Summary:
A large and lacklustre collection of stories with far too many works (20 out of 32!) whose quality I would rate as less than good (compare this volume’s 12:20 good to less than good ratio with Allan Kaster’s two Best of the Year anthologies, which scored 10:5 and 7:6).
The worthwhile stories here are the outstanding Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars by Mercurio D. Rivera, which progresses the themes in Theodore Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God; the very good Eyes of the Forest by Ray Nayler, a exotic and thrilling colony planet adventure (think Harry Harrison’s Deathworld), and An Important Failure by Rebecca Campbell, the Theodore Sturgeon Award winner about resilience in the face of future adverse climate change; and better than good work by Nadia Afifi, Nancy Kress, S. B. Divya, Andy Dudak and Rich Larson.

Other reviews:
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Neil Clarke

Fiction:
Scar Tissue • short story by Tobias S. Buckell ∗∗∗
Eyes of the Forest • short story by Ray Nayler ∗∗∗∗
Sinew and Steel and What They Told • short story by Carrie Vaughn ∗∗
An Important Failure • novelette by Rebecca Campbell ∗∗∗∗
The Long Iapetan Night • novelette by Julie Novakova ∗∗
AirBody • short story by Sameem Siddiqui ∗
The Bahrain Underground Bazaar • novelette by Nadia Afifi ∗∗∗+
Lone Puppeteer of a Sleeping City • novelette by Arula Ratnakar –
Your Boyfriend Experience • novelette by James Patrick Kelly ∗∗
Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars • novelette by Mercurio D. Rivera ∗∗∗∗+
The 1st Interspecies Solidarity Fair and Parade • novelette by Bogi Takács ∗∗
Oannes, From the Flood • short story by Adrian Tchaikovsky ∗∗+
Yellow and the Perception of Reality • novelette by Maureen F. McHugh ∗∗+
Exile’s End • novelette by Carolyn Ives Gilman ∗∗
Invisible People • novelette by Nancy Kress ∗∗∗+
Red_Bati • short story by Dilman Dila ∗∗
Textbooks in the Attic • short story by S. B. Divya∗∗∗+
Seeding the Mountain • novelette by Maggie Clark ∗
“Knock, Knock” Said the Ship • short story by Rati Mehrotra ∗∗∗
Still You Linger, Like Soot in the Air • short story by Matthew Kressel ∗
Tunnels • novelette by Eleanor Arnason ∗∗∗
Test 4 Echo • short story by Peter Watts ∗∗
Uma • short story by Ken Liu ∗∗+
Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations of Love • short story by Usman T. Malik ∗
The Translator, at Low Tide • short story by Vajra Chandrasekera –
Fairy Tales for Robots • novelette by Sofia Samatar –
This World Is Made for Monsters • short story by M. Rickert ∗∗
Elsewhere • short story by Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck [as by James S. A. Corey] ∗∗∗
Salvage • novelette by Andy Dudak ∗∗∗+
The Long Tail • short story by Aliette de Bodard ∗∗
Rhizome, by Starlight • short story by Fran Wilde ∗∗
How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobučar? • novelette by Rich Larson ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Pascal Blanche (cover design by Daniel Brount and David Ter-Avaneysan)
Introduction: A State of the Short SF Field in 2020 • by Neil Clarke
Permissions
Acknowledgments
2020 Recommended Reading List • by Neil Clarke
About the Editor

_____________________

There are thirty-two stories in this collection and, rather than plough through them in book order, I have arranged them from best to worst. I have also put brief notes at the beginning of the sections for those not interested reading the full story reviews.

Very Good to Excellent ∗∗∗∗+

There is only one outstanding story in this volume, and it should be a future classic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Very Good ∗∗∗∗

There are two very good stories in this volume. The first is an exciting alien planet adventure by Ray Nayler, Eyes of the Forest, and the second is set in a climate-changed world where a violin maker takes decades to accumulate the particular woods he needs to make a new instrument. This latter piece, An Important Failure by Rebecca Campbell, won the Theodore Sturgeon Award.

Eyes of the Forest by Ray Nayler (F&SF, May-June 2020) opens on a colony planet that has a distinct Deathworld vibe² (i.e. it is inimical to human life), and sees Mauled by Mistake treating the wounds of her apprentice Sedef, who has just been attacked by a lashvine. However, once Mauled is finished applying the nanobot medical patches, Mauled tells Sedef that (a) she herself has also been badly wounded in the attack, (b) they are out of medical supplies, and (c) Sedef will have to go back to the depot and get more.
The rest of the story sees the inexperienced Sedef make her way to the depot before returning to treat Mauled. During her journey we see that the human settlers have colonised an exotic and brightly illuminated world where anything that isn’t brightly lit is food. Consequently, humans have to wear lightsuits to protect themselves on the surface. As Sedef makes her way to the depot we also learn something about the colony’s history, that most humans retreated underground after arrival, and now only wayfinders like Mauled and Sedef go out on the surface. Light relief is provided by flashback passages which limn the pair’s mentor/student relationship:

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

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

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

(Mauled is supposed to be a woman, but it is hard to visualise this character as anything other than a grumpy, mansplaining, 50-year-old bloke.³)
The story (spoiler) comes to an exciting climax when Sedef realises that she won’t get back to where Mauled is before Changeover, when there is a chance that the arrival of sundark and its accompanying EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) may knock out her suit lights . . . . This subsequently happens, and then a “puma” appears: Sedef’s solution to this terminal problem is ingenious, and provides the story with a neat pay-off line.
This is a hugely appealing story, particularly so for those attracted to old-school SF.
∗∗∗∗ (Very Good). 5,650 words.

•

An Important Failure by Rebecca Campbell (Clarkesworld, August 2020) begins (after a data dump about a particularly dense form of wood last formed in the Little Ice Age) with a man called Mason going to the illegal felling of a centuries old Sitka spruce in Canada—one of the last trees of its vintage in the world due to climate change effects (wildfires, etc.). After the men he has arranged to meet have cut down the tree, Mason daydreams about apprenticing to a luthier (violin maker) in Italy before going to select the section of wood he wants.
In the years that follow Mason ends up working for a Canadian luthier called Eddie, and during this period a teenage virtuoso called Delgado comes to prominence in their area. When she is thirteen she gets a loan of a very high quality violin (it is made with the dense Little Ice Age wood mentioned in the opening of the story).
Eddie is the Canada Council for the Arts’ custodian for the instrument, so he and Mason become professionally connected to Delgado. Then, when Delgado’s three year loan expires, she has to return the instrument. Mason sees her bitterness about the loss, and determines to make her a replacement.
Most of the remainder of the story takes place over the following years, a period of continued environmental degradation that sees Mason improve his violin making skills, take trips back home to see his friend Jacob and a woman called Sophie, and harvest the various woods he needs to make a violin for Delgado (he saves money for some of the last Nigerian ebony in the world, scavenges old furniture, and, later on in the story, badly damages his shoulder when he falls out of a willow tree while felling it for material).
Eventually, a decade and a half later later, Mason finally completes the violin after he (sacrilegiously, to him) robs a part off of another instrument. By this point Eddie is near death’s door, and Delgado, when she turns up at their shop, now has her own child. She admires the violin that Mason has created and plays it for him and Eddie. Finally, she asks who it is for, and it shocked when she realises that Mason has made it for her. After she has finished her protestations, she asks what name Mason has given the violin. He thinks for a moment about everything that has gone before, and what may lie ahead:

Mason heard the oceanic crash of falling spruce, his own cry as he hit the dirt at the base of a shining willow in Stanley Park. The market garden and the homestead, the lake, the abandoned subdivisions and the burn lines that still showed through the underbrush, the ghost forests, the dead black teeth of what had once—a long time ago—been a rainforest. And among them, Jacob still cutting lumber and helping out at the garage when he could, fishing and hunting. Sophie in the greenhouses and the gardens, with her new Garry oak trees and her transfigured arbutus, the beetle-resistant spruce that would never, ever, be the kind of tonewood he wanted. The firebreaks of trembling aspen, the return of cougars. The steady erosion of human shapes: foundations and roads all lost to the burgeoning forest.
“Nepenthe?”
As he said it, he wasn’t sure what it meant: a physick that would make the end easier; a draft of healing medicine.

The coda of the story, which presumably takes place after Eddie and Mason are dead, and after even more environmental chaos, sees Delgado as a grandmother who has had to flee inland with her family after the failure of the seawall where she previously lived. Delgado considers whether to give the instrument to her daughter or her granddaughter, realising that one of them will be the first to hear the instrument’s richest, fullest tone.
This is an elegiac and bittersweet story about, I think, how humanity survives and adapts in a collapsing or changing world, and perhaps about how we hold on to what is important to us. It is a very good piece (it won the 2021 Theodore Sturgeon Award) but, if I have one quibble, it is that the beginning of the story should have started with the felling of the Sitka spruce, and the rest of that section shortened somewhat, or at least rearranged (the story takes some time to get going).
∗∗∗∗ (Very Good). 9,600 words. Story link.

Good to Very Good ∗∗∗+

The five better-than-good stories in this category cover a variety of themes. The Bahrain Underground Bazaar by Nadia Afifi sees a dying woman experience the memory uploads of others and become obsessed with one of the woman donors; Invisible People by Nancy Kress sees a couple learn that their adopted daughter had her genome tampered with before she came to them, and who subsequently investigate what the changes might be; Textbooks in the Attic by S. B. Divya is another climate change story, and tells of a female scientist’s resilience in a future flooded Iowa;  Salvage by Andy Dudak is a memory upload story in some respects but mixes in so much more, including super-powerful aliens, the expansion of the Universe, and historic war crimes; How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobučar by Rich Larson is an inventive and tightly plotted art heist/gangster story set in the near future.

The Bahrain Underground Bazaar by Nadia Afifi (F&SF, November/December 2020) opens with Mansour, a woman with terminal cancer, going to the Bahrain Underground Bazaar. There she experiences the deaths of others (these have been harvested by an internet like brain implant called a NeuroLync):

In the Underground Bazaar’s virtual immersion chambers, I’ve experienced many anonymous souls’ final moments. Through them, I’ve drowned, been strangled, shot in the mouth, and suffered a heart attack. And I do mean suffer — the heart attack was one of the worst. I try on deaths like T-shirts. Violent ones and peaceful passings. Murders, suicides, and accidents. All practice for the real thing.
The room tilts and my vision blurs momentarily. Dizzy, I press my hands, bruised from chemo drips, into the counter to steady myself. The tumor wedged between my skull and brain likes to assert itself at random moments. A burst of vision trouble, spasms of pain or nausea. I imagine shrinking it down, but even that won’t matter now. It’s in my blood and bones. The only thing it’s left me so far, ironically, is my mind. I’m still sharp enough to make my own decisions. And I’ve decided one thing — I’ll die on my terms, before cancer takes that last bit of power from me.  pp. 7-8

On this occasion she experiences the death of a woman who is leading a donkey down a cliff path, and who either jumps or slips to her death (there is a death-wish moment at the edge, but it is unclear whether the fall is intentional). Then, after the blackness that normally denotes death, Mansour experiences something else:

And then nothing. The world is dark and soundless. Free of pain, or of any feeling at all. And then voices.
The darkness is softened by a strange awareness. I sense, rather than see, my surroundings. My own mangled body spread across a rock. Dry plants and a gravel path nearby. Muted screams from above. I know, somehow, that my companions are running down the path now, toward me. Be careful, I want to cry out. Don’t fall. They want to help me. Don’t they know I’m dead?
But if I’m dead, why am I still here? I’m not in complete oblivion and I’m also not going toward a light. I’m sinking backward into something, a deep pool of nothing, but a feeling of warmth surrounds me, enveloping me like a blanket on a cold night. I have no body now, I’m a ball of light, floating toward a bigger light behind me. I know it’s there without seeing it. It is bliss and beauty, peace and kindness, and all that remains is to join it.  pp. 10-11

This is the seed for the story’s further developments, but Mansour’s desire to find out more about the woman and that post-death experience is derailed when she is intercepted by her concerned daughter-in-law outside the bazaar (“You don’t need dark thoughts — you’ll beat this by staying positive.”). Later that evening Mansour’s son Firaz also expresses his worry, but this doesn’t stop her going back to the bazaar the next day and asking the proprietor to show her the dead woman’s “highlights reel”. Mansour discovers that the women was a Bedouin mother who lived a largely unremarkable life, and then, even though Mansour doesn’t feel any particular connection with her, she impulsively buys a train ticket to Petra in Jordan, the area where the woman lived.
On her arrival in Petra (spoiler) Mansour hires a teenager with a donkey to take her to see the tourist sights. First they go to the nearby Treasury, and then she asks to be taken up the cliff-edge path to the Monastery:

“Do people ever fall?”
Rami’s eyes are trained ahead, but I catch the tightness in his jawline.
“It’s rare, ma’am. Don’t worry.”
My skin prickles. His voice carries a familiar strain, the sound of a battle between what one wants to say and what one should say. Does he know my old woman? Has he heard the story?
While I craft my next question, the donkey turns another corner and my stomach lurches. We’re at the same spot where she fell. I recognize the curve of the trail, the small bush protruding into its path. I lean forward, trying to peer down the cliff.
“Can we stop for a minute?”
“Not a good place to stop, ma’am.” The boy’s voice is firm, tight as a knot, but I slide off the saddle and walk to the ledge.
Wind, warm under the peak sun, attacks my thinning hair. I step closer to the edge.
“Please, sayida!”
Switching to Arabic. I must really be stressing the boy. But I can’t pull back now.
Another step, and I look down. My stomach clenches. It’s there — the boulder that broke her fall. It’s free of blood and gore, presumably washed clean a long time ago, but I can remember the scene as it once was, when a woman died and left her body, a witness to her own demise.
But when I lean further, my body turns rigid. I’m a rock myself, welded in place. I won’t jump. I can’t. I know this with a cold, brutal certainty that knocks the air from my lungs. I’m terrified of the fall. Every second feels like cool water on a parched throat. I could stand here for hours and nothing would change.  pp. 20-21

They continue up the mountain to the Monastery. There they eat and drink, and Mansour discovers that the boy is the grandson of the woman who fell to her death. She asks him about his grandmother, and listens to what he has to say, but does not tell him about the recording of her death. Then she asks him to use his NeuroLync to call her son (she has left her phone behind so Firaz and her daughter-in-law cannot track her).
The last part of the story sees her reconciled with Firaz, and her approaching death (or at least to the extent anyone can be).
I liked this story quite a bit. Afifi’s writing style is concise but conjures up a believable world and characters—and there is a plot here too, even though it is essentially a mainstream one (one slight quibble is that the writer went for a mainstream ending—reconcilement, acceptance—rather than doing a transcendent call-back to the post-death experience). If the ending had been stronger (i.e. melded the mainstream and SFnal endings), I would have probably given this four stars.
A writer to watch, I think (I had the rare impulse to check out her novel⁴), and a story that would probably appeal to Ray Nayler fans.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 7,600 words.

•

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

•

Textbooks in the Attic by S. B. Divya (Rebuilding Tomorrow, 2020) is set in a future America that is suffering from the effects of climate change (a flooded Iowa in this case) and has split into those who live in walled communities and those who live outside. The narrator, a biologist who specialises in distributed horticulture, is one of the latter, and the story opens with her son cutting his hand and developing an infection:

The next two sunrises bring barely more light than the nights that precede them. I always kiss my sleeping child after I get up. This morning, his forehead feels warm under my lips, more than usual. I sniff at his wounded hand and almost gag. Angry red streaks radiate away from the bandage.
Jin stirs as I pull on my raincoat.
‘Where are you going?’ he murmurs.
‘Rishi’s cut is infected,’ I say softly. ‘I’m going Uphill to see if I can get some antibiotics before I go to work.’
I step onto the balcony and uncover our small boat. We removed the railing when the rain started, turning it into a dock for the wet season. I push off into the turbulent water flowing through the street and start the motor. The boat putters upstream. Four houses down, the Millers are on the roof in slickers, checking their garden. They wave as I pass by, and I slow down enough to ask if they have any antibiotics, but they shake their heads, No.
‘Good luck!’ Jeanie Miller calls after me, her brow furrowed in concern. Their youngest died last year, just six months old, from a nasty case of bronchitis.

When she gets to Uphill, the walled community nearby, the gate guard tells her, after radioing the hospital, that they don’t have any antibiotics to spare as they are saving it for post-flu pneumonia cases that may develop. The guard tells her that it is nothing personal, and that her father “was a good man” (ironically, her father used to be a doctor at the hospital).
On returning home the narrator finds her husband and son having lunch, which includes a fresh loaf from one of their neighbours. As she eats, she thinks of her doctor father, and Alexander Fleming, which prompts her to retrieve a microbiology textbook from the attic. Then she decides to try and make penicillin.
The rest of the story details the narrator’s struggle to grow the penicillin mould and purify it, a process which starts with a visit to a rundown college campus where she gets fifteen minutes of precious internet time. There are various trials and tribulations that follow, including a sub-plot where (spoiler), her husband Jin rounds up the local militia to force Uphill to give them the antibiotics they need for their son’s worsening condition (Jin is arrested, but one of the hospital’s doctors visits the narrator with the antibiotics required for Rishi’s condition).
There is a final twist when the doctor later returns with news that Jin has been stabbed while breaking up a fight in prison, and that the hospital has by now run out of antibiotics. Needless to say the narrator manages to decant and purify the antibiotics her husband needs just in time. Finally, the last scene telescopes forward in time to show the industrial process that has been set up to supply antibiotics to the surrounding area.
This piece has, unlike a lot of post-collapse stories, a refreshing can-do/pull yourself up by your bootstraps attitude and, even though the plot is relatively slight, it developed in a different way from what I expected. I rather enjoyed this story, and it struck me as the kind of piece that could appear in Analog.⁵
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 6,350 words.

•

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

Good ∗∗∗

This category contains work that I liked and would be pleased to see in a normal magazine issue or original anthology—but I don’t think they are quite up to the standard of a “Best of the Year” pick. Scar Tissue by Tobias S. Buckell sees a man who is dealing with his own disabilities take on a job that involves rearing a “baby” robot; Knock, Knock Said the Ship by Rati Mehrotra involves the narrator and a joke telling AI on a ship that is boarded by renegades; Tunnels by Eleanor Arnason is an entertaining alien buddy story set on another planet; Elsewhere by James S. A. Corey is an avatar story which sees a disabled woman use the technology to visit her dying father (this is the the best of the three avatar stories in this volume).

Scar Tissue by Tobias S. Buckell (Slate, 30^th May 2020) opens with the protagonist telling his friend Charlie that he thinks that he has made a huge mistake:

“You need the money.” [Charlie says.]
[. . .]
“Everyone needs the money.” You swig the cheap beer that’s the best either of you can manage. You can’t wait to afford something from one of those smaller local breweries nearby.
“But . . .”
You’ve been on disability since the forklift accident. The apartment’s small, but Enthim Arms is nice. The shared garden out back, the walking trails. You can’t use them as much as you’d like right now, but that physical therapist keeps saying June is when you might be able to make it to the lake and back.
It’ll hurt, but you’ve never cared so much about seeing a mediocre quarry lake before.
“Advent Robotics will pay me more money to raise it than I made at the warehouse, and I can keep focusing on recovery while doing it.” You raise your hand and flex it. A low battery alert blinks on your wrist. Plus, the bonus at the end will give you enough to afford something only the rich usually can: regrowing your forearm and your leg. Like a damn lizard. The biolabs that do that are so far out of your reach you normally wouldn’t even consider it.

It materialises that Advent Robotics is paying for the protagonist to raise a newly created robot, which, when it wakes in its pre-language, pre-memory state, acts like a baby—it smashes a coffee table on awakening, constantly has to be taken back to its power charging platform, copies the protagonist when he punches the wall in sleep-deprived frustration, etc.
The rest of the story sees the robot (now called Rob) rapidly grow up (the entire growth process, from switch on to maturity, is essentially an analog for having a normal child, i.e. the robot quickly changes from an uncomprehending baby stage to an argumentative teenager). During this process (spoiler) the protagonist attempts to deal with his own Daddy and other therapy issues while attempting to continue with his physical rehabilitation, during which he has a heart attack. Rob helps him recover.
At the end of the story the protagonist bonds further with robot after Rob complains about his plan to get rid of the prosthetics and regrow his limbs (“Have you ever thought about how I feel?”). The plan is abandoned, and the protagonist matches Rob’s subsequent scrimshaw on his prosthetics with tattoos on the skin above, and he later gets a prosthetic heart as well.
The idea of a robot growing up like a human is a neat idea, and it’s well developed, but the story is essentially about the protagonist healing himself mentally and bodily. Those who like works about emo characters (and the second person narration plays to that aspect) will probably appreciate this one more than me.
∗∗∗ (Good). 5,050 words. Story link.

•

Knock, Knock Said the Ship by Rati Mehrotra (F&SF, July-August 2020) opens with Kaalratri, a spaceship AI, asking Deenu a knock-knock joke on a neural link that no-one else can overhear. We then learn that Deenu is on the bridge of the ship trying to work out a course to their destination beyond the asteroid belt (Captain Miral likes to train his crew in various skills). Then, as Captain Miral needles Deenu about her performance, we learn she has been bonded for three years after one of the Kaalatri’s drones rescued her from the wreckage of the colony on Luna.
Deenu is spared further torment when a Peace ship hails them, and its commander, Captain Zhao, tells Miral that they intend to board his ship. When Zhao and his party do so, Miral quickly realises that they are imposters—and he is shot for his trouble. Then, after some backchat, Miral is shot again, but not before he puts the ship into lockdown:

“Override the ship,” snapped Zhao. “You’re next in command, aren’t you?”
“That would be me,” said Lieutenant Saksha, straightening and speaking with an effort. “But I cannot override her. It was the captain’s last order before you…before she…” She paused to swallow. “The ship will lift the lockdown only when she deems the threat is over. You could kill us, but it will serve no purpose.”
“Hey, Ship, can you hear me?” shouted Zhao.
“Yes,” said Kaalratri, her voice remote.
“Would you like me to kill the rest of your crew? We can start here, with these officers. Then we’ll break down your door and go for the rest of them. Would you like that, eh?”
“Would you like to hear a joke?” said Kaalratri.
“What?”
“Knock knock,” said the ship.
“The fuck is wrong with you?” screamed Zhao.
“You are supposed to say, who’s there,” said the ship.  p. 17

The rest of the story sees Deenu overhear Zhao talk to the rest of his crew in Lunarian, and she realises they are refugees like herself. Deenu pretends to sympathise with them, and takes the group to the supplies they want. As they walk to the main bay (spoiler), Deenu hatches a plan with Kaalatri on her neural link and the latter organises an ambush. They are successful, the Captain and First Officer are still alive and are treated, and Deenu is rewarded by having her debt written off.
The plot of this is too straightforward, and the story also tries to have its violence cake and eat it (the gunshot injuries to the Captain and First Officer are severe but both recover), but, that said, the interaction between Deenu and the joke-telling computer is quite entertaining, and the story has an interesting setting.
∗∗∗ (Good). 5,700 words.

•

Tunnels by Eleanor Arnason (Asimov’s SF, May-June 2020) is the sixth of the author’s ‘Lydia Duluth’ stories to appear. This one finds her in Innovation City, an island on the planet Grit, and she is there, as usual, on a work assignment for her employer, the holoplay production company Stellar Harvest. Most of the first part of the story is a mixture of background material (including a previous run-in she had with the owners of the island, a genemod company called BioInnovation), a description of the local silicon and carbon based lifeforms, and travelogue.
The story finally gets going when she meets an actor’s agent for tea to discuss a production in progress on Grit. Before this, however, Duluth feels like she is coming down with a cold and, after the meal, she feels worse. Not only does it feel like she has caught the flu, she also has a compunction to go down into the railway system tunnels under the city. Her inbuilt AI, which hasn’t said a lot until this point, tells her to phone for help, but she can’t remember how. Then she sees a “Gotcha” on the inside of her eyelids, and realises she has been infected with a hacked flu virus.
The second part of the story sees Duluth wake to find herself in a dark tunnel, with her AI silent. She starts walking and eventually finds a lit water fountain where, a little bit later, an alien Goxhat turns up:

[She] saw something by the drinking fountain, her size, but lower to the floor. The way it moved was distinctive. She came closer. The creature had an oval body that rested on four legs, and four arms, two on each side of the oval body. One arm in each pair ended in a formidable-looking pincher. The other ended in a cluster of tentacles. The creature was holding a cup in one of its tentacle-hands and dipping it into the fountain. There was no head. Instead, its brain was housed in a bulge atop its body. There ought to be four eyes in the bulge, though Lydia couldn’t see them. The Goxhat was facing away from her.
“Hello,” she said in humanish.
The alien spun. The four blue eyes glared. “Dangerous!” it cried in humanish. “Beware!” It waved the cup, spilling water. “Fierce! Fierce!”
“I’m not a threat,” Lydia said, trying to sound reasonable and unafraid. As far as she knew, the Goxhat were never dangerous to members of other species, but this one looked agitated and poorly groomed. The black hair that covered its body was spiky in some places and matted in others. What the heck was this guy doing here in this condition, and where was the rest of it?
“Where are your other bodies?” Lydia asked.
The Goxhat screamed and ran into the darkness.
Well, that had certainly been the wrong question to ask.  p. 21

Eventually, Duluth manages to talk to the creature and discovers that it knows other humans in the tunnels, and she manages to convince it to take her to them. She later meets three others that have been trapped underground for years because they too caught the hacked flu virus, and one of the side effects is that trying to climb up any of the stairways incapacitates them. Duluth also learns that the tunnels aren’t actually in use, but are a result of a BioInnovation genmod product that has run wild and spread under the planet.
Further adventures follow, beginning with the four of them (and the Goxhat) going to a vagrants camp (this other group of humans aren’t infected, but refuse to help those who are because they variously use them for stories, provided by Genghis the professor, and sex, from Tope the courtesan, etc.). This encounter is rather irrelevant to the story because when Lydia later talks to the Goxhat and asks it its name, it hoots three times, and adds that no-one has ever asked, before offering to lead her to the surface. However, the meeting provides an amusing after dinner episode where (a) Duluth is quizzed by the tunnel dwellers about a holo star she knows and (b) Genghis’s story about Thor losing his hammer is subject to a relentless analysis of the character’s attitudes and behaviour (“You can’t be killing people, even if they’re giants. It’s illegal.” “And wrong,” etc.).
The last section (spoiler)—where Duluth and Three Hoots reach the surface, steal a boat and escape to the mainland, and then BioIn and Stellar Harvest (Duluth’s employers) security get involved—is routine stuff and not as engaging as the previous part (even with Three Hoots’ revelation about how its other bodies died after they discovered financial irregularities in BioIn’s accounts). The story also feels longer than it needs to be (it is just short of novella length).
Overall an entertaining and amusing, if minor, piece.
∗∗∗ (Good). 17,400 words.

•

Elsewhere by James S. A. Corey (Avatars Inc., 2020) opens with the narrator arriving at a hospital to see her dying father. She isn’t there in person but as an avatar (a robotic telepresence). As she talks to her father it becomes apparent that she is using this method of visiting because she is almost totally paralyzed, and has been since she was a child. We also learn that, when it became apparent she was never going to recover, she was introduced to virtual reality games and eventually managed to attend architectural college and graduate. Now, by the use of avatars, she works all over the world.
The last part of the story sees her watch her father pass away. There is a good penultimate line:

And how strange it is that, in just a few minutes, there will be two bodies in this room whose consciousness had left them to go elsewhere.  p. 41

A slight piece—but it has a neat idea, and the elegiac feel at the end is well enough done.
∗∗∗ (Good). 3,600 words. Story link.

Average to Good ∗∗+

These are all stories which, for one reason or another, did not quite work for me. The Tchaikovsky and Liu feel rather fragmentary—good ideas rather than good stories; the McHugh doesn’t go anywhere.

Oannes, From the Flood by Adrian Tchaikovsky (Avatars Inc., 2020) opens with the narrator searching what appears to be an underwater archaeological site using an “avatar” (robotic technology that makes him feel like he is there):

Opening my lids and a great stone paw is reaching for me. From the Avatar’s vantage point it’s about to claw my eyes out. Cue yelp of primeval fear from a professional archaeologist who should know better.
But the Faculty rushed the training, didn’t have many people they could call on, short notice. I never signed up for this kind of technology when I was studying.
Jetting backwards I ram the insanely expensive piece of kit into the wall, and a fresh curtain of clouding dust filters down from the ruin above.
I freeze, because it’s a toss-up whether the flood water is bringing this place down or actually holding it up. No great slide of masonry descends to bury my remote self or those of my fellow researchers.
Researchers.
Tomb raiders.
Thieves. Call it what it is, we are nothing but thieves. But our cause is just, I swear to God. We steal from the past that we may gift to the future.

The narrator and the rest of his team are attempting to recover Sumerian relics (tablets about Oannes, a man or mythical water creature, and an earlier flood), and it soon becomes apparent that this isn’t an archaeological site in the Middle East but a rich collector’s house in a recently flooded future-Louisiana.
Eventually, despite the potentially imminent collapse of the building (spoiler), the narrator finds the tablets he is looking for—and a man and two children who have been trapped in an air pocket by the rising waters. As the team rescue the tablets the building starts to collapse, and the narrator uses the avatar to signal the family to leave the building. Initially they do not respond, so he holds out its arms and uses his broken English to implore them to come:

[Who] knows if I have time? But I will be true to Oannes. I will bring wisdom from the flood, but also I will bring life.

This story has an intriguing idea (rescuing relics from museums and private collections in a climate-changed world), but the storyline is too simple and the dramatic ending feels tacked on (I also had my doubts about how long the family’s oxygen would have lasted in the air pocket).
∗∗+ (Average to Good). 3,850 words. Story link.

•

Yellow and the Perception of Reality by Maureen F. McHugh (Tor.com, 22^nd July 2020) opens with the narrator visiting her brain-damaged sister, Wanda:

The doctors say that Wanda has global perceptual agnosia. Her eyes, her ears, her fingers all work. She sees, in the sense that light enters her eyes. She sees colors, edges, shapes. She can see the color of my eyes and my yellow blouse. She can see edges—which is important. The doctor says to me that knowing where the edge of something is, that’s like a big deal. If you’re looking down the road you know there’s a road and a car and there is an edge between them. That’s how you know the car is not part of the road. Wanda gets all that stuff: but her brain is injured. She can see but she can’t put all that together to have it make sense; it’s all parts and pieces. She can see the yellow and the edge but she can’t put the edge and the yellow together. I try to imagine it, like a kaleidoscope or something, but a better way to think of it is probably that it’s all noise.

The laboratory accident which caused her injury (and killed two others) may have been Wanda’s fault—we subsequently learn that she was a physicist doing research with a group that had developed a pair of “reality goggles”, a device designed to see the true quantum reality that lies beyond our own perceptions. Or at least I think that what they were designed to do, as the story only tangentially addresses the subject: the closest we get is a meeting between a physics researcher and the narrator towards the end of the story where the physicist attempts to quiz her about her sister’s work. The narrator does not reveal her suspicion that Wanda used the goggles herself.
What we get instead of a development of the core idea is a well written and characterised—but definitely mainstreamish—story that provides, variously: an account of the two sisters’ childhood; an interview with a detective who quizzes her about the two men who got killed in the accident; Wanda having a bad episode at the care home; and a visit to Claude the octopus, the team’s experimental subject who is now living in an aquarium.
This piece has an intriguing idea at its heart but, as with a couple other stories I’ve read by McHugh, it is a road to nowhere.⁶
∗∗+ (Average to Good). 8,750 words. Story link.

•

Uma by Ken Liu (Avatars, Inc., 2020) opens with the narrator discussing his employment-related disciplinary case with a lawyer before the story flashbacks to the incident that caused his problem—the rescue of three children from a burning house while he was operating a UMA for a power company:

A Utility Maintenance Avatar is vaguely humanoid, but only about three feet tall fully stretched out and no more than fifty pounds in weight. For light maintenance tasks such as vegetation management, removal of bird and wasp nests, patching cables, and so forth, you don’t need or want anything bigger—the extra bulk would just get in the way. I had at my disposal small shears, extensible ladder-legs, a general electrical tool kit, and not much else. PacCAP has thousands of these cheap telepresence pods distributed around the state to maintain its hundreds of thousands of miles of transmission, distribution and equipment. With remote operators in centralized offices inhabiting them whenever needed, it’s much cheaper than sending out a whole crew in a truck just to prune an overgrown oak branch.  pp. 134-135

During the rescue the children receive minor injuries (scratches, a sprained ankle, etc.), and subsequently a plantiff’s bar AI suggests they should sue the power company because the narrator wasn’t properly trained, etc. Hence the company disciplining him for safety violations.
Later, after the narrator has refused to sign the legal papers, he is contacted by the power company’s CEO about another emergency—and ends up operating a similar model UMA in Myanmar to save a kid trapped during an earthquake.
This piece is a convincing look at what the future might bring, and it also has a couple of good action scenes—but it feels rather fragmentary, more a neat idea than a story.
∗∗+ (Average to Good). 4,150 words. Story link.

Average ∗∗

This group contains stories which have, to my eye, various faults, e.g. they stretch credulity to breaking point, they are too long or just dull, they have overcomplicated plots hiding a lack of substantial idea or concept, they do not have an obvious point, or they were unsatisfying to a greater or lesser extent.
There were a lot more of these than I would expect to see in a collection like this.

Sinew and Steel and What They Told by Carrie Vaughn (Tor.com, 26^th February 2020)⁷ opens with a scout-ship pilot called Graff who is nearly cut in half:

My biologics are mostly shut down with shock, though I’m dutifully trying to monitor the pain. It’s all-enveloping, a fist squeezing my brain. My mechanics are in full self-repair mode, overheating because there’s so much to knit back together. Because of them, I have survived long enough that I will probably not die. This is going to be awkward.
From my own internal processor I send out an emergency signal to piggyback on ship comms, so that maybe someone can come and explain.

Graff manages to get back to the ship after the accident and, before he passes out, he realises that the medical crew see that he is a cyborg.
When Graff next recovers consciousness he is in drug-induced and physical restraint, and is questioned by the ship’s doctor, Ell (who is also his lover), and Captain Ransom. After they leave him, Graff recalls various memories he has sent back to a group of other AIs who have secretly sent cyborgs like Graff out into the universe to accumulate memories of what it is like to travel, and be human, etc.
The rest of the story (spoiler) sees further sessions where the three meet, during which Graff attempts to explain who and what he is, and how he is not a threat to them or the ship. Eventually he succeeds, and the final scene has Ell remove the nerve block that incapacitates him. A woman called Tek also appears, a cyborg summoned by the message Graff sent immediately after the accident (which was initially detected and blocked by Captain Ransom but later allowed through). Graff downloads his memories to Tek, and Ransom and Ell agree to keep Graff’s secret.
This is a slickly told piece but the ending, especially the captain’s actions, stretches credulity (even if Graff had been a loyal crewmember for some time previously).
∗∗ (Average). 4,400 words. Story link.

•

The Long Iapetan Night by Julie Novakova (Asimov’s SF, November/December 2020)⁸ sees Lev, the narrator of the story, wake from cold sleep on Iapetus at the beginning of a second expedition to this moon of Saturn (the first was abandoned a century earlier when Earth was subject to the twin catastrophes of a super volcano and a solar flare). Lev’s team build their shelters and then, when they find that an abandoned unit from a previous expedition is still showing signs of activity, they send a team to investigate. When communications are lost Lev joins a backup team which goes after them and, on arrival, they start searching. Lev eventually comes upon one of the original team, who tells her that the unit is trying to kill them—the pair of them only just get out alive.
Running parallel with this account are diary entries from one of the original Iapetus crew at the time of the disaster on Earth a century earlier. When they realised how bad things were on Earth, and how their supply line would be affected, they decided to return home, or at least to the L-5 colonies. Until, that is, their fuel production facility was destroyed—perhaps by sabotage, something that seemed more likely when their ship was also destroyed later on.
Meanwhile, the second expedition is plagued by further accidents, and the crew speculate as to whether there is inimical life on the satellite.
Eventually the two threads dovetail when (spoiler) Lev and her team discover that a member of the original team (co-incidentally the diarist of the other thread) put himself into cryo-storage, and rigged the unit he was sleeping in with bobby traps—the source of all the accidents that the second expedition experienced.
I found this rather dull (don’t spend the first two pages of your story having your protagonist wake up), plodding (it’s way too long), and unlikely (the idea that the survivor of the first expedition could booby trap the unit to cause so many problems for the second group is just too far-fetched).
** (Average). 13,250 words.

•

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

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

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

•

The 1^st Interspecies Solidarity Fair and Parade by Bogi Takács (Rebuilding Tomorrow, 2020) is set on a future Earth that has seen three waves of alien visitors. The first destroyed everything, the second came to scavenge, and then the third (comprising a number of different races who have also been attacked by the first) come seeking allies. Against this background we watch the travels of the narrator and a floating containment sphere which carries an alien called Lukrécia.
As they pass through various regions of Hungary we see them interview various people to see if they would be interested in working in extra-terrestrial communications, but most are not interested as they fully occupied with their hard, agriculture-based lives (the pair do, however, manage to recruit a 72 year old ex-social worker while staying at an old summer camp site).
After this minor success the pair decide to detour round the nearby (and supposedly dangerous) city of Győr and enter it from the southern side. En route they talk to a trans person named Lala, who takes them to the city and, when they arrive, they find it is in pretty good shape (they suspect that the rumours that it is dangerous have been deliberately spread to protect the city).
The final part of the story is partly description of the city and the people who live there (it seems remarkably untouched by the invasions), and partly an account of how the pair try to organise a Pride parade to bring everyone in the city together—although this quickly morphs into the Interspecies Fair in the title. The event is large and disorganised, but is a great success with both the human and alien visitors.
This gets off to an intriguing start but it ends up rambling on too long, and by the end it feels more like a thinly veiled mainstream story about current-day Hungary:

‘I thought an apocalypse would finally get us to give up plastic,’ someone my age in a sparkly dress grumbles next to me. I shrug apologetically. I’m looking around for Lala. I spot him with a very tall person handing out signs. Lala gets one saying ‘FAITH, HOPE, CHARITY’ in rainbow letters above what looks like a very complicated version of the trans symbol.
I remember that slogan from somewhere—for a moment I feel something go crosswired in my brain as I dredge up the right memory from an age gone by. ‘The three Catholic virtues, huh?’ I nod at him, half-yelling in the noise. The unknown sign-maker must have been missing the march of St. Ladislas.
He looks at the sign in puzzlement. ‘Are they?’ He glances around, but the person has already been carried away by the crowd. ‘You know I’m Jewish, right?’ he yells back.
I shrug. ‘I guessed. Here, I’ll take it.’ Not that I should be carrying a large sign. It looks like a recipe for injuring others.
‘Are you Catholic?’ he asks.
‘I was baptised…’
He shrugs, too. ‘I was also baptised.’ He chuckles at my confusion. ‘My great-grandma said you needed to have the right documents.’
‘Even in an apocalypse?’ I look around. A cream-coloured butterfly lands on my shoulder, then another.
‘Especially in an apocalypse.’ But we don’t get to think about the grim moments of Hungarian history, because a large metallic sphere rolls past, the size of Lukrécia’s, but with a brass tint.

∗∗ (Average). 8,650 words.

•

Exile’s End by Carolyn Ives Gilman (Tor.com, 12^th August 2020) opens with Rue Savenga, a museum curator at on the planet Sarona, receiving an unexpected visitor just before closing time. The man tells Rue that his name is Traversed Bridge, and that he has been sent by the Whispering Kindom of the Manhu to find their ancestors.
It materialises that Bridge’s people are descended from a Saronan tribe called the Atoka (long thought extinct) who, after being persecuted on both Sarona and another planet called Radovani, ended up on Exile. When Bridge says he wants to see his ancestors, Rue takes him instead to see a painting of a woman called Aldry:

People called it a painting, but it was actually an elaborate mosaic, made from pieces so small it took a magnifying glass to see them. Rue had commissioned a scientific analysis that had shown that the colors were not, strictly speaking, pigments; they were bits of bird feather, beetle carapace, butterfly wing-anything iridescent, arranged so as to form a picture. And what a picture it was: a young girl in an embroidered jacket and silver headdress, looking slightly to one side, lips parted as if about to speak. Operas had been written about her. Volumes of poetry had speculated on what she was about to say. Speeches invoked her, treatises analyzed her, children learned her story almost as soon as they learned to speak. She was the most loved woman on Sarona.
“We call her Aldry,” Rue said.
Traversed Bridge looked transfixed, as if he were falling in love. He whispered, “That is not her name.”
“What do you call her?” Rue asked.
“She is Even Glancing.”

After some more small talk, Bridge collapses. While they are waiting for help to come, he tells Rue that the painting spoke to him, and that the woman in the picture said she was lonely and wanted to return home—and see an Immolation. Rue explains, after Bridge recovers, the rules and regulations governing the return of artefacts are complicated.
The second part of the story sees Rue learn that the painting was “rescued” from an Atoka Immolation—apparently the tribe’s customs dictated they should periodically burn all their possessions and start again from scratch. Then Bridge tells her that the Manhu are going to court to reclaim the painting because “there is a ghost imprisoned in it”, and that they intend to release it by holding an Immolation.
The matter eventually ends up in court and Rue tells Bridge, just before the verdict:

“This is not an ordinary object. At some point, great art ceases to be bound to the culture that produced it. It transcends ethnicity and identity and becomes part of the patrimony of the human race. It belongs to all of us because of its universal message, the way it makes us better.”

The verdict is decided (spoiler) on a narrow point of property law, and the object is put on a slower than light ship that will take almost sixty years to get to Exile (it and the other reclaimed pieces cannot go by the faster wayport “because what would arrive at the other end would be mere replicas of the originals”).
Fifty years later, the ninety-five-year-old Rue decides to go to Exile to be there for the arrival of the painting and the other artefacts (ten years will elapse while she travels, although it will appear instantaneous to Rue). When she arrives she meets Bridge, who is now a grandfather and has built a huge dam in the hills to improve life for the Manhu.
Rue spends the night in his house, and the next day they go to unpack the painting. There is then a procession to the village where the painting is put on a pyre and all the members of the Manhu add possessions of particular value. Then (after a token back and forth about what is about to happen between Rue and Bridge), they light the fire. After the blaze starts to die down, the Manhu leave the village and Rue follows them. Once they have reached a spot on the mountain overlooking the village, Rue sees and then hears the dam being blown up.
The story ends with some suitable humbug about the past not feeding anyone, “only the future does that”.
This is quite well done for the most part, an interesting examination of the issues affecting archaeological artefacts that were created by one culture but are now in the contested possession of another. However, the final actions of the Manhu are so mind-numbingly and nihilistically stupid that I suspect many readers will be hugely irritated not only by those but by what is a dramatically unsatisfying conclusion. Apart from this the story’s other shortcomings are the unconvincing “ghost” idea, and reader realisation that the survival chances of a civilization that periodically destroys everything are probably non-existent (and what a legacy to leave your children).
A good story about stupid people, so a mixed bag.
∗∗ (Average). 13,400 words. Story link.

•

Red_Bati by Dilman Dila⁹ (Dominion, 2020) opens in a spaceship hold (although that is not immediately obvious, see below) with Red_Bati (originally a robot dog built as a kid’s toy) running out of power and realising that, if it does not get a recharge, it will die. As Red starts hacking the nearby bot and ship systems in an effort to get what it wants, we learn that it was upgraded to look after an old woman called Granny. After her death Red then hid its high level of sentience as it was converted into a mining robot. The loss of one of Red’s mining arms while he was working in that role is how it has come to be in the spaceship’s hold.
Eventually, and I am compressing a lot of the story here (spoiler), Red takes control of the ship and heads out to the asteroid belt to build more of its own kind.
This is a slickly enough told story, with the exception of the confusing (and irrelevant in terms of story setup) first page. The opening paragraph:

Red_Bati’s battery beeped. Granny flickered, and the forest around her vanished. She sighed in exaggerated disappointment. He never understood why she called it a forest, for it was just two rows of trees marking the boundary of her farm. When she was alive, she had walked in it every sunny day, listening to her feet crunching dead twigs, to her clothes rustling against the undergrowth, to the music of crickets, feeling the dampness and the bugs, sniffing at the rotten vegetation, which she thought smelled better than the flowers that Akili her grandson had planted around her house. Now, she liked to relive that experience. With his battery going down, he could not keep up a real life projection and, for the first time, she became transparent, like the blue ghost in the painting that had dominated a wall of her living room. Akili’s mother had drawn it to illustrate one of their favorite stories.

Who is “He” at the beginning of the second sentence? I thought this was referring to a third person, not Red_Bati, and the reason I thought this was because a “he” doesn’t normally have batteries. More generally, the point of view/subject matter bounces around like a ping-pong ball in the first few sentences: Red_Balti, Granny, She, He, She, She, He, Akili’s mother (!).
Furthermore, the whole first page is little more than backstory waffle like the above, and our intitial introduction (apart from the security cameras) to Red_Bati’s environment is a reference to ice floating about like a “predator shark”, something that further confused me.
The story would have benefited from a revised beginning that started with this paragraph:

The half-empty storage room looked like a silver blue honeycomb. They had dumped [Red-Bati] in it after the accident ripped off his forearm. The Captain had evaluated his efficiency and, seeing it down to 80%, tagged him DISABLED. They could not fix his arm on the ship, so they shut him down and dumped him in storage until he got back to Earth. Entombed alive. Left to die a cold death.

From this we would quickly have got Where, Who, What, Why, and realised that there was a sense of peril. You get none of that from the original. Then, after this opening, Red_Bati could have projected Granny for company, and you could then have fed in exchanges with her that outlined his predicament and gave snippets of his backstory.
Ultimately, this is a bit dull for the same reason that a lot of cyberpunk stories are, i.e. they are a series of hacking events that are rarely emotionally engaging or entertaining. It is also uncomplicated, and there is little sense of risk or peril.
∗∗ (Average). 4,450 words. Story link.

•

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

•

This World is Made for Monsters by M. Rickert (F&SF, September-October 2020) starts with an alien spaceship landing at a farm near a town and all the children rushing out to see it. The alien family come out of the ship and the farmer’s dog bounds towards them: one of the larger aliens reaches down to give it a pat.
Shortly after this (and other initial encounters), the first alien Fest begins:

It was the first annual Alien Fest, which grew so popular that the local economy has come to rely on it, and the recent sharp decline in attendance is worrisome. Revelers dress in green costumes, drink from alien cups, throw balls at alien targets, and eat fried dough dyed to look like green fingers. It is good old-fashioned fun, which apparently no one wants any more.
The mothers made sandwiches while the fathers set up tables quickly fashioned from planks of wood and sawhorses found in the Beltens’ barn. Mr. Ellreidge went back to town with the men to open his store. He kindly offered to start a tab for the various supplies such as cases of soda and paper plates and, as the day wore on, charcoal, beer, hot dogs, and condiments.
“Charge it all to the town,” the mayor said, but waited until after his reelection that November to send a bill to every household, the “alien tax” as it has come to be called.
I don’t know why this isn’t taught in our schools. I used to page through my children’s history books, and it took me a long time to stop being surprised it wasn’t there. Now, when I ask my grandchildren what they know about the genesis of Alien Fest, they have most of the details right but deliver it all in jest and laugh when I say I remember it well.
Recently, after trying to explain this to Tess, my youngest granddaughter, stranger than anyone in our family has ever been, she looked up at me with sad brown eyes then slipped her small hand into mine and I realized, with a shock, how old I am, so old that no one believes I know what I am talking about.  p. 222

Events go well at the first Alien Fest until (spoiler) the mother of one of the girls thinks that the aliens have abducted her: the mother shakes and interrogates one of the alien children, which causes her to be levitated by the displeased alien parents. Then the other alien child and her unhurt daughter appear, but the atmosphere has soured and the aliens go back to their ship. They leave (but not until after the dog runs onto the ship and is put back outside and given a tummy rub) and never return.
The story ends with the narrator saying the annual Alien Fests are becoming less popular with the young before she launches into an impassioned defence of the day, people’s memories of it, and how the aliens would be pleased at the commemorative event if they ever returned. The narrator concludes with the comment, “This world is made for monsters”, at which point Tess, the granddaughter, starts crying.
This has a readable narrative style (it feels like a 1950s SF story in some ways) but I’m perplexed as to what message the story is trying to deliver.¹⁰ Is it that that previous generations have different memories and values from the young? Is it that older generations are unaware that some of the memories they revere are monstrous? Is it that the young take a reflexively antagonistic and/or overly-sensitive response to the memories and values of the old? Or all of the above? I have no idea.
∗∗ (Average). 2,400 words.

•

The Long Tail by Aliette de Bodard (Wired, 30^th November 2020) opens with Thu salvaging on the spaceship Conch Citadel, twenty years after the war, when a “lineaged memory” from another of her crew, Ánh Ngọc, makes her pause at the entry of the room she was about to enter:

Looking more closely, Thu could see, now, that the holes in the floor were a little too regular, the mechs’ multiple legs a little too polished, the edges of the robots’ disk-shapes distorted, as if someone had pulled and the metal had given in like taffy. Not a physical room, then. The real room, the one she could interact with, lay under layers of unreality. A whole lot of it.
Shit. Shit.
Thu chewed at her lower lip, considering. Everyone onboard the scavenging habitat knew there was no correlation between the unreality and what lay underneath. Going in there would be a calculated risk.

As she weighs up the possible problems against the financial advantages, she is contacted by a third crew member, Khuyên. She tells Thu that Ánh Ngọc has been infected by a new form of the nanites which infect the wreck, and that she is “on her way to chimeral”—a condition where the affected experience constant delusions (“unreality”).
The next part of the story sees Thu retrace Ánh Ngọc’s path through the ship to find out what she was contaminated with and where. During this journey we get backstory about (a) Thu’s mother, who became contaminated by nanites and had to have her implant removed (privately, the company wouldn’t pay) leaving her essentially lobotomised and (b) the Conch Citadel’s part in the final stages of the war.
Eventually (spoiler) Thu tracks down the ship’s Central (its AI), which was thought dead. Initially Thu thinks that the Central is still fighting the war, but it turns out that it is just lonely and looking for company (or something like that).
There isn’t much of a story here, and all the gimmicks and window dressing (nanites, unreality, her mother’s implant removal, the rogue AI, etc.) doesn’t really hide that. Also—and I don’t usually like making this kind of criticism of stories—why wouldn’t they uses drones or mechs or robots to search such a hazardous environment (especially one where problems of human perception are involved)?
∗∗ (Average). 4,600 words. Story link.

•

Rhizome by Starlight by Fran Wilde (Rebuilding Tomorrow, 2020) is set on an island that is overgrown with what appears to be a fast-growing, mutant, and malevolent form of kudzu. The story opens with the narrator cutting back the day’s growth from the seed bank cum greenhouse where she lives and works.
We later learn that she is the third generation of her family to do this job:

It was left to us to tend the seeds because something in grandfather’s genes wasn’t right. That’s what he wrote in the manual. He, and others like him, stayed with the greenhouse, while others, much stronger and better, found safety on the ships. At least that’s what the neat seed-letters say. His young daughter, her genes like his, remained too. She, and we became the promise he made: to stay, to be gardeners.

After some further description of the narrator’s daily routine and backstory (as well as a rare visit to the island from a scientist who she avoids), she decides to build a boat and leave the island.
When the narrator is later picked up by a ship (spoiler), she is kept prisoner, and it becomes apparent that she is a form of mutant plant or semi-plant life herself. At the very end of the story the scientist who visited the island frees her before she dies from lack of light.
This tale starts off as a future eco-disaster piece but appears to turn into something more far-fetched, or perhaps even magical realist.
∗∗ (Average). 3,750 words.

Mediocre ∗

The stories in this group split between those that stretch credulity to breaking point, and those I just found tedious.

AirBody by Sameem Siddiqui (Clarkesworld, April 2020)¹¹ opens with a young man preparing for an “AirBody” job from a “Desi aunty” the next day (the client, a fifty-nine-year-old woman from Karachi called Meena, will use his body for a short period of time—like Airbnb, but using the person’s body rather than their house).
After this promising start the story pretty much goes into reverse: when Meena takes possession of his body the next morning he watches her (he is still mentally present for safety and facilitation reasons) cook dal and answers any questions she has—when he is not contending with her snarky comments about the cleanliness of his kitchen. We also get a chunk of backstory about his own family and a failed relationship with a woman called Karla.
The second part of the story (spoiler) sees him drive Meena to a house where she attempts to give another women the pot of dal: she has the door slammed in her face. Later, the woman turns up at his flat—and then she and Meena make love (apparently they used to be lovers). This scene—where the woman makes love to Meena while she inhabits someone else’s body—did not convince (and that is before you consider that the AirBody is of a different sex, and its owner could be watching you in action).
This is pretty much a mainstream story about cooking and relationships (not my favourite themes) which has some SF furniture in it. The ramifications of the technology are barely hinted at beyond the convenience of not having to travel.
∗ (Mediocre). 4,950 words. Story link.

•

Seeding the Mountain by M. L. Clark (Analog, September-October 2020) has an overly long and discursive start that sees Luis watch a dove die while he waits outside Medellín airport in Columbia. The body of the dove is subsequently disposed of by a woman using nanotech.
The rest of the story suffers from the same long-windedness as it goes on to tell the story of Luis and his partner Elena’s attempt to stabilize a over-mined and potentially hazardous mountain (also using, I think, nanotech). However, there have been problems elsewhere in the world with this technology:

Luis took a second to process the metaphor.
He knew that among the Embera-Katio animalism connected three realms of existence, with serpents and other critters of the soil sometimes taking mythopoetic revenge upon mankind by dragging sinners to the lands below. Rarely, though, did others refer similarly to the Six-Cities incident: twelve days when hacked nanotech, the likes of which had been developed to process rare-earth metals with greater ease, devoured cities whole—people, pets, cars, buildings—while the rest of each affected country scrambled to contain the spread. Japan. Indonesia. Benin. Colombia. Madagascar. France. The UN Accord against private access to whole bodies of nanotech research had come swiftly, with only the U.S. and Bangladesh holding out in the initial rush of militarized search-and-seizure, at least until scares hit them in turn. (A prank, as it turned out, in the midwestern U.S.—but near enough the home of an online celebrity that the famed musician had rallied his fan base through social media: enough, for once, to turn the political tide.)  p. 115

Luis later goes out to talk to a holdout on the mountain, an old man called Bidø. The man tells him about a piece of rogue nanotech that killed an ocelot, and he also says that he wants to die on the mountain.
There are other events that occur, and these include, variously: the discovery of the bones of a baby near one of the probe holes; continued funding problems for the project; the disappearance of a young worker and his girlfriend; the arrival of the Feds when illegal nanotech (or somesuch) is discovered on the mountain, etc. etc. Matters are eventually wrapped up (spoiler) when the couple are found on the mountain with Bidø, and we discover there is a family connection. The girl is pregnant, so Bidø finds a new lease of life and agrees to leave.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I’ve got some of this detail wrong (especially about whether Luis and Elena are using nanotech or another technology to stabilise the mountain) because the story, although well enough written on a sentence and paragraph level, just has too much ephemeral detail and no sense of tension or pacing—so it is very easy to become bored and tune out. And even when the story does come together at the end it seems to be as much a family soap opera as science fiction.
A short story buried in a very long novelette.
∗ (Mediocre). 14,800 words.

•

Still You Linger, Like Soot in the Air by Matthew Kressel (Lightspeed, August 2020) opens with a holy man called Gil finishing his meditation to find that Muu (an incorporeal alien “God”, I think) has “already removed the body of Demi”, a pupil of Gil’s who was also his lover. Apparently, Demi “isn’t dead exactly”, but Gil will never see him again.
Shortly after Gil’s loss another pupil turns up on Gilder Nefan (I am not sure why the planet has a similar name). Tim is female—she had previously changed gender several times but “but ultimately chose female because she felt it suited her temperament”—and she subsequently spends most of her time running errands for Gil when not annoying him with a thousand questions. When Gil gets some time to himself, he thinks about Demi and feels sad.
Eventually (spoiler) Tim convinces Gil to let her join him in taking “jithmus” (some sort of alien weed). He warns her of the dangers, but she insists.
During Gil’s trippy experience, he sees Demi and talks to Muu:

Demi—oh, lovely Demi—stood on a precipice in an endless white desert, while the horizon behind him stretched to infinity. Beyond the cliff’s edge spread an infinite blue sky. Demi, bright-eyed and eager. Demi, smiling and reaching out his hand. Gil floated down, down toward the hand, ready to grasp it and never let go. But he was just a photon. And as he raced toward Demi’s palm, the molecules of Demi’s hand spread into their constituent atoms, and the atoms spread into quarks, and each of these minuscule bundles of smeared energy drifted as far apart from each other as stars in a galaxy.
We are all empty, Muu said to him, in thought pictures. Demi was never anything at all, nor will he ever be anything again. The thoughts you have of him are like waves that ripple in a turbulent sea. Sometimes they form shapes and sense impressions. You ascertain meaning in them, but in reality they are just waves in a stormy sea. You mourn his loss, but why mourn when Demi was never anything at all? He has more life in death than you do in life, because now he is infinite.
But, but, but . . . Gil struggled to say. His photon energy leaped from orbital to orbital like stones across a pond. I felt something real, he said, and that was enough . . .
You are a bird, trapped in a room with a single half-open window, Muu said. The escape is just an inch below you, where the window lies open, yet you keep flying headfirst into the glass.
Can I see him? Gil said. Can I speak to Demi, as he was?
But you are him, now, Muu said. You are the photon which reflected off his eye and wound its way into space, where it has been speeding away from Gilder Nefan for eighty million years. All of your senses of him were nothing more than reflected photons and electrostatic pressure.
And what of my feelings? Gil said.
Just waves on a stormy sea, said Muu.
Why do you hurt me? Gil said. Why do you make me suffer so?
It is you who make yourself suffer.

Deep.
Gil wakes to find that the drug has had no effect on Tim and, because of this, she decides to leave the planet. She tries to convince Gil to go with her but he remains and, after she has gone, he eats all his remaining jithmus stash in one go (about a millions times the usual amount).
A tedious and sometimes pretentious piece that offers moping and cod-transcendence instead of a story. The only time this comes alive is during the back and forth between Gil and Tim.
∗ (Mediocre). 5,650 words. Story link.

•

Beyond These Stars Other Tribulations of Love by Usman T. Malik (Wired, 11^th December 2020) starts off in mainstream territory with a diabetic Pakistani man called Bari whose mother is suffering from dementia. He cares for her, and he worries about what will happen if he gets ill.
After a few pages of scene setting (including a childhood flashback), Bari agrees to join the New Suns to better care for his mother. This involves him joining a starship crew after he is given quantum consciousness:

Decades ago, the Penrose-Hameroff theory ushered in a new era of quantum consciousness: Although gravity prevents the occurrence of large objects in two places simultaneously, subatomic particles can exist at opposite ends of the universe at the same time.

The remainder of the story sees Bari switch his consciousness back and forth between his body on the starship and a telepresence robot in his mother’s house. Because of the relativistic effects (time passes much more quickly on Earth than it does on the ship), a few seconds away from the ship equates to hours on Earth. Eventually (spoiler) the relativistic trips start to have a mental toll on Bari, which in turn causes the failure of a relationship with a woman on board the ship. Then the mother dies a couple of weeks or so after launch (on Earth, over a decade has passed).
What we have here is a mainstream story with a clunky SF idea bolted on, i.e. a hand-wringing story about family and dementia, and not one about quantum consciousness.
∗ Mediocre. 2,950 words. Story link.

Awful –

Here I experienced incomprehension, pretension and boredom. I think that, looking at the comments in the last few sections, I can see what my personal hierarchy of faults is.

Lone Puppeteer of a Sleeping City by Arula Ratnakar (Clarkesworld, September 2020) opens with a data-dump account of a future Earth where a worsening climate disaster means that humans are going to be frozen in pods. These pods will then “tend the sick lands”. If the idea of mini-fridges for humans wandering around the planet doing environmental work isn’t enough to put you off, there are also passages like this to decrypt:

Eesha began to ask Emil to translate your thoughts constantly—so much that it began to distract him from training you to construct the simulations. So Emil constructed and gave Eesha a helmet. It contained the parts of his uploaded mind that could receive your thoughts and feelings, and she could use it to noninvasively meld with her brain activity anytime, as long as she would occasionally lend him the helmet to connect with the metal sphere he was uploaded into, if he ever needed to know your thoughts.

Even if you know, as I did, that the “you” in that passage is an AI called Opal, it’s hard to figure out what is going on in that passage until you have read it half a dozen times.
After this we learn about another form of humanity that is living alongside normal (or, as the story puts it, “non-manipulated biological”) people on this future Earth: the Diastereoms. We learn, after another page long data dump, about how the Diastereoms have had the “dimensionality” of their brains altered, and also had part of it replaced with electronic systems. The Diastereoms have since bred amongst themselves to the point there is now a ban on “inter-procreation” with normal humans (but that did not stop Eesha’s absentee mother running off with a Diastereom called Bosch).
After this set-up, most of the second half seems to revolve (I think, I struggled to work out what was going on) around the simulations that the humans will experience while in their pods. We see one simulation where three woman age and pass through different rooms; another has a woman, whose sister died in a fire, entering a simulation and rescuing her. She subsequently lives a rewarding life—but, as she is one of the experimental users, she is pulled out and (for some made up authorial reason) can’t go back in again.
Then, after Eesha’s grandmother dies, she does a sample simulation (Opal can’t warn Eesha about the consequences for some other plot-convenient reason), and a distressed Emil breaks the news to her afterwards. Emil and Eesha then watch all the people get into their pods, and then leave with the Diastereoms.
Eesha comes back years later, with her Diastereom sister, and mindmelds with Opal, which (I think) then starts a loop of the three woman simulation, or maybe the whole story—who knows. Oh, and Opal/Eesha make the decision to never let the humans leave their simulations (because they’ll just mess up the Earth again).
I found this a badly written and almost incoherent piece, and some of the material that I did understand either does not make any sense or has no point. Why are the Diastereoms in the story?—All they seem to do is wander off the set at the end. What are the Diastereoms going to do on this climate-disaster Earth after the humans are gone? More specifically, what is Eesha’s sister going to do with herself after Eesha mindmelds with Opal?
It is hard to see why this one was published at all, never mind selected for a Year’s Best. Dreadful.
– (Awful). 9,550 words. Story link.

•

The Translator, at Low Tide by Vajra Chandrasekera (Clarkesworld #164, May 2020)¹² gets off to a rambling literary start:

The sea lapping at my back and my face to the fire, I translate: poems, mostly. Now that entire languages and cultures are on the verge of being lost forever to the sea, the storms, the smog, the plagues, and the fires, now the art of the dead and the almost-dead have become quaintly valuable to a small but enthusiastic readership of the living. The wealthy and living, I should say, but are those not the same thing, now? I am alive; I breathe in and am overcome with riches. It itches, deep in my lungs.
The big publishing houses (we used to count their decreasing number; I don’t know where the dice finally rolled to a stop) in distant walled New York pay an entire pittance for authentic translations from the lost world, which translates into a moderate income for me because of the horrific exchange rate. It keeps me fed and sheltered—long may the fashion in third world ruin-poetry last—and I pray now only for the goodwill of distant tastemakers. The world’s decay is now the province of poets, not the useless powers and principalities of the world. There was a war on loss and we lost. It is now the age of mourning. I only wish it paid better.

The idea of written works being lost to climate change a few decades in the future seems rather unlikely (one would have thought they would all be scanned and on the internet by then), but I suppose this occupation lets the narrator give his thesaurus a work out and utter pretentious comments like “Poetry causes delirium and weakness. It burdens the heart”, and “the city’s death will come après moi”, etc.
We also learn about the climate disaster future the narrator lives in, and how his home in a tower block has a flooded ground floor where the rugs stink of mildew (and yet they still have intermittent electricity—I’m not sure how that works in a building awash with water).
In amongst all this are a couple of trips to his friend’s library, and a mugging by the local youths for his groceries. The same feral children who steal from him later start setting people of his generation on fire (drowning would have been better symbology).
In short: a poet’s misery memoir crossed with climate-change hand wringing.
– (Tedious). 3,950 words. Story link.

•

Fairy Tales for Robots by Sofia Samatar sees a narrator talking to a robot (shortly to become conscious for the first time) about various fairy tales and how robots should interpret them. It is full passages like this:

The tale of the Happy Prince speaks to robots in another way, I think, for it represents the duality of being. The statue and the swallow work as one, as two parts of a whole, two elements bent upon one task. Their powers complement one another: the prince provides physical material, but is too heavy to affect the space outside himself without aid, while the light and airy swallow darts all over the place, bringing reports from the other side of the world, but only interacts with humans through the statue’s gold and jewels. What if, I ask myself—what if the swallow had behaved otherwise, had refused to allow the Happy Prince to sacrifice both their lives?
What if the bird had used its encyclopedic knowledge of the world to give the prince another way to live?

The story—and I use the word loosely as it’s more an essay than anything else—cycles through over a dozen fairy tales and, mixed in with the tedious analysis, are dollops of the narrator’s misery memoir childhood.
A stunningly boring story (and this from someone who got through Brian W. Aldiss’s Report on Probability A, an anti-novel where nothing happens, and which seems like a romp by comparison).
– (Awful). 10,150 words. Story link.

•••

The non-fiction is, as you would expect from an anthology like this, pretty minimal, and the main attraction is an essay by Neil Clarke, Introduction: A State of the Short SF Field in 2020. He opens by giving the results of a survey he sent to fifty-four English language magazines in the field during this COVID year and, after dealing with the business side of the magazine business, and how some of the titles fared in 2020, he has this ominous message:

As each new year passes, I become more certain that the current system for magazines is a carefully built house of cards. The overall pool of money coming into short fiction is too low to be sustainable for the variety of publications we have. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that we need to reduce their numbers, but financial pressures may lead to that outcome if things remain unchanged.
Instead, I’m suggesting that we need to see a culture shift in financially supporting free content. The prevalence of online fiction (to which I admittedly contribute) has created the perception that short fiction should be free, establishing a financial value that’s unrealistic and problematic. Furthermore, most short fiction magazines are underpriced. While book prices have steadily increased over the years, the prices for magazine subscriptions have remained largely unchanged. $1.99 and $2.99 per month have practically become carved-in-stone standards. It’s no secret these things must change for the health of the field. In fact, some editors were considering revisions to their pricing structure before the pandemic placed those plans on hold.

I’d have to say that I don’t think it is likely this situation will improve—once you have trained a generation of readers that fiction is free I very much doubt that you will be able to flip many of them into becoming paying customers. Even someone like myself, who has a subscription to Analog, Asimov’s and F&SF, only recently joined the Clarkesworld Patreon. Partly this was because I started reading more of the magazine, and partly it was for the convenience of getting a PDF copy. While I’m happy to pay $2.99 a month for format convenience, I’m not sure that I’m willing to stretch beyond that, even though I have the money.
The other sections in the essay cover Magazine Comings and Goings, Anthologies and Collections, The 2020 Scorecard (which sources the stories in this collection come from), The International Effect, Notable 2020 Awards, In Memoriam, and, finally, In Closing.
This essay is similar in style to the encyclopaedic introductions that Gardner Dozois did in his Year’s Bests.
The Cover painting, by Pascal Blanche, is fine, but it suggests a collection of hard or traditional science fiction, and that isn’t this volume (which, I would suggest, contains quite a lot of mainstream-ish content that it is only superficially SF).
At the back of the book there are 2020 Recommended Reading List, and the Permissions, Acknowledgments, and About the Editor pages.

•••

A disappointing volume¹³ and, I’d also add in closing, one that does not do itself any favours in pricing the Kindle version at more or less the same price as the paperback.¹⁴  ●

_____________________

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

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

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

4. The Sentient, by Nadia Afifi, 2020, is the first in the “Cosmic” series (the next one, Emergent, is due any day now). “The race to stop the first human clones uncovers a dark secret.”

5. A quick skim of ISFDB shows that S.B. Divya has published all over, including a couple of pieces on Tor, and one in Analog.

6. Maureen F. McHugh’s Useless Things (Eclipse Three, 2009) is another example of a story that goes nowhere or has no ending.

7. Carrie Vaughn’s Sinew and Steel and What They Told has a prequel: An Easy Job.

8. The Long Iapetan Night by Julie Novakova was previously published in Czech in 2018, and won the Aeronautilus Award for best short story.

9. Dilman Dila has an interesting biography.

10. A handful of us read This World is Made for Monsters by M. Rickert in a recent Facebook group read. Two of us were mystified, and two didn’t comment about the meaning of the story. I think someone on Goodreads (where the point of the story is either not mentioned in reviews or seems to have gone over readers’ heads) suggested it was an “okay, Boomer” story.
I’m reminded of the old movie quote: “If you want to send a message, use Western Union”.

11. AirBody by Sameem Siddiqui was the winner of the Clarkesworld Readers’ Poll for 2021.

12. The Translator, at Low Tide by Vajra Chandrasekera was a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Award—a group of voters who, it seems, like to see writers writing.

13. We read this as a recent group read in one of my Facebook groups. I don’t think people found it as disappointing as I did, but I suspect most thought it was a mixed bag. Here are the votes in the end of read poll for what they are worth (very small sample size, 11 people; 1% = 1 vote, 3% = 2 votes, 5% = 3 votes, etc.):

14. The UK Kindle version, as of today, costs £10.06; the paperback costs £10.61, a 55p difference (66 cents). The other Year’s Bests have much more of a price split between the Kindle and paperback editions (e.g the Strahan volume, £8.49/£11.48). At least two of the readers in this group read didn’t buy the ebook because of this pricing policy, and only read the stories they already had or were available free online.  ●

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

_____________________

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

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Maurizio Manzieri
Index

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

•••

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Maurizio Manzieri
Index

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

•

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•••

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

•••

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

____________________

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

_____________________

Editor, Donald A. Wollheim, Terry Carr

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– (Awful). 6,200 words.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

•••

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

Editor, Judith Merril

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

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

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

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

She then adds:

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

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. The Wikipedia article on Feghoots.

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

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

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

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

_____________________

Editor, David G. Hartwell

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

∗∗+ (Average to Good). 9,000 words.

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

There is more of this kind of thing:

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

•••

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

Editor, Terry Carr

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

•

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

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

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

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

There is more of this later on:

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

Pretty good.

•

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

•••

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He adds later:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13. The Honorable Mentions list is:

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

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

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

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

_____________________

Editors, Harry Harrison & Brian W. Aldiss

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

•

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

•

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

•••

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

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

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

•

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

•••

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

5. The Wikipedia page for Diego Garcia is here.

6. Rabbinic Fences are discussed here.

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

The official Playboy archive is here.

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

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

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

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

Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories 1971

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

Editor, Terry Carr

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

Non-fiction:
Introduction • by Terry Carr

_____________________

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

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

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

•

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

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

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

He ends with this:

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

•

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The official Playboy archive is here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories 1971

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

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

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