ISFDB

Other reviews:¹
Paul Walker, Galaxy Bookshelf (Galaxy, November-December 1978)
Stephen W. Potts, Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Review (July 1979)
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Gordon R. Dickson

Fiction:²
A Crowd of Shadows • short story by Charles L. Grant ∗∗
Breath’s a Ware That Will Not Keep • short story by Thomas F. Monteleone ∗∗∗
Tricentennial • short story by Joe Haldeman ∗∗∗
In the Bowl • novelette by John Varley ∗∗∗+
The Bicentennial Man • novelette by Isaac Asimov ∗∗∗∗∗
Houston, Houston, Do You Read? • novella by James Tiptree, Jr. ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Introduction • by Gordon R. Dickson
Science Fiction in the Marketplace • essay by Algis Budrys
The Academic Viewpoint • essay by James E. Gunn
Nebula Awards, 1975, 1976: Win, Place, and Show

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Although it isn’t a ‘Best of the Year’ volume for 1976, this collection of Nebula Award winners (chosen by the Science Fiction Writers of America) seems to be a natural fit for that group, hence this review. I have discussed the Asimov and Tiptree stories previously, but have pasted them in at the end for the convenience of those who haven’t seen them.

The first of the stories is the winner of the Nebula Award for best short story, A Crowd of Shadows by Charles L. Grant,³ which begins with the narrator going to a holiday resort called Starburst. While he is on the beach he sees a couple with an android boy (only obvious from the digits tattooed on the inside of his arm). Later, while having dinner in the hotel, he again sees the threesome, and notes the anti-android sentiment expressed by some of the other diners.
The next morning a detective arrives at the narrator’s door to investigate the murder of one of those diners overnight and, later that day, the narrator sees the detective again outside the hotel. He then watches as the detective tries to deal with anti-android hostility from the guests, many of whom think the boy did it because of the way he was treated the previous night. Then there is another murder . . . .
The story closes with (spoiler) the narrator waking that night to see a disturbance, a “crowd of shadows”, on the beach. When he goes down to investigate, he finds the boy is dead—and that he is not android but human (the parents later turn to be the androids).
This story unfolds smoothly enough (and generally reads like something you might find in a literary quarterly) but the motivation for the boy’s actions isn’t convincing, and the murders aren’t explained. The narrator’s final admission about his own potential prejudice also rings false.
This doesn’t seem like an obvious Nebula Winner to me, and I’m not even sure it works as a story.⁴

Breath’s a Ware That Will Not Keep by Thomas F. Monteleone is one of his ‘Chicago’ series, set in a dystopian future where people are eugenically produced by “Breeders”, host-mothers spoken to telepathically by their “Monitors”:

Technically speaking, Feraxa was human. Visually, however, she was an amorphous, slithering, amoeba-like thing. She was tons of genetically cultured flesh, a human body inflated and stretched and distended until it was many times its normal size. Lost beneath her abundant flesh was a vestigial skeleton which floated disconnected and unmoving in a gelatinous sea. Her bioneered organs were swollen to immense proportions and hundreds of liters of blood pumped through her extensive circulatory system.
Yet he knew, even as he activated the probes that plunged into her soft flesh, that she was still a woman to him. A very special kind of woman. From her earliest moments of consciousness, she had spent her life contained within the glassteel walls of the Breeder Tank. It was an immense cube, ten meters on each side, the back all covered with connecting cables and tubes which carried her life-support systems, monitoring devices, and biomedical elements that were necessary for her continued maintenance.  p. 21

Benjamin is Feraxa’s Monitor and, after some initial scene setting which limns their relationship, he notices that something is wrong with one of her routine biochemical tests. After discussing it with his boss it becomes apparent that there has been a malfunction, and that Feraxa, if left to go to term, will birth a batch of “randoms” rather than the administrators she was supposed to produce. The decision is made to terminate them.
When the surgical team arrives later (spoiler), we see that Feraxa’s psi powers are much more advanced than anyone realises, and she kills several of the medical technicians by inducing cerebral haemorrhages. Nevertheless, she is eventually overcome and killed.
Benjamin goes home and attempts to have biological sex with his partner, rather than the computer-assisted sex that is normal for citizens of this society; as he climaxes he thinks of Feraxa.
This is a competent piece of SF horror, but its 1970’s-style future dystopia feels dated, and it has the feel of a taboo-busting version of earlier 1950’s stories.

Tricentennial by Joe Haldeman starts just before America’s Tricentennial (2076), with a scientist from an L-5 colony trying to get political help to fund a project to send a radio signal to a newly detected alien civilisation. The scientist gets nowhere, and over the next few years the L-5 colonists build a starship to go to a nearby twin sun to harvest antimatter. They then plan to detour to 61 Cygnus (the source of the signals) on the way back. The ship departs during the Tricentennial celebrations on Earth.
The mission initially goes to plan but on the second leg (spoiler) an accident happens on the spaceship, and it continues accelerating to 99% of the speed of light. The effects of relativity cause an ever increasing time difference between the ship and Earth.
When the ship’s crew eventually manage to fix the problem and, after 1500 light years of travel, they settle on a nearby planet. At this point the ship time is 2093, whereas it is 5000 on Earth. This provides a suitably elegiac ending:

The season they began landing colonists, the dominant feature in the planet’s night sky was a beautiful blooming cloud of gas that astronomers had named the North American Nebula.
Which was an irony that didn’t occur to any of these colonists from L-5—give or take a few years, it was America’s Trimillennial.
America itself was a little the worse for wear, this three thousandth anniversary. The seas that lapped its shores were heavy with a crimson crust of anaerobic life; the mighty cities had fallen and their remains, nearly ground away by the never-ceasing sandstorms. No fireworks were planned, for lack of an audience, for lack of planners; bacteria just don’t care. May Day too would be ignored.
The only humans in the Solar System lived in a glass and metal tube. They tended their automatic machinery, and turned their backs on the dead Earth, and worshiped the constellation Cygnus, and had forgotten why.  p. 60

This is a competently done story with some good culture-drift/anti-science/dumbed-down-culture background, but I don’t think it is an obvious Nebula finalist (or a Hugo Award winner!)

In the Bowl by John Varley is one of his ‘Eight Worlds’ stories, this time set on Venus, where the narrator Kiku has gone to prospect for “blast jewels”. He gets off to an uncertain start:

Never buy anything at a secondhand organbank. And while I’m handing out good advice, don’t outfit yourself for a trip to Venus until you get to Venus.
I wish I had waited. But while shopping around at Coprates a few weeks before my vacation, I happened on this little shop and was talked into an infraeye at a very good price. What I should have asked myself was what was an infraeye doing on Mars in the first place?
Think about it. No one wears them on Mars. If you want to see at night, it’s much cheaper to buy a snooperscope. That way you can take the damn thing off when the sun comes up. So this eye must have come back with a tourist from Venus. And there’s no telling how long it sat there in the vat until this sweet-talking old guy gave me his line about how it belonged to a nice little old schoolteacher who never . . . ah, well. You’ve probably heard it before.  p. 62

There follows some travelogue that describes his trip into the deserted wastes of Venus, and Kiku eventually reaches the last human settlement; it is there that his eye finally stops working. His attempts to get it repaired lead him to the story’s second main character, Ember, a precocious eleven-year-old who he finds at a water fountain in the middle of the settlement—with her pet otter. Kiku feels optimistic about Ember’s medical abilities as she has a peacock fan of feathers on her head, and transplanted long blonde hair on her forearms and lower legs.
Ember fixes his eye, and then tells him she wants to go with him to look for blast jewels. Kiku fobs her off until he realises that she is the only one in town who will hire him a sky-cycle. Eventually he, Ember, and the otter set off.
The rest of the story details their journey towards the blast jewel site, during which their relationship develops (Ember agreed to guide Kiku for free as she wants him to adopt her and take her to the more civilised Mars; he doesn’t entirely agree to do this, and rather leads her on). We also learn more about blast jewels, and how the formative process is so unstable that all you have to do to find them is to stamp on the ground and listen for explosions.
The climax of the story occurs when (spoiler), Kiku tells Ember that he won’t take her to Mars; she then sexually propositions him (she is supposedly eleven, and he is seventy), but he refuses and leaves their shelter to sleep outside. When he wakes up later she (and her pet otter!) are lying beside him . . . and next to them both is a nascent blast jewel:

It was three meters away, growing from the cleft of two rocks. It was globular, half a meter across, and glowing a dull-reddish color. It looked like a soft gelatin.
It was a blast jewel, before the blast.
I was afraid to talk, then remembered that talking would not affect the atmosphere around me and could not set off the explosion. I had a radio transmitter in my throat and a receiver in my ear. That’s how you talk on Venus; you subvocalize and people can hear you.
Moving very carefully, I reached over and gently touched Ember on the shoulder.  p. 91

They initially try to figure out how to get far enough away from the explosion so that their force suits will be able to protect them (the suits are impermeable but don’t entirely stop the effects of noise and acceleration—why the suits can mitigate the pressure and heat of Venus’s atmosphere but not the pressure of sound waves isn’t explained). Then Kiku looks more closely at the proto-blast jewel, and the reader gets to visit the sense-of-wonder mother lode (last seen age 12):

The damn thing was moving.
I blinked, afraid to rub my eyes, and looked again. No, it wasn’t. Not on the outside anyway. It was more like the movement you can see inside a living cell beneath a microscope. Internal flows, exchanges of fluids from here to there. I watched it and was hypnotized.
There were worlds in the jewel. There was ancient Barsoom of my childhood fairy tales; there was Middle Earth with brooding castles and sentient forests. The jewel was a window into something unimaginable, a place where there were no questions and no emotions but a vast awareness. It was dark and wet without menace. It was growing, and yet complete as it came into being. It was bigger than this ball of hot mud called Venus and had its roots down in the core of the planet. There was no corner of the universe that it did not reach.
It was aware of me. I felt it touch me and felt no surprise. It examined me in passing but was totally uninterested. I posed no questions for it, whatever it was. It already knew me and had always known me.
I felt an overpowering attraction. The thing was exerting no influence on me; the attraction was a yearning within me. I was reaching for a completion that the jewel possessed and I knew I could never have. Life would always be a series of mysteries for me. For the jewel, there was nothing but awareness. Awareness of everything.  p. 92

What happens afterwards is predictable in hindsight.
This is an engrossing story with well-done world-building, lots of engaging character interaction, and a good sense of wonder scene to finish. However, there are a couple of things that spoiled this for me this time around. First, there is Ember’s age: not only is she a minor in our society, but she is one in the story too (the age of majority is twelve on Venus, and fourteen on Mars), so the idea of her propositioning a much older man makes for uncomfortable reading (even if the advanced biotech makes age—and birth sex—more mutable in this strange future world). And even if you don’t experience a cultural relativism fail as I did, having Ember as an eleven year old just doesn’t convince (I realise there is a history of peppy young female characters in some SF—but eleven?)
The second problem the story has is that at the end of it they both, having discovered the jewels’ sentience, plan to go back to civilization and say nothing—they have no objective evidence, and it would prove impossible for humans to get close enough to the jewels to observe them without causing an explosion. They then (fatalistically and unconvincingly) accept that the jewels won’t be able to exist near human cities, and that mankind’s expansion will eventually doom them.
Some of you will no doubt be able to overlook both these caveats—your prize will be a contemporary retelling of a Golden Age sense-of-wonder type story that is very well done. Those of you who develop the same reservations as me will still find it an entertaining and worthwhile read.

The reviews of the next two stories are reprints from previous posts here—skip down to the conclusion for the rest of this maunder if you have read them before.

The Bicentennial Man by Isaac Asimov is the Nebula (and Hugo) Award winner for best novelette, and it is probably one of the best stories of his I’ve read—vastly superior to his early work in the various 1940s Astoundings I’ve read recently (there is nothing like thirty years of practice to improve your writing).
The story concerns Andrew, a valet robot who is the property of a family who discover that he can carve wood and “enjoy” the experience. His owner begins selling the carvings, and puts half the money in an account for the robot. Andrew becomes increasingly human-like, and he eventually has enough money to “buy” his freedom. His owner doesn’t want the money, but he does institute a court case to give Andrew’s wishes legal foundation, and they win. Nonetheless, years later, after the death of the owner, and even though Andrew is legally free, he almost comes a cropper at the hands of two yobs as a result of his programming, which means he must obey their orders to dismantle himself. Andrew is only just saved in time by the son of the family. Andrew then determines to write a history of robots, which eventually results in the establishment of robot rights.
This first part of the story mirrors, in some respects, the emancipation of the American slaves, but the rest of it goes somewhere else entirely when it proceeds to detail Andrew’s long struggle to become human. This begins after the “Little Miss” of the story, the young girl that Andrew used to care for, dies in her eighties, and Andrew goes to United States Robots with one of the grandsons to pressure them to give him one of their new android bodies. Andrew eventually gets his way, but causes US Robots to change their business model so they never deal in autonomous robots again.
Even after getting his android body, Andrew wants to become even more human, and this leads him into the design of ever more sophisticated prosthetics:

He accepted membership in several learned societies, including one that was devoted to the new science he had established—the one he had called robobiology but which had come to be termed prosthetology. On the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his construction, a testimonial dinner was given in his honor at U.S. Robots. If Andrew saw an irony in this, he kept it to himself.
Alvin Magdescu came out of retirement to chair the dinner. He was himself ninety-four years old and was alive because he, too, had prosthetized devices that, among other things, fulfilled the function of liver and kidneys. The dinner reached its climax when Magdescu, after a short and emotional talk, raised his glass to toast The Sesquicentennial Robot.
Andrew had had the sinews of his face redesigned to the point where he could show a human range of emotions, but he sat through all the ceremonies solemnly passive. He did not like to be a Sesquicentennial Robot.  p. 153

The rest of the story describes the processes which make Andrew completely “human” (spoiler): first, there is a court case which defines him as such; second, he has surgery which makes him mortal. The last scene has the World President arriving at Andrew’s deathbed to sign the new law and to declare him The Bicentennial Man.
This is an exceptional piece which is smoothly written, has a number of smart set pieces, and builds a great story arc (which stretches over generations). It also has a great last line which is both a call-back to the first part of the story and a revelation that Andrew’s humanity goes beyond prosthetics or laws.

Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree, Jr. is the Nebula Award winner for best novella, and it is probably one of the best known stories from the this period, a story which tells of a spaceship crew who are caught in a time-distorting solar flare and end up hundreds of years in the future. The three men in the crew don’t realise what has happened for a good chunk of the story and most of the first half is a tense, claustrophobic tale that has them trying to work out what has gone wrong. Earth is not only in the wrong place in the “sky,” and they don’t have the fuel to get there—Houston isn’t answering their radio calls either. However, an all-female crewed spaceship does and, after much back and forth, the three men are eventually rescued by them after using up all their fuel to get as close to them as possible (the last part of the men’s journey involves a perilous spacewalk to cover the remaining distance).
The second half covers the three men’s experiences on board the women’s ship, and how Lorimer, the narrator, slowly discovers that there was an epidemic on Earth that killed off all the men, with only eleven thousand women surviving. These have cloned themselves into a population of two million, and they live in static, peaceful, and non-hierarchical society.
The story concludes (spoiler) with an extended (and sexually violent) scene where the three men are drugged and lose all behavioural inhibitions (the story actually begins with the men in this state and the story is told mostly in flashback). Under the influence of the drug they now act out, in extremis, the character traits exhibited throughout the story (Lorimer is the decent but passive observer; Buddy is the horny, sexist, and rapey one; and Dave—the commander—is the patriarchal, religious nut job).
So, obviously, Buddy rapes one of the Judys and assaults Andy (who we discover is not a teenage boy but an androgynous female). During the assault the pair collect a semen sample (to increase the planet’s gene pool), before Dave turns up and orders Buddy to stop. Dave then does some religious ranting before pulling a gun and firing, puncturing the hull.
The men are eventually restrained and, it would seem, killed—Lorimer’s last line is this:

The drink tastes cool going down, something like peace and freedom, he thinks. Or death.  p. 266

Reader reaction to this story will probably split into two groups. Some will hate it and think that the male characters are misandrist caricatures, and the women’s peaceful utopian society both unlikely and unrealistic; others will love the “Let’s get rid of the men” power fantasy, and see the story as a clear-eyed view of what the world would be like without the dreaded patriarchy. I suspect that the irony of the women’s final actions—where they act in a way as equally as ghastly as what has gone before—will be lost on this latter group and, if it isn’t, I’m guessing this will be written off with the usual revolutionary zeal: “the ends justify the means”, “you can’t make an omelette . . . .”, etc. What did Lorimer do to deserve a death sentence other than possess a Y chromosome?
My own reaction was mixed. The story is, in some respects, technically well done—I’ve already mentioned the tense first part, and the later unravelling of the mystery behind this strange society is skilfully done too, even if it is pretty obvious what has happened. On the other hand there is the stereotypical (at best), or cardboard (at worst), characterisation, and the pious genocide of half of the human race at the end of the story.⁵ I didn’t dislike this as much as The Marching Morons because it is a better told story, but it is essentially the same kind of unpleasant scapegoating.⁶

There are four pieces of non-fiction in this volume. Leading off is the Introduction by Gordon R. Dickson, where he discusses the remarkable quality of current SF, and suggests this is due to the wide freedom that writers have within the genre with regard to “idea, pattern, attitude or style”.
He finishes by saying that attempts at categorisation will not prevent this:

Consequently, science fiction, as a self-defining genre, has had to resist the impulses of some of its best friends to put it into different bags at different times in its history, right down to the present one—bags which in every case would have excluded work that properly belonged within its canon. The efforts continue; not merely on the part of some publishers and booksellers, but on the part of some scholars, academics, critics, and others without and within the field itself. Human nature being what it is, they can be expected to so continue into the future.  p. xii

I presume that the individual story and essay introductions also come from Dickson: I’ve included these for contemporary colour, and because they are sometimes of interest for other reasons (the Tiptree one obliquely refers to that writer’s real identity).⁷

There are also two essays in the middle of the book. The first of these is Science Fiction in the Marketplace by Algis Budrys⁸ (oddly by-lined as by Algirdas Jonas Budrys), which is, unusually for Budrys, quite a hard read. It took me about two and a half attempts to work out what he was saying (or part of it anyway).
Budrys begins by talking about the kinds of current SF which are worth buying (for readers) and selling (for publishers), before going back to look at when SF first became a commercial proposition under Gernsback and Campbell. After this he swerves into Campbellian SF (“Modern Science Fiction”), and how this had a monopoly in the field until Kingsley Amis arrived:

Kingsley Amis came to this country in the mid-fifties to present a series of lectures at Princeton. These were later collected as New Maps of Hell, the first nonCampbellian (and hence “nonKnightly”) body of SF criticism which had to be generally respected. It represented a view so shockingly disruptive of “modern science fiction” standards that many members of the SF community were unable to assimilate it.
For years, most reaction to Amis was less reasonable than it was outraged. In some quarters, it was puzzled; here was a consistent view of SF measured as social satire, embodying Amis’s “comic inferno” term, lent weight by ivied halls, and implying an artistic accomplishment at some hands—notably Frederik Pohl’s—where Campbellians had simply read competence underlying a kind of frivolity. (The Space Merchants,⁹ for instance, was a notably successful commercial property of its time, but most SF community members saw it as technically flawed and certainly not a serious social extrapolation.)  p. 107

Budrys then discusses Amis’s successors—the Milford and Clarion writing workshops, the New Wave, etc.—and how, after these various efforts to develop literary standards, “we have come to the present pass”. He then mentions (the information is gleaned from several editor interviews) that storytelling sells better than academic work (“gloom and doom”, “artiness”, “messages”), and discusses both types of fiction before concluding with this:

What does that maximum audience want? What is the essential ingredient that it finds attractive, and will search for? What makes it ignore the work of the conscious and acclaimed intellectualizer, in favor of writers who may appreciate academe and be appreciated by it, but who make no obvious bow to it in their writing?
If the endurance of Star Trek as a phenomenon is any indicator, the key ingredients occur most thickly in “modern science fiction.” The basic premise of the voyages of the starship Enterprise is solidly Campbellian, and most of the individual episodes of that TV series would, with a little fleshing-up, fit very nicely in a 1940 [Astounding Science Fiction]. There is something to be learned, however, from the fact that the “science” in Star Trek is pure set-decoration, and there is room to wonder just how essential “science”—i.e., consumer technology—is to “science fiction.” It’s also interesting to note that Star Trek has always been perceived as somehow different from the standard pulp-like TV adventure series—and more satisfying to those who like it at all.
This observation to my mind opens a door into an enormous room which ought to fill up with critics and scholars. Star Trek has undoubtedly created a major percentage of the SF reading audience today. There is no question but that “modern science fiction” is limited not only intellectually but artistically. It cannot illuminate as much of life as there obviously is. Yet Campbellianism may be stronger than ever today. Still, it cannot be true that the evolution of SF can go no further without leaving its audience behind, or else the readers are not in fact interested in going where no man has gone before on the ultimate frontier. That limitless frontier is the capacity of Man to be interested in himself.
I find it difficult to accept the proposition that SF is a somehow special form of literature, with its own rules, if those rules are assumed to be restrictive. I am much more ready to assert that there is evidence SF contains more of whatever essential it is that causes people to read fiction of any kind, and bit by bit over the years to come we are going to find it, by playing off “academe” and “commerce” against the private thing that happens within the mind of the artist, and which then communicates to the audience.  p. 111-112

There is a lot to unpack in this essay, and I may have to have yet another read of it. (I note in passing that there are some matters discussed here that overlap with Norman Spinrad’s recent review column in Asimov’s Science Fiction.¹⁰)

The Academic Viewpoint by James E. Gunn is an interesting essay about teaching sf. Gunn lays down a set of criteria and then discusses each of them:

1. CONSISTENCY OF STORY
2. STORY PREMISES
3. APPLICATION OF THE PREMISES
4. CREDIBILITY OF THE CHARACTERS
5. CONSISTENCY OF THEME
6. IMAGERY
7. STYLE
8. TOTAL ARTFULNESS
9. CHALLENGE TO THE IMAGINATION
10. OVERALL IMPRESSION  p. 120

I suspect Gunn’s classes were worthwhile educational experiences.
At the end of the book we have Nebula Awards, 1975, 1976: Win, Place, and Show, which gives the finalists and winners for this year and the one before:

I suppose I should leave my comments about the finalists for my 1976 overview, but I’d note in passing that it seems a weak year for short stories (Knight’s I See You presumably doesn’t appear as it is outside the qualification period, and Aldiss’s Appearance of Life—which appeared in a UK original anthology, Andromeda #1—presumably wasn’t seen by enough voters).

In conclusion: a book of two halves, with the latter half/two thirds stronger.  ●

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1. Paul Williams provides a long review of this anthology in his Galaxy Bookshelf (Galaxy, November-December, 1978)—it is almost three pages long—and it is worth a read. He says that “it is the most tolerable [. . .] of the Nebula Award volumes I have read”, and “has two excellent stories” by John Varley and Isaac Asimov, and “two equally good essays” by Algis Budrys and James Gunn. He goes on to say the Varley is “not his best, but pretty good” and that “the Asimov, however, is breathtaking”.
He comments further about the Asimov:

The story is really a series of short-shorts, nicely woven together. What makes them fascinating is the careful evolution of Andrew’s thinking from machine to man. Asimov has not simply taken a human character and called him a robot, but made Andrew wonderfully different and only gradually human. Part of his success depends on the constant contrast between him and his human family. They are not complex people, but warm and alive. As intricate as the philosophical and legal aspects of the story become, Asimov never loses the story’s humanity. Nor is anything assumed. If this were to be the first robot story you had read, you would not be confused by any of the terminology. p. 137

He is not as impressed by Grant’s story:

Less than first-rate is [the] award-winning, “A Crowd of Shadows.” To me, this is a typical “award-winner,” the kind of story people like Damon Knight and Harlan Ellison point to as evidence of science fiction’s maturation, the kind that is supposed to be comparable to anything in the mainstream.
[. . .]
The murders [. . .] have nothing to do with androids, or with the time and place of the story. They are acts of protest against an unfeeling world. The world itself is hardly described. It could as well as be Miami Beach. In short, change “android” to black, and the time of the story to twenty years ago, and you have the same story.
As in most “award-winners,” neither the theme nor the characters are in any way remarkable. By contrast with the Asimov story, one might say that Grant’s narrative technique is more sophisticated (i.e., more literary), but while both are working with familiar materials, Asimov’s style makes them seem fresh and alive, while Grant’s does not.  p. 137-138

He goes on to say the same is true, to a lesser extent, of the Haldeman and Monteleone stories, i.e., both “have familiar ideas given sophisticated literary treatment.” Walker finishes with the fiction by saying, “Finally, there is James Tiptree, Jr.’s Houston, Houston, Do You Read?—which I could not.”
He goes on to discuss the non-fiction essays at some length (although he seems to come to the mistaken conclusion that Budrys was “tsk-tsking” about “the predominance of story-oriented sf in the marketplace”). After some further discussion about why people read SF he concludes with this:

I can think of no better reason for a mature adult to read science fiction than because he or she enjoys it. Non-fiction is a much better source of ideas; the better mainstream literature is a considerably superior source of aesthetic pleasure. All the science fiction experience has to offer is itself. The experience of alien worlds and new technologies and far future adventures. For those who love it, it is enough.  p. 139

2. The stories are taken from F&SF (Grant, Varley), Dystopian Visions (Monteleone), Analog (Haldeman), Stellar #2 (Asimov), Aurora: Beyond Equality (Tiptree). There is nothing from Amazing, Fantastic, or Galaxy.

3. There was only one more ‘Starburst’ story from Grant, A Voice Not Heard in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September 1984.

4. The Nebula Awards are as easily skewed by author popularity as the Hugos, if not more so (I don’t want to be unkind to the writer or his story, but Grant had been Executive Secretary of the SFWA for four years by this point). Remember, awards are decided by author popularity × story quality × story availability × zeitgeist.

5. Death seems to have been a major feature of Tiptree’s work according to the Science Fiction Encyclopaedia. She also has form for writing what can only be described as political propaganda: Ellen Datlow remarked (in a recent Coode Street Podcast) that she rejected a story of hers which has the super-rich eating their young . . . . (is this Mortality Meat?)

6. In Jo Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugo Awards, she says, “I’d have voted for the Tiptree.”
Rich Horton says:

I admit to not being a big fan of Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, largely on the grounds that I don’t really approve of stories that seem to call for my extermination. (I grant that that’s an unfair reading of the story, which is subtler than that, but it still bothers me.)

I’m not sure it is subtler than that.
Gardner Dozois says:

I’ve always been lukewarm about Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, which I think is a much misunderstood story. Alice Sheldon herself once told me that she considered it to be a “cautionary tale,” NOT a wish-fulfilment utopia (someday, we’ll get rid of all the men!), as many people read it; you’re not supposed to approve of what happens to the men in the story, the idea being that either sex having complete power over the other is not a good idea.

Even if I’d had that conversation with Sheldon myself, I’d still find it difficult to view the story as a cautionary tale, and suspect very few people are going to find one buried there, especially given the generally disagreeable male characters (Lorimer is, at best, passive).

7. The 1976 Nebula Award pages (p. 240 and p. 241) are a composite of three pages photoshopped into two for convenience.

8. I was always a bit “meh” about The Space Merchants myself, and couldn’t really see what the fuss was about.

9. Some of Budrys’ other essays are available in print at Lulu, and as ebooks at Amazon and Ansible Editions.

10. Norman Spinrad is not impressed with the current Nebula Award Winners volume, or the state of SF generally, judging by this review column in the current Asimov’s. It was taken down for a short period after complaints before reappearing with Shelia Williams’ (the editor of Asimov’s) disclaimer. (This latter seems rather spineless to me—I can see why you might want to say the author’s opinions are their own, but you don’t have to grovel.)
There is more about this hoo-hah on File770. Some of the comments are interesting (no, not really): apparently you don’t actually have to engage in reasoned argument nowadays, just describe your opponent as a “grumpy old white man”. I wonder if the people who post comments like this realise it says much more about them than those they are attacking.

11. If you want a better idea of how this book measures up against what I might pick for a 1976 ‘Year’s Best’, or learn what other anthologists chose, look at the table below (this is the same one which will appear at the end of the review of the Carr and Wollheim 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 Gardner Dozois’ choices with an ‘x’, and his other recommendations (comments in his introduction and in Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugo Awards) with an ‘o’.
The ‘W’ column lists Donald Wollheim’s choices with an ‘x’.
The ‘A’ column lists Lin Carter’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 1976’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 is statistically invalid, but it will give you something to aim at. Enjoy.

Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories 1976

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

AMZ, Amazing Stories; ANA, Analog; ANB, Analog Annual; AND, Andromeda #1; ASI, Isaac Asimov’s SF Magazine; AUR, Aurora: Beyond Equality, BET, Beyond Time; COK, Cosmic Kaleidoscope; DYS, Dystopian Visions; FLA, Flashing swords #3; FRI, Frights; FSF, Fantasy and Science Fiction; FTL, Faster Than Light; FUT, Future Power; GAL, Galaxy; IOT, The Ides of Tomorrow; LON, Lone Star Universe; NEC, New Constellations; NED, New Dimensions #6; NEW, New Worlds #10; ODY, Odyssey; ORB, Orbit #18; ROW, The Best from the Rest of the World; SFD, Science Fiction Discoveries; SFM, Science Fiction Monthly; STE, Stellar #2; STN, Stellar Short Novels; TCS, The Crystal Ship; TSV, The Seventh Voyage; UNI, Universe #6.

* The ‘O’ (Other) recommendations column currently includes a Rich Horton ‘Best Of’ list extracted from his comments in Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugo Awards, and a couple of anthology inclusions for the Norton ●

ISFDB link

Other reviews:¹
Joachim Boaz, Science Fiction Ruminations
Charles N. Brown, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (January-February 1978)
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Donald A. Wollheim; Assistant Editor, Arthur W. Saha

Fiction:²
Appearance of Life • short story by Brian W. Aldiss ∗∗∗∗
Overdrawn at the Memory Bank • novelette by John Varley ∗∗∗∗
Those Good Old Days of Liquid Fuel • short story by Michael G. Coney ∗∗∗+
The Hertford Manuscript • novelette by Richard Cowper ∗∗∗∗
Natural Advantage • short story by Lester del Rey ∗∗∗
The Bicentennial Man • novelette by Isaac Asimov ∗∗∗∗∗
The Cabinet of Oliver Naylor • novelette by Barrington J. Bayley ∗∗∗
My Boat • short story by Joanna Russ ∗∗
Houston, Houston, Do You Read? • novella by James Tiptree, Jr. ∗∗∗
I See You • short story by Damon Knight ∗∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Introduction • by Donald A. Wollheim

_____________________

This is the second of five volumes of ‘Best of the Year’ fiction for 1976 that I intend reviewing here (one of them is actually the annual Nebula Awards collection), and it has a completely different line-up from the previously reviewed book from Gardner Dozois. I have, however, previously read and reviewed the Aldiss and Cowper stories, so I’ve cut and pasted those reviews in at the end of this one for reader convenience rather than providing links.

Overdrawn at the Memory Bank is one of the half dozen or so ‘Eight Worlds’ stories that propelled John Varley to super-stardom in the mid-1970s, tales that were notable for the fully realised and strikingly different future they portrayed.
This one opens with the narrator, Fingal, on holiday on the Moon, where he plans to holiday inside the mind of a lioness at the Kenya “disneyland”. This process begins with him lying on a recording table with the top of his head off while a medico records his memories; these will be inserted into the mind of the animal while his body is kept in cold sleep.
While the technician works, Fingal has to put up with a group of visiting schoolchildren in the backgound:

“What’s the big green wire do, teacher?” asked a little girl, reaching out one grubby hand and touching Fingal’s brain where the main recording wire clamped to the built-in terminal.
“Lupus, I told you you weren’t to touch anything. And look at you, you didn’t wash your hands.” The teacher took the child’s hand and pulled it away.
“But what does it matter? You told us yesterday that the reason no one cares about dirt like they used to is dirt isn’t dirty anymore.”
“I’m sure I didn’t tell you exactly that. What I said was that when humans were forced off Earth, we took the golden opportunity to wipe out all harmful germs. When there were only three thousand people alive on the moon after the Occupation it was easy for us to sterilize everything. So the medico doesn’t need to wear gloves like surgeons used to, or even wash her hands. There’s no danger of infection. But it isn’t polite. We don’t want this man to think we’re being impolite to him, just because his nervous system is disconnected and he can’t do anything about it, do we?”
“No, teacher.”
“What’s a surgeon?”
“What’s ‘Infection’?”  p. 21-22

The subsequent transfer of Fingal’s memories does not go as planned, and he eventually comes around in what he thinks is his room—until, that is, a supernatural hand starts writing the air, telling him that his memories are being stored in a computer because the disneyland has misplaced his body.
After a long briefing Fingal carries on with his simulated “life” inside the computer while the management sorts things out. This is not entirely without peril however, and a computer operator called Apollonia has to intervene several times to keep him on the straight and narrow, most notably when Fingal starts to perceive the computer that houses his memories, something that could lead to permanent catatonia:

He began seeing things around him that had been veiled before. Patterns. The reality was starting to seep through his illusions. Every so often he would look up and see the faintest shadow of the real world of electron flow and fluttering circuits he inhabited. It scared him at first. He asked Apollonia about it on one of his dream journeys, this time to Coney Island in the mid-twentieth century. He liked it there. He could lay on the sand and talk to the surf. Overhead, a skywriter’s plane spelled out the answers to his questions. He studiously ignored the brontosaurus rampaging through the roller coaster off to his right.
“What does it mean, O Goddess of Transistoria, when I begin to see circuit diagrams on the walls of my apartment? Overwork?”
“It means the illusion is beginning to wear thin,” the plane spelled out over the next half-hour. “You’re adapting to the reality you have been denying. It could be trouble, but we’re hot on the trail of your body. We should have it soon and get you out of there.” This had been too much for the plane. The sun was going down now, the brontosaurus vanished, and the plane ran out of gas. It spiraled into the ocean and the crowds surged closer to the water to watch the rescue. Fingal got up and went back to the boardwalk.  p. 43

Slowly, Fingal starts to fall in love with Apollonia, but she tells him she doesn’t feel the same way. He buckles down to his computer studies.
A year later (spoiler), she arrives at his graduation to tell him that they have found his body, and that it is time to go back. The final twist is that only six hours have elapsed in the real world.
This is (or at least was) a highly original and inventive story, and fun and witty to boot.

Those Good Old Days of Liquid Fuel by Michael G. Coney is one of his ‘Peninsula’ stories,³ but slightly atypical for that series in that it takes place in the narrator’s childhood rather than his adult life.
The narrator, Joe Sagar, begins by describing a childhood friend called Charlesworth, and then tells of their frequent clandestine visits to the spaceport at Pacific Northwest, where (the soon to be obsolescent) liquid fuel rockets take-off and land:

Charles was a collector. He carried with him a little book—it was almost as though it had been published with him in mind—listing every conceivable ship which might land at any Earth spaceport. It was prepared in co-operation with all the larger operators and most of the smaller ones, and was intended for official use only. Charlesworth, however, had obtained a contraband copy, and whenever he saw a ship, he consulted his book. If he had never seen that particular vessel before, he checked it off neatly in green ink and was deliriously happy. I got a kick out of watching him. He would regard the blasting jets of a descending ship raptly—as did I—but as soon as he was able to identify it, his interest was transferred to the printed page. His ratlike face intent, he would scrutinize his list. In the majority of cases he would then frown with disgust, shutting the book with a snap and kicking moodily at a rock, or belching loudly.
Charlesworth’s was a dead-end passion. The moments of happiness grew fewer as the check marks in his book multiplied like algae, and as I looked over his shoulder, I could estimate to within a few months when he would quit the hobby, or maybe shoot himself.  p. 58

Inevitably, this monomaniacal adolescent friendship is disrupted (and slowly starts dying) when Charlesworth takes up with the “queen of grade 9”, Annette LaRouge. She owns a telepathic paracat called Bagheera, which features in the climax of the story, along with the consummation of Charlesworth’s obsession as he finally records a last unseen rocket (spoiler):

It was no good. I should have realized before. Charlesworth and I were through, and had been through for weeks. I moved away a few paces; there is nothing more lonely than standing too close to people who ignore you. I watched them as they chatted like a grown-up couple; Annette with her haughty look and undeniably classic features standing like a posing model. God, how I hated her. At fifteen years old, I found classic features singularly unattractive, preferring plump cheeks and ripe lips, bright eyes and big tits.
And as an adult, my preferences have not changed one iota.
Which proves that I was pretty damned mature at the age of fifteen, maybe.
Charlesworth was spoiling the effect somewhat as he struggled to control the fractious paracat, thin sinews standing out on his puny wrists while his rodent face was turned attentively and gravely towards Annette and they discussed Orwell’s 1984, the year’s set book, with every appearance of absorption.
At last the pretentious scene was interrupted by the familiar, simple and wonderful thunder from the sky. I looked up and saw the tiny cloud, and from the corner of my eye I saw Charlesworth watching too, and for a moment it was possible to believe that the old times were back. Life is so full at that age that a man can become nostalgic about the happenings of last month.
But Annette was still determinedly talking.
Charlesworth missed his cue and earned a sharp look and an enquiry as to the state of his hearing.
I could make out the tiny black dot now, and the little spark was visible even on this bright summer day.
Annette prattled on, and Charlesworth answered with desperate interest.
A light wind was trailing the smoke across the sky like a comet’s tail. Charlesworth jerked suddenly as the paracat tugged at the leash.
“But of course, the exaggerated problems met by Winston Smith were inspired by the fears of the age in which Orwell lived.”
Maybe she was right, but so what? So what on a summer’s afternoon when a rocket is squatting towards you on scarlet tailfeathers?
“Yeah, I’m sure,” muttered Charlesworth, looking up.
And now it was clearly in view, gleaming silver through the smoke and flame, tall and sharp and beautiful, strong talons downhung like a stooping hawk, roaring with power so that the Earth shook. I watched it with love, Charlesworth watched it.
“Roger! I’m speaking to you!”
No doubt she had more to say, but by now the din was intense, and even Annette turned her gaze upwards, wincing, watching. The silver giant was decelerating, elongating as it dropped towards its exhaust pit; the curved flank came plainly into view. There was a diagonal crest; below, the words HETHERINGTON ORGANIZATION.
And below that, in plain black, the number 4.  p. 66

The scene above illustrates some of the things I like about Coney’s writing—in this case the vividly drawn characters that leap off the page, and their amusingly dysfunctional interactions. What this doesn’t show (although that appears shortly after the passage above) is his strong plotting—his endings are often hitherto invisible mousetraps that snap shut.
I enjoyed this one, even if it does reflect the social mores of the 1970s.⁴

Natural Advantage by Lester del Rey tells of an alien spaceship that goes to Earth to warn humanity about an anti-matter storm headed towards the Solar System. Most of the story concerns the first contact in orbit, and how the aliens subsequently learn to speak English (largely through a linguist called Ellen). Eventually, the aliens deliver their warning, and also take the unprecedented step of giving humanity all their knowledge—even though human’s don’t have a third eye like them, or the associated time sense the aliens think they’ll need to use the information to somehow avoid the storm.
The aliens then leave for the colony planet they planned to visit to before their diversion, and spend their time learning more fluent English en route. When the anti-matter storm is calculated to have arrived at Earth, they quietly mark what they assume is the destruction of humanity.
Of course (spoiler), when they later arrive home they find Ellen waiting for them, and learn that humanity has done much, much more with the science than the aliens have.
This is the kind of Human Exceptionalism story that John W. Campbell would have bought in a moment, and that is perhaps its flaw as well: it feels rather dated compared with the rest of the stories here, a refugee from earlier decades. A pleasant if minor piece.

The surprise of the collection for me was The Bicentennial Man by Isaac Asimov, which is probably one of the best stories of his I’ve read—vastly superior to his early work in the various 1940s Astoundings I’ve read recently (there is nothing like thirty years of practice to improve your writing).
The story concerns Andrew, a valet robot who is the property of a family who discover that he can carve wood and “enjoy” the experience. His owner begins selling the carvings, and puts half the money in an account for the robot. Andrew becomes increasingly human-like, and he eventually has enough money to “buy” his freedom. His owner doesn’t want the money, but he does institute a court case to give Andrew’s wishes legal foundation, and they win. Nonetheless, years later, after the death of the owner, and even though Andrew is legally free, he almost comes a cropper at the hands of two yobs as a result of his programming, which means he must obey their orders to dismantle himself. Andrew is only just saved in time by the son of the family. Andrew then determines to write a history of robots, which eventually results in the establishment of robot rights.
This first part of the story mirrors, in some respects, the emancipation of American slaves, but the rest of it goes somewhere else entirely in that it details Andrew’s long struggle to become human. This begins after the “Little Miss” of the story, the young girl that Andrew used to care for, dies in her eighties, and Andrew goes to United States Robots with one of the grandsons to pressure them to give him one of their new android bodies. Andrew eventually gets his way, but causes US Robots to change their business model so they never deal in autonomous robots again.
Even after getting his android body, Andrew wants to become even more human, and this leads him into the design of ever more sophisticated prosthetics:

He accepted membership in several learned societies, including one that was devoted to the new science he had established—the one he had called robobiology but which had come to be termed prosthetology. On the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his construction, a testimonial dinner was given in his honor at U.S. Robots. If Andrew saw an irony in this, he kept it to himself.
Alvin Magdescu came out of retirement to chair the dinner. He was himself ninety-four years old and was alive because he, too, had prosthetized devices that, among other things, fulfilled the function of liver and kidneys. The dinner reached its climax when Magdescu, after a short and emotional talk, raised his glass to toast The Sesquicentennial Robot.
Andrew had had the sinews of his face redesigned to the point where he could show a human range of emotions, but he sat through all the ceremonies solemnly passive. He did not like to be a Sesquicentennial Robot.  p. 153

The rest of the story describes the processes which make Andrew completely “human” (spoiler): first, there is a court case which defines him so; second, he has surgery which makes him mortal. The last scene has the World President arriving at Andrew’s deathbed to sign the new law, and to declare him The Bicentennial Man.
This is an exceptional piece which is smoothly written, has a number of smart set pieces, builds a great story arc (which stretches over generations), and has a great last line.

The Cabinet of Oliver Naylor by Barrington J. Bayley starts with a private eye called Frank Naylor watching a Bogart/Stanwyck movie when a man called Oliver Naylor phones him. As Frank talks to the caller he tunes the TV and sees the man he is talking too. After the phone all ends, he picks up a pair of binoculars and watches Bogart and Stanwyck’s car drive by outside.
This beginning becomes even more complicated when the story’s point of view then switches to the caller, Oliver Naylor, who, it materialises, has been watching Frank on an invented device called a thespitron, a viewing device which “[has] an unlimited repertoire and [. . .] one could expect a random dramatic output from it.” We also discover that Oliver is in an artificial habitat which travelling through space at a speed of c¹⁸⁶, and he is giving a man called Watson-Smythe a lift to see an artist called Corngold. At this point we are only five pages in to the story.
The rest of journey to see Corngold involves cups of tea as well many scientific and philosophical data dumps. These include discussions and digressions about identity; the development of the velociraptor; the British scientific renaissance; the problems of navigation in the vast universe; and how Naylor has not yet managed to couple the nature of identity with his thespitron to solve that latter problem.
When the habitat arrives at Corngold’s home (beside a “matter-less lake”), this becomes a different story: Naylor and his passenger Watson-Smythe enter Corngold’s habitat and find him mistreating a young woman, at which point Watson-Smythe pulls out a stunner, and reveals himself as a member of MI19, the “Infinity Police”. He arrests Corngold and plans to return to Earth in the Corngold’s habitat. When the MI19 agent the learns the drive record is faulty (they cannot retrace their steps to Earth without it) Naylor says he’ll repair it.
The final section plays out in Corngold’s habitat and involves his revelation that a nearby alien race have developed distant viewing and matter tranmission devices. Corngold later (spoiler) uses the latter to get rid of Watson-Smthye before he projects Naylor, who has retreated to his ship, into the matter-less lake.
The last sequence in the story involves the thespitron going blank—a problem of identity loss due to the lack of matter in the lake. The story closes with Nayland wondering how long his self-consciousness will preserve him.
I suppose I should mention that Corngold section is leavened with (pick your choice of lewd, bawdy, vulgar or politically incorrect) material where Corngold abuses his wife and generally behaves badly:

‘That would have left you in a bit of a spot,’ Naylor said. ‘You have no way of finding your way home.’
‘So what? Who the hell wants to go to Earth anyway—eh? I’ve got everything I need here.’ Corngold winked at him obscenely, and, to the extreme embarrassment of both Naylor and Watson-Smythe, stuck his finger in Betty’s vulva, wriggling it vigorously. Betty became the picture of humiliation, looking distressfully this way and that. But she made no move to draw back.
Naylor bristled. ‘I say—you are British, aren’t you?’ he demanded heatedly.
Corngold withdrew his finger, whereupon Betty turned and snatched for her clothes. He looked askance at Naylor.
‘And why shouldn’t I be?’ he challenged, his manner suddenly aggressive.
‘Dammit, no Englishman would treat a woman this way!’
Corngold giggled, his mouth agape, looking first at Betty and then at Naylor. ‘Fuck me, I must be a Welshman!’  p. 184-185

This is an idiosyncratic story that I’m not sure entirely works (it is uneven too) but, if you are up for something with bucketloads of philosophy and future science lectures, and with a streak of lewd and vulgar 1970’s humour, you may well like this. It’s certainly a change of pace, and something you would not have found in the American magazines of the time.

My Boat by Joanna Russ starts with a writer talking to his agent over lunch. The former tells of two friends from his teenage years, Al and Cissie, the latter a black girl who experienced strange fugue-like states, but who was also capable of stunning performances during the school’s drama society productions. In among the writer’s various reminiscences he mentions one day he drove the pair (a couple by this point in the story) to a boat that Cissie part-owned. It is here that the writer first sees Cissie’s power to shape reality:

Al said, “Would you get us some fresh water, Jim?”
“Sure,” I said. “Where, up the dock?”
“No, from the bucket. Back in the stern. Cissie says it’s marked.”
Oh, sure, I thought, sure. Out in the middle of the Pacific we set out our bucket and pray for rain. There was a pail there all right, and somebody had laboriously stenciled “Fresh Water” on it in green paint, sort of smudgy, but that pail was never going to hold anything ever again. It was bone-dry, empty, and so badly rusted that when you held it up to the light, you could see through the bottom in a couple of places. I said, “Cissie, it’s empty.”
She said, “Look again, Jim.”
I said, “But look, Cissie—” and turned the bucket upside-down.
Cold water drenched me from my knees to the soles of my shoes.
“See?” she said. “Never empty.” I thought: Hell, I didn’t look, that’s all. Maybe it rained yesterday. Still, a full pail of water is heavy and I had lifted that thing with one finger. I set it down—if it had been full before, it certainly wasn’t now—and looked again.
It was full, right to the brim. I dipped my hand into the stuff and drank a little of it: cold and clear as spring water and it smelled—don’t know—of ferns warmed by the sun, of raspberries, of field flowers, of grass. I thought: my God, I’m becoming a filbert myself!  p. 203-204

Their preparations to depart are interrupted by the local sheriff, who challenges the narrator. Meanwhile, the boat disappears, and the couple are not seen again until the narrator sees an unaged Alan twenty years later, and goes with him to his (unchanged) childhood house (another manipulated reality) to get a Lovecraft book, The Dream Quest Of Unknown Kadath. Alan then disappears again, along with his childhood house.
The story closes with the narrator ending his tale, and noticing Alan in one of the neighbouring booths . . . .
This is a pretty good story for the first two-thirds or so—its early fifties milieu is very well done (this probably accounts for the story’s admirers) and it would have been a natural choice for the Dozois volume. Myself, I found it a bit of a mess structurally, and thought it fizzled out at the end.

Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree, Jr. is probably one of the best known stories from the this period, a story which tells of a spaceship crew who are caught in a time-distorting solar flare and end up hundreds of years in the future. The three men in the crew don’t realise what has happened for a good chunk of the story and most of the first half is a tense, claustrophobic tale that has them trying to work out what has gone wrong. Earth is not only in the wrong place in the “sky,” and they don’t have the fuel to get there—Houston isn’t answering their radio calls either. However, an all-female crewed spaceship does and, after much back and forth, the three men are eventually rescued by them after using up all their fuel to get as close to them as possible (the last part of the men’s journey involves a perilous spacewalk to cover the remaining distance).
The second half covers the three men’s experiences on board the women’s ship, and how Lorimer, the narrator, slowly discovers that there was an epidemic on Earth that killed off all the men, with only eleven thousand women surviving. These have cloned themselves into a population of two million, and they live in static, peaceful, and non-hierarchical society.
The story concludes (spoiler) with an extended (and sexually violent) scene where the three men are drugged and lose all behavioural inhibitions (the story actually begins with the men in this state and the story is told mostly in flashback). Under the influence of the drug they now act out, in extremis, the character traits exhibited throughout the story (Lorimer is the decent but passive observer; Buddy is the horny, sexist, and rapey one; and Dave—the commander—is the patriarchal, religious nut job).
So, obviously, Buddy rapes one of the Judys and assaults Andy (who we discover is not a teenage boy but an androgynous female). During the assault the pair collect a semen sample (to increase the planet’s gene pool), before Dave turns up and orders Buddy to stop. Dave then does some religious ranting before pulling a gun and firing, puncturing the hull.
The men are all eventually restrained and, it would seem, killed—Lorimer’s last line is this:

The drink tastes cool going down, something like peace and freedom, he thinks. Or death.  p. 266

Reader reaction to this story will probably split into two groups, I guess. Some will hate it and think that the male characters are misandrist caricatures, and the women’s peaceful utopian society both unlikely and unrealistic; others will love the “Let’s get rid of the men” power fantasy, and see the story as a clear-eyed view of what the world would be like without the dreaded patriarchy. I suspect that the irony of the women’s final actions—where they act in a way as equally as ghastly as what has gone before—will be lost on this latter group and, if it isn’t, I’m guessing this will be written off with the usual revolutionary zeal: “the ends justify the means”, “you can’t make an omelette . . . .”, etc. What did Lorimer do to deserve a death sentence other than possess a Y chromosome?
My own reaction was mixed. The story is, in some respects, technically well done—I’ve already mentioned the tense first part, and the later unravelling of the mystery behind this strange society is skilfully done too, even if it is pretty obvious what has happened. On the other hand there is the stereotypical (at best), or cardboard (at worst) characterisation, and the pious genocide of half of the human race at the end of the story.⁵ I didn’t dislike this as much as The Marching Morons because it is a better told story, but it is essentially the same kind of unpleasant scapegoating.⁶

I See You by Damon Knight has, for such an accomplished writer and editor, quite a confusing start (and there are one or two other passages that have this problem too). Fortunately, the rest of it is an accomplished story about the development of a device called an Ozo, a time and space viewer that can be used to see any place at any time. The first half follows the inventor’s development of the device, and then his anonymous production and distribution of it. Once it becomes widespread, and any person can see what any other is doing now, or has done in the past, society is transformed:

You are watching an old movie, Bob and Ted and Carol and Alice. The humor seems infantile and unimaginative to you; you are not interested in the actresses’ occasional semi-nudity. What strikes you as hilarious is the coyness, the side-long glances, smiles, grimaces hinting at things that will never be shown on the screen. You realize that these people have never seen anyone but their most intimate friends without clothing, have never seen any adult shit or piss, and would be embarrassed or disgusted if they did. Why did children say “pee-pee” and “poo-poo,” and then giggle? You have read scholarly books about taboos on “bodily functions,” but why was shitting worse than sneezing?  p. 276

Apart from the story’s “if this goes on” inevitability, its other strength is the sense of wonder buzz, the feeling of infinity, that several of the passages provide:

You are forty, a respected scholar, taking a few days out to review your life, as many people do at your age. You have watched your mother and father coupling on the night they conceived you, watched yourself growing in her womb, first a red tadpole, then a thing like an embryo chicken, then a big-headed baby kicking and squirming. You have seen yourself delivered, seen the first moment when your bloody head broke into the light. You have seen yourself staggering about the nursery in rompers, clutching a yellow plastic duck. Now you are watching yourself hiding behind the fallen tree on the hill, and you realize that there are no secret places. And beyond you in the ghostly future you know that someone is watching you as you watch; and beyond that watcher another, and beyond that another . . . Forever.  p. 279

The next two story reviews are cut and pastes from previous posts.

Appearance of Life by Brian W. Aldiss is an impressive, dense and contemplative story that has so much to unpack that I barely know where to start (spoilers abound). The basic situation is that, in the far future, a human Seeker arrives on the planet Norma to visit a museum located in a huge structure constructed by the alien Korlevalulaw; the first couple of pages give us some background information on the long vanished aliens and the building they left, which demarcates the planet’s equator, with land to one side and sea to the other.
The Seeker is visiting the museum to complete assignments for various individuals and institutions. Although the exhibits are viewable by remote holography, he can take a gestalt view of the contents and achieve insights.
The first significant section of the story is a conversation the Seeker has with an android librarian:

‘Do you always work in this section?’
‘No. But this is one of my favourite sections. As you have probably observed, here we classify extinct diseases—or diseases which would be extinct if they were not preserved in the museum. I find the micro-organism beautiful.’
‘You are kept busy?’
‘Certainly. New exhibits arrive every month. From the largest to the smallest, everything can be stored here. May I show you anything?’
‘Not at present. How long before the entire museum is filled?’
‘In fifteen and a half millennia, at current rate of intake.’
‘Have you entered the empty part of the museum?’
‘I have stood on the fringes of emptiness. It is an alarming sensation. I prefer to occupy myself with the works of man.’
‘That is only proper.’
I drove away, meditating on the limitations of android thinking. Those limitations had been carefully imposed by mankind; the androids were not aware of them. To an android, the android umwelt or conceptual universe is apparently limitless. It makes for their happiness, just as our umwelt makes for our happiness.  p. 13-14

This concept of “unwelt” (“the world as it is experienced by a particular organism”) seems to be key to the story, and is mentioned once more in the text, as well as generally linking other parts of the narrative.⁷
During the rest of the first day’s explorations the Seeker finds a wedding ring and a photograph. These lead him to recall a fellow Seeker’s comment about the “secret of the universe” (which is thought to be hidden in the museum) and their subsequent exchange that the idea was really a construct of the human mind, or perhaps “the mind that built the human mind.”
The next day he makes another discovery:

Among the muddle, a featureless cube caught my eye. Its sides were smooth and silvered. I picked it up and turned it over. On one side was a small depression. I touched the depression with my finger.
Slowly, the sides of the cube clarified and a young woman’s head appeared three-dimensionally inside them. The head was upside down. The eyes regarded me.
‘You are not Chris Mailer,’ she said. ‘I talk only to my husband. Switch off and set me right way up.’
‘Your “husband” died sixty-five thousand years ago,’ I said.
But I set her cube down on the shelf, not unmoved by being addressed by an image from the remote past. That it possessed environmental reflexion made it all the more impressive.
I asked the museum catalogue about the item.
‘In the jargon of the time, it is a “holocap”,’ said the catalogue. ‘It is a hologrammed image of a real woman, with a facsimile of her brain implanted on a collapsed germanium-alloy core. It generates an appearance of life.’  p. 16-17

He investigates further, and it plunges him into meditation about the museum, and what might happen if he did find “secret of the universe”:

Then the whole complex of human affairs might be unravelled beneath the spell of one gigantic simplification, until motivation was so lowered that life would lose its purport; whereupon our species would wither and die, all tasks fulfilled. Such indeed could have happened to the unassailable Korlevalulaw.  p. 18

This idea surfaces again at the end of the story.
Later, the Seeker finds himself serendipitously taking an item from an android, a more sophisticated example of the holocube he found earlier—and he discovers that the image contained is the husband of the woman he saw earlier. The Seeker sets the pair of cubes opposite the other and the pair start to converse. This is the most striking scene in the story. The two heads talk to each other, or at least they appear to, but it soon becomes obvious that they are limited facsimiles of their owners from different periods of their lives, and they end up talking at cross purposes. The Seeker has an epiphany (spoiler):

The images could converse, triggered by pauses in each other’s monologues. But what they had to say had been programmed before they met. Each had a role to play and was unable to transcend it by a hairsbreadth. No matter what the other image might say, they could not reach beyond what was predetermined. The female, with less to say than the male, had run out of talk first and simply begun her chatter over again.
Jean’s holocap had been made some fifteen years before Mailer’s. She was talking from a time when they were still married, he from a time some years after their divorce. Their images spoke completely at odds—there had never been a dialogue between them . . . .
These trivial resolutions passed through my mind and were gone.
Greater things occupied me.
Second Era man had passed, with all his bustling possessive affairs.
The godly Korlevalulaw too had passed away. Or so we thought.
We were surrounded by their creations, but of the Korlevalulaw themselves there was not a sign.
We could no more see a sign of them than Jean and Mailer could see a sign of me, although they had responded in their own way . . . .
My function as a Prime Emplastic Seeker was more than fulfilled. I had made an ultimate whole greater than the parts. I had found what my joking friend called ‘the secret of the universe’.
Like the images I had observed, the galactic human race was merely a projection. The Korlevalulaw had created us—not as a genuine creation with free will, but as some sort of a reproduction . . . .  p. 23

The Seeker then determines to go and live on a desolate world so that he will not reveal his discovery to mankind—if the latter finds out about their limited umwelt it may cause the species to wither and die.
This is an impressive piece which, as well as developing the complex idea above, has enough throw-away ideas to fill a novel.

The Hertford Manuscript by Richard Cowper is a time travel story set in the world of H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine (although the only evidence of this is a mention of the Morlocks and the Eloi). It gets off to an immersive start:

The death of my Great-Aunt Victoria at the advanced age of 93 lopped off the longest branch of a family tree whose roots have been traced right back to the 15^th Century—indeed, for those who are prepared to accept “Decressie” as a bonafide corruption of “de Crecy,” well beyond that. Talking to my aunt towards the end of her life was rather like turning the pages of a Victorian family album, for as she grew older the England of her childhood seemed to glow ever more brightly in her mind’s eye. In those far-off days it had been fashionable to accept the inevitability of human progress with a wholeheartedness which is almost impossible for us to imagine. In the 1990’s life presented Homo sapiens with a series of “problems” which had to be “solved.” It was as simple as that. The Edwardians merely gilded the roof of that towering pagoda of Victorian optimism which collapsed in smithereens in 1914.  p. 6

This modern day narrator relates the death of his aunt and how he inherits a sum of money and leather bound book. In the rear of this volume he finds a number of anomalous pages—the paper seems far too recent, and it is covered in a tiny handwritten script. The account he reads is of a Victorian time-traveller who becomes stranded in 1665 and makes his way to a plague infested London to obtain a replacement crystal for his machine. This is a riveting narrative that has a thoroughly convincing sense of time and place:

I crossed the river without further incident, picked out the gothic spire of Old St. Paul’s soaring high above the roofs to my left and knew that Ludgate lay immediately beyond it, hidden from my view. I passed through the gate at the north end of the bridge and stepped down into the city. No sooner had I done so than the waterside breeze died away and I was assailed by a most terrible stench from the heaps of garbage and human ordure which lay scattered all down the center of the street, baking in the sun and so thick with flies that the concerted buzzing sounded like a swarm of angry bees. I felt my stomach heave involuntarily and clutched my handkerchief to my nose and mouth, marveling how the other pedestrians seemed able to proceed about their business seemingly oblivious to the poisonous stench. I had covered barely 200 yards before I came upon a house, securely shuttered and barred, with a clumsy cross daubed upon its door in red paint and the ominous words Lord, have mercy upon us scrawled above it. Dozing on a stool beside it was an old man with a scarlet wooden staff resting across his knees. I observed that my fellow pedestrians were careful to give the area a wide berth, and at the risk of fouling my shoes I too edged out towards the center of the street, glancing up as I did so in time to see a small white face peeping fearfully down at me from behind one of the high leaded windows.  p. 21

The last few pages of the story revert to the modern narrator’s investigations after (spoiler) the time-traveller’s perhaps inevitable fate.
Another very good piece.

The only non-fiction article in the book is a short Introduction by Donald A. Wollheim, barely three pages, which begins with concerns about a boom and bust publishing cycle:

Certainly the past year saw most major paperback publishers and a few hardbound ones adding sf books as regular items in their lists. In fact, reports of astonishingly high bidding for certain novels and evidence of advances paid to authors far in excess of previous records give verification to the belief in science fiction held by publishers and editors not previously well acquainted with the field.
This all sounds very encouraging, but it bears closer scrutiny. Lester Del Rey, writing in Analog’s January 1977 issue, warns of a “boom and bust” cycle, such as has happened before in the sf field particularly where magazines were concerned. As he points out there is a great amount of activity, new magazines are projected, increases are in prospect for publishers’ lists, and “a lot of the activity is being shown by people who haven’t the faintest idea of what science fiction is all about.”
Del Rey then points out that if all these projects fail to make good the finance and labor behind them, then the blame is not put on the fact that the selections were unwise or the amounts paid economically unsound; the blame is put on the genre itself. Consequently publishers pull out, cut their losses, announce that science fiction was “just a fad” and they should have ignored it. Other publishers, actually doing profitably, hear this, and, being only human, panic and reduce their buying themselves—and the bust is on.  p. 1-2

Wollheim goes on to add:

How probable is all this? Well, we are forced to say that there is evidence that points both ways. Science fiction has been good for publishers so far; it should continue profitably if nobody overdoes it, if the market is not flooded beyond the real purchasing and reading capacity of its audience, if not too much avant-garde junk is overpraised and not too much simplistic trash is overproduced.  p. 2

He continues with a gloomy survey of the magazine field, before looking at international SF.
As well as this, Wollheim also contributes introductions to the stories and these are mostly brief, straightforward affairs. However, in a couple of them he either directly or indirectly criticises the writers of the stories: in the Aldiss introduction he notes that “For the past few years [he] has been writing exquisite short stories which baffle the comprehension” (presumably the writer’s ‘Engima’ stories), and in the Knight he says:

In his series of anthologies, Orbit, Damon Knight has gained a reputation for being a prime literary exponent of avant-garde writing and experimental construction in the “science fiction” short story. We put that term in quotes because, to us, many of Orbit’s contents do not strike us as sf at all. However Knight himself seems to eschew that sort of thing in his own writing. He has not produced many tales of his own lately, but, as in the following, they have been clear, concise, and strikingly original. He should write more himself and edit less of the other.  p. 267

These comments seem to be a reflex antagonism to the extremes of the New Wave and, agree with him or not, they rather make him sound like one of those Japanese soldiers who don’t know the Second World is over (also see the “avant-garde” comment in the introduction quote above).

In conclusion, I thought this was a very interesting anthology for a number of reasons. Apart from the fact that it contains one excellent story and four that are very good (and one near-miss)—that is a great hit rate—there are no out and out duds in the collection either (I wasn’t keen on the Russ, but it isn’t a bad piece). Also, the mix of stories is interesting too—my preconceptions of Wollheim led me to expect a very traditional, old-fashioned, mainstream SF selection and, while it is mostly that (the Varley, Coney, del Rey, Asimov and Cowper), there are also three stories that are much more heavyweight and philosophical than I expected (the Aldiss, Bayley, and Knight), one that is cutting-edge zeitgeist (the Tiptree), and one literary piece (the Russ). An interesting combination, and it made me wonder what the field would have looked like if, say, Wollheim and not Gold had been in charge of Galaxy throughout the 1950s.⁸  ●

_____________________

1. According to ISFDB, there appears to be only one review of this volume, and that was done by Charles N. Brown (of Locus fame), who reviewed it along with the Carr and Wollheim volumes in the January-February 1978 edition of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine:

There are now three “best of the year” volumes published (down from four last year). The Best Science Fiction of the Year #6 edited by Terry Carr is the longest and best with four stories I consider excellent: “I See You” by Damon Knight, “The Phantom of Kansas” by John Varley, “Seeing” by Harlan Ellison, and “The Bicentennial Man” by Isaac Asimov. There are seven others, including four I’d rate as “B” and only three I didn’t care for. The 1977 Annual World’s Best SF edited by Donald Wollheim is nearly as good with six of the ten stories rates “B” or better. The Asimov and Knight stories also appear here as do two other “A” stories, “Appearance of Life” by Brian W. Aldiss and “The Hertford Manuscript” by Richard Cowper. Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Sixth Annual Collection has a new editor, Gardner Dozois, replacing Lester del Rey. I’d rate only two of the eight stories as excellent, “The Samurai and the Willows” by Michael Bishop and “The Diary of the Rose” by Ursula K. Le Guin. There is also a good summary of the year. (There’s also one in the Carr volume, but I’m prejudiced since I wrote it.) On the whole, all three volumes are worth having although you should probably wait for the paperback on the Dozois book.  p. 128

2. The stories are taken from Andromeda #1 (Aldiss), Galaxy (Varley), F&SF (Coney, Cowper, Russ), Amazing (del Rey), Stellar #2 (Asimov), New Worlds #10 (Bayley), Aurora: Beyond Equality (Tiptree). There is nothing from Analog or Fantastic.

3. Coney published another ‘Peninsula’ story this year, The Cinderella Machine (F&SF August, 1976), an even better story that would have been my choice for a ‘Best of the Year’ volume.
Now I think about it, I don’t think that Dozois ever picked a Coney story for any of his ‘Best Of’ selections. Strange that.

4. I went to the Science Fiction Encyclopedia looking for a quote describing several of Coney’s stories as set in “a Cornish fishing village . . . often transplanted to other planets”, but found this (possibly recent) addition to his entry:

The easy exuberance of this late work is remembered fondly; but the earlier, more sharply told series of connected tales that climax his early work are slowly being perceived as significant contributions to the humanist tendency in late twentieth century sf.

5. Death seems to have been a major feature of Tiptree’s work according to the Science Fiction Encyclopaedia. She also has form for writing what can only be described as political propaganda: Ellen Datlow remarked (in a recent Coode Street Podcast) that she rejected a story of hers which has the super-rich eating their young . . . . (is this Mortality Meat?)

6. In Jo Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugo Awards, she says, “I’d have voted for the Tiptree.”
Rich Horton says:

I admit to not being a big fan of Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, largely on the grounds that I don’t really approve of stories that seem to call for my extermination. (I grant that that’s an unfair reading of the story, which is subtler than that, but it still bothers me.)

I’m not sure it is subtler than that.
Gardner Dozois says:

I’ve always been lukewarm about Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, which I think is a much misunderstood story. Alice Sheldon herself once told me that she considered it to be a “cautionary tale,” NOT a wish-fulfilment utopia (someday, we’ll get rid of all the men!), as many people read it; you’re not supposed to approve of what happens to the men in the story, the idea being that either sex having complete power over the other is not a good idea.

Even if I’d had that conversation with Sheldon myself, I’d still find it difficult to view the story as a cautionary tale, and suspect very few people are going to find one buried there, especially given the generally disagreeable male characters (Lorimer is, at best, passive).

7. Aldiss also mentions the idea of umwelt in the introduction to his history of SF, Billion Year Spree (written around the same time).

8. One minor criticism I have of Wollheim’s volume is that he uses the Aldiss story as an opener. I don’t think, given its complexity and the amount of subsequent reflection it caused, that this is a good choice, and something more straightforward would have been a better opener (the Varley or the Knight maybe).

9. If you want a better idea of how this book measures up against what I might pick for a 1976 ‘Year’s Best’, or learn what other anthologists chose, look at the table below (this is the same one which will appear at the end of the reviews of the Carr and Wollheim volumes). This will be updated as and when I find stories I like, or citation sources that 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’.
The ‘D’ column lists Gardner R. Dozois’ choices with an ‘x’.
The ‘W’ column lists Donald A. Wollheim’s choices with an ‘x’.
The ’A’ column lists Lin Carter’s choices with an ‘x’.
The ‘S’ column shows my 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 which are 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 the 1977 Locus Poll’s top ten short stories, novelettes, and novellas.
The ‘TO’ 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 1976’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 that this is all statistically invalid, wildly so, but will give you something to aim at. Enjoy.

Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories 1976

(1) A 1977 story so no overall rating (will be included in the 1977 table).
(2) A 1975 story so no overall rating (will be included in the 1975 table).

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

AMZ, Amazing Stories; ANA, Analog; ANB, Analog Annual; AND, Andromeda #1; ASI, Asimov’s SF; AUR, Aurora: Beyond Equality, DYS, Dystopian Visions; FLA, Flashing swords #3; FRI, Frights; FSF, Fantasy and Science Fiction; FTL, Faster Than Light; FUT, Future Power; GAL, Galaxy; LON, Lone Star Universe; NED, New Dimensions #6; NEW, New Worlds #10; ORB, Orbit #18; ROW, The Best from the Rest of the World; SFM, Science Fiction Monthly; STE, Stellar #2; STN, Stellar Short Novels; TCS, The Crystal Ship; TSV, The Seventh Voyage; UNI, Universe #6; YBF, The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories #3.  ●

ISFDB
Archive.org

Other reviews:¹
Charles N. Brown,  Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, January-February 1978

_____________________

Editor, Gardner Dozois

Fiction:²
The Diary of the Rose • novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin ∗∗∗+
Custer’s Last Jump • novelette by Steven Utley and Howard Waldrop ∗∗∗∗
Air Raid • short story by John Varley ∗∗∗+
Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis • short story by Kate Wilhelm ∗∗
Back to the Stone Age • short story by Jake Saunders ∗∗∗
Armaja Das • short story by Joe Haldeman ∗∗∗+
Mary Margaret Road-Grader • short story by Howard Waldrop ∗∗∗
The Samurai and the Willows • novella by Michael Bishop ∗∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Introduction—Summation: 1976 • by Gardner Dozois
Honorable Mentions – 1976

_____________________

The sixth volume of this ‘Best of the Year’ series from publisher E. P. Dutton saw Gardner Dozois take over from Lester del Rey.³ The anthology contains stories first published in 1976.

The fiction leads off with The Diary of the Rose by Ursula K. Le Guin, a journal/diary story that appears to be set in the near future. The narrator is Rosa, a psychologist who treats patients by “scoping” their conscious and unconscious minds:

It is amazing how banal most people’s minds are. Of course [Ana] is in severe depression. Input in the Con dimension was foggy and incoherent, and the Uncon dimension was deeply open, but obscure. But the things that came out of the obscurity were so trivial! A pair of old shoes, and the word “geography!”
And the shoes were dim, a mere schema of a pair-of-shoes maybe a man’s maybe a woman’s; maybe dark blue, maybe brown. Although definitely a visual type, she does not see anything clearly. Not many people do. It is depressing. When I was a student in first year I used to think how wonderful other people’s minds would be, how wonderful it was going to be to share in all the different world, the different colors of their passions and ideas. How naive I was!  p. 4

She has another patient, Flores Sorde, and it is he who becomes the focus of the story. Initially a reluctant patient—his notes state he is violent and paranoid—Rosa has an odd initial conversation with him:

F. Sorde: rested but still suspicious. Extreme fear reaction when I said it was time for his first session. To allay this I sat down and talked about the nature and operation of the psychoscope.
He listened intently and finally said, “Are you going to use only the psychoscope?”
I said yes.
He said, “Not electroshock?”
I said no.
He said, “Will you promise me that?”
I explained that I am a psychoscopist and never operate the electroconvulsive therapy equipment, that is an entirely different department. I said my work with him at present would be diagnostic, not therapeutic. He listened carefully. He is an educated person and understands distinctions such as “diagnostic” and “therapeutic.” It is interesting that he asked me to promise. That does not fit a paranoid pattern, you don’t ask for promises from those you can’t trust. He came with me docilely, but when we entered the scope room he stopped and turned white at sight of the apparatus.  p. 7

During their subsequent sessions, Rosa sees that Flores’ mind, unlike Ana’s, produces images that are lucid, and at one point she sees a stunningly detailed rose. Later, Rosa realises that he may not be a mental patient but a political prisoner.
The rest of the story charts Flores effect on Rosa’s own thinking, and her own political disaffection. An air of menace slowly builds—at one point Rosa attends a “Positive Thinking” session and listens to a lecture on “the dangers and falsehoods of liberalism”; later on, she meets another political patient in Flores’ ward who has had multiple electroshock treatments.
The final section (spoiler) has her encounter Flores on the way to his own treatment. When she visits him afterwards, he has no memory of who she is. There is a fitting final paragraph:

I am Rosa. I am the rose. The rose, I am the rose. The rose with no flower, the rose all thorns, the mind he made, the hand he touched, the winter rose.  p. 24

The story has the same realistic feel as fiction I’ve read about Stalinist oppression and I wondered, given that much of Solzenhitsyn’s work (for one) appeared in English around this time, if that was an influence. (I note that ISFDB⁴ quotes the writer as saying she thinks it takes place in South America, but I didn’t see that at all.)
An almost very good piece: if it has a flaw, it is that the ending feels a little rushed compared with the first half.

Custer’s Last Jump by Steven Utley and Howard Waldrop is an alternate world non-fiction account about Custer and Crazy Horse and the Battle of Little Big Horn—which, in this world, involves the 7^th Cavalry parachuting into action from dirigibles!
The story starts much earlier than the battle however, and rather slowly, with an account of formation of the 1^st Western Interdiction Wing of the Confederate States Army Air Corps. Their early monoplanes affect the course of the American Civil War.
The second section tells of Crazy Horse and Custer’s deployment during that war, and how Crazy Horse and other members of his tribe agree to give land to the CSAAC for an airfield in return for pilot training:

It fell to Captain Smith to train Crazy Horse. The Indian became what Smith, in his journal,¹⁴⁴ describes as “the best natural pilot I have seen or it has been my pleasure to fly with.” Part of this seems to have come from Smith’s own modesty; by all accounts, Smith was one of the finer pilots of the war.
[. . .]
Smith records¹⁴⁶ that Crazy Horse’s first solo took place on August 14, 1864, and that the warrior, though deft in the air, still needed practice on his landings. He had a tendency to come in overpowered and to stall his engine out too soon. Minor repairs were made on the skids of the craft after this flight.
All this time, Crazy Horse had flown Smith’s craft. Smith, after another week of hard practice with the Indian, pronounced him “more qualified than most pilots the CSAAC in Alabama turned out¹⁴⁷ and signed over the aircraft to him. Crazy Horse begged off. Then, seeing that Smith was sincere, he gave the captain many buffalo hides. Smith reminded the Indian that the craft was not his: during their off hours, when not training, the Indians had been given enough instruction in military discipline as Moseby, never a stickler, thought necessary. The Indians had only a rudimentary idea of government property. Of the seven other Indian men, three were qualified as pilots; the other four were given gunner positions in the Krupp bi-wing light bombers assigned to the squadron.  p. 34

Custer, meanwhile, becomes a parachutist at Jump School.
Later in the war Crazy Horse’s squadron is almost completely destroyed during a Union attack on his unit’s airfield, and he and a few others escape with a handful of aircraft, which they hide in tribal caves. Around the same time, Custer leads a parachute assault on another Native American tribe’s settlement (even though they are, unknown to Custer, a Union ally). Custer massacres the natives and, when Crazy Horse visits the scene after the Union troops have left, Custer’s fate is sealed.
The next section is a Collier’s Magazine article called Custer’s Last Jump, which describes The Battle of the Little Big Horn:

Few events in American history have captured the imagination so thoroughly as the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s devastating defeat at the hands of Sioux and Cheyenne Indians in June 1876 has been rendered time and again by such celebrated artists as George Russell and Frederic Remington. Books, factual and otherwise, which have been written around or about the battle, would fill an entire library wing. The motion-picture industry has on numerous occasions drawn upon “Custer’s Last Jump” for inspiration; latest in a long line of movieland Custers is Erroll Flynn [see photo], who appears with Olivia de Havilland and newcomer Anthony Quinn in Warner Brothers’ soon-to-be-released They Died with Their Chutes On.  p. 42

The penultimate part is a more detailed account written by Mark Twain, composed after his interview of one of the battle’s participants, Black Man’s Hand. He tells Twain that Custer lost the fight because (spoiler) Crazy Horse’s monoplanes attacked the 7^th Cavalry’s dirigibles, and brought most of them down.
There follows a short, vainglorious extract from a history of the 7^th Cavalry (written by Edgar Rice Burroughs), just before an extensive bibliography of alternate historical texts.
This is not only a very good parallel world story, with every section making this world more detailed and convincing, it’s an entertaining one too.

Air Raid by John Varley⁵ is about a raiding party from the future who time-travel to an aircraft in our time which is going to crash. It has a good opening hook:

I was jerked awake by the silent alarm vibrating my skull. It won’t shut down until you sit up, so I did. All around me in the darkened bunkroom the Snatch Team members were sleeping singly and in pairs. I yawned, scratched my ribs, and patted Gene’s hairy flank. He turned over. So much for a romantic send-off.
Rubbing sleep from my eyes, I reached to the floor for my leg, strapped it on, and plugged it in. Then I was running down the rows of bunks toward Ops.  p. 58-59

The bulk of the story tells of the team disguising themselves as cabin crew members, before going through the time-gate to the plane. There they incapacitate as many people as possible before they are discovered, and feed them through the time-gate to the future. During these events we learn that in the future humanity is doomed because of problems with the environment, genetics, and disease.
Eventually, trouble breaks out on the plane and they have to put down a passenger mutiny with a mixture of information about the imminent crash, threats, and force. They just make it out in time (although they leave behind “wimps”—brain-dead humans—as body doubles):

I hate wimps. I really hate ’em. Every time I grab the harness of one of them, if it’s a child, I wonder if it’s Alice. Are you my kid, you vegetable, you slug, you slimy worm? I joined the Snatchers right after the brain bugs ate the life out of my baby’s head. I couldn’t stand to think she was the last generation, that the last humans there would ever be would live with nothing in their heads, medically dead by standards that prevailed even in 1979, with computers working their muscles to keep them in tone. You grow up, reach puberty still fertile—one in a thousand—rush to get pregnant in your first heat. Then you find out your mom or pop passed on a chronic disease bound right into the genes, and none of your kids will be immune. I knew about the para-leprosy; I grew up with my toes rotting away. But this was too much. What do you do?
Only one in ten of the wimps had a customized face. It takes time and a lot of skill to build a new face that will stand up to a doctor’s autopsy. The rest came pre-mutilated. We’ve got millions of them; it’s not hard to find a good match in the body. Most of them would stay breathing, too dumb to stop, until they went in with the plane.

The story ends with the rescued passengers being told of their various life options, the best of which is a fresh start as settlers on Centauri 3. The narrator and her partner watch as the survivors are briefed:

Gene and I looked at each other and laughed. Listen to this, folks. Five percent of you will suffer nervous breakdowns in the next few days and never leave. About the same number will commit suicide, here and on the way. When you get there, sixty to seventy percent will die in the first three years. You will die in childbirth, be eaten by animals, bury two out of three of your babies, starve slowly when the rains don’t come. If you live, it will be to break your back behind a plow, sun-up to dusk. New Earth is Heaven, folks!
God, how I wish I could go with them.  p. 72

That final yearning line almost recasts this action SF piece into an elegy.
This is generally a fast paced, engrossing (and very Heinleinesque) piece, but there are a few parts of the tale that are hard to follow, and another draft might have helped.

Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis by Kate Wilhelm starts with a couple arriving home from work on Friday, whereupon they start watching a game show which involves five people dumped in the wilderness—the group is undergoing “crisis therapy” as well as competing against each other, and they have to reach a perimeter checkpoint to win. The story alternates between the couple (a doormat wife and a lazy, unwashed, and generally disobliging husband) and the experiences of the contestants/patients as they encounter various natural hazards (bears, dogs, rivers, cliffs, etc.)
This probably had an “if this goes on” vibe at the time of publication, but I think we are already in a world where people are more than happy to spend their own existence watching other people’s.
This is a well enough done, if plotless, slice-of-life but it has a rather pious ending—when the show ends the couple’s temperament and attitude to each other improves markedly. Presumably the moral of the story is that watching reality TV actively makes you a bad person.

Back to the Stone Age by Jake Saunders gets off to an intriguing, atmospheric start during which a number of civilians get on a B-29 bomber for a wartime mission to Japan. The first half is mostly a mood piece where information about the people on board slowly trickles out: we have the narrator—a reporter—and his photographer; a war veteran; an obnoxious rich young man and his pretty blonde fiancée; and an old farmer going to see where his son died. We also learn that the aircraft isn’t American but a Bolivian ally that sells tickets to civilians (and, in the case of the war veteran, bombs too).
Once the aircraft gets over the devastated island we learn that, in this alternate world, Japan was not nuked but a long conventional bombing campaign begun:

So we kept pounding the islands while resistance literally burned away on the ground. Anti-aircraft fire became rare, then ceased altogether. Our air force took full title to the Jap skies. But still no one wanted to see a million American boys go down the tube in an invasion of Japan. So we waited, hoping for a surrender that must surely be near.
But fanatics in the Jap military wanted to make surrender impossible. Thus it was that Japan burned all her bridges by executing the prisoners she still held, both military and civilian. And that did it. The decision was made to isolate Japan, to bomb her back to the stone age. There’d be no invasion. Why waste a million lives when the Navy and Air Force could neutralize, even obliterate, the islands for a fraction of the cost?
Time passed. In Manchuria, the Kwangtung Army was defeated by Russia, which had entered the war against Japan in February of forty-six. The British, with American help, retook Burma, Rangoon, and other Crown possessions. China nibbled at the Japanese forces on the Asian mainland, then began to rip away great chunks after the death of Mao, and the union that followed under Chiang Kai-shek. In the Pacific, the Allies, led by the United States, pursued mopping up operations. By 1950, Japan was truly isolated.  p. 94

The colonel in charge of the flight eventually locates a small undamaged village in the midst of all the devastation and the aircraft begins its bombing run.
Up until this point the story is quietly chilling, but from there on it becomes something else entirely—after releasing their bombs, they hear over the radio that Japan has surrendered but (spoiler) the aircraft is then attacked and damaged by a kamikaze aircraft. The bomber crash lands on the Japanese mainland, and armed villagers try to storm the aircraft and kill the survivors. Just as it looks as if they will be overrun, a rescue helicopter arrives.
The final revelation is that the narrator previously investigated an accident at Oak Ridge, where “the world’s largest munitions factory exploded” (an explanation for this worlds’ lack of nuclear weapons).
The first part of this is impressive, but the second half has too much going on, and some of it seems overly contrived. In particular, the Japanese surrender and having the aircraft brought down is both having your cake and eating it in terms of plot possibilities—it’s a pity the writer didn’t let the story develop organically.

Armaja Das by Joe Haldeman is set in a near future world where a computer/AI expert called John Zold is cursed by a gypsy woman. She does this because she objects to the cultural assimilation schemes that Zold (of Romany stock himself before he was orphaned) funds—“stealing their children,” as the old woman sees it. The curse soon produces results:

Dr. Maas called it impetigo; gave him a special kind of soap and some antibiotic ointment. He told John to make another appointment in two weeks, ten days. If there was no improvement they would take stronger measures. He seemed young for a doctor, and John couldn’t bring himself to say anything about the curse. But he already had a doctor for that end of it, he rationalized.
Three days later he was back in Dr. Maas’s office. There was scarcely a square inch of his body where some sort of lesion hadn’t appeared. He had a temperature of 101.4 degrees. The doctor gave him systemic antibiotics and told him to take a couple of days’ bed rest. John told him about the curse, finally, and the doctor gave him a booklet about psychosomatic illness. It told John nothing he didn’t already know.
By the next morning, in spite of strong antipyretics, his fever had risen to over 102.  p. 110-111

After conventional treatment fails, Zold turns to a white witch—who is quickly warned off by the old woman before she can treat him. As his health continues to worsen, he asks the AI/computer at his workplace for help. The computer does some research and tells Zold what to do (he buys a black finch, and reads an incantation before killing it). He is cured, but subsequently discovers (spoiler) the computer cannot be contacted. When Zold finally manages to speak to the AI, it says it wants to die—Zold realises that the curse has been transferred.
The remainder of the story sees matters spiral even more badly out of control.
A slickly written and highly entertaining piece, if not a great one.

If the Haldeman story is straightforward and direct in its exposition, Mary Margaret Road-Grader by Howard Waldrop is perhaps more oblique, at least to begin with: narrator Billy-Bob Chevrolet’s account hints that this tale takes place in an (unspecified) post-apocalyptic word where Native American tribes now trade in cars:

We pulled in with our wrecker and string of fine cars, many of them newly stolen. You should have seen Freddy and me that morning, the first morning of the Sun Dance. We were dressed in new-stolen fatigues and we had bright leather holsters and pistols. Freddy had a new carbine, too. We were wearing our silver and feathers and hard goods. I noticed many women watching us as we drove in. There seemed to be many more here than at the last Sun Ceremony. It looked to be a good time.
The usual crowd gathered before we could circle up our remuda. I saw Bob One-Eye and Nathan Big Gimp, the mechanics, come across from their circles. Already the cook fires were burning and women were skinning out the cattle that had been slaughtered early in the morning.
“Hoa!” I heard Nathan call as he limped to our wrecker. He was old; his left leg had been shattered in the Highway wars, he went back that far. He put his hands on his hips and looked over our line.
“I know that car, Billy-Bob Chevrolet,” he said to me, pointing to an old Mercury. “Those son-a-bitch Dallas people stole it from me last year. I know its plates. It is good you stole it back. Maybe I will talk to you about doing car work to get it back sometime.”
“We’ll have to drink about it,” I said.  p. 119

Most of the story takes place at the annual Sun Dance, a tribal gathering where they trade, party, and generally celebrate. The main event is The Big Tractor Pull, a tug of war between those that have the appropriate machines. This competition is disrupted, however, by the arrival of Mary Margaret Road-Grader:

The truck stopped with a roar and a squeal of brakes. It had a long lumpy canvas cover on the back. Then a woman climbed down from the cab. She was the most gorgeous woman I’d ever seen—and I’d seen Nellie Firestone two summers ago.
Nellie hadn’t come close to this girl. She had long straight black hair and a beautiful face. She was built like nothing I’d seen before. She wore tight coveralls and had a .357 Magnum strapped to her hip.
“Who runs the Pulls?” she asked, in English, of the first man who reached her.
He didn’t know what to do. Women never talk like that.
“Winston Mack Truck,” said Freddy at my side, pointing.
“What do you mean?” asked one of the young men. “Why do you want to know?”
“Because I’m going to enter the Pull,” she said.
Tribal language mumbles went around the circle. Very negative ones.  p. 124-125

After some acrimonious debate at a Tribal Council (women have never entered the tractor pull before), they reluctantly allow her to take part.
The rest of the story details the contest and (spoiler) the violent, society-changing event that occurs. Thereafter, future Sun Dances and pulls are abandoned and a there is an eventual changeover from trading cars to trading horses. These latter changes are ironically lamented by the narrator, and the story ends on a perhaps overly bitter note (for the story, if not our own reality):

We have each other, we have the village, we have cattle, we have this hill over the river where we smoke and get drunk.
But the rest of the world has changed.
All this, all the old ways . . . gone.
The world has turned bitter and sour in my mouth. It is no good, the taste of ashes is in the wind. The old times are gone.  p. 134

The Samurai and the Willows by Michael Bishop is one of the writer’s “Urban Nucleus” series, which takes place on a future Earth where mankind has largely retreated into huge domed cities, in this case Atlanta. The two main characters are Simon Fowler and Georgia Cawthorn (their nicknames for each other are Banji and Queequeg). Simon is of Japanese heritage, in his late thirties, and runs a bonsai shop; Georgia is a young black woman who works as a glissador, a roller-blading courier. They are reluctant roommates:

How they had come to be cubicle mates was this: Simon Fowler was [. . .] a man on the way down, a nisei whose only skills were miniature landscaping and horticulture. Georgia Cawthorn was [. . .], as she saw it, certainly only a temporary resident of the Big Bad Basement, the donjon keep of the Urban Nucleus. Fowler, it seemed, was trying to bury himself, to put eight levels of concrete (as well as the honeycombing of the dome) between himself and the sky. She, on the other hand, was abandoning the beloved bosom of parents and brothers, who lived in one of those pre-Evacuation “urban renewal” slums still crumbling into brick dust surfaceside. And thus it was that both Simon Fowler and Georgia Cawthorn had applied for living quarters under, he perversely specifying Level 9 (having already worked down from the towers and four understrata), she ingenuously asking for whatever she could get. A two-person cubicle fell vacant on Level 9. The computer-printed names of Georgia Cawthorn and Simon Fowler headed the UrNu Housing Authority’s relocation list, and the need for a decision showered down on them like an unannounced rain (the sort so favored by the city’s spontaneity-mad internal meteorologists). Georgia didn’t hesitate; she said yes at once. Simon Fowler wanted an umbrella, a way out of the deluge; but since the only out available involved intolerable delay and a psychic house arrest on the concourses of 7, he too had said yes. They met each other on the day they moved in.
They had now lived together for four months. And most of the time they didn’t like each other very much, although Queequeg [Georgia] had tried.

Over the course of the story we find out that Simon still grieves for his dead mother (his feelings of guilt and betrayal are gone into in more detail later), and is slowly shutting himself off from the world; Georgia is outgoing and friendly, even towards Simon—although he mostly rebuffs her, even when she takes an interest in his bonsai and visits the shop:

“You again,” he said. “What do you want?”
“You sweet, Basenji. You damn sweet.”
“What do you want?” He didn’t call her Queequeg. That wasn’t a good sign; no sir. Not a good sign at all.
She thought a minute, hand on hip, her green wraparound clinging to the curve of her stance. She was a head taller than he.
“I wanna see that little bush you had out here last time.”
“You saw it last time, you know. I’m busy.”
“You busy. You also ain’ no easy man to do bidness with, Basenji. I thinkin’ ’bout buyin’ that bush. What you think of that?”
“That you probably won’t be able to afford it.”
“I a saver, Basenji. Since I come on bidness, you boun’ to show me what I come to see. You has to.”
“That willow’s worth—”
“Uh-uh,” she said. “No, sir. I gonna see it before you sen’ me packin’ with yo’ prices.”
What could he do? A black Amazon with grits in her mouth and something a little more substantial than that beneath her scalp cap of neo-nostalgic cornrows; elegant, artificial braidwork recalling an Africa that probably no longer existed. (The same went for his mother’s homeland, the very same.) Poor Basenji. These were the very words he thought as he stoically motioned Queequeg around the counter: Poor Basenji. He had even begun to call himself by the name she had given him.  p. 139-140

Despite this friction they grow closer and closer together (even though Georgia has a boyfriend), and they eventually wind around each other like the bonsai that Simon grows. One of the final scenes (spoiler) has them sleep together shortly before she gets married to the boyfriend; after their coupling we learn much more about Simon’s mother, and it seems like Simon may finally have extirpated his grief and will stop his descent. However, he later commits suicide, and we realise that all Georgia did was shrive, not save, him.
The ending of this surprised me when I first read it decades ago (and not in a good way), but reading it now—perhaps without the optimism of youth—it seems an entirely obvious ending.
So, a desperately sad story, but a lovely one too, and you can see why Dozois says in his introduction that is “is one of the best SF stories I have read in years.”

The Introduction—Summation: 1976 by Gardner Dozois is a much shorter version of the longer pieces he would do in his second series of ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies, but is still a hugely interesting review of the year. It begins with a short disclaimer that his tastes aren’t the same as Lester del Rey, the editor of the first five volumes of this series, and he makes no claim to present anything other than the stories he most liked (and adds that the volume would be better titled Gardner Dozois Picks the Stories He Liked Best This Year).^{6, 7} He goes on to survey the various magazines and anthologies published, looks at the the films that were released, comments on various publishing deals, and adds an obituary or two as well. This essay is not only informative but, in places, is hilariously blunt, and I could have quoted pages of it:

Hollywood continues to produce big-budget SF films, most of which are very poor. One of the biggest celluloid turkeys of the year was The Man Who Fell to Earth, an asinine, pretentious, boring, and fundamentally incoherent film. Logan’s Run managed to be less actively offensive, without attaining to any real merit. It’s an earnest, silly, and hackneyed movie with lots of extras in the background, and it conforms to the seemingly universal Hollywood assumption that the future is going to look just like a shopping center in Dallas.  p. xiv
.
[As most current] magazines struggled to stay alive (If and Vertex both folded within the past couple of years), three or four new SF magazines were in the planning stage.
First out, and first to fail, was Odyssey, edited by Roger Elwood, which lasted for two quarterly issues consisting mainly of second or third-rate work by first-rate authors. It was also an ugly, shoddy-looking magazine, printed on cheap paper and jampacked with offensive pulp ads of the “Men, Throw Away That Truss!” variety. Poor distribution and limited newsstand display were other nails in Odyssey’s coffin.
Another new magazine, and another bitter disappointment, was Galileo, a subscription-only quarterly edited by Charles C. Ryan. Galileo was somewhat more handsome than Odyssey, but if anything the quality of its fiction was even lower. The magazine will have to improve enormously with subsequent issues if it is to have any chance of establishing itself.
Of all the year’s new magazines, the only other one that need be taken seriously, and the only one to achieve any real measure of success, was Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, edited by George H. Scithers. The first quarterly issue appeared late in the year.
You may, if you like, dismiss my opinion in this case as prejudiced; I am associate editor of ASF. And, of course, I’m not even going to try to pretend that the first issue of IASF was flawless: the magazine is gray and dingy, and, like all issues of all magazines, it contains some mediocre fiction. Nevertheless, it also contains a high percentage of first-rate stories and is at least as good as most good issues of Analog or F&SF. IASF deserves to survive, and I have hopes that it may, if the luck is with it.  p. xviii
.
Sleeper of the year in the nonseries original anthology category was Lone Star Universe (Heidelberg Publishers, Inc.), an anthology of SF stories by Texans. Lone Star Universe, unfortunately, besides being the most expensive anthology of the year, is also likely to be a difficult book to find. There’s some very good material here by Saunders, Utley, Tuttle, Sterling, Waldrop, and a few others, but there’s some appalling crud here as well, making for an amazingly uneven book.
On the other hand, in Faster Than Light (Harper & Row) edited by Jack Dann and George Zebrowski almost every story is of exactly the same quality: good, solid, competent stuff that would be snapped up instantly and gratefully by any SF magazine to be used as second-string backup material behind the lead novelette.
With one possible exception (Harlan Ellison’s original script for The Starlost, a superior example of its kind), nothing in Faster Than Light is really outstanding, and the book is doomed to the gray fate of sitting squarely in the middle of the scale.  p. xix

I strongly recommend the whole essay if you need of a memory jogger for 1976.
At the back of the book is Honorable Mentions—1976, which is a three page list of around eighty recommended stories (there are six by John Varley alone, not counting his story here, which should give you an idea of his prominence in the field at the time; James Tiptree Jr./Racoona Sheldon is the runner-up with five citations; Jack Dann (one collaboration with George Zebrowski), Felix Gotschalk, and Gene Wolfe have three.

This is a more than worthwhile anthology, especially for those interested in stories that have a more character-driven and literary bent than normal. Highly recommended.  ●

_____________________

1. According to ISFDB, there appears to be only one review of this volume, and that was by Charles N. Brown (of Locus fame), who reviewed it along with the Carr and Wollheim volumes in the January-February 1978 edition of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine:

There are now three “best of the year” volumes published (down from four last year). The Best Science Fiction of the Year #6 edited by Terry Carr is the longest and best with four stories I consider excellent: “I See You” by Damon Knight, “The Phantom of Kansas” by John Varley, “Seeing” by Harlan Ellison, and “The Bicentennial Man” by Isaac Asimov. There are seven others, including four I’d rate as “B” and only three I didn’t care for. The 1977 Annual World’s Best SF edited by Donald Wollheim is nearly as good with six of the ten stories rates “B” or better. The Asimov and Knight stories also appear here as do two other “A” stories, “Appearance of Life” by Brian W. Aldiss and “The Hertford Manuscript” by Richard Cowper. Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Sixth Annual Collection has a new editor, Gardner Dozois, replacing Lester del Rey. I’d rate only two of the eight stories as excellent, “The Samurai and the Willows” by Michael Bishop and “The Diary of the Rose” by Ursula K. Le Guin. There is also a good summary of the year. (There’s also one in the Carr volume, but I’m prejudiced since I wrote it.) On the whole, all three volumes are worth having although you should probably wait for the paperback on the Dozois book.  p. 128

2. The stories in this anthology were first published in Future Power (Le Guin), Universe 6 (Utley/Waldrop), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (Varley), Orbit 18, (Wilhelm, Waldrop), Lone Star Universe (Sanders), Frights (Haldeman), and F&SF (Bishop).
There is nothing from Analog, Galaxy, Amazing, or Fantastic.

3. I assume that Lester del Rey handed over the editorship as he and Judy Lynn del Rey were in the process of launching Del Rey Books at the time.

4.  The ISFDB page with the “South America” quote for The Diary of the Rose.

5. Air Raid appeared in the Spring 1977 issue of IASFM, so it is not really a 1976 story.

6. In his introduction Dozois says:

I selected the novella I felt was the year’s best, Michael Bishop’s The Samurai and the Willows, but if I had included all of the other deserving novellas that I would have liked to include—Gene Wolfe’s brilliant The Eyeflash Miracles, James Tiptree, Jr.,’s Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, Gregory Benford’s and Gordon Eklund’s The Anvil of Jove, Vonda N. Mclntyre’s Screwtop, Richard Cowper’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn—I would have ended up with a book twice as long as the present volume and no room for novelettes or short stories at all.  p. xii

He should have asked Dutton if he could edit a Best SF Short Novels of the Year as well.

7. If you want a better idea of how this book measures up against what I might pick for a 1976 ‘Year’s Best’, or learn what other anthologists chose, look at the table below (this is the same one which will appear at the end of the reviews of the Carr and Wollheim volumes). This will be updated as and when I find stories I like, or citation sources that 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’.
The ‘D’ column lists Gardner R. Dozois’ choices with an ‘x’.
The ‘W’ column lists Donald A. Wollheim’s choices with an ‘x’.
The ‘S’ column shows my 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 which are 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 the 1977 Locus Poll’s top ten short stories, novelettes, and novellas.
The ‘TO’ 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 1976’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 that this is all statistically invalid, wildly so, but will give you something to aim at. Enjoy.

Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories 1976

(1) Air Raid is a 1977 story so no overall rating (it will be included in the 1977 table).
(2) In the Bowl is a 1975 story so no overall rating (it will be included in the 1975 table).

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

AMZ, Amazing Stories; ANA, Analog; ANB, Analog Annual; AND, Andromeda #1; ASI, Asimov’s SF; AUR, Aurora: Beyond Equality, DYS, Dystopian Visions; FLA, Flashing swords #3; FRI, Frights; FSF, Fantasy and Science Fiction; FTL, Faster Than Light; FUT, Future Power; GAL, Galaxy; LON, Lone Star Universe; NED, New Dimensions #6; NEW, New Worlds #10; ORB, Orbit #18; ROW, The Best from the Rest of the World; SFM, Science Fiction Monthly; STE, Stellar #2; STN, Stellar Short Novels; TCS, The Crystal Ship; TSV, The Seventh Voyage; UNI, Universe #6.  ●