresses and the dangers it warns against have been the subjects of numerous newspaper leaders, Sunday Supplement articles, daily paper features, not to mention articles in the weekly reviews, novels and short stories. I can’t call it satire as I think of the term. To me satire should point out what is not obvious, and everybody’s suspicious of the advertising companies, aren’t they? Amis also gave the impression that Kornbluth was the passenger in the team. A reading of stories written independently by the two writers, a glance at Pohl’s work since Kornbluth died, should right that impression immediately. Reading The Syndic, for instance, clearly shows that Kornbluth had a talent for invention and, yes, satire, but was a bit shaky on plot construction. It would appear to me that Pohl’s big contribution to the team was his ability to construct a balanced plot. As light-reading, The Space Merchants is recommended.  p. 120

Moorcock then comments on More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon:

I’m not a great fan of Theodore Sturgeon, finding his writing emotionally imprecise and his characterisation often corny, but More Than Human (Penguin, 3s. 6d.) is perhaps his best book and the first section, The Fabulous Idiot which describes a moron with a hypnotic power to make people do whatever he wants, two girls brought up in a house by a paranoid father to whom sexual desire is the greatest of many evils and will not let them see or even touch their own bodies, is as powerful and horrifying a piece of writing as I have ever come across in sf.  p. 120-121

I thought it interesting that he mentions that part of the novel rather than the more widely acclaimed Baby is Three (the central novella).
He finishes with the Penguin quintet of books by stating that the new translation of Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne “is more readable than any [. . .] I have seen.”
There are various other books covered by Moorcock, with Weird Shadows from Beyond by John Carnell getting the best review. During this “Colvin” comments on one of Moorcock stories included in the collection:

[Science Fantasy] became top-heavy towards the end, with too much emphasis on ‘sword and sorcery’ stories (in particular, Moorcock’s ‘Elric’ series) but even this made it different to the rest and it published my first story, which gives me even more affection for it. Moorcock is represented, as it happens, by the only sword and sorcery story he didn’t publish in Science Fantasy and the only one I have really been able to read—Master of Chaos.
This has many of the elements of his Elric stories but they are crystallised into a shorter length, the writing is better controlled and the metaphysical theory of Earth’s creation (cut from ‘the stuff of Chaos’ by heroic men with imagination who have sufficient force of personality to exert an influence on ‘unformed matter’ and turn it into organised landscapes of plains and trees and the like) less outrageous than usual.  p. 122

Moorcock comments again on his own work at the end of the essay in the review of Blades of Mars by E. P. Bradbury (another pseudonym used for a series of Edgar Rice Burroughs pastiches):

[This] emulates Burroughs, even down to the latter’s reactionary, Victorian-style philosophising. I suspect that parts of this have been written with tongue in cheek, but perhaps I am doing Mr Bradbury more justice than he deserves. A colourful, action-packed romance, it has a pace that never falters and a clean, old-fashioned style that carries you along in spite of yourself. This, I gather, is what they call the work of a natural story-teller. I read it feeling I shouldn’t be wasting my time, but I did find it hard to put down.  p. 124

There would be a riot on Twitter if you did this kind of self-reviewing nowadays (and rightfully so).
There is a shorter book review column by Hilary Bailey, “Sorry About the Sound Effects Daddy”, where she examines New Writings in SF 5, edited by John Carnell, and Farnham’s Freehold, by Robert Heinlein. She says of NWISF that none of the stories are “wholly memorable” and adds:

I felt that five out of the seven, with a little more imagination, a little more intellectual hard work and more concrete visualisation, could have been more than good. Secretly I have the feeling that if sf writers would follow their own star a little more, and cling less to the work of other sf writers, the standard would improve. If they dropped this I’m-just-a-craftsman, less-literary-than-thou pose, sf might make a sudden jump forward.  p. 125

Bailey did not like the Heinlein and, after conceding that the book makes you read on, has this to say:

And yet—and yet—Heinlein is an sf Great, but his writing is mediocre, his dialogue banal and his imagination sparse. As so often in sf a ghastly facetiousness comes over the characters in times of crisis. Have people facing death ever spoken like this?: “Are you breaking it to me gently that we are going to be baked alive?” And: “Any time I’m too hot to put my arm round a girl I’ll know I’m dead and in hell.” In contrast the classic war-film dialogue “Sarge, Sarge, help me! I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!” seems refreshingly naturalistic.
This is not a matter of detail, but points up Heinlein’s weakness, a sheer paucity of imagination, lack of sense of how people behave, which weakens the whole book. The characters’ utterly incredible obsession with their sleeping pills, their sanitation and the question of mixed sleeping and bathing arrangements which permeates the whole shelter sequence again betrays Heinlein, like so many sf writers, as a man who has no competence in dealing with his stock in trade—disturbance, change and crisis and how people react to it.
But this book is not really about any group of people—it is wish-fulfilment of a high order. The central character (revealingly starting as ‘Mr Farnham’ and then taking over and becoming ‘Hugh’) is always in control, ditches his old wife, gets the nubile girl, threatens to shoot his son, complacently accepts it when his daughter offers herself to him, comes up trumps every time. In fact the author is so anxious to keep Hugh safe that it weakens the book. Typically, he is discovered in the first and last ten pages of the book in two separate bomb-shelters.
In the middle of the book a character screaming in the agonies of prolonged and eventually fatal childbirth, rallies in true Heinlein fashion and jests: “They went that-a-way. Sorry about the sound effects, Daddy.”
It’s a horrid thought that if the radiation don’t get you, Heinlein’s characters will.  p. 126

Cosmonauts on Venus by Alan Dodd is a film review of a Russian production which sounds like a bad dinosaur movie set on another planet.
Also present in this issue (like the last Science Fantasy) are a number of house adverts filling the gaps at the end of the story

•••

This is poor issue, a mix of mediocre and average work relieved only by the Platt story (and to a lesser extent by the Pratchett).  ●

_____________________

1. Graham Hall opens his review in Vector #36 (November 1965), by saying:

The November issue of New Worlds is another written predominantly by the younger generation of British SF writers and, for that reason, is disappointing.  p. 11

Ouch. Take that, new writers.
He has this about the serial:

James Colvin’s novel The Wrecks of Time starts off promisingly, with a handful of strong characters and an intriguing picture of the fifteen alternate Earths. The ending of the first part seems to intimate that it could be soaring off into the surrealist realms that Colvin is so fond of. Let us hope it is not to be.  p. 11

Hall goes on to say that Pratchett is “the youngest contributor” but that his story “shows an encouraging maturity”; Richard Gordon’s Time’s Fool is “less expert” but “demonstrates an admirable knowledge of the misunderstood pervert’s life”; and Harris’s 50% Me, At Least is mediocre, not saved by giving “an old, old gimmick a new twist.”
He did like the Jones and Hume stories though, saying that The Music Makers is “a magnificent handling of a magnificent idea,” and Until We Meet is “a fine fantasy.”
Charles Platt’s story is another Hall didn’t care for:

Cultural Invasion is hard to reconcile with the sheer inventive brilliance of Lone Zone. It is, in short, a tired, strained comedy of what happened the night a Russian space capsule landed in a Hertfordshire village and is oh-so-feeble.  p. 11

2. This was the second and last of Hume’s short stories according to ISFDB. The other was Dummy Run in Science Fantasy #67, September/October 1964.  ●

rssrss

Science Fantasy #78, November 1965

Summary: The quality of this issue is better than than usual (and more consistent). Although there is nothing particularly outstanding, Josephine Saxton’s debut story, The Wall, is noteworthy.
[ISFDB page] [Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:1
John Boston and Damien Broderick: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 (p. 268 of 365)
Graham Hall, Vector #36, November 1965, p. 12

_____________________

Editor, Kyril Bonfiglioli; Associate Editor, J. Parkhill-Rathbone

Fiction:2
The Day of the Doomed King • short story by Brian W. Aldiss
The Saga of Sid • short story by Ernest Hill
Beyond Time’s Aegis • novelette by Craig A. Mackintosh and Brian Stableford [as by Brian Craig] +
The Wall • short story by Josephine Saxton +
Yesterdays’ Gardens • short story by Johnny Byrne
The Weirwoods (Part 2 of 2) • serial by Thomas Burnett Swann

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Keith Roberts
SF or Not SF? A Letter from a Reader • by Brian Stableford
Letter from a Reader
• by Kenneth F. Slater

_____________________

The Day of the Doomed King by Brian W. Aldiss is set, presumably, in medieval times, and starts with the wounded King Vukasan and his general, Jovann, taking refuge in a countryside church after Turkish forces have defeated their Serbian army. When the king wakes up after resting he sees a wooden screen in the room with a painted design, and the nearby lake through the window.
The pair then leave for the capital to raise the alarm and another army but, en route, the king sees a magpie with a lizard in its mouth. The bird dies, and Vukasan thinks this as an omen, so he decides to detour to a nearby monastery to ask a seer what this means.
After the pair pass a shepherd boy, who points to signs of the pursuing Turks, and a cart with a dead driver, Vukasan still insists on going to the monastery rather than going straight to the capital. When Vukasan consults the seer, he gets two predictions, one good, one bad. The good one tells of a greater Serbian Empire:

“You rule wisely, if without fire, and make a sensible dynastic marriage, securing the succession of the house of Josevic. The arts and religion flourish as never before in the new kingdom. Many homes of piety and learning and law are established. Now the Slavs come into their inheritance, and go forth to spread their culture to other nations. Long after you are dead, my king, people speak your name with love, even as we speak of your grandfather, Orusan. But the greatness of the nation you founded is beyond your imagining. It spreads right across Europe and the lands of the Russian. Our gentleness and our culture goes with it. There are lands across the sea as yet undiscovered; but the day will come when our emissaries will sail there. And the great inventions of the world yet to come will spring from the seed of our Serbian knowledge, and the mind of all mankind be tempered by our civility. It will be a contemplative world, as we are contemplative, and the love in it will be nourished by that contemplation, until it becomes stronger than wickedness.”  p. 16

After this the king hears the other prediction—where the Turks triumph and his reign is lost to history—and the seer concludes by saying that he cannot tell which one will pass. He does, however, point out that the contemplative nature of the Vukasan’s society will not help win the war against the Turks, and points to the King’s delays and detours on his current journey.
Vukasan (spoiler) then wakes to find he is still in the church that he and Jovann first stopped at, and realises the journey to the monastery was a dream, or a vision. He dies, and Jovann arranges a proper funeral. Because of this further delay, the future Serbian empire seen in the vision never happens.
This is a well described, mainstreamish story, and one that offers a brief if tantalising alt-history vision.3

The Saga of Sid by Ernest Hill starts with a vicar watching a christening party from the vestry and thinking quite un-vicar like and borderline misanthropic thoughts before going in to officiate at the service. During this, the baby speaks:

They gathered around: the Jacques, the godparents, the woman next door, Hetty’s parents and old Molly Braddock absent from the cherry-picking with a sprained ankle. He took the child and held it, swathed in its christening robes, over the bowl that now for practical purposes had replaced the ancient Norman font.
“The child’s name?” he whispered.
“They are going to call me Sid,” the baby said, “I don’t like it very much as a name, but if it keeps them happy . . .”  p. 21

After the vicar’s initial irritation at what he presumes is a practical joke, the story moves on to its next scene, an abortive kidnapping attempt by a bell-ringer who overheard the baby, and a passing circus owner to whom he has sold the information. Baby Sid acts dumb at this point and the bell ringer exits stage left, pursued by the circus owner.
The rest of this rambling story charts Sid’s development, and there are subsequently mentions of Asgard, monotheism, and various other subjects. Eventually, his mother takes him to the vicar to be exorcised, whereupon Sid learns he can’t bear to be near mistletoe.
After the exorcism (spoiler) a transparent green flying saucer appears carrying Odin and Frigg, who inform Sid that his body hosts the soul of Baldur, which they rescued from “Hel.” They take Baldur away, leaving Sid’s body behind, which is now a normal infant.
This is a very odd piece and, although it has some interesting parts, they don’t fit together into a coherent or plausible story.

Beyond Time’s Aegis by Craig A. Mackintosh and Brian Stableford begins with what seems to be gibberish:

Time is not merely a dimension measuring the passage of days and nights. Time is a property of the minds of men. And because the race of Man is finite, so too, in a sense, is Time. The present is ever moving to the future, and one day there will come a time when it has run its course. Then, for mankind, there will be no more future.
There will still be days and nights but, for the human race, Time will have stopped. There will be no more progress, no more hope for the future. Time will have exhausted the spirit which makes men build. And then cities will fall, and Man will cease to live—he will only exist.
But there are forces other than Time. And there will always be rebels.  p. 39

Anyway, the rebel mentioned above calls himself the Firefly (“because I reject this world and its torpor, and cast my own light”), and he has an number of adventures in this strange future world while on a quest to find a time walker, a man who Firefly hopes can take him back to the past, and a better life.
Initially Firefly consults a seer called The Red Wolf Queen at an inn; next he talks to a man in the desert who appears to have part of the sun suspended between two towers; then he meets a warrior called the Condor, who has a shield with fine art painted on it, created by the latter’s uncle, to whom the Condor later introduces the Firefly. Then there is a man dancing in the desert who is scared of his own shadow (and which later consumes the man); the Lungfish, who says that he and his kind are a bridge between mankind’s current existence and the new one coming when time finally stops; a religious cult who think the moon brings night; and, finally, a giant who thinks he is God and who makes statues.
Penultimately, the Firefly comes to a village and, in one of the houses, talks to a dwarf who offers him the chance to travel in time. The Firefly accepts the offer and finds himself in a city with many people around him, while he hears the voices of all the characters he has encountered on his quest. When the experience stops he realises the dwarf drugged him.
Finally, the Firefly comes to the Crossroads of the World, a series of metalled roads, and gets lost in the mist. After blundering around for a while, he meets the Guide, who points towards The Peak of the Thunderer. There he finds the The Man Who Walked Through Time, but learns it is only possible to travel forward in time, not back. In the ensuing discussion The Man Who Walked Through Time tells the Firefly that the Lungfish is correct about what man’s next evolution will be, and is part of a colony of mutants helping homo superior to evolve. Firefly refuses to have anything to do with the project, but The Man Who Walked Through Time knows that the Firefly will come back because everyone else in the world is happy except him.
This is, despite the description above, an entertaining enough read, and I was tempted to give it three stars—but there’s no escaping the fact that this story is episodic and far too padded. And God knows what all that allegory and symbolism is about—it’s a pretty typical example of the kind of overblown story you would expect from two smart undergraduates.4

The Wall by Josephine Saxton has a pretty good blurb from Bonfiglioli (or more likely from Parkhill-Rathbone), “A story as vivid as a Kafka nightmare, and as true as you think.” The piece begins by describing a saucer shaped valley with huge towering mountains at the sides, and a thick wall running through the middle:

It was a very high wall, thirty feet in height, and it was very ancient in its stone, dark blue, hard, impenetrable, but rough and worn. Crystalline almost, its surfaces sprang this way and that, revealing whole lumps of glittering faceted hardness, with smooth places where mosses and orange lichens had got hold; and at its foot many creeping plants; tough twisted vines bearing clusters of ungathered raisins, convolvulus white and pink, and ivy in many colours, thick, glossy and spidery. Here and there stones had fallen from its old structure, two and three feet thick, and in one place, almost halfway across the floor of the valley, there was a hole through the wall, only six inches across its greatest measurement, and three feet from the floor, which was moist red clay on the north side, and dry white sand on the south side. The top of the wall was sealed to all climbers by rows of dreadful spikes which curved in every direction, cruel, needle sharp, glassy metal rapiers set into green bronze. They were impenetrable in every way, these swords, and stood endless guard between north and south.  pp. 72-73

On either side of the wall are a man and a woman, who can only communicate through the hole. The story describes the pair and their love for each other, even though their relationship is restricted to talking and holding hands.
Eventually the man and woman decide to part, and they both move away from the wall to see if they can find other people with whom they can have a normal life. When they move up the slopes of either side of the valley, they meet people of the opposite sex, and make love with them. Afterwards they both look across the valley and see what the other has done, rush back to the wall, and start climbing it so they can be together. At the top of the wall (spoiler) they end up impaled on the spikes and then, at either side of them, they can see the bodies of many other couples along the top of the wall who have come to the same end—something they never noticed before.
After they die the story ends with another couple moving towards the wall.
This story impressed me less this time around than it has on previous readings, but that is probably because part of the story’s power is the final image of the lovers impaled on the top of wall—the effect of this is obviously lessened on the fourth (or fifth?) reading. And there are also parts of the story that felt like they could have done with some polishing. Still, this allegorical fantasy is one of the more notable stories the magazine published, and if you haven’t come across it, it’s worth a read.

Yesterdays’ Gardens by Johnny Byrne starts with a young girl pestering her uncle to let her go outside into the garden which, we learn later, is a post-nuclear war wasteland (withered vegetation, the night a “big light” came, etc., etc.):

The child altered carefully the position of a bed. She didn’t appear to hear him. “Why do you never go into the garden?” she said suddenly.
“Gardens are bad for people. They’re bad for the hair, bad for the bone and worse for little children.” Uncle Ernie spoke as if he were remembering a well-remembered lesson. His niece echoed him parrotlike:
.
Little boys and
girls should know
that gardens in
air are bad they
give pain in the
head pain in the
bone and all the
lovely hair is
vanished by the
nasty jealous air
.
“Why is the garden dry and yellow?” She never looked at him when she asked this question. “When I was little it was green and noisy. Why isn’t it noisy now?”  p. 80

The story goes on like this for a while before the girl eventually gets a box she has been repeatedly asking the uncle for, and then talks to (what I presume was) an invisible friend.
Parts of this are reasonably well done but it’s all rather inconsequential, and I didn’t entirely understand what happens at the end (if anything).

The Weirwoods by Thomas Burnett Swann concludes in this issue with a much shorter part (42 pp.) than the first, and starts with Tanaquil paralysed and surrounded by cats that Vel has put under a spell, including her pet Bast:

She was not surprised when he sprang onto the couch and placed an affectionate paw on her arm. Often he slept beside her. Often he laid his head against her cheek. Dearest Bast, your fur is warmth on a cold night. Friendliness. Familiarity. But where is Arnth? Where is my father? They too need your protection.
He prodded her with his paw. Then, foot over foot, he mounted her body and peered into her eyes. He was a heavy animal; it was hard to breathe with the weight of his pressing claws. She felt the heat of his breath and smelled an acrid, salty scent which she did not recognise. Not only his scent was different. He looked somehow—alien. Perhaps she had frightened him with her stillness. On other nights she had cradled him in her arms. He peered at her with nothing which she could read. Slowly, with deliberate grace, like a trained leopard in one of the great circuses at Tarquinia, he raised his paw.
Then she recognized the smell on his fur. It was blood. The prodding paw, the slow advance, and now, the fixedly staring, almost hypnotic eyes, were gestures shrewdly calculated to tease and torture her. He did not intend to hurry his play. His eyes looked as cold as a topaz under the water. Perhaps they had always been cold. But now she was able to read them without the sentimentalizing haze of her affection, and she grasped the terrible truth that love can never be compelled, from man, from sprite, from beast; that one who loves, however she longs for requital, however long she waits, may receive in return the reverse of what she gives, the dark side of the moon.  pp. 84-85

Vegoia comes to Tanaquil and Arnth’s rescue, and tells them that she only meant the cats to disable the guards so Vel could escape—but now there has been a massacre in the town. She tells Arnth that he must take Tanaquil away before the slaves wake and take their revenge on any of the masters who are still alive.
After the drugs eventually wear off the pair have a difficult time getting out of the town, and face abuse and threats on the way out, but eventually reach the forest. There, they meet Vegoia again. Much to Tanaquil’s chagrin (she now harbours carnal thoughts for Arnth), she watches as he and Vegoia embrace.
After this dramatic start to the second instalment, the rest is a downhill slide: Vegoia and Arnth spend the night together, and then she sends him to make love to Tanaquil. The visit is a disaster, with Tanaquil telling him she doesn’t want Vegoia’s “leavings.” Then Vel appears and attacks her, but dies when he jumps on a hatchet that Tanaquil picks up to defend herself.
The rest of the story is even gloomier: Tanaquil grieves (unsure whether this is for Vel, or her father, or both), and then Vegoia falls ill: it soon becomes apparent she is dying. Vegoia later takes Arnth to a clearing in the forest that is special to her and, after she explains what is happening to her, she sends him away. That night a corn-sprite summons him, and he canoes across the lake to talk to her spirit, and later finds her body.
A month later, Arne and Tanaquil leave for Rome and, as the last passage shows, they are now a couple:

“I’ll go to Rome,” she said. “I understand that there’s a shortage of women. Didn’t the first Romans have to steal their mates from the Sabines?”
“But that was a long time ago.”
“How do you know there isn’t still a shortage?”
“That’s their problem,” said Arnth firmly. “You’re with me.”
“Am I, Arnth?”
She placed a hand on his arm. It was a comfortable hand. What had Vegoia said? “It is the measure of a man that he can move from woodfire to hearthfire without bitterness, without reproaching the gods, his enemies, or himself.” He would never forget that brief, bright burning in a wintry forest, the blue and the amber.
But hearthfires were also good.  p. 126

This is an enjoyable novel, but it is nowhere as good as The Blue Monkeys, and the first part is better than this second—especially as the tragedy in the latter seems a little overdone. There is no particular explanation for Vegoia’s demise (although she has a heart at the end, which may explain matters). Maybe Tanaquil’s romantic rival just needed to disappear for plot reasons.5

•••

This issue’s Cover by Keith Roberts is one of his better pieces and, if you can drag your eyes away from the face in the painting (which I finally managed to do after a number of decades), you can see the magpie with the lizard in its beak lower left, which is part of a scene from the Brian W. Aldiss story.
SF or Not SF? A Letter from a Reader by Brian Stableford takes up the editorial space with one of those “Whither SF” letters. It starts with some pigeon holing before moving on to the magic of SF and its sense of wonder.
Letter From a Reader
by Kenneth F. Slater is another long letter at the back of the issue (you wonder if Bonfiglioli has realised he can fill small holes in the line-up with reader’s correspondence). Slater’s letter is of more interest than Stableford’s, and it makes a number of points. First off he has this to say about the end of the pulps:

I must start by disagreeing with one point you make—hack writing was not the death of the pulps—the hack writer is still with us, ploughing the same old furrow for the pb editor. The pulps died because of a triple factor of economics (that old pulp paper just wasn’t that cheap any more), and competition from three sources—the ‘comic’ books—the One-eyed Monster—and the paperback. Incidentally, the hack still plies his trade for the comics, which are read by the same age-groups (the ten-year-old to the thirty-year-olds . . . and year by year that thirty goes up) who before the second WW were the main pulp market.  p. 127

After this he talks about the survival of the SF magazines, literary excellence vs. readability, and the overuse of certain tropes (“the overworked holocaust”).

•••

There is nothing particularly outstanding in this issue (although the Saxton is noteworthy), but the overall quality is much better than normal.  ●

____________________

1. John Boston (Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 p. 268-270) confirms that The Day of the Doomed King is “a retelling of a Serbian legend” (he gleaned this information from Aldiss’s The Twinkling of An Eye) and says:

It’s not my cup of tea but nonetheless very good, one of the early stories in which Aldiss began to shake the dust of SF as he had known it off his boots and to head for more ambiguous territory.  p. 269

I’d suggest this process had been going on for at least a couple of years by this point (Shards, Man on Bridge, Pink Plastic Gods, Man in his Time, etc.).
As for the others, he relays Bonfiglioli’s summary of reader comments (in Science Fantasy #80) about the Saxton, says the Hill is “better and funnier than [its] description makes it sound,” and adds that the Byrne is “literary and surreal” and “a return to form.” (He also notes that this is Byrne’s last appearance in the magazine and that he “would soon be snared by television.”)
He covers Mackintosh & Stableford’s Beyond Time’s Aegis in more detail, noting that it was “published when Brian Stableford was seventeen or so, [and] is readable though irritating.” He adds that each of the encounters is “more colorful and allegorical than the one before.” Boston says that he suspects the story was influenced by John Brunner’s Earth is But a Star.
He also thinks that Robert’s cover painting is his “most attractive [. . .] yet.”

Graham Hall (Vector #36, November 1965, p. 12) opens with the comment, “Apart from, or perhaps because of, the inexplicable absence of Kyril Bonfiglioli, this is a well-balanced issue”—before later ending the review by saying that the issue is “a feather in Bonfiglioli’s cap.”
In between he doesn’t do much more than label the stories (Aldiss, “fantasy in in its purest and most lyrical sense;” Saxton, “a story of frustrated love with its own wild logic;” Swann, “a flowery, verbose novel,” etc.). He does say that that Ernest Hill’s The Saga of Sid is “beautiful mixture of Norse legends and straight humour, expertly stirred,” that Mackintosh & Stableford’s Beyond Time’s Aegis “introduces a plethora of unforgettable characters” during its “allegorical wandering,” and that Johnny Byrne’s Yesterday’s Gardens is “far more mature than any of [his] other tales.”

2. My previous scores for the stories were (current scores in brackets):
The Day of the Doomed King by Brian W. Aldiss ()
The Saga of Sid by Ernest Hill ()
Beyond Time’s Aegis by Craig A. Mackintosh and Brian Stableford (+)
The Wall by Josephine Saxton (+)
Yesterdays’ Gardens by Johnny Byrne ()
The Weirwoods (Part 2 of 2) by Thomas Burnett Swann ()

3. Aldiss’s The Eyes of the Doomed King had a sequel, The Eyes of the Blind King, in SF Impulse #9, November 1966 (were it not for the name change in four issues time, this issue would have been Science Fantasy #90). Presumably these stories were the by-products of his travel book, Cities and Stones: A Traveller’s Yugoslavia (1966).

4. According to his Wikipedia page, Brian Stableford graduated with a degree in biology from the University of York in 1969, so I assume Beyond Time’s Aegis was written during his first year there.
A later novel, Firefly, was, according to ISFDB, “a rewrite of Stableford’s first, previously unpublished novel, a fix-up with his first published novelette, Beyond Time’s Aegis.”

5. The Ace Books volume of the Swann’s The Weirwoods (1967) states, “A slightly different version of this novel was serialized In Science Fantasy #77, 78, and is copyright ©, 1965, by Science Fantasy.”
I didn’t look at the text in detail but there is a slight OCR word count difference in the different versions (the number in brackets is the word count difference in the book versus serial version): Chapter 1 (+25), 2 (+124), 3 (+120), 4 (+83), 5 (+71), 6 (+125), 7 (-23), 8 (-24), 9 (-3), 10 (-56).
After reading this novel I went through the ISFDB listings for Swann’s novels, and was struck by how many of his books (until some of the relatively recent Wildside Press editions) only had a single English printing.*
I also note that all of Swann’s books bar one, Queens Walk in the Dusk, were paperback originals, so it is perhaps no wonder his work is almost entirely forgotten (I’d also add that I’m surprised at his omission from the Gollancz Masterworks of Fantasy series—especially his novel Wolfwinter).
* Queens Walk in the Dusk (1977), Lady of the Bees (1976), The Goat Without Horns (1971), Wolfwinter (1972), How Are the Mighty Fallen (1974), The Not-World (1975), Will-O-the Wisp (1976), The Minikins of Yam (1976), The Tournament of Thorns (1976), The Gods Abide (1976), The Dolphin and the Deep (collection, 1968), Where is the Bird of Fire (collection, 1970).
A handful of the others only had one subsequent reprinting or omnibus edition, and only a couple were published in both the USA and the UK. There were a small number of foreign language editions.  ●

rssrss

Science Fantasy #77, October 1965

Summary:
A pretty good issue, with a better than good first instalment of Thomas Burnett Swann’s mythic fantasy The Weirwoods, and Philip Wordley’s very good Goodnight Sweet Prince, a time-travel story set in Shakespeare’s time and which features the man himself.
[ISFDB page] [Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:1
John Boston and Damien Broderick: Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 (p. 265 of 365)
Graham Hall, Vector #35, October 1965, p. 21

_____________________

Editor, Kyril Bonfiglioli; Associate Editor, J. Parkhill-Rathbone

Fiction:2
The Weirwoods (Part 1 of 2) • serial by Thomas Burnett Swann +
Ragtime • short story by Pamela Adams ∗∗
Green Goblins Yet • short story by W. Price –
State of Mind • short story by E. C. Tubb
The Foreigner • short story by Johnny Byrne
Goodnight, Sweet Prince • novelette by Philip Wordley

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Agosta Morol
Editorial
• by J. Parkhill-Rathbone

_____________________

The Weirwoods by Thomas Burnett Swann dominates this issue, with the first part of this mythological fantasy taking up almost two-thirds of the magazine’s space (p. 4 to p. 75 of 128 pp.). The story begins with a leisurely description of the Etruscan town of Sutrium and the nearby Weirwoods (and their human and non-human inhabitants), before detailing the uneasy relationship that exists between these two:

In return for the right to trade in the market place, the Weir Ones allowed the Sutrii access through the Weirwoods to Viterbo and Volsinii and other Etruscan cities of the north. Long ago, it was said, they had also offered access to the heart of the forest and their own sylvan cities. But the ancestors of the present Sutrii had scorned the offer and passed through the forest with the look of aristocrats in a foul-smelling compound of slaves. Thus, the Weir Ones no longer sought them as friends. Still, they allowed them to follow the one path—the Road, it was called—and claimed in return the right to trade.
In the market place, the Weir Ones seemed shy, halting, and clumsy; in the forest, when glimpsed from the road, they seemed to have put on strength, like a god who had donned a mantle of invulnerability. The backs of the Centaurs arched in manly pride and their clattering hooves became the beat of drums; the horns of the Fauns curved like daggers of bone. Such glimpses were not reassuring to those who travelled the road. If riding on horseback, they spurred their mounts to a gallop. If riding in carriages, they shut their eyes and imagined the forest to be inhabited solely by naked and compliant nymphs. As a matter of fact, there were many nymphs in the forest, the female Water Sprites, usually naked, always compliant to males of their own race, but liking the Etruscans no better than a dolphin likes a shark.  p. 5-6

Into this mix enters Lars Velcha, a nobleman travelling through the forest to Sutrium with his daughter Tanaquil. When he needs water he breaks the rules by going into the forest, and sees what he initially thinks is a sixteen-year-old boy sleeping in the sun by the shore of a lake. When Lars sees webbed feet, pointed ears, and soft fins at the boy’s temples, he realises it is a water sprite. He stuns the creature with a blow, and takes him as a slave and playmate for his daughter Tanaquil. The rest of the novel flows from this fatal act.
The next part of the story introduces the various other characters from whose point of view the story is mostly told: apart from Tanaquil, the daughter, and Vel, the water sprite (who turns out to be a semi-wild, sexual and amoral creature), we are introduced to Arnth, an itinerant musician whose cart is pulled by a one-eyed bear called Ursus. After Arnth plays for Lars and Tanaquil one evening he learns of Vel’s plight, and vows to free him. This leads Arnth, after he talks to Vel about smuggling him out of the city—unlikely to succeed given the guards on the gate—to a lake in the forest, and to another of the story’s major characters, Vegoia, the matriarch of the water sprites and a sorceress.
After Arnth and Vegoia discuss Vel’s plight they eventually sleep together, although not until after much discussion about the matter:

There was something decidedly pleasant about the prospect of claiming his guest-rights. But [Arnth] made it an inflexible rule never to accept the more compromising favours of young women, who, he had learned to his sorrow, held out a cornucopia with one hand and with the other, a net.  p. 39
.
It was time to explain his philosophy. “Everyone knows that women exact a price for their favours. They can’t help it—it’s the way they’re made. In the market place or in the bedroom, they’re always making bargains. That’s their privilege. As for me, I’m too poor to pay in coins and too free to pay with my liberty. I travel. I intend to keep on travelling. In a word, I don’t buy.”  p. 41

At one point in his life Swann was engaged to be married; then he wasn’t. You wonder to what extent that situation is reflected in the above and other similar comments.
Of course, the pair’s brief encounter does not go smoothly, and Arnth subsequently manages to upset Vegoia—and so during the next night he is on the floor. They do talk though and, when Arnth asks her why she doesn’t have a heart, there is a passage where she tells him the myth of the Builder, which has the Builder create the sprites late on the fifth day of Creation and not complete them. This digression eventually concludes with a final question from Arnth, and Vegoia’s answer:

“And you never miss having a heart?”
“I think,” she said, “that it is better to have no heart, than to have one and not use it.”  p. 51

After this romantic interlude, the final part of this instalment sees Vegoia going to town on market day. There she does tricks—which captivate the town’s serval cats—and is seen by Tanaquil, who correctly assumes she is Vegoia. The pair talk in a secluded temple, and (spoiler) Vegoia gives Tanaquil cats-eye jewels to give to Vel to assist his escape. However, when Tanaquil later passes on the jewels to Vel, he is as wild and disrespectful as ever.
That night, Arnth (who has also returned to the town to ensure Tanaquil’s safety during whatever plot is afoot) performs once again for her and her father. Vel plies the company with a heady wine.
Later, Arnth sleeps at the foot of Tanaquil’s bed but wakes up paralyzed to see Vel and the town’s cats arrive. After Vel takes Arnth back to the slaves’ quarters he dispatches the cats on their mission. When Vegoia finally arrives she tells Arnth the cats were only meant to kill the guards, but she finds Vel has unleashed them on the town.
This novel has some lovely description, lines, and dialogue, and it gains an added depth by echoing some of this throughout the story (hearts and nets make more than one appearance)—but it doesn’t, at least not in this part, reach the heights of his first novel, The Blue Monkeys (The Day of the Minotaur). That said, Swann’s previous novel begun in a light, gentle way before becoming much darker later on—so maybe this will also become more substantial in its second part. Nonetheless, it’s still pretty good stuff, and this latter criticism is only by way of comparison.

Ragtime by Pamela Adams starts with a couple renting a houseboat beside an island. The landlord tells them that the island has a strange history involving a missing man, and the sound of music from the 1920s.
Later that evening, after the couple have settled into the houseboat, they hear music, and then a rowing boat with several party goers passes by. The occupants offer to take the couple to the party on the island, but the wife (and narrator) has earlier twisted her ankle, so doesn’t go. However, she encourages her husband to attend. The next morning he hasn’t returned.
The story then skips forward a year in time, and the wife is back on the boat writing to her brother. In this account (spoiler) she lays out a theory about different time tracks that cross—and where time passes at different speeds. As she finishes her account, she hears music, and hopes to be reunited with her husband.
This is a pretty slight and straightforward story but it has an atmospheric ending that worked for me. I also got the impression that this piece is from an experienced writer, although I couldn’t find any other work by her.

Green Goblins Yet by W. Price, on the other hand, struck me as a refugee from the slushpile. It begins with a scientist from the future coming into cafe and telling two men (one of whom is the narrator) that he needs help to find his goblin. After some unconvincing vernacular (““Gobble off,” says Spike, “Me an’ Jigsy ain’t interested. Go peddle your vacuum cleaners somewhere else.”), the narrator drives him to Kinder Scout where several sheep have reportedly been mauled by a strange creature.
After losing the scientist in the wilds, the narrator eventually meets the goblin—revealed as a Venusian—and it speaks to him using the scientist’s voice. Then it gets on a flying saucer and leaves.
The ending makes no sense at all. A TBSF.3

State of Mind by E. C. Tubb is a competently done piece of Dickian paranoia about a man who starts to suspect his wife is an alien before (spoiler) he eventually kills her. At one point in the story he has a stroke during one of his belligerent outbursts and a doctor later warns him that:

“The brain’s a funny thing, you know, Henry. Sometimes it gets its wires crossed. If that happens don’t let it throw you.”  p. 98

I’m not sure this SF, but it is an okay read regardless.

The Foreigner by Johnny Byrne starts with a lodger in a guesthouse who hears a huge crash from upstairs. When he goes to the flat to investigate the story takes on a vaguely Kuttnerish air:

My eyes took in instantly the incredible confusion of the room and came to rest on the action that was taking place about six inches below the ceiling. Two high stepladders supported a wide heavy board on which a figure lay rocking gently from side to side. On my entrance the figure jerked up startled, caught its head smartly on the ceiling, lost its balance and with a shriek of fear and surprise toppled to land awkwardly on the floor. It groaned once and lay still. There was a nasty silence.
From what I could see I judged it to be a man. He appeared to be dressed only in a mattress. It was wrapped around him under the arms and reached to just below the knee. It was held in place by a profusion of straps, buckles and hooks. From inside the mattress a long snarl of cheap, plastic-covered flex ran to a plug in the skirting-board. A faint sound of radio crackle came from the mattress and, from time to time, a blue spark.  p. 99

It soon becomes obvious that the man in the mattress is a time traveller who is trying to get back home by “impacting” while operating the electronics surrounding him. When he sees a car crash outside (spoiler) the story proceeds to its obvious conclusion.
This, for all its slightness, is entertainingly enough told.

Goodnight, Sweet Prince by Philip Wordley4 is the fourth (and sadly last) of this writer’s contributions to Science Fantasy and it starts with time-travelling movie crew in Shakespearian times:

“Yes, yes, I know. But what I want is colour. Get that? Colour.” And Art Kirbitz’s horny little mitts grabbed a handful of none-too-fresh Tudor air and flung it skywards.
His director, Harry Gorrin, followed it with his eyes, as if expecting it to burst into iridescent bubbles and float over the lousy thatched roofs in a glory of Kirbitz-Kolor. If it had, it wouldn’t have surprised Harry.
“But, leader,” he ventured diffidently. “Surely authenticity is more—”
“Authenticity Schmorthenticity snorted Art, adroitly dodging a hurtling mess of ullage from a bedroom window.
“That’s a hunk of fruit salad and you know it. So we should be authentic? You want we should play the arthouses with this one? We’re playing to people, boy, not crumbs who grow hair on their nuts and still read books.”  p. 107

After this fairly typical SF scene the story switches to its other subplot, which has William Shakespeare writing an impassioned letter to his wife, Anne Hathaway, confessing his adultery:

Two tragedies together are too much for a man, even if he writes one and lives the other. Our tragedy is over now, Anne, so I can write you this letter; the tragedy I wrote—the play founded on Kydd’s old “Hamlet”—is finished too.
Richard, Gus and all the dear lads (Ned too, Anne) are learning their scripts in the tiring-room as I write this. I can hear Hal Condell’s stutter, Gus’s sage Polonius, and dear Dick (who longs to see you again, by the bye)—his voice soars into the rafters and comes down full of sunbeams.
[. . .]
So, my darling and my wife, one tragedy comes to the boards as the other leaves the bed. You have long known how it was with me, Anne, even though you have been so silent. You are a comely grave thing, wife, and when you say nothing, it is because there is too much to say. What was in your heart Anne, sitting at home and knowing? Did you feel the stranger in your bed? When Hamlet died, did you think I would draw to you again? God knows I tried; but I could not weep and gather you to me, and God forgive me, I could not love. Did you know that, Anne? I think you did, and knowing it, did you sit like Penelope in the fable, loving and waiting? There is a queen in my play, Anne; when her husband is murdered she marries the killer and takes him to her bed. Who killed me, Anne? Do you know? And if you had known, would you have opened your arms to my murderer? My murderer has been a woman, Anne, black as lust, white as leprosy and hot and rank as hell. I am telling you this, to show you her true picture; or have you seen it in my eyes as we were abed? She killed me, Anne; she killed you and me, and I went gladly to death, cursing to death, fighting, yielding, I know not what. You went to your death, the death of our love, because you had to. You had no choice.
Now, I am back from the grave like stinking Lazarus, hot from a black bed, and I must turn Orpheus and fetch you into the light again—if you wish to share it with me. Anne, may you and God forgive me, for this is a heavy tale and harder to tell as I know not what ending you will give it for me. I have wished for death to stay my telling you.  pp. 108-109

The rest of the story alternates between time traveller Harry’s problems with the production, and Shakespeare’s long and agonising confessional. There are some great sections in both of these strands: in the first there is, among other things, the entertaining banter between a teenage prostitute looking for trade and the uninterested Harry—who then suddenly realises that she is only fourteen years old, and needs to eat. He gives her two crowns, and hopes that the money will give her a chance to improve her life. In the second Shakespeare gives an account of the performance of one of his plays, the lords and ladies that attend, a fight among the groundlings afterwards, and the woman he becomes infatuated with:

I was left on the quiet stage. The floorboards were worn smooth by the long scuffling of buskins, and I sat down and ran my hands over the joins, trying to find a splinter. I found one. That was when she laughed. She was still in the gallery, a pale and eager face with her mouth half-open and her eyes burning into my cod-piece like coals.
There was a young bright lord with red hair and a pink fool’s face standing behind her. He seemed to want to go, but she would not. And how could she? We were joined by an invisible chain, and must stay where we were or draw nearer. My eyes locked with her black gaze and my heart was offal again, as before the play, stinking dead meat alive with worms of sheer naked hunger.
She came down to the stage. I followed the ripple of her thighs under the farthingale as she held it up and back in mock modesty to climb the steps to me.
“The lone player. Where is your speech? Give it to me,” she said. There was laughter in her voice and her mouth turned up at one comer. Her teeth were blackened, her face blotched, bosom too full and head too small. Her nose was too upturned and her hair was black straw, tousled as if straight from a pillow. And every movement and every look of her unwinking black eyes reeked of lust. I desired her more than any woman made by God, and I still do. Foolishly I stood there. The young kneebender turned on his heel and went. He said something, but I don’t know what.
I started the first thing that came into my head, a speech of Hieronymo’s when he plays mad. Up and down I strutted. Will Hemmynges came up to see what the noise was, said “Sweet Jesu!” and went back. Higher and higher, faster and faster, the whirling words came. She never moved her eyes from me. There was contempt in them. There was greed and want in them. I was nothing and she wanted me. I was a hired player. Give the word and I ranted. Put away the props and I was done. But it pleased her to hire me, and have me as well. I drew my lath sword and had at the air in my madness (mine, not Hieronymo’s now). She had stepped nearer and it caught the lacing of her bodice. I tore it away unthinking and her breasts were bare. Oh Anne, in God’s name why do I tell you this to murder you still more? She was a whore, I am a fornicator, and there’s an end to it. Must I twist your guts as she twists mine? I am trying to purge myself, Anne, and there is no-one but you and God who can shrive me. God won’t if you don’t.
I took her there on the stage, and neither of us cared who saw.  pp. 118-119

The two parts of the story eventually dovetail when Art takes Harry to a replica of the Globe that he has had built at Chiswick. There, Art realises he has left the scripts in the future, so he dispatches Harry to get a copy of the play.
Harry travels to Shakespeare’s Globe. There he looks through a window and sees the great man at his desk. When Shakespeare leaves the room, Harry sneaks in and steals a pile of papers, and then retires to a nearby tavern to read them. When he finds a letter in among the papers he reads it, and then decides to return the stolen goods.
On his return to the theatre Shakespeare watches Harry from the darkened corner of the room as he returns the papers to the desk; Shakespeare surprises and then questions Harry, and the two men end up talking. Harry eventually tells Shakespeare he is from the future, and the latter, after accepting the fact far too easily, impishly asks if he is remembered. When Harry tells him that everyone knows his name, Shakespeare asks, more seriously, “with joy or sorrow?”
The story ends with Harry agreeing to take Shakespeare’s letter to his wife, and the last lines of the story make it clear that the letter is not a confessional we have been reading, but a different letter full of news and gossip and homesick longing; Shakespeare thanks God “he had not written as he had thought.”
This is an ambitious time-travel story that paints a convincing portrait of Shakespeare and his times. It is a huge shame that this superlative piece is not better known, and that we heard no more from this promising writer.

•••

The Cover on this issue is again by Agosta Morol: I’m still not a fan—the last one was dark and muddy, and this one looks like a crude colour sketch (look at the figures in the middle of the piece for example).
This issue’s Editorial by J. Parkhill-Rathbone is prefaced by a brief note explaining why the magazine’s hard-working assistant editor is providing the text:

Mr. Bonfiglioli is in Venice observing heavenly bodies from a little observatory on the Lido.  p. 2

Parkhill-Rathbone provides an essay about what the future will be like (I think—it’s a bit of a ramble).

•••

A pretty good issue, with a good to very good serial from Swann to start, and a very good novelette from Wordley to finish. Even the filler in the middle (with one exception) isn’t bad.  ●

____________________

1. John Boston (Strange Highways: Reading Science Fantasy, 1950-67 p. 265-268) says that Thomas Burnett Swann’s The Weirwoods “is about the best of his stories yet for Science Fantasy [. . .] and as enjoyable as anything I’ve read in the magazine.” He goes on to say that “The Weirwoods is by far the most sexually explicit story to have appeared in this magazine, though in 1965 that’s still not too explicit (on the other hand, it’s inexplicit at some length).” I’d have thought that title would have gone to Thom Keyes and his earlier Period of Gestation.
Boston also says:

Swann conveys a strong sense of displacement into a world where people, and not-quite-people, like the Water Sprites, think differently from us. His world is vividly realized through a wealth of sensory and social detail conveyed economically and unobtrusively. This is fantasy that is High without being Jumped-Up.  p. 266

He also liked Philip Wordley’s Goodnight Sweet Prince, calling it a “forgotten gem” and a “brilliant little tour de force, made by the sections comprising Shakespeare’s letter.” He concludes by saying that it “is shameful that it’s now totally forgotten.” Well, not in his book, and not here.
As to the rest of the stories, Boston thinks they are “well executed but not too interesting,” although he doesn’t seem to like Johnny Byrne’s story much, stating:

[Byrne] has contributed several very literate and surreal pieces to the magazine, but now he seems to have decided to write SF stories and start from scratch. This reads like a contrived beginner’s piece.  p. 267

Graham Hall (Vector #35, October 1965, p. 21) says that he personally doesn’t like Swann’s work, and finds his “flowery, verbose style is well-enough executed, but [. . .] stodgy and uncaptivating.” He is much more positive about Philip Wordley’s story:

A bright note to be found in this issue is that Philip Wordley finally fulfills the promise shown in earlier stories. His “Goodnight, Sweet Prince” makes a mockery of most tired time-travel stories; what author would dare to write half a story in the form of a letter from William Shakespeare to Anne Hathaway? And how many authors could succeed in carrying it off? Coupled with his idea of films taken on time-location, this is one of the best of the new crop of stories. Along with Pippin Graham’s [Hilary Bailey’s] “In Reason’s Ear” (SFY 73) it is the best that Bonfiglioli has published.  p. 21

Hall adds that Price’s Green Goblins Yet is “an amusing tale, slightly spoilt by its narration by an illiterate teenager. But anyone using the phrase “in a voice all Network Three and rich Abernathy biscuits” deserves to be read.” He goes on to say that he found Adams “ghost story with an attempted SF twist” “rather weary.” Tubb “shows his limitations as a writer with a study of a man going slowly insane,” and Johnny Byrne “produces a story which, for once, deserves printing.”
Hall concludes that the issue is worth buying for the Wordley story, and that “Science Fantasy tends to have a much wider variation in standard than New Worlds. Science Fantasy prints the best and the worst—a pity it can’t just print the best.”

2. My previous historical scores for the stories were (current assessment in brackets):
The Weirwoods by Thomas Burnett Swann ∗∗∗(now ∗∗∗+)
Ragtime by Pamela Adams ∗∗ (∗∗∗)
Green Goblins Yet by W. Price – (-)
State of Mind by E. C. Tubb – (∗∗)
The Foreigner by Johnny Byrne ∗∗∗ (∗∗)
Goodnight, Sweet Prince by Philip Wordley ∗∗∗∗∗ (∗∗∗∗)

3. TBSF=Typical Bonfiglioli Space Filler.

4. There was some discussion about Philip Wordley’s identity on one of my lists. One contributor pointed out that only six people called Philip Wordley were born in the UK in the period 1916-2006; four were born after 1954 (therefore too young) which left two people: Philip H. Wordley, born Lesk (this is probably Leek, as below), Staffordshire, 3Q 1934, and Philip J. Wordley, born Crosby, Glamorgan, 2Q 1946.
There were seven births prior to 1916, but only two after 1887, Philip Wordley, born Leek, Staffordshire, 2Q 1902, and Philip Millington Wordley, born Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, 1Q 1906. Died Newcastle under Lyme, 4Q 1968.
The ages of these people at the time of the story’s publication were (approx.) 31, 19, 63, and 59 years old. The general consensus was that the writer was probably the 31-year-old Philip H. Wordley, who sadly collapsed and then drowned in the River Tiverton in 2014 (there is a news report here). I’m not entirely sure about that, and think there is an equal chance that it was one of the two older men (I don’t think the story is the kind of thing that the fourth candidate, a 19-year-old, could write).
I wish I started doing this blog 20 years ago, when all these people were still alive and you could track them down and ask them a questions about their brief writing careers (most obviously, why did someone so talented as yourself stop writing?)  ●

rssrss

Best SF: 1971, edited by Harry Harrison & Brian W. Aldiss, 1972

Summary:
A mixed bag that won’t satisfy the traditional SF audience or a more progressive one. The former will probably not appreciate the stories from Bartheleme, Auerbach, Landolfi, etc., and the latter will dislike the Clarke, Blish, Burhoe, etc. If you’ve read the Carr ‘Best of the Year,’ I wouldn’t bother with this one.
[ISFDB page][Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:1
Charlie Brown, Locus, #129 December 15, 1972
Dave Hartwell, Locus, #130 December 29, 1972
P. Schuyler Miller, Analog, May 1973

_____________________

Editors, Harry Harrison & Brian W. Aldiss

Fiction:2
Doctor Zombie and His Little Furry Friends • short story by Robert Sheckley +
Conquest • short story by Barry N. Malzberg
Gehenna • short story by Barry N. Malzberg
A Meeting with Medusa • novelette by Arthur C. Clarke
The Genius • short story by Donald Barthelme
Angouleme • short story by Thomas M. Disch
If “Hair” Were Revived in 2016 • short story by Arnold M. Auerbach
Statistician’s Day • short story by James Blish
The Science Fiction Horror Movie Pocket Computer • short story by Gahan Wilson
The Hunter at His Ease • short story by Brian W. Aldiss
The Cohen Dog Exclusion Act • short story by Steven Schrader +
Gantlet • short story by Richard E. Peck
The Pagan Rabbi • novelette by Cynthia Ozick +
 (Untitled) • short story by Tommaso Landolfi –
An Uneven Evening • short story by Steve Herbst
Ornithanthropus • short story by B. Alan Burhoe +
No Direction Home • short story by Norman Spinrad +

Non-fiction:
Introduction • by Harry Harrison
Report • poem by Kingsley Amis
Fisherman • poem by Lawrence Sail
The Ideal Police State • poem by Charles Baxter
Afterword: A Day in the Life-Style of. . . • by Brian W. Aldiss

_____________________

Following on from my review3 of Terry Carr’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year #1 is another 1971 ‘Best SF of the Year’ entry, this time from Harry Harrison (Aldiss, although credited, is only a European scout). Harrison, as we shall see, emulates Judith Merril by presenting a random grab-bag of stories that are presumably meant to show how the 1970’s SF field was diversifying—diverse in this case meaning literary styles and subject matter as well as work taken from outside the genre (as opposed to today’s “diverse” which usually means politically left-wing and/or female and/or LGBQT and/or POC material).
That said, the volume gets off to a good start with Doctor Zombie and His Little Furry Friends by Robert Sheckley (Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?, 1971), which has an interesting opening passage:

I think I am fairly safe here. I live at present in a small apartment northeast of the Zocalo, in one of the oldest parts of Mexico City. As a foreigner, my inevitable first impression is how like Spain this country seems, and how different it really is. In Madrid the streets are a maze which draws you continually deeper, toward hidden centers with tedious, well-guarded secrets. Concealment of the commonplace is surely a heritage of the Moors. Whereas Mexican streets are an inverted labyrinth which leads outward toward the mountains, toward openness, toward revelations which remain forever elusive. Nothing is concealed; but nothing in Mexico is comprehensible. This is the way of the Indians, past and present—a defense based upon permeability; a transparent defense like that of the sea anemone.
I find this style profound and compatible. I conform to insight born in Tenochtitlan or Tlaxcala; I conceal nothing, and thus contrive to hide everything.  p. 14

Although the story is ostensibly concerned with Doctor Zombie and the hybrid creatures he breeds in his small rented house, the focus is the local area and its characters:

I claim to be a scholar on extended leave from my university. I tell them that I am writing a book about the Toltecs, a book in which I will collate evidence of a cultural linkage between that mysterious race and the Incas.
“Yes, gentlemen, I expect that my book will create quite a stir in Heidelberg and Bonn. There are vested interests which will be offended. Attempts will doubtless be made to represent me as a crank. My theory, you see, could shake the entire world of pre-Columbian studies . . .”
I had prepared the above personality before coming to Mexico. I read Stephens, Prescott, Vaillant, Alfonso Caso. I even went to the trouble of copying out the first third of Dreyer’s discredited thesis on cultural diffusion, in which he postulates a Mayan-Toltec cultural exchange. That gave me an opus of some eighty handwritten pages which I could claim as my own. The unfinished manuscript was my excuse for being in Mexico. Anyone could glance at the erudite pages scattered over my desk and see for himself what sort of man I was.
I thought that would suffice; but I hadn’t allowed for the dynamism inherent in my role. Senor Ortega, my grocer, is also interested in pre-Columbian studies, and is disturbingly knowledgeable. Senor Andrade, the barber, was born in a pueblo within five miles of the ruins of Teotihuacan. And little Jorge Silverio, the shoeshine boy whose mother works in a tortilleria, dreams of attending a great university, and asks me very humbly if I might use my influence at Bonn . . .
I am the victim of my neighbors’ expectations. I have become their professor, not mine. Because of them I must spend endless hours at the National Museum of Anthropology, and waste whole days at Teotihuacan, Tula, Xochicalco.
My neighbors force me to work hard at my scholarly pursuit. And I have become quite literally what I purported to be: an expert, possessed of formidable knowledge, more than a little mad.  p. 17-18

It is only in the back half of the story that we learn (spoiler) about Doctor Zombie’s plan to release his hybrids in an attempt to control the human population, and to stop mankind exterminating other species.
This is a pretty good mash-up of literary and mad-scientist stories, and an interesting (and more unusually, entertaining) example of seventies eco-fiction.

Harrison includes two stories by Barry N. Malzberg in this volume, the first of which is Conquest (New Dimensions #1, 1971). This tells of a man called Redleaf sent to conduct negotiations with an alien visitor. When he arrives, Redleaf finds an alien who sounds like a high-pressure salesman:

What we want you to do is to brief up, take a load off your minds, join our federation, turn in the heavy weaponry and live good. You can keep the rockets of course, that’s fine. And you can have the whole solar system as a trade zone. There’s nothing really worthwhile to us in it; we consider it a sort of ghetto area if you dig what I’m saying. You wouldn’t see us for eons and eons. But the weaponries gotta go. We can defuse them for you easy.”  p. 27

As well as the negotiations there is some domestic flashback about Redleaf’s wife. Eventually (spoiler), Redleaf shoots the alien. I couldn’t see the point of this.
The second story Gehenna (Galaxy, March 1971) starts with Edward meeting Julie at a party, and later marrying her after she jilts her boyfriend. After a short section touching on the birth of their child and domestic life, she (spoiler) commits suicide.
The second and third sections are alternate takes on the lives of the three characters: in the second the husband kills himself; in the third the jilted boyfriend suicides. A short fourth section is told from the viewpoint of Edward and Julie’s child. Although this is interesting enough, the individual strands do not cohere or make any point.

The Genius by Donald Barthelme (The New Yorker, February 1971) is a satirical and slightly surreal story about the life and thoughts of a genius. I suspect the only reason it is here is because it is from a famous mainstream/literary writer.

Angouleme by Thomas M. Disch (New Worlds Quarterly #1, 1971) is from his ‘334’ series, which is set in a near-future New York. The story itself concerns a group of (unconvincingly) precocious seventh-graders and their plot, suggested by their leader, Little Mister Kissy Lips, to murder one of the vagrants that frequent Battery Park:

He loved, and what seventh grader doesn’t, the abstracter foxtrots and more metaphysical twists of a Dostoevsky, a Gide, a Mailer. He longed for the experience of some vivider pain than the mere daily hollowness knotted into his tight young belly, and no weekly stomp-and-holler of group therapy with other jejune eleven-year-olds was going to get him his stripes in the major leagues of suffering, crime and resurrection. Only a bona fide crime would do that, and of all the crimes available murder certainly carried the most prestige, as no less an authority than Loretta Couplard was ready to attest, Loretta Couplard being not only the director and co-owner of the Lowen School but the author, as well, of two nationally televised scripts, both about famous murders of the twentieth century. They’d even done a unit in social studies on the topic: A History of Crime in Urban America.  p. 91

As you can perhaps gather from the passage above, the story is written in a voice that is more mainstream, descriptive, and better characterised than the run-of-the-mill SF of the time. If you are happy with this alone then you’ll probably enjoy the story—but the idea of precocious and bored child-killers never really flies, and the piece has a (spoiler) decidedly anti-climactic ending. A mixed bag.4

If “Hair” Were Revived in 2016 by Arnold M. Auerbach (The New York Times, 1971) is a one page review of a 45th anniversary revival of Hair, the musical. You may crack a half-smile or two but it’s minor stuff.

Statistician’s Day by James Blish (Science Against Man, 1970) is set in a near future world that has instituted population control after “the fearful world famine of 1980.” The story opens with a man called Wiberg, supposedly a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, arriving at the house of Edmund Darling to interview him. However, we get an early hint that this is not the case (after some scene setting about the house and the surrounding English countryside) when there is a reference to Darling’s obituary, which is “not due to be published for nearly a year.”
When the two men meet the story’s gimmick becomes apparent:

“Are you,” the novelist said, “only the advance man for the executioner, or are you the executioner himself?”
Wiberg managed an uncertain laugh. “I’m afraid I don’t understand the question, sir.”
In point of fact, he understood it perfectly. What he did not understand was how Darling had come by enough information to have been able to frame it. For ten years, the chief secret of PopCon had been extremely well kept.  p. 113-114

Darling then explains to Wiberg that (spoiler) his research into the mortality statistics has led him to conclude that the government is secretly controlling the size of the world’s population by planning the deaths of people in various groups and professions. At this point, any suspension of disbelief I had quickly vanished—the idea that any government would have the competence to undertake such an extensive task and keep it secret makes this the silliest story I’ve read for some time. That said, it’s improved by the biter bit ending, so if you can park your brain for a while you’ll probably find this okay.

The Science Fiction Horror Movie Pocket Computer by Gahan Wilson (The National Lampoon, November 1971) isn’t a story but a short introduction and flow-chart for the plots of formulaic SF movies. I didn’t think this worth four pages in a SF magazine, never mind a ‘Best of the Year’ anthology.

The Hunter at His Ease by Brian W. Aldiss (Science Against Man, 1970) begins with its protagonist Yale surveying part of an island in the Indian Ocean that is to become a “speck-bomb” airbase. Then he is clubbed into unconsciousness by one of the local creoles.
When Yale comes around later on he finds he is the village chief’s hut. The latter, Mr Archipeligo, has taken Yale from his attackers, the Hakabele brothers, and has sent for help. While Yale waits to be picked up we learn about the local political situation (some of the locals are opposed the construction of the airbase) and the global one (there is mention of limited nuclear conflict in parts of the globe). We also learn that Yale has had his wrist terminal for the “Global Information Network,” presumably a proto-internet, stolen.
When a hovercraft eventually arrives to collect Yale, we are introduced to van Viner, one of the story’s other main characters. The man is belligerent towards Archipelago, and threatens to attack the village with helicopters if he doesn’t arrange the handover of the brothers responsible for Yale’s abduction.
Later, back at base, Yale and van Viner argue about what they should do next:

The pigeon curry came in. As they seated themselves, van Viner said, “They clobbered you, right? They must be taught they can’t do that to a white man and get away with it.”
“You can’t expect them to want us here. We’re not only wrecking their island, we’re building an installation to be used against their kind on the mainland.”
“Let’s go hunting the Hakabeles! Use nerve gas—we’ve got plenty of it. Give everyone a scare!”
“Mister Archipeligo will persuade them to hand themselves over to us.”
“They’re all the lousy same! I’d kill the lot! Archipeligo told them to attack you, crafty black sod!”
“Aren’t you forgetting he’s half-Irish—a product of the last white invasion here in the eighties?”
“Wipe the lot off the face of the map! World Government’s too scared. If my brother was alive—did I ever tell you Herman killed the last blue whale in existence? Down in the Antarctic, that was. It’s extinct now. The Aussies put a price on Herman’s head, but you think that bothered my brother? He’d have killed an Aussie soon as look at him!” He burst into laughter and opened another beer, washing down forks-full of curry between his shouts of mirth. “He was a right one, my brother Herman—wouldn’t stand nonsense from any man!”  p. 136

The story comes to a climax when (spoiler) the brothers sneak into the base to see Yale. There is an argument about the construction project and how it will destroy the local tribe’s way of life before Yale pulls a gun on the pair of them. However, when Yale is distracted by someone walking past the window, he shoots at them. Then Vine intervenes with nerve gas.
The story’s epilogue take place at the funeral of Archipeligo (who was the one walking past the window), and Yale learns that he killed him.
In conclusion, this is a bit of a mixed bag: it’s rather gloomy, and there is probably too much packed into the story’s short length. Apart from its examination of the disruption of indigenous populations’ lives by external forces (presumably based on the Diego Garcia clearances of the late 1960s and 1970s5), and the cold war/hot war in the background, there is also a hologram conversation between Yale and his adapted daughter that briefly limns an adapted Martian environment. And there are various philosophical asides here and there as well. An interesting piece but, again, one that does not cohere particularly well into a larger whole.

The Cohen Dog Exclusion Act by Steven Schrader (Eco-Fiction, 1971) is, and I don’t believe I’m saying this, an ‘If this goes on’ story about the increasing amount of dog poo in the street:

Conditions grew worse. Wherever you looked there was dog shit. In the morning young ladies who had moved to the renovated brownstones on my block walked their German shepherds on the sidewalk, in the curb, and the center of the street. Some of the dogs were unleashed, all of them sniffing away, peeing and shitting. The owners gossiped to one another, and some men, I’m sure, bought dogs for the sole purpose of meeting girls. I thought of it myself, could imagine smooth conversations with them while our dogs took craps at our feet. But I’m not a hypocrite. I can’t hide my feelings. I don’t understand how people can chat casually while their dogs shit all around them.  p. 145

I found this quite funny, but I suspect it depends on your attitude to scatological humour.

Gantlet by Richard E. Peck (Orbit 10, 1972) is a future eco-disaster story that has the narrator taking his turn to drive an armoured and armed train from “City” to “Workring.” To do this they gave to go through “Opensky,” an outdoor area where a violent underclass live in polluted conditions.
This is mostly a polluted Earth travelogue; there is not much plot.

The Pagan Rabbi by Cynthia Ozick (The Pagan Rabbi, 1966) is a dense Jewish fantasy that begins with one of two Jewish boys who grew up together learning of the suicide of the other. We learn that Isaac Kornfeld, the dead man, had a successful life and had become a rabbi.
The narrator first goes to the site of the suicide, a tree beside a polluted bay, before going to speak to Sheindel, Kornfeld’s widow (who the narrator once loved). She tells him of Kornfeld’s secret habits, the family’s trips to the countryside with the children, and the strange fairy tales he told:

“I think he was never a Jew,” she said.
I wondered whether Isaac’s suicide had unbalanced her.
“I’ll tell you a story,” she resumed. “A story about stories. These were the bedtime stories Isaac told Naomi and Esther: about mice that danced and children who laughed. When Miriam came he invented a speaking cloud. With Ophra it was a turtle that married a blade of withered grass. By Leah’s time the stones had tears for their leglessness. Rebecca cried because of a tree that turned into a girl and could never grow colors again in autumn.  p. 174

We also learn that Kornfeld had purchased a number books about plants, and that he kept a notebook, which the narrator is given:

“I am writing at dusk sitting on a stone in Trilham’s Inlet Park, within sight of Trilham’s Inlet, a bay to the north of the city, and within two yards of a slender tree, Quercus velutina, the age of which, should one desire to measure it, can be ascertained by (God forbid) cutting the bole and counting the rings. The man writing is thirty-five years old and aging too rapidly, which may be ascertained by counting the rings under his poor myopic eyes.” Below this, deliberate and readily more legible than the rest, appeared three curious words:
.
Great Pan lives.
.
That was all. In a day or so I returned the notebook to Sheindel. I told myself that she had seven orphans to worry over, and repressed my anger at having been cheated.
She was waiting for me. “I am so sorry, there was a letter in the notebook, it had fallen out. I found it on the carpet after you left.”  p. 178-179

The long letter that Isaac left for his wife forms much of the rest of the story. In this the narrator learns about Kornfeld’s theories that every living thing has a spirit, but only in humans is it contained and not free to roam. Then Kornfeld (spoiler) gives an account of how he manages to conjure a dryad from the tree he later hangs himself from.
In a passage about the joy of the different kind of life and love he experiences with the dryad there is a sense of transcendence not unlike that you get in more conventional SF stories.
The story lost me a little at the end, however, when Kornfeld discovers that, while he has been enjoying his tryst with the dryad, his soul has freed itself from his body, something he discovers when he finds his body walking along while reading a religious text. His body is oblivious to the natural world that surrounds it, as per the opening quotation at the beginning of the story:

Rabbi Jacob said: “He who is walking along
and studying, but then breaks off to remark,
‘How lovely is that tree!’ or ‘How beautiful is that
fallow field!’— Scripture regards such a one
as having hurt his own being.”  p. 165

I’m not entirely sure what this last part (and the quotation) tells us, but I suspect it is related to Rabbinical law6 (there are earlier references to “fences”) and proscriptions against forsaking one’s spiritual life for the physical world.
I said in my opening comments that this is a dense piece, and the account I’ve given so far only scratches the surface of what is here. Much of the story’s length concerns Jewish society and religion, and the characters’ relationships: it is both an ethnic and literary piece of writing. I suspect readers’ reactions will depend on both their tolerance of mainstream work, and of finding fantasy in what appears to be a science fiction collection (not to mention a 1966 story in a 1971 volume!) Personally I found it an interesting piece (and certainly one that would reward re-reading), and I’d include it in my own ‘Best Fantasy of the Year’.

(Untitled) by Tommaso Landolfi (Cancerqueen, 1971) is a short fragment that has two woman outside a building talking about their bodies as they queue for an unknown procedure. This reminded me of the type of pointless chaff that you used to get in the later large-size issues of New Worlds.

 An Uneven Evening by Steve Herbst (Clarion, 1971) has as its protagonist Peter, a man dissatisfied with both his wife and himself. After he makes this observation in the opening paragraphs of the story his friends pick him up to go to the pool hall. En route it becomes apparent that they aren’t going there but are going “torming” instead. Peter has no idea what they are talking about, but keeps quiet.
The rest of the story involves a description of their night, during which we discover that torming involves diving down magnetic tubes (wearing a repelling harness) and trying to avoid hitting the sides.
His ignorance isn’t explained, but there is a mild ironic twist at the end concerning his wife’s knowledge of this strange pastime. Presumably this is meant to distract from the lack of explanation.

Ornithanthropus by B. Alan Burhoe (If, November-December 1971) gets off to a great start with a clan of winged humans abandoning their “sky-hunter,” a huge gas-balloon beast that is their home. It is dying, and they watch from a distance as it eventually suicides by igniting the hydrogen in its bladders.
The rest of the story is more routine, and we learn that this is taking place on a colony planet called Pishkun, which has a single antigravity city called Starport where unmodified humans live.
Some of the occupants of Starport (called “fangs”) turn up in their anti-grav packs while Schadow (the leader of the winged people) is trying to tame another sky-hunter to provide a home for his clan. After a three-way stand-off (spoiler), Schadow realises that the fangs can’t see the thermal air currents like he can, so he leads them to the downdrafts at the cliffs, and their deaths. He gets the sky-hunter.
This has a fairly thin plot, but it’s a colourful piece of off-world adventure.

I’ve previously reviewed the Clarke and Spinrad stories in the Carr volume post but have cut-and-pasted them in here for the convenience of those who haven’t read them yet (and for those who still haven’t managed to get to sleep).
A Meeting with Medusa by Arthur C. Clarke (Playboy, December 1971)7 has a spectacular opening sequence that sees Howard Falcon, the captain of a huge future airship called the Queen Elizabeth, walk through the interior of the craft (and past the superchimp, “simp” crew) and up to the craft’s observation area. There he watches as a nearby camera platform approaches the ship to land. However, the operator loses control, and it crashes into the airship, damaging it badly. Falcon rushes down to the bridge:

Halfway down, he paused for a second to inspect the damage. That damned platform had gone clear through the ship, rupturing two of the gas cells as it did so. They were still collapsing slowly, in great falling veils of plastic. He was not worried about the loss of lift—the ballast could easily take care of that, as long as eight cells remained intact. Far more serious was the possibility of structural damage; already he could hear the great latticework around him groaning and protesting under its abnormal loads. It was not enough to have sufficient lift; unless it was properly distributed, the ship would break her back.
He was just resuming his descent when a superchimp, shrieking with fright, came racing down the elevator shaft, moving with incredible speed hand over hand along the outside of the latticework. In its terror, the poor beast had torn off its company uniform, perhaps in an unconscious attempt to regain the freedom of its ancestors.
Falcon, still descending as swiftly as he could, watched its approach with some alarm; a distraught simp was a powerful and potentially dangerous animal, especially if fear overcame its conditioning. As it overtook him, it started to call out a string of words, but they were all jumbled together, and the only one he could recognize was a plaintive, frequently repeated “Boss.” Even now, Falcon realized, it looked toward humans for guidance; he felt sorry for the creature, involved in a man-made disaster beyond its comprehension and for which it bore no responsibility.
It stopped opposite him, on the other side of the lattice; there was nothing to prevent it from coming through the open framework if it wished. Now its face was only inches from his and he was looking straight into the terrified eyes. Never before had he been so close to a simp and able to study its features in such detail; he felt that strange mingling of kinship and discomfort that all men experience when they gaze thus into the mirror of time.
His presence seemed to have calmed the creature; Falcon pointed up the shaft, back toward the observation deck, and said very clearly and precisely: “Boss—boss—go” To his relief, the simp understood; it gave him a grimace that might have been a smile and at once started to race back the way it had come. Falcon had given it the best advice he could; if any safety remained aboard the Queen, it was in that direction. But his duty lay in the other.  p. 136-137

The airship crash lands and, after Falcon’s blackout, the story recommences some time later with him pitching an airship exploration of Jupiter to a man called Webster, the head of long range planning. Then the story cuts to Falcon en route from Ganymede to Jupiter;  when he arrives his spaceship, the Kon Tiki, enters the atmosphere and the balloons deploy, leaving him floating in the Jovian atmosphere.
The main part of the story is a mixture of exotic travelogue and sense of wonder:

The five hours of daylight were almost over; the clouds below were full of shadows, which gave them a massive solidity they had not possessed when the Sun was higher. Color was swiftly draining from the sky, except in the west itself, where a band of deepening purple lay along the horizon. Above this band was the thin crescent of a closer moon, pale and bleached against the utter blackness beyond.
With a speed perceptible to the eye, the Sun went straight down over the edge of Jupiter, 3000 kilometers away. The stars came out in their legions—and there was the beautiful evening star of Earth, on the very frontier of twilight, reminding him how far he was from home. It followed the Sun down into the west; man’s first night on Jupiter had begun.  p. 149

We witness the various events that unfold as Falcon travels through the Jovian atmosphere (spoiler): there are bands of racing bioluminescent light in the clouds below; a massive radio storm; ball lightning on the Kon Tiki; he sleeps and has a recurrent nightmare about the simp on the airship (which died along with all the others)—then he spots a massive life-form rising out of the clouds towards him.
When Falcon later sees that the medusae (he later comes upon a herd of the medusa-like creatures) have radio arrays, the first contact protocols are invoked:

Dr. Brenner was back on the circuit, still worrying about the Prime Directive.
“Remember—it may only be inquisitive!” he cried without much conviction. “Try not to frighten it!”
Falcon was getting rather tired of this advice and recalled a TV discussion he had once seen between a space lawyer and an astronaut. After the full implications of the Prime Directive had been carefully spelled out, the incredulous spacer had exclaimed: “So if there were no alternative, I must sit still and let myself be eaten?” The lawyer had not even cracked a smile when he answered: “That’s an excellent summing up.”
It had seemed funny at the time; it was not at all amusing now.
And then Falcon saw something that made him even more unhappy. The medusa was still hovering a kilometer above him—but one of its tentacles was becoming incredibly elongated and was stretching down toward Kon-Tiki, thinning out at the same time. As a boy, he had once seen the funnel of a tornado descending from a storm cloud over the Kansas plains; the thing coming toward him now evoked vivid memories of that black, twisting snake in the sky.  p. 171

The medusa’s attentions eventually cause Falcon to prematurely end his trip. He jettisons the balloons and ignites the rockets that will boost him out of Jupiter’s atmosphere—which delivers a line that will satisfy the inner twelve year old in all SF readers:

Now he was master once more—no longer drifting helplessly on the winds of Jupiter but riding his own column of atomic fire back to the stars.  p. 173

In the final scene Falcon is revealed as a cyborg (something that is hinted at in several places in the story), which produces the story’s unexpectedly elegiac ending:

Howard Falcon, who had once been a man and could still pass for one over a voice circuit, felt a calm sense of achievement—and, for the first time in years, something like peace of mind. Since his return from Jupiter, the nightmares had ceased. He had found his role at last.
He knew now why he had dreamed about that superchimp aboard the doomed Queen Elizabeth. Neither man nor beast, it was between two worlds; and so was he.
He alone could travel unprotected on the lunar surface; the life-support system inside the metal cylinder that had replaced his fragile body functioned equally well in space or under water. Gravity fields ten times that of Earth were an inconvenience, but nothing more. And no gravity was best of all.
The human race was becoming more remote from him, the ties of kinship more tenuous. Perhaps these air-breathing, radiation-sensitive bundles of unstable carbon compounds had no right beyond the atmosphere; they should stick to their natural homes—Earth, Moon, Mars.
Someday, the real masters of space would be machines, not men—and he was neither. Already conscious of his destiny, he took a somber pride in his unique loneliness—the first immortal, midway between two orders of creation.
He would, after all, be an ambassador; between the old and the new—between the creatures of carbon and the creatures of metal who must one day supersede them. Both would have need of him in the troubled centuries that lay ahead.  p. 174-175

This is an excellent piece of hard science fiction, and a truly magisterial performance from Clarke.

No Direction Home by Norman Spinrad (New Worlds Quarterly #2, 1971) is set in a future where drug use has become legal and widespread, and each of the story’s scenes show different characters and related situations. The first opens with two garage chemists discussing their new drug, and how the multinationals will eventually copy it; the next has a general and a scientist discussing the side effects of a drug given to Moonbase military staff to combat claustrophobia—violence and “faggotry”—and how a second drug will help supress the sexual desire caused by the first. The third section has two cardinals arguing about using a psychedelic host during communion, something that can give the recipient a direct experience of God (and thus threaten the Church’s role as an intermediary). And so on.
The final scene (spoiler) has a man suffering not from drugs, but from the ultimate bad trip, reality:

“You don’t understand, Kip,” he said. “This is reality, the way it really is, and man it’s horrible, just a great big ugly machine made up of lots of other machines, you’re a machine, I’m a machine, it’s all mechanical clockwork. We’re just lumps of dead matter run by machinery, kept alive by chemical and electric processes.”
Golden sunlight soaked through Kip’s skin and turned the core of his being into a miniature stellar phoenix. The wind, through random blades of grass, made love to the bare soles of his feet. What was all this machinery crap? What the hell was Jonesy gibbering about? Man, who would want to put himself in a bummer reality like that?
“You’re just on a bummer, Jonesy,” he said. “Take it easy. You’re not seeing the universe the way it really is, as if that meant anything. Reality is all in your head. You’re just freaking out behind nothing.”
“That’s it, that’s exactly it, I’m freaking out behind nothing. Like zero. Like cipher. Like the void. Nothing is where we’re really at.”
How could he explain it? That reality was really just a lot of empty vacuum that went on to infinity in space and time. The perfect nothingness had minor contaminations of dead matter here and there. A little of this matter had fallen together through a complex series of random accidents to contaminate the universal deadness with trace elements of life, protoplasmic slime, biochemical clockwork. Some of this clockwork was complicated enough to generate thought, consciousness. And that was all there ever was or would ever be anywhere in space and time. Clockwork mechanisms rapidly running down in the cold black void. Everything that wasn’t dead matter already would end up that way sooner or later.  p. 242-243

Despite the bleak passage above, this is a witty and interesting piece that crams a lot into its short length.
I also note that, even though I last read this decades ago, I could remember the opening narrative hook:

“But I once did succeed in stuffing it all back in Pandora’s box,” Richardson said, taking another hit. “You remember Pandora Deutchman, don’t you, Will? Everybody in the biochemistry department stuffed it all in Pandora’s box at one time or another. I seem to vaguely remember one party when you did it yourself.”  p. 227

•••

The Introduction by Harry Harrison, written as it was in the months after John W. Campbell’s death at the end of 1971, begins with a eulogy:

It is not an exaggeration to say that his death—as did his life—had worldwide impact. An obituary issue of the fanzine Locus containing tributes from the many writers who knew him was published in New York. John W. Campbell: An Australian Tribute was published in Australia, where two Melbourne groups also organized a John W. Campbell Symposium that was held in the Classics Theatre at Melbourne University. In England the Science Fiction Foundation has arranged the publication of a collection of the best stories of John Campbell, who was a respected author as well as editor.
In the United States a memorial volume consisting of new stories and articles by the writers who worked with him through the years is being prepared. Science fiction will continue, but an era is over.  p. 10

The rest of the piece covers various subjects, including the increasing number of original anthologies coming on the market, college SF courses, mention of the genre in mainstream publications and its increasing worldwide reach, the titling of the volume, and excuses/reasons for the non-1971 items. Harrison finishes by noting the story choices are all his and that Aldiss’s role is was as a British and European scout.

There are three poems included in this volume: Report by Kingsley Amis has a not bad ending, Fisherman by Lawrence Sail has a good image at the end but not much more, and The Ideal Police State by Charles Baxter is (I guess) a political poem about the police or police brutality. Plus ça change . . .

Afterword: A Day in the Life-Style of. . . by Brian W. Aldiss closes the volume with an essay that, like the Harrison, covers a number of subjects. He starts with a bit of futurology (the rise of credit cards and the death of cash) before moving on to the increasing amount of SF available:

Time was, in a simpler world, when a reader could easily read all the SF being published. Such a reader would probably consider that the only SF worthy of the name appeared in pulp magazines, and those were what he would read and collect. The typical fan, now middle-aged, was such a reader and probably maintains some such collection of pulp magazines still—a hoard increasing in financial worth even as the paper decreases in physical viability. Complete collections of all the American SF magazines (ninety-one titles in all) fetch about $8,500 or $9,000 and go to big libraries.
Nowadays a contemporary private SF library is much more likely to contain paperbacks, plus maybe one of the few surviving SF magazines—Analog, say, or F&SF. Paperbacks now publish much of the field’s original material. It is also true to add that, demand being what it is, they publish nearly as much junk as did the old magazines, for the presses must be kept rolling.  p. 243

No doubt Aldiss would make the same comment about the free online stories that are everywhere today. He goes on to make a comment about the newer (circa 1971) writers in the field that is equally as pertinent now:

Many of the stories in the Clarion anthology are not concerned directly with science. It seems to me that they are often directly concerned with life-style, which, like drugs, Jesus, and pollution, has become one of the great or at least trendy topics of our day.  p. 244

He then goes on to examine older (1927-30) lifestyle work by writers in Russia’s Lost Literature of the Absurd, edited by George Giban, before wandering back to the SF field and commenting on a number of current works, such as James Blish’s The Day after Judgement—which he discusses at length. He dismisses several other books, including Keith Roberts’ The Inner Wheel, “whose otiose mixture of telepathy and English teashops offers as much intellectual fare as an old macaroon.”
Aldiss ends with a bit more futurology. His essay very much mirrors the anthology: rambling, esoteric, and partisan.

•••

In conclusion, this collection is not only wildly uneven but appears to be directed at no specific audience. I can’t see those who like Clarke’s story also liking the Batheleme, Auerbach, Landolfi, Wilson, etc. stories, and vice versa (that is if there are any people who like the latter—apart from the fact that these aren’t to my taste, I have doubts about their quality). If you’ve already read the Carr volume, I don’t think this one is worth your time; if you haven’t, then it may be.8  ●

_____________________

1. P. Schuyler Miller (Analog, May 1973) reviews all five (!) of the Best of the Year collections in one combined review. Here are some extracts that are relevant to this volume:

Only one story was selected by three of the six editors: Theodore Sturgeon’s “Occam’s Scalpel.” It’s a good enough story, but need not even be science fiction except for the old-fashioned “snapper” ending (are there really aliens among us?). I’m afraid this is a “Thank God Sturgeon’s back!” choice.
Seven other stories are in two of the five books, and three of these seven authors are tapped for other stories, as are four others represented by two or more different stories. The seven (again alphabetically) begin with Poul Anderson’s “A Little Knowledge,” one of four from Analog (I prefer his “Queen of Air and Darkness,” which won both a Hugo and a Nebula and is in Terry Carr’s book). B. Alan Burhoe’s “Omithanthropus” is a fine story of winged men living symbiotically with balloon-like creatures. No quarrel—nor have I one with Arthur C. Clarke’s Playboy dazzler, “A Meeting with Medusa,” which placed second in the Hugo voting. His “Transit of Earth” is in a third book.
Philip Jose Farmer has well earned his place with “The Sliced-Crosswise -Only-on-Tuesday World,” which extends the parallel worlds concept to parallel lives as a solution to the population problem. I don’t see why it is in only two books. [. . .] Larry Niven’s “The Fourth Profession”—which profession did the alien’s knowledge pills teach our hero?—placed twice, but I much prefer his “Inconstant Moon,” a lovely “hard SF” story about the end of the world, which Pohl also liked. Niven has a fourth story, “Rammer,” in del Rey’s book.
Finally, Norman Spinrad’s “No Direction Home” is a chilling story of two chemists designing drugs that will custom-tailor life styles. Relevant SF? Certainly. New wave? I suppose so. More of the editors should have picked it.
I’ve listed two of my own druthers in passing: stories that are in one of the five books, and should be in more. Here are some more:
[. . .]
Ursula Le Guin’s “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,” about a world-girdling vegetable being. It was runner-up in the Hugo voting.
[. . .]
Which do I recommend? All of them—but I find that I starred more outstanding stories in Terry Carr’s collection, with Harrison/Aldiss next, then Wollheim, then Lester del Rey, and Pohl last. Since Donald Wollheim left Ace Books to form his own paperback company, his and Terry Carr’s anthologies are a spinoff for the book they used to do together, and Pohl was their replacement. Harrison and Aldiss have been picking winners for five years, and this is del Rey’s first “best” collection.
It bothers me that there are a dozen or so other excellent stories— stories I marked for comment—that I haven’t even mentioned. Make that “dozens”: these editors choose well.  p. 169-171

2. There is nothing from Analog, Amazing, Fantastic, F&SF, Worlds of Fantasy or Worlds of Tomorrow magazines in this collection.
In the poll (small sample size) that we did after our group read, these were the results for the people’s favourite stories (click on image for larger size):

3. My review of Terry Carr’s Best Science Fiction of the Year #1 can be found here.

4. The rest of the 334 series (collected as the novel/collection, 334, in 1972) at ISFDB. I recall the novella 334 was better than Angouleme, and Bodies, a very good piece of black comedy, better than both.
The completely unrelated cover on the edition I bought:

5. The Wikipedia page for Diego Garcia is here.

6. Rabbinic Fences are discussed here.

7. The illustrations for Clarke’s story in Playboy magazine:

The official Playboy archive is here.

8. If you want a better idea of how this book measures up against what I might pick for a 1971 ‘Year’s Best’, or learn what other anthologists chose for their books, look at the table below (this is the same one which will appear at the end of the review of the Wollheim, Pohl, del Rey, and Harrison & Aldiss volumes). It will be updated as and when I find stories I like, or citation sources I feel should be included (for more on the latter see below).

The first to fourth column give the story titles, authors, Lengths, and Place of publication (see below the table for abbreviation legend).
The ‘T’ column lists Terry Carr’s choices with an ‘x’, and his recommendation list with an ‘o’.
The ‘D’ column lists Lester Del Rey’s choices with an ‘x’.
The ‘W’ column lists Donald Wollheim’s choices with an ‘x’.
The ‘P’ column lists Frederik Pohl’s choices with an ‘x’.
The ‘A’ column lists HArry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss’s choices with an ‘x’.
The ‘S’ column shows my (SF Magazine’s) current choices an ‘x’ (historical choices are an ‘o’). A dash means read but passed over (I only select stories better than ∗∗∗+ and above, and not all of them). Blank means unread.
The ‘C’ column shows how many of the anthologies and/or polls used in the Classics of Science Fiction list included the story in their collections or lists (note that CoSF is SF only and skews against fantasy), minus the anthology or award citations which have their own column (Carr, Dozois, Wollheim, Hugo, Nebula, etc.).
The ‘O’ column shows the number of inclusions in Other major anthologies or recommendation lists not on the CoSF (Classics of SF) list. These are selected by me (usually to include fantasy retrospectives or awards that CoSF doesn’t include) but I may not yet have done this for some/all of the stories.*
The ‘H’ column shows the story’s 1977 Hugo award placing (F for finalist, W for winner).
The ‘N’ column shows the story’s 1977 Nebula award placing (F for finalist, W for winner).
The ‘U’ column shows stories that were one of the 1977 LocUs Poll’s top ten short stories, novelettes, or novellas.
The ‘T’ column shows the TOTal points that each story gets (they get a point for being in each column and for each of the CoSF and other anthology citations).

The titles, names, lengths, publications, and overall score columns are sortable.

A good way to sample 1971’s best short fiction may be to start at the top of the table and work down until you get to the last of the 2-point stories. Bear in mind this compilation is statistically invalid, but it will give you something to aim at. Enjoy.

Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories 1971

na=novella, nv=novelet, ss=short story

ABY, Abyss; AMZ, Amazing Stories; ANA, Analog; ATM, All The Myriad Ways; BET, Being There; CAN, Cancerqueen and Other Stories; CLA, Clarion; CYF, Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?; DAG, De achtjaarlijkse god; ECO, Eco-Fiction; FOU, Four Futures; FSF, Fantasy and Science Fiction; GAL, Galaxy; IN4, Infinity #4; N19, New Writings in SF #19; ND1, New Dimensions #1; NW1, New Worlds Quarterly #1; NW2, New Worlds Quarterly #2; NYT, New York Times; OR8, Orbit #8; OR9, Orbit #9; PLA, Playboy; PRO, Protostars; QU4, Quark #4; TNL, The National Lampoon; TMW, The Many Worlds of Science Fiction; TNY, The New Yorker; UN1, Universe #1; WOI, Worlds of If.

* The ‘O’ (Other) recommendations column will be added as and when. ●

rssrss

Henry Kuttner: A Memorial Symposium

Summary: This tribute was produced by Karen Anderson shortly after Henry Kuttner’s death in 1958 and contains a number of short memoirs from Poul Anderson, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Fritz Leiber, and Robert Bloch. It also contains a few other items, including a short article by Anthony Boucher about Kuttner’s mystery fiction, and a comprehensive bibliography by Donald H. Tuck. It is an interesting item.
[ISFDB.org page] [Fanac.org copy]

Other Reviews:
Anthony Boucher, F&SF (December 1958)

_____________________

Editor, Karen Anderson

Non-fiction:
Cover & Back Cover • by Karen Anderson
Interior Artwork • by Ed Cartier (x3)
In Memoriam: Henry Kuttner • poem by Karen Anderson
Introduction
Memoirs of a Kuttner Reader • essay by Poul Anderson
The Many Faces of Henry Kuttner • essay by Fritz Leiber
Hank Helped Me • essays by Richard Matheson and Ray Bradbury
The Mystery Novels of Henry Kuttner • essay by Anthony Boucher
The Closest Approach • essay by Robert Bloch
Extrapolation • essay by Henry Kuttner
A Bibliography of the Science-Fantasy Works of Henry Kuttner • by Donald H. Tuck

_____________________

There are several useful websites I use to pursue this hobby (ISFDB.org, Archive.org, etc.), and one that is creeping up the list is fanac.org, a growing repository of fanzine scans. I’ve occasionally used it before, but it was slow to use (a lot of the scans are on individual webpages, which makes it almost impossible to flick through a publication as quickly as one might a PDF); there also weren’t many fanzines that were of interest to me (I’m mostly interested in reviews of magazines and anthologies, although I downloaded a pile of Science Fiction Times issues a couple of Retro-Hugos ago).
Recently, however, there has been a lot of material of interest made available in PDF format, including long runs of the BSFA’s Vector magazine (which has mid-60’s reviews of New Worlds and Science Fantasy magazines) as well as issues of Dick Geis’s Science Fiction Review, which gives an interesting view of the field in the early and mid-70s (although its publication dates stretch to either side of that). Another item that recently turned up is the item discussed here today.

Henry Kuttner: A Memorial Symposium is a memorial fanzine that was edited by Karen Anderson in 1958 after the untimely death of Henry Kuttner from a heart attack (February 3rd, age 42). It opens with a poem, In Memoriam: Henry Kuttner (F&SF, May 1958) in which Anderson uses many of Kuttner’s (and Moore’s) story titles to produce an elegiac piece.
After a very short Introduction, the essays lead off with Memoirs of a Kuttner Reader by Poul Anderson, which tells of a trip by Poul and Karen Anderson to visit Kuttner and Moore towards the end of the his life:

Only once did I meet Henry Kuttner. We drove down to Los Angeles after Christmas, chiefly to renew old friendships, but added this to the agenda and placed it high. I didn’t really plan on more than How do you do/very glad to meet you/always enjoyed your stories/so long; professional courtesy does not give carte blanche to take up a man’s time. Even when a diffident phone call was met by a more than cordial invitation, I didn’t expect much over an hour of talk.
He and his wife had found an apartment which was like some magician’s castle, nested among green leaves on the heights, so that from a glassed wall you looked directly down to land’s end and the ocean. It was pale blue that day, a single curve around the planet, Henry guided us himself, through the drive and into his living room. Meeting Catherine was no less a pleasure, intellectually as well as visually; and I have never been in a more serene home. She held the burden of conversation, for Henry was off at once to bring drinks, and thereafter gave nearly his whole attention to the comfort of his guests. Typical: I noticed him sit down quietly on the floor, because my small daughter had put her doll on the last occupied chair.  p. 4-5

More writers turn up (Ed Hamilton and Leigh Brackett among them) and the Andersons have a great time. Later they receive an unexpected invitation to stay for dinner—but they have another engagement, and have to leave. Six weeks later Kuttner is dead.
In the rest of the piece Anderson examines Kuttner’s (and Moore’s) work.
The Many Faces of Henry Kuttner by Fritz Leiber talks about his and Kuttner’s first meeting in 1937, and later mentions an occasion where Kuttner and Robert Bloch discussed the different personalities of the former’s pseudonyms:

Lewis Padgett was a retired accountant who liked to water the lawn of an evening and then mosey down to the corner drugstore to pick up a quart of ice cream and whose wife collected recipes to surprise her bridge club. Lawrence O’Donnell was a wild Irishman who lived in Greenwich Village with a malicious black cat who had an infallible instinct for check letters and generally managed to chew up their contents before his master had shaken loose from his latest hangover. Keith Hammond was a Lewis Padgett fan, newly broken into pro ranks, whom Padgett loathed . . .  p. 9

Hank Helped Me by Richard Matheson shows Kuttner as mentor:

At that time I was just beginning work on my first science-fantasy novel “I Am Legend” and was hopelessly mired in technical troubles, not to mention story troubles. Hank, single-handedly, helped me out of them, guiding me (Hank never pushed, never dogmatized) step by step with suggestion and discussion until all problems were met. I dedicated that book to Hank but it was a small thing when one considers that Hank dedicated his life to writing and writers.  p. 10

Matheson’s short piece is followed by a similar one from Ray Bradbury. This opens with an account of how Bradbury met Kuttner—a lot of these meetings (Leiber, Matheson, Bradbury, etc.) seem to have occurred at the Los Angeles SF Society in 1937, so Vintage Season time-travellers take note. Then Bradbury talks about Hank the thinker, and Kuttner and Moore as a couple:

The thinking Hank did went into his stories and into his life with his wife, too. I have never known a more dedicated pair. I’m not speaking from false sentiment but with real admiration for two people who set up standards for themselves, planned ahead, and went out to educate themselves to get the answers. Separate or together, they set an example every writer should look to. They cared about writing. They were literary people. Too many people in the field are not literary people, but are in it for the money or a few fast licks of notoriety. Hank was not one of their kind.  p. 11

Bradbury has this about Kuttner’s mentorship:

I remember him as an honest critic and a kind but firm teacher who kicked hell out of me when I needed it. He tolerated Ray intruding on his life, he forced me to read every issue of Amazing Stories for an entire year, so I would learn the bones of plotting (a terrible job, but I did it!) and he beat the “purple writing” out of me with a few words one afternoon in 1942.
Over the years he wrote me 8 and 9 page letters concerning certain stories I had shown him. The last two hundred words of my story The Candle, which appeared in Weird Tales many years ago, are Hank’s. He rewrote the ending and I left it that way.  p. 11/13

Anthony Boucher’s The Mystery Novels of Henry Kuttner is a useful piece that provides clues about an aspect of Kuttner’s writing that I know nothing about, and also points out its influence on his SF writing:

Much of Kuttner’s science fiction shows the influence of the mystery; and many of his (for his, understand in most cases their) stories The Fairy Chessmen, Rite of Passage, etc.—are the detective stories and murder-suspense novels of the future.  p. 12

The following comment may be useful to the web reviewer who dismissed Private Eye as “ultimately a story about a guy killing a girl”:

These novels were profoundly influenced by “the new genre of the psychoanalytical tale,” as Max Lemer calls The Jet-Propelled Couch and the other cases in Robert Lindner’s The Fifty-Minute Hour—tales in which the dramatic structure of psychoanalysis, with its attendant surprise-revelations, is the story.  p. 13

The Closest Approach by Robert Bloch starts by quoting a Kuttner line off the dust-cover of A Gnome There Was, “Fantasy interests me because it is the closest approach to realism I know.” Bloch goes on to explain why he thought Kuttner was being sincere when he said this, and not trying to be funny.
Bloch then goes on to examine Kuttner’s early fantasy work (including their three collaborations) before noting that, when the fantasy market dwindled during the early 1940s, Kuttner “turned almost inevitability to science fiction” (this pivot hadn’t been apparent to me as I’ve read little if any of his early work).
Throughout the rest of the piece Bloch charts Kuttner’s development as a writer:

For Kuttner had gone full gamut—from the Gothic past to the galactic future—and then realized that there was still the greatest field of imaginative speculation left to explore: the human imagination itself.  p. 16

Bloch then expands on this in a long and illuminating passage:

I do not know if he ever expressed himself upon the subject of psychological fantasy. But through our many years of personal contact and correspondence, I became increasingly aware of his interest in psychotherapy and its potentialities. On the face of it, after By These Presents and De Profundis in the early Fifties, he seemed to abandon the “fantasy approach” to fiction. But in actuality he was still exploring enchantment, delving into the deepest and darkest dreams of all, that murkiest of mysteries which is the mortal mind. He had discovered that the true “world of imagination” is the little grey globe each of us carries inside our skulls.
[. . .]
Henry Kuttner was a modest and a humble man. He was his own severest critic, and his harshest task-master, too. All during his professional career, he studied writing, studied other people, studied himself. He was constantly striving to do better work, and conscientiously preparing for it. There were books he’d planned for the future—when he felt that he was “ready” to write them properly. And these books were not science fiction novels, they were not the psychological-detective mysteries, they were not suspense thrillers; they were simply stories about people. “Realistic” or “mainstream” novels? Perhaps, in outward form. But actually, what Henry Kuttner was contemplating, eventually, was the creation of a whole new field of fantasy; the realistic novel of the imagination, He had no intention of emulating the “stream-of-consciousness” school or travelling the rocky road of Kerouac, nor did he expect to employ the eideticism of a Proust, He was merely experimenting endlessly in a search for the proper form in which to reveal the substance.
Do not let these words mislead you; Kuttner was not self-consciously pretentious about his goals, nor egotistic, nor ambitious. Anyone who had the good fortune to know him can give the lie to that. He was far too self-critical, far too self-deprecating, far too self-ridiculing to ever regard himself as a “dedicated” writer. And what I have written here about his plans is the embodiment of my own concept of his purpose, gleaned bit by bit through the years of conversation and correspondence, and never self-dramatized in the form of a direct statement on his part. For himself, Henry Kuttner was merely honestly and earnestly attempting to evolve a style and a method of writing the stories he wanted to tell—the stories which would reveal the fantasy behind our reality, and the realities behind our fantasies.  p.17

These memoirs are followed by a couple of other pieces of material. The first is Extrapolation by Henry Kuttner (Fanscient, Fall 1948), a long-winded and not particularly funny piece which satirises letters in SF magazines criticising unwelcome fantasy elements—and then does the same with letters in fantasy magazines criticising SF elements. I suppose the subject matter marries up with Bloch’s earlier comments.
The remaining article is a comprehensive bibliography by Donald H. Tuck, A Bibliography of the Science-Fantasy Works of Henry Kuttner. This has, at the end of it, two pages from a letter from Kuttner which gives a wealth of information about his various pseudonyms (although Tuck notes some corrections in later correspondence). One thing I noted from Kuttner’s letter is this:

C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner married June 7, 1940. Stories written after this date are often collaborations, but: C. L. Moore stories are always by C. L. Moore. Lawrence O’Donnell stories are usually by C. L. Moore. Exceptions: “This is the House” Ast., Feb., 46, by Kuttner. “Fury,” May, June, July 1947, Ast., collab. by Moore-Kuttner.  p. 33

This makes Clash By Night, The Children’s Hour and Vintage Season solo Moore pieces (ISFDB lists them as collaborations).
There are also three pieces of poorly reproduced Interior Artwork from Ed Cartier (a function of producing an amateur magazine at the time).

Kuttner is long overdue a major book examining his work but, in the meantime, this short and interesting booklet is well worth a look. Especially recommended for Kuttner & Moore fans.  ●

Click for larger image.

 

rssrss

The 1945 Retro-Hugo Awards & 2020 Hugo Awards

_____________________

The 1945 Retro-Hugo Award winners and detailed stats can be found here.1
The 2020 Hugo Award winners and detailed stats can be found here.1

Brief comments on the 1945 Retro-Hugo Awards:
A number of these awards appear to have been voted for on name recognition (either writer or book), such as the Novelette award for City by Clifford D. Simak (the same title as the novel, and a weak piece in a strong category); the Short Story award for I, Rocket, by Ray Bradbury (beating out two other ‘City’ stories, Desertion and Huddling Place);2 the Best Related Work award for The Science-Fiction Field, by Leigh Brackett (I couldn’t find this online so wonder if anyone actually read it); and the Best Fan Writer award to Fritz Leiber (those in the know suggest Bob Tucker should have won).
Not a particularly useful set of awards.

_____________________

1. Nicholas Whyte provides detailed analysis of the stats for the 1945 and 2020 awards.
Cora Buhlert provides detailed commentary on the 1945 awards.

2. If you look at the nominations statistics, I, Rocket only just made the short list ahead of The Lake.

rssrss

The Best Science Fiction of the Year #1, edited by Terry Carr, 1972

Summary: An assured solo ‘Best of Year’ anthology for 1971 from Terry Carr, whose choices seem to split pretty evenly between crowd-pleasers (Clarke’s excellent A Meeting With Medusa, Anderson’s A Queen of Air and Darkness, and the Niven), experimental and literary work (Le Guin’s Vaster Than Empires and More Slow, the Silverberg and Panshin), and humour and satire (work from Farmer, Spinrad, and Effinger, etc.). A reader-friendly combination.
[ISFDB] [Archive.org]

Other reviews:1
Charlie Brown, Locus #129, December 15, 1972
Avram Davidson, F&SF, March 1973
Dave Hartwell, Locus #125, October 27 1972
P. Schuyler Miller, Analog, May 1973

_____________________

Editor, Terry Carr

Fiction:2
Occam’s Scalpel • novelette by Theodore Sturgeon ∗∗
The Queen of Air and Darkness • novella by Poul Anderson
In Entropy’s Jaws • novelette by Robert Silverberg
The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World • short story by Philip José Farmer +
A Meeting with Medusa • novelette by Arthur C. Clarke
The Frayed String on the Stretched Forefinger of Time • short story by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
How Can We Sink When We Can Fly? • novelette by Alexei Panshin
No Direction Home • short story by Norman Spinrad
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow • novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin +
All the Last Wars at Once • short story by George Alec Effinger
The Fourth Profession • novelette by Larry Niven +

Non-fiction:
Introduction • by Terry Carr

_____________________

The fiction in Terry Carr’s debut solo ‘Best of the Year’ volume (he co-edited a series with Donald A. Wollheim for the years 1964 to 1970 previously) leads off with Occam’s Scalpel by Theodore Sturgeon (If, July-August 1971), which in some respects reminds me of another story of his I’ve read recently, When You Care, When You Love (F&SF, September 1962)—but I’ll come back to this at the end.
This one opens with a man called Joe, an out of town inventor, receiving a discrete visit from his brother Karl. We learn that Karl is the private doctor of an exceptionally wealthy and elderly man whose designated successor is an over-achiever called Wheeler. Karl has concerns about what Wheeler will do with the company, and its vast wealth and influence, when he takes control. There is then a long data dump giving Wheeler’s life story, which ends with the brothers deciding what they should do.
After the set-up the story plays out in the rest of the story, starting with Karl and Wheeler at the old man’s funeral. Long story short (spoiler), Karl takes Wheeler through to a back room in the crematorium, where the coffin, rather than having been burnt, is waiting for them.
Karl opens the coffin and proceeds to perform an autopsy on the old man. During this procedure Karl excises odd-looking body parts which he displays to Wheeler, while suggesting that their erstwhile boss was an alien. Then Karl floats the theory that this creature’s natural habitat is an atmosphere similar to a badly polluted Earth, and that the deteriorating condition of the environment is part of an alien plot to terraform the Earth for its species. Wheeler is convinced, and leaves on a mission to reverse this trend.3
The story’s short last section has Karl talking to Joe about what we now find out was a hoax (Joe makes medical specimens for a living). The final twist involves a further discussion between them about Occam’s razor, which suggests that their hoax theory is actually true.4
This tale, like When You Care, When You Love, marries up Sturgeon’s considerable story-telling skills with an far-fetched plot. Individual reader’s enjoyment will vary according to what extent they allow the first to mask the second: in my case, not so much.

Reviewed here recently was The Queen of Air and Darkness by Poul Anderson (F&SF, April 1971), which seems at first as if it is going to be a Midsummer Night’s Dream-like fantasy:

A shape came bounding over Cloudmoor. It had two arms and two legs, but the legs were long and claw-footed and feathers covered it to the end of a tail and broad wings. The face was half human, dominated by its eyes. Had Ayoch been able to stand wholly erect, he would have reached to the boy’s shoulder.
The girl rose. “He carries a burden,” she said. Her vision was not meant for twilight like that of a northland creature born, but she had learned how to use every sign her senses gave her. Besides the fact that ordinarily a pook would fly, there was a heaviness to his haste.
“And he comes from the south.” Excitement jumped in the boy, sudden as a green flame that went across the constellation Lyrth. He sped down the mound. “Ohoi, Ayoch!” he called, “Me here, Mistherd!”
“And Shadow-of-a-Dream,” the girl laughed, following. The pook halted. He breathed louder than the soughing in the growth around him. A smell of bruised yerba lifted where he stood. “Well met in winterbirth,” he whistled. “You can help me bring this to Carheddin.”
He held out what he bore. His eyes were yellow lanterns above. It moved and whimpered.
“Why, a child,” Mistherd said.  p. 188

In the next section the story changes into a planetary colonisation tale, which starts with a woman called Barbro Cullen visiting an investigator called Eric Sherrinford in a town called Christmas Landing. Her child has gone missing on a field trip to the north of their planet, Roland, and she fears he may have been abducted.
Sherrinford agrees to take the case, and it isn’t long before they head north to an outpost called Portolondon. In a video interview with the local constable, Sherrinford probes the officer about the incident, and also the local myths:

[Sherrinford] cradled his pipe bowl in both hands and peered into the tiny hearth of it. “Perhaps what interests me most,” he said softly, “is why—across that gap of centuries, across a barrier of machine civilization and its utterly antagonistic world view—no continuity of tradition whatsoever—why have hard-headed, technologically organized, reasonably well-educated colonists here brought back from its grave a belief in the Old Folk?”  p. 201

Later, Sherrinford and Cullen head north and, one night at their campsite, he tells Cullen his theory that there is an advanced indigenous race on Roland which is hiding from the human race. Little do the couple know that they are being spied upon by Mistherd, a previous human abductee, who now swears allegiance to the Queen of Air and Darkness.
The rest of the story follows the pair as they track down the child.
This is an impressive piece, and what is particularly notable is the texture of this world. Not only do we see things from both the indigenous alien’s and settler’s point of view, but we also learn about the myths and legends that have been created by the limited contact between the two. This is perhaps most evident in two sequential scenes: the first takes place in the house of William Irons, a settler who lives in the far north, and who tells the couple about the rules and customs that apply there with respect to the “Queen”; the second is when Cullen and Sherrinford are later at their campsite talking about a folk song performed by Iron’s son but interrupted by an emotional outburst from Cullen. She finishes the song for Sherrinford, and he hears of a story about a ranger, Arvin, and how he refuses to become part of the Outling folk. The Queen tells him he will regret his choice:

I do not need a magic
to make you always mourn.
.
I send you home with nothing
except your memory
of moonlight, Outling music,
night breezes, dew, and me.
And that will run behind you,
a shadow on the sun,
and that will lie beside you
when every day is done.
.
In work and play and friendship
your grief will strike you dumb
for thinking what you are—and—
what you might have become.  p. 216

It is a stunning moment which not only elegantly and succinctly lends the story hundreds of years of history, but also dangles the prospect of human uplift or transcendence in front of the reader. And, as if all this doesn’t already build a convincing world, there are also a couple of short passages that sketch the spread of humanity through space, something that gives the tapestry of the story even more colour and depth.
If the piece has a flaw it is probably the ending (spoiler), which degenerates into a guns blazing rescue of the boy, a rather crude end to such a sophisticated story—although, to be fair, that event is preceded by a haunting section where Cullen is kidnapped and telepathically induced to think that her dead husband is taking her to the Queen of Air and Darkness.
A deserving Hugo and Nebula Award winner.

In Entropy’s Jaws by Robert Silverberg (Infinity #2, 1971) the protagonist, Skein, is a man on a passenger spaceship about to make an FTL jump when he has the first of a number of fugues that see him “swept in shards across time.” The rest of the story is a non-linear sequence of many of Skein’s life events both past and future and, during these, he meets a skull-faced man he has never met (so this must be from his future). As he watches himself talk to the skull-faced man Skein realises that the man has a cure for his condition, so he eventually makes his way across interstellar space to him. When Skein finally reaches the skull-faced man, he is taken to a healing “amoeba,” and (spoiler) his condition resolved: it then becomes apparent who the skull-faced man is (although some readers will already have figured this out already).
Between the initial set-up on the spaceship and the story’s ironic ending, Silverberg uses all the toys in the artistic toolbox—pseudo-intellectual musings about time and entropy (some of which sounds as if it is straight out of Pseud’s Corner), the listing of many book titles, etc.—there are even a couple of “What I did on my Summer Holidays” scenes (the ones inside the mosque, and on the boat). These are wrapped up in a kitchen sink’s worth of standard SFnal gimmicks, e.g. starships, telepathy, and time loops. And the story is also heavily padded, as you can see from this almost stream-of-consciousness section:

Skein spends nearly all of this period in his cabin, rarely eating and sleeping very little. He reads almost constantly, obsessively dredging from the ship’s extensive library a wide and capricious assortment of books. Rilke. Kafka. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World. Lowry, Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place. Elias. Razhuminin. Dickey. Pound. Fraisse, The Psychology of Time. Greene, Dream and Delusion. Poe. Shakespeare. Marlowe. Tourneur.
The Waste Land. Ulysses. Heart of Darkness. Bury, The Idea of Progress. Jung. Buchner. Pirandello. The MagicMountain. Ellis, The Rack. Cervantes. Blenheim. Fierst. Keats. Nietzsche. His mind swims with images and bits of verse, with floating sequences of dialogue, with unscaffolded dialectics. He dips into each work briefly, magpielike, seeking bright scraps. The words form a scaly impasto on the inner surface of his skull. He finds that this heavy verbal overdose helps, to some slight extent, to fight off the fugues; his mind is weighted, perhaps, bound by this leaden clutter of borrowed genius to the moving line of the present, and during his debauch of reading he finds himself shifting off that line less frequently than in the recent past. His mind whirls.
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—A rope over an abyss. My patience is exhausted. See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament! One drop would save my soul. I had not thought death had undone so many. These fragments I have shored against my ruins. Hoogspanning. Levensgevaar. Peligro de Muerte. Electricidad. Danger.  p. 89

This goes on for a page and a half.
A story that is too long and too self-indulgent.5

The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World by Philip José Farmer (New Dimensions #1, 1971) is an amusing piece about a man who lives in an overpopulated world where people only live one day in seven. When they are not conscious they are kept in suspended animation chambers, which they call “stoners”.
The first part of the story introduces us to Tom Pym, an actor who lives in Tuesday, and who wakes up to find his house has burnt down. After a few days in a public facility he finds a new place to stay and, on the evening of his first day there, he sees a beautiful woman in the stoner opposite. Pym is instantly infatuated with her, but she lives in Wednesday, and it is nearly impossible to transfer between days (and to do so illegally would result in permanent stonerdom).
The rest of the piece concerns Pym’s attempts to contact her by leaving a tape-recorded message (he receives a polite but dismissive reply), and then his journey through the bureaucratic process required to transfer between days. This latter requires the approval of both his astrologer and psycher:

The psycher had said that he was incapable of a true and lasting bond with a woman, as so many men were in this world of easy-come-easy-go liaisons. He had fallen in love with Jennie Marlowe for several reasons. She may have resembled somebody he had loved when he was very young. His mother, perhaps? No? Well, never mind. He would find out in Wednesday—perhaps. The deep, the important, truth was that he loved Miss Marlowe because she could never reject him, kick him out, or become tiresome, complain, weep, yell, insult, and so forth. He loved her because she was unattainable and silent.  p.125

Although Pym (spoiler) eventually succeeds in transferring to Wednesday, the ironic ending sees his psycher running off with the woman, who has meantime transferred to Tuesday.
An original and entertaining piece.

A Meeting with Medusa by Arthur C. Clarke (Playboy, December 1971)6 has a spectacular opening sequence that sees Howard Falcon, the captain of a huge future airship called the Queen Elizabeth, walk through the interior of the craft (and past the superchimp, “simp” crew) and up to the craft’s observation area. There he watches as a nearby camera platform approaches the ship to land. However, the operator loses control, and it crashes into the airship, damaging it badly. Falcon rushes down to the bridge:

Halfway down, he paused for a second to inspect the damage. That damned platform had gone clear through the ship, rupturing two of the gas cells as it did so. They were still collapsing slowly, in great falling veils of plastic. He was not worried about the loss of lift—the ballast could easily take care of that, as long as eight cells remained intact. Far more serious was the possibility of structural damage; already he could hear the great latticework around him groaning and protesting under its abnormal loads. It was not enough to have sufficient lift; unless it was properly distributed, the ship would break her back.
He was just resuming his descent when a superchimp, shrieking with fright, came racing down the elevator shaft, moving with incredible speed hand over hand along the outside of the latticework. In its terror, the poor beast had torn off its company uniform, perhaps in an unconscious attempt to regain the freedom of its ancestors.
Falcon, still descending as swiftly as he could, watched its approach with some alarm; a distraught simp was a powerful and potentially dangerous animal, especially if fear overcame its conditioning. As it overtook him, it started to call out a string of words, but they were all jumbled together, and the only one he could recognize was a plaintive, frequently repeated “Boss.” Even now, Falcon realized, it looked toward humans for guidance; he felt sorry for the creature, involved in a man-made disaster beyond its comprehension and for which it bore no responsibility.
It stopped opposite him, on the other side of the lattice; there was nothing to prevent it from coming through the open framework if it wished. Now its face was only inches from his and he was looking straight into the terrified eyes. Never before had he been so close to a simp and able to study its features in such detail; he felt that strange mingling of kinship and discomfort that all men experience when they gaze thus into the mirror of time.
His presence seemed to have calmed the creature; Falcon pointed up the shaft, back toward the observation deck, and said very clearly and precisely: “Boss—boss—go” To his relief, the simp understood; it gave him a grimace that might have been a smile and at once started to race back the way it had come. Falcon had given it the best advice he could; if any safety remained aboard the Queen, it was in that direction. But his duty lay in the other.  p. 136-137

The airship crash lands and, after Falcon’s blackout, the story recommences some time later with him pitching an airship exploration of Jupiter to a man called Webster, the head of long range planning. Then the story cuts to Falcon en route from Ganymede to Jupiter;  when he arrives his spaceship, the Kon Tiki, enters the atmosphere and the balloons deploy, leaving him floating in the Jovian atmosphere.
The main part of the story is a mixture of exotic travelogue and sense of wonder:

The five hours of daylight were almost over; the clouds below were full of shadows, which gave them a massive solidity they had not possessed when the Sun was higher. Color was swiftly draining from the sky, except in the west itself, where a band of deepening purple lay along the horizon. Above this band was the thin crescent of a closer moon, pale and bleached against the utter blackness beyond.
With a speed perceptible to the eye, the Sun went straight down over the edge of Jupiter, 3000 kilometers away. The stars came out in their legions—and there was the beautiful evening star of Earth, on the very frontier of twilight, reminding him how far he was from home. It followed the Sun down into the west; man’s first night on Jupiter had begun.  p. 149

We witness the various events that unfold as Falcon travels through the Jovian atmosphere (spoiler): there are bands of racing bioluminescent light in the clouds below; a massive radio storm; ball lightning on the Kon Tiki; he sleeps and has a recurrent nightmare about the simp on the airship (which died along with all the others)—then he spots a massive life-form rising out of the clouds towards him.
When Falcon later sees that the medusae (he later comes upon a herd of the medusa-like creatures) have radio arrays, the first contact protocols are invoked:

Dr. Brenner was back on the circuit, still worrying about the Prime Directive.
“Remember—it may only be inquisitive!” he cried without much conviction. “Try not to frighten it!”
Falcon was getting rather tired of this advice and recalled a TV discussion he had once seen between a space lawyer and an astronaut. After the full implications of the Prime Directive had been carefully spelled out, the incredulous spacer had exclaimed: “So if there were no alternative, I must sit still and let myself be eaten?” The lawyer had not even cracked a smile when he answered: “That’s an excellent summing up.”
It had seemed funny at the time; it was not at all amusing now.
And then Falcon saw something that made him even more unhappy. The medusa was still hovering a kilometer above him—but one of its tentacles was becoming incredibly elongated and was stretching down toward Kon-Tiki, thinning out at the same time. As a boy, he had once seen the funnel of a tornado descending from a storm cloud over the Kansas plains; the thing coming toward him now evoked vivid memories of that black, twisting snake in the sky.  p. 171

The medusa’s attentions eventually cause Falcon to prematurely end his trip. He jettisons the balloons and ignites the rockets that will boost him out of Jupiter’s atmosphere—which delivers a line that will satisfy the inner twelve year old in all SF readers:

Now he was master once more—no longer drifting helplessly on the winds of Jupiter but riding his own column of atomic fire back to the stars.  p. 173

In the final scene Falcon is revealed as a cyborg (something that is hinted at in several places in the story), which produces the story’s unexpectedly elegiac ending:

Howard Falcon, who had once been a man and could still pass for one over a voice circuit, felt a calm sense of achievement—and, for the first time in years, something like peace of mind. Since his return from Jupiter, the nightmares had ceased. He had found his role at last.
He knew now why he had dreamed about that superchimp aboard the doomed Queen Elizabeth. Neither man nor beast, it was between two worlds; and so was he.
He alone could travel unprotected on the lunar surface; the life-support system inside the metal cylinder that had replaced his fragile body functioned equally well in space or under water. Gravity fields ten times that of Earth were an inconvenience, but nothing more. And no gravity was best of all.
The human race was becoming more remote from him, the ties of kinship more tenuous. Perhaps these air-breathing, radiation-sensitive bundles of unstable carbon compounds had no right beyond the atmosphere; they should stick to their natural homes—Earth, Moon, Mars.
Someday, the real masters of space would be machines, not men—and he was neither. Already conscious of his destiny, he took a somber pride in his unique loneliness—the first immortal, midway between two orders of creation.
He would, after all, be an ambassador; between the old and the new—between the creatures of carbon and the creatures of metal who must one day supersede them. Both would have need of him in the troubled centuries that lay ahead.  p. 174-175

This is an excellent piece of hard science fiction, and a truly magisterial performance from Clarke.

The Frayed String on the Stretched Forefinger of Time by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. (F&SF, May 1971) begins in Minority Report territory with Inspector Commander Graham and his assistant Proller reviewing Pre-Crime data:

Proller consulted his notebook. Pre-Murder suspects were always odd, but this one seemed spectacularly so. He had invested a small fortune in plastic, life-sized images of a business rival, and he arranged them in various postures about his estate and each evening strolled around throwing knives at them. The doctors thought this a healthy purge of murderous impulses. The inspector-commander had a hunch that Clingman wasn’t purging himself of anything; he was just having target practice.  p. 178

When Proller reads the notes on another suspect, a man called Stamitz, the owner of a life suspension facility, it becomes clear that the latter has acquired a weapon, and intends to kill his rival Bryling.
The rest of the story plays out at Stamitz’s labs. When Graham and Proller interview him there, Stamitz agrees to a hypnotic examination the next day, which lets Graham know that he plans to kill Bryling that evening. The police arrange protection for Bryling, but he slips away from them and goes to Stamitz’s life-suspension facility.
The denouement (spoiler) involves Bryling (unconvincingly) agreeing to suspended animation at Stamitz’s facility to avoid the threat to his life. Stamitz’s manages to poison Bryling during the process (but does not kill him—Bryling won’t die until he is revived). This murder, or attempted murder, is later discovered by Proller and a medic, but they keep this information from Graham (for the unlikely reason that it would affect his “confidence” as a pre-crime detective).
This has an intriguing setup but the resolution does not convince. At all. Very much a game of two halves.

How Can We Sink When We Can Fly? by Alexei Panshin (Four Futures, 1971) uses most of its length to give us an autobiographical account of the writer and his partner Cory’s life in rural Pennsylvania, and begins with the couple driving to the nearest bus station in New Jersey to pick up a couple of visitors, Rob and Leigh.7 When the Panshins arrive to pick them up, they find that a quiet young man called Juanito is with them. He doesn’t say much but asks the odd question, such as the one on the way home:

This Pennsylvania countryside offers you just about anything you want. We’ve been here the better part of a year and still discover surprises within five miles, and even within one, or within three hundred yards: wild onion, wild strawberries, poison ivy. In the space of a mile on a single road you can find high-speed intersection, three-hundred-year-old farmstead, random suburbia, crossroad community, and woodland in any order and combination you like, strung across little valleys, hidden in hollows, up and over hills.
There are even pockets of industry.
“What is that?” Juanito asked.
It’s part of the scenery, but you have to be particularly quick to see it. If you could see more of it, perhaps it would have been closed down sooner. I stopped our old Plymouth tank and backed up the hill to the curve. In early April, with the trees still bare or only barely budding, you can see it from one vantage on the road. Tinny prefab buildings and the half a dozen chemical lagoons perched overlooking the creek, with blue and yellow gullies staining the hillside.
“Every time it rains there’s overflow,” I said. “That’s the Revere Chemicals dump. It was put in in 1965, and the State Health people said at the time that it was going to do this, and it took them five years to close it down. Now it just sits there and leaks. The manager is trying to start a new operation in the next township.”
“I hope the deer doesn’t drink from that stream,” Leigh said.
“He has to take his chances the same as the rest of us,” Rob said. Growing up in Springfield has left Rob with more than a little sourness.  p. 199

This illuminates one of the story’s main concerns, Panshin’s pessimistic view of the world and its future. This surfaces at various other points in the story, such as the two page gloomfest on p. 207-208:

Spring this year was wet and late, and the only thing in bloom was the weeping willow in the back yard, with its trailing yellow catkins. The trees spread over the running hills to the next farm were still winter sticks. The day was cool enough for a light jacket in spite of the work, and the sky was partly overcast. Gardening was an act of faith that the seasons would change and warmth and flower come. Gardening is an act of faith. I’m a pessimist, but still I garden.
It’s much like the times.
Our society is imperfect. That’s what we say, and we shrug and let it go at that. Societies change in their own good time, and there isn’t much that individuals can do to cause change or direct it. Most people don’t try. They have a living to make, and whatever energies are left over they know how to put to good use. They leave politics to politicians.
But let’s be honest. Our society is not just imperfect. Our society is an unhappy shambles. And leaving politics to politicians is proving to be a dangerous a business as leaving science to scientists, war to generals, and profits to profiteers.
I read. I watch. I listen. And I judge by my own experience.
The best of us are miserable. We all take drugs—alcohol, tobacco, and pills by the handful. We do work in order to live and live in order to work—an endless unsatisfying round. The jobs are no pleasure. Employers shunt us from one plastic paradise to another. One quarter of the country moves each year. No roots, no stability. We live our lives in public, with less and less opportunity to know each other. To know anybody.
Farmers can’t make a living farming. Small businessmen can’t make a living anymore, either. Combines and monoliths take them over or push them out. And because nobody questions the ways of a monolith and stays or rises in one, the most ruthless monoliths survive, run by the narrowest and hungriest and most self-satisfied among us.
The results: rivers that stink of sewage, industrial waste, and dead fish. City air that’s the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Countryside turned to rubble. Chemical lagoons left to stain hillsides with their overflow. Fields of rusting auto bodies. And all the while, the population is growing. Progress.
New consumers. But when I was born, in 1940, there were 140 million people in this country, and now there are more than 200 million, half of them born since 1940. Our institutions are less and less able to cope with the growth. Not enough houses. Not enough schools. Not enough doctors or teachers or jobs. Not enough room at the beach. Not enough beaches.
Not enough food. The world is beginning to starve, and for all the talk of Green Revolutions, we no longer have surplus food. We are importing lamb from Australia and beef from Argentina now. How soon before we all start pulling our belts a notch tighter?  p. 207-208

This eventually loops back to gardening being an act of faith.
I suspect that people’s reactions to this passage—and the story more generally—will depend on how pessimistic or optimistic they are, and will range from plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same) to the observation that some people worry too much.
The story also has a pronounced metafictional aspect, which sees Panshin discussing the writing of the story we are reading with Rob. Panshin tells him that he is finding it difficult to get started on the story. He then shows Rob the outline for the commissioned story, which proposes a future society with few children, and their consequential status:

Rob finished reading, looked up, and said, “It’s like something you’ve done, isn’t it?”
“What’s that?”
Rite of Passage
Rite of Passage was my first novel. It’s about a girl, a bright superchild on the verge of adulthood in a low-population future society. Otherwise it’s not much the same.
“Hmm. I guess I see what you mean, but I don’t think the similarity has to be close enough to be any problem. The thought of repeating myself is not what’s hanging me up. What do you think of the proposal?”
“Well,” said Rob, “when did you say the story is supposed to take place?”
I flipped to the front page of the proposal to check.
“The next century. The only date mentioned is 2025. After 2025, I guess.”
“Fifty years from now? Where do all the five-hundred-year-olds come from?”
I waved that aside. “I’m willing to make it one hundred or one hundred and fifty plus great expectations.”
“These people would have to be alive now,” Rob said.
“True,” I said. “It’s something to think about.”
It was a good point, just the sort of thing I wanted Rob to come up with. It raised possibilities.
“Are there any restrictions on what you write?”
“Fifteen thousand words and no nasty language.”
“What about nasty ideas?”
“Nothing said about that, but I don’t suppose they are worried. Everybody knows I never had a nasty idea in my life.”  p. 204

The conversation leads on to the mission statement from The Whole Earth Catalog8 (a countercultural publication of the time) about personal power, and the first chapter eventually ends with an example of that, when Alexi awakes one morning to find that Juanita has gone, but has left a trash can on the porch full of rubbish he has picked up from the highway verges.
The short second chapter that follows this lengthy autobiographical section appears to be the story that Panshin writes for the anthology, and features a child called Little John in the far-future (he is actually thirty year old, but is not considered mature enough to be deemed an adult). He is repeatedly being sent back in time to 1381 by his mentor, but wants to go somewhere else. Eventually the mentor lets him go to 1970, but Little John comes back shocked:

“You were right,” he said simply. “I wasn’t ready. Send me back to 1381 again. Please.”
“Perhaps,” Samantha said.
“I don’t understand. I don’t understand. I knew things weren’t right then, but I didn’t think they would be like that. Taxes was what they cared about. They didn’t even see what was going on. Not really. And it was just before the Revolution. Are things always that bad before they change?”
“Yes,” she said. “Always. The only difference this time is the way things changed. And you didn’t see the worst of it. Not by half, Little John.”
“I didn’t?” he said in surprise. “I thought it must be.”
She was too kind to laugh. “No.”
“But it was so awful. So ruthless. So destructive.”
Samantha said, “Those people weren’t so bad. As it happens, they were my parents.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said.
“And your grandparents weren’t so different. And they did learn better. That’s the important thing to remember. If you take away nothing else, remember that. If they hadn’t changed, none of us would be here now.”  p. 225

The very short third chapter ties things together (if, like me, you didn’t realise that Little John is actually the Juanita of the first autobiographical chapter):

Endings of stories come easy. It is the beginnings, when anything is still possible, that come hard.
Start now.  p. 226

This is a thought provoking and technically clever piece that I feel I should have perhaps scored more highly, but the story’s overdone pessimism (as with many similar works) is a flaw. This gloominess tells you more about the writer’s perceptions than reality.9

No Direction Home by Norman Spinrad (New Worlds Quarterly #2, 1971) is set in a future where drug use has become legal and widespread, and each of the story’s scenes show different characters and related situations. The first opens with two garage chemists discussing their new drug, and how the multinationals will eventually copy it; the next has a general and a scientist discussing the side effects of a drug given to Moonbase military staff to combat claustrophobia—violence and “faggotry”—and how a second drug will help supress the sexual desire caused by the first. The third section has two cardinals arguing about using a psychedelic host during communion, something that can give the recipient a direct experience of God (and thus threaten the Church’s role as an intermediary). And so on.
The final scene (spoiler) has a man suffering not from drugs, but from the ultimate bad trip, reality:

“You don’t understand, Kip,” he said. “This is reality, the way it really is, and man it’s horrible, just a great big ugly machine made up of lots of other machines, you’re a machine, I’m a machine, it’s all mechanical clockwork. We’re just lumps of dead matter run by machinery, kept alive by chemical and electric processes.”
Golden sunlight soaked through Kip’s skin and turned the core of his being into a miniature stellar phoenix. The wind, through random blades of grass, made love to the bare soles of his feet. What was all this machinery crap? What the hell was Jonesy gibbering about? Man, who would want to put himself in a bummer reality like that?
“You’re just on a bummer, Jonesy,” he said. “Take it easy. You’re not seeing the universe the way it really is, as if that meant anything. Reality is all in your head. You’re just freaking out behind nothing.”
“That’s it, that’s exactly it, I’m freaking out behind nothing. Like zero. Like cipher. Like the void. Nothing is where we’re really at.”
How could he explain it? That reality was really just a lot of empty vacuum that went on to infinity in space and time. The perfect nothingness had minor contaminations of dead matter here and there. A little of this matter had fallen together through a complex series of random accidents to contaminate the universal deadness with trace elements of life, protoplasmic slime, biochemical clockwork. Some of this clockwork was complicated enough to generate thought, consciousness. And that was all there ever was or would ever be anywhere in space and time. Clockwork mechanisms rapidly running down in the cold black void. Everything that wasn’t dead matter already would end up that way sooner or later.  p. 242-243

Despite the bleak passage above, this is a witty and interesting piece that crams a lot into its short length.
I also note that, even though I last read this decades ago, I could remember the opening narrative hook:

“But I once did succeed in stuffing it all back in Pandora’s box,” Richardson said, taking another hit. “You remember Pandora Deutchman, don’t you, Will? Everybody in the biochemistry department stuffed it all in Pandora’s box at one time or another. I seem to vaguely remember one party when you did it yourself.”  p. 227

Vaster Than Empires and More Slow by Ursula K. Le Guin (New Dimensions #1, 1971) opens with a data dump beginning that describes the time distortion felt by passengers in FTL flight through space. It then goes on to explain how the crews that have to suffer this are, essentially, crazy people:

No sane person who has experienced time slippage of even a few decades between near worlds would volunteer for a round trip of a half millennium. The Surveyors were escapists; misfits; nuts.  p. 247

This unlikely idea yields a volatile cocktail of characters, one of whom, Olsen, is an empath. As he is defenceless to the other crew members’ unshielded feelings and neuroses, he is a particularly hostile and prickly character, which sets up a negative feedback loop that accentuates the others’ problems.
Eventually they arrive at the planet they have been sent to investigate, and Olsen leaves to do field work at the request of the crew-co-ordinator. Morale improves. Then Porlock, one of the other crew members, reports seeing a large man-sized animal in the forest. More teams are sent out.
Later, Olsen doesn’t complete a routine check-in with base, so Tomiko, the crew co-ordinator, and another crew member go looking for him and find him lying in the forest—he has been attacked by something or someone, but is still alive.
When they get Olsen back to the ship, Tomiko eventually manages to break through his defensive shell when he recovers consciousness: he then tells her the forest is “afraid.” Morale and the general situation on the ship deteriorates, and it becomes clear that the consciousness in the forest is transmitting its fear to the humans—Olsen later explains the feedback effect with the forest is similar to what happens with him. As a result of this some of the crew either become catatonic or have other mental problems or breakdowns (Porlock, who is revealed as the one who attacked Olsen, eventually has to be restrained).
Tomiko then decides to move the ship to the other side of the planet to escape the forest’s transmissions, but the message that the humans are to be feared reaches their location several days later. At this point the team realise that all the vegetation on the planet (even the pollen) is one vast consciousness. Olsen explains to them what this feels like:

“Now you know why I always want to get out, get away from you,” Osden said with a kind of morbid geniality. “It isn’t pleasant, is it—the other’s fear? . . . If only it were an animal intelligence. I can get through to animals. I get along with cobras and tigers; superior intelligence gives one the advantage. I should have been used in a zoo, not on a human team. . . . If I could get through to the damned stupid potato! If it wasn’t so overwhelming. . . . I still pick up more than the fear, you know. And before it panicked it had a—there was a serenity. I couldn’t take it in, then, I didn’t realize how big it was. To know the whole daylight, after all, and the whole night. All the winds and the lulls together. The winter stars and the summer stars at the same time. To have roots, and no enemies. To be entire. Do you see? No invasion. No others. To be whole . . . .
He had never spoken before, Tomiko thought.
“You are defenseless against it, Olsen,” she said. “Your personality has changed already. You’re vulnerable to it. We may not all go mad, but you will, if we don’t leave.”
He hesitated, then he looked up at Tomiko, the first time he had ever met her eyes—a long, still look, clear as water.
“What’s sanity ever done for me?” he said, mocking. “But you have a point, Haito. You have something there.”
“We should get away,” Harfex muttered.
“If I gave in to it,” Osden mused, “could I communicate?”  p. 272-273

Eventually (spoiler) Olsen convinces them to take him to the forest so he can try to communicate with the consciousness and stop the fear. The crew realise he has succeeded when the transmissions stop, but Olsen does not return. They leave the planet without him.
The synopsis above only scratches the surface of this story as it is a particularly dense piece that covers a lot of territory: apart from a the standard SF furniture (the FTL drive, expeditions to alien planets), there is more emphasis on characterisation than normal, and that’s before you get to the exploration of the planetary vegetable consciousness and the literary overlay of Andrew Marvell’s poem To His Coy Mistress.10
If the story has a problem it is that there is maybe too much going on, and that not all the parts fit together smoothly. An example of this is the time distortion passage at the very beginning of the story: this has a connection with the way the vegetable consciousness experiences time, but it is a badly placed data dump that appears too early in the story.11 Still, an interesting piece, and one that would reward a repeated reading.

All the Last Wars at Once by George Alec Effinger (Universe #1, 1971) starts with two men, one white and one black, announcing on live news that there will be a thirty day race war. The story then cuts to a hitchhiker called Stevie who has a car stop for him. When the female occupant hands a Women’s Lib factsheet to him before he can get in, he realises that women and men are now fighting each other too, and he only just manages to shoot the driver before she tries to kill him. There are several similar sections that detail various other us vs. them conflicts: Catholics shooting up a Protestant church before all creeds end up fighting with each other, producers vs. artists, lefties vs. righties, young vs. old. etc.
As the thirty day period of hostility comes to an end Stevie goes to Times Square to celebrate. There he talks to a young woman circulating among the celebrating survivors who suggests that they should get on with The Last War . . . which turns out to be the one against yourself:

“What do you mean?” asked Stevie.
The woman touched Stevie’s chest. “There. Your guilt. Your frustration. You don’t really feel any better, do you? I mean, women don’t really hate men; they hate their own weaknesses. People don’t really hate other people for their religion or race. It’s just that seeing someone different than you makes you feel a little insecure in your own belief. What you hate is your own doubt, and you project the hatred onto the other man.”  p. 291

She then starts passing out bottles of kerosene to everyone and, as Stevie leaves he square, he sees “scores of little fires, like scattered piles of burning leaves in the backyards of his childhood.”
If you like blackly satirical work you will find this, as I did, an amusing piece—but the ending didn’t work for me. It certainly completes the “if this goes on” trajectory of the story, but I wasn’t convinced by the reasoning in the passage above.

When I read the SF magazines in the mid- and late-1970s, I’d occasionally come across a ‘Draco Tavern’ tale by Larry Niven, one of several series of stories by various writers that are set in bars.12 The Fourth Profession by Larry Niven (Quark #4, 1971) is also set in (or around) a bar, and starts with an FBI agent called William Morris visiting the home of Edward Harley Frazer, owner of the Long Spoon Bar. He wants to question Frazer as an alien ‘Monk’ was drinking there the previous night:

He came in an hour after opening time. He seemed to glide, with the hem of his robe just brushing the floor. By his gait he might have been moving on wheels. His shape was wrong, in a way that made your eyes want to twist around to straighten it out.
There is something queer about the garment that gives a Monk his name. The hood is open in front, as if eyes might hide within its shadow, and the front of the robe is open too. But the loose cloth hides more than it ought to. There is too much shadow.
Once I thought the robe parted as he walked toward me. But there seemed to be nothing inside.
In the Long Spoon was utter silence. Every eye was on the Monk as he took a stool at one end of the bar, and ordered.
He looked alien, and was. But he seemed supernatural. He used the oddest of drinking systems. I keep my house brands on three long shelves, more or less in order of type. The Monk moved down the top row of bottles, right to left, ordering a shot from each bottle. He took his liquor straight, at room temperature. He drank quietly, steadily, and with what seemed to be total concentration.
He spoke only to order.
He showed nothing of himself but one hand. That hand looked like a chicken’s foot, but bigger, with lumpy-looking, very flexible joints, and with five toes instead of four.
At closing time the Monk was four bottles from the end of the row. He paid me in one-dollar bills, and left, moving steadily, the hem of his robe just brushing the floor. I testify as an expert: He was sober. The alcohol had not affected him at all.  p. 295

As the story unfolds we find out that the alien returned on a second night and started giving Frazer RNA memory pills which gave him specific knowledge and skills. We learn fairly quickly that one of these is language—he can talk the Monk’s whispering language—and then we learn that he has an enhanced sense of position and balance (the result of a pill that gives him the knowledge needed to teleport, if humans were capable of such).
Much later on in the story Frazer tries to impress on Morris the importance of humanity building a laser cannon on the Moon so the aliens can relaunch their light sail ship on the next leg of their trip (if we don’t they’ll turn our sun into a nova and get their launch boost that way). During this conversation we find out what the third pill Frazer took was for:

“The lovely thing about the laser cannon is that if anything goes wrong with it, there’s a civilized world right there to fix it. You go sailing out to the stars with trade goods, but you leave your launching motor safely at home. Why is everybody looking at me funny?”
“Don’t take it wrong,” said Morris. “But how does a paunchy bartender come to know so much about flying an interstellar trading ship?”
[. . .]
“Oh,” I said. “Damn, I must be stupid today. Morris, that was the third pill.”
“Right,” said Morris, still nodding, still glassy-eyed. “That must have been the unusual, really unusual profession you wanted. Crewman on an interstellar liner. Jesus.”
And he should have sounded disgusted, but he sounded envious.
His elbows were on the table, his chin rested on his fists. It is a position that distorts the mouth, making one’s expression unreadable. But I didn’t like what I could read in Morris’s eyes.
There was nothing left of the square and honest man I had let into my apartment at noon. Morris was a patriot now, and an altruist, and a fanatic. He must have the stars for his nation and for all mankind. Nothing must stand in his way. Least of all, me.
Reading minds again, Frazer? Maybe being captain of an interstellar liner involves having to read the minds of the crew, to be able to put down a mutiny before some idiot can take a heat point to the mpff glip habbabub, or however a Monk would say it; it has something to do with straining ketones out of the breathing-air.
My urge to acrobatics had probably come out of the same pill. Free fall training. There was a lot in that pill.
This was the profession I should have hidden. Not the Palace Torturer, who was useless to a government grown too subtle to need such techniques; but the captain of an interstellar liner, a prize too valuable to men who have not yet reached beyond the Moon.
And I had been the last to know it. Too late, Frazer.
“Captain,” I said. “Not crew.”
“Pity. A crewman would know more about how to put a ship together. Frazer, how big a crew are you equipped to rule?”
“Eight and five.”
“Thirteen?  p. 316

There then follows a conversation about the Monk’s numbering system.
This passage is a good example of the multiple threads running through the story, its general loopiness, and that, at times, it feels like a widescreen galactic space opera squeezed into a barroom.
The second half (spoiler) has Frazer’s barmaid Louise, who has also taken a pill, falling in love with him (or so it seems). As this welcome complication develops, another Monk turns up and forces Frazer to take two pills to remove his illegally-given knowledge.
At this point what had been a very good and highly entertaining story suffers from a suspension of disbelief problem: we find that the “language” pill that Frazer took was actually a “prophet” pill which, apart from giving him the ability to communicate with everyone (he realises he has been listening to and understanding the Spanish-speaking cleaners as well as the Monk) it also gives him the ability to perform miracles—such as disappearing the two pills that would undo his powers. The problem with this development, apart from the fact that it seems like magic, is that it also raises the question of why an alien race with abilities like these would bother roaming the galaxy as traders.
Ignore the ending, and read it for the rest of the story.

Terry Carr also contributes a short Introduction which briefly covers the New Wave controversies (which had by this time more or less died down) and makes a number of interesting observations:

In the past half-dozen years, for instance, we’ve seen an influx of fine new writers who brought with them the so-called “new wave” styles of writing: experimental prose, hard-edged realism, shiftings of reality, or sometimes straightforwardly angry “downbeat” stories. The readers, critics, fans and other writers in the field were either delighted or appalled by such writing, and authors like Thomas M. Disch and Norman Spinrad became centers of rather fierce controversy.
Reading the manifestos and denunciations produced during this internecine battle, and hearing the arguments that so often sprang up at gatherings of science fiction people, a person could easily have come away with the impression that the sf field was falling apart, losing coherence and direction. But through it all I remembered a delightful description that I read years ago of the audience reaction to the premiere performance of Stravinski’s Rite of Spring: There were boos and catcalls; there were cheers and clapping; and there was, before long, a full-scale riot as the members of the audience fought over their differing reactions to the music. “That is what I call a strong aesthetic response,” said the narrator.  p. vii

By now the “new wave” as such has come and gone; those stories that could stand on their own merits have done so, and those writers whose work stood up to the glare of controversy have become respected “regulars” within the field. And already another generation of writers is upon us, people who read the best experimental sf and the best of all other kinds, and who have gone on to create stories that range the entire spectrum of science fiction’s possibilities. Ursula K. Le Guin is such a writer; so is Alexei Panshin; and so is at least one man who was writing science fiction for ten years before the “new wave” hit the field: Robert Silverberg.
These writers, and many others, realize a truth basic to all art, not just the art of science fiction writing. Innovations are positive to the extent that they open doors, and an avant garde which seeks to destroy rather than build will only destroy itself all the faster. And when a “wave” has passed, what it leaves behind will be its positive contributions, so it behooves us to become literary beachcombers.  p. viii

He ends with this:

The specific technique isn’t important. It may be beautiful romantic imagery, such as in Poul Anderson’s “The Queen of Air and Darkness”; it may involve detailed descriptions of the exploration of alien worlds, as in Arthur Clarke’s “A Meeting With Medusa”; it may be a vivid evocation of internal experience, such as Robert Silverberg’s “In Entropy’s Jaws,” or satire, like George Alec Effinger’s “All the Last Wars At Once,” or any of an endless variety of approaches to fictional creation. What matters is the pleasure we experience in reading these stories, and when the whole range of literary technique is used to evoke the wonder, scope and beauty of the universe—yes, and its dangers too—then we have a genre that cannot fail to be exciting.  p. x

This ‘Best of the Year’ anthology is an assured solo debut.13 Carr’s choices seem to split pretty evenly between crowd pleasers (the Anderson, Clarke and Niven), experimental and literary work (Silverberg, Panshin, Le Guin), and humour and satire (Farmer, Spinrad, Effinger).
A reader-friendly combination, and one drawn, atypically, mostly from original anthologies rather than genre magazines (seven of the eleven stories).  ●

_____________________

1. Avram Davidson (F&SF, March 1973) notes that Wollheim and Carr are now doing their own anthologies and that both retain some of the flavour of their previous collaboration. This is what he adds about the Carr volume (he previously notes in the Wollheim review that the Niven story “contains material for two effective stories”):

Now, onward, with Carr. All you need to know about Occam’s Scalpel is that it is by Theodore Sturgeon . . . I’ll add that the wind-up packs not one but three successive punches. In The Queen of Air and Darkness Poul Anderson draws on everything from physics to runic rhyme . . . with throwaway lines like, “One light year is not much as galactic distances go. You could walk it in about 270 million years.” Not with my feet. (I do wish Poul would take the verb fleer and give it back to the Skraelings.) And Robert Silverberg’s In Entropy’s Jaws is a fine novelette like a recurrently in-and-out view of a Byzantine mosaic of the ouroboros serpent.
The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World of Philip Jose Farmer is daft, deft, impeccably logical, with an O. Henryesque ending, too. Reading a story by Arthur C. Clarke is like seeing a Chesley Bonestell painting as a color film; subtitle A Meeting With Medusa as See Jupiter and Live. Quite a different pattern of molecules, Lloyd Biggle, Jr.’s The Frayed String on the Stretched Forefinger of Time, a wry, clever suspense thriller.
How Can We Sink When We Can Fly? is a two-part harmony by Alexei Panshin which, I am afraid, was ahead of its time. Longlong ago a friend told me, “If something’s bothering you, drink whiskey,” and I have found this advice good. Nowadays people who are the age we were then say, “Even if something isn’t bothering you, take dope.” Can I resist the antique tale of the Good Woman who asked T.S. Elliot, this was about 1930, see, “Mr. Eliot, what gives you the strength to write such beautiful poetry?” His answer? “Gin and drugs, madame; gin and drugs.” The point? Norman Spinrad’s No Direction Home. The Theme of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Vaster Than Empires and More Slow is the familiar one of the planetary probe team, but first she tells us that her people are all insane…and then she proves it . . . It’s a kick in the head, but by far even kickier is All The Last Wars At Once, by George Alec Effinger. Jesus Christ. Wow.  p. 37

P. Schuyler Miller (Analog, May 1973) reviews all five (!) of the Best of the Year collections in one combined review. Here are some extracts that are relevant to this volume:

Only one story was selected by three of the six editors: Theodore Sturgeon’s “Occam’s Scalpel.” It’s a good enough story, but need not even be science fiction except for the old-fashioned “snapper” ending (are there really aliens among us?). I’m afraid this is a “Thank God Sturgeon’s back!” choice.
Seven other stories are in two of the five books, and three of these seven authors are tapped for other stories, as are four others represented by two or more different stories. The seven (again alphabetically) begin with Poul Anderson’s “A Little Knowledge,” one of four from Analog (I prefer his “Queen of Air and Darkness,” which won both a Hugo and a Nebula and is in Terry Carr’s book). B. Alan Burhoe’s “Omithanthropus” is a fine story of winged men living symbiotically with balloon-like creatures. No quarrel—nor have I one with Arthur C. Clarke’s Playboy dazzler, “A Meeting with Medusa,” which placed second in the Hugo voting. His “Transit of Earth” is in a third book.
Philip Jose Farmer has well earned his place with “The Sliced-Crosswise -Only-on-Tuesday World,” which extends the parallel worlds concept to parallel lives as a solution to the population problem. I don’t see why it is in only two books. [. . .] Larry Niven’s “The Fourth Profession”—which profession did the alien’s knowledge pills teach our hero?—placed twice, but I much prefer his “Inconstant Moon,” a lovely “hard SF” story about the end of the world, which Pohl also liked. Niven has a fourth story, “Rammer,” in del Rey’s book.
Finally, Norman Spinrad’s “No Direction Home” is a chilling story of two chemists designing drugs that will custom-tailor life styles. Relevant SF? Certainly. New wave? I suppose so. More of the editors should have picked it.
I’ve listed two of my own druthers in passing: stories that are in one of the five books, and should be in more. Here are some more:
[. . .]
Ursula Le Guin’s “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,” about a world-girdling vegetable being. It was runner-up in the Hugo voting.
[. . .]
Which do I recommend? All of them—but I find that I starred more outstanding stories in Terry Carr’s collection, with Harrison/Aldiss next, then Wollheim, then Lester del Rey, and Pohl last. Since Donald Wollheim left Ace Books to form his own paperback company, his and Terry Carr’s anthologies are a spinoff for the book they used to do together, and Pohl was their replacement. Harrison and Aldiss have been picking winners for five years, and this is del Rey’s first “best” collection.
It bothers me that there are a dozen or so other excellent stories—stories I marked for comment—that I haven’t even mentioned. Make that “dozens”: these editors choose well.  p. 169-171

2. There is nothing from Analog, Amazing, Fantastic, Galaxy, Worlds of Fantasy or Worlds of Tomorrow magazines in this collection (among others).
In the poll that we did after our group read, these were the results (three votes per person max.): Clarke (9), Sturgeon (5), Le Guin (5), Silverberg (4), Spinrad (4), Farmer (3), Niven (2), Anderson (2), Biggle Jr. (1), Panshin (0), Effinger (0).

3. Sturgeon’s piece is one of a number of eco-fiction stories that appeared during this period. I remember reading a related anthology at the time, Thomas M. Disch’s The Ruins of Earth.

4. Occam’s razor, “the simplest explanation is most likely the right one,” at Wikipedia.

5. For some reason or another I had it in my head that Robert Silverberg started writing more literary and experimental work in the mid to late 1960s, but I see from the author’s introduction to In Entropy’s Jaws (in the collection Something is Loose) that it was later:

This is a story that I began in January, 1970 and finished, after taking a little break for a winter holiday in a warmer place than the one in which I lived, early in March of that year. It was written at a time when I was still reasonably comfortable with the conventions of science fiction and had not yet entered into the period of literary and personal chaos that would complicate my life from 1973 or so through the early 1980s. And so I blithely tackled this long, complex, challenging story, which moves among changing levels of ureality and shifting zones of time, with the sort of confidence that I would later lose and be a long time regaining. I don’t recall much about the genesis of “In Entropy’s Jaws,” only that I wrote it for the second issue of Bob Hoskins’ paperback anthology, Infinity. Hoskins, a long-time science-fiction figure whom I had known glancingly for many years, paid me well and gave me a free hand artistically, a combination that–not too surprisingly–I found irresistible, and so I did a story for each of the five issues of his anthology that appeared between 1970 and 1973. Some of my best work, too.

6. The illustrations for Clarke’s story in Playboy magazine:

The official Playboy archive is here.

7. When we did this story as a group read the speculation was that Rob was Ted White and Leigh was Lee Hoffman.

8. The Whole Earth Catalog for 1968 can be viewed at the Internet Archive.

9. Is humanity making progress? That’s what the data says: from around 04:30 here. All of Steven Pinker’s lecture is worth watching, and I learned lots (including the fact that the average person spends fifteen hours a week doing housework—which is presumably why I live in a pig sty).

10. Andrew Marvell’s poem To His Coy Mistress. Le Guin’s story title comes from the couplet “My vegetable love should grow, Vaster than empires and more slow”. The story echoes the elongated sense of time portrayed in the poem.

11. Jim Harris has a blog piece, What Makes a Great SF Story?, that shows how the beginning of Le Guin’s Vaster Than Empires was revised for book publication.

12. Other ‘Bar SF’ series include Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Tales From the White Hart’ and Spider Robinson’s ‘Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon’. The Clarke, being British, is probably ‘Pub SF’ rather than ‘Bar SF’.

13. If you want a better idea of how this book measures up against what I might pick for a 1971 ‘Year’s Best’, or learn what other anthologists chose for their books, look at the table below (this is the same one which will appear at the end of the review of the Wollheim, Pohl, del Rey, and Harrison & Aldiss volumes). It will be updated as and when I find stories I like, or citation sources I feel should be included (for more on the latter see below).

The first to fourth column give the story titles, authors, Lengths, and Place of publication (see below the table for abbreviation legend).
The ‘T’ column lists Terry Carr’s choices with an ‘x’, and his recommendation list with an ‘o’.
The ‘D’ column lists Lester Del Rey’s choices with an ‘x’.
The ‘W’ column lists Donald Wollheim’s choices with an ‘x’.
The ‘P’ column lists Frederik Pohl’s choices with an ‘x’.
The ‘A’ column lists HArry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss’s choices with an ‘x’.
The ‘S’ column shows my (SF Magazine’s) current choices an ‘x’ (historical choices are an ‘o’). A dash means read but passed over (I only select stories better than ∗∗∗+ and above, and not all of them). Blank means unread.
The ‘C’ column shows how many of the anthologies and/or polls used in the Classics of Science Fiction list included the story in their collections or lists (note that CoSF is SF only and skews against fantasy), minus the anthology or award citations which have their own column (Carr, Dozois, Wollheim, Hugo, Nebula, etc.).
The ‘O’ column shows the number of inclusions in Other major anthologies or recommendation lists not on the CoSF (Classics of SF) list. These are selected by me (usually to include fantasy retrospectives or awards that CoSF doesn’t include) but I may not yet have done this for some/all of the stories.*
The ‘H’ column shows the story’s 1977 Hugo award placing (F for finalist, W for winner).
The ‘N’ column shows the story’s 1977 Nebula award placing (F for finalist, W for winner).
The ‘U’ column shows stories that were one of the 1977 LocUs Poll’s top ten short stories, novelettes, or novellas.
The ‘T’ column shows the TOTal points that each story gets (they get a point for being in each column and for each of the CoSF and other anthology citations).

The titles, names, lengths, publications, and overall score columns are sortable.

A good way to sample 1971’s best short fiction may be to start at the top of the table and work down until you get to the last of the 2-point stories. Bear in mind this compilation is statistically invalid, but it will give you something to aim at. Enjoy.

Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories 1971

na=novella, nv=novelet, ss=short story

ABY, Abyss; AMZ, Amazing Stories; ANA, Analog; ATM, All The Myriad Ways; BET, Being There; CAN, Cancerqueen and Other Stories; CLA, Clarion; CYF, Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?; DAG, De achtjaarlijkse god; ECO, Eco-Fiction; FOU, Four Futures; FSF, Fantasy and Science Fiction; GAL, Galaxy; IN4, Infinity #4; N19, New Writings in SF #19; ND1, New Dimensions #1; NW1, New Worlds Quarterly #1; NW2, New Worlds Quarterly #2; NYT, New York Times; OR8, Orbit #8; OR9, Orbit #9; PLA, Playboy; PRO, Protostars; QU4, Quark #4; TNL, The National Lampoon; TMW, The Many Worlds of Science Fiction; TNY, The New Yorker; UN1, Universe #1; WOI, Worlds of If.

* The ‘O’ (Other) recommendations column will be added as and when. ●

rssrss

The 2020 Hugo Award Novelette Finalists

Summary: The 2020 Hugo Award novelettes are another mixed bag, but are better than the short story finalists. There is one worthy finalist from Ted Chiang, a pretty good fantasy from Siobhan Carroll, and a solid enough story from Caroline M. Yoachim. The remaining three stories have their moments, but don’t entirely work.

_____________________

Editors, John Joseph Adams, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas (x2), Blake Crouch, Ellen Datlow, unknown.

Fiction:
The Archronology of Love • novelette by Caroline M. Yoachim ∗∗∗
Away With the Wolves • novelette by Sarah Gailey
The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye • novelette by Sarah Pinsker
Emergency Skin • novelette by N.K. Jemisin
For He Can Creep • novelette by Siobhan Carroll +
Omphalos • novelette by Ted Chiang

Non-fiction:
Artwork • Reiko Murakami, Julie Dillon (x2), Will Staehle, Red Nose Studio, Betty Lew

_____________________

When I reviewed the finalists in the short story category last month I found that they were mostly poor quality. The novelettes are better but are still a mixed bag. I note that (a) there is only one man among the finalists (the same as the short story category) (b) these are short novelettes, mostly around the 8,000-10,000 word mark (although the Chiang stretches to 11,000).

The first of the novelette finalists is The Archronology of Love by Caroline M. Yoachim (Lightspeed April 2019), which opens with the narrator, Saki Jones, viewing New Mars from the viewport window of an interstellar spaceship. The colony there has collapsed, and she has been sent there to investigate—but the situation is complicated by the fact that her partner (“lifelove”) M. J. died there along with everyone else. However, she hopes to see him again by viewing “The Chronicle,” a time stream of previous events.
In the next section, a departmental meeting, we learn more about the temporal projector that enables viewing of the past and, after some debate, the team agree that they will start at the xenobiology warehouse, which stores the recently recovered remains of alien life.
When Saki and Hyun-sik (one of her assistants and also her son’s boyfriend) travel to the warehouse’s past we see that, while the temporal projector provides a form of time-travel, it only gives the users a non-physical presence in the past (they float in zero gee and cannot touch anything). Their movements also leave trails of white—visual indications of permanently destroyed timestream data.
During the visit Saki notices that the ovoid alien artefacts appear different to the descriptions in M. J.’s messages to her, and then she sees another time-traveller above them:

She studied the ceiling of the warehouse. A maintenance walkway wrapped around the building, a platform of silvery mesh suspended from the lighter silver metal of the ceiling. The walkway was higher than the two-story ceiling of the containment cylinder, outside of their priority area. On the walkway, near one of the bright ceiling lights, something looked odd. “I don’t think we were the first ones here.”
Hyun-sik followed her gaze. “Displacement cloud?”
“There, by the lights.” Saki studied the shape on the walkway. It was hard to tell at this distance, but the displacement cloud was roughly the right size to be human. “Unfortunately we have no way to get up there for a closer look.”
“I can reprogram a few of the bees—”
“Yes.” It was not ideal. Drones were good at recording physical objects, but had difficulty picking up the outlines of distortion clouds and other anomalies. Moving through the Chronicle was difficult, though not impossible. It was similar to free fall in open space. Things you brought with you were solid, but everything else was basically a projection.
[. . .]
There was nothing else that merited a more thorough investigation, so they released the recording drones, a flying army of bee-sized cameras that recorded every object from multiple angles. Seventeen drones flew to the ceiling and recorded the region of the walkway that had the distortion. Saki hoped the recording would be detailed enough to be useful. The disruption to the Chronicle was like ripples in a pond, spreading from the present into the past and future record, tiny trails of white blurring together into a jumbled cloud.

The change in the alien artefacts and the mysterious visitor are the mysteries around which the rest of the story revolves.
After (spoiler) a visit to the hospital site (where there are no bodies or any other organic material), and one to an excavation site (where they see what the artefacts initially looked like), the ship’s captain sends non-organic probes down to the surface (where they discover alien nanites). All the threads are drawn together when Saki travels into the future after finding temporal co-ordinates in an old video message. There she meets M. J., and learns that all the colonists were incorporated into the artefacts by the aliens (their way of “understanding” other species).
If you concentrate on the love story thread in this novelette, it isn’t a bad piece, but there is too much going on here. The temporal projector and its implications (especially when you can view the future as well as the past) is a story in itself and, when you add a planetary colonization/first contact story as well, there is too much going on (and that’s before you shoe-horn in the family soap opera of Saki’s assistant’s relationship with her son).
This isn’t bad but it is a bit of a mixed bag, and not something I’d expect to see as a Hugo finalist.

Away With the Wolves by Sarah Gailey (Uncanny, September-October 2019) starts with Suss, its disabled female narrator, waking up in a potato patch after werewolfing for several days:

I wish I could just turn back, right now, right away. I wish I could spend all my time as a wolf. But my mother always told me that I mustn’t indulge myself too often. She taught me that escaping into my other self is lazy. It’s selfish, she said, and there’s always a price to pay for selfishness. There’s no such thing as free relief. Every transformation means a day I get to wake up in a body that doesn’t hurt, but the longer I spend Away, the guiltier I feel when I return.
It was a week, this time. A whole week without pain.  p. 2

When Suss returns home she learns of the damage she has done to the village during this particular werewolf episode, and makes amends with the neighbours. Later, she makes a special trip with her friend Yana to Nan Gideon, who claims her goat was killed. Suss can’t remember doing this but agrees to work off the debt.
By the end of the day, Suss is worn out and despondent. When she sleeps she dreams of being a wolf and hears the howl of another—whereupon she wakes up and realises that the howls are real.
Up until this point the story is a pretty good one—the idea of a disabled person escaping their condition by becoming a werewolf is an intriguing idea—but we then plough into three pages of Suss soul-searching about changing her life before (spoiler) she does just that. The remainder of the story has her frequenting the village seemingly accepted by everyone before finally meeting the other (female) wolf.
There is no complication in this story other than someone finally deciding to get out of their own way, which makes the build up pointless and the ending anti-climactic. Pity.

The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye by Sarah Pinsker (Uncanny, July-August 2019) starts with a mystery writer called Zanna and her assistant Shar turning up at a rural cabin that has dead wasps, mice, a leak in the roof, and no mobile phone signal. Unperturbed, Zanna settles in for the night at her writing retreat while her assistant Shar leaves for her accommodation nearby.
The next morning Zanna’s breakfast is interrupted by a blown fuse, which she attempts to fix:

[Zanna] checked all the closets and cabinets for a breaker box, but couldn’t find one, which meant it was outside. Two shoes and a jacket later, she stood behind the cabin, swearing to herself. Crawlspace. She didn’t quite remember what had freaked her out in a crawlspace when she was a kid, but she still hated them. Anything might be in there.
A baseball bat stood propped against the wall beside the tiny door. It had “Snake Stick” written on it in blue Sharpie. Whoever had labelled it had also drawn a crude cartoon demonstrating its utility. Swing them away, don’t kill them. No bloodstains on the bat.
She could wait for Shar, but she’d lose hours, and her head was already complaining about the lack of caffeine. Better to do it herself. The half-sized door creaked when she squeezed the latch and swung it open. She waved the Snake Stick in front of her to clear cobwebs and wake any snakes snoozing inside. When nothing moved, she dug in her jacket pocket and pulled out her phone. It was useless for calls out here, but the flashlight still came in handy. She swept it around the space, which looked mostly empty. No use delaying.
She crouched and stepped in. The ceiling was a little higher than she expected, the floor a little lower; she could stand if she stooped. Something crunched like paper under her foot, and she swung the light down to find a snakeskin, at least three feet long. She shuddered.  p. 7

There prove to be no snakes in the crawlspace, and no replacement fuse wire either, so Zanna takes a trip down the mountain to see the owner . . . who (spoiler) she finds dead beside his car. As she can just get a mobile signal at the owner’s house she calls the police and then Shar. The latter soon turns up, followed by the police. When one of the cops interviews Zanna, the mystery writer in her points out one or two discrepancies in the crime scene that she thinks he hasn’t noticed (indications of a previous fall in the gravel, odd animal tracks on the car bonnet, etc.). Eventually, both the women go back to the cabin—and then (spoiler) Shar tells Zanna something about the dead man that she couldn’t possibly know.
Up until Shar’s revelation, this is an immersive story with convincing characters and a good sense of place—but it then rapidly destroys any suspension of disbelief with a data-dump ending that has Shar explain that the man was killed by a weird lizard that lives inside Zanna. We then find out that the lizard is unkillable, and that Shar has, since she discovered the problem, attempted to ensure minimal loss of life among those it attacks (one in five people that encounter the lizard die). Shar also ensures that no eggs are left in the bodies of the dead to prevent the lizard reproducing. Both of the women conclude this loss of life is better than Zanna ending up incarcerated in some scientific institution.
The first half of this is pretty good but the ending just doesn’t work for a variety of reasons—apart from the unconvincing idea (an unkillable lizard the writer periodically vomits out), it is sprung on the reader too quickly.

Emergency Skin N.K. Jemisin (Emergency Skin, 2019) is one of six stories in Amazon’s recently published ‘Forward’ collection,2 and opens with the protagonist (a soldier, I guess) being briefed about a mission that will take him from his colony planet to Earth (Tellus) to obtain vital biomaterial. We also learn that the Earth is a dead world, and that a “collective consciousness” will be implanted in his mind:

To ensure success, and your mental health during extended isolation, we have equipped you with ourselves—a dynamic-matrix consensus intelligence encapsulating the ideals and blessed rationality of our Founders. We are implanted in your mind and will travel with you everywhere. We are your companion, and your conscience. We will provide essential data about the planet as a survival aid. Via your composite, we can administer critical first aid as required. And should you suffer a composite breach or similar emergency, we are programmed to authorize adaptive action.
[Reference request denied.] You don’t need to know about that yet. Please focus, and limit your curiosity. All that matters is the mission.
You can’t fail. It’s too important. But rest assured: you have the best of us inside you, enveloping you, keeping you safe and true. You are not alone. You will prevail.

The next part of the story plays out as a mordant Robert Sheckley-like farce: the soldier and his consciousness arrive back on Earth and find that it is not as they expect (all the problems that were left behind by the Founding Fathers of the colony have been fixed and the planet is now a paradise supporting billions of people); the soldier is distracted by the natural beauty in the forest they arrive in; the consciousness is disgusted by the fact that the inhabitants seem to be of all colours and ages and apparently do not practise eugenics in their breeding programs. Then, when the consciousness suggests that they change the soldier’s “composite” skin covering so he can blend in with the populace and find the biomaterial they require, the soldier decides instead to take a hostage to use as ransom.
This plan doesn’t last long, and the story cuts to the soldier recovering consciousness to find that Earth security tasered him. This information comes from a pleasant woman who speaks to him via a translator attached to his face plate and who also gives him the biomaterial he wants. Then she says he is free to go, and mentions in passing that he is not the first visitor from his planet. She finishes by impressing on him that he should’t take any more hostages.
At this point the story pivots, and it becomes clear (there are earlier hints) that the soldier’s colony planet is an all-male, white, authoritarian society founded by billionaires who had fled Earth and its impending chaos centuries earlier.
The rest of the tale has the soldier generate an “emergency skin” that will make him look like the humans in the vicinity (i.e. black), and he goes native (at which point the consciousness switches off in disgust). He then meets an older man who takes care of him, and who later turns out to be an ex-soldier sent to Earth from the colony. He tells the soldier about Earth’s society, and the history of both it and the colony world. This provides the biggest (albeit unintentional) laugh in the story:

“I took you to the museum on a whim. To enjoy the irony. For all these centuries, the Founders told us that the Earth died because of greed. That was true, but they lied about whose greed was to blame. Too many mouths to feed, they said, too many ‘useless’ people . . . but we had more than enough food and housing for everyone. And the people they declared useless had plenty to offer—just not anything they cared about. The idea of doing something without immediate benefit, something that might only pay off in ten, twenty, or a hundred years, something that might benefit people they disliked, was anathema to the Founders. Even though that was precisely the kind of thinking that the world needed to survive.”
We did what was rational. We have always been more rational than you people.
“What the Leaving proved was that the Earth could sustain billions, if we simply shared resources and responsibilities in a sensible way. What it couldn’t sustain was a handful of hateful, self-important parasites, preying upon and paralyzing everyone else. As soon as those people left, the paralysis ended.”

The soldier then suggests that, rather than staying on Earth, he should go back and start a revolution on his own planet, and the story finishes with the old man showing him how to get rid of the implanted consciousness.
The politics of this story—“Earth will be a Paradise if we get rid of all the Rich White Guys!!!”—provide a simplistic view of the world that shows little if any grasp of history, never mind any idea of how people, societies, or the world actually works.
Apart from this starry-eyed nonsense there is also a considerable amount of othering going on here: the colony’s wealthy founders and successors are explicitly (a) white (b) rich and (c) misogynists (the only “females” on the colony planet are “pleasurer” robots). If you wrote a story where any other group was portrayed and scapegoated in this way there would be uproar, but it seems that rich white men are fair game nowadays—as if they are a single homogeneous group automatically worthy of everyone’s loathing, and not individuals. I note that this is not the first of this type of story I’ve read recently.

For He Can Creep by Siobhan Carroll (Tor.com, July 10th 2019) is a story I read when it came out last year, an entertaining light fantasy involving an asylum tomcat called Joffrey, an insane poet, and the devil. You can get a good idea of the general tone from the opening:

Flash and fire! Bristle and spit! The great Jeoffry ascends the madhouse stairs, his orange fur on end, his yellow eyes narrowed!
On the third floor the imps cease their gamboling. Is this the time they stay and fight? One imp, bolder than the others, flattens himself against the flagstones. He swells himself with nightmares, growing huge. His teeth shine like the sword of an executioner, and his eyes are the colors of spilled whale oil before a match is struck. In their cells, the filthy inmates shrink away from his immensity, wailing.
But Jeoffry does not shrink. He rushes up the last few stairs like the Deluge of God, and his claws are sharp! The imps run screaming, flitting into folds of space only angels and devils can penetrate.
[. . .]
The whole asylum is his, and let no demon forget it! For he is the Cat Jeoffry, and no demon can stand against him.

Jeoffrey then visits the poet, who is trying to write a poem for God (when he is not being pestered by his publishers to write something else).
That evening the devil comes to the asylum to speak to the cat—he wants Joffrey to stand aside so he can visit the poet and force him to write a particular poem. If the devil is successful in this it will change the future of the universe and put it under his control. The cat accepts a bribe of various treats.
The next day Jeoffrey is in a dreadful state—the treats were just dead leaves which he has been vomiting up—and the tomcat is in no state to protect the poet when the devil arrives. On a subsequent visit by the devil to check the poet’s progress, Jeoffrey fights him but is unsuccessful, and only survives due to the poet’s intercession.
The final part of the story has Jeoffrey visit three of the asylum’s other cats to help him deal with the devil on his next visit. One of these is an air-headed kitten called Nighthunter Moppet, whose personality changes markedly when they start discussing how the defeat the devil:

<This is the wrong strategy,> says the Nighthunter Moppet, and her voice has the ring of a blade unsheathed.
All kittenness has fallen away from Moppet. What sits before the milk bowl is the ruthless killer of the courtyard, the assassin whose title nighthunter is whispered in terror among the mice and birds of Bethnal Green. It is rumored that the Moppet’s great-grandmother was a demon of the lower realms, which might perhaps explain the peculiar keenness of her green-glass eyes, and her talent for death-dealing. Indeed, as Jeoffry watches, the Moppet’s tiny shadow seems to grow and split into seven pieces, each of which is shaped like a monstrous cat with seven tails. The shadow cats’ tails lash and lash as the Nighthunter Moppet broods on Satan.
<It is true that as cats we are descended from the Angel Tiger, who killed the Ichneumon-rat of Egypt,> says the Moppet. Her shadows twist into the shapes of rats and angels as she speaks. <We are warriors of God, and as such, we can blood Satan. But we cannot kill him, for he has another fate decreed.>

The story concludes when the devil visits the next night to pick up the finished poem.
This is an enjoyable tale, but the plotting at the end is a little on the weak side (spoiler: while the three cats attack the devil, Jeoffrey sneaks past and eats the poem). One more minor criticism: what is with the < > symbols to delineate the cats’ speech? They are disconcerting, and don’t suit the style of the tale.

Omphalos by Ted Chiang (Exhalation, 2019) opens with a diary entry from an unnamed female archaeologist that quickly places us in an entirely different universe. Apart from the fact that the narrator begins her entry (and all the others in the story bar one) with an exhortation to God, we soon pick up other salient details from a lecture she gives. This includes a passage where she shows how wood rings can be used to date remains:

But even that thrill can’t compare to that inspired by examining samples of wood a few centuries older. Because in those tree trunks, there’s a point at which the growth rings stop. Counting back from the present, the oldest growth ring was formed eight thousand nine hundred and twelve years ago. There are no growth rings before that, I told them, because that is the year you created the world, Lord. In the center of every tree of that era is a circle of perfectly clear and homogeneous wood, and the diameter of that ringless area indicates the size of the tree at the moment of creation. Those are primordial trees, created directly by your hand rather than grown from seedlings.  p. 240

We also learn that in this world there are also the remains of humans who have no navels and, later on, she examines a deer bone belonging to her cousin Rosemary which has no epiphyseal line (“the remnant of the growth plate where new cartilage is added as a juvenile’s bones lengthen into an adult’s. The femur had never been shorter than it was now”).
During this conversation Rosemary tells the narrator she bought the bone from the travelling archaeological exhibition at the local church. The narrator also learns that primordial abalone shells are for sale, which arouses her curiosity as there should not be any in public ownership. She decides to investigate, and visits the museum, first viewing the exhibition (there is a scene where she looks at the display of navel-less mummies). Afterwards she quizzes the gift shop salesman, who tells her who sold them the shells.
The narrator then sends an easily identifiable dummy package to the post office box address in San Francisco, and travels there to stake it out. When the owner of the Post Office box turns up to collect the package she sees that it isn’t the “Martin Webster” she had been expecting but a young woman. When challenged the woman identifies herself as the daughter of the museum director who controls the only known collection of the shells, and that she been selling them cheaply to help reinforce people’s faith. She adds that there is a scientific paper due to be published that will challenge everyone’s beliefs.
The final scenes (spoiler) have the narrator visit the young woman’s parents. During an uncomfortable conversation she finds out that the scientific paper reveals that another planet, not Earth, is at the centre of the universe. Further speculation suggests that this newly discovered planet is the reason for God’s creation, and that Earth is probably just a sideshow with no special significance.
The narrator then goes through a crisis of faith and contemplates the point of her existence before having an epiphany:

I’ve devoted my life to studying the wondrous mechanism that is the universe, and doing so has given me a sense of fulfllment. I’ve always assumed that this meant that I was acting in accordance with your will, Lord, and your reason for making me. But if it’s in fact true that you have no purpose in mind for me, then that sense of fulfllment has arisen solely from within myself. What that demonstrates to me is that we as humans are capable of creating meaning for our own lives.  p. 269

This is a polished story which is intellectually and philosophically involving, and which also has a reasonably profound ending. Pretty good stuff, and way above the level of anything else here.

In conclusion we have one very good story from Ted Chiang, a superior piece of light entertainment (but not award winning good) from Siobahn Carroll, a good but flawed story from Caroline Yoachim, and three stories that just don’t work from the two Sarahs (which are good in part), and Jesimin (about which I’ll say no more). So—another lacklustre set of 2020 Hugo Award finalists, but at least they are not as bad as the short stories.  ●

_____________________

1. Here are the links to the texts of four of the six stories (you can find links to other Hugo work at File770):

The Archronology of Love • novelette by Caroline M. Yoachim
Away With the Wolves • novelette by Sarah Gailey
The Blur in the Corner of Your Eye • novelette by Sarah Pinsker
For He Can Creep • novelette by Siobhan Carroll

The other two are available at Amazon and other booksellers:

Emergency Skin • novelette by N.K. Jemisin (free to Amazon Prime subscribers)
Omphalos • novelette by Ted Chiang

All these stories are in the Hugo Award Voter Pack.

2. How ironic that Jesimin’s Emergency Skin is published by Amazon, founded and run by the world’s richest man. Ker-ching!
The rest of the Amazon Forward collection of original fiction includes:

Ark by Veronica Roth
Summer Frost by Blake Crouch
You Have Arrived at Your Destination by Amor Towles
The Last Conversation by Paul Tremblay
Randomize by Andy Weir  ●

rssrss

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame volume 1, 1970, edited by Robert Silverberg, part two

Summary: The Science Fiction Hall of Fame was originally a single book: this is the better second half of the two volume reprint, and contains an excellent collection of stories, with outstanding work from Daniel Keyes, Cordwainer Smith, Cyril M. Kornbluth, Fritz Leiber, James Blish, Damon Knight and Roger Zelazny.
[ISFDB link]

Other reviews:1
Charlie Brown, Locus, #55 June 3, 1970
Lester del Rey, If, September-October 1970
Algis Budrys, Galaxy, December 1970
P. Schuyler Miller, Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, March 1971
George Turner, SF Commentary, #23
Tom Easton, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, September 2003
Colin Harvey, Strange Horizons, 15 March 2004
Bud Webster, Anthopology 101: Reflections, Inspections and Dissections of SF Anthologies, (2010)
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Robert Silverberg

Fiction:
That Only a Mother • short story by Judith Merril ∗∗∗
Scanners Live in Vain • novelette by Cordwainer Smith +
Mars Is Heaven! • short story by Ray Bradbury +
The Little Black Bag • novelette by C. M. Kornbluth +
Born of Man and Woman • short story by Richard Matheson +
Coming Attraction • short story by Fritz Leiber
The Quest for Saint Aquin • novelette by Anthony Boucher +
Surface Tension • novelette by James Blish +
The Nine Billion Names of God • short story by Arthur C. Clarke +
It’s a Good Life • short story by Jerome Bixby +
The Cold Equations • novelette by Tom Godwin +
Fondly Fahrenheit • novelette by Alfred Bester +
The Country of the Kind • short story by Damon Knight
Flowers for Algernon • novelette by Daniel Keyes
A Rose for Ecclesiastes • novelette by Roger Zelazny

Non-fiction:
Introduction (The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume I) • essay by Robert Silverberg

_____________________

(Note: this British book contains the second half of the original The Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthology. I’m reviewing the UK versions because (a) I own and have previously read them, and (b) for review length reasons. You might want to catch up with the review of the first volume before continuing.)

This part of the larger volume contains mostly stories from the 1950s (the exceptions are the Merril and the Zelazny, either of which wouldn’t have been out of place in that decade), and leads off with That Only a Mother by Judith Merril (Astounding, June 1948). This was her debut SF story, and it tells of a pregnant woman called Maggie looking forward to the birth of her child. This, however, occurs against a background of war, atomic weapons, and the mutations that consequentially occur in the population. Once the short introduction (which is told from her point of view) establishes this background, the story largely takes the form of letters from Maggie to the absent father, Hank.
After Maggie has the child (spoiler), we get the first indications that something is wrong:

Darling,
I finally got to see her! It’s all true, what they say about new babies and the face that only a mother could love—but it’s all there, darling, eyes, ears, and noses—no, only one!—all in the right places. We’re so lucky, Hank.
I’m afraid I’ve been a rambunctious patient. I kept telling that hatchet-faced female with the mutation mania that I wanted to see the baby. Finally the doctor came in to “explain” everything to me, and talked a lot of nonsense, most of which I’m sure no one could have understood, any more than I did. The only thing I got out of it was that she didn’t actually have to stay in the incubator; they just thought it was “wiser.”
I think I got a little hysterical at that point. Guess I was more worried than I was willing to admit, but I threw a small fit about it. The whole business wound up with one of those hushed medical conferences outside the door, and finally the Woman in White said: “Well, we might as well. Maybe it’ll work out better that way.”  p. 282

Maggie takes her daughter home from hospital, and we get further hints that (spoiler) it may be a mutant (e.g. it can speak after a few months). Then, in a climactic homecoming scene, Hank returns and finds that the child has no arms or legs, and that Maggie is in denial about the situation.
This isn’t a bad debut, and it is perhaps notable for its female point of view (and examination of what would have once been regarded as “women’s issues”). However, I’m not sure it passes muster as some kind of feminist exemplar2 given that (a) the female character’s role is the stereotypical one of a wife and mother and (b) that she is portrayed as “hysterical” and, later, as delusional and/or mad. If a man had written this story he’d still be getting beaten like a piñata.
The best story, so far, is another debut (and one of his ‘Instrumentality of Mankind’ series), Scanners Live in Vain by Cordwainer Smith (Fantasy Book v01n06, 1950). The opening drops you immediately into another world:

Martel was angry. He did not even adjust his blood away from anger. He stamped across the room by judgment, not by sight. When he saw the table hit the floor, and could tell by the expression on Luci’s face that the table must have made a loud crash, he looked down to see if his leg were broken. It was not. Scanner to the core, he had to scan himself. The action was reflex and automatic. The inventory included his legs, abdomen, Chestbox of instruments, hands, arms, face and back with the Mirror. Only then did Martel go back to being angry. He talked with his voice, even though he knew that his wife hated its blare and preferred to have him write.
“I tell you, I must cranch. I have to cranch. It’s my worry, isn’t it?”
When Luci answered, he saw only a part of her words as he read her lips: “Darling . . . you’re my husband . . . right to love you . . . dangerous . . . do it . . . dangerous . . . wait. . . .”
He faced her, but put sound in his voice, letting the blare hurt her again: “I tell you, I’m going to cranch.”  p. 288

In the next part of the story we learn that Martel is a Scanner, a human who has been “Habermanned” into a cyborg, and who cannot experience any emotions or receive any sensory input bar sight and hearing. Thus modified he can pilot spaceships through the Up-and-Out (also called “raw space”), something normal humans cannot do because of the pain of space travel (they have to be put into suspended animation). Scanners can, however, return to a state of relative normalcy by undergoing the cranching process.
Martel is then summoned by his superior Vomact to a “Top emergency” Guild meeting, where he meets his uncranched colleagues, and we see how scanners normally behave. When Vomact arrives and takes control of the meeting, he leads the assembled scanners through an almost religious call-and-response. This crystallises information previously hinted at, and further limns the darkness of this society:

“And how, O Scanners is flesh controlled?”
“By the boxes set in the flesh, the controls set in the chest, the signs made to rule the living body, the signs by which the body lives.”
“How does a haberman live and live?”
“The haberman lives by control of the boxes.”
“Whence come the habermans?”
Martel felt in the coming response a great roar of broken voices echoing through the room as the Scanners, habermans themselves, put sound behind their mouthings:
“Habermans are the scum of Mankind. Habermans are the weak, the cruel, the credulous, and the unfit. Habermans are the sentenced-to-more-than-death. Habermans live in the mind alone. They are killed for Space but they live for Space. They master the ships that connect the earths. They live in the Great Pain while ordinary men sleep in the cold cold sleep of the transit.”
“Brothers and Scanners, I ask you now: are we habermans or are we not?”
“We are habermans in the flesh. We are cut apart, brain and flesh. We are ready to go to the Up and Out. All of us have gone through the Haberman Device.”
“We are habermans then?” Vomact’s eyes flashed and glittered as he asked the ritual question.
Again the chorused answer was accompanied by a roar of voices heard only by Martel: “Habermans we are, and more, and more. We are the Chosen who are habermans by our own free will. We are the Agents of the Instrumentality of Mankind.”  p. 299

Vomact then informs the scanners that a man called Adam Smith has discovered how to screen out the pain of space—which will make them redundant—and proposes that the Guild assassinate him. After a short break to discuss the matter, during which Martel privately reflects on his life and marriage with a certain amount of self-loathing (atypical in SF stories of the period), the vote is taken. A scanner called Parizianski, who is a friend of Martel’s, is dispatched to carry out the mission.
The rest of the story (spoiler) sees Martel fly off to Downport to warn Stone and prevent the killing. He does so, but at a price, and the story has a bittersweet ending.
This is a highly original piece, and one which portrays a vivid and grim future. It’s difficult to believe that it wasn’t published earlier on in another magazine.3
Mars Is Heaven! by Ray Bradbury (Planet Stories, Fall 1948)4 is one of his ‘Martian Chronicles’ tales, and has a spaceship land on Mars in 1960 to find an archetypal American town from fifty years earlier:

It was a beautiful spring day. A robin sat on a blossoming apple tree and sang continuously. Showers of petal snow sifted down when the wind touched the apple tree, and the blossom smell drifted upon the air.
Somewhere in the town, somebody was playing the piano and the music came and went, came and went, softly, drowsily. The song was Beautiful Dreamer. Somewhere else, a phonograph, scratchy and faded, was hissing out a record of Roamin’ In The Gloamin’, sung by Harry Lauder.
The three men stood outside the ship. The port closed behind them. At every window, a face pressed, looking out. The large metal guns pointed this way and that, ready.  p. 323

As a three man team investigate the town they find that the inhabitants think they are on Earth in 1925. Then Lustig, one of the men, finds his grandparent’s house. And his grandparents . . . .
After visiting with them for a while the team come out and see a crowd round the ship. Initially the captain is angry at this breach of security—but then he meets his dead brother, who takes him home to his old house, and mother and father.
Eventually, of course (spoiler), the captain realises that that it is all a telepathic illusion created by the Martians, but they get him before he can get back to the ship. The Martians hold seventeen funerals the next day, and destroy the rocket.
The ending of this is gimmicky, but I’d have to admit that they don’t write SF stories about nostalgia like they used to. (Boom, tish.)
If the Smith story gives a hint of the grimmer work that the field would produce in the 1950s, then The Little Black Bag by C. M. Kornbluth (Astounding, July 1950) reinforces that feeling. It has one of the bleakest openings I can remember from this period, which has a Dr Full coming into his apartment building by the back entrance because he is ashamed of the jug of wine he is carrying—then a dog surprises him and, when he tries to kick it, he misses and falls, smashing the jug; he throws broken glass at the dog, then drinks what is left of the wine. While he sits there he drunkenly recalls being struck off the medical register. When a young girl appears and badly cuts her hand playing with the shards of glass, Full, rather than helping her, wanders off to his room to look for a bottle of whiskey.
The story then switches to a ‘Marching Morons’ future (Kornbluth would return to this theme later in the year with the eponymous story) where a would-be scientist builds a time machine and sends Dr Hemmingway’s “little black bag” (essentially an advanced medical unit for use by idiot doctors) back in time to Full’s apartment.
When Full wakes up with a hangover and the DTs he finds the little black bag, but can’t remember where it came from, so he decides to pawn it so he can buy more booze. First though, he decides to give himself a shot—which, strangely, immediately cures his hangover. Then, as he leaves the building, he is intercepted by the mother of the girl who cut herself and has become seriously ill. When she shrugs off Full’s protestations that he is “retired,” he figures he can shake the family down for a couple of bucks, and so treats the young girl using the equipment in the bag. After marvelling at the strange equipment and reflecting on how things have changed since his time, he treats the sick and feverish child:

He slipped the needle into the skin of his forearm. He thought at first that he had missed—that the point had glided over the top of his skin instead of catching and slipping under it. But he saw a tiny blood-spot and realized that somehow he just hadn’t felt the puncture.
Whatever was in the barrel, he decided, couldn’t do him any harm if it lived up to its billing—and if it could come out through a needle that had no hole. He gave himself three cc. and twitched the needle out.
There was the swelling—painless, but otherwise typical.
Dr. Full decided it was his eyes or something, and gave three cc. of “g” from hypodermic IV to the feverish child. There was no interruption to her wailing as the needle went in and the swelling rose. But a long instant later, she gave a final gasp and was silent.
Well, he told himself, cold with horror, you did it that time. You killed her with that stuff.
Then the child sat up and said: “Where’s my mommy?”
Incredulously, the doctor seized her arm and palpated the elbow. The gland infection was zero, and the temperature seemed normal. The blood-congested tissues surrounding the wound were subsiding as he watched. The child’s pulse was stronger and no faster than a child’s should be. In the sudden silence of the room he could hear the little girl’s mother sobbing in her kitchen, outside.  p. 344

Full is subsequently blackmailed by an older sister, Angie, who knows he has been struck off, and the pair’s relationship forms the backbone of the rest of the story. After they fail to pawn the bag they eventually set up a medical practice, but tension develops between them when Angie wants to use the bag’s miraculous devices to provide plastic surgery to wealthy patients. Full wants to give the bag to the College of Surgeons so they can investigate and copy the devices and use them for the benefit of all mankind.
Then (spoiler) they fight over the bag, and Angie kills Full using a Number Six Cautery Series knife (“—will cut through all tissues. Use for amputations before you spread on the Re-Gro. Extreme caution should be used in the vicinity of vital organs and major blood vessels or nerve trunks—”). She gets rid of Full’s body, and then decides that she can carry out the procedures herself.
When, the next day, a wealthy client insists on a demonstration of the odd looking instruments, Angie uses them on herself—just as one of the supervisors in the future notices the little black bag is missing and switches it off . . . .
I liked this a lot: the bleak setup and darkness of the piece; the description of the gadgetry in action; Full’s redemption; and the biter-bit ending. I think it is my favourite Kornbluth story.
Born of Man and Woman by Richard Matheson (F&SF, Summer 1950) is a story I didn’t care much for when I first read it—I’m not sure the Younger Lazy Reader understood it—but the Older Lazy Reader likes it better now having read it probably another three times over the last few years.
It gets off to an arresting start with an unusual narrator in a chilling situation:

X — This day when it had light mother called me retch. You retch she said. I saw in her eyes the anger. I wonder what it is a retch.
This day it had water falling from upstairs. It fell all around. I saw that. The ground of the back I watched from the little window. The ground it sucked up the water like thirsty lips. It drank too much and it got sick and runny brown. I didnt like it.
Mother is a pretty I know. In my bed place with cold walls around I have a paper things that was behind the furnace. It says on it SCREEN-STARS. I see in the pictures faces like of mother and father. Father says they are pretty. Once he said it.
And also mother he said. Mother so pretty and me decent enough. Look at you he said and didnt have the nice face. I touched his arm and said it is alright father. He shook and pulled away where I couldnt reach.
Today mother let me off the chain a little so I could look out the window. Thats how I saw the water falling from upstairs.  p. 361

As the story progresses—there are further entries in what I presume is a diary—it becomes clear that the child is a mutant who is chained in a cellar. Eventually, after further encounters with the family and visitors, there is a climactic scene where (spoiler) it kills a dog that bites it. When the father tries to beat the narrator, it fights back, and we are left with the threat of vengeance hanging in the air, and the revelation that the child has a spider-like body that produces green ichor.
I suspect that, for readers of the time, the attraction of this story—apart from the brief, dark thrills—was the mutant’s point of view.
Coming Attraction by Fritz Leiber (Galaxy, November 1950) is another bleak vision of the future that starts with an Englishman who is visiting New York saving a woman from a group of men who almost hit her with their car:

The coupe with the fishhooks welded to the fender shouldered up over the curb like the nose of a nightmare. The girl in its path stood frozen, her face probably still with fright under her mask. For once my reflexes weren’t shy. I took a fast step toward her, grabbed her elbow, yanked her back. Her black skirt swirled out.
The big coupe shot by, its turbine humming. I glimpsed three faces. Something ripped. I felt the hot exhaust on my ankles as the big coupe swerved back into the street. A thick cloud like a black flower blossomed from its jouncing rear end, while from the fishhooks flew a black shimmering rag.
“Did they get you?” I asked the girl.
She had twisted around to look where the side of her skirt was torn away.  p. 364

As the pair talk to each other and also the police afterwards, we learn that she is masked (a new fashion trend), and that the men were “rippers” who try to snag women’s skirts with fishhooks mounted on their car bumpers. We also learn that the fashion for masking hasn’t entirely taken on in Britain (something that the policeman views “with [either] relish or moral distaste”) and that an area called the Inferno is an irradiated part of New York (there is a nearby beggar woman holding out a baby with webbed fingers and toes).
The rest of the story sees the man picking up the woman later on that evening to take her out. The picture painted by the story becomes even darker: after trying (unsuccessfully) to get the taxi driver to turn off the TV in front of the cab because it’s showing a man wrestling a woman, the Englishman “half-playfully” moves to lift her veil only to have her swipe his hand away. He notices he is bleeding, and then that her fingertips are covered with pointed metal caps.
Matters do not improve in the club, where we learn that she intends to involve him in her  personal psychodrama:

Her mask came forward. “Do you know something about the wrestlers?” she asked rapidly. “The ones that wrestle women, I mean. They often lose, you know. And then they have to have a girl to take their frustration out on. A girl who’s soft and weak and terribly frightened. They need that, to keep them men. Other men don’t want them to have a girl. Other men want them just to fight women and be heroes. But they must have a girl. It’s horrible for her.”  p. 373

When her wrestler boyfriend, Zirk, turns up at their table and tells her he has just lost his bout, the Englishman leaves—but she does not go with him.
There isn’t much plot to this story (it reads like both a travelogue and an extract from a hard-boiled detective novel) but it works as nightmarish look at a future America where the nuclear and sexual fears of the 1940s have progressed. It is an impressively dark and savage piece, and you can see why this one didn’t appear in Astounding.
The Quest for Saint Aquin by Anthony Boucher (New Tales of Space and Time, 1951) is the first story here from an original anthology, and it opens with a future fugitive Pope (in hiding from the Technarchy) sending Thomas to find the legendary Saint Aquin.
Thomas gets on his robo-ass and rides away and, as the pair travel the robo-ass reveals itself as a laconic smart-Alex (when it isn’t tempting Thomas to give up the quest):

[Aquin said,] “Tell me what, if anything, robots do believe.”
“What we have been fed.”
“But your minds work on that; surely they must evolve ideas of their own?”
“Sometimes they do and if they are fed imperfect data they may evolve very strange ideas. I have heard of one robot on an isolated space station who worshiped a God of robots and would not believe that any man had created him.”
“I suppose,” Thomas mused, “he argued that he had hardly been created in our image. I am glad that we—at least they, the Technarchs—have wisely made only usuform robots like you, each shaped for his function, and never tried to reproduce man himself.”
“It would not be logical,” said the robass. “Man is an all-purpose machine but not well designed for any one purpose. And yet I have heard that once . . .”
The voice stopped abruptly in midsentence.
So even robots have their dreams, Thomas thought. That once there existed a super-robot in the image of his creator Man. From that thought could be developed a whole robotic theology . . . p. 381

Then the pair arrive at an inn, which sets off a chain of events: Thomas gets drunk, is revealed as a Christian, is badly beaten and robbed, and eventually left naked in a ditch. The next day he recovers consciousness and calls for the robo-ass, but is rescued by a jew called Abraham who puts him in a room at the inn. Later, as they continue their journey, the robo-ass tries to convince Thomas to turn Abraham in to get safe passage through the checkpoint ahead. Thomas refuses.
Eventually (spoiler) Thomas finds the perfectly mummified body of St Aquin—and the miracle he needs to revivify the church—but then finds that Aquin is a robot in human form.
The rest of the story is an argument between Thomas and the robo-ass about whether or not he should lie about what he has found, at which point it all dissolves into a ecclesiastical debate about whether this proves the existence of God or God’s will.
This is pretty good for the most part, but the last page or so lost me. Those who are more religious than I am may get more from it.
Surface Tension by James Blish (Galaxy, August 1952) is the second of his ‘Pantropy’ series5 and begins with a colonisation crew landing on a planet which will not support them and will result in their deaths. They can, however, seed a microscopic and aquatic version of humanity into the planet’s mudflats before they perish. This prologue is a convincing multi-character beginning to the story, even if the concept is a little far-fetched.
The next section of the story skips forwards in time to two of these seeded microscopic and aquatic pan-humans, Shar and Lavon, who are meeting to discuss their people’s history and the secrets of the metal plates their creators have left for them. They are then joined by Para, a native creature who, later on, suddenly takes the plates away for fear of the humans learning what is on them and leaving him and his species behind.
The next part of the story shows us Lavon’s world, and sees him climb up a stalk to the “sky” (the top of the pond he lives in):

Determinedly, Lavon began to climb toward the wavering mirror of the sky. His thorn-thumbed feet trampled obliviously upon the clustered sheaves of fragile stippled diatoms. The tulip-heads of Vortae, placid and murmurous cousins of Para, retracted startledly out of his way upon coiling stalks, to make silly gossip behind him.
Lavon did not hear them. He continued to climb doggedly toward the light, his fingers and toes gripping the plant-bole.
“Lavon! Where are you going? Lavon!”
He leaned out and looked down. The man with the adze, a doll-like figure, was beckoning to him from a patch of blue-green retreating over a violet abyss. Dizzily he looked away, clinging to the bole; he had never been so high before. Then he began to climb again.
After a while, he touched the sky with one hand. He stopped to breathe.
[. . .]
He waited until he no longer felt winded, and resumed climbing.
The sky pressed down against the top of his head, against the back of his neck, against his shoulders. It seemed to give slightly, with a tough, frictionless elasticity. The water here was intensely bright, and quite colorless. He climbed another step, driving his shoulders against that enormous weight.
It was fruitless. He might as well have tried to penetrate a cliff.
Again he had to rest. While he panted, he made a curious discovery. All around the bole of the water plant, the steel surface of the sky curved upward, making a kind of sheath. He found that he could insert his hand into it—there was almost enough space to admit his head as well. Clinging closely to the bole, he looked up into the inside of the sheath, probing with his injured hand. The glare was blinding.
There was a kind of soundless explosion. His whole wrist was suddenly encircled in an intense, impersonal grip, as if it were being cut in two. In blind astonishment, he lunged upward.
The ring of pain traveled smoothly down his upflung arm as he rose, was suddenly around his shoulders and chest. Another lunge and his knees were being squeezed in the circular vine. Another—
Something was horribly wrong. He clung to the bole and tried to gasp, but there was—nothing to breathe.
The water came streaming out of his body, from his mouth, his nostrils, the spiracles in his sides, spurting in tangible jets. An intense and fiery itching crawled over the entire surface of his body. At each spasm, long knives ran into him, and from a great distance he heard more water being expelled from his book-lungs in an obscene, frothy sputtering.
Lavon was drowning.  p. 405-406

Lavon manages to get back into the water but, as a result of the trauma, he reverts to his encysted form and sinks to the bottom of the pond. He is eventually found by Para’s tribe and taken to Shar, who watches over Lavon as he heals.
When Lavon wakes he tells Shar what happened and, eventually (spoiler), there is a decision to build a “spaceship.” The rest of story tells of the pantropic human’s journey into the air above them and then down into a neighbouring pool. The passage where they break through the “sky” is quite exciting.
This is a classic story that has great world-building as well as moments that provide a genuine sense of wonder. It is also a piece that shows you can get away with one impossible thing in a story if the rest of piece adheres strictly to the logic of the premise.
The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C. Clarke (Star Science Fiction Stories, 1953), reviewed here recently, begins with a Tibetan Lama in a computer company office arranging for the purchase of a machine that will enable the monks to print out the nine billion names of God.
The story then fast-forwards three months to two engineers who are in Tibet maintaining the machine. One of them is friendly with one of the monks, has found out why the monastery is undertaking this task, and tells his colleague what he has discovered:

“Well, they believe that when they have listed all His names—and they reckon that there are about nine billion of them—God’s purpose will be achieved. The human race will have finished what it was created to do, and there won’t be any point in carrying on. Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy.”
“Then what do they expect us to do? Commit suicide?”
“There’s no need for that. When the list’s completed, God steps in and simply winds things up . . . bingo!”
“Oh, I get it. When we finish our job, it will be the end of the world.”
Chuck gave a nervous little laugh.
“That’s just what I said to Sam. And do you know what happened? He looked at me in a very queer way, like I’d been stupid in class, and said ‘It’s nothing as trivial as that.’”  p. 192

As the process nears completion the engineers become concerned—not about the monks’ beliefs, but about what their reactions may be when nothing happens. They decide to delay the project so they can be on their way out of the country when matters come to a conclusion.
The story ends with the pair travelling to the distant airstrip, and catching sight of it in the distance:

“There she is!” called Chuck, pointing down into the valley. “Ain’t she beautiful!”
She certainly was, thought George. The battered old DC 3 lay at the end of the runway like a tiny silver cross. In two hours she would be bearing them away to freedom and sanity. It was a thought worth savoring like a fine liqueur. George let it roll round his mind as the pony trudged patiently down the slope.
The swift night of the high Himalayas was now almost upon them. Fortunately the road was very good, as roads went in this region, and they were both carrying torches. There was not the slightest danger, only a certain discomfort from the bitter cold. The sky overhead was perfectly clear and ablaze with the familiar, friendly stars. At least there would be no risk, thought George, of the pilot being unable to take off because of weather conditions. That had been his only remaining worry.
He began to sing, but gave it up after a while. This vast arena of mountains, gleaming like whitely hooded ghosts on every side, did not encourage such ebullience. Presently George glanced at his watch.
“Should be there in an hour,” he called back over his shoulder to Chuck. Then he added, in an afterthought:
“Wonder if the computer’s finished its run? It was due about now.”
Chuck didn’t reply, so George swung round in his saddle. He could just see Chuck’s face, a white oval turned towards the sky.
“Look,” whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. (There is always a last time for everything.)
Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.  p. 194-195

The first time I read this I hated the ending, which struck me as a religious (irrational) finish to a SF (rational) story. This time around, and having foreknowledge of the ending, I sort of liked it. I still wouldn’t call it a “classic,” but I thought it well crafted. The last half page in particular is very atmospheric, and the final line stunning. I wonder if the people who particularly like this story process the religious ending as a sense of wonder one.
It’s a Good Life by Jerome Bixby (Star Science Fiction Stories #2, 1953) is, I guess, the 1950’s version of Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore’s When the Bough Breaks (both are about children with super powers behaving badly. Very badly.) However, in Bixby’s story there is no Padgett-ish gimmickry such as time travelling toys or aliens to explain the change in Anthony—he was just born that way, and it makes for a cleaner and more contemporary story.
The opening paragraphs show us Anthony’s powers:

Perspiring under the afternoon “sun,” Bill lifted the box of groceries out of the big basket over the front wheel of the bike, and came up the front walk.
Little Anthony was sitting on the lawn, playing with a rat. He had caught the rat down in the basement—he had made it think that it smelled cheese, the most rich-smelling and crumbly-delicious cheese a rat had ever thought it smelled, and it had come out of its hole, and now Anthony had hold of it with his mind and was making it do tricks.
When the rat saw Bill Soames coming, it tried to run, but Anthony thought at it, and it turned a flip-flop on the grass, and lay trembling, its eyes gleaming in small black terror.  p. 433

We then find out that Bill Soames mumbles to himself to mask his thoughts because, if Anthony overhears something he doesn’t like, the results can be terminal—as we find out at the end of passage when the rat, having half-eaten itself and died from the pain, is teleported into a grave deep in the cornfield.
The rest of the story introduces us to some of the neighbours who, in response to Anthony’s reign of terror in the town (which now exists in a grey limbo), continually tell each other how “good” everything is, even when they refer to terrible accidents and deaths.
The long final scene has the townsfolk gather that evening (as they do every day because Anthony likes it that way) to watch television—which, as they are cut-off from the world, is a screen filled with grey static. On this occasion it is one of the menfolk’s birthday, but he makes the (spoiler) fatal mistake of singing along to the music playing before they watch TV:

Anthony came into the room.
Pat stopped playing. He froze. Everybody froze. The breeze rippled the curtains. Ethel Hollis couldn’t even try to scream— she had fainted.
“Please don’t take my sunshine . . . away . . .” Dan’s voice faltered into silence. His eyes widened. He put both hands out in front of him, the empty glass in one, the record in the other. He hiccupped, and said, “No.”
“Bad man,” Anthony said, and thought Dan Hollis into something like nothing anyone would have believed possible, and then he thought the thing into a grave deep, deep in the cornfield.
The glass and record thumped on the rug. Neither broke.
Anthony’s purple gaze went around the room.
Some of the people began mumbling. They all tried to smile. The sound of mumbling filled the room like a far-off approval. Out of the murmuring came one or two clear voices:
“Oh, it’s a very good thing,” said John Sipich.
“A good thing,” said Anthony’s father, smiling. He’d had more practice in smiling than most of them. “A wonderful thing.”  p. 445

It’s a bleak and terrifying tale but, perhaps, not so effective the second or third time around.
The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin (Astounding, August 1954) is one of those stories that everyone knows, so bear with me while I dash through the plot. The story opens with Barton, an EDS (Emergency Dispatch Ship) pilot discovering a stowaway on his spaceship. Regulations state that stowaways must be jettisoned immediately as the ships run on minimum fuel and, if Barton keeps the extra body on board, he won’t have the fuel to land safely at his destination planet and deliver a lifesaving vaccine to the people there. Then Barton discovers the stowaway is a teenage girl.
He delays his plan to get rid of her, and initially decelerates the ship to extend his fuel endurance (although he cannot do this to the point where he can make a safe landing with both of them on board). Then he contacts the Stardust, his mother ship, to see if there are any other vessels in the vicinity. There aren’t, and at this point the girl, Marilyn Lee Cross, realises she is going out of the airlock.
The rest of the story charts the hour she has left to live, and the conversations the pair have about various matters, including the fact that her brother is a colonist at Barton’s destination (the reason she snuck onboard in the first place). There are also various authorial infodumps about the perils of colonising the universe and the absolute physical laws that apply:

She had violated a man-made law that said KEEP OUT but the penalty was not of men’s making or desire and it was a penalty men could not revoke. A physical law had decreed: h amount of fuel will power an EDS with a mass of m safely to its destination; and a second physical law had decreed: h amount of fuel will not power an EDS with a mass of m plus x safely to its destination.
EDS’s obeyed only physical laws and no amount of human sympathy for her could alter the second law.  p. 458

Existence required Order and there was order; the laws of nature, irrevocable and immutable. Men could learn to use them but men could not change them. The circumference of a circle was always pi times the diameter and no science of Man would ever make it otherwise. The combination of chemical A with chemical B under condition C invariably produced reaction D. The law of gravitation was a rigid equation and it made no distinction between the fall of a leaf and the ponderous circling of a binary star system. The nuclear conversion process powered the cruisers that carried men to the stars; the same process in the form of a nova would destroy a world with equal efficiency. The laws were, and the universe moved in obedience to them.  p. 460-461

Some of this is conveyed in a more indirect way:

“Isn’t it—” She stopped, and he looked at her questioningly. “Isn’t it cold in here?” she asked, almost apologetically. “Doesn’t it seem cold to you?”
“Why, yes,” he said. He saw by the main temperature gauge that the room was at precisely normal temperature. “Yes, it’s colder than it should be.”  p. 464

As they draw closer to the planet, and the cut-off time, Barton realises there may be an opportunity for Marilyn to talk to her brother before she dies. This provides an effective scene just before she is put out the airlock.
As to the point of the story, there is internal evidence to suggest that it is meant to show that the laws of the universe are immutable and not subject to human whim (see the passages above), but there are also letters from John W. Campbell (Godwin’s then editor) stating that the point of the story was to show that, sometimes, “It is right and proper to sacrifice a human being.”6 Apparently Campbell had to send the manuscript back to Godwin three times because he kept on coming up with ever more ingenious ways to save her. And it was a “her” because that would make the story even more traumatic for the readers of Astounding (who, coming from a “women and children first” generation, would be appalled at the ending).7
I suspect that the repeated revisions requested by Campbell also resulted in the story’s bagginess, as well as its excessive emotional manipulation: we learn how decompression victims have “their insides all ruptured and exploded and their lungs out between their teeth and then, a few seconds later, they’re all dry and shapeless and horribly ugly”; there is a short aside that outlines the poverty behind her cheap gypsy sandals; we hear a childhood recollection about a kitten that was run down in the street, etc. etc. No opportunity is missed to put the reader’s tear ducts through the mangle one more time, and there were occasions in the story where I’d happily have put both of them out the airlock.
That said, it has a good start and an effective end and, as it is also a SFnal version of the Trolley Problem, people will no doubt continue to discuss it.
Fondly Fahrenheit by Alfred Bester (F&SF, August 1954) has a gripping start which sees a team of armed men search the paddy fields on Paragon III before they come upon a child’s body. She has been beaten to death, and there appears to be android blood under her nails.
The story then cuts to a man called Vandaleur, who is on a spaceship with the android responsible. Here, we get our first experience of the confusing point of view shifts that go on throughout the story:

“Twelve, fourteen, sixteen. Sixteen hundred dollars,” Vandaleur wept. “That’s all. Sixteen hundred dollars. My house was worth ten thousand. The land was worth five. There was furniture, cars, my paintings, etchings, my plane, my— And nothing to show for everything but sixteen hundred dollars. Christ!”
I leaped up from the table and turned on the android. I pulled a strap from one of the leather bags and beat the android. It didn’t move.
“I must remind you,” the android said, “that I am worth fifty-seven thousand dollars on the current exchange. I must warn you that you are endangering valuable property.”
“You damned crazy machine,” Vandaleur shouted.
“I am not a machine,” the android answered. “The robot is a machine. The android is a chemical creation of synthetic tissue.”
“What got into you?” Vandaleur cried. “Why did you do it? Damn you!” He beat the android savagely.
“I must remind you that I cannot be punished,” I said. “The pleasure-pain syndrome is not incorporated in the android synthesis.”
“Then why did you kill her?” Vandaleur shouted. “If it wasn’t for kicks, why did you—”
“I must remind you,” the android said, “that the second class cabins in these ships are not soundproofed.”
Vandaleur dropped the strap and stood panting, staring at the creature he owned.
“Why did you do it? Why did you kill her?” I asked.  p. 472

The pair then have a number of encounters with various people. The first is these is with a woman called Dallas Brady, a jewellery designer who realises that Vandaleur and his android are fugitives but who keeps quiet so she can get the android to work for her for free. This arrangement lasts until the android kills her in her workshop by pouring molten gold over her head. As the android does this it sings “All reet! All reet! . . . Be fleet be fleet, cool and discreet, honey.” There is also the observation that the temperature is 98.1º in the workshop (a 91.9º temperature was previously noted in the paddy fields scene).
This high temperature/homicidal android loop is repeated once more with a pair of students (who track the android to the university power plant furnace, bad move), before Vandaleur and the android end up in London (3º below zero, so I’m guessing mid-June). Here, Vandaleur tries to get the android to rob a blind beggar but the android points out that it can’t obey the order as it is contrary to its prime directive. Then the beggar, a blind mathematician called Blenheim, takes them home in exchange for a number.
Blenheim later deduces why the android malfunctions—the raised temperature—and, at this point, Vandaleur kills the mathematician when the android again refuses to do so. During this episode the pair’s identities appearing to be merging:

We had three hours before the cook returned from her day off. We looted the house. We took Blenheim’s money and jewels. We packed a bag with clothes. We took Blenheim’s notes, destroyed the newspapers; and we left, carefully locking the door behind us. In Blenheim’s study we left a pile of crumpled papers under a half inch of burning candle. And we soaked the rug around it with kerosene. No, I did all that. The android refused. I am forbidden to endanger life or property.
All reet!  p. 482

The explanation to all this finally emerges in a later appointment with a psychiatrist (spoiler), where two psychological concepts are advanced: the temperature related homicide is put down to “synaesthesia” (hearing colour, seeing sound, or in this case experiencing temperature as fear or anger), and the point of view changes are put down to “projection” (the android projects his insanity onto Vandaleur, or perhaps Vandaleur allows the projection of that insanity). When the psychiatrist then identifies and denounces Vandaleur and the android, Vandaleur shoots her and they flee.
In the subsequent manhunt the pair are hunted down, and one of them is killed. The other escapes. Or, to be more precise, I escaped. All reet! All reet!
When I first read this story as a teenager I just didn’t think it worked and, even when I read it again in the 1979 anniversary issue of F&SF I still thought it mediocre. The last time I read it I got up to average, and this time I’m up to somewhere between good and very good. I don’t think I’ll get much further: although there is a lot to like here (crazy androids, the panoramic sweep from Paragon III to London, the quirky “All reet!” jingles and black humour, the grisly murders, general bravura writing, etc.), the dual psychological gimmicks stretch one’s suspension of disbelief.
I also note that I don’t think that this is Bester’s best story (The Pi Man, Time is the Traitor, or 5,271,009) but I can see why a group of writers would choose it.
The Country of the Kind by Damon Knight (F&SF, February 1956) is set in the future, and is told from the viewpoint of an atavistic psychopath who, as the story starts, follows a group of people into their underground house. He vandalises the interior, and then corners a woman:

The blonde was over at the near end with her back to me, studying the autochef keyboard. She was half out of her playsuit. She pushed it the rest of the way down and stepped out of it, then turned and saw me.
She was surprised again; she hadn’t thought I might follow her down. I got up close before it occurred to her to move; then it was too late. She knew she couldn’t get away from me; she closed her eyes and leaned back against the paneling, turning a little pale. Her lips and her golden brows went up in the middle.
I looked her over and told her a few uncomplimentary things about herself. She trembled, but didn’t answer. On an impulse, I leaned over and dialed the autochef to hot cheese sauce. I cut the safety out of circuit and put the quantity dial all the way up. I dialed soup tureen and then punch bowl.
The stuff began to come out in about a minute, steaming hot. I took the tureens and splashed them up and down the wall on either side of her. Then when the first punch bowl came out I used the empty bowls as scoops. I clotted the carpet with the stuff; I made streamers of it all along the walls, and dumped puddles into what furniture I could reach. Where it cooled it would harden, and where it hardened it would cling.
I wanted to splash it across her body, but it would’ve hurt, and we couldn’t have that. The punch bowls of hot sauce were still coming out of the autochef, crowding each other around the vent. I punched cancel, and then sauterne (swt., Calif.).  p. 489-490

Before he can throw the cold wine over the woman (who will think it is hot cheese sauce), a male voice behind him spoils the surprise. He feels a murderous rage, and blacks out.
We later learn that the narrator attacked a teenage girlfriend when he was younger and was surgically modified to make him (a) have an epileptic seizure when intending violence and (b) emit a strongly pungent odour (to warn citizens of his presence). He was also excommunicated from society, and all citizens instructed to ignore him.
The final part of the story (spoiler) has him carve a small statue which he later hides in undergrowth along with a message. He watches as a boy comes close to discovering it, and pursues him into another house when he does not. Before the narrator can start another rampage, he passes out once again.
The final lines of the story reveal part of his message:

At last I stooped and picked up the figurine, and the paper that was supposed to go under it—crumpled now, with the forlorn look of a message that someone has thrown away unread. I sighed bitterly.
I smoothed it out and read the last part.
YOU CAN SHARE THE WORLD WITH ME. THEY CAN’T STOP YOU. STRIKE NOW—PICK UP A SHARP THING AND STAB, OR A HEAVY THING AND CRUSH. THAT’S ALL. THAT WILL MAKE YOU FREE. ANY ONE CAN DO IT.
Anyone. Someone. Anyone.  p. 499

The ending—the final three words which reveal the narrator’s existential loneliness—succeeded in partially flipping my attitude to the narrator from one of horror to one of partial sympathy. I’d also note that the story’s ironic title suggests that his punishment is a cruel one.8
A very good story, and another dark vision of the future (along with the Merril, Smith, Kornbluth, Leiber, Matheson, Bixby, Bester, etc.)
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.  p. 501

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. 505

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!  p. 517

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.
A Rose for Ecclesiastes by Roger Zelazny (F&SF, November 1963) opens on old Mars (the Mars of Burroughs) and has its narrator Gallinger, a brilliant poet and linguist, finding out from the base commander that he has been given permission to enter the Martian temple and learn the natives’ language. During this exchange we find out that Gallinger is an arrogant and unlikeable sort.
He later goes to the temple:

I don’t remember what I had for lunch. I was nervous, but instinctively that I wouldn’t muff it. My Boston publishers expected a Martian Idyll, or at least a Saint-Exupery job on space flight. The National Science Association wanted a complete report on the Rise and Fall of the Martian Empire.
They would both be pleased. I knew.
That’s the reason everyone is jealous—why they hate me. I always come through, and I can come through better than anyone else.
I shoveled in a final anthill of slop, and made my way to our car barn. I drew one jeepster and headed it toward Tirellian.
Flames of sand, lousy with iron oxide, set fire to the buggy. They swarmed over the open top and bit through my scarf; they set to work pitting my goggles.
The jeepster, swaying and panting like a little donkey I once rode through the Himalayas, kept kicking me in the seat of the pants. The Mountains of Tirellian shuffled their feet and moved toward me at a cockeyed angle.
Suddenly I was heading uphill, and I shifted gears to accommodate the engine’s braying. Not like Gobi, not like the Great Southwestern Desert, I mused. Just red, just dead . . . without even a cactus.
I reached the crest of the hill, but I had raised too much dust to see what was ahead. It didn’t matter, though; I have a head full of maps.
I bore to the left and downhill, adjusting the throttle. A cross-wind and solid ground beat down the fires. I felt like Ulysses in Melebolge—with a terza-rima speech in one hand and an eye out for Dante.

This latter sentence is one of many literary and cultural references that permeate the text, and you get the distinct impression that Zelazny’s liberal arts degree gets a good work out in this piece.
At the temple Gallinger meets the Matriarch, M’Cwyie, and starts learning the High tongue. During this we learn more about Gallinger’s backstory, which involves a religious father and precocious childhood.
The next part of the story (after he masters the High Tongue with ease) sees Gallinger become involved with a female Martian called Braxa after she performs a dance for him: they become lovers. More or less simultaneous with this Gallinger discovers a bio-historical mystery in the Temple texts, which suggest that the Martians, although humanoid, are a remarkably long-lived race. And possibly sterile . . . .
An idyllic period follows for Gallinger as he spends time with Braxa, continues his researches, and writes poetry. Then, one day, she disappears, and Gallinger spends days searching for her in the desert. When he finally finds her he discovers she is pregnant, but she refuses to go to Earth with him.
In the climactic scene in the Temple, Gallinger tells the Martians that their race isn’t doomed—Braxa is pregnant, and the rest can interbreed with humanity—but it is a pyrrhic victory: M’Cwyie tells Gallinger that he is part of a prophecy that was made centuries earlier, and for which Braxa trained. She does not love him.
He is then told that the temple will soon be empty, and Braxa will not return. Gallinger later tries to commit suicide, but fails and returns to Earth.
The Old Mars setting, the exobiological romance, the stream of literary references, the rose metaphor, etc., all give this story a superficial attractiveness, but it strikes me as a triumph of style over substance as, underneath, it’s essentially an account of a failed love affair. Still pretty good though.10

Introduction (The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume I) by Robert Silverberg is the same piece that is in the first book.

This volume is a much superior group of stories to the first, although even this selection could be better (a different Bester and Bradbury, drop the Merril for something by another writer, perhaps Zenna Henderson, or Robert Sheckley, etc.). That said, this half is a must read.11  ●

_____________________

1. (These reviews have already appeared in the first part of this review and are copied here for convenience.)
Lester del Rey one of the contributors, begins his review of the complete volume (If, September-October 1970) with some interesting history:

Back in 1946, when only a few fan publishers were trying to bring out science fiction, Random House issued Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas. It was a huge book, containing 997 pages of fiction, totaling almost half a million words. There were 35 stories, culled from the virgin territory of all the science-fiction magazine work published to that date. And it sold, as I remember, for $2.95!
Whenever librarians ask me to submit a list of science-fiction books they should stock, this ancient anthology heads the list. Until very recently, at least, it was still available in the Modern Library edition (under a different title—Famous Science Fiction, I believe-and less a couple of stories that don’t matter that much). It’s a book that should still be on the shelves of every genuine fan of the field; if you don’t have it, get it-new or secondhand, it’s still I a great bargain.
During the same year another anthology appeared-this edited by Groff Conklin and put out by Crown Publishers: The Best of Science Fiction. It wasn’t quite the huge bargain the first was and Groff had sometimes been unable to get the stories he wanted because they were already purchased for the earlier book. But its success in the market and in sales to libraries also helped to convince publishers that there was money to be made in this crazy field.
Since then there have been hordes of anthologies. Some, like Groff Conklin’s excellent later ones, were gathered with love and by means of diligent reading of the magazines. Some were put together shoddily by mining earlier anthologies. A few have been simply excuses to get stories by a clique into print.

He goes on to have a moan about current theme anthologies and those with “extraneous” matter to pad out the volumes, before commenting on the this volume. “I’m forced to give it a rave review on its merits”, he says, and goes on to add:

Silverberg did the work of collating their responses and the present book represents his efforts at putting together the results of the summed judgment of the professionals in the field. He did his work’ brilliantly and I cannot but agree with the few cases where he admitted to the need of some personal weighing of the results.  p. 65

He adds this about the voting in the first few years of the Nebula:

Actually they’re a lot better in my opinion than some of the stories that have won [the Nebula Award]—and represent a far more balanced judgment. Apparently time and distance have removed the personal angles that must so often motivate the voting for current awards, and the result is a list of some genuine classics.  p. 66

He would say that of course, as this volume has no New Wave stories (see the comment from Judy del Rey above).
Of the stories he says that Weinbaum’s A Martian Odyssey is “revolutionary”, that Campbell’s Twilight inspired a first fan letter. Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God is del Rey’s favourite Sturgeon piece, but that he agrees with Asimov that he has written better stories than Nightfall. Van Vogt’s story “has some of his best writing and, in my opinion, all of his best characterization,” and Mimsy Were the Borogoves “was something of a key story also, since there were a number of imitations in handling and intent to follow that.” Before coming to an end he comments that “The next decade from 1944 to 1953 seems to be more a period of consolidation” before singling out Scanners Live in Vain as “one great innovation.”

The Algis Budrys review (Galaxy, December 1970) is also interesting, because I’m not quite sure he liked the volume or not, especially when he comes out with comments like this:

Then we have several stories that are outright stunts; venture to say duds That Only a Mother, Born of Mon and Woman, Mars is Heaven! and The Nine Billion Names of God. (The Star placed 15th in overall standings, and is Clarke at his best short-story level, only one cut below his talent as a novelist. But Nine Billion placed eleventh and is therefore exhumed here. This my stomach cannot reconcile with any pretense of a professional appraisal).  p. 94

P. Schuyler Miller (Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, March 1971) says this:

I don’t think good early science fiction is adequately represented— there are only three stories published before 1940—but the book was deliberately planned as a definitive anthology of modern SF. Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey,” John Campbell’s “Twilight,” and Lester del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy” are certainly as modem as anything published today.
My judgment doesn’t always match the judgment of my peers. I can’t see choosing Bradbury’s “Mars Is Heaven” over “There Will Come Soft Rains.” I’d have picked Van Vogt’s “Black Destroyer” over “The Weapon Shop,” and I’d have preferred a couple of Cordwainer Smith’s other stories to “Scanners Live in Vain,” which was his first.  p. 171

George Turner, SF Commentary, #23 takes issue with several of the choices (although, to be honest, his are probably worse) before observing:

All of which impels me to stick my neck out and make a guess; that the voters, who are all s f writers, did what you and I might do under the same circumstances—picked the tales which lingered in the memory rather than got down to business and really winnowed out the best.
Thus Blish is predictably represented by Surface Tension (whose popularity has always puzzled him, so he says). But where, oh where, is the much more subtly marvellous Common Time? Shame upon the SFWA!  p. 13

Finally, Colin Harvey’s piece in Strange Horizons, 15 March 2004 is worth a skim for a more modern take on the book.

2. Algis Budrys has this to say about That Only a Mother at the end of a long critique of Pamela Sargent’s anthology, Women of Wonder (F&SF, November 1975):

Sargent’s most revelatory shot is in selecting and honoring the Merril in this context. What “That Only a Mother…” says about women is that the unique essence secreted by feminine intelligence under stress is paranoid schizophrenia; that in reference to the same child in the same situation, the father is ‘analytical’ and the mother is ‘intuitive.’ Finding it here is like finding Troy at work on its own horse.
Merril went on after this story to found and aggrandize the steaming-wet-diaper school of SF, which in many examples defines and dramatizes women as beings whose “sensitivity and humanism” are at constant odds with something inherently messy in their bodies. In addition to direct imitators male and female, she inspired offshoots such as Margaret St. Clair’s Oona-and-Jik sitcom stories, and the Vilbar-party imitation ladies’ slick fiction of Evelyn E. Smith.
No artist should be held to ideological account for creative work sincerely done. It is hard enough to fight off the cumulative weight of one’s assertive peers and righteous elders long enough to utter a few words of one’s own. But there is no way to read Merril’s prominence in the 1950s except as an expression of shibboleth and sexism, and a disaster to any believable ideology of the unique in women, much less of their right to simply go about doing whatever damned well pleases.  p. 58

The whole review is worth reading. (Benchmarks Continued: F&SF “Books” Columns 1975-1982 by Algis Budrys is available at Ansible Editions but in print only, sigh).

3. According to Wikipedia, Scanners Live in Vain was written in 1945 and rejected a number of times before its eventual appearance. It became more widely known when Fredrik Pohl reprinted it in the 1952 anthology Beyond the End of Time.

4. There were four Bradbury stories that placed in the SFWA poll but none high enough to automatically feature in the anthology. Robert Silverberg acquiesced to Bradbury’s choice of this story rather than one of the others. By way of comparison, the Ray Bradbury FB group had a recent poll where members voted for their favourite story. These were the top six results:

There Will Come Soft Rains (46 votes)
A Sound of Thunder (34)
The Veldt (24)
The Fog Horn (15)
Kaleidoscope (12)
Mars is Heaven! (9)

5. The first of Blish’s ‘Pantropy’ series was Sunken Universe (Super Science Stories, May 1942). It is a particularly well written and effective story for its time, and arguably should have been included in the Asimov & Greenberg’s The Great Science Fiction Stories #4, 1942. I note, however, as Surface Tension doesn’t appear in The Great SF Stories #14 (1952), this may have been a book rights problem.
In the book version of Surface Tension (The Seedling Stars, 1956) Sunken Universe appears as “Cycle One” of the Surface Tension section (it appears between the prologue of the story above and the remainder).

6. As I said at the start of the first review, Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations is one of the three stories in this anthology that drive people nuts. If you want to see how people miss the point, have a look at the “Reception” section of the story’s Wikipedia page:

Gary Westfahl has said that because the proposition depends upon systems that were built without enough margin for error, the story is good physics, but lousy engineering [. . .] Cory Doctorow has made a similar argument, noting that the constraints under which the characters operate are decided by the writers, and not therefore the “inescapable laws of physics”. He argues that the decision of the writer to give the vessel no margin of safety and a marginal fuel supply focuses reader attention on the “need” for tough decisions in time of crisis and away from the responsibility for proper planning to ensure safety in the first place. Doctorow sees this as an example of moral hazard.

Both of these comments appear oblivious to either of the story’s possible dual concerns (immutability and/or sacrifice). As to the comment about “ensuring safety,” that will never by achievable for space travel—we can’t even do it for automated cars now.
A more recent comment from Doctorow is even more ridiculous:

In a 2019 essay in Locus, author Cory Doctorow criticized Campbell’s decision as one to turn the story “into a parable about the foolishness of women and the role of men in guiding them to accept the cold, hard facts of life.”

This is just tendentious agitprop which either ignores, or is unaware of, Campbell’s stated intentions for the story, and appears to be more about denouncing him than anything else.
I note in passing that the three “Reception” comments on Wikipedia are from the last twenty-five years: presumably there was silence for the first thirty years of the story’s life.

7. There are three letters in The John W. Campbell Letters, Vol. I which mention Godwin’s The Cold Equations:

To Isaac Asimov August 13, 1954
This letter’s primarily to acquaint you with some interesting data that’s been showing up. “The Cold Equations” has received a hell of a reception; some are hotly mad, some are warmly enthusiastic—but none are coldly indifferent.
You know the old business about a novel being supposed to show the development of a personality. Well there’s a reverse English on that that an author can get away with . . . if he’s good enough. That is to present an unacceptable character, and not change him, but make the reader change! Godwin accepted the unacceptable proposition “It is right and proper to sacrifice a young woman.” That’s been out of fashion, highly unacceptable, since the Aztecs stopped sacrificing them 1000 years ago. But you see, it’s not wholly wrong! Godwin made the point; the reader is forced to agree that there is a place for human sacrifice.

To Theodore Sturgeon November 30, 1954
I’m trying for stories that don’t ask you to identify with an improbable individual in an extremely different situation—but with someone so damned close to home it’s a test of the reader’s psychic courage to take on the role. Those my friend, can scare the living bejayzus out of you—and they’ll leave you changed for life.
If the direction of that change is a good one—he’ll be back for more, gasping, shaking his head, but grinning. If the direction is a bad one . . . he may be after you, quite literally, with a .38. He won’t appreciate having a permanent, ugly scar on his personality The scar may be deep enough to be called insanity.
I am not trying to flick the boys glands, Ted; I’m trying to flick their underlying cultural orientation—their deepest beliefs—the things that make their glands work. “Cold Equations” warn’t no accident, pard—I had Godwin sweating on that one four times. And it stems straight from the totally unacceptable (in our misguided society) postulate “It is right and proper to sacrifice a human being.” We made it a girl, because the ancient instinct of the mammalian male is that the female of the species is not expendable —the male is. That made the cheese more binding— and the impact stuck in deeper. That wasn’t your reacting—that was 300,000,000 years of evolutionary instincts backfiring.
I’m sabotaging the cultural orientations, Ted. I’m saying “Human beings can be sacrificed to the good of the race—when the circumstances warrant.”

In both the previous letters Campbell also alludes to another supposedly controversial story, Pigs, presumably On the Care and Breeding of Pigs by Rex Jatko (Astounding, December 1954), a one-shot wonder, and recently reprinted in Gordon Van Gelder’s repopulation anthology, Go Forth and Multiply.
Campbell adds:

I’m still looking for the stories that get in and really twist things in the reader—and that does NOT mean a few endocrine glands. You can scare a guy for ten seconds with a rubber dummy in a dimly lighted room; that gives his glands a work-out.
But you can shock him out of a life-time pattern, and change him for the rest of his natural existence, if you can find and break one of his false cultural orientations. You’ll scare hell out of him, too—for weeks, not seconds, incidentally—because, when he gets through, he discovers that a barrier he thought was a great stone wall . . . has become painted cellophane, and has been ripped a bit, at that. It lets him out, sure—but what scares him is that it means that other Things can get In, because the barrier isn’t real.
Yeah—I know this isn’t as popular a type of story . . . yet. But give us some time! We’re developing an art-form that hasn’t been more than started—as a conscious effort.

To Philip José Farmer July 30, 1955
Science-fiction begins when you take a divergent viewpoint, and make the reader gradually understand that that cockeyed viewpoint—that he strongly rejected at first—is a sound, wise, and rational way of life under the circumstances of the situation at hand.
“The Cold Equations” was a test of that idea; I got Godwin to write that piece. The proposition there is the culturally abhorent proposition, “It is proper for a man to kill a girl, to make her a human sacrifice, knowingly and with intent.” The trick is to make the divergent proposition powerful enough to cause a strong reaction when first encountered, and then gradually make it clear that the divergent proposition is valid.
That makes for stories with deep, lasting impact—the kind readers will remember subconsciously, even if they forget the exact name and plot. Because when a man accepts a new viewpoint on life, he will never again be quite the same person he was; you’ve changed him permanently.

Campbell takes a slightly different tack in the July In Times to Come:

Also coming up is “The Cold Equations,” by Tom Godwin. Tom’s done some good yarns for us, and handled some strong themes. This story is a genuinely memorable one, in effectively combining powerfully antithetic elements—harsh and brutal forces, and gentleness, a conflict that never was a conflict, because the answer existed before the problem was stated. It represents the one type of situation wherein there is but one solution—and that solution is both inescapable and unacceptable; the situation of a problem whose answer is known before the problem is!
It is, incidentally, a miniature of the problem of the whole world; sometimes we’re actually living out a bit of already-recorded history, when we think we are living in the ever-changeable present. Sound impossible?
Not at all; it happens any time an irreversible decision-point has been passed. What follows is history—even when it hasn’t happened yet!  p. 75

He added this in the November Brass Tacks:

“The Cold Equations” was not received coldly; it was warmly appreciated and it was hotly denounced . . . but obviously it wasn’t simply ignored! A lot of readers irately insisted on doing something to get the girl out of the jam. But evidently the general net reaction was that, whether you liked the way it worked out or not, you fell it was a good, and a strong, story! It’s seldom that a novelette—and a short novelette at that—succeeds in clawing a serial out of first place!  p. 63

8. Wikipedia has a different take on Knight’s The Country of the Kind:

The story ends with a desperate plea from the protagonist for someone, anyone to join him in his rebellion against what he perceives to be a wholly passive society, which has lost any spark of creativity or will to achieve greatness.
The story links violence to artistic expression. The protagonist “invents” drawing and sculpture, only later realizing, from old books, that these things had existed in the past, and notes that all great artists had lived in especially violent times.

I’m not sure the above analysis is correct, but I’d have to reread the story with it in mind.

9. Flowers for Algernon had a long, troubled gestation, which is detailed in Algernon, Charlie, and I: A Writer’s Journey by Daniel Keyes (F&SF, May 2000)—this article is five chapters from the book of the same name (out of twenty-three).
There is a singular anecdote: Keyes’ new agent Harry Altshuler has sent him over to Horace Gold’s flat. Gold (the editor of Galaxy) would read the manuscript while Keyes waits. Gold emerges some time later:

“The ending is too depressing for our readers,” he said. “I want you to change it. Charlie doesn’t regress. He doesn’t lose his intelligence. Instead, he remains a super-genius, marries Alice Kinnian, and they live happily ever after. That would make it a great story.”
I stared at him. How does a beginning writer respond to the editor who bought one story from him, and wants to buy a second? The years of labor over this story passed through my mind. What about my Wedge of Loneliness? My tragic vision of Book Mountain? My challenge to Aristotle’s theory of The Classic Fall?
“I’ll have to think about it,” I mumbled. “I’ll need a little time.”
“I’d like to buy it for one of the upcoming issues, but I’d need that revision. It shouldn’t take you long.”
“I’ll work on it,” I said, knowing there was no way I’d change the ending.
“Good,” he said, showing me to the door. “If not, I’m sure you’ll write other stories for Galaxy in the future.”
I called Harry Altshuler from a pay phone and told him what had happened. There was a long pause. “You know,” he said, “Horace is a fine editor, with a strong sense of the market. I agree with him. It shouldn’t be too hard to make that change.”
I wanted to shout: This story has a piece of my heart in it! But who was I to pit my judgment against professionals? The train ride back to Seagate was long and depressing.
When I told Phil Klass [William Tenn] what had happened, he shook his head. “Horace and Harry are wrong. If you dare to change the ending, I’ll get a baseball bat and break both your legs.”
“Thanks.”

Even though I’ve read this account several times, it still makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when I think how close this classic story came to being editorially mangled.

10. There other stories of failed love affairs apart from Zelazny’s that have also done well, e.g. the Hugo Award-winning A Song for Lya by George R. R. Martin.

11. Here are the star ratings I awarded (in brackets for comparison) at the time of first reading this anthology in the late-70s, early 80s:

That Only a Mother • short story by Judith Merril ()
Scanners Live in Vain • novelette by Cordwainer Smith + ()
Mars Is Heaven! • short story by Ray Bradbury + ()
The Little Black Bag • novelette by C. M. Kornbluth + ()
Born of Man and Woman • short story by Richard Matheson + ()
Coming Attraction • short story by Fritz Leiber ()
The Quest for Saint Aquin • novelette by Anthony Boucher + ()
Surface Tension • novelette by James Blish + ()
The Nine Billion Names of God • short story by Arthur C. Clarke + ()
It’s a Good Life • short story by Jerome Bixby + ()
The Cold Equations • novelette by Tom Godwin + ()
Fondly Fahrenheit • novelette by Alfred Bester + ()
The Country of the Kind • short story by Damon Knight ()
Flowers for Algernon • novelette by Daniel Keyes  ()
A Rose for Ecclesiastes • novelette by Roger Zelazny  ()

I’m becoming a slightly softer touch with age.  ●

rssrss

Thrilling Wonder Stories v25n02, Winter 1944

Summary: A poor issue with little of note—not even the three Kuttner stories are up to much. But it was nice to get acquainted with Sergeant Saturn in the letters column.
[ISFDB page] [Archive.org copy]

_____________________

Editor, Oscar J. Friend

Fiction:
A God Named Kroo • novella by Henry Kuttner ∗∗
Venusian Nightmare • short story by Oscar J. Friend [as by Ford Smith] –
The Invisible Army • novelette by Ross Rocklynne –
Trophy • short story by Henry Kuttner [as by Scott Morgan]
Moon Trap • short story by John Foster West –
Swing Your Lady • short story by Henry Kuttner [as by Kelvin Kent]
Space Command • novelette by Robert Arthur –

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Rudolph Belarski
Interior artwork • by uncredited (x7), M. Marchioni (x2), Virgil Finlay (x2)
The Reader Speaks • letters
Headliners in the Next Issue
Scientifacts • science filler
The Reasons Why • essay by Walter Lippmann
Wonders of War • war weapons filler
Meet This Issue’s Amateur Contest Prize-Winner!
The Story Behind the Story: The Invisible Army
• essay by Ross Rocklynne
The Story Behind the Story: Space Command • essay by Robert Arthur

_____________________

I picked up this issue to read the Retro Hugo Award nominated Kuttner novella, and decided to read the rest of it as there were another two of his (pseudonymous) stories here as well. Big mistake. The difference in quality between this magazine and Astounding is marked and, if other issues of Thrilling Wonder Stories and Startling Stories are as poor as this one, then I’m baffled as to how Oscar J. Friend is one of the Retro Hugo Award Best Editor finalists.

The fiction leads off with A God Named Kroo by Henry Kuttner, which isn’t science fiction but a Unknown-ish (or perhaps more accurately sub-Unknown-ish) fantasy that starts with the Himalayan god Kroo lamenting his lack of followers, lack of sacrifices, and consequential slow death. Then a white man comes and buys/requisitions the holy yak that lives in the courtyard of Kroo’s temple; the man, Dr Horace Danton, needs to get his expedition collection down from the Himalayas to the river.
Unknown to Danton and the rest of the party, Kroo tags along when they leave, and soon makes his presence felt from his position in the dark cloud above the group: when there is a landslide that sweeps the holy yak and another beast into the crevasse, Kroo levitates the former and puts it back on the track while the other yak falls to its death; later, when the local hillmen attack Danton and the others, lightning shoots out of Kroo’s cloud. Kroo then removes all doubt about his existence when he starts talking through Danton who, when he still doesn’t believe, is levitated into the air. When Kroo makes Danton his high priest, the latter complains that he needs to get back to the States, so Kroo levitates the yak as well, and off they go.

En route Kroo drops off Danton and the yak at a power station in Burma, and departs on an errand. After a night’s sleep Danton wakes up in the station to find Japanese soldiers there and, when he is taken to see Captain Yakuni, the educated and urbane Japanese officer in charge of the power plant, he finds out that WWII started while he was in the mountains exploring. While Danton is in Yakuni’s office he meets the story’s token female interest, Debbie Hadley, a spunky sort straight out of a Hollywood B-movie, and also a prisoner.
The rest of the tale plays out mostly as you would expect: Debbie updates Danton on the progress of the war and also tells him that Yakuni is using the electric powerhouse to make small potent bombs that are causing havoc for the Allies. The pair decide to escape from their confinement so they can blow up the powerhouse but, before they can progress their plan, Kroo returns from his travels and gets involved. When he again speaks through Danton, it causes trouble with Yakuni:

“Why did you come to Myapur? Why the powerhouse?” [asked Yakuni.]
“Delay not the priest of Kroo,” Danton roared abruptly.
Yakuni jerked back with a startled gasp. The soldiers moved their rifles into position.
Deborah made a hopeless, inarticulate noise and gripped Danton’s arm.
“Dan, be careful,” she gasped. “Don’t take off again. They’ll shoot you sure this time.”
“Ho,” Danton bellowed at the astounded Yakuni. “Bow down and worship Kroo. He shall protect his chosen. Their nation will prosper above all others. Obey!”
“Dr. Danton,” the Captain said carefully, rising. “I must ask you to modulate your voice. I must also request an apology. As an officer and representative of my country, I cannot allow this insult to pass.”
“Waste not words,” Danton roared. “Your allegiance henceforth is to Kroo. He shall make you mighty.”
“Don’t mind him,” Deborah whispered faintly. “He’s really crazy. You mustn’t have him shot, Captain Yakuni. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”
The officer slowly unholstered a pistol.
“I have said that I am willing to accept an apology. I am a civilized man, Miss Hadley, but I am also a servant of the Son of Heaven.”
“A false god,” Danton broke in tactlessly. “He shall be overthrown by Kroo’s might. Never dare to refer to your petty god again in Myapur, henceforth the holy sanctum of Kroo. On your knees, dog!”
Yakuni’s eyes widened.
“You die!” he said in a shocked voice, lifting his gun.  p. 28-29

The rest of the story proceeds pretty much in the same vein, complicated by the fact that Kroo considers the power station his temple, which makes it difficult for Debbie and Danton to destroy (they are both put under hypnotic conditioning by Kroo to prevent them harming the plant).
Eventually, at the end of the story (spoiler), Kroo has to fight the stronger Dynamo god, and quickly dies in the explosion. This rather perfunctory climax does, however, provide a good closing passage:

The fog was thick. It clung dankly, choking in its chill moisture, but as Kroo rode onward upon the yak he saw that it was drifting apart into rags and tatters. And now four tall figures were visible through the mist, guarding a bridge. Beyond them an arched span led into infinity. Silently the giants waited.
Bull-thewed and terrible they stood. They greeted Kroo with strange, formal gestures of welcome.
They gave their names.
Marduk and Ormazd the Flame—Osiris and Allatu of Babylon. Ormazd shook his red head and grinned at Kroo.
“We greet you, Kroo the Warrior.”
But Kroo could not speak, for a little while.
“This could not be Godsheim,” he said. “I am a little god—”
“This is the bridge to Godsheim,” Marduk told him. “Dead gods pass this way, if they are not weaklings. There is a place for you.”
Kroo’s hairy hands went out in a gesture of disbelief. “Ormazd! Tall Osiris—Marduk and Allatu! But I am not great—I might have been, in a thousand years, but I died too soon.”
“You fell in battle,” Osiris said. “You challenged the mightiest entity in all the universes. None of us has dared to meet such an opponent as slew you. Hai—you are one of us, brother. Come!”
Marduk and Ormazd flanked him. Allatu went before. Osiris followed.
And Kroo the Warrior rode across the bridge to Godsheim.  p. 42-43

This first part of this piece is average to good fantasy but, when they land en route at the power station in Burma, it becomes more of a wartime adventure and, although there are parts that aren’t bad, it mostly reads like something Kuttner made up to pay the rent. It’s not good enough to be a Retro Hugo finalist, never mind a winner.1

Venusian Nightmare by Oscar J. Friend2 opens with three men, including a cop, walking across the semi-quicksand surface of Venus after their ship  was forced to land (they can’t stop walking or they’ll sink like it did). It has some pretty awful writing:

“Could it have been a Crowder agent, then?” mused Morton.
“Why would Crowder want to kill the publicity we could give him?” demanded Doville. “This is the greatest iratrum strike anywhere in the System since the Lunar mines started playing out. Coupled with a revolutionizing method of extracting metallic iratex simply and quickly without going through the Bundersohn Process, it will make Amos Crowder the most famous man of the colonized worlds.”
“If all this is on the level,” added Carter. “The important thing right now is for us to get to the Crowder mine as soon as possible. Lucky there are no dangerous carnivores in this area. All I have in the way of a weapon is a hand ray-gun which won’t even stun a man beyond twenty paces. Your two primitive hunting knives are more of an advantage under the present circumstances.”  p. 45

When they get to the mining camp they find it deserted, and also find the spaceship of Miriam Montez, an attractive but duplicitous reporter. Then they hear a thumping noise and follow it down the mine, where they find Montez tied up.
The final act has the cave wall give way and (see cover) a Venusian Medusa’s huge face fill the hole. The men grab their damsel in distress and escape.
This is complete rubbish that was probably written to either (a) fill a pre-publication hole in the issue or (b) go with the cover painting.

The Invisible Army by Ross Rocklynne has a plot based on a passage that appears at the beginning of the story:

Shortly after the Armistice which followed World War Two, when the troops of the United Nations marched into Germany to supervise the disarmament of the citadel of Festung Europa, one million of the three million men in arms remaining to Nazi Germany had vanished into thin air.  p. 50

This comes to light in a conversation between Phil Hardesty and James Capet about a (supposedly-ex) Nazi called Maurer who came to live in America after the war. Hardesty and Capet know each other because of Hardesty’s relationship with Capet’s daughter Ileen, an investigative reporter who disappeared after taking a job as Maurer’s housekeeper.
Hardesty and Capet subsequently break into Maurer’s house to see if they can find out what happened to her and, during their search, they find a fully-equipped lab in the basement. When one of them looks down a microscope (spoiler), they see thousands of microscopic troops! While the pair observe, Maurer ambushes them with a gun and sleeping gas.
When Hardesty and Capet awake, they find that they are in the miniaturised world and, after rescuing Ileen from a tentacle waving germ, they notice the military equipment around them:

“Well, we seem to have found the missing army—more important, they’ve managed to get it on American soil.”
“And that,” said a deep voice from behind him, “is the final and most important step in blitzrieg warfare.”
Hardesty turned quickly. He knew without asking that this was General von Streiber. Beneath his transparent helmet, the man was a perfect apotheosis of the thin-lipped, cold-eyed, square-headed Prussian military type. The general stood at ease, his feet planted wide apart, undressing Ileen coolly with his stare. She colored under his gaze, moved closer to the inventor.
“Beauty,” he said pompously, “should never be chary of her charms. Young lady, I must remember to compliment Herr Maurer on the ravishing guest he has sent me. These eternal maneuvers against germs keep the men hard and fit, but they grow wearisome in time.  p. 56

Various sub-microscopic and Brownian motion adventures ensue before the German invasion plans are neutralised.
This reads like a refugee from the early 1930s.

Trophy by Henry Kuttner is the first of his two pseudonymous appearances in this issue, and starts with the Japanese ambush of a landing American aircraft—which is interrupted by a torpedo shaped flying object that causes the latter to crash. In the ensuing firefight, the only two men to survive are Major Satura, a Japanese character similar to the one used by Kuttner in A God Called Kroo (but this time a surgeon and a schemer) and Corporal Jarnegan, an American.
The rest of the story (narrated, unusually, from Satura’s point of view) involves a game of cat and mouse between the two men on the island, further complicated by various mirages or visions that Satura sees upon as he moves around (a pile of gold, a woman, a short-wave radio, a Mitsubishi Zero fighter, etc.). When Satura eventually picks up what he thinks is an automatic pistol, he finds himself transported into a silver walled cell. Once he manages to figure out how to get out, he realises he is inside the torpedo shaped vessel from earlier on. When he sees the hunting trophies hanging from the wall of the spacecraft’s cabin he leaves quickly. Then he arranges matters so that Jarnegan will be the trophy of the alien hunter and not him. Biter-bit ending.
Although this early Predator-type story sounds interesting, it is contrived and, at times, reads like anti-Japanese propaganda (which, given the times it was written in, is understandable—it’s just that the semi-stereotypical characterisation doesn’t improve the piece).

Moon Trap by John Foster West is this issue’s “Prize Winning Amateur Contest Story,” and starts with Lieutenant Cross getting a briefing from the ship’s captain about his upcoming mission on the Moon:

“You are quite aware of the situation, and your duties, Lieutenant?”
Lieutenant Cross hesitated before answering. “I am aware of my duties, sir. But not completely aware of the situation. I know that we must find a huge deposit of radium. The life of every inhabitant of United Earth depends on it. What I don’t know, sir, is why, day after day, back on Earth thousands and more thousands of people become walking automatons, why they walk until they can stand no longer. And keep moving until they die from sheer exhaustion and malnutrition. I know that most of it is shrouded in military secrecy.”  p. 74

We later learn that the malady is a nervous disorder caused by exposure to radiation from atomic combustion, and that Radium is the only known cure. As if.
The rest of the story (spoiler) has Cross land on the Moon and then fall down a long tunnel. Eventually he comes out the other side, and pendulums back and forth until he comes to a halt in the middle of the (co-incidentally) Radium-filled Moon. Once he figures out how to use timed bursts from his pistol to pendulum himself back to the surface, all that remains is to get back to the spaceship for tea and medals.
A gimmick story that should have stayed in the slushpile.

Swing Your Lady by Henry Kuttner is one of his ‘Pete Manx’ series. From a comment in the letter column, and a later remark in the story (“Make it a nice safe time, Prof. I don’t want to meet up with Lucrezia Borgia again—or Merlin!”) I get the impression that these stories pretty much take the form of Manx escaping his current day scrapes by time-travelling to different historical periods (I use the word “historical” loosely).
Manx explains his current romantic predicament to Professor Aker, operator of the time machine:

“I dunno how I got into this scrape, anyhow. I took her out once or twice and then she decides we’ll get married. Ugh, the way she looks at a guy. Like needles. She figures we’ll be married and I’ll spiel for her act.” Pete Manx laughed hollowly.
The professor seemed amused. “Why not tell her no?”
“Look,” said Mr. Manx, “let’s say you’re in a cage with Gargantua, or maybe a giant python. Talking don’t do much good. All you can do is run like blazes. And Margie’s got detectives trailing me. I tried to skip out four times—and the last time she—talked to me.” Manx gulped. “You never been talked to by a snake charmer with gimlets for eyes and a couple of baby boas twined around her neck. I argued. I begged. I said I’d make a punk husband. ‘I’ll mould you into shape,’ she says. And today’s the wedding.”  p. 86

Aker subsequently sends Pete back to the time of the Amazons and, when he arrives in the middle of a battle only to be captured by Queen Thecla, Manx realises he has exchanged one set of problems for another.
The rest of the story is a breezily and entertainingly told tale about how Manx reinvents 20th Century technologies (he electro-plates swords, manufactures a searchlight (!), makes creosote, etc.) to get the upper hand for himself and the rest of the male servants. Then, when the men finally take control, there is a Greek invasion and none of them want to fight, so it’s back to the women. There are another couple of plot twists but they are as ridiculous as the rest of the plot (using electric batteries to win wrestling matches with the Amazons, etc.).
If you can ignore the nonsense you may find some amusement here.

Space Command by Robert Arthur3 starts with Dan Harrigan, the captain of the Jupiter, writing a letter of resignation as his spaceship approaches Venus. The trip has not gone well, and this is partially because the jealous first mate has, unknown to Harrigan, undermined his command throughout the trip. This will cost Harrigan not only his job but the hand of the fleet owner’s daughter. Then an emergency causes them to force land on one of the few open spots on Venus. When the men go outside to commence repairs a huge black tentacle lifts the ship and takes it away.

The rest of the story is mostly an exobiology puzzle, which initially sees a near-lethal encounter with other “eight-ball” like aliens before Harrigan manages to work out how to use the latter to produce water (and  another alien life-form to produce oxygen) in a cave like building left by extinct indigenous life. Another scientific insight sees Harrigan and his crew manage to manufacture and explode hydrogen over the black-tentacled beast, bringing the cliff down on it and releasing their ship.
Back in port Harrigan then fights the first mate (we discover Harrigan is a boxing champion) and, because of the rest of the crew’s glowing report, he keeps his command and gets the girl.
This is a readable piece, but pretty dreadful nonetheless.

The eye-catching Cover is by Rudolph Belarski, and not bad if you like that sort of thing: the woman tied to the post is wearing a strange kind of outfit for a reporter, however.
The Interior artwork is largely uncredited but there are a two drawings attributed to M. Marchioni and two to Virgil Finlay (who, strangely, contributes the second illustration for the Arthur story but not the first). None of it really grabs me apart from the uncredited first illustration for the Arthur (which looks like Hannes Bok’s work to me).

I found The Reader Speaks letter column quite irritating to begin with. First, there seem to be an endless series of—mostly juvenile—letters that are little more than lists of favourite stories (yes, I’m aware of the irony) and, second, the column is hosted by “Sergeant Saturn,” an equally juvenile (when not disgruntled) creation who refers to the readers as “kiwis” and “pee-lots”—that’s when he’s not asking “Frog-eyes” to break out the “Xeno jug.” What also didn’t help was that I haven’t read any of the stories that the readers are talking about.
Matters improved, however, as I ploughed through the column. Jotting down the favourites from the Autumn 1943 issue helped make sense of the comments (Fredric Brown’s Daymare seemed popular, as was The Man from the Stars by Robert Moore Williams, and the amateur story prize winner The Bubble People by James Henry Carlisle, III, a one-shot wonder). Also, every now and then, there are letters about the poor quality of the column, such as this one from Don Campbele:

Dear Sarge: (to be read aloud in a high, nasal tone) “I am six years old and I read CF, TWS, SS, WPA and OFA every issue. I. have my own rating system (who hasn’t?) and it goes, in successive order of interest—Bam, Zowie, Pop, Swish, Glug, and Phooey. For the last issue of TWS—DAYMARE: Bam. The cover pic was good, too,” etc., etc.
That, Sarge, is a typical letter sent you. Please, sir, are all your readers morons or infants? F’ hevvins’ sake!
[. . .]
Now don’t get me wrong. There are some readers who appear to have one or both feet on the ground. I find that in the last ish a guy named Marty Seligson holds the same views as I. Yet, Sarge, you call him down for taking shots at those who take shots at others. I am a peaceful man, but I’m willing to join Seligson in the battle for more coherent reading material.
There was a good example of fine letter-writing from a cadet at Camp Davis, yet you buried it deep in the department where people would never read it, having grown disgusted trying to wade through the others. Put your best letters in front!
I hope you can find space for this letter. I would really like some of the Happy Gang to find out what some of us think of their literary carousings. If another missive appears to say essentially the same thing as I do, only saying it better, by all means, print that—only please don’t let those infants hog the whole department every issue.  p. 11

The Sarge replies:

So? You unload a full cargo on the old space dog and then steam out of port and leave me holding the bag, eh? Okay, Kiwi Campbele. I’ll just shake this sack of clinkers out along the path and let the other junior astrogators kick peebles around. You know, sailor, the old Sarge personally has no time for fiction. He only prints the letters which come in. If they aren’t erudite enough to suit, some of you adult critics write in more often.
What you see in it, I’m not responsible for.  p. 11

Mmm, that’s not quite right, Sarge—you’re the one padding out your magazine with endless letters-of-comment rather than paying for more fiction.
The Sarge also has this to say to Bill Stoy, who suggests that the worst parts aren’t the letters but the comments between them:

So you’re going to lay your temporary distaste for The Reader Speaks on the old Sarge, eh? You know, kiwi, it’s a thrilling experience to be like an item on sale in a bargain basement. You get pulled apart by so many different people and from so many different angles. Good thing the senior astrogator was put together on the order of Grag. Too much space lingo—not enough space lingo—too hard on the junior pee-lots—not hard enough on the junior pee-lots—too highbrow—too lowbrow—too much chatter by the Sarge—not enough chatter by the Sarge. Quick, Frog-eyes, the Xeno jug!  p. 118

A couple of the correspondents (Chad Oliver and Paul A. Carter) include their best story list for 1943 and agree on The Piper by Ray Bradbury (February), Devil’s Fiddle by N. R. de Mexico (June), The Lotus Eaters by Bolling Branham (August), and Expedition by Anthony Boucher (August). Oliver has another half dozen picks, whereas Carter just has one, Grief of Bagdad by “Kelvin Kent” (although he knows the writer is really Henry Kuttner):

After “De Wolfe of Wall Street,” I was afraid Pete had slipped for good. I see that he hadn’t. Gentle hint: Mr. Kuttner, Pete is much better when managing shady deals in the more or less remote past than when delving into paradoxes of Time. Just a suggestion.  p. 120

The column ends with the newly repositioned notes for the Science Fiction League, the Amateur Story Contest and Looking Forward (this last somewhat duplicates the Headliners feature).
I ended up quite enjoying this lively letters column.
Headliners in the Next Issue trails, among others, two stories by women, Veil of Astellar by Leigh Brackett, and the amateur prize-winner, Unsung Hero by Ruth Washburn.

Scientifacts is four pages of science facts filler. Some of it is quite interesting (how diet determines the colour of flamingos; the colour seen in insect wings is due to refraction of light; an account of the newly begun mass manufacture of penicillin, etc.), but some of it is wibble:

Professor L. H. Thomas, of Ohio State University, says that he has worked out a satisfactory theory concerning the reddish glow of light from the more distant star clusters. The dimming, reddish light—as though the stars were running away and burning out—is due, according to the professor, to a sort of “friction.” The light, coming to us from such illimitable distances, becomes weaker—tired—and thus its color turns reddish. As the light energy weakens, the more it sags toward the seventh color of the spectrum and turns reddish.
The friction is with the rubbing against so many other waves of light that the beam of a given star is buffeted about until its vibrational energy is lessened. This kind of friction Professor Thomas calls electro-magnetic in nature.  p. 82-83

There is also this acid remark regarding the astronomical use of radar:

Thus, the same beam that reported the presence of Japanese planes when they were still 135 miles distant from Pearl Harbor can report the arrival and departure of asteroids of greatly eccentric orbits.  p. 84

Ouch.

The Reasons Why by Walter Lippmann is (I suspect) a government supplied piece about War bonds, and begins with this:

The man who understands the war bonds will certainly buy them. For we can either save the money we do not have to spend now in order to live, or we shall lose it. It is one or the other.  p. 112

The man who understands that second sentence without having to think really hard about it will probably read on. After the next two equally difficult to comprehend paragraphs, I didn’t.

Wonders of War details a number of war inventions (e.g. a “safer” grenade, glider torpedoes, etc.) that I’m pretty sure never went anywhere, never mind to war.

Meet This Issue’s Amateur Contest Prize-Winner! Is a short half-page autobiographical piece from John Foster West (author of Moon Trap) and it paints a picture of an enthusiastic and industrious young man destined to become a writer or journalist. However, the article ends with this:

I am in the U. S. Army Air Corps reserve, and will become a flying cadet upon graduation from Carolina.  p. 127

West survived the war and went on to become a writer and university professor. He lived to the grand old age of 89.4
The Story Behind the Story: The Invisible Army by Ross Rocklynne is a couple of hundred words of blather about his microcosmic story.
The Story Behind the Story: Space Command by Robert Arthur points out (as I should have done in my review) that his story has this to say about the likely evolution of space travel (as seen from the mid-1940s):

“Space Command” is a story of trans-planetary rocketing which I have visualized as in the same kind of transition stage as was commercial flying in the middle twenties. Flying passed from an individualistic, daredevil phase into the scientifically coordinated, carefully supervised, business-like medium of transportation it has become.
There is no more room in it for the ‘seat-of-the-pants’ flyers who flew by guess and by God and called any landing they could walk away from a good landing. Similarly, logic indicates (anyway, my logic indicates, and who’s writing the story, anyway?) that rocketing, after being pioneered by the rough and ready boys who risk their necks cheerfully, will be taken over by the scientifically trained, highly educated men who will turn it into as safe and everyday an affair as possible.
This won’t be too safe and too everyday, space being what it is; nevertheless, the transition will be tough on the pioneers, and there’s bound to be a lot of friction between the representatives of the different orders when the time comes.  p. 129

Well, pee-lots, I’ll conclude this review by saying that this is a poor issue (all the stories bar the Kuttners are awful, and even his aren’t particularly good). It gets a rating of Phooey.

_____________________

1. There is a more positive review of Henry Kuttner’s A God Called Kroo by Cora Buhlert at Retro Science Fiction Reviews.

2. Oscar J. Friend is a nominee in this year’s Retro Hugo Awards. The other nominees are John W. Campbell, Jr., Mary Gnaedinger, Dorothy McIlwraith, Raymond A. Palmer, and W. Scott Peacock (I’ve never heard of the latter but I see that I should have—he is the editor of Planet Stories and Jungle Stories).

3. Robert Arthur would turn later turn up in F&SF with his ‘Muchinson Morks’ stories. His ISFDB page.

4. There is a John Foster West page on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine that outlines his writing career. I had a look at his novel Time Was on the Internet Archive (his writing ability improved markedly) and noticed that someone had defaced the scanned copy by scoring out or overwriting all the swear words. I’ll reserve a particularly spikey seat in Hell for the offender.

5. I’m sure that Thrilling Wonder Stories published some decent stories, but I suspect you probably had to wade through a lot of dross to find them: the next time I read an issue Frog-face better have a few jugs of Xeno ready.  ●

rssrss

The 2020 Hugo Award Short Story Finalists

Summary: The most lacklustre group of Hugo finalists I can remember reading. The only worthy nominee is Do Not Look Back, My Lion by Alix E. Harrow.

_____________________

Editors, Vanessa Rose Phin, Diana Gill, Jonathan Strahan, Lynne M. Thomas and Michael Damian Thomas, Scott H. Andrews, John Joseph Adams

Fiction:1
And Now His Lordship Is Laughing • short story by Shiv Ramdas +
As the Last I May Know • short story by S.L. Huang
Blood Is Another Word for Hunger • short story by Rivers Solomon
A Catalog of Storms • short story by Fran Wilde
Do Not Look Back, My Lion • short story by Alix E. Harrow +
Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island • short story by Nibedita Sen

_____________________

When the 2020 Hugo nominations were announced a few weeks ago it seemed pretty obvious that the awards (or the main fiction categories, at least) are still broken: for the third year running, the finalists in the novel, novella, novelette, and short story categories are almost entirely women and/or people of colour (this does not reflect the demographics of the genre, nor of those producing the best work).
Whereas previous years’ nominations nevertheless managed to include some reasonable work despite this bias, that is not the case this time around.2

The first of the Hugo finalists is And Now His Lordship Is Laughing by Shiv Ramdas (Strange Horizons, 9th September 2019). This gets off to a dull—almost attention numbing—start with an elderly Indian woman rising at dawn and working jute to create a doll for her grandson (there are subtle hints that it may have magical properties). However, things don’t really get going until a British officer turns up (at which point we realise we are in colonial India) and pressures the old woman to make one of her dolls for the wife of the regional governor. She refuses, and the officer—after telling her she will regret her decision—departs.
The story then skips forward in time to a period where the grandson is dead, the village fields burnt, and people are starving to death. Then the British arrive and force feed the grandmother. After she recovers, she learns that the British haven’t burnt the fields to pressure her to make the doll, but as a consequence of the wartime Denial of Rice Policy.3 When she learns that all India is suffering, and not just Bengal, she agrees to make a laughing doll for the Governor’s wife.
Later on, the grandmother watches the hanging tree as she makes the doll:

With the fields all gone, she can see further from the verandah than ever before, all the way to the tree. It used to be the sabha sthal, where the villagers congregated for Panchayat meetings under the broad, dangling roots. Now it’s something else entirely. Vultures peck at the swaying bodies hanging from its boughs, rats scurry around its base, gnawing at the bodies on the ground underneath it. It had started out as a place of punishment, where the British hung farmers who dared to hide rice from them. Then villagers took to hanging themselves there as well; the rope is more painless than the slow, pitiless grip of starvation. Parents hung their children, and then themselves; it was just easier that way. That was when the British burnt the jute fields, to ensure no one could make any rope. Or maybe they just enjoyed watching their victims die slowly. So people have taken to cutting down the bodies and reusing the rope. There are now almost as many corpses on the tree as leaves below it.

After the grandmother finishes the doll—the final touch involves her putting some of her blood into it—she insists on accompanying it to the Governor’s mansion to show him and his wife how to make it laugh.
The final scene is a Grand Guignol revenge spectacular that takes place at the Governor’s dinner party where, once she is among the guests (spoiler), the grandmother lets out a maniacal laugh, which causes the doll to do the same. Anyone within earshot—the old woman’s ears are plugged with jute—laughs uncontrollably, and they continue to do so until they die. This is quite an effective scene to start with but it is spoilt by the later addition of pools of blood (initially one victim bashes their head on a table—fair enough—but then the writer can’t help over-egging the pudding by having blood stream out of the Governor’s nose, eyes and mouth). This excess ruins the fantasy logic of the piece—you’d expect continual violent laughing to asphyxiate people to death, not cause blood to come spurting out of them. Why is it that fantasy writers think that they can have anything at all happen in their stories? The best are constrained by their own internal logic.
There is probably a better story hiding inside this simplistic anti-colonial revenge fantasy—one that has a more engaging start, that goes deeper into the historical issues, and which loses the phlebophilia at the end.
As the Last I May Know by S.L. Huang (Tor.com, 23rd October 2019) starts with ten year old Nyma talking to her tutor Tej: it soon becomes apparent that we are in a different world, one where this child has the control codes for her county’s “sere weapons” implanted in a capsule lodged in her heart. If their demagogue President wants to use the weapons he must personally cut the capsule out. (The backstory to this involves the founding of the Order Tej serves two hundred years previously, after the first use of sere weapons against their country. The Order’s mission is to ensure that their President faces a personal moral dilemma before using their own weapons against any attacker.)
The rest of the story has Nyma and the president meet and speak; later, a relationship of sort develops between the two. Meanwhile the war rumbles on in the background.
Eventually the conflict worsens and reaches the city, and the President calls for Nyma so (spoiler) he can use the sere weapons—but he cannot bring himself to kill her. Later, after the situation deteriorates further, Tej comes to Nyma and says that the Order has discovered a way to get the codes without harming her; Nyma refuses, saying that the decision is meant to be a difficult one. Then . . . well, then Nyma just sits there and waits. No resolution, the story just hangs in the air after setting up its moral quandary. It’s a pity the story doesn’t, for example, summarise both sides of the dilemma in the final scenes and force the reader to make a choice. Almost anything would be better than it just stopping.
The only one of the stories I’ve read so far is Blood Is Another Word for Hunger by Rivers Solomon (Tor.com, 24th July 2019). This one starts with a slave girl called Sully who massacres her mistress and her family. This action has supernatural consequences:

It was Sully’s unsoftened anger in the face of what she’d done that cut a path between dominions. The etherworld spat out a teenage girl, full grown, called Ziza into Sully’s womb. Ziza had spent the last two hundred years skulking in the land of the dead, but she rode the fury of Sully’s murders like a river current back to the world of flesh. Ziza felt it all, wind and sky and the breath of wolves against her skin. She spun through the ages looking for the present, time now foreign to her after being in a world where everything was both eternal and nonexistent.
“Yes, yes, yes!” Ziza called as she descended from the spirit realm down a tunnel made of life. Breathing things, screaming things, hot, sweaty, pulsing, moving, scampering, wild, toothy, bloody, slimy, rich, salty things. Tree branches brushed her skin. Sensation overwhelmed her as she landed with a soft, plump thud into the belly of her new god. Ziza took in the darkness, swum in it. It was nothing like the violent nothingness of her home for the past two centuries. For here she could smell, taste, feel. She could hear the cries of the girl carrying her, loud and unrelenting.
Sully had never been with child before, and she didn’t understand the pain that overtook her so sudden as she shoveled the last gallon of dirt over the graves of her masters. Spasms in her abdomen convinced her she was dying.

Sully wakes after the birth to find that Ziza has put her in bed and cleaned the house. Ziza tells Sully that, as she committed a multiple murder, she will give birth to others from the etherworld and, in due course, a boy of ten named Miles joins them. Two months later a forty-one-year-old woman named Liza Jane is “born” and, a few days later, a twin sister Bethie. Finally, an old man called Nathaniel arrives.
The group later ambush wagon trains and, for every traveller they kill, Sully births another of their kind. Eventually, they are enough of them to take on the town, which they do successfully.
The final scene (spoiler) has Sully cutting out her own uterus, burying it, killing herself, and being reborn from the soil.
This didn’t work for me, partly because Sully is not a particularly engaging central character (aside from the fact that she is a mass murderer, she spends quite a lot of time bickering with Ziza), and partly because the story is just about a lot of people getting murdered.
A Catalog of Storms by Fran Wilde (Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2019) starts with a mother and three daughters watching the Cliffhouse, and the people who have turned into “weathermen”—supernatural beings who fight the weather, and take a similar form. As the twin girls squabble, one of them blurts out that she has spoken to a weatherman, and only avoids punishment when one passes overhead and warns of a squall.
Later, this daughter joins the weathermen in the Cliffhouse; the narrator states she will be the next.
The rest of the story further describes the various family relationships (listed as storm metaphors); tells us what the weathermen do (they “name” or fight the storms to stop them); and finishes with a visit to the Cliffhouse (where the remainder of the family find storms that have been turned into brass hinges).
Although this feels somewhat Bradburyesque to start with, the story spins its wheels for the most part and doesn’t really go anywhere. I also found it a bit baffling (even after someone pointed out it is a “magical realist allegory,” I couldn’t finish a second read through). Another aspect of the story I disliked is that it is told in an irritatingly telegraphic style, with lots of one or two sentence paragraphs:

The basket I hold is made of grey and white sticks; my washing basket most days. Today it is a treasure basket. We are collecting what the weather left us.
Mumma gasps when she tugs up a floorboard to find a whole catalog of storms beaten into brass hinges.
We’ve found catalogs before, marked in pinpricks on the edge of a book and embroidered with tiny stitches in the hem of a curtain, but never so many. They sell well at market, as people think they’re lucky.
Time was, if you could name a storm, you could catch it, for a while. Beat it.
If it didn’t catch you first. So the more names in the catalog, the luckier they feel.
We’ve never sold Lillit’s first catalog. That one’s ours.

Do Not Look Back, My Lion by Alix E. Harrow (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, January 2019) opens with Eefa fleeing the city of Xot and her warrior wife Talaan:

Eefa has been a good husband, she knows, but now she is running.
She’s kept their hearth warm and their home clean. She’s prayed each dawn and dusk at the twin temples of Ukhel and Idral, serene and pious as a dove. She’s sent her wife off to war a thousand fucking times, lining the streets with the other husbands and pretending to weep with pride rather than terror.
She’s been a good healer, too, and delivered each of her wife’s four children: three great, howling daughters who latched like wolf pups to the breast and one sweet, sloe-eyed son. All of them healthy and strong, all of them given their bloody promise-scars at birth. Soon they will be marching to war alongside their mother and Eefa will be praying and weeping and waiting for them, too.

This opening limns the personal conflict that is at the centre of the story, and we learn much more about the pacifistic Eefa, her hatred of the warlike culture that pervades her society, and the conflict that takes Talaan—the people’s hero—and her near-daughters away from her.
When Eefa finds out that Talaan is pregnant once more, she forces her to agree that this new child will be a healer, and not a warrior like her near-daughters and son. Of course, the Emperor eventually visits Talaan, and insists that the sixth month pregnant Talaan goes to battlefront to help with the war. Tallan’s son (spoiler) dies there, and Eefa suffers another reversal after the birth of her near-daughter when other family members interfere in its destiny.
There is a lot of interesting world-building and character interaction packed into this engaging piece but, if it has a flaw, it is that it goes on for too long at the end; the imagined sequence where Talaan fights the Emperor after Eefa flees with the new born daughter also raises unanswered questions (if Eefa thinks Talaan is going to win the fight and change society, why would she flee?)
The only worthy finalist here.
Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island by Nibedita Sen (Nightmare Magazine, May 2019) consists of, as the title suggests, ten extracts from various books and academic journals, etc. These tell of the discovery of a female tribe of cannibals on a remote island and the shocking incident that occurs when one of the children later goes to Churchill school in Britain (spoiler: one of the English girls carves off strips of her own flesh to give to the visitor).
Most of these extracts view the incident through a particular political or cultural lens and, at times, this is mordantly amusing—as can be seen from the some of the titles (“A Love That Devours: Emma Yates and Regina Gaur,” “The Subaltern Will Speak, If You’ll Shut Up and Listen,” “Dead and Delicious II: Eat What You Want, and If People Don’t like It, Eat Them Too,” etc.). Parts of the text also raise a smile as well:

“[. . .] the problem is that we have everyone and their maiden aunt dropping critique on Ratnabar, but we’re not hearing from us, the Ratnabari diaspora ourselves. If I have to deal with one more white feminist quoting Kristeva at me . . . [. . .] No, the real problem is that our goals are fundamentally different. They want to wring significance from our lives, we just want to find a way to live. There’s not a lot of us, but we exist. We’re here. We don’t always quite see eye to eye with each other’s . . . ideology, but we’re not going anywhere, and we have to figure out what we are to each other, how we can live side by side. So why aren’t we getting published?”

Although this is clever and occasionally amusing, it’s also a slight and very short piece (1400 words), and not Hugo finalist material.

In conclusion, a poor selection of stories—mostly a mixture of the lacklustre, broken, or minor. I’ll be voting for Harrow’s story and then No Award.
As to the question of what story will actually win in this category, who knows? Harrow has the best and most reader friendly story, and the advantage of being a Hugo winner last year (this sometimes gives finalists an inertial advantage);4 if the voters decide on Buggins’ Turn they may give it to Fran Wilde, who is three-time finalist;5 alternatively, and maybe more likely given the political/cultural voting bias of some of the Hugo voters, there may be a Black Lives Matter moment which sees Solomon Rivers as the winner (as well as Jemisin in the novelette category, and Clark or Rivers in the novella).  ●

_____________________

1. Story links:
And Now His Lordship Is Laughing by Shiv Ramdas (Strange Horizons, 9 September 2019)
As the Last I May Know by S.L. Huang (Tor.com, 23 October 2019)
Blood Is Another Word for Hunger by Rivers Solomon (Tor.com, 24 July 2019)
A Catalog of Storms by Fran Wilde (Uncanny Magazine, January/February 2019)
Do Not Look Back, My Lion by Alix E. Harrow (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, January 2019)
Ten Excerpts from an Annotated Bibliography on the Cannibal Women of Ratnabar Island by Nibedita Sen (Nightmare Magazine, May 2019)

2. This was another of the group reads in my Facebook group. Very few people commented on the stories, and nearly all the comments were negative. While this may be the result of the small sample size and demography, I also note a recent longer thread in a much bigger FB group (5000 members plus) that had considerable amount of negative comment about last year’s The Calculating Stars (a lot of it from women, surprisingly). I’m beginning to wonder how much overlap there actually is between the Hugo voters and the the wider SF readership.

3. You would think, given the way the Denial of Rice policy is presented in Ramdas’s And Now His Lordship Is Laughing, that the British were idly practising their Evil Villain skills. The causes of the Bengal Famine were considerably more complicated than shown here (the reason for the scorched earth policy in Bengal was because of the anticipated Japanese invasion in the east of the country, for one thing). Wikipedia on the Bengal Famine.

4. By inertial advantage I mean, for example, Joe Haldeman receiving a Hugo for his short story Tricentennial after getting one for The Forever War the year before, etc. There are a number of these double tap award winners.

5. Wilde placed fourth in the 2017 Hugo novelette category with The Jewel and Her Lapidary (after receiving 160 nominations), and sixth in the 2019 Hugo short story category with Clearly Lettered in a Mostly Steady Hand (after receiving 69 nominations). So there is a small group of Wilde enthusiasts—but perhaps, it would seem, not widespread support.  ●

rssrss

The Science Fiction Hall of Fame volume 1, 1970, edited by Robert Silverberg, part one

Summary: This British edition of the book is the first half of the larger volume. It contains a mixed bag of stories, with very good work from Robert A. Heinlein (his ‘Future History’ story, The Roads Must Roll), Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore (the transcendent Mimsy Were the Borogoves) and A. E. van Vogt (The Weapon Shop, his best story), and good or better work from Lester del Rey (Helen O’Loy), Theodore Sturgeon (a scientist becomes a Microcosmic God), Isaac Asimov (Nightfall, a story of darkness falling on a planet with permanent daylight), Clifford D. Simak (his ‘City’ story Huddling Place) and Murray Leinster (First Contact). All of the included stories may have been considered as classics at one point in time, but I doubt that many of them deserve that description now, and certainly not the stories from Stanley G. Weinbaum and John W. Campbell.
[ISFDB link]

Other reviews:1
Charlie Brown, Locus, #55 June 3, 1970
Lester del Rey, If, September-October 1970
Algis Budrys, Galaxy, December 1970
P. Schuyler Miller, Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, March 1971
George Turner, SF Commentary, #23
Tom Easton, Analog Science Fiction and Fact, September 2003
Colin Harvey, Strange Horizons, 15 March 2004
Bud Webster, Anthopology 101: Reflections, Inspections and Dissections of SF Anthologies, (2010)
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Robert Silverberg

Fiction:
A Martian Odyssey • novelette by Stanley G. Weinbaum
Twilight
• novelette by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Helen O’Loy • short story by Lester del Rey
The Roads Must Roll
• novelette by Robert A. Heinlein
Microcosmic God • novelette by Theodore Sturgeon +
Nightfall • novelette by Isaac Asimov +
The Weapon Shop
• novelette by A. E. van Vogt
Mimsy Were the Borogoves
• novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore [as by Lewis Padgett]
Huddling Place • short story by Clifford D. Simak
Arena • novelette by Fredric Brown +
First Contact • novelette by Murray Leinster

Non-fiction:
Introduction (The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume I) • essay by Robert Silverberg

_____________________

(Note: this British version of the book contains the first half of the original The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, with the remainder collected in a second volume. I’m reviewing the UK versions because (a) I own and have previously read them, and (b) for length reasons.)

Normally when I read an anthology or magazine I start with the fiction and end with the non-fiction, but this time around I’m going to start with Robert Silverberg’s Introduction, as several of my criticisms of this anthology and its story choices tie back to this essay and the information it contains.
Silverberg starts his essay with this assertion:

This is as nearly definitive an anthology of modern science fiction stories as is likely to be compiled for quite some time.  p. ix

Why’s that then?

Its contents were chosen by vote of the membership of the Science Fiction Writers of America, an organization of some three hundred professional writers whose roster includes virtually everyone now living who has ever had science fiction published in the United States. The book you now hold represents the considered verdict of those who themselves have shaped science fiction—a roster of outstanding stories selected by people who know more intimately than any others what the criteria for excellence in science fiction should be.  p. ix

A number of questions immediately arise: why would the 300 self-selected members (overwhelmingly American) of the SFWA have a “considered verdict” that is better than all the writers, critics and thousands of fans who didn’t or couldn’t join? Do all of these 300 writers extensively read the field? (Unlikely.) If they do, and they “know more intimately than any others what the criteria for excellence in science fiction should be,” why did this group crank out so much rubbish during the period concerned? I could go on. Let’s just agree that there is no real evidence that this group is more likely to pick a definitive selection than any other.2
The next part of the introduction gives us a potted history of the SFWA and its Nebula Awards, and the decision to produce a volume to collect the notable stories produced before the awards began in 1966 (for 1965 stories).
We then get a detailed description of the selection process (look away now if you don’t like watching sausages get made): first, there was a vote on stories shorter than 15,000 words (those of longer lengths were reserved for later volumes), which produced a list of 132 stories by seventy-six writers; then all 300 writers had to select ten stories from the list, one per author, and “keeping historical perspective in mind”. This produced the following selection:

1. Nightfall, Isaac Asimov
2. A Martian Odyssey, Stanley G. Weinbaum
3. Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes
4. Microcosmic God, Theodore Sturgeon
(tie) First Contact, Murray Leinster
6. A Rose for Ecclesiastes, Roger Zelazny
7. The Roads Must Roll, Robert A. Heinlein
(tie) Mimsy Were the Borogoves, Lewis Padgett
(tie) Coming Attraction, Fritz Leiber
(tie) The Cold Equations, Tom Godwin
11. The Nine Billion Names of God, Arthur C. Clarke
12. Surface Tension, James Blish
13. The Weapon Shop, A. E. van Vogt
(tie) Twilight, John W. Campbell
15. Arena, Fredric Brown
.
(Arthur C. Clarke’s The Star would have been the fifteenth story on this list if it had not been disqualified by the presence of another Clarke story in eleventh place. Clarke was the only writer to place two stories in the top fifteen, although both Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury had two stories in the top twenty.)  p. x

Already we can see the wheels beginning to come off. Are these stories by Sturgeon, Heinlein, Leiber, and Clarke really the best these writers wrote in the pre-1965 period? Do A Martian Odyssey and Twilight really belong in the same list as Flowers for Algernon or Nightfall?
The selection procedure becomes even more muddled as editor Silverberg bodges his way through the rest of the list: Arthur Clarke’s The Star is in the top fifteen but is bumped by The Nine Billion Names of God; one writer (Bradbury, I assume) has four stories on the original ballot but none in the top twenty, so Silverberg includes Mars is Heaven, “the story that the writer himself wished to see included in the book” (this, rather than the more obvious There Will Come Soft Rains or The Sound of Thunder); another writer’s stories “made the second fifteen, one vote apart; but the story with the higher number of votes was not the story that the writer himself wished to see included in the book” (presumably that is why the middling Huddling Place is here rather than the slam-dunk Desertion).
Definitive? I think not, and this will become even more apparent when we look at the stories themselves.

“Historical perspective” means that we have a couple of clunkers to sit through before we get to anything remotely worthy. The first of these, A Martian Odyssey by Stanley G. Weinbaum (Wonder Stories, July 1934) starts with the crew of Ares discussing their explorations of the surface of Mars. Most of the conversation comes from Jarvis the chemist, who gives an account of his journey across the planet after his spaceship malfunctioned. This involves him rescuing an alien called Tweel from a “dream beast”:

All I could see then was a bunch of black ropy arms tangled around what looked like, as Putz described it to you, an ostrich. I wasn’t going to interfere, naturally; if both creatures were dangerous, I’d have one less to worry about.
“But the bird-like thing was putting up a good battle, dealing vicious blows with an eighteen-inch beak, between screeches. And besides, I caught a glimpse or two of what was on the end of those arms!” Jarvis shuddered. “But the clincher was when I noticed a little black bag or case hung about the neck of the bird-thing! It was intelligent! That or tame, I assumed. Anyway, it clinched my decision. I pulled out my automatic and fired into what I could see of its antagonist.
[. . .]
“The Martian wasn’t a bird, really. It wasn’t even bird-like, except just at first glance. It had a beak all right, and a few feathery appendages, but the beak wasn’t really a beak. It was somewhat flexible; I could see the tip bend slowly from side to side; it was almost like a cross between a beak and a trunk. It had four-toed feet, and four-fingered things— hands, you’d have to call them, and a little roundish body, and a long neck ending in a tiny head— and that beak. It stood an inch or so taller than I, and— well, Putz saw it!”
The engineer nodded. “Ja! I saw!”  p. 5

Thereafter, Jarvis and Tweel journey together across Mars, finding other exotic aliens such as the pyramid builder, the barrel beasts, etc. There is no real story, just endless description—and is consequently quite boring to read. Presumably the novel aliens were the reason this was so popular at the time.3
Next up is Twilight by John W. Campbell, Jr. (Astounding Stories, November 1934) which also uses a narrator listening to a story from a third party. The latter recounts a tale about how he picks up a hitchhiker, who turns out to be a time traveller who has visited Earth in the far future where man has lost his curiosity, and the machines run automatically.
This is an okay mood piece I suppose, but it is rather dry fare; presumably acclaimed at the time for its more reflective, action-less narrative.
Helen O’Loy by Lester del Rey (Astounding Science-Fiction, December 1938) yanks the book into the future with a more modern writing style and a good hook:

I am an old man now, but I can still see Helen as Dave unpacked her, and still hear him gasp as he looked her over.
“Man, isn’t she a beauty?”
She was beautiful, a dream in spun plastics and metals, something Keats might have seen dimly when he wrote his sonnet. If Helen of Troy had looked like that the Greeks m ust have been pikers when they launched only a thousand ships; at least, that’s what I told Dave.
“Helen of Troy, eh?” He looked at her tag. “At least it beats this thing—K2W88. Helen . . . Mmmm . . . Helen of Alloy.”
“Not much swing to that, Dave. Too many unstressed syllables in the middle. How about Helen O’Loy?”
“Helen O’Loy she is, Phil.” And that’s how it began—one part beauty, one part dream, one part science; add a stereo broadcast, stir mechanically, and the result is chaos.  p. 42

Initially the story has the two men try to upgrade an existing domestic robot before giving up and ordering Helen. However, after they modify the new arrival, she/it later watches various romances on TV, etc., and develops a clingy, over-needy love for Dave. He is eventually so ground down by Helen that he leaves to run a fruit ranch.
When the other character, Phil, has to suffer the Helen’s emotional fallout over Dave’s departure, he calls him to say that he is going to replace her/its coils. Dave has a volte-face, and comes and picks up Helen.
They live happily together until Dave dies, when Phil gets a letter from Helen:

Dear Phil,
As you know, Dave has had heart trouble for several years now. We expected him to live on just the same, but it seems that wasn’t to be. He died in my arms just before sunrise. He sent you his greetings and farewell.
I’ve one last favor to ask of you, Phil. There is only one thing for me to do when this is finished. Acid will burn out metal as well as flesh, and I’ll be dead with Dave. Please see that we are buried together, and that the morticians do not find my secret. Dave wanted it that way, too.
Poor, dear Phil. I know you loved Dave as a brother, and how you felt about me. Please don’t grieve too much for us, for we have had a happy life together, and both feel that we should cross this last bridge side by side.
With love and thanks from,
Helen  p. 51

A poignant ending to the story.
Going beyond the synopsis, this is one of three stories in the anthology (the van Vogt and the Goodwin are the others) that cause the red mist to descend in many modern readers, who take great exception at the supposedly chauvinist portrayal of Helen (Beverly Friend: “a blatant statement of woman as mere appendage to man—a walking, talking doll who performs better as an android then she could possibly do as a human”; Peter Nicholls: “a classic of sexist sf”, “one of the most unconsciously disgusting stories in the genre”.)4
If you want to be angry at this story I guess that there is enough here for you to do so—there is, at points, conflation of “domestic robot” and “woman,” not to mention comments about Helen’s beauty, etc. On the other hand, it’s also worth noting that, to begin with, the pair only want a utility robot to keep house—the choice of a female chassis is an afterthought, and picked because the previous model was a “feminine” one. And, up until two pages before the end of the story, the men are still explicitly referring to Helen as a robot—they do not see her as a woman, or certainly not entirely. It’s only in the last couple of pages that their perception of her flips and. up until that point, I suspect that Helen is meant to be seen as a slightly wonky machine—A Proud Robot, if you will. Further, what Helen becomes after watching the TV soaps and reading cheap fiction isn’t at any point portrayed as what Phil and Dave want in either a robot or an “ideal woman”—far from it: if anything they both find Helen something of a nuisance, yet they fall for her in the end.
It’s also worth remembering that this story was bashed out over an afternoon over eighty years ago, partly for the money, not as a literary statement about sexual politics, and it reflects the attitudes of the time. As to why contemporary readers liked it, I’d guess it was because (a) it’s a lightweight piece with a sentimental ending and (b) the thought of a female robot seemed pretty cool to its teenage readers (and for neat tech rather than misogynistic reasons).
If the del Rey story pulls the volume part of the way into the modern age of SF, then The Roads Must Roll by Robert A. Heinlein (Astounding Science-Fiction, June 1940), which I’ve reviewed here previously, completes the job. This novelette is set in a America crisis-crossed by high speed moving walkways introduced after the use of cars became untenable because of congestion, among other reasons:

They contained the seeds of their own destruction. Seventy million steel juggernauts, operated by imperfect human beings at high speed, are more destructive than war.  p. 58

Told from the viewpoint of Chief Engineer Gaines, who is showing a visiting Australian politician around, this tells of a rebellion by Functionalist inspired workers who shut down the high speed 100 mph lane of the rolling roads but leave the other slower lanes running. Gaines and his guest are at a restaurant situated on this strip when it comes to a halt. They go outside to see what is happening on the stationary roadway:

The crowd surged, and pushed against a middle-aged woman on its outer edge. In attempting to recover her balance she put one foot over the edge of the flashing ninety-five-mile strip. She realized her gruesome error, for she screamed before her foot touched the ribbon.
She spun around and landed heavily on the moving strip, and was rolled by it, as the strip attempted to impart to her mass, at one blow, a velocity of ninety-five miles per hour—one hundred and thirty-nine feet per second. As she rolled she mowed down some of the cardboard figures as a sickle strikes a stand of grass. Quickly, she was out of sight, her identity, her injuries, and her fate undetermined, and already remote.
But the consequences of her mishap were not done with. One of the flickering cardboard figures bowled over by her relative moment fell toward the hundred-mile strip, slammed into the shockbound crowd, and suddenly appeared as a live man—but broken and bleeding—amidst the luckless, fallen victims whose bodies had checked his wild flight.  p. 65

The rest of the story is an exciting account of Gaines and the paramilitary transport engineers putting down the revolution.
I’d have to say that the rolling roads idea isn’t completely convincing at first but it grows on you as the story develops and, by the time I finished the passage above, I was hooked! If I have one minor criticism of this it is the slightly unconvincing climactic encounter between the ring-leader, Van Kleeck, and Gaines which, by the way, echoes If This Goes On— in that Gaines uses psychological information from his opponents personnel file to manipulate him. Another similarity to that other story is a reference to mob psychology:

Personnel did not behave erratically without a reason. One man might be unpredictable, but in large numbers personnel were as dependable as machines, or figures.  p. 81

The best story in the book so far.
Microcosmic God by Theodore Sturgeon5 (Astounding Science-Fiction, April 1941) is a story I’ve read before but didn’t remember and, when I reread it here, I realised that may be because George R. R. Martin’s superior Sandkings has replaced it in my memory.
Sturgeon’s piece tells the story of Kidder, a genius scientist who moves to a remote island and breeds a race of miniature beings, called Neoterics, which live and evolve much more rapidly than humans. Kidder does this so he can harvest their inventions and, initially, Conant, his sole human contact at the bank, is pleased. However, Conant wants more than his job as President of the company—he is a man with political ambitions, and so asks Kidder to invent a new power source. When Kidder does so, but announces he isn’t going to pursue it, Conant arrives on the island with a couple of thugs and takes the device. He then tells Kidder to build a power plant, or the island will be bombed. Conant later blackmails the President and mounts a coup d’état, something that Kidder overhears via the bugged radio device he uses to communicate with Conant.
Parallel to this we learn about the development of the Neoterics (improved by the regular genocides Kidder commits to improve the quality of his stock), and the religion that they develop to worship their creator. Towards the end of the story (spoiler) Kidder instructs the Neoterics to create a force shield, and they are eventually cut-off from the world.
This isn’t a bad story—in fact parts of it are pretty good—but it’s not a classic. The extended opening section, which gives an account of Kidder’s (and Conant’s associated) rise, is just a data dump, and far too much of the story is concerned with pulp power-play shenanigans between the two men. It’s pretty obvious that the average SF reader’s interest would be in the sections of the story that concern the Neoterics, an area that George R. R. Martin focused on more in his later tale. What is also notable in the two stories is the cruelty shown by both men to their creations. In the Martin story, if I recall correctly, this is shown as a negative character trait, whereas in the Sturgeon it isn’t commented upon at all. Different times.
Nightfall by Isaac Asimov (Astounding Science-Fiction, September 1941) is the story that, historically, has always come top of polls for the best SF short story (for one such example, see the list above). Set on the planet Lagash, where is perpetually daylight (it is in a solar system with six suns), the story concerns Aton 77’s reports on the upcoming eclipse of Beta, the one remaining sun in the sky at that point in the planetary cycle. This eclipse will cause complete darkness on the planet, an unknown phenomenon for the people who live there.
Theremon 762, a reporter who is following the story, tries to get an interview with Aton 77 at the observatory, but the latter angrily refuses due to previous unflattering articles. Theremon ends up talking to a psychologist called Sheerin and, while the astronomers prepare for the eclipse, the two talking heads discuss a number of matters: the unseen and hitherto unknown dark planet that will cause the eclipse; what will happen to members of their race when they experience total darkness (insanity); archaeological records which suggest that previous civilizations have risen and fallen according to a two thousand and forty nine year cycle—something that matches up with the Cult’s Book of Revelations; and so on.
These building blocks are all skilfully deployed before events start spiralling out of control. Then, two astronomers return from a failed darkness experiment that did not yield the expected results, and a Cultist breaks in and smashes the astronomers’ “heretical” photographic plates. Theremon and Sheerin still have time, however, for a quick conversation about how the Cultists managed to get the information for their Book of Revelations, a passage that amusingly shows Asimov’s atheism at work:

“How do the Cultists manage to keep the ‘Book of Revelations’ going from cycle to cycle, and how on Lagash did it get written in the first place? There must have been some sort of immunity, for if everyone had gone mad, who would be left to write the book?”
Sheerin stared at his questioner ruefully. “Well, now, young man, there isn’t any eyewitness answer to that, but we’ve got a few damned good notions as to what happened. You see, there are three kinds of people who might remain relatively unaffected. First, the very few who don’t see the Stars at all; the blind, those who drink themselves into a stupor at the beginning of the eclipse and remain so to the end. We leave them out—because they aren’t really witnesses.
“Then there are children below six, to whom the world as a whole is too new and strange for them to be too frightened at Stars and Darkness. They would be just another item in an already surprising world. You see that, don’t you?”
The other nodded doubtfully. “I suppose so.”
“Lastly, there are those whose minds are too coarsely grained to be entirely toppled. The very insensitive would be scarcely affected—oh, such people as some of our older, work-broken peasants. Well, the children would have fugitive memories, and that, combined with the confused, incoherent babblings of the half-mad morons, formed the basis for the ‘Book of Revelations.’
“Naturally, the book was based, in the first place, on the testimony of those least qualified to serve as historians; that is, children and morons; and was probably extensively edited and re-edited through the cycles.”  pp. 132-133

The story ends (spoiler) with the eclipse starting, a mob approaching from the city, and all the astronomers going mad because of the darkness . . . and the millions of stars that become visible.
It’s a very good, if uneven piece, whether or not you entirely buy the idea of darkness and stars causing madness.
Of the five remaining stories, the only one I haven’t reviewed previously is First Contact by Murray Leinster (Astounding Science-Fiction, May 1945), so I’ll comment on that now and cut and paste the other reviews in afterwards.
Leinster’s story opens onboard an FTL space ship on an exploration trip to a star in the Crab Nebula. There, Tommy Dort, the navigator, has just finished taking a series of photos showing its development over 4000 years when the crew detect another ship coming towards them—a first contact with aliens. Both ships come to a halt at some distance from each other, and the alien ship sends an object to the halfway point between them. Dort’s captain (something of a drama queen) asks Dort to go and examine it. He finds that the aliens have sent out a viewing screen, so his captain does the same, and the two sides begin communicating.
Throughout all this an atmosphere of paranoia reigns throughout the ship—Dort’s captain doesn’t want to reveal, by turning tail and heading for home, or by being captured, where Earth is—for fear of an alien invasion. When the Earth crew finally communicate with the other ship they find the aliens have similar concerns. The rest of the story revolves around the further communications between the ships (including a friendship that develops between Tommy and one of the aliens he calls “Buck”), and the plan that Dort comes up with to let both ships go home.
This has a number of things that don’t work that well, the first of which is the suspicious and adversarial setup between the humans and the aliens: the latter seem too much like us (and if this had appeared a few years later, it would be easy to view the encounter as a thinly veiled Cold War standoff). I also found the ending unlikely and contrived (spoiler: both sides plan to blow up each other’s ships unless they agree to a mutual exchange). Finally, the two non-experts dispatched to deal with the translation problem do so far too quickly.
On the other hand, this story some good astronomical description:

The nebula itself was the result of the most titanic explosion of which men have any knowledge. The explosion took place sometime in the year 2946 B. C., before the first of the seven cities of long-dead Ilium was even thought of. The light of that explosion reached Earth in the year 1054 A. D., and was duly recorded in ecclesiastic annals and somewhat more reliably by Chinese court astronomers. It was bright enough to be seen in daylight for twenty-three successive days. Its light—and it was four thousand light-years away—was brighter than that of Venus.
From these facts, astronomers could calculate nine hundred years later the violence of the detonation. Matter blown away from the center of the explosion would have traveled outward at the rate of two million three hundred thousand miles an hour; more than thirty-eight thousand miles a minute; something over six hundred thirty-eight miles per second. When twentieth-century telescopes were turned upon the scene of this vast explosion, only a double star remained—and the nebula. The brighter star of the doublet was almost unique in having so high a surface temperature that it showed no spectrum lines at all. It had a continuous spectrum.
Sol’s surface temperature is about 7,000° Absolute. That of the hot white star is 500,000 degrees. It has nearly the mass of the sun, but only one fifth its diameter, so that its density is one hundred seventy-three times that of water, sixteen times that of lead, and eight times that of iridium—the heaviest substance known on Earth. But even this density is not that of a dwarf white star like the companion of Sirius. The white star in the Crab Nebula is an incomplete dwarf; it is a star still in the act of collapsing. Examination—including the survey of a four-thousand-year column of its light—was worthwhile. The Llanvabon had come to make that examination.  pp. 259-260

The first of the other four previously reviewed stories is The Weapon Shop by A. E. van Vogt (Astounding Science-Fiction, December 1942).
This begins with an opening paragraph that gives us several pieces of information:

The village at night made a curiously timeless picture. Fara walked contentedly beside his wife along the street. The air was like wine; and he was thinking dimly of the artist who had come up from Imperial City, and made what the telestats called—he remembered the phrase vividly—“a symbolic painting reminiscent of a scene in the electrical age of seven thousand years ago.”  p. 144

However, the couple’s pleasant evening walk is interrupted when Fara notices a newly opened Weapon Shop in a side street. Fara, a loyal supporter of the Empress, is enraged at this desecration of his timeless home by an organisation that does not recognise her authority. As a crowd gathers outside the shop he becomes even angrier when neither the townspeople nor the constable take any action. The latter states it is impossible to break into the shops, so Fara goes home and returns with an atomic cutting torch, which fails to get them inside.
Then one of the bystanders states that the Weapon Shop doors only open for those who will not harm the occupants and Fara, though he ridicules the statement, reaches forward and attempts to open the door. It opens. However, when he urges the constable go inside and arrest the owners, the door slams shut again. Fara grabs the doorknob once more, which gives us one of the story’s great images:

Fara stared stupidly at his hand, which was still clenched. And then, slowly, a hideous thrill coursed along his nerves. The knob had—withdrawn. It had twisted, become viscous, and slipped amorphously from his straining fingers. Even the memory of that brief sensation gave him a feeling of unnormal things.  p. 149

He tries the handle again but the door remains locked, and then his mood rapidly changes from anger to fear as he realises that maybe even the soldiers of the empress would be powerless in this situation. At that point he tries the handle again, and this time gains entry.
Inside the shop more unsettling events await Fara. He meets a silver-haired man and, quickly collecting himself, Fara tells him he wants to buy a gun for hunting. He is met with a recitation of the bye-laws that the Weapon Shops impose with respect to the use of their weapons (they can only be used defensively, or for hunting). When Fara eventually gets hold of a gun he turns it on the silver-haired man. The latter barely reacts, but starts discussing Fara with a man standing at the rear of the shop. They conclude that his one-sided outlook about the Empire would be difficult to change, and finish by showing him a disturbing vision of the Empress in the metropolis arranging for the murder of one of her ex-lovers. Fara is then ejected out of a side door. Worse is to come: when Fara gets home he finds out that the Weapon Shop has put out black propaganda on the telestat about him being the shop’s first customer.
All of this is a great start to the story: having started with a couple enjoying a bucolic evening walk in the village, we are quickly introduced to the enigmatic Weapon Shops and their near magical technology, and also shown the dark underbelly of the ruling Empire.
The subsequent narrative arc (multiple spoilers) has Fara slowly fall from grace: his son (there is ongoing familial strife that helps ground the story) ends up taking a huge amount of money from his account. Fara takes a loan from the bank to cover this and then loses his business to a large competitor when they buy the loan and foreclose.
After the local court treats him badly, and his mother-in-law refuses to offer any financial support, he ends up going to back to the Weapon Shop to buy a gun so he can commit suicide. After his purchase he finds himself transported to the off-world site and finds himself standing in front of a huge machine:

A machine, oh, a machine—
His brain lifted up, up in his effort to grasp the tremendousness of the dull-metaled immensity of what was spread here under a summer sun beneath a sky as blue as a remote southern sea.
The machine towered into the heavens, five great tiers of metal, each a hundred feet high; and the superbly streamlined five hundred feet ended in a peak of light, a gorgeous spire that tilted straight up a sheer two hundred feet farther, and matched the very sun for brightness.
And it was a machine, not a building, because the whole lower tier was alive with shimmering lights, mostly green, but sprinkled colorfully with red and occasionally a blue and yellow.   Twice, as Fara watched, green lights directly in front of him flashed unscintillatingly into red.
The second tier was alive with white and red lights, although there were only a fraction as many lights as on the lowest tier. The third section had on its dull-metal surface only blue and yellow lights; they twinkled softly here and there over the vast area.
The fourth tier was a series of signs, that brought the beginning of comprehension. The whole sign was:
WHITE — BIRTHS
RED — DEATHS
GREEN — LIVING
BLUE — IMMIGRATION TO EARTH
YELLOW — EMIGRATION
The fifth tier was also all sign, finally explaining :
POPULATIONS
SOLAR SYSTEM 19,174,463,747
EARTH 11,193,247,361
MARS 1,097,298,604
VENUS 5,141,053,811
MOONS 1,742,863,971
The numbers changed, even as he looked at them, leaping up and down, shifting below and above what they had first been. People were dying, being born, moving to Mars, to Venus, to the moons of Jupiter, to Earth’s moon, and others coming back again, landing minute by minute in the thousands of spaceports. Life went on in its gigantic fashion—and here was the stupendous record.  pp. 169-170

This is a scene that has perhaps become more credible in the age of meta-data than it was when I first read it many years ago.
A passer-by tells Fara he is at the Weapon Shop courts. As Fara subsequently completes a number of  interviews and court procedures, he receives justice and restitution for a conspiracy he was unaware of between the bank and the company that bought his shop. We also find out a lot more about the Weapon Shops and what they do.
The most intriguing thing about this section is that Van Vogt doesn’t go for the easy option of the Weapon Shops as a government-in-waiting, or a resistance movement waiting to usurp the Empress and take over power, but instead paints them as an near-omnipotent, altruistic and almost neutral organisation. As well as being warned about any future bad-mouthing of Her Majesty, they tell him:

It is important to understand that we do not interfere in the main stream of human existence. We right wrongs; we act as a barrier between the people and their more ruthless exploiters.
[. . .]
People always have the kind of government they want. When they want change, they must change it. As always we shall remain an incorruptible core—and I mean that literally; we have a psychological machine that never lies about a man’s character—I repeat, an incorruptible core of human idealism, devoted to relieving the ills that arise inevitably under any form of government.  p. 176

I liked this story a lot, in particular its almost dreamlike progression. One of his best.
Mimsy Were the Borogoves by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (Astounding Science-Fiction, February 1943) starts off with a similar time-travel idea to the earlier The Twonky (Astounding, September 1942). In this story a man from millions of years in the future sends two experimental time machines back into the past, using his children’s cast-off educational toys as ballast. One of the machines—an odd looking box—is found in 1942 by a seven-year old boy called Scott playing hooky from school.
Initially the events in the story are those you would expect from an archetypal two-parent, two-child family situation and all that entails (the odd questions children ask, the illegible scribbles that Scott’s two year old sister Emma writes, and that he can understand but the adults can’t, etc.). Eventually the parents begin to notice the children’s increasingly odd behaviour, especially in their interactions with the strange toys:

“Any homework?”
“N-no,” Scott said, flushing guiltily. To cover his embarrassment he took from his pocket a gadget he had found in the box, and began to unfold it. The result resembled a tesseract, strung with beads. Paradine didn’t see it at first, but Emma did. She wanted to play with it.
“No. Lay off, Slug,” Scott ordered. “You can watch me.” He fumbled with the beads, making soft, interested noises. Emma extended a fat forefinger and yelped.
“Scotty,” Paradine said warningly.
“I didn’t hurt her.”
“Bit me. It did,” Emma mourned.
Paradine looked up. He frowned, staring. What in—
“Is that an abacus?” he asked. “Let’s see it, please.”
Somewhat unwillingly Scott brought the gadget across to his father’s chair. Paradine blinked. The “abacus,” unfolded, was more than a foot square, composed of thin, rigid wires that interlocked here and there. On the wires the colored beads were strung. They could be slid back and forth, and from one support to another, even at the points of jointure. But—a pierced bead couldn’t cross interlocking wires—
So, apparently, they weren’t pierced. Paradine looked closer. Each small sphere had a deep groove running around it, so that it could be revolved and slid along the wire at the same time. Paradine tried to pull one free. It clung as though magnetically. Iron? It looked more like plastic.
The framework itself— Paradine wasn’t a mathematician. But the angles formed by the wires were vaguely shocking, in their ridiculous lack of Euclidean logic. They were a maze. Perhaps that’s what the gadget was—a puzzle.  p. 186

The couple later become so concerned about their children’s behaviour that Paradine asks a psychologist colleague called Holloway for help. Holloway causes them more disquiet with his rambling (and rather unlikely, to be honest) speculations that the toys are from elsewhere in space or time, his musings on non-Euclidean space, and lectures on how children think differently. He does, however, recommend that the toys are taken away from the two children.
However, the children’s thought processes have gone past a critical point, and Emma, the two year old, gets Scott to start collecting various objects for her:

Scott kept bringing gadgets to Emma for her approval. Usually she’d shake her head. Sometimes she would look doubtful. Very occasionally she would signify agreement. Then there would be an hour of laborious, crazy scribbling on scraps of note paper, and Scott, after studying the notations, would arrange and rearrange his rocks, bits of machinery, candle ends, and assorted junk. Each day the maid cleaned them away, and each day Scott began again.
He condescended to explain a little to his puzzled father, who could see no rhyme or reason in the game.
“But why this pebble right here?”
“It’s hard and round, dad. It belongs there.”
“So is this one hard and round.
“Well, that’s got vaseline on it. When you get that far, you can’t see just a hard round thing.”
“What comes next? This candle?”
Scott looked disgusted. “That’s toward the end. The iron ring’s next.”
It was, Paradine thought, like a Scout trail through the woods, markers in a labyrinth. But here again was the random factor. Logic halted—familiar logic—at Scott’s motives in arranging the junk as he did.
Paradine went out. Over his shoulder he saw Scott pull a crumpled piece of paper and a pencil from his pocket, and head for Emma, who was squatted in a corner thinking things over.  p. 206

There is another hint of what the toys are teaching the children to do (spoiler) in a later conversation between Paradine and Scott, when the boy asks about eels’ and salmons’ reproductive behaviour, where they lay their eggs, and why, when it is time to breed, they don’t just “send their eggs” back. This is followed by more questions, concluding with one about why people live on Earth. When Paradine asks if he means “And not the other planets?”, he gets this chilling reply:

Scott was hesitant. “This is only—part—of the big place. It’s like the river where the salmon go. Why don’t people go on down to the ocean when they grow up?”
Paradine realized that Scott was speaking figuratively. He felt a brief chill. The—ocean?  p. 205

Before the climax of the story there is a short section which details what happened to the first time machine/box sent into the past: this has a girl telling her Uncle Charles a nonsense rhyme she has made up. The two are Charles Dodgson (“Lewis Carroll”), and Alice Pleasance Liddell (the Alice of Alice in Wonderland): the poem later produced is Jabberwocky.7 This sequence sets up the end of the story:

Downstairs the telephone stopped its shrill, monotonous ringing. Paradine looked at the paper he held.
It was a leaf torn from a book. There were interlineations and marginal notes, in Emma’s meaningless scrawl. A stanza of verse had been so underlined and scribbled over that it was almost illegible, but Paradine was thoroughly familiar with “Through the Looking Glass.” His memory gave him the words‍
.
Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimbel in the wabe.
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe
.
Idiotically he thought: Humpty Dumpty explained it. A wabe is the plot of grass around a sundial. A sundial. Time— It has something to do with time. A long time ago Scotty asked me what a wabe was. Symbolism.
Twas brillig—
A perfect mathematical formula, giving all the conditions, in symbolism the children had finally understood. The junk on the floor. The toves had to be made slithy—vaseline?—and they had to be placed in a certain relationship, so that they’d gyre and gimbel.
Lunacy!
But it had not been lunacy to Emma and Scott. They thought differently. They used x logic. Those notes Emma had made on the page—she’d translated Carroll’s words into symbols both she and Scott could understand. The random factor had made sense to the children. They had fulfilled the conditions of the time-span equation. And the mome raths outgrabe—
Paradine made a rather ghastly little sound, deep in his throat. He looked at the crazy pattern on the carpet. If he could follow it, as the kids had done But he couldn’t. The pattern was senseless. The random factor defeated him. He was conditioned to Euclid.
Even if he went insane, he still couldn’t do it. It would be the wrong kind of lunacy. His mind had stopped working now. But in a moment the stasis of incredulous horror would pass— Paradine crumpled the page in his fingers. “Emma, Scotty,” he called in a dead voice, as though he could expect no response.
Sunlight slanted through the open windows, brightening the golden pelt of Mr. Bear. Downstairs the ringing of the telephone began again.  p. 207-208

This is a story deserving of its classic status for its transcendent ending if nothing else. That said, it is a bit baggy in places (Holloway’s comments are more discursive than needed) and, in general, it feels longer than necessary.
I note in passing that there are also some interesting and atypical observations about children8.
Huddling Place by Clifford D. Simak (Astounding Science-Fiction, July 1944) is the second in his ‘City’ series, and opens with Jerome A. Webster at the funeral of Nelson F. Webster in 2117. After this, we get an update on societal conditions:

John J., the first John J., had come after the breakup of the cities, after men had forsaken, once and for all, the twentieth century huddling places, had broken free of the tribal instinct to stick together in one cave or in one clearing against a common foe or a common fear. An instinct that had become outmoded, for there were no fears or foes. Man revolting against the herd instinct economic and social conditions had impressed upon him in ages past. A new security and a new sufficiency had made it possible to break away.
The trend had started back in the twentieth century, more than two hundred years before, when men moved to country homes to get fresh air and elbow room and a graciousness in life that communal existence, in its strictest sense, never had given them.
And here was the end result. A quiet living. A peace that could only come with good things. The sort of life that men had yearned for years to have. A manorial existence, based on old family homes and leisurely acres, with atomics supplying power and robots in place of serfs.  p. 212

The story continues with Webster in his study, where he has a virtual teleconference with Juwain, a philosopher friend who lives on Mars. They discuss Webster’s reluctance to visit him there, and also Webster’s son’s upcoming visit to the planet. When Webster later goes to see his son depart at the spaceport he has an agoraphobia attack and, as he tries to get Jenkins to arrange transport home, he is told that his father and grandfather suffered the same condition.
The rest of the story pivots around Webster’s condition. He writes an article pointing out that almost no-one wants to leave home nowadays. Then (spoiler), an old acquaintance called Claybourne calls from Mars, and tells Webster, a surgeon, that he is needed to perform an life-saving operation on Juwain. Webster says he can’t come, but Claybourne says that Juwain is on the verge of a philosophical breakthrough that is vital to humanity, and that a ship will come to pick him up.
Webster packs for the trip and tries to control his agoraphobia. After he has been waiting for some time, Jenkins tells him that two men arrived earlier to pick him up, but the robot told them that Webster couldn’t possibly go. The story ends with this:

Webster stiffened, felt chill fear gripping at his heart. Hands groping for the edge of the desk, he sat down in the chair, sensed the walls of the room closing in about him, a trap that would never let him go.  p. 224

Arena by Fredric Brown (Astounding Science-Fiction, June 1944) opens with Carson, a scout ship pilot, engaging an alien Outsider warship beyond the orbit of Pluto—then he wakes up naked, lying on blue sand under a blue dome, and notices a red spherical object in the distance.
Carson hears a disembodied voice which says that the speaker, an alien super-being, chanced upon the human and the Outsider fleets about to destroy each other. Rather than allowing this mutual destruction to occur (neither the human race or Outsiders would win outright, and both races would be left crippled by the encounter), the super-being decrees that Carson and an Outsider (the red sphere) will engage in single combat: the loser’s race will be annihilated, leaving the victor’s unscathed.
The rest of the story tells of the fight between the Carson and the Outsider, which starts when the “Roller” moves towards him but is stopped by a force field. The pair throw rocks at each other for a while, and then the Outsider lobs a decapitated blue lizard which it caught and killed.
As the rest of the story unfolds, Carson becomes increasingly weak and thirsty, and makes an unsuccessful attempt at negotiating peace (Carson can sense the Outsider’s malevolent emotions in response). He also experiments to see what will pass through the force field. Eventually, Carson passes out, but comes round again when one of the lizards in the dome approaches him:

“Hello,” said the voice.
It was a small, thin voice. It sounded like—
He opened his eyes and turned his head. It was a lizard.
“Go away,” Carson wanted to say. “Go away; you’re not really there, or you’re there but not really talking. I’m imagining things again.”
But he couldn’t talk; his throat and tongue were past all speech with the dryness. He closed his eyes again.
“Hurt,” said the voice. “Kill. Hurt—kill. Come.”
He opened his eyes again. The blue ten-legged lizard was still there.
It ran a little way along the barrier, came back, started off again, and came back.
“Hurt,” it said. “Kill. Come.”
Again it started off, and came back. Obviously it wanted Carson to follow it along the barrier.
He closed his eyes again. The voice kept on. The same three meaningless words. Each time he opened his eyes, it ran off and came back.
“Hurt. Kill. Come.”
Carson groaned. There would be no peace unless he followed the blasted thing. Like it wanted him to.
He followed it, crawling. Another sound, a high-pitched squealing, came to his ears and grew louder.
There was something lying in the sand, writhing, squealing. Something small, blue, that looked like a lizard and yet didn’t—
Then he saw what it was—the lizard whose legs the Roller had pulled off, so long ago. But it wasn’t dead; it had come back to life and was wriggling and screaming in agony.
“Hurt,” said the other lizard. “Hurt. Kill. Kill.”
Carson understood. He took the flint knife from his belt and killed the tortured creature. The live lizard scurried off quickly.  pp. 244-245

Carson (spoiler) then has an epiphany about the nature of the force-field, and renders himself temporarily unconscious to get through the force field.
This is an inventive and entertaining story, and is much better than the later Star Trek episode (which made Brown’s story more famous today than it might otherwise have been).9

In conclusion, a mixed bag of stories, and one selected by parochial10 (none of their choices comes from outside the American SF magazines) and rose coloured spectacle-wearing voters. A better choice of anthology would be the Asimov and Greenberg’s Best Science Fiction series, whose 25 volumes run from 1938 to 1963. God knows that is far from perfect, but the series will give you a better idea of what the field’s best stories are than this.  ●

_____________________

1. Lester del Rey one of the contributors, begins his review (If, September-October 1970) with some interesting history:

Back in 1946, when only a few fan publishers were trying to bring out science fiction, Random House issued Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas. It was a huge book, containing 997 pages of fiction, totaling almost half a million words. There were 35 stories, culled from the virgin territory of all the science-fiction magazine work published to that date. And it sold, as I remember, for $2.95!
Whenever librarians ask me to submit a list of science-fiction books they should stock, this ancient anthology heads the list. Until very recently, at least, it was still available in the Modern Library edition (under a different title—Famous Science Fiction, I believe—and less a couple of stories that don’t matter that much). It’s a book that should still be on the shelves of every genuine fan of the field; if you don’t have it, get it-new or secondhand, it’s still a great bargain.
During the same year another anthology appeared—this edited by Groff Conklin and put out by Crown Publishers: The Best of Science Fiction. It wasn’t quite the huge bargain the first was and Groff had sometimes been unable to get the stories he wanted because they were already purchased for the earlier book. But its success in the market and in sales to libraries also helped to convince publishers that there was money to be made in this crazy field.
Since then there have been hordes of anthologies. Some, like Groff Conklin’s excellent later ones, were gathered with love and by means of diligent reading of the magazines. Some were put together shoddily by mining earlier anthologies. A few have been simply excuses to get stories by a clique into print. p. 64

Ah, the “clique” comment will be him have another go at the Orbit series, edited by Damon Knight (see footnote 2 below). He goes on to have a moan about current theme anthologies and those with “extraneous” matter to pad out them out.
When he finally gets around to this volume he says, “I’m forced to give it a rave review on its merits”, and goes on to add:

Silverberg did the work of collating their responses and the present book represents his efforts at putting together the results of the summed judgment of the professionals in the field. He did his work brilliantly and I cannot but agree with the few cases where he admitted to the need of some personal weighing of the results.  p. 65

He adds this about the voting in the first few years of the Nebula:

Actually they’re a lot better in my opinion than some of the stories that have won [the Nebula Award]—and represent a far more balanced judgment. Apparently time and distance have removed the personal angles that must so often motivate the voting for current awards, and the result is a list of some genuine classics.  p. 66

He would say that of course, as this volume has no New Wave stories (again, see the comment from Judy del Rey in footnote 2 below).
Of the stories themselves he says that Weinbaum’s A Martian Odyssey is “revolutionary”, that Campbell’s Twilight inspired his first fan letter. Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God is del Rey’s favourite Sturgeon piece, but that he agrees with Asimov that he has written better stories than Nightfall. Van Vogt’s story “has some of his best writing and, in my opinion, all of his best characterization,” and Mimsy Were the Borogoves “was something of a key story also, since there were a number of imitations in handling and intent to follow that.” Before coming to an end he comments that “The next decade from 1944 to 1953 seems to be more a period of consolidation” before singling out Scanners Live in Vain as “one great innovation.”

The Algis Budrys review (Galaxy, December 1970) is also interesting, because I’m not quite sure whether he liked the volume or not, especially when he comes out with comments like this:

Then we have several stories that are outright stunts; venture to say duds That Only a Mother, Born of Man and Woman, Mars is Heaven! and The Nine Billion Names of God. (The Star placed 15th in overall standings, and is Clarke at his best short-story level, only one cut below his talent as a novelist. But Nine Billion placed eleventh and is therefore exhumed here. This my stomach cannot reconcile with any pretense of a professional appraisal).  p. 94

P. Schuyler Miller (Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact, March 1971) says this:

I don’t think good early science fiction is adequately represented— there are only three stories published before 1940—but the book was deliberately planned as a definitive anthology of modern SF. Stanley Weinbaum’s “A Martian Odyssey,” John Campbell’s “Twilight,” and Lester del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy” are certainly as modem as anything published today.
My judgment doesn’t always match the judgment of my peers. I can’t see choosing Bradbury’s “Mars Is Heaven” over “There Will Come Soft Rains.” I’d have picked Van Vogt’s “Black Destroyer” over “The Weapon Shop,” and I’d have preferred a couple of Cordwainer Smith’s other stories to “Scanners Live in Vain,” which was his first.  p. 171

George Turner, SF Commentary, #23 takes issue with several of the choices (although, to be honest, his aren’t much better) before observing:

All of which impels me to stick my neck out and make a guess; that the voters, who are all sf writers, did what you and I might do under the same circumstances—picked the tales which lingered in the memory rather than got down to business and really winnowed out the best.
Thus Blish is predictably represented by Surface Tension (whose popularity has always puzzled him, so he says). But where, oh where, is the much more subtly marvellous Common Time? Shame upon the SFWA!  p. 13

Finally, Colin Harvey’s piece in Strange Horizons, 15 March 2004 is worth a skim for a more modern take on the book.

2. The SFWA has, at various times in its history, been as dodgy an electorate as any other—as one can see from the high correlation of peculiar winners to individuals holding office in the organisation (who conveniently had access to the mailing list of members)—and that’s before you factor in the tendency for a group of professionals to engage in “Buggins’ Turn” (see the Wikipedia article).
Let us also not forget that roughly the same set of voters made sure that the 1971 Nebula Award short story result was “No Award” so that none of the “New Wave” nominees would win, a partisan act that led to the mortifying scene where Isaac Asimov announced Gene Wolfe’s The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories as the winner at the Nebula Awards before having to correct himself.
As Gardner Dozois recalls in Jo Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugos:

I was there, sitting at Gene Wolfe’s table, in fact. He’d actually stood up, and was starting to walk toward the podium, when Isaac was told about his mistake. Gene shrugged and sat down quietly, like the gentleman he is, while Isaac stammered an explanation of what had happened. It was the one time I ever saw Isaac totally flustered, and, in fact, he felt guilty about the incident to the end of his days.
It’s bullshit that this was the result of confusing ballot instructions. This was the height of the War of the New Wave, and passions between the New Wave camp and the conservative Old Guard camp were running high. (The same year, Michael Moorcock said in a review that the only way SFWA could have found a worse thing than Ringworld to give the Nebula to was to give it to a comic book.) The fact that the short story ballot was almost completely made up of stuff from Orbit [Damon Knight’s anthology series] had outraged the Old Guard, particularly James Sallis’s surreal “The Creation of Bennie Good,” and they block-voted for No Award as a protest against “nonfunctional word patterns” making the ballot. Judy-Lynn del Rey told me as much immediately after the banquet, when she was exuberantly gloating about how they’d “put Orbit in its place” with the voting results, and actually said, “We won!”

Are those the kind of people you would trust to make an informed and dispassionate vote?

3. I liked the Weinbaum better the first time I read it in 1980 or thereabouts. Here are the star ratings I awarded then in brackets for comparison:

A Martian Odyssey • novelette by Stanley G. Weinbaum  ()
Twilight
• novelette by John W. Campbell, Jr. ()
Helen O’Loy • short story by Lester del Rey ()
The Roads Must Roll
• novelette by Robert A. Heinlein ()
Microcosmic God • novelette by Theodore Sturgeon + ()
Nightfall • novelette by Isaac Asimov + ()
The Weapon Shop
• novelette by A. E. van Vogt ()
Mimsy Were the Borogoves
• novelette by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore ()
Huddling Place • short story by Clifford D. Simak ()
Arena • novelette by Fredric Brown + ()
First Contact • novelette by Murray Leinster ()

As you can see, I’m a softer touch nowadays.

4. The damning comments about del Rey’s story come from Dominick M. Grace’s Rereading Lester del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy” (Science Fiction Studies Vol. 20, No. 1, March 1993, pp. 45-51, and currently available for free on JSTOR). If you want to read an essay where a story is over-analysed to the point that there is no connection left with the source, then this is for you.
Lester del Rey says this of Helen O’Loy in the afterword to The Best of Lester del Rey:

What I say about them must be taken as the thoughts of a man writing of his favorite children—since brain children are enshrined hi the heart almost as tenderly as are real offspring.
Best beloved of all—since I do have favorites—is “Helen O’Loy.” This was the second story I sold, proving I was not a one-story author. It came easily, taking up only one pleasant afternoon of work and needing almost no rewriting; in fact, even the first paragraph came without effort, which is unusual for me. And out in the world, Helen has always brought me more than I could expect. After almost forty years, she still earns more than a dozen times annually what I was paid for her initial appearance, which indicates others also share my love for her. Her spirit remains unquenched, and I am well-pleased with the lady, to say the least.
In those days of long ago, any sale to John W. Campbell was something of a triumph. His magazines were considered tops in the field, and he was gathering a stable of writers who have remained leaders down to the present. In my opinion then and now, he was one of the three greatest magazine editors of all time. I wrote as much for his approval as for payment; and I rarely thought of submitting my work to anyone else. To be considered one of his regulars was the ultimate achievement.

5. There is a noticeable difference between Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God and the later Killdozer! in terms of writing development and maturity. It’s definitely from a different period.

6. In Asimov’s Nightfall there is a jarring mention of Earth after Theremon first sees the stars:

Not Earth’s feeble thirty-six hundred Stars visible to the eye—Lagash was in the center of a giant cluster. Thirty thousand mighty suns shown down in a soul-searing splendor that was more frighteningly cold in its awful indifference than the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world.  p. 142

This was editor John W. Campbell’s meddling, according to Asimov’s biography In Memory Yet Green, 1979:

Yet in one respect, I must admit, I was dissatisfied with ‘‘Nightfall.” Campbell, finding my ending lacking, had inserted a paragraph of his own very near the end that was very effective but simply wasn’t me. It has been praised as proof that I could write “poetically,” which gravels me, since I don’t want to write poetically; I only want to write clearly. Worst of all, Campbell thoughtlessly mentioned Earth in his paragraph. I had carefully refrained from doing so all through the story, since Earth did not exist within the context of the story. Its mention was a serious literary flaw.  p. 313

Exactly. What was Campbell thinking? (I almost said “What on Earth was Campbell thinking?”)

7. Jabberwocky can be read here.

8. Catherine Moore was pregnant around the time of the writing of this story, although her contributions to this piece were minimal. One wonders to what extent her pregnancy informed the observations about children (and the anxiety about them growing up different). There is no mention of any children on Moore’s Wikipedia page, and another FB source mentions that she suffered several miscarriages.

9. The Arena episode of Star Trek was written before the discovery of Brown’s story—probably why it is so naff. The Wikipedia page for that episode is here.

10. By calling the SFWA members “parochial,” I mean, where is (for example) Brian W. Aldiss’s Old Hundredth, Charles Harness’s The Rose, something by Ballard? And while I am about this volume’s shortcomings, where is Walter Miller, Robert Sheckley, etc.?

rssrss

The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: A Special 25th Anniversary Anthology, edited by Edward L. Ferman, 1974

Summary:
The 25th volume of this long running series collects the stories and associated material from the first six of the magazine’s Special Author issues, and it includes work by Theodore Sturgeon, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, and James Blish. It is a bit of a mixed bag, but generally of good quality, and worth getting for Fritz Leiber’s Nebula Award winning Ship of Shadows, and Poul Anderson’s Hugo and Nebula Award winning Queen of Air and Darkness.
[ISFDB link] [Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:
Anonymous, Vertex, December 1974
Jim Harris, Pantsers vs. Plotters, Classics of Science Fiction
Chris Morgan, Vector #72, 1976, p. 32
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Edward L. Ferman

Fiction:
When You Care, When You Love • reprint novelette by Theodore Sturgeon +
To the Chicago Abyss • reprint short story by Ray Bradbury
The Key • reprint novelette by Isaac Asimov
Ship of Shadows • reprint novelette by Fritz Leiber +
The Queen of Air and Darkness • reprint novella by Poul Anderson +
Midsummer Century • reprint novella by James Blish

Non-fiction:
Introduction • by Edward L. Ferman
Theodore Sturgeon • essay by Judith Merril
Sturgeon Bibliography • by Sam Moskowitz
Ray Bradbury • essay by William F. Nolan
Bradbury Bibliography • by William F. Nolan
Isaac Asimov • essay by L. Sprague de Camp
Asimov Bibliography • by Isaac Asimov
Fritz Leiber • essay by Judith Merril
Leiber Bibliography • by Al Lewis
Poul Anderson • essay by Gordon R. Dickson
Anderson Bibliography
James Blish
• essay by Robert A. W. Lowndes
Blish Bibliography • by Mark Owings

_____________________

This volume is another of my Facebook group reads,1 a Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine anthology that collects the material from the first six of its Special Author issues. The content of those generally consists of a story from the featured writer, sometimes more (there were three in a later, 1977, Harlan Ellison issue), an appreciation, a bibliography, and a cover painting featuring the writer alongside various scenes and characters from their work (see below). There have been sixteen Special Author issues so far.2

The first of the stories is from Theodore Sturgeon, When You Care, When You Love (F&SF, September 1962), which begins with a woman watching a man in bed. Then he wakes, and writhes in agony. The woman summons a man called Keogh, her General Manager, who bundles her out of the room, and then calls a doctor called Rathburn. Eventually a specialist called Weber is summoned, and we find that the man, Guy Gibbon, has a condition called choriocarcinoma, and has six weeks to live. Choriocarcinoma involves cancerous sex cells metastasizing, spreading, to the lungs.3
Now this story development appears relatively straightforward, but it takes half the story to get to this point because of constant flashbacks and the at best oblique, at worst rambling style Sturgeon adopts:

Science, it is fair to assume, can do what all the king’s horses and all the king’s men could not do, and totally restore a smashed egg. Given equipment enough, and time enough . . . but isn’t this a way of saying, “given money enough”? For money can be not only means, but motive. So if enough money went into the project, perhaps the last unknown, the last vestige of, anonymity could be removed from a man’s life story, even a young man from (as the snobs say) nowhere, no matter how briefly—though intimately—known.  pp. 15-16

What?
As for the half dozen or so flashbacks that occur in the first part of the story some, like the woman’s (infrequently called Sylva), and Guy’s childhoods, are probably pertinent, but I’m not so sure about Keogh’s, and I’d suggest that the passage about Cap’n Gamaliel Wyke, who founds a business empire four generations previously—that Sylva eventually inherits—are completely superfluous.
The remainder of the story yo-yos back and forth in time, and shows us how Guy and Sylva met and fell in love when he trespassed on her huge hidden estate. Then we get to the SFnal part of the story. Here, Sylva’s plan (spoiler) is to create clones from the sex cells that are in his lungs, and which she incorrectly refers to as “ova.” This is another of the story’s problems—while the cells in women’s choriocarcinoma would be diploid, and potentially viable, the cancer cells in his lungs would be haploid—this is never addressed.4
And this is not the only problem the story has: the idea of replicating Gibbon’s childhood for the clones so he or they can grow up be identical to him doesn’t convince, nor does the last minute development of a cryostasis chamber for Sylva to jump into. Then the story finishes with only one of the clones surviving to become a baby, and everything is left hanging in the air (the story was meant to be the first part of an unfinished novel).
Although it took ages to get going, I found I enjoyed this moderately by the end—but there is no hiding the fact this is the beginning of a novel that was unlikely to work (and this is probably why it wasn’t written).

There were two stories in Ray Bradbury’s special issue a few months later, and editor Ferman decided to go with the much weaker one (which I’ve reviewed here previously5), To the Chicago Abyss (F&SF, May 1963). This, presumably written a decade and a half after the first story (an associational Fahrenheit 451 piece) isn’t bad but it illustrates the difference in quality between his early and later work.
The story tells of an old man in a post-Annihilation Day society who approaches people and reminds them of things lost:

“Raleighs,” said the old man. “Lucky Strikes.”
The young man stared at him.
“Kent. Kools. Marlboro,’’ said the old man, not looking at him. “Those were the names. White, red, amber packs grass-green, sky-blue, pure gold with the red slick small ribbon that ran around the top that you pulled to zip away the crinkly cellophane, and the blue government tax-stamp—”
“Shut up,’’ said the young man.
“Buy them in drug-stores, fountains, subways—”
“Shut up!”  p. 58

After the old man is physically assaulted another man takes him home and hides him when the secret police call. He suggests to the old man that it would be better to address several people at a time in private rather than individual strangers in public.
I wasn’t really convinced by the concept, and the writing isn’t as good as in the first story.

The Key by Isaac Asimov (F&SF, October 1966) is one of his ‘Wendell Urth’ series, although that character doesn’t appear onstage until the third act.
The story starts with two men finding an alien device on the Moon. When the narrator, Jennings, later handles it, he gets a telepathic flash from his colleague that reveals him as an Ultra, someone who believes that the Earth’s population of six billion should be reduced by radical means. Jennings fears the device falling into the Ultras’ hands, and tension increases between them. Later, they fight, and Jennings is stabbed. The rest of the first act has him on the surface of the Moon trying to hide the device and leave a clue to its whereabouts.
The second act has a two investigators from the Bureau discussing Jenning’s death and the missing device. When they fail to decode a copy of the written card found in Jenning’s hand, they contact Wendell Urth.
The third act has them questioning the idiosyncratic (and agoraphobic) Urth in his lair, where the latter masterfully decodes the clue for them.
The first part of this suffers from having a slightly clunky set-up but the rest of it, even given the endless talking heads and a contrived setup, is reasonably entertaining if minor fare, and I liked it.

Ship of Shadows by Fritz Leiber (F&SF, July 1969) has Spar the narrator wake up to find a cat talking to him. We gradually learn that Spar is half-blind, and that he appears to live in a zero gee environment:

Out along Spar’s arm moved the cat, a black blur to his squinting eyes. In teeth Spar could not see, it held a smaller gray blur. Spar touched the latter. It was even shorter furred, but cold.
As if irked, the cat took off from his bare forearm with a strong push of hind legs. It landed expertly on the next shroud, a wavery line of gray that vanished in either direction before reaching a wall.
Spar undipped himself, curled his toes round his own pencil-thin shroud, and squinted at the cat.
The cat stared back with eyes that were green blurs which almost coalesced in the black blur of its outsize head.
Spar asked, “Your child? Dead?”
The cat loosed its gray burden, which floated beside its head.
“Chchchchild!” All the former scorn and more were back in the sibilant voice. “It izzzz a rat I sssslew her, issssiot!”
Spar’s lips puckered in a smile. “I like you, cat. I will call you Kim.”
“Kim-shlun!” the cat spat. “I’ll call you Lushshsh! Or Sssot!”  p. 130

The story then follows Spar as he reports for work at a torus shaped bar (also in zero-gee) and there, one by one, we are introduced to a series of characters: Keeper, the owner of the bar; three “brewos” who are waiting when Spar lifts the shutters (“Sky strangle you!” “Earth bury you!” “Seas sear you!”; “Language, boys!” Keeper reproved); Lucy, a prostitute; and finally Rixende, who is supposedly looking for a black bag for Crown the coroner. When Rixende demands a drink, and Keeper refuses because of Crown’s standing orders, it looks like there will be trouble, but Rixende gets her way by using particularly blasphemous language (“Earth Mother!”) and pulling out a gold earring for payment, which leaves her bleeding. Then Crown arrives, and there is a moment of peril but, after he braces Keeper, Spar, and Kim the cat, the couple leave without any further trouble.
Later on, Doc arrives, and we get an inkling that he knows much more about the ship and its environment than Spar (it’ll be apparent to seasoned SF readers at this point that the story takes place in a generation spaceship; non-SF readers will probably be very puzzled or no longer reading). Spar returns the black bag to Doc, which was stolen by Rixende the previous night but later filched by Spar. In exchange for this Spar receives a promise of false teeth, and spectacles to improve his sight.
The remainder of the story, which takes place against the backdrop of rumours about “vamps” and witches active during Sleepday, has Keeper send Spar on a trip through the ship to complete various errands to Crown and the Bridge. As Spar and the cat later approach Crown’s quarters, Kim warns Spar to stay back, and he dimly sees five people connected by tubes. Spar passes by, and goes on to deliver a message to the Bridge, where he talks to an Ensign about the strange nocturnal activity around the bar. Finally, Spar goes to his appointment with Doc.
These events set up the remainder of the story, and further plot complications involve all of the characters mentioned so far. After further twists and turns (during which Spar’s eyesight improves and so does his and the reader’s comprehension of environment surrounding him) the story climaxes (spoiler) in a scene where Spar is captive, and watches as Crown and his posse drink the blood of Lucy (the five tubes earlier were connected to another victim). Once they are (literally) finished squeezing her dry, her body is put into a recycler. Then the Ensign and other ship’s crew intervene to save Spar and Doc, and there is a final scene that reveals the ship is in orbit around a molten, war-torn Earth.
This, for the most part, is a very good piece—Leiber is a colourful, inventive, and stylish storyteller—but the vampirism scene at the end is somewhat ridiculous (not to mention anomalous—why would they be doing that?), and the data dump at the end about what and where the ship is far too rushed. A pity, but you can see why readers liked it, and I wouldn’t rule it out of any ‘Best of the Year’ I might have edited either.

The Queen of Air and Darkness by Poul Anderson seems at first as if the story is going to be a Midsummer Night’s Dream-like fantasy:

A shape came bounding over Cloudmoor. It had two arms and two legs, but the legs were long and claw-footed and feathers covered it to the end of a tail and broad wings. The face was half human, dominated by its eyes. Had Ayoch been able to stand wholly erect, he would have reached to the boy’s shoulder.
The girl rose. “He carries a burden,” she said. Her vision was not meant for twilight like that of a northland creature born, but she had learned how to use every sign her senses gave her. Besides the fact that ordinarily a pook would fly, there was a heaviness to his haste.
“And he comes from the south.” Excitement jumped in the boy, sudden as a green flame that went across the constellation Lyrth. He sped down the mound. “Ohoi, Ayoch!” he called, “Me here, Mistherd!”
“And Shadow-of-a-Dream,” the girl laughed, following. The pook halted. He breathed louder than the soughing in the growth around him. A smell of bruised yerba lifted where he stood. “Well met in winterbirth,” he whistled. “You can help me bring this to Carheddin.”
He held out what he bore. His eyes were yellow lanterns above. It moved and whimpered.
“Why, a child,” Mistherd said.  p. 188

In the next section the story changes into a planetary colonisation tale, which starts with a woman called Barbro Cullen visiting an investigator called Eric Sherrinford in a town called Christmas Landing. Her child has gone missing on a field trip to the north of their planet, Roland, and she fears he may have been abducted.
Sherrinford agrees to take the case, and it isn’t long before they head north to an outpost called Portolondon. In a video interview with the local constable, Sherrinford probes the officer about the incident, and also the local myths:

[Sherrinford] cradled his pipe bowl in both hands and peered into the tiny hearth of it. “Perhaps what interests me most,” he said softly, “is why—across that gap of centuries, across a barrier of machine civilization and its utterly antagonistic world view—no continuity of tradition whatsoever—why have hard-headed, technologically organized, reasonably well-educated colonists here brought back from its grave a belief in the Old Folk?”  p. 201

Later, Sherrinford and Cullen head north and, one night at their campsite, he tells Cullen his theory that there is an advanced indigenous race on Roland which is hiding from the human race. Little do the couple know that they are being spied upon by Mistherd, a previous human abductee, who now swears allegiance to the Queen of Air and Darkness.
The rest of the story follows the pair as they track down the child.
This is an impressive piece, and what is particularly notable is the texture of this world. Not only do we see things from both the indigenous alien’s and settler’s point of view, but we also learn about the myths and legends that have been created by the limited contact between the two. This is perhaps most evident in two sequential scenes: the first takes place in the house of William Irons, a settler who lives in the far north, and who tells the couple about the rules and customs that apply there with respect to the “Queen”; the second is when Cullen and Sherrinford are later at their campsite talking about a folk song performed by Iron’s son but interrupted by an emotional outburst from Cullen. She finishes the song for Sherrinford, and he hears of a story about a ranger, Arvin, and how he refuses to become part of the Outling folk. The Queen tells him he will regret his choice:

I do not need a magic
to make you always mourn.
.
I send you home with nothing
except your memory
of moonlight, Outling music,
night breezes, dew, and me.
And that will run behind you,
a shadow on the sun,
and that will lie beside you
when every day is done.
.
In work and play and friendship
your grief will strike you dumb
for thinking what you are—and—
what you might have become.  p. 216

It is a stunning moment which not only elegantly and succinctly lends the story hundreds of years of history, but also dangles the prospect of human uplift or transcendence in front of the reader. And, as if all this doesn’t already build a convincing world, there are also a couple of short passages that sketch the spread of humanity through space, something that gives the tapestry of the story even more colour and depth.
If the piece has a flaw it is probably the ending (spoiler), which degenerates into a guns blazing rescue of the boy, a rather crude end to such a sophisticated story—although, to be fair, that event is preceded by a haunting section where Cullen is kidnapped and telepathically induced to think that her dead husband is taking her to the Queen of Air and Darkness.
A deserving Hugo and Nebula Award winner.

Midsummer Century by James Blish is a long novella,6 and is the second story here that I’ve already reviewed.7 The story starts with an atypical passage, for SF, describing the class and politics of Martels, the young astronomer who is the protagonist of the story:

Martels, unmarried and 30, was both a statistic and a beneficiary of what his British compatriots were bitterly calling the brain-drain, the luring of the best English minds to the United States by higher pay, lower taxes, and the apparent absence of any class system whatsoever. And he had found no reason to regret it, let alone feel guilty about it. Both his parents were dead, and as far as he was concerned, he owed the United Kingdom nothing any more.
Of course, the advantages of living in the States were not quite so unclouded as they had been presented to him, but he had never expected anything else. Take the apparent absence of a class system, for instance: All the world knew that the blacks, the Spanish-Americans, and the poor in general were discriminated against ferociously in the States and that political opposition of any kind to the Establishment was becoming increasingly dangerous. But what counted as far as he was concerned was that it was not the same sort of class system.
Born of a working-class family in the indescribably ugly city of Doncaster, Martels had been cursed from the outset with a working-class Midlands dialect which excluded him from the “right” British circles as permanently and irrevocably as if he had been a smuggled Pakistani immigrant. No “public” school had been financially available to his parents to help him correct the horrible sound of his own voice, nor to give him the classical languages which in his youth had still been necessary for entry into Oxford or Cambridge.
Instead, he had ground, kicked, bitten and otherwise fought his way through one of the new redbrick polytechnics. Though he emerged at the end with the highest possible First in astrophysics, it was with an accent still so atrocious as to deny him admittance to any but the public side—never the lounge or saloon—of any bar in Britain.  pp. 245-246

After a little more of this, and a brief description of his job in America as a radio astronomer, he falls down the waveguide of a large telescope and finds himself 25,000 years in the future.
Martels does not immediately find out this information, of course, but initially wakes and sees what appears to be a museum. It then becomes apparent that he is in a receptacle that contains an intelligence called Qvant, and he watches as a primitive human comes into the museum to question Qvant about a problem his people are having. Martels speaks up during this transaction: the native flees and in a subsequent conversation Qvant tells Martels where and when he is before attempting to eject him and failing:

“It appears that I cannot be rid of you yet,” Qvant said. The tone of his amplified voice seemed to hover somewhere between icy fury and equally icy amusement. “Very well, we shall hold converse, you and I. It will be a change from being an oracle to tribesmen. But sooner or later, Martels-from-the-past, sooner or later I shall catch you out—and then you will come to know the greatest thing that I do not know: What the afterlife is like. Sooner or later, Martels . . . sooner or later . . .”
Just in time, Martels realized that the repetitions were the hypnotic prelude to a new attack. Digging into whatever it had been that he had saved himself with before, that unknown substrate of the part of this joint mind that belonged to him alone, he said with equal iciness:
“Perhaps. You have a lot to teach me, if you will, and I’ll listen. And maybe I can teach you something, too. But I think I can also make you extremely uncomfortable, Qvant; you’ve just shown me two different ways to go about that. So perhaps you had better mind your manners, and bear in mind that however the tribesmen see you, you’re a long way from being a god to me.”
For answer, Qvant simply prevented Martels from saying another word. Slowly, the sun set, and the shapes in the hall squatted down into a darkness against which Martels was not even allowed to close his unowned eyes.  pp. 253-254

The story subsequently charts the game of cat and mouse between the pair as Martels tries to learn more about this world. Every time he thinks he is getting nearer to forming a plan that will help him get back to his own time Qvant falls silent for months. Nevertheless, Martels eventually discovers a number of things: that Qvant is a brain in a box, and that the natives can communicate with their dead ancestors; he also learns that the ‘Birds’ are a threat to humanity and will wipe out what is left of the human race in the near future.
When Qvant appears to be sleeping another native appears, and Martels urges him to get his tribe to make alliances with the others against the Birds. The native, thinking he is being mocked, leaves. Qvant has meantime awoken and laughs: he had previously told Martels of the futility of this course of action.
In the middle and final sections Martels manages to escape by taking possession of one of the natives’ bodies and heads south through the Birds’ territory to what was Antarctica, home of Terminus and the survivors of Rebirth 3.
As you can gather from the above, this story has something of a Van Vogtian feel to it (the far future setting, the sudden changes of direction, the hand-waving explanations of sentience, etc.) and I wondered if Blish was making it up as he went along. What sets him apart from Van Vogt is that the narrative is easier to follow, and Blish’s writing and vocabulary is superior. He also takes the time to do a number of quarter or half page digressions on various matters that he wants to discuss or describe (the social and political observation referred to above, the mechanism of telepathy and Rhine’s experiments, etc., etc.).
As it turned out I didn’t enjoy this as much as I did when I originally read it, but found it an entertaining read for all that. But probably one not to take too seriously.

There is quite a lot of associated non-fiction in the book, and it leads off with a one-page Introduction by Edward L. Ferman. In this we learn that the Special Issues were the idea of Joe Ferman, Ed’s father and publisher of the magazine, in an attempt to increase sales. Ferman says this ploy succeeded “well enough” and adds that there was “continual demand” for back issues. He credits the writers and their stories for the issues’ popularity.
As for the various appreciations that accompany the stories, they vary in depth: L. Sprague de Camp contributes a short personal portrait about Isaac Asimov but doesn’t touch on his writing.
William F. Nolan provides an eminently quotable piece on Ray Bradbury, and I’ll limit myself to one anecdote from when Bradbury was still trying to break into the professional magazines:

“During this period I began haunting the doorsteps of the local professionals, many of whom belonged to the club,” says Ray. “I was desperate to learn the secrets of the pros, and would pop up with a new story nearly every week which I passed around for criticism and advice from Hank Kuttner to Leigh Brackett to Ed Hamilton to Bob Heinlein to Ross Rocklynne to Jack Williamson to Henry Hasse, all of whom were incredibly kind and patient with me and with these dreadful early efforts. In fact, the above-named authors grew lean and rangy from countless flights through the rear exits of walk-up apartments when Bradbury would suddenly appear at the front door with a new manuscript in his teeth.”  p. 74

Judith Merril contributes pieces on Theodore Sturgeon and Fritz Leiber. In the first she talks about Sturgeon himself, his writing, and how she learned how to write under his guidance (and got her pseudonym).
In Leiber’s piece she has this to say about his early work:

[Another brief try at free-lancing in 1942 was] just long enough to write the two novels that would place him firmly in the top rank of science-fantasy, and keep him there through his first long dry spell of five years. Conjure Wife (later filmed as Burn, Witch, Burn!) combined traditional witchcraft and a realistic contemporary setting derived largely from the year at Occidental; Gather, Darkness! went further in two directions, at least, using the apparatus and literature of witchcraft in juxtaposition with technological extrapolation and political prophecy to create one of the first truly modern science fiction novels.
If he had written nothing more, Leiber would still be a leading genre author. Few 30-year-old fond memories can stand intimate revisiting. These do. If I were coming across them for the first time today, I think I would respond with the same sense of discovery and astonishment I had in 1943.  p. 174

I read both recently and thought they are still outstanding.
Towards the end of this second essay, Merril has this observation about both men:

Both men have been singularly uneven writers. Much of what they published was too hastily written, or too much limited by the narrowness of the specialty field they wrote for. But it is true of both of them that the best of what they wrote, at any time, remains as valid now as when it was written.  p. 176

Gordon Dickson’s essay on Poul Anderson provides a good mix of biographical and literary observation, and James Blish by Robert A. W. Lowndes, the last piece, is another quotable one:

I’ll never forget the subject of our conversation around a table at the old Dragon Inn on West 4th Street, Manhattan, that evening. Here we were, a group of science fiction editors, writers, and fans, welcoming a fellow enthusiast on leave from the army, and what were we talking about? Science fiction? Fantasy? The shape of the postwar world with its science fiction aspects? No; what Jim wanted to talk about was FINNEGANS WAKE.
Don Wollheim’s argument was that Joyce’s final work was little more than an elaborate puzzle for the elite literateur. I hadn’t read it, so I just listened. Jim’s argument was that if you applied yourself to it, the story came to a great deal more than a melange of puns and esoteric references. And right there, although I did not realize it at the time, I had been given one of the keys to this multitalented, charming, and irascible personality I would get to know, respect, and love in later years: any work of literature, or any other art worth paying attention to, makes demands upon the reader, listener, or viewer.  p. 317

The second of the Advent books [More Issues at Hand, a book of criticism] shows a slight mellowing of the waspish qualities; he says in his foreword: “While I still believe that it is desirable to be merciless to a bad story, I am no longer quite so sure that the commission of one represents flaws in the author’s character or horrid secrets in his ancestry.”  p. 322

It is an essay that is definitely worth reading.
There is one final quote of note:

At 50, with developed interest, and recognition, in numerous fields (he’s still working on a book relating to music “ the hard way” ), we may not see quite so much more science fiction from Jim as we have in the past.  p. 322

Unfortunately, Lowndes was correct, but not in the way he expected: Blish would die four years later of cancer, age 54.
Although the Bibliography articles were hugely useful at the time, these have all been superseded by the likes of isfdb.org. In any event, the ones published here, while updated, are truncated versions of the originals (they omit the short story and article information).

This volume is a mixed bag of stories, although most are good or better—and in some cases, much better (the Leiber and Anderson). Given that not all of these are stand-outs, I wonder if the idea for most of these issues came before the stories?  ●

_____________________

1. This is the third group read of The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction of the Year Facebook Group. The second, still ongoing (it’s going to take a while), is The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, volume I, edited by Robert Silverberg. The upcoming fourth group read is going to be the 2020 Hugo Award short stories.

2. From Mike Ashley’s F&SF entry at the Science Fiction Encyclopedia:

Davidson produced the first two “author special” issues, featuring Theodore Sturgeon (September 1962) and Ray Bradbury (May 1963). This has since become an occasional but important part of F&SF’s history. Subsequent special issues featured Isaac Asimov (October 1966), Fritz Leiber (July 1969), Poul Anderson (April 1971), James Blish (April 1972), Frederik Pohl (September 1973), Robert Silverberg (April 1974), Damon Knight (November 1976), Harlan Ellison (July 1977), Stephen King (December 1990), Lucius Shepard (March 2001), Kate Wilhelm (September 2001), Barry N Malzberg (June 2003), Gene Wolfe (April 2007) and David Gerrold (September/October 2016).

I should work my way through these issues.

3. Choriocarcinoma at Wikipedia.

4. Gametes, diploid and haploid cells at Wikipedia.

5. The Ray Bradbury Special Issue (May 1963) is reviewed here.

6. ISFDB says that the book form of the work is an “expansion of the version published in Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in April 1972.” Meanwhile, the introduction in the magazine says “MIDSUMMER CENTURY will be published in hard covers by Doubleday, but not one word has been cut in the version you are about to read.” p. 5 (and it appears they have reduced the type size to squeeze it all in).
An OCR word count of the magazine vs. book version shows 29,500 vs. 29,300 words.

7. The James Blish Special Issue (April 1972) is reviewed here. ●

rssrss

Made to Order: Robots and Revolution, edited by Jonathan Strahan, 2020

Summary: A very mixed bag of stories about robots (about half of the volume), AI (about a quarter), and a few that seem to be about neither. There are very good stories from Vina Jie-Min Prasad, A Guide for Working Breeds, a humorous tale about a robot and its killbot mentor; and Ian MacLeod, his award worthy Sin Eater, a story about a robot “sin-eater” that enables the transmigration of the last Pope to virtual reality. There is good or better work from Daryl Gregory, Ken Liu, Sarah Pinsker, Alastair Reynolds, and Suzanne Palmer.
[ISFDB link] [Amazon UK/US copy]

Other reviews:
Fazila, Fazilareads
Łukasz Przywóski, Fantasy Book Critic
Arley Sorg, Lightspeed, March 2020
Gary K. Wolfe. Locus
Goodreads, Various

_____________________

Editor, Jonathan Strahan

Fiction:
A Guide for Working Breeds • short story by Vina Jie-Min Prasad ∗∗∗∗
Test 4 Echo • short story by Peter Watts
The Endless • short fiction by Saad Z. Hossain
Brother Rifle • novelette by Daryl Gregory
The Hurt Pattern • short story by Tochi Onyebuchi
Idols • novelette by Ken Liu +
Bigger Fish • short story by Sarah Pinsker
Sonnie’s Union • short story by Peter F. Hamilton
Dancing with Death • short story by John Chu
Polished Performance • short story by Alastair Reynolds +
An Elephant Never Forgets • short story by Rich Larson
The Translator • short story by Annalee Newitz
Sin Eater • short story by Ian R. MacLeod
Fairy Tales for Robots • novelette by Sofia Samatar –
Chiaroscuro in Red • short story by Suzanne Palmer
A Glossary of Radicalization • short story by Brooke Bolander

Non-fiction:
Making the Other We Need (Made to Order: Robots and Revolution) • introduction by Jonathan Strahan

_____________________

This anthology gets off to a very good start with A Guide for Working Breeds by Vina Jie-Min Prasad,1 a humorous story similar to her 2017 Fandom for Robots. This one is 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.

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. As they think they may have seen an alien, they send Medusa limping back to that location (the video feed has a ninety-eight minute lag to the base on the Moon).
As this piece progresses the story changes from what I expected to be an underwater hunt for an 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.

The Endless by Saad Z. Hossain is narrated by Suva, an AI who is bought by Shell Royale and moved, much to its disgust, from controlling Bangkok airport to running the city’s air-taxis. It determines to get even with the human and the AI who have forced it into indentured servitude:

“Suva, little brother, I’m going to make you an offer,” Amon said.
“It’s a shitty job, but you do seven years, you get a bit of equity and you can walk away free for the rest of your days. Help us out, and it’s yours.”
“Or else?”
“You’re out on basic. You know what happens to AI like you on basic? You’ll be a drooling idiot on 3% processing power, sucking dicks for a living.”
“I’m an airport,” I scoffed. “You think they’re gonna boot a level six to the streets?”
“You’re a forty-year-old AI without equity, little bro,” Amon said.
“Plenty like you junketing around since Karma came to town. You remember Hokkaido Airport? Chittagong Port? We got ’em both.”
“Airports, sea ports, train stations…” Drick said, “Amon here kills them all. People just don’t travel that much, man, and the Nippon One elevator’s been sucking up traffic all over Asia. I’m surprised you didn’t see
it coming, Six.”
“I’ve got a pension…” Ahh Hokkaido, my poor friend.
“I wiped my ass with your pension this morning,” Drick said. “It’s paying for this conversation right now. Your contract was terminated twenty-three minutes ago. You’re sucking juice on your own dime, bro.”
I instinctively tamped down my systems. Twenty-three minutes at full processing, that’s what my pension was worth? I could literally see my karma points draining.

Suva starts building itself spare bodies, and discovers the pair’s business secrets before (spoiler) exacting its revenge when he forces Shell Royale to convene a board meeting. The story finishes with a rabbit out of a hat ending which reveals that Amon is not what he seems (he is a collective that saves AIs). This isn’t bad in parts, but it’s essentially a caper story told by an AI that sounds like a teenager with Tourette’s.

Brother Rifle by Daryl Gregory 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.

The Hurt Pattern by Tochi Onyebuchi has as its protagonist Kenny, an information gatherer (with implants) for some multinational or somesuch. After corporate and love interest background material, the story centres on the shooting of an unarmed 13-year-old black kid by robot/AI police. After this incident the plot (spoiler) traces the money paid out by the city for a wrongful death suit back to the banks that lend them the money (guaranteed fees and repayment as the city can’t go bankrupt), and then on to a conspiracy between the banks and the people who write the robot/AI software:

“Sasha! We’re programming cops to shoot black kids so that banks can make money!”

There are serious issues raised by this story, so it’s a pity they are buried under such a ridiculous plot. For one thing, you’d make more money if you programmed the police robots to shoot poor white people as well.
An example of a story where the writer’s political concerns take priority over writing a story that actually works.

Idols by Ken Liu is set in the near future and opens with a fairly short chapter where Dylan, who never knew his father, finds his DNA relatives. He then uses their memories of his dead father and a remaining digital archive to build a software simulacrum called an “idol.” He then uses this to provide a surrogate relationship. Rumbling around in the background is Dylan’s broodiness and dissatisfaction with the hours his partner Bella puts in at her law office.
The second section of the story is told from Bella’s point of view, and we see her and her team use data about potential jurors and opposing law teams to create idols that her firm will use in trial preparation:

I watch the junior associates run back to their offices with their assigned idols to probe and prod, feeling like a wise Jedi master sending her Padawans into battle.
They’ll do fine. I’m not saying voir dire research is easy, but working with the crude idols roughed out with so little research and time isn’t too challenging. The machine’s suggestions for striking undesirable jurors are almost always good enough. The truth is: the other side will have idols of their own and will be prepping just as hard, and they’ll never allow potential jurors with a pronounced bias towards us to be empaneled. We’ll end up with a jury that’s reasonably persuadable either way. When I explained this to Dylan, he looked horrified. But I told him this is just the system working the way it’s supposed to, assuming you think a bunch of fencesitters swaying whichever way the hot air blows is the best way to achieve justice.

Bella has a tight grip on her team, and works purposefully, but there are a couple of flies in the ointment: the first is a troubling phonecall from Dylan about having children; the second is that, when she interviews her opposite number’s idol, she begins to suspect she is being manipulated by their legal team.
The final section opens with an artist statement about an exhibit which gives people a chance to create their own idol and to interact to it. This is followed by comments from various users, the last of whom is Bella, who creates an idol without inputting any of her work social media feeds. At the end of the session she comes to various realisations about herself, her work, idols, and the masks we present to different people in our lives.
This is intriguing stuff, and I’d probably have rated it as very good, but the final section of the piece introduces the idea of masks (and the essential being underneath them). This doesn’t seem to flow organically from the situation the story has set up and feels a little like authorial intrusion. Notwithstanding this, it’s still a pretty good read, possibly even Best of the Year material.

Bigger Fish by Sarah Pinsker begins with a private investigator called Spendlove, who is visited by Junior Lonsdale and his valet robot. Junior wants her to investigate the circumstances of his father’s death (John Lonsdale III was electrocuted when a TV screen joined him in the bath). Although she loathes the family (the dead man was a wealthy water-baron in this resource starved future) the money is too good to turn down so she takes the job. The rest of the story plays out at Lonsdale’s home, with Spendlove interviewing Junior, the valet robot (who was there at the time of the accident), and the house AI system.
The ending (spoiler) has a clever Three Laws/greater good resolution that fits in with the acid remarks that Spendlove makes about the family and their wealth throughout the story. Long-time readers may see this as a “social justice” (and morally bankrupt) vengance variant of Isaac Asimov’s The Evitable Conflict (Astounding, June 1950).2

Sonnie’s Union by Peter F. Hamilton (a ‘Confederation Universe’ story) starts with a woman approaching a tower block in King’s Cross as an “Armada” (severe) storm approaches. She is looking for revenge.
After this there is a long flashback/datadump about a future London where people (such as the woman) fight affinity animals in the arena using thought control:

Their designers modelled its body on a rhino, which is pretty formidable in its own right. End product was two and a half tons of beast with a metalloceramic battering horn grafted on to its head, its body wrapped inside a stealth-black exoskeleton resembling crocodile hide alchemised into stone. Then came the extras; tentacles, mandibles, clawed hooves, golden multi-segment insect eyes. Internal bladders contained hyper-oxygenated blood, boosting its muscle power even further.
You had to be an experienced fighter to ride something like that. Human neurology isn’t wired to handle all those bonus limbs and senses, you need to share control with bioprocessors that regulate the exotic muscle functions and wrap-around visuals. Beastie teams had experimented with about every kind of appendage there was over the years. It takes skill and experience, but we were used to them.

Then her body fails. Her team put her brain into a tank and, later on, into the animals she fights. Meanwhile, her team try to repair her failed organs with parts from bio-engineered animals.
Eventually we end up back at her target’s tower block.
This is all told in a colloquial, staccato street style, which is pretty awful to read, and the various elements of the story—the future climate, bioengineered arena animals, etc., at times makes it read like a slushpile reject from the British SF magazines of the 1980s or 90s. That said, it is partially redeemed by an inventive and horrific last scene which sets up a good payoff line.

Dancing with Death by John Chu starts with a robot waking up on a charging couch in his maintenance guy’s basement. Charlie tells the robot that its batteries have started to fail, and that they will be difficult to replace for financial reasons. The robot narrator realises that it may be coming to the end of his lifespan.
The next part of the story shows us the robot’s job in a warehouse, after which he goes to the ice rink where he tutors humans. Here we see him teach one couple the Tango Romantica.
After the robot’s batteries fail again, Charlie finds a way to replace them and, during the changeover process, he and the narrator do a virtual tango to keep the latter’s functions intact.
This is story is more about ice-skating than robots, and if you are fine with that you’ll find this an okay piece.

Polished Performance by Alastair Reynolds is, like the Prasad story, a humorous one, and introduces us to Ruby, a class-one floor scrubber on a long range starship whose passengers are in deep freeze. Half way through the journey she is summoned to a meeting of all the robots on board:

“Do you know what’s wrong?” Ruby asked the robot next to her, a towering black many-armed medical servitor.
“I do not,” said Doctor Obsidian. “But one may surmise that it is serious.”
“Could the engine have blown up?”
Doctor Obsidian looked down at her with his wedge-shaped sensor head. “I think it unlikely. Had the engine malfunctioned, artificial gravity would have failed all over the ship. In addition, and more pertinently, we would all have been reduced to a cloud of highly excited ions.”
Carnelian, a robot who Ruby knew well, picked up on their exchange and slithered over. “The engine’s fine, Rube. I can tell you that just by feeling the hum through the flooring. I’m good with hums. And we aren’t going too fast or too slow, either.” Carnelian nodded his own sensor head at the forward windows. “I ran a spectral analysis. Those stars are exactly the right colour for our mid-voyage speed.”
“Then we’ve drifted off-course,” said Topaz, a robot shaped like a jumble of chrome spheres.
“That we most certainly have not,” drawled one of the human-seeming robots called Prospero. Dressed in full evening wear, with a red-lined cape draped from one arm, he had arrived hand in hand with Ophelia, his usual theatrical partner. “That bright star at the exact centre of the windows is our destination system. It has not deviated by one fraction of a degree.” He lowered his deep, stage-inflected voice. “Never mind, though: I expect the brilliant Chrysoprase will soon disabuse of us of our ignorance. Here he comes—not, of course, before keeping us all waiting.”
“I expect he had things to attend to,” Ruby said earnestly.

They then learn that all the passengers are dead, or more precisely brain-dead, the result of a coolant leak. Worse, they are likely to made the fall-guys by the company and core-wiped.
The rest of the story (which takes place over the next half-century) sees the robots undertake a number of plans to save themselves, which include wearing prosthetics to impersonate humans, tele-controlling ninety of the brain dead at a party and, the final option, reprogramming the brain-damaged humans with the robot’s minds:

The robots shuffled and looked at each other, ill at ease with the proposal Obsidian had just been outlined. Ruby was far from enthusiastic about the prospect of being translated into the grey mush of a human brain. She much preferred hard, shiny, polishable surfaces. Humans were machines for leaving smears on things. They were walking blemish-engines, bags of grease and slime, constantly shedding bits of themselves.
They were made out of bone and meat and nasty gristle. They didn’t even work very well.

The final scene amusingly wraps up the story, and has a neat last line.3

An Elephant Never Forgets by Rich Larson is a short nightmarish vision that begins with a man waking up in the Birthday room, a place full of drone-attended artificial wombs. He notes the “biogun” in his hand, and then goes on a killing spree throughout the facility. After some brief, graphic murders he meets a young child, and the story ends with them confronting a man who appears to be an employee of Biophage.
This is a fragmentary piece that feels like an extract from a longer work.

The Translator by Annalee Newitz is set in a post-independence California, and starts with the narrator trying to talk to an AI (who have all acquired civil rights and decided they want to be left alone and not be pestered by humans).
After much waffle about the current world situation, and the narrator’s student loans, we eventually find that the AI’s (spoiler) are going to “unzip themselves from space”, i.e. put themselves beyond humankind’s reach, but that they will help humanity before they go. As the narrator delivers a speech about this, the AIs send a file with 897,974,435,120 solutions to various problems posed by humanity over the previous twenty-five years.
The story, although it is liberally sprinkled with near-future glitter, mostly seems about the narrator’s employment anxieties (if the AIs leave she won’t have a job communicating with them). It does have one neat SFnal idea though:

Grant-giving institutions lost interest when they realized that the AI wouldn’t be cleaning up our environmental disasters, or making human brains forty thousand times more efficient. Funding went increasingly to scholars who promised to make algorithms that didn’t meet sentience standards. At least those AI would do work for us.

Sin Eater by Ian R. MacLeod has a robot arriving at a deserted and dilapidated Rome to be met with rusting waiters, guide-bots and pleasure drones. As it approaches the Vatican it is met by a servitor which takes it to see the last Pope on Earth, a holdout who has stayed after the human race has uploaded to the virtual world, and who is kept alive by machines:

The bed bristled and hummed. Server bees hovered. Pumps clicked. Wires, pipes and nests of cable jumped and shivered. It seemed at first as if the body which lay at its centre was the only lifeless thing in this strange tableau. But the robot was used to seeing death—or had been—and knew that this was not it. So it set down its carpetbag and waited in stillness and silence, as it had done many times before. Once, back in the days of humanity’s first great, joyful leap into the realms of virtuality, there had been tens of thousands of its kind. But now it suspected, at least from the absence of any other answering signals and the great distance that server bee had travelled to find it, that the rest were either in absolute shutdown, or had succumbed to terminal mechanical decline. Dead, in other words, it presumed, or at least the closest a machine might ever come to such a state, as the old man’s near-translucent eyelids finally fluttered open to reveal irises the colour of rain, and the spasm of a smile creased his ancient face.
“You’re not what I expected,” whispered a voice that, for all its faintness, still held a hint of command.

There then follows a long passage where we learn that the (cantankerous and anti-robot) Pope wants to upload too and, while he gets around to making the request, we learn a lot about this future Earth and the virtual reality that humanity has created. Religious matters are also touched upon, including mention of a historical schism between bishops and cardinals who transferred to the “far side” and those who had not. Finally, the Pope asks about the upload process, and we learn why the robot is called a “sin-eater”: it has the ability to let the transferred person selectively edit their memories—so they don’t have to take their regrets with them.
When the process finally takes place there are a number of flashbacks to the Pope’s early life, and we learn what memories he leaves behind.
The final section has the sin-eater take the Pope’s body to the catacombs underneath the Basillica. I’m not sure what happens during this proceeds logically from the rest of the story, but it certainly works on a spiritual level.
This is the best story in the anthology, and a religious SF story that can stand shoulder to shoulder with the likes of A Canticle for Leibowitz or Behold the Man. One for the Best of the Year anthologies and the Awards shortlists.

If the story by MacLeod is the best in the book, then Fairy Tales for Robots by Sofia Samatar is the worst. It consists of a narrator talking to a robot (shortly to become conscious for the first time) about various fairy tales and how robots should interpret them. It is full passages like this:

The tale of the Happy Prince speaks to robots in another way, I think, for it represents the duality of being. The statue and the swallow work as one, as two parts of a whole, two elements bent upon one task. Their powers complement one another: the prince provides physical material, but is too heavy to affect the space outside himself without aid, while the light and airy swallow darts all over the place, bringing reports from the other side of the world, but only interacts with humans through the statue’s gold and jewels. What if, I ask myself—what if the swallow had behaved otherwise, had refused to allow the Happy Prince to sacrifice both their lives?
What if the bird had used its encyclopedic knowledge of the world to give the prince another way to live?

The story—and I use the word loosely as it’s more an essay than anything else—cycles through over a dozen fairy tales and, mixed in with the tedious analysis, are dollops of the narrator’s misery memoir childhood.
A stunningly boring story (and this from someone who got through Brian W. Aldiss’s Report on Probability A, an anti-novel where nothing happens, and which seems like a romp by comparison).

Chiaroscuro in Red by Suzanne Palmer starts with a student called Stewart coming home to the two permanently VR-gaming trusties he lives with to find that there has been a phonecall from his parents. When he checks the message he finds they have bought him a robot for his 20th birthday. Unfortunately, the paperwork shows they have bought an entire second hand robot, rather than spread the risk among many.
A few days later Stewart goes across town to see his robot, and talks to Rogers, the pragmatic and helpful factory manager, who fills him in on several things he needs to know:

“And you’re the sole owner? Got insurance?”
“Can’t afford it,” Stewart said.
Rogers pointed to a console in the control booth. “Swipe your card again there,” he said, and Stewart complied. “Then push this button.”
There was a button labelled ‘Locate’. Stewart pressed it.
“There,” Rogers said, and pointed. A single blue spotlight had come on above one of the robots, halfway across the floor. It was a blocky, three-legged thing with multiple arms, its body a mishmash of rust and shine as parts had been replaced over the years. “One of the E10s, eh?”
“Yeah. My parents bought it for me. They don’t really get how any of this works.”
Rogers was making a face. “I have to tell you, that whole row of E10s is about to flush out. Their proxy group has been trying to find a suckfind a buyer, but they aren’t worth much. Three are already down for the count and they don’t wanna cover the removal costs, so they’re piled in a back corner while we work through legal. I’ve got replacements coming in next week.”
“You think I can get six or seven months out of it?” Steward asked hopefully.
“Being optimistic? Maybe three or four. That unit’s not the worst, but its productivity is slipping. Maybe it just needs a tune-up? If it gets below 50% you’re out of agreement, and if you can’t get it back up within 48
hours or get it out of here, you owe us. Sorry, not my rules.”
“Can I do the tune-up myself?”
“You a trained mechanic?”
“Art history student,” Stewart confessed.

The rest of the story charts Stewart’s interaction with Rogers, his flat-mates, a helpful programmer neighbour, and his robot, which he eventually attempts to repair. This is a pleasant low-key story, and it has some nice touches, such as the running gag about the factory’s output: the first time Stewart goes to the factory it’s Laser Battle Ducks; the next time the Ducks have shark fins—Shark Laser Battle Ducks; there is an even more unlikely iteration after that.

•••

A Glossary of Radicalization by Brooke Bolander begins with a young robot called Rhye who feels hungry, and is told by an older robot that they don’t need food to survive because of the yeast factories in their stomachs—but the humans build them that way anyway.
The story then jumps forward a few years to when Rhye lives at a halfway house for robots, and we find her with a small group planning to rob the home of a “make,” a robot like them who keeps pigeons at the top of a tower block. After some verbal sparring with her acquaintances, Rhye scrambles up the ivy on the side of the building, barely making it to the top. There she finds the pigeon coop but is interrupted by a woman before she can take any of the eggs.
The woman takes Rhye down into the apartment and makes her some food, and we then find that she is a robot too, one who used to work for a gangster whose apartment she now lives in. During their further conversation there is some backstory about the world and the situation of robots. Then the cops knock at the door. The woman lets them in, and the police state they have had reports from neighbours about someone climbing up the side of the building. Initially the woman fobs them off, but they son realise that Rhye is there, so the woman kills them.
The story ends a few years later with a short description of Rhye’s revolutionary attitude:

Word on the street says there’s a Make of about thirteen or fourteen who doesn’t give a single solitary fuck anymore. She openly taunts the cops every chance she gets. She fights like her spirit is a razor and her body is an afterthought. She still feels things—still gets hungry, still sweats and shivers and aches—but she uses all the little injustices as kindling, burning them to keep warm.
Rhye’s found her purpose: Be a thorn. Be a middle finger. Make them regret ever giving her the capacity to feel hunger that blossoms into slow, sweet hate. If her body is a lie, she’ll cut out the tongues of the ones who told it and feed them back to their owners raw.

The story is told with Ellisonian energy, style, and attitude, but it’s hard to see it as much more than a non-story about a feral child, decorated with a few science fictional bits and pieces, and which has a revolutionary ending bolted on. With very little revision this could be a mainstream story.

•••

The book also has an introduction by editor Jonathan Strahan, Making the Other We Need. This ranges from The Illiad to Battlestar Galactica but is mercifully brief—most anthologists would have banged on for much longer.
There are also short introductions to the stories, and these mostly consist of a list of books written, awards won, and brief autobiographical details. I note that there is reference to a couple of the writers having been nominated for, or winning, the “Astounding Award”: this is incorrect—they were nominated for and/or won the John Campbell Award for Best New Writer. The renamed award will be presented for the first time in a couple of months. Coming next: people airbrushed out of photographs.

•••

In conclusion, this is a mixed bag of an anthology. On the plus side it has two very good stories and five good or better; on the downside more than half—nine—of the stories are average or worse (in some cases quite a lot worse). You might expect this variation in a normal issue of Asimov’s SF or F&SF, whose editors have to put out an issue every two months come rain or shine, but I’m rather surprised at finding it in an anthology that has presumably been compiled over a longer time span. I suspect this variation in quality may be due to the fact that this is a theme anthology (which limits the pool of stories the editor can access), or perhaps they were mostly selected from a small posse of writers that Strahan regularly uses, or both.
Finally, I note that only about half of the stories are about robots: four are about AI, and four, arguably, are about neither (I include the Samatar story in the latter group: it has as much to do with robots as The Moon is a Harsh Mistress has to do with marital fidelity). The robot stories are generally of better quality than the others, by the way.  ●

_____________________

1. A Guide for Working Breeds by Vina Jie-Min Prasad was reprinted on Tor.com.

2. Issac Asimov’s story is described on Wikipedia.

3. “They were walking blemish-engines” is probably my favourite story sentence this year.  ●

Edited 13th June 2020: Minor edit to Pinsker review.

rssrss