Summary:
Given that Damon Knight read eight months worth of manuscripts for this anthology, it is a disappointment, and is probably of poorer quality than an average issue of F&SF of the time. Only one of the stories, Keith Roberts’ The Deeps, is any good, and the rest are either partially broken (I’d include the Nebula Award winning The Secret Place by Richard McKenna in that group) or just generally mediocre.
[ISFDB page][Archive.org]

Other reviews:¹
Algis Budrys, Galaxy, October 1966
Judith Merril, Fantasy and Science Fiction, September 1966
P. Schuyler Miller, Analog, January 1967
Michael Moorcock, New Worlds #169, December 1966
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Damon Knight

Fiction:
Staras Flonderans • short story by Kate Wilhelm ∗
The Secret Place • short story by Richard McKenna ∗∗
How Beautiful with Banners • short story by James Blish ∗∗
The Disinherited • short story by Poul Anderson ∗∗
The Loolies Are Here • short story by Ruth Allison and Jane Rice [as by Allison Rice] ∗
Kangaroo Court • novella by Virginia Kidd ∗
Splice of Life • short story by Sonya Dorman ∗
5 Eggs • short story by Thomas M. Disch ∗
The Deeps • short story by Keith Roberts ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Introduction • by Damon Knight
Story introductions • by Damon Knight

_____________________

This was the first volume of a long running anthology series started by Knight in 1966, and which would last for 21 volumes and until 1980. It would publish many Nebula Award winning stories (some deserving, some because the writers were part of the Milford writing course clique who dominated the voting). This volume is (I hope) one of the weaker entries.
(The following reviews have already appeared on my sfshortstories.com site, so skim down to the three dots ••• for any non-fiction and concluding comments.)

Staras Flonderans by Kate Wilhelm opens with two humans and a long-lived alien called Staeen closing in on a wrecked and tumbling spaceship that appears to be abandoned. Throughout their craft’s approach to the wreck, which they intend to investigate, we learn various things about Staeen, including the fact that he is tulip-shaped, is very long lived, can survive unsuited in space, and is able to sense the men’s emotions. Staeen also, in common with the rest of his race, feels a paternalistic concern for the men (who they call Flonderans):

When the Flonderans had come to Chlaesan, they had been greeted with friendliness and amusement. So eager, so impulsive, so childlike. The name Earthmen was rarely used for them; they remained the Flonderans, the children. It amused Staeen to think that when they had still been huddling in caves, more animal than man, his people already had mapped the galaxy; when they had been floundering with sails on rough seas, engrossed in mapping their small world, his people already had populated hundreds of planets, light-years away from one another.  p. 14

When the three of them go aboard the wreck they come to realise that the missing crew used all the lifeboats to abandon the ship, a course of action that would only have kept them alive for a few hours longer because of the limited oxygen carried. Mystified, they leave. However, when they return on a further search, Staeen picks up various vibes that make him realise that the crew left the ship “in the madness of fear,” but he does not tell the humans as he thinks they will not accept his discovery.
The final act of the story involves the three of them subsequently encountering a Thosar spaceship, a race who only pass through the galaxy every twelve thousand years, and who mankind have never come into contact with. Staeen explains to the men that the Thosars are huge creatures, and that they will send representatives to the ship but stay outside. When they get close enough to be seen (spoiler) the humans go into a blind panic and accelerate their ship away at a pace that almost kills the three of them. Staeen eventually manages to turn off the drive but, when the men come around, they get into their suits and flee through the airlock, dragging Staeen with them.
Staeen then floats in space contemplating his demise, and concludes that the human’s panic response must be down to a previous visit to Earth by the Thosars in prehistoric times, where they inadvertently terrified the primitive humans and some sort of genetic or race memory was laid down.
There is much to like in the first part of this story—it is a readable example of a traditional SF tale, the kind of thing you could easily imagine finding in Analog—but the ending is just ridiculous. Apart from the fact that the reason for the human’s terror is never specified (the Thosars have one eye and there is a brief mention of “Bi—”), you would hide in the ship if something terrified you, not jump out the airlock to a place you are even more exposed. And the generational chicken-fleeing-from-chickenhawk response that Staeen uses to explain the human’s behaviour could not have been imprinted on mankind in one visit. It all just falls apart.
PS According to Staeen, Staras eku Flonderans means “poor, short-lived Earthmen.”
∗ (Mediocre). 5,800 words.

•

The Secret Place by Richard McKenna has as its narrator a geologist called Duard Campbell, one of a team sent to a small town to search for a vein of uranium:

It began in 1931, when a local boy was found dead in the desert near Barker, Oregon. He had with him a sack of gold ore and one thumb-sized crystal of uranium oxide. The crystal ended as a curiosity in a Salt Lake City assay office until, in 1942, it became of strangely great importance. Army agents traced its probable origin to a hundred-square-mile area near Barker.  p. 31

After the team finds nothing (the whole area is overlaid by Miocene lava flows) Campbell is left behind to maintain a skeleton operation to keep the army happy. He is angry and feels betrayed by his boss, and decides he will find the vein to spite him. Then, one night at dinner, Campbell speaks to Old Dave, one of the townsmen, who tells him about a local myth of a lost mine, and how the deceased boy’s sister, Helen, may know of its whereabouts.
Campbell then hires Helen (described in part as “elfin”) as his secretary, and the main part of the story concerns itself with Campbell’s manipulation of her to obtain the information he wants. Initially this proves unsuccessful, but one day he makes a breakthrough:

I was trying the sympathy gambit. I said it was not so bad, being exiled from friends and family, but what I could not stand was the dreary sameness of that search area. Every spot was like every other spot and there was no single, recognizable place in the whole, expanse. It sparked something in her and she roused up at me. “It’s full of just wonderful places,” she said.
“Come out with me in the jeep and show me one,” I challenged.

During this trip, and subsequent ones, Helen tells him of the “fairyland” that she and her brother used to play in, and talks about “big cats” that chase dogs, “shaggy horses with claws, golden birds, camels, witches, elephants and many other creatures,” “the evil magic of a witch or giant,” “sleeping castles,” “gold or jewels,” and “magic eggs” amongst other things. Throughout this Campbell sketches the topology of Helen’s fantasy land (noting that she is remarkably consistent with her descriptions) and later convinces her to show him the “magic eggs,” which turn out to be quartz pebbles that could never have originated in the basalt desert around Barker.
Throughout all this Helen becomes increasingly unhappy and unstable, and there is a crisis point where she says that her brother Owen stole the “treasure” and later died because of her family’s poverty (when he was found he had lacerations of his back consistent with a cougar attack, although there were no such animals in the area). Old Dave eventually intervenes, tells Campbell about the townfolk’s displeasure about Helen’s condition, and states that she needs to go home.
Before he can arrange this Campbell receives a map of the prevolcanic Miocene landscape of the area, and is stunned when he realises it is a point for point copy of the map he has made of Helen’s fairyland. All of a sudden he realises, “The game was real [. . .] All the time the game had been playing me,” and he rushes out to find Helen, only to come across Dave who says she is missing.
Campbell drives out to the desert in the jeep ahead of the search party and, when he finds her, declares his love:

“Wait for me, little sister!” I screamed after her. “I love you, Helen! Wait for me!”
She stopped and crouched and I almost ran over her. I knelt and put my arms around her and then it was on us.
They say in an earthquake, when the direction of up and down tilts and wobbles, people feel a fear that drives them mad if they can not forget it afterward. This was worse. Up and down and here and there and now and then all rushed together. The wind roared through the rock beneath us and the air thickened crushingly above our heads. I know we clung to each other, and we were there for each other while nothing else was and that is all I know, until we were in the jeep and I was guiding it back toward town as headlong as I had come.
Then the world had shape again under a bright sun.  p. 45

There is a minor confrontation with the townsfolk when they get back, but Helen says she is going away with Campbell to be his wife.
A short postscript takes place sixteen years later, where Campbell tells of his professorship and the son they have had. Campbell also says that they don’t have any books of fairy tales in the house, but goes on to quote a cryptic remark from the son:

“You know, Dad, it isn’t only space that’s expanding. Time’s expanding too, and that’s what makes us keep getting farther away from when we used to be.”  p. 47

When I first finished this story (I skimmed it again later) I found it a bit of a muddle to be honest, and wasn’t sure whether “The Secret Place” was located in a different time or in a different reality, or both.² Part of this was down to expectation (I’d previously read a review—which I can’t now find—of McKenna’s Fiddler’s Green which states that the characters in the story generate their own reality to escape the current one), and part of it was McKenna’s execution of the story itself, which trowels in so much talk of fantasy and magic that it almost drowns out the evidence suggesting the children (and later Campbell and Helen) are playing make-believe games in another time: the gold, the uranium, the quartz pebbles, the topology map, and the comment by the son.
I also thought the sudden declaration of love by Campbell a bit unlikely, and have no idea what is happening in the earthquake scene above (is it really a timequake—“now and then all rushed together”—or is it just an emotional climax to the story?)
It’s a very mixed bag and by no means a worthy Nebula winner. Bob Shaw’s Light of Other Days should have won that year, but was probably pipped by McKenna as he had recently died, and the film of his best-selling book, The Sand Pebbles, was in the cinemas.
∗∗ (Average). 6,150 words.

•

How Beautiful with Banners by James Blish begins with Dr Ulla Hillstrøm on the surface of Titan wearing a molecule thick “virus space-bubble”. After some description of this space suit, her environment (which includes a view of the rings of Saturn), and of an alien “flying cloak,” the latter hits her in the small of the back and knocks her over.
The second chapter of the story sees her recover consciousness, and which point she starts thinking about a post-divorce affair that she had at a Madrid genetics conference. There is another page or so of background which, in part, focuses on her generally unhappy love life.
In the third chapter she realises that her suit isn’t working correctly but can’t remember what happened. Then she realises that the alien cloak creature has wrapped itself around her, and may have bonded with her suit, but this doesn’t stop further self-absorption:

And suppose that all these impressions were in fact not extraneous or irrelevant, but did have some import—not just as an abstract puzzle, but to that morsel of displaced life that was Ulla Hillstrøm? No matter how frozen her present world, she could not escape the fact that from the moment the cloak had captured her she had been simultaneously gripped by a Sabbat of specifically erotic memories, images, notions, analogies, myths, symbols and frank physical sensations, all the more obtrusive because they were both inappropriate and disconnected. It might well have to be faced that a season of love can fall due in the heaviest weather—and never mind what terrors flow in with it or what deep damnations. At the very least, it was possible that somewhere in all this was the clue that would help her to divorce herself at last even from this violent embrace.  p. 58

The final part of the story has her notice another of the flying creatures in the distance and, thinking that it might attract the one that surrounds her, she goes to the thermal beneath which it is soaring. She blocks up the vent, the creature descends, and then the cloak surrounding her departs, along with her spacesuit. She has time to think “You philanderer—” but not to realise that she has started a long evolution in the cloaks that will end sixty million years later.
This is a complete muddle of various parts, some of which are quite good (Ulla’s character is much more three-dimensional than usual for the time; there is some good descriptive writing; and there is a sense-of-wonder-ish ending) but some of it is awful (who wakes up from an attack on an alien and starts relationship navel gazing? What on Earth is the silly “philanderer” comment about?) None of this works as a coherent whole. God only knows what Blish was trying to achieve here.
∗∗ (Average). 3,800 words.

•

The Disinherited by Poul Anderson (Orbit #1, 1966) starts with two starship pilots in orbit around a planet called Mithras, where a human science expedition landed a century before. Their discussion provides various bits of background information, most pertinently that all interstellar travel is to be stopped.
After this setup the bulk of the story is from the viewpoint of Thrailkill, who is the son of one of the science team, and we join him as he returns from expedition upriver of Point Desire, the only city on the planet. With him are his wife, child, and an indigenous alien called Strongtail, a kangaroo-like creature with long arms and a head like a bird. When they arrive at an inn in Point Desire they are greeted with the news of the starship’s arrival, and that the arriving crew “say you can now go home”.
The remainder of the story focuses on the plan to remove the science mission, which leads Thrailkill and the other colonists to realise that they want to stay. In amongst all this, there is some good description of the planet and Thrailkill’s life there:

When he and Tom Jackson and Gleam-Of-Wings climbed the Snowtoothe, white starkness overhead and the wind awhistle below them, the thunder and plumes of an avalanche across a valley, the huge furry beast that came from a cave and must be slain before it slew them. Or shooting the rapids on a river that tumbled-down the Goldstream Hills, landing wet and cold at Volcano to boast over their liquor in the smoky-raftered taproom of Monstersbane Inn. Prowling the alleys and passing the lean temples of the Fivedom, and standing off a horde of the natives’ half-intelligent, insensately ferocious cousins, in the stockade at Tearwort. Following the caravans through the Desolations, down to Gate-of-the-South, while drums beat unseen from dry hills, or simply this last trip, along the Benison through fogs and waterstalks, to those lands where the dwellers gave their lives to nothing but rites that made no sense and one dared not laugh. Indeed Earth offered nothing like that, and the vision-screen people would pay well for a taste of it to spice their fantasies.  p. 73

Eventually Kahn, the starship captain, assembles all the humans and speaks to them while he waits for his men to arrive. He tells them that their colony isn’t a viable size, and they cannot be allowed to stay because, if they do, they will expand their numbers and overwhelm the planet and the aliens who live there. During his speech he refers to some of the indigenous populations of Earth’s past (Native Americans, etc.) who were overwhelmed by new arrivals. Then a shuttle from the starship arrives, armed men enter, and the story ends.
This is a picturesque story, but it poses a false dichotomy³ and the last scene resembles one of those didactic Analog story-lectures. It also ends far too abruptly, and feels like the beginning of a longer, better story.
∗∗ (Average). 5,500 words.

•

The Loolies Are Here by Ruth Allison and Jane Rice (Orbit #1, 1966) isn’t so much a story as an account of a mother of four’s various domestic problems and accidents. In a mainstream story these would mostly be the fault of the children, but here they are ascribed to the “loolies”:

Anyhow, to the inevitable queries—Why are they called loolies? Where do they come from, et cetera?—I can only reply through a mouthful of clothespins, I haven’t time to hat this over the head with a rolled-up research paper. I guess they’re called loolies for the same reason that brownies are called brownies. It is their name. Maybe they come from the same place. Et cetera. Wherever that is. However and whereas a brownie is a good-natured goblin who performs helpful services at night (that’s what I need, begod, a reliable brownie, with an eyeshade and some counterfeiting equipment) a loolie will leave you lop-legged. And probably already he has. I’m not sure a loolie is a goblin either.  p. 85-86

Deliver all this in Rice’s high-energy, madcap style⁴ for half a dozen pages, until which time the loolies turn their attention to the wife’s less than helpful husband, and you are done.
Not bad, just froth that would have been better off in Good Housekeeping.
∗ (Mediocre). 2,150 words.

•

Kangaroo Court by Virginia Kidd⁵ starts off as a satire about bureaucracy with Tulliver Harms, the First Exec of the Middle Seaboard Armies, sidelining other branches of government so he can deal militarily with an alien landing on Earth. Then Wystan Godwin, the story’s main character, arrives after six months in a Tibetan lamasery oblivious to all of this. Most of the rest of the first part of the story concerns Godwin’s readjustment to society (he buys some depilatory cream to make his hairstyle conform with the times, etc.), and his gradual awareness that he is being kept in the dark:

Still serenely certain that somehow, somewhere, the traditional Liaison packet was on its traditional way to him, Wystan Godwin—lacking even the one or two bits of information that might have triggered an assessment of the true situation—sat and waited for a sheaf of papers to bring him up to date. As Harms had foreseen, he never even thought of demeaning his position by actively seeking data from anyone in the complex. The only man of status equal to his, Harms himself, never spoke directly to him. Their sole contact was via dispute protocol, a procedure as ritualized as the mating dance of the bower bird. Harms’ dictum of later swallowed up fourteen days.  p. 101

This wordy and slightly affected semi-satire swallows up about a third of the story, until the point where Godwin (after a peculiar dispute between Harms and a draughtsman) eventually gets his hands on the briefing documents concerning the aliens. Then the story switches to become a first contact piece, beginning with a data dump of several pages from the liaison packet.
These papers reveal that the aliens are called the Leloc, and they are intelligent marsupial creatures virtually identical to the kangaroos on Earth (we later find that the latter are a devolved colony of Leloc left behind millions of years ago). We also learn about Leloc technology in general, and their Hilbert space drive in particular, which apparently causes temporal distortions (initially, if I recall correctly, the Leloc think they have been away from Earth for six months, not millions of years).
The final part of the story sees Godwin meet the Leloc in their spaceship, where he has to quickly learn their strange movement and number customs (there is a lot of standing up and sitting down, and people and Leloc coming and going with chairs). When the Leloc later learn that Harms is threatening to attack the ship they refuse to go to Australia to meet their descendants, and say they’ll stand their ground. Matters eventually proceed (spoiler) to an ending where Harms is kidnapped by the Leloc, and the latter’s leader is deposed and left behind.
This very much feels like the work of an amateur or neo writer: apart from the fact that it seems to be two stories fused into one, and has a huge data dump in the middle, it is buried under far too many words. And, to be honest, a lot of the incident in the story is of little interest.
It’s not dreadful, but it’s far from being any good; why Knight thought it would be a good idea, after eight months of reading submissions, to devote almost a third of the anthology to this is a mystery.
∗ (Mediocre). 18,200 words.

•

Splice of Life by Sonya Dorman (Orbit #1, 1966) begins with a woman in hospital getting a hypodermic syringe inserted between her bottom eyelid and eye. The rest of the narrative is a surreal nightmare-ish piece where she sees things (even though her eyes are bandaged), thinks there is a dog under her bed, learns she was probably in a car accident, and talks to a ten-year-old boy, and a nurse with an odd verbal tic.
The story finishes with her overhearing a doctor’s conversation (spoiler), which gives her the impression she is repeatedly wounded so the hospital can re-use her for ophthalmologist training courses (I think).
I didn’t get this at all the first time around, and even on reread I’m not sure it is particularly clear, or convincing.
∗ (Mediocre). 2,400 words.

•

5 Eggs by Thomas M. Disch begins with a man finding his bride to be has gone, after which he decides to go ahead with the post-wedding party anyway. As the story unfolds we find that she was a bird-like creature of alien origin, and that she has left him 5 eggs to incubate.
At the party we see the narrator greet and talk to a couple of guests and then, towards the end of the event, he can’t find the eggs. Eventually (spoiler) he finds cracked, empty eggshells in the kitchen, and finds a recipe card for Caesar salad (needing a similar amount of eggs). He then realises that the note was left for the cook by his avian fiancée and, at this point, he remembers her hilarity at cannibalism scene in Titus Andronicus.
For the most part this is a quirky but enjoyable enough story, but it morphs into a weak and contrived black joke at the end (and not one that is saved by referencing Shakespeare).
∗ (Mediocre). 2,650 words.

•

The Deeps by Keith Roberts begins with a short data dump that describes an over-populated future Earth where the cities have spread towards the coasts and moved under the seas.⁶ The rest of the story concerns two undersea residents, Mary Franklin and her daughter Jennifer,⁷ and begins with the teenager going to a party (“And for land’s sake child, put something on . . .”)
There is really not much plot after this (spoiler): we follow Jennifer to the party and get some description of the undersea colony before the narrative cuts back to her mother, who later becomes increasingly concerned when Jennifer doesn’t return on time, eventually going out to search for her. The story ends with both mother and daughter floating underwater above a deep, dark void, and her daughter telling her to listen to the sounds of the Deeps. Mary does so, and almost becomes hypnotised to the point she runs out of oxygen:

She could hear Jen calling but the voice was unimportant, remote. It was only when the girl swam to her, grabbed her shoulders and pointed at the gauges between her breasts that she withdrew from the half-trance. The thing below still called and thudded; Mary firmed reluctantly, found Jen’s hand in her own. She let herself float, Jen kicking slowly and laughing again delightedly, chuckling into her earphones. Their hair, swirling, touched and mingled; Mary looked back and down and knew suddenly her inner battle was over.
The sound, the thing she had heard or felt, there was no fear in it. Just a promise, weird and huge. The Sea People would go on now, pushing their domes lower and lower into night, fighting pressure and cold until all the seas of all the world were truly full; and the future, whatever it might be, would care for itself. Maybe one day the technicians would make a miracle and then they would flood the domes and the sea would be theirs to breathe. She tried to imagine Jen with the bright feathers of gills floating from her neck. She tightened her grip on her daughter’s hand and allowed herself to be towed, softly, through the darkness.  p. 191-192

Although there is not much in the way of a story here, the description of the settlement is pretty good, probably Arthur C. Clarke level stuff, and Roberts skilfully generates enough atmosphere and mood to make up for the not entirely convincing idea of sounds luring people to the Deeps (scattered through the text there are rumours about the phenomenon, and recalled conversations with Mary’s husband about how there may be a racial memory drawing humanity down there).
It’s an effectively  hypnotic story.
∗∗∗ (Good). 7,000 words.

•••

Knight contributes an Introduction to the collection which begins with this:

Here are the nine best new science fiction stories I could find in eight months of reading manuscripts. I did not know when I started what kind of stories I was looking for: all I had in mind was to try to put together a collection of unpublished stories good enough to stand beside an anthology of classic science fiction.  p. vii

Wow, that it is the best you could find in eight months?
There are also short Story introductions, a paragraph or two for each of the pieces.

•••

In conclusion, this collection probably isn’t even as good as an average 1966 issue of F&SF. Try one of the better volumes instead.  ●

_____________________

1. Algis Budrys (Galaxy, October 1966), after opening remarks about Knight and the standard he is trying to attain, states that the Rice, Dorman and Disch are “froth”. He then adds that Anderson, Blish, and McKenna are each represented by the subject matter expected of these writers before adding that: the Blish was “a little bewildering,” if “well-written”; the McKenna, “a minor story by a major writer”; and the Anderson is not as good as some others of the same type he has written. Then he back peddles a bit (I get the impression that Budrys is trying to avoid being unkind). Roberts’ treatment of The Deeps “is extremely effective; the enchantment of ‘the deeps,’ the undercurrent of tension and fear.”
Budrys has this about the Wilhelm:

[This] is the kind of story in which all the characters are mouthpieces, discussing some inexplicable mystery of vital importance to them, while actually performing no actions. What action does occur is scene-setting by the author, who provides, at intervals, visible illustrations of that same mystery. Forward progress thus is zero. Finally the author pushes a couple of new characters and some additional scenery on stage; thus the actual nature of the problem is revealed, and what you suddenly realize is that the story that ought to have started there, and arisen from it, is thus lost. It was good thinking, nice thinking, but now another attempt will have to be made.  p. 156

The first part of the story is more interesting than Budrys makes it sound, but he has a point about the second part.
Budrys then goes on speak at length about Kidd’s story, comparing it to Blish’s work:

In “Kangaroo Court”, one does find many of the devices and approaches which are typical of a Blish story, as well as a quality of competence and self-trust which is accepted as a matter of course in work signed by an established name. In this unique context, it shows up as what we would call “daring” in a new writer. In other words, there is evident knowledge that there are things you should leave out as well as things you must put in.
[. . .]
However, as in the Blish story, there is a sense of the last-act performers being conscious of a four-alarm fire backstage. There is also the immediate appearance of a villain whose villainy is pretty much unmotivated except in terms of cliche. He is a one-view- point man without past or future—a fetish dropped from the sky to worry the three-dimensional characters. Too, the narrative pacing is bad—there either needs to be more build-up toward the ending or, perhaps preferably, less detail beforehand, so that the need for a tacked-on trip to Australia does not arise. The actual story all takes place aboard the landed alien spaceship where marsupial and mammal sit in deliberation over the two viewpoints on the situation. Even so, this is very nearly a major story, by an undoubtedly important writer, representing a definite gain to the field.  p. 157

Budrys concludes:

What Damon Knight has put together here, then, is a book that represents science fiction well but not to any extraordinary extent. He has come up with some solid stories, some well written trifling stories, and one or two uncommon stories, though none that ring so well as to be clearly and obviously the “best” of anything.  p. 157-158

I usually like Budrys’ reviews but found this one a bit useless to be honest, and couldn’t help but think he was muddying the waters as much as he could because (I suspect) he knew Knight well.

Judith Merril (F&SF, September 1966) opens her review with some general remarks:

[Orbit #1] emerges as a most uneven volume leaning more to polish than profundity, rather stronger on technique than concept. It is an excellently readable collection, but of the nine stories, there are no more than four I am likely to read a second time, and of those four, only two ‘needed’ a book like this to achieve publication.  p. 18

She then talks about the four stories:

The outstanding inclusion here is Richard McKenna’s posthumous “The Secret Place,” long overdue for publication, and by itself, I suppose, justifying the existence of the book. Almost the same thing might be said of James Blish’s “How Beautiful with Banners,” if he had finished the story he began. Rich, meaty, absorbing in its opening pages, it seems to run out of content half way through: a woman more complex and believable than any character of Blish’s I have ever read turns into a scientifictional spinster stereotype; a compelling emotional experience seems to degenerate into a pale dirty joke. Yet the first part is so extraordinary that I know I will return to it, ignoring the drop-off afterwards.  p. 18-19

She goes on to add that she doesn’t know why the McKenna has not seen print before now; and adds that she can see why a book of this sort would be necessary for the publication of the Blish, and the Dorman, which she thought an unclassifiable story unsellable to any magazine (what, not even F&SF?)
Merril also thinks that Virginia Kidd’s “Kangaroo Court” is a “valuable find” but is “less potent than the McKenna in its symbolic content,” (whatever that means) and is “a solid piece of science fiction wrapped up in some elegant prose.” I wonder if she and Budrys were reading the same story as me.
She describes the Wilhelm as a “somewhat overwritten good idea”, the Anderson, “a beautifully smooth mood piece with not much idea at all”, the Rice a “shrill giggle”, the Disch, “a gorgeously colored bottle of bird-woman relish”, and the Roberts an “unoriginal but strongly written underwater story.”
She finishes by saying that only the Kidd and McKenna fit Knight’s stated aims “to put together a collection of unpublished stories good enough to stand beside an anthology of classic science fiction.”
Another useless review in my opinion (“a gorgeously colored bottle of bird-woman relish”?), apart from her comments about the Blish, which are spot on.

P. Schuyler Miller (Analog, January 1967) states that “there are nine good stories” in the collection but doesn’t really give any further idea what he thinks of them beyond saying that he thinks that the McKenna was the best, and that the Kidd “could well have been published here”. I doubt it.

Michael Moorcock* (New Worlds #169, December 1966) has this to say about the anthology:

None are outstanding, most are readable, conventional sf stories. One of the best is by newcomer Virginia Kidd. Unrepresentative work by Disch and Roberts, representative work by McKenna. Anderson, Wilhelm. Women writers too rarely seen include Sonya Dorman and Allison Rice. The Blish story is unbelievably badly written, has a good start and descends rapidly into sf cliche. Collection has standard of good issue of, say,
F&SF.  p. 156

Another mystifying vote for the Kidd. The story did not go down nearly as well in our Facebook group read.

* The reviews are signed “WEB” which I presume (and have had others agree) is probably Moorcock using his “William Barclay” pseudonym. An ex-editor in the know thinks the “E” may be for “Ewart”.

2. It took me a couple of days of scratching my head, Algis Budrys’ October 1966 Galaxy review (“about time travel, love and maturation”), and reading the other comments on my Facebook group read thread before I could make sense of The Secret Place.

3. The ending of Poul Anderson’s piece made me realise that a lot of stories probably have simplistic either/or endings for dramatic reasons—in this case it means you can either finish the story as above (armed arrest), or you could have a “resistance and independence” ending (in what would be a longer story). A more pragmatic, fudged solution, where the humans covenant with the aliens to limit the size of their colony, for instance, probably wouldn’t be so satisfying.

4. For better examples of Jane Rice’s solo humorous style, I recommend The Elixir (Unknown Worlds, December 1942), or The Magician’s Dinner (Unknown Worlds, October 1942).

5. Virginia Kidd was once married to James Blish, and was better known and an agent and editor than a writer. Her ISFDB page is here, and her Wikipedia page here.

6. In his early period Keith Roberts worked through a number of conventional SF themes before doing his own thing: alien invasions in his first novel, The Furies; psi powers in his third, The Inner Wheel, and in some short stories, e.g., Manipulation, The Worlds That Were; time travel in Escapism; androids in Synth; and post-nuclear holocausts in many others.

7. Keith Roberts used the name “Jennifer” in another undersea story called The Jennifer, (Science Fantasy #70, March 1965) although that one is about Anita, a teenage witch taken by a mermaid to see a gigantic sea serpent. Still, it’s worth a look, if you can cope with Granny Thomson’s Northamptonshire accent (it gives them the vapours on one review site). His cover painting for that story appeared on another issue.  ●

Summary:
An interesting and worthwhile anthology about the arts. It contains one of Barry Malzberg’s better (and longer) stories, Choral, which mixes time travel, Beethoven, metaphysics and black comedy; Richard Frede’s strangely titled Oh, Lovelee Appearance of the Lass from the North Countree, a very readable story about a painter preparing for a flight in a military jet (although the fantasy ending is much stranger and doesn’t really work); finally, there is the Nebula Award winning A Glow of Candles, a Unicorn’s Eye, which is a story about the death of theatre in the future. It has a neat title and is competently done I guess, but is the least interesting piece in the collection.
[ISFDB link] [Archive.org copy] [Barry Malzberg’s Chorale (novel version)]

Other reviews: ¹
Anonymous, Kirkus Review
Various, Goodreads (none as of Jan 2020)
Brian Stableford, Foundation #88, September 1978 (partial)

_____________________

Editors, Edward L. Ferman & Barry N. Malzberg

Fiction:
Oh, Lovelee Appearance of the Lass from the North Countree • novelette by Richard Frede ∗∗+
A Glow of Candles, a Unicorn’s Eye • novelette by Charles L. Grant ∗∗∗
Choral • novella by Barry N. Malzberg ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Science Fiction and the Arts • introduction by Barry N. Malzberg

_____________________

When I first started reading SF magazines in the mid-seventies I also tried to keep up with the new  original anthologies, seeing them as essentially the same thing (albeit an ersatz version of the former). While this was relatively easy for British anthologies (they were few and far between, and usually had paperback editions—New Writings in SF, New Worlds, Andromeda, etc.), it was harder to do for American ones: they were more expensive and, apart from the currency hit, I had to get them mail order (more cost) from Ken Slater at Fantast Medway. A further problem was that some of these American anthologies only appeared in hardback, which meant that, even if Ken could get hold of them, the cost was prohibitive for a cash-strapped student.² So, even though I was aware of the likes of, say, the Orbit series of anthologies from Damon Knight, I never saw a copy of the later hardbacks until a couple of years ago, when I stumbled upon some scanned editions.
As for the volume under review, not only do I not recall seeing any mention of Graven Images, but I also never came across it subsequently; I only found out about it when there was a mention of the Richard Frede story on one of my listservs a couple of weeks ago (if I recall correctly he was thought to be an unusual choice of contributor for a volume that also contains Grant’s Nebula Award winning story and Malzberg’s piece).³ Frede was a name I recognised from F&SF (I remembered his May 1977 story Mr Murdoch’s Ghost, or at least the title), and who I thought was a frequent contributor. When I checked ISFDB, however, I found that he only contributed three stories over a fifteen-month period. I then picked up Graven Images, thinking I’d have a quick look at the beginning of Frede’s story . . . and ended up finishing it at half past one in the morning (a rare event for me as at that time of night drooping eyelids always trump reading).

The reason that Oh, Lovelee Appearance of the Lass from the North Countree kept my attention is twofold: first, Frede is a very good storyteller (an early bestselling novel, Interns, sold over 1,000,000 copies according to the cover blurb) and, second, the story’s narrative arc—a painter attending a number of aeromedical courses in preparation for a flight in a USAF fighter—is similar to something I’ve experienced myself.
The story itself opens with a Colonel Jack “Jock” McTeague flying upside down in an F-106 looking at the colours in the sky at the edge of a distant storm. When he gets home he tells his wife what he has seen, and she tells him she will commission a painting for his Christmas present:

His wife then wrote to the American Artists’ Association, “He says it was generally flaming color, but he could see, as well, sepia, burnt sienna with raw sienna at the edges, and both umbers (burnt and raw), the earth colors, he believes you call them, and oranges . . .”
.
“. . . and some pinks along in there with the oranges, too,” Mr. Tribble of the American Artists’ Association read. “He believes he saw, too, ranges of rose and vermilion, especially against leadlike gray and blacks. He says especially, too, note the yellow-oranges and burnt oranges, streaks of yellow, ochers, the yellow-orange family.”
“Turner,” Mr. Tribble said aloud. Over his desk intercom he said, “Nancy, who is that fellow who does Turner for us?”
“I don’t remember,” Nancy said. “It’s been so long since anyone wanted a Turner. Shall I look him up?”  p. 14

They contact a painter called Clarence Beattie, who discusses the commission with them before he—driven in part by domestic restlessness—phones Colonel McTeague. McTeague thinks it would be a good idea if Beattie came for a flight and saw what a storm front looks like from the cockpit. He tells Beattie to get a medical certificate, and then attend a military aeromedical course where he’ll be taught about the dangers of hypoxia, how to safely eject from the aircraft, and so on. And that’s what the first thirty pages or so are mostly about: his medicals, the training, and the endless travelling to and from, and waiting at, various Air Force bases (McTeague is continually postponing their meeting as he is a busy man). There is also one night in a bar where his sexual fidelity to his wife is tested.
This is recounted in a breezy and very readable style (you can see why Frede was a bestselling writer), and the story is also leavened with military quirkiness and black humour, such as the advice given by his ejection seat instructor:

“You’ll need [the fur hat] on the flight line before the colonel lowers the canopy. Afterward slip it into your flight suit. In case you have to eject, you’ll need it on the ground. Remember, before you eject, get your head back, chin back, arms in tight across your chest; tuck your hands into your armpits and get your knees and feet tight back against the seat. When you go out, you’re going to get exploded out and you don’t want to lose anything going, like your legs or head. That could ruin your whole day.
[. . .]
“You don’t know how many people, even the pilots, don’t remember to pull in their legs when they’re ejecting, and they’re a mess afterward, believe me, those who survive. But probably you won’t have to.”  p. 33

Beattie, at long last, meets McTeague, and they have several drinks in the bar the night before they go flying. The next day Beattie is in the back seat of the jet:

The colonel climbed in and settled himself. He was about eight feet forward, but there was a radar screen directly in front of Clarence and a lot of other equipment in between, so all Clarence could see of the colonel was a bit of white of the back of the colonel’s helmet. Clarence was tightly fitted in. It was difficult for him to move. The colonel seemed a great distance away. Clarence, usually most at ease in confinement, such as his studio, now found himself subject to an attack of claustrophobia.
I’m going to be flying at thirty thousand and be claustrophobic there? Clarence asked himself. I am?
Something buzzed and garbled in his helmet. Then again. Then. “zzzzz . . . zzzzz . . . ’s that?” said the colonel.
“What?” said Clarence.
“—ll turn it up. . . . There. How do you read me?”
“Fine.”
“Fine,” said the colonel. “Just give me a few minutes to get everything checked. There’re so many dials and gadgets and things, they confuse me.”
Clarence did not laugh.  p. 40

Before much longer they are off the ground and in an afterburner climb to thirty thousand feet. When they get through the cloud, McTeague tells Beattie to look to his left, where he finally sees the coloured sky ahead of the storm front.
It’s at this point (spoiler) where the story takes a major left turn. Having been repeatedly briefed and drilled, Beattie ejects when a red light unexpectedly comes on in front of him. As he falls away from the aircraft he realises that the caption didn’t say EJECT but AC GEN. He then remembers his ejection drills and activates his emergency oxygen, and then waits for his parachute to open.
The next part of the story is even weirder: he lands in snow and makes his way to a solitary farmhouse, where he is greeted by a strange woman who thinks he is someone else:

A woman opened the door. She wore a long dress of rough material in an old style, as in eighteenth-century paintings of provincial life. Her hair was piled up. She was pretty, but her skin was coarse, from work or weather.
Her features had beauty and dignity, but there was a sternness to the set of her expression as if she had just eaten something not to her liking. She said, tonelessly, and as if withholding her belief, “Jack-Jock, my John-John.”
“No,” said Clarence, “my name is Clarence.”
“Jack-Jock,” she said quietly. “You’ve come to me, come back to me.”
“May I come in?” said Clarence.
“I thought you’d sunk beneath the wind. You went off in that terrible wind and never came back. No message. But I knew why, did I not, Lord John?”
“I don’t know. My name really is Clarence.”
“Clarence, Jack, John, Jock. You may come in. Ah, you’ve come again.”
“Thank you. But actually I haven’t been here before. Actually I just sort of fell down from the sky.”
She said, “It does not surprise me. You were a harper then, did sing of air.”  pp. 45-46

The next part reads like a fantasy sequence.⁴ She accuses Beattie of trying to deflower her, something he apparently achieved with her now dead sister, and she takes him down to the cellar to see her frozen body. He is locked in, and eventually goes to sleep.
The next day she lets him out and takes him outside at the end of a shotgun but, before she can shoot him, a rescue helicopter arrives overhead and he runs to them and is winched on board.
When Beattie gets back to base he learns that McTeague is now a general in Hawaii, and that his ejection occurred several years previously. He then finds that he has been declared dead, his wife has moved to California with his daughter, and that she has remarried.
This last section made absolutely no sense to me whatsoever, and seems completely at odds with the rest of the story (it’s almost like the pages of two different stories got muddled up in the editor’s office). That said, I really enjoyed the first two-thirds/three quarters of the story, so I’d classify this one as a fascinating failure.

A Glow of Candles, a Unicorn’s Eye by Charles L. Grant gets off to a maundering, near-incoherent start:

There are no gods but those that are muses. You may quote me on that if you are in need of an argument.
It’s original. One of the few truly original things I have done with my life, in my life, throughout my life, which has been spent in mostly running. Bad grammar that, I suppose. But nevertheless true for the adverb poorly placed.
And how poorly placed have I been.
Not that I am complaining, you understand. I could have, and with cause, some thirty years ago, and for the first thirty-seven I did—though the causes were much more nebulous. But the complaints I have now are of the softer kind, the kind that grows out of loving, and are meant—in loving—not to be heard, not to be taken seriously.
For example, consider my beard. Helena loved it, once she became accustomed to its prickly assaults. But I do not need it anymore. There is no need for the hiding because I have been forgiven my sins—or so it says here on this elegant paper I must carry with me in case the message has been lost—forgiven my trespasses. But I like the stupid beard now. Its lacing of gray lends a certain dignity to a face that is never the same twice in one week. And it helps me to forget what I am beneath the costumes and the makeup and the words that are not mine. Yet it’s not a forgetting that is demanded by remorse, nor is it a forgetting necessitated by a deep and agonizing secret.  pp. 55-56

There is a page and a half of this sort of thing, and it is an awful beginning.
The story then cuts to the narrator, Gordon Anderson, a film actor (or what passes for films in this near future) doing a take with a simulacrum of a tiger. He is accidentally injured, and then gets a lecture from the director.
We then find out what kind of films Anderson is involved in making:

Begun by the British and expanded by the Americans, the tapes were the foundation of a dream-induced system through which young people would hopefully be matured without actually suffering through the birth pangs of adolescence. Hospital wards with soft colors, nurses with kind faces, and for two hours and twenty minutes every other day the young were wired and hooked and taped to a machine, which I and others like me, those actors with no place to go, inhabited. We wrestled with tigers, endured floods, endured women and men and disasters personal. It was, as the narration stressed again and again and again—who knows how often?—all very symbolic, and all very real.
Watch! the voice ordered.
Take care, the voice cautioned.
Watch, and take care, and listen, and apply . . . apply . . . apply . . . listen . . . apply . . .
A debriefing, then, which lasted for something like an hour. More, if you were new to growing without aging. Less, if you’d been in the system for a year or more.  p. 64

We also learn about Anderson’s past, that he appeared in five failed stage plays (there is no appetite for these in this future), and subsequently, in a fit of anger, beat up the playwrights involved. The authorities have not yet discovered his involvement in this crime.
Anderson later gets involved with Helena, the partner of friend. After he sleeps with her, he tells her about the assaults. Eventually (spoiler), the authorities discover he is responsible. The couple go on the run, leaving the city for the sparsely populated countryside and hiding out in abandoned house (it is in this section where Helena finds and gives Anderson the unicorn necklace mentioned in the title).
Woven into this chase story is the couple’s interest in old plays (Shakespeare, Williams, Miller, Chekhov, etc.). Later in the story, after the heat has dies down, they set up a travelling theatre. They visit small towns, and have some success educating the audience about the art form before performing their plays.
One night, Helena’s ex and an official appear at one of their shows, and the couple find out they have been pardoned.
The story ends with a reference to Helena’s death at age eighty, and the unicorn necklace.
In my notes I ended up categorising this as “good”, although, judging from what I’ve written above, I’m a bit puzzled as to why (if I recall correctly the beginning and end are better than the middle). That said, there is no escaping the fact that it is an entirely minor piece, and one hamstrung by its waffle, pretentiousness, and unconvincing future.
The theme of artists losing, and then regaining, their audience obviously played better with SFWA voters than me—they voted it a Nebula Award for best novelette in 1979.⁵

Choral by Barry N. Malzberg is the longest story in the book, and the best. This was a pleasant surprise for me as I wasn’t a fan of his short fiction in the late 1970’s and the early 1980’s: it seemed as if his stories always featured protagonists having a breakdown, or who were suffering from terminal sexual or existential angst. In small doses these would have been tolerable, but it felt like the stories were everywhere. It didn’t help that they were in advance of my reading age (and maybe still are).
This story opens with a time-traveller called Reuter who is forging documents thought to be written by Beethoven:

Hunched over the papers on the third floor of his stinking, reeking rooms in the Vienna of 1802, Reuter applied himself to the paper. I renounce, he wrote, I renounce. How did that go in German? It didn’t matter, the papers would be picked up and the translation done by his section man, but he would feel a little more secure if he knew German. A hint of authenticity. For that matter, he would feel a little more secure if he knew more music, but then again you had to keep some sense of perspective. What he knew about was history and the psychology of the mind that would have been Beethoven’s. The rest could be faked, right down to the transcripts of the compositions, which he had stowed in various cubicles in the room. Nothing had to be original; all he had to do was to reconstitute. He supposed.  p. 105

Reuter is unhappy in his role, and frequently discusses this with his superiors—but he agrees to continue. According to the theories of Karl Kemperer, the “mad physicist”, the past is in flux and must be eternally reconstructed by surrogates:

Kemper’s core speculation was that his theory could be proved true if the reconstruction of historical figures were evolved. He believed that upon the return of surrogates from the present to the past, it would be found that the surrogates were the actual personages, that there had been, in short, no JFK, Chamberwit, Thomas Alva Guinzaburg other than those who were the surrogates.
This would make clear, Kemper had postulated, that the past was an absolute creation of the present and that indeed it was only the concept of a timeless present, working toward both future and past, that sustained all of human existence.  p. 113

There is quite a lot of this kind of metaphysical comment throughout, and I found some of it confusing (it may be that the later passages are just intended to show Reuter’s unsettled mental state).
What I thought the story does do well are the details about Beethoven’s life (there is a lot of this in the back end of the tale), and the mordant black humour threaded throughout the piece. Sometimes these combine, such as when Reuter/Beethoven faces a near mutiny from his orchestra about the opening of his Fifth Symphony—at this point Reuter begins to suspect that the conductor and orchestra are also time-travellers. The comedy is also evident when he is interviewed by supervisors, who seem to have a decidedly shaky grasp of past events:

“In some ways your work is quite satisfactory. The outburst to the orchestra was quite neatly conceived.”
“I knew it was in character.”
“It is important, however, that there be a sense of total conviction. You cannot lapse. We are dealing, after all, with a central historical figure, the cornerstone, so to speak, of modern music. The five piano concerti, the ten symphonies—”
“Nine symphonies.”
“Come?”
“He wrote nine symphonies, not ten.”
“Oh,” the Supervisor said. “Well, no difference.” He consulted some papers in his hand. “Perfectly true; there were only nine symphonies.”
“He died with some notes for a tenth, but they were lost, or at least appropriated by someone.”
“Quite so,” the Supervisor said. “On balance, your performance is adequate, however. There are elements of real range and passion. If you could open up some more levels of pain—”
“I don’t understand how you could think there were ten symphonies,” Reuter said. “There were nine, that’s a very common fact.”
“No difference. That’s your specialty. Now, when I talk about pain, I mean—”
“It’s not a matter of specialty. It’s just something that you ought to know. I mean, if you’re reconstructing the past, then it should be assumed that you know the details you’re seeking to reconstruct. Wouldn’t that be reasonable?”  pp. 123-124

A worthwhile read, and possibly one for my hypothetical ‘Best of the Year’ collection.

Like most anthologies there isn’t much nonfiction, but there is an introduction to the volume as a whole, as well as individual ones for the stories. In the former, Science Fiction and the Arts, Barry N. Malzberg begins with this:

Science fiction, as Brian Stableford has pointed out in various essays, has always been a technological fiction, a means of helping us understand the confusing machines and of mapping little way stations, such as showing us where the lavatories might be in the rocket ships—and since its emphasis was on the explication of the machinery, it had very little room for somewhat less urgent matters. Busy, busy: the science fiction writer felt himself to be a tour guide around the apocalypse.  p. 9

The emphasis may lie there, but there are so many counter-examples I wonder if this is even a worthwhile generalisation.
Malzberg then gives a brief sketch of the arts in SF before telling us what we can expect from this volume:

Painting, music, performance—this anthology is the first, I think, to be exclusively devoted to the subject of art, and so it may constitute a precedent of sorts.
Precedent is what art is about: the breaking of new ground, the granting of the perception to see as we have never seen before, the spiritual insight that will enable us to understand or be moved in different ways. Precedent is not perhaps the business of science fiction, which for the most part seems more than ever dedicated to the smoothing away of strange and terrible landscapes to outposts of Corporate Headquarters . . . and this may be one explanation for the dearth of stories utilizing both art and science fiction.  p. 10

Malzberg also contributes introductions to the stories. In the one for the Frede story he mentions that the “story grew from an Experience [Frede] had while researching an upcoming novel called The Pilots”, and quotes a letter that shows the story’s genesis:

“I wrote a letter to a friend in the Air Force and one day I found myself at the second and tandem set of controls of an F-106 Delta Dart. At one point in a rather violent maneuver the EJECT light seemed to flash on—it may have been an instant of electrical malfunction or it may have been in my imagination. I elected not to eject and, fortunately, my instructor, through my headset, confirmed my decision. But the warning light kept going off in my mind, and I had a lot of recall of the lonely upstate New York countryside over which we did our training. . . .”  p. 11

The introduction for the Grant is perfunctory, but Malzberg provides an informative one for his own contribution (click on the image above).
This anthology has an interesting mix of stories, and is well worth seeking out.  ●

_____________________

1. According to ISFDB, this anthology doesn’t seem to have been reviewed in any of the publications they index. I only found one complete review on the internet. (Goodreads is usually a reliable source for at least a brief comment, but it is a blank sheet.)

2. When I hear people moan about Amazon I think of the old days, and then gladly buy the easily available (and relatively cheap) Kindle editions.

3. Richard Frede’s ISFDB page is here. And here is the cover for The Interns (which was later made into a film):

Apparently the genesis of Graven Images was that Frede and Ferman were neighbours, and Frede couldn’t sell the story to a mainstream market.

4. Kirkus Review states that the “fantasy” part of the story is actually taking place in a daydream of Colonel McTeague’s—missed that, if this is the case, although she does call him “Jack-Jock”. I’m not sure that knowledge improves matters.

5. Grant’s story was up against Mikal’s Songbird by Orson Scott Card, and Devil You Don’t Know by Dean Ing for the 1979 novelette award (I can’t remember reading Card’s piece).  ●