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Luminist

Other reviews:¹
Graham Hall, Vector #35 (September 1965)

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Editor, Michael Moorcock; Assistant Editor, Langdon Jones

Fiction:
Girl and Robot with Flowers • short story by Brian W. Aldiss ∗∗∗∗
Old Time’s Sake • short story by Brian W. Aldiss ∗∗
Traveller’s Rest • short story by David I. Masson ∗∗∗∗∗
A Dip in the Swimming-Pool Reactor (Part 2 of 3) • serial by Harry Harrison ∗∗∗
The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius • short story by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin] ∗∗+
At the End of Days • short story by Robert Silverberg ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover
Interior artwork • by Harry Douthwaite, James Cawthorn
A Welcome Choice • editorial by Michael Moorcock
Brian W. Aldiss: The Image Maker • essay by Edmund Crispin
Story Ratings No. 152
Brian Aldiss • essay by Peter White
An Outstanding Space Story • book reviews by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
Cutting Past the Defences • book review by Michael Moorcock [as by James Colvin]
Letters to the Editor

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This is a special Brian W. Aldiss issue which has two stories from the writer as well as two essays about his work. Moorcock explains the reason for this celebration in A Welcome Choice, his editorial:

This year, over the August Bank Holiday weekend, the twenty-third World SF Convention will be held at the Mount Royal Hotel, Marble Arch. One of Britain’s outstanding sf writers, Brian W. Aldiss, is to be Guest of Honour. To celebrate this choice we are publishing two new stories by Brian Aldiss, plus articles on him by Edmund Crispin and Peter White. The first story was specially written for the issue and the second is an early, previously unpublished, piece of work which illustrates that Mr. Aldiss has always had the deft style and ability to handle character which marks all his fiction.
Apart from being admired for his talent, Brian Aldiss is also amongst the most well-liked sf writers; charming, ebullient, fluent, not unhandsome, a gourmet and man of good taste and humour, he is as interesting to meet as he is to read. His criticism, in The Oxford Mail and SF Horizons, is intelligent and pithy, matched only by a few.  p. 2

The remainder of the editorial briefly mentions the rest of the issue’s contents, and Moorcock, once again, adds contextual comments about his pseudonymous story:

James Colvin contributes an experimental story of a kind he believes hasn’t been tried before and which, he says, is ‘meant to be enjoyed, not studied’, The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius.  p. 2

The first of the essays about Aldiss, Brian W. Aldiss: The Image Maker, comes from Edmund Crispin, and he makes some interesting observations about the writer’s work:

The difference between science-fiction and science-fantasy may be hard to define, but it does, I think, exist. Emphasis is the clue. A science-fiction story can be good even when its visualisation—of a Martian, a megalopolis, a mutant—is relatively sketchy and commonplace; it can succeed because of its other merits. As against this, in a science-fantasy story the quality of the visualisation is the all important thing.
Brian W. Aldiss has written both kinds of tale, yet it seems to me that his natural inclination is towards the second type. As he himself has said, he is interested chiefly in ‘the images’. This interest is not, of course, allowed to become all-devouring: themes, ideas, narrative, plotting and so forth, though subservient to the images, are not the less skilfully handled for that (here Aldiss easily outdistances other science-fantasy writers, many of whom have too often seemed to assume that once they have dreamed up something sufficiently vivid and bizarre, their job is over). No: all I mean to suggest is that in a good proportion of Aldiss’s best work, it is the images which dominate.  p. 3

After a brief survey of some of the writer’s recent fiction, Crispin concludes that Aldiss has the eye of a painter:

In Hothouse, the big canvas, the primaries, the palette-knife. In Greybeard (appropriately) water-colours unassertive and subtly mingled. In the short story Old Hundredth, pastels: faded, yet still clean and clear and pure as the story demands.  p. 4

The first of the two Aldiss stories is Girl and Robot with Flowers, which opens with Aldiss at home with his wife in Oxford on a sunny afternoon. He is having problems with a story he is writing, and his wife suggests that it might help to talk it over.
Aldiss lays out the plot, which involves an alien race declaring war on Earth. Because of the long voyage times to the aggressor’s planet, the Earthmen send robots to fight for them, with a plan to remove all the oxygen in the aliens’ atmosphere, rendering it unbreathable. Meanwhile, the aliens arrive in our solar system and attack, killing 70% of humanity. This doesn’t stop the robots though, who wipe out the aliens and message Earth before tidying away the corpses. Years later, the remnants of humanity receive the message, and they decide to send a manned scout craft to the aliens’ world to investigate; the crew return with information almost two hundred years later. Aldiss continues his description:

[The photographs] show a world covered with enormous robot cities, and tremendous technological activity going on apace. This looks alarming.
But Earth is reassured, it seems that the war robots they made have turned to peaceful ways. More than one shot through the telescopic lenses shows solitary robots up in the hills and mountains of their planet, picking flowers. One close-up in particular is reproduced in every communication medium and finds its way all round rejoicing Earth, it shows a heavily armed robot, twelve feet high, with its arms laden with flowers. And that was to be the title of my story: “Robot with Flowers”.
Marion had finished washing up by this time. We were standing in my little sheltered back garden, idly watching the birds swoop along the roof of the old church that stands behind the garden. Nikola came out and joined us.
“Is that the end?” Marion asked.
“Not quite. There’s an irony to come. This shot of the robot with flowers is misinterpreted—an automated example of the pathetic fallacy, I suppose. The robots have to destroy all flowers, because flowers exhale oxygen, and oxygen is liable to give the robots rust troubles. They’ve not picked up the human trick of appreciating beauty, they’re indulging in the old robot vice of being utilitarian, and in a few years they’ll be coming back to lick the Earthmen on Earth.”
Inside the kitchen, I could hear the fridge charging again. I fought an urge to tell Marion about it; I didn’t want to disturb the sunlight on her face.
She said, “That sounds quite a good twist. It sounds as if it ought to make a decent run-of-the-mill story. Not quite you, perhaps.”
“Somehow, I don’t think I can bring myself to finish it.”
“It’s a bit like that Poul Anderson robot story you admired—’Epilogue’, wasn’t it?”
“Maybe. Every SF story is getting like every other one.”
It’s also a bit like one of Harry’s in his ‘War With the Robots’ collection.”
“‘Anything that Harry wrote can’t be all bad,’” she said, quoting a private joke.
“‘Wish I’d written that,’” I said, adding the punchline.
“But that isn’t really why I don’t want to finish ‘Robot With Flowers’. Maybe Fred Pohl or Mike Moorcock would like it enough to publish it, but I feel disappointed with it. Not just because it’s a crib.”
“You said once that you could always spot a crib because it lacked emotional tone.”
The goldfish were flitting about under the water-lily leaves in my little ornamental pond. Both Nikola and Marion had got interested in them; I said that they were alike. I looked down at them in love and a little exasperation. Her last remark told me she was carrying on the conversation just for my sake—it lacked emotional tone.  p. 7-8

Marion goes to get ready for the picnic, and Aldiss dissatisfiedly mulls over his idea while he watches the cats. He realises that he would prefer to write a story about the sunny afternoon he has been enjoying rather than something so divorced from normal life. When he later tells Marion this she asks him what he means. Aldiss replies:

“Why can’t I get the fridge into an SF story, and this wonderful sunlight, and you, instead of just a bunch of artless robots? See that little furry cat outside, trying to scoop up goldfish? She has no idea that today isn’t going to run on forever, that the rest of life isn’t going to be one golden afternoon. We know it won’t be, but wouldn’t it be a change if I could make a story about just this transitory golden afternoon instead of centuries of misery and total lack of oxygen, cats, and sexy females?”
We were outside the front door. I shut it and followed Marion to the car. We were going to be a bit late.
She laughed, knowing by my tone that I was half kidding.
“Go ahead and put those things into a story,” she said. “I’m sure you can do it. Pile them all in!”
Though she was smiling, it sounded like a challenge.  p. 11

This is a clever, playful, and perceptive piece of meta-fiction about subject matter the field too often ignores. I enjoyed it a lot, and think it is one of Aldiss’s better pieces from the mid-60s.

Old Time’s Sake by Brian W. Aldiss is, as per the blurb above, an early piece about an immortal man called Alec Sampson. Every twenty years he goes to Oxford and reports to the board of the company responsible for his treatment. The first half of the story is largely taken up with Sampson’s visit, and his interaction with the board members—who are all now twenty years older while he is unchanged. After coping with the resultant awkwardness, and completing the medical examinations, Sampson goes home.
A member of the board called Granville later visits Sampson with the results, which suggest that he can expect to live for thirty thousand years. After they finish talking about this and related matters, Sampson tells Granville he wants to marry, and introduces him to his girlfriend Lynette. Granville later tells Sampson he will only hurt her, and writes to Lynette to let her know about Sampson’s treatment and his extended lifespan. The couple break up.
The final part of the story tells of Sampson’s return to Oxford twenty years later.
This is, for the most part, not a bad mainstream take on a standard sfnal theme, but it does drag a little in places. I could also have done without the twist ending (spoiler: we discover that Granville has married Lynette) which squashes the story into a genre template.

The next story, Traveller’s Rest by David I. Masson,² completely upstages the Aldiss material—it is probably the best (or one of the best) stories from this period of New Worlds. This initially appears to be a future war tale, but it is one that takes place in a very strange environment:

It was an apocalyptic sector. Out of the red-black curtain of the forward sight-barrier, which at this distance from the Frontier shut down a mere twenty metres north, came every sort of meteoric horror: fission and fusion explosions, chemical detonations, a super-hail of projectiles of all sizes and basic velocities, sprays of nerve-paralysants and thalamic dopes. The impact devices burst on the barren rock of the slopes or the concrete of the forward stations, some of which were disintegrated or eviscerated every other minute. The surviving installations kept up an equally intense and nearly vertical fire of rockets and shells. Here and there a protectivized figure could be seen “sprinting” up, down or along the slopes on its mechanical “walker” like a frantic ant from an anthill attacked by flamethrowers. Some of the visible oncoming trajectories could be seen snaking overhead into the indigo gloom of the rear sightcurtain, perhaps fifty metres south, which met the steepfalling rock surface forty-odd metres below the observer’s eye. East and west, as far as the eye could see, perhaps some forty miles in this clear mountain air despite the debris of explosion (but cut off to west by a spur from the range) the visibility-corridor witnessed a continual  onslaught and counter-onslaught of devices. The audibility-corridor was vastly wider than that of sight; the many-pitched din, even through left ear in helm, was considerable.  p. 27

Matters do not become any clearer during a subsequent conversation between soldier H and his “next-up” B:

“But if the conceleration runs asymptotically to the Frontier, as it should if Their Time works in mirror-image, would anything ever have got over?”
“Doesn’t have to, far’s I can see—maybe it steepens a lot, then just falls back at the same angle the other Side,” said B’s voice ; “anyway, I didn’t come to talk science: I’ve news for you, if we hold out the next few seconds here: you’re Relieved.”
H felt a black inner sight-barrier beginning to engulf him, and a roaring in his ears swallowed up the noise of the bombardment. He bent double as his knees began to buckle, and regained full consciousness. He could see his replacement now, an uncertain-looking figure in prot-suit (like everybody else up here) at the far side of the bunker.
“XN 3, what orders then?” he said crisply, his pulse accelerating.
“XN 2: pick em-kit now, repeat now, rocket 3333 to VV, present tag”—holding out a luminous orange label printed with a few coarse black characters—“and proceed as ordered thence.”
H stuck up his right thumb from his fist held sideways at elbow length, in salute. It was no situation for facial gestures or unnecessary speech. “XN 3, yes, em-kit, 3333 rocket, tag” (he had taken it in his left glove) “and VV orders; parting!”  p. 27-28

The story then details H’s journey away from the battle. During this we learn that time speeds up (relative to the front line) the further south he goes, something that H occasionally notes:

A minute later (five seconds only, up in his first bunker, he suddenly thought ironically and parenthetically) the next car appeared. He swung himself in just as a very queerlooking purple bird with a long bare neck alighted on the stoat-lizards’ tree-fern. The cable-car sped down above the ravines and hollows, the violet southern curtain backing still more swiftly away from it. As the time-gradient became less steep his brain began to function better and a sense of well-being and meaningfulness grew in him. The car’s speed slackened.  p. 31

As H gets further and further away from the front (and the relative time differential increases), we see other changes too: the flora and fauna change from prehistoric to modern day, electronic communication becomes easier, and the “sightlines” recede further into the distance (these are caused by the red- and blue-shift of visible light due to the time differences north and south). Another unexplained change is that H’s name begins to lengthen, first to Had, and then to Hadol and, after a couple more changes, to Hadolarisóndamo.
Eventually he reaches a town and is prepared for civilian life:

Some hours later the train arrived at Veruam by the North-Eastern Sea. Thirty miles long, forty storeys high, and 500 metres broad north-south, it was an imposing city. Nothing but plain was to be seen in the outskirts, for the reddish fog still obliterated everything about four miles to the north, and the bluish one smothered the view southward some seven. A well-fed Hadolaris visited one of the city’s Rehabilitation Advisors, for civilian techniques and material resources had advanced enormously since his last acquaintance with them, and idioms and speech-sounds had changed bewilderingly, while the whole code of social behaviour was terrifyingly different. Armed with some manuals, a pocket recorder, and some standard speechform and folkway tapes, he rapidly purchased thin clothing, stormwear, writing implements, further recording tools, lugbags and other personal gear. After a night at a good guestery, Hadolaris sought interviews with the employing offices of seven subtropical development agencies, was tested and, armed with seven letters of introduction, boarded the night liner rocktrain for the south past the shore of the North-Eastern Sea and to Oluluetang some 360 miles south. One of the tailors who had fitted him up had revealed that on quiet nights very low-pitched rumblings were to be heard from, presumably, the mountains northward. Hadolaris wanted to get as far from that North as he conveniently could.
He awoke among palms and savannah-reeds. There was no sign of either sight-barrier down here.  p. 35

Hadolarisóndamo eventually settles down hundreds of miles away from the front line, marries, and has three children. Then, one day at work, after twenty years away from the front line (spoiler), the military police come for him—he has been recalled to duty. On his railway journey back to the front line Haldolaris (his name starts contracting again) calculates that only twenty minutes will have passed at the front line by the time he returns.
When he finally arrives back at the bunker he sees that his replacement is dead, killed by a new enemy weapon. H then realises that the weapon is identical to one his own side has just started using—at which point he has an epiphany about the war, and who the enemy may be.
This a highly original, dense, and intellectually engaging piece, and a very impressive debut story.
A Dip in the Swimming-Pool Reactor is the second part of the Bill the Galactic Hero serial by Harry Harrison which started last issue (no reason is given for the title change), and it starts with Bill arriving by spaceship at the centre of the Empire:

“Bowbidy-bowb! Look at that! “ Bill felt elated as their ship broke through the clouds and there, spread before them, was the gleaming golden sphere of Helior, the Imperial Planet, the ruling world of 10,000 suns.
“What an albedo,” the gunner grunted from somewhere inside his plastic face. “Hurts the eye.
“I should hope so! Solid gold—can you imagine—a planet plated with solid gold?!”
“No, I can’t imagine. And I don’t believe it either. It would cost too much. But I can imagine one covered with anodized aluminium. Like that one.”  p. 45

Of course, we soon find that things are not as they seem:

The gleaming upper level was dotted with space ships of all sizes, while the dark sky twinkled with others arriving and departing. Closer and closer swam the scene, then there was a sudden burst of light and the window went dark.
“We crashed! “Bill gasped. “Good as dead . . .”
“Shut your wug. That was just the film what broke. Since there’s no brass on this run they won’t bother fixing it.”
“Film—?”
“What else? Are you so ratty in the head you think they’re going to build shuttleships with great big windows in the nose just where the maximum friction on re-entry will burn holes in them? A film. Back projection. For all we know it’s nighttime here.”  p. 46

Bill later receives his medal at an awards ceremony presided over by a fake Emperor. After this, Bill goes sightseeing, and visits the roof of the planetary city before going to the legendary Hanging Gardens. When he falls asleep in the gardens, his guidebook/map is stolen, and losing your guidebook on Helior is not only inconvenient (it is impossible to find your way around otherwise) but, like a number of other things, is also a capital offence.
Bill eventually arrives back at the transit camp eight days late, and is then arrested for impersonating himself (he has supposedly shipped out according to the erroneous admin records). Deathwish Drang is one if the two MPs who arrive to take him into custody and, at that point, Bill runs for it.
The rest of the instalment charts Bill’s descent down through the city until he eventually reaches the surface of the planet.³ During this journey he becomes involved in various shenanigans including a criminal gang’s thefts, a sanitation department overwhelmed by the amount of waste the planet produces, and a resistance movement that ultimately proves to have more spies in its membership than conspirators.
This second instalment begins well but it flags a little towards the end. It is not as good, or funny, as the first part, and is more obviously episodic as well.

The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius by Michael Moorcock has Minos Aquilinas, a “Metatemporal Investigator” arriving in an alternative Berlin to investigate a murder. (Bismarck is the Police Chief in this world, and various other historical characters appear in other roles: Hitler is a Captain of Uniformed Detectives; Einstein and Stalin also appear.)
Aquilinas discovers the murder occurred in a strange garden owned by Otto Bismarck and, after he examines the body (and finds that it has paper lungs), he talks to Sagittarius, the gardener:

I looked out at the weird garden. “Why does it interest you—what’s all this for? You’re not doing it to his orders, are you? You’re doing it for yourself.”
Sagittarius smiled bleakly. “You are astute.” He waved an arm at the warm foliage that seemed more reptilian than plant and more mammalian, in its own way, than either.
“You know what I see out there? I see deep-sea canyons where lost submarines cruise through a silence of twilit green, threatened by the waving tentacles of predators, halffish, half-plant, and watched by the eyes of long-dead mermen whose blood went to feed their young; where squids and rays fight in a graceful dance of death, clouds of black ink merging with clouds of red blood, drifting to the surface, sipped at by sharks in passing, where they will be seen by mariners leaning over the rails of their ships; maddened, the mariners will fling themselves overboard to sail slowly towards those distant plant-creatures already feasting on the corpse of squid and ray. This is the world I can bring to the land—that is my ambition.”
He stared at me, paused, and said: “My skull—it’s like a monstrous gold-fish bowl!”  p. 105-106

In the rest of this (more straightforwardly told) story, Aquilinas discovers that Bismarck has a lover called Eva, and later meets Captain Hitler. The pair eventually end up in a bar run by a man called Weill (presumably Kurt Weill, the Jewish composer; Alfred Einstein also briefly features here as one of the customers). Aquilinas discovers more about the case, and the piece eventually resolves with (spoiler) the revelation that the murdered man is Stalin (and Eva’s jilted lover), who was killed by the plants when he broke into the gardens to attack Bismarck.
The plot isn’t entirely lucid or convincing, but the pleasure in this one is the strange setting, and the use of known historical figures in other roles.

At the End of Days by Robert Silverberg is a short mood piece about an old man mulling the end of Earth’s civilisation who receives a child visitor from another part of the Galaxy. The child states he traveled by a process called “quadrature” and, after he leaves, the old man realises that humanity’s time may not be over:

The wind had grown colder. Old Narin rose to go inside. The sun had set; the lulls were dark, and grey clouds hung in the blackening sky. But, bright as a billion candles, the stars were beginning to shine.  p. 117

A reverse The Nine Billion Names of God ending.

The ghastly Cover is another one of those uncredited photographic agency transparencies that blighted the SF paperbacks of the late 1960s and early 1970s; I suppose they seemed modern at the time.
There are two pieces of Interior artwork in this issue: Harry Douthwaite’s is the best I’ve seen from him so far, and it complements the strangeness of the Masson story well. The other piece is by James Cawthorn.
At the end of the issue there is Brian Aldiss, a longer essay about the writer by Peter White. This opens with comments about how much SF fails because it is not truly contemporary (an arguable proposition at best), and notes that Ballard and Aldiss are two exceptions:

Aldiss has not always been this kind of artist, for his aims have changed somewhat since he began writing, and it is possible to follow this development in his work. He is blazing a trail that leads away from science fiction as it is today: away from the contrived action of the sf thriller, and the contrived problems of the sf brain-teaser, towards a more serious—and more fully entertaining—form of writing. He says himself: “At first, in the Space, Time and Nathaniel era, I just wanted to be clever. Now I want to try and get an insight into life. I still want to be clever too . . .  p. 118

I’ve always thought that, during the mid-1960s, that Aldiss was in transition between his more conventional early work and his later literary and experimental output. White notes this too:

Aldiss’s work has moved in idiosyncratic jumps, and he occasionally produces work today that is similar to his earliest material.  p. 119

White also makes several other observations in this interesting article:

[His] style is not without its faults; puns and aphoristic clichés often intrude into the most serious passages.  p. 119
.
[Aldiss] has also said that many of his early works were therapeutic fantasies, in which he worked off his petty neuroses. In stories such as Outside and The New Father Christmas there is an almost hysterical sense of isolation and ennui. Dumb Show is the best of these, and must be amongst the most lyrical horror stories written. Aldiss claims to have run out of phobias around the time of Space, Time and Nathaniel, and is now concerned with writing itself—art, if you like—rather than self-therapy.  p. 120
.
He is now literary editor of the Oxford Mail, which takes up most of his time, though he does like sitting and chatting in bars. Although an unhappy private life has undoubtedly influenced his work, he remains a generally extrovert personality, and particularly enjoys travelling abroad.  p. 121-122

Story Ratings No. 152 was discussed in that issue.⁴
The Books column in this issue contains two essays by Michael Moorcock. An Outstanding Space Story begins, suitably enough, with a review of Non-Stop by Brian W. Aldiss:

An example of what the space story can do in the hands of a really good writer is the recently re-issued Non-Stop by Brian W. Aldiss (Faber Paperback, 7s. 6d.). I first read this when it appeared in 1958 and thought it excellent. Today I am possibly more critical of sf than I was then. I still find Non-Stop excellent. Here the space setting contributes to the atmosphere of loss and bewilderment experienced by the characters. It is completely gripping on a second reading and the writing and characterisation is outstanding in the sf field.  p. 123

He follows this with a short review of Best SF Four by Edmund Crispin (“To the new reader many of [the stories] should be very entertaining. Personally I found the collection only average in general standard”), before briefly mentioning New Writings in SF 3 by John Carnell, and panning Colin Kapp’s The Dark Mind:

Kapp is heavily in debt to Alfred Bester’s Tiger, Tiger! in this novel. His visual imagination is above average but his handling of character and dialogue is poor in the extreme and his technique, where it is his own, does not match his imagination or his ability to come up with convincing scientific ideas. One is inclined to feel that the author should spend much more time studying his craft before attempting his next novel.  p. 124

The second essay, Cutting Past the Defences, examines The Drought by J. G. Ballard:

This is a novel which is hard to review in the normal reviewer’s terms. It effects one like an hallucinogenic drug and although plot and characterisation are there, the visions dominate. It has ceased to rain, cities burn, rivers and lakes evaporate, the earth turns to desert and, still living in his houseboat, Dr. Ransom contemplates the true meaning of the change, fails to communicate its significance to the others with whom he comes in contact—Philip Jordan the wild Swan Youth, Catherine Austen who identifies herself with the lions she releases from the zoo, Lomax the sinister, mocking dandy, Miranda his depraved sister and Quilter the deformed half-wit.
[. . .]
Quilter, like all the characters but Ransom himself, are creatures of fantasy; not of fantasy fiction, but the deep, archetypal fantasies which form a mutual link between us all.  p. 125

Letters to the Editor has three letters, two of which are from writers: Edward Mackin praises Tubb’s novel, and John Brunner outlines the genesis of this novel The Whole Man (the details of this are in my review of the previous issue⁵). The main event is the letter from P. Johnson (above) supporting the “Anything goes” policy.

A must-get issue.  ●

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1. Graham Hall says that Aldiss’s Girl and Robot with Flowers is “an over-esoteric non-SF tale”, and that it “sets out to show the failure of SF to come to grips with life—and does it quite successfully, although it is over personalised.” He says the second story does “not [show] off the best of Aldiss’s talent”.
Masson’s Traveller’s Rest “constructs a very unusual and peculiar world where time ratios vary by latitude”. It is “a very interesting story” that “is well written for a first story and is one of the most original ideas in recent issues”.
Hall doesn’t know if the Colvin’s (Moorcock’s) “very experimental/straight piece [. . .] comes off or not, because I don’t understand what Mr Colvin was trying to do.”
The Harrison serial “continues in its admirable vein”, and the Silverberg vignette is “poor”.
Hall briefly mentions the non-fiction material before concluding that this is “a disappointing issue after some recent ones”.

2. Masson’s Traveller’s Rest is the only story from New Worlds that made it into both the American ‘Best SF of the Year’ volumes. (Masson’s Traveller’s Rest, Vernor Vinge’s Apartness and Arthur C. Clarke’s reprint Sunjammer made it into the Wollheim/Carr volume, there were no stories from Science Fantasy. Masson’s Traveller’s Rest also appeared in the Merril volume for 1965 along with New Worlds stories from E. C. Tubb and David Rome, and Science Fantasy stories from A. K. Jorgennson, Josephine Saxton, Keith Roberts, and Johnny Byrne.)

3. I suspect this instalment of Bill is largely a parody of Asimov’s The Caves of Steel.

4. No story ratings for this issue appeared in future volumes—it looks as if the ratings for #153 were the last to be published.

5. The details about the origins of The Whole Man are in this review, footnote 4.  ●