Other reviews:1
Charles N. Brown, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, January-February 1978
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Editor, Gardner Dozois
Fiction:2
The Diary of the Rose • novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin ∗∗∗+
Custer’s Last Jump • novelette by Steven Utley and Howard Waldrop ∗∗∗∗
Air Raid • short story by John Varley ∗∗∗+
Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis • short story by Kate Wilhelm ∗∗
Back to the Stone Age • short story by Jake Saunders ∗∗∗
Armaja Das • short story by Joe Haldeman ∗∗∗+
Mary Margaret Road-Grader • short story by Howard Waldrop ∗∗∗
The Samurai and the Willows • novella by Michael Bishop ∗∗∗∗
Non-fiction:
Introduction—Summation: 1976 • by Gardner Dozois
Honorable Mentions – 1976
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The sixth volume of this ‘Best of the Year’ series from publisher E. P. Dutton saw Gardner Dozois take over from Lester del Rey.3 The anthology contains stories first published in 1976.
The fiction leads off with The Diary of the Rose by Ursula K. Le Guin, a journal/diary story that appears to be set in the near future. The narrator is Rosa, a psychologist who treats patients by “scoping” their conscious and unconscious minds:
It is amazing how banal most people’s minds are. Of course [Ana] is in severe depression. Input in the Con dimension was foggy and incoherent, and the Uncon dimension was deeply open, but obscure. But the things that came out of the obscurity were so trivial! A pair of old shoes, and the word “geography!”
And the shoes were dim, a mere schema of a pair-of-shoes maybe a man’s maybe a woman’s; maybe dark blue, maybe brown. Although definitely a visual type, she does not see anything clearly. Not many people do. It is depressing. When I was a student in first year I used to think how wonderful other people’s minds would be, how wonderful it was going to be to share in all the different world, the different colors of their passions and ideas. How naive I was! p. 4
She has another patient, Flores Sorde, and it is he who becomes the focus of the story. Initially a reluctant patient—his notes state he is violent and paranoid—Rosa has an odd initial conversation with him:
F. Sorde: rested but still suspicious. Extreme fear reaction when I said it was time for his first session. To allay this I sat down and talked about the nature and operation of the psychoscope.
He listened intently and finally said, “Are you going to use only the psychoscope?”
I said yes.
He said, “Not electroshock?”
I said no.
He said, “Will you promise me that?”
I explained that I am a psychoscopist and never operate the electroconvulsive therapy equipment, that is an entirely different department. I said my work with him at present would be diagnostic, not therapeutic. He listened carefully. He is an educated person and understands distinctions such as “diagnostic” and “therapeutic.” It is interesting that he asked me to promise. That does not fit a paranoid pattern, you don’t ask for promises from those you can’t trust. He came with me docilely, but when we entered the scope room he stopped and turned white at sight of the apparatus. p. 7
During their subsequent sessions, Rosa sees that Flores’ mind, unlike Ana’s, produces images that are lucid, and at one point she sees a stunningly detailed rose. Later, Rosa realises that he may not be a mental patient but a political prisoner.
The rest of the story charts Flores effect on Rosa’s own thinking, and her own political disaffection. An air of menace slowly builds—at one point Rosa attends a “Positive Thinking” session and listens to a lecture on “the dangers and falsehoods of liberalism”; later on, she meets another political patient in Flores’ ward who has had multiple electroshock treatments.
The final section (spoiler) has her encounter Flores on the way to his own treatment. When she visits him afterwards, he has no memory of who she is. There is a fitting final paragraph:
I am Rosa. I am the rose. The rose, I am the rose. The rose with no flower, the rose all thorns, the mind he made, the hand he touched, the winter rose. p. 24
The story has the same realistic feel as fiction I’ve read about Stalinist oppression and I wondered, given that much of Solzenhitsyn’s work (for one) appeared in English around this time, if that was an influence. (I note that ISFDB4 quotes the writer as saying she thinks it takes place in South America, but I didn’t see that at all.)
An almost very good piece: if it has a flaw, it is that the ending feels a little rushed compared with the first half.
Custer’s Last Jump by Steven Utley and Howard Waldrop is an alternate world non-fiction account about Custer and Crazy Horse and the Battle of Little Big Horn—which, in this world, involves the 7th Cavalry parachuting into action from dirigibles!
The story starts much earlier than the battle however, and rather slowly, with an account of formation of the 1st Western Interdiction Wing of the Confederate States Army Air Corps. Their early monoplanes affect the course of the American Civil War.
The second section tells of Crazy Horse and Custer’s deployment during that war, and how Crazy Horse and other members of his tribe agree to give land to the CSAAC for an airfield in return for pilot training:
It fell to Captain Smith to train Crazy Horse. The Indian became what Smith, in his journal,144 describes as “the best natural pilot I have seen or it has been my pleasure to fly with.” Part of this seems to have come from Smith’s own modesty; by all accounts, Smith was one of the finer pilots of the war.
[. . .]
Smith records146 that Crazy Horse’s first solo took place on August 14, 1864, and that the warrior, though deft in the air, still needed practice on his landings. He had a tendency to come in overpowered and to stall his engine out too soon. Minor repairs were made on the skids of the craft after this flight.
All this time, Crazy Horse had flown Smith’s craft. Smith, after another week of hard practice with the Indian, pronounced him “more qualified than most pilots the CSAAC in Alabama turned out147 and signed over the aircraft to him. Crazy Horse begged off. Then, seeing that Smith was sincere, he gave the captain many buffalo hides. Smith reminded the Indian that the craft was not his: during their off hours, when not training, the Indians had been given enough instruction in military discipline as Moseby, never a stickler, thought necessary. The Indians had only a rudimentary idea of government property. Of the seven other Indian men, three were qualified as pilots; the other four were given gunner positions in the Krupp bi-wing light bombers assigned to the squadron. p. 34
Custer, meanwhile, becomes a parachutist at Jump School.
Later in the war Crazy Horse’s squadron is almost completely destroyed during a Union attack on his unit’s airfield, and he and a few others escape with a handful of aircraft, which they hide in tribal caves. Around the same time, Custer leads a parachute assault on another Native American tribe’s settlement (even though they are, unknown to Custer, a Union ally). Custer massacres the natives and, when Crazy Horse visits the scene after the Union troops have left, Custer’s fate is sealed.
The next section is a Collier’s Magazine article called Custer’s Last Jump, which describes The Battle of the Little Big Horn:
Few events in American history have captured the imagination so thoroughly as the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s devastating defeat at the hands of Sioux and Cheyenne Indians in June 1876 has been rendered time and again by such celebrated artists as George Russell and Frederic Remington. Books, factual and otherwise, which have been written around or about the battle, would fill an entire library wing. The motion-picture industry has on numerous occasions drawn upon “Custer’s Last Jump” for inspiration; latest in a long line of movieland Custers is Erroll Flynn [see photo], who appears with Olivia de Havilland and newcomer Anthony Quinn in Warner Brothers’ soon-to-be-released They Died with Their Chutes On. p. 42
The penultimate part is a more detailed account written by Mark Twain, composed after his interview of one of the battle’s participants, Black Man’s Hand. He tells Twain that Custer lost the fight because (spoiler) Crazy Horse’s monoplanes attacked the 7th Cavalry’s dirigibles, and brought most of them down.
There follows a short, vainglorious extract from a history of the 7th Cavalry (written by Edgar Rice Burroughs), just before an extensive bibliography of alternate historical texts.
This is not only a very good parallel world story, with every section making this world more detailed and convincing, it’s an entertaining one too.
Air Raid by John Varley5 is about a raiding party from the future who time-travel to an aircraft in our time which is going to crash. It has a good opening hook:
I was jerked awake by the silent alarm vibrating my skull. It won’t shut down until you sit up, so I did. All around me in the darkened bunkroom the Snatch Team members were sleeping singly and in pairs. I yawned, scratched my ribs, and patted Gene’s hairy flank. He turned over. So much for a romantic send-off.
Rubbing sleep from my eyes, I reached to the floor for my leg, strapped it on, and plugged it in. Then I was running down the rows of bunks toward Ops. p. 58-59
The bulk of the story tells of the team disguising themselves as cabin crew members, before going through the time-gate to the plane. There they incapacitate as many people as possible before they are discovered, and feed them through the time-gate to the future. During these events we learn that in the future humanity is doomed because of problems with the environment, genetics, and disease.
Eventually, trouble breaks out on the plane and they have to put down a passenger mutiny with a mixture of information about the imminent crash, threats, and force. They just make it out in time (although they leave behind “wimps”—brain-dead humans—as body doubles):
I hate wimps. I really hate ’em. Every time I grab the harness of one of them, if it’s a child, I wonder if it’s Alice. Are you my kid, you vegetable, you slug, you slimy worm? I joined the Snatchers right after the brain bugs ate the life out of my baby’s head. I couldn’t stand to think she was the last generation, that the last humans there would ever be would live with nothing in their heads, medically dead by standards that prevailed even in 1979, with computers working their muscles to keep them in tone. You grow up, reach puberty still fertile—one in a thousand—rush to get pregnant in your first heat. Then you find out your mom or pop passed on a chronic disease bound right into the genes, and none of your kids will be immune. I knew about the para-leprosy; I grew up with my toes rotting away. But this was too much. What do you do?
Only one in ten of the wimps had a customized face. It takes time and a lot of skill to build a new face that will stand up to a doctor’s autopsy. The rest came pre-mutilated. We’ve got millions of them; it’s not hard to find a good match in the body. Most of them would stay breathing, too dumb to stop, until they went in with the plane.
The story ends with the rescued passengers being told of their various life options, the best of which is a fresh start as settlers on Centauri 3. The narrator and her partner watch as the survivors are briefed:
Gene and I looked at each other and laughed. Listen to this, folks. Five percent of you will suffer nervous breakdowns in the next few days and never leave. About the same number will commit suicide, here and on the way. When you get there, sixty to seventy percent will die in the first three years. You will die in childbirth, be eaten by animals, bury two out of three of your babies, starve slowly when the rains don’t come. If you live, it will be to break your back behind a plow, sun-up to dusk. New Earth is Heaven, folks!
God, how I wish I could go with them. p. 72
That final yearning line almost recasts this action SF piece into an elegy.
This is generally a fast paced, engrossing (and very Heinleinesque) piece, but there are a few parts of the tale that are hard to follow, and another draft might have helped.
Ladies and Gentlemen, This Is Your Crisis by Kate Wilhelm starts with a couple arriving home from work on Friday, whereupon they start watching a game show which involves five people dumped in the wilderness—the group is undergoing “crisis therapy” as well as competing against each other, and they have to reach a perimeter checkpoint to win. The story alternates between the couple (a doormat wife and a lazy, unwashed, and generally disobliging husband) and the experiences of the contestants/patients as they encounter various natural hazards (bears, dogs, rivers, cliffs, etc.)
This probably had an “if this goes on” vibe at the time of publication, but I think we are already in a world where people are more than happy to spend their own existence watching other people’s.
This is a well enough done, if plotless, slice-of-life but it has a rather pious ending—when the show ends the couple’s temperament and attitude to each other improves markedly. Presumably the moral of the story is that watching reality TV actively makes you a bad person.
Back to the Stone Age by Jake Saunders gets off to an intriguing, atmospheric start during which a number of civilians get on a B-29 bomber for a wartime mission to Japan. The first half is mostly a mood piece where information about the people on board slowly trickles out: we have the narrator—a reporter—and his photographer; a war veteran; an obnoxious rich young man and his pretty blonde fiancée; and an old farmer going to see where his son died. We also learn that the aircraft isn’t American but a Bolivian ally that sells tickets to civilians (and, in the case of the war veteran, bombs too).
Once the aircraft gets over the devastated island we learn that, in this alternate world, Japan was not nuked but a long conventional bombing campaign begun:
So we kept pounding the islands while resistance literally burned away on the ground. Anti-aircraft fire became rare, then ceased altogether. Our air force took full title to the Jap skies. But still no one wanted to see a million American boys go down the tube in an invasion of Japan. So we waited, hoping for a surrender that must surely be near.
But fanatics in the Jap military wanted to make surrender impossible. Thus it was that Japan burned all her bridges by executing the prisoners she still held, both military and civilian. And that did it. The decision was made to isolate Japan, to bomb her back to the stone age. There’d be no invasion. Why waste a million lives when the Navy and Air Force could neutralize, even obliterate, the islands for a fraction of the cost?
Time passed. In Manchuria, the Kwangtung Army was defeated by Russia, which had entered the war against Japan in February of forty-six. The British, with American help, retook Burma, Rangoon, and other Crown possessions. China nibbled at the Japanese forces on the Asian mainland, then began to rip away great chunks after the death of Mao, and the union that followed under Chiang Kai-shek. In the Pacific, the Allies, led by the United States, pursued mopping up operations. By 1950, Japan was truly isolated. p. 94
The colonel in charge of the flight eventually locates a small undamaged village in the midst of all the devastation and the aircraft begins its bombing run.
Up until this point the story is quietly chilling, but from there on it becomes something else entirely—after releasing their bombs, they hear over the radio that Japan has surrendered but (spoiler) the aircraft is then attacked and damaged by a kamikaze aircraft. The bomber crash lands on the Japanese mainland, and armed villagers try to storm the aircraft and kill the survivors. Just as it looks as if they will be overrun, a rescue helicopter arrives.
The final revelation is that the narrator previously investigated an accident at Oak Ridge, where “the world’s largest munitions factory exploded” (an explanation for this worlds’ lack of nuclear weapons).
The first part of this is impressive, but the second half has too much going on, and some of it seems overly contrived. In particular, the Japanese surrender and having the aircraft brought down is both having your cake and eating it in terms of plot possibilities—it’s a pity the writer didn’t let the story develop organically.
Armaja Das by Joe Haldeman is set in a near future world where a computer/AI expert called John Zold is cursed by a gypsy woman. She does this because she objects to the cultural assimilation schemes that Zold (of Romany stock himself before he was orphaned) funds—“stealing their children,” as the old woman sees it. The curse soon produces results:
Dr. Maas called it impetigo; gave him a special kind of soap and some antibiotic ointment. He told John to make another appointment in two weeks, ten days. If there was no improvement they would take stronger measures. He seemed young for a doctor, and John couldn’t bring himself to say anything about the curse. But he already had a doctor for that end of it, he rationalized.
Three days later he was back in Dr. Maas’s office. There was scarcely a square inch of his body where some sort of lesion hadn’t appeared. He had a temperature of 101.4 degrees. The doctor gave him systemic antibiotics and told him to take a couple of days’ bed rest. John told him about the curse, finally, and the doctor gave him a booklet about psychosomatic illness. It told John nothing he didn’t already know.
By the next morning, in spite of strong antipyretics, his fever had risen to over 102. p. 110-111
After conventional treatment fails, Zold turns to a white witch—who is quickly warned off by the old woman before she can treat him. As his health continues to worsen, he asks the AI/computer at his workplace for help. The computer does some research and tells Zold what to do (he buys a black finch, and reads an incantation before killing it). He is cured, but subsequently discovers (spoiler) the computer cannot be contacted. When Zold finally manages to speak to the AI, it says it wants to die—Zold realises that the curse has been transferred.
The remainder of the story sees matters spiral even more badly out of control.
A slickly written and highly entertaining piece, if not a great one.
If the Haldeman story is straightforward and direct in its exposition, Mary Margaret Road-Grader by Howard Waldrop is perhaps more oblique, at least to begin with: narrator Billy-Bob Chevrolet’s account hints that this tale takes place in an (unspecified) post-apocalyptic word where Native American tribes now trade in cars:
We pulled in with our wrecker and string of fine cars, many of them newly stolen. You should have seen Freddy and me that morning, the first morning of the Sun Dance. We were dressed in new-stolen fatigues and we had bright leather holsters and pistols. Freddy had a new carbine, too. We were wearing our silver and feathers and hard goods. I noticed many women watching us as we drove in. There seemed to be many more here than at the last Sun Ceremony. It looked to be a good time.
The usual crowd gathered before we could circle up our remuda. I saw Bob One-Eye and Nathan Big Gimp, the mechanics, come across from their circles. Already the cook fires were burning and women were skinning out the cattle that had been slaughtered early in the morning.
“Hoa!” I heard Nathan call as he limped to our wrecker. He was old; his left leg had been shattered in the Highway wars, he went back that far. He put his hands on his hips and looked over our line.
“I know that car, Billy-Bob Chevrolet,” he said to me, pointing to an old Mercury. “Those son-a-bitch Dallas people stole it from me last year. I know its plates. It is good you stole it back. Maybe I will talk to you about doing car work to get it back sometime.”
“We’ll have to drink about it,” I said. p. 119
Most of the story takes place at the annual Sun Dance, a tribal gathering where they trade, party, and generally celebrate. The main event is The Big Tractor Pull, a tug of war between those that have the appropriate machines. This competition is disrupted, however, by the arrival of Mary Margaret Road-Grader:
The truck stopped with a roar and a squeal of brakes. It had a long lumpy canvas cover on the back. Then a woman climbed down from the cab. She was the most gorgeous woman I’d ever seen—and I’d seen Nellie Firestone two summers ago.
Nellie hadn’t come close to this girl. She had long straight black hair and a beautiful face. She was built like nothing I’d seen before. She wore tight coveralls and had a .357 Magnum strapped to her hip.
“Who runs the Pulls?” she asked, in English, of the first man who reached her.
He didn’t know what to do. Women never talk like that.
“Winston Mack Truck,” said Freddy at my side, pointing.
“What do you mean?” asked one of the young men. “Why do you want to know?”
“Because I’m going to enter the Pull,” she said.
Tribal language mumbles went around the circle. Very negative ones. p. 124-125
After some acrimonious debate at a Tribal Council (women have never entered the tractor pull before), they reluctantly allow her to take part.
The rest of the story details the contest and (spoiler) the violent, society-changing event that occurs. Thereafter, future Sun Dances and pulls are abandoned and a there is an eventual changeover from trading cars to trading horses. These latter changes are ironically lamented by the narrator, and the story ends on a perhaps overly bitter note (for the story, if not our own reality):
We have each other, we have the village, we have cattle, we have this hill over the river where we smoke and get drunk.
But the rest of the world has changed.
All this, all the old ways . . . gone.
The world has turned bitter and sour in my mouth. It is no good, the taste of ashes is in the wind. The old times are gone. p. 134
The Samurai and the Willows by Michael Bishop is one of the writer’s “Urban Nucleus” series, which takes place on a future Earth where mankind has largely retreated into huge domed cities, in this case Atlanta. The two main characters are Simon Fowler and Georgia Cawthorn (their nicknames for each other are Banji and Queequeg). Simon is of Japanese heritage, in his late thirties, and runs a bonsai shop; Georgia is a young black woman who works as a glissador, a roller-blading courier. They are reluctant roommates:
How they had come to be cubicle mates was this: Simon Fowler was [. . .] a man on the way down, a nisei whose only skills were miniature landscaping and horticulture. Georgia Cawthorn was [. . .], as she saw it, certainly only a temporary resident of the Big Bad Basement, the donjon keep of the Urban Nucleus. Fowler, it seemed, was trying to bury himself, to put eight levels of concrete (as well as the honeycombing of the dome) between himself and the sky. She, on the other hand, was abandoning the beloved bosom of parents and brothers, who lived in one of those pre-Evacuation “urban renewal” slums still crumbling into brick dust surfaceside. And thus it was that both Simon Fowler and Georgia Cawthorn had applied for living quarters under, he perversely specifying Level 9 (having already worked down from the towers and four understrata), she ingenuously asking for whatever she could get. A two-person cubicle fell vacant on Level 9. The computer-printed names of Georgia Cawthorn and Simon Fowler headed the UrNu Housing Authority’s relocation list, and the need for a decision showered down on them like an unannounced rain (the sort so favored by the city’s spontaneity-mad internal meteorologists). Georgia didn’t hesitate; she said yes at once. Simon Fowler wanted an umbrella, a way out of the deluge; but since the only out available involved intolerable delay and a psychic house arrest on the concourses of 7, he too had said yes. They met each other on the day they moved in.
They had now lived together for four months. And most of the time they didn’t like each other very much, although Queequeg [Georgia] had tried.
Over the course of the story we find out that Simon still grieves for his dead mother (his feelings of guilt and betrayal are gone into in more detail later), and is slowly shutting himself off from the world; Georgia is outgoing and friendly, even towards Simon—although he mostly rebuffs her, even when she takes an interest in his bonsai and visits the shop:
“You again,” he said. “What do you want?”
“You sweet, Basenji. You damn sweet.”
“What do you want?” He didn’t call her Queequeg. That wasn’t a good sign; no sir. Not a good sign at all.
She thought a minute, hand on hip, her green wraparound clinging to the curve of her stance. She was a head taller than he.
“I wanna see that little bush you had out here last time.”
“You saw it last time, you know. I’m busy.”
“You busy. You also ain’ no easy man to do bidness with, Basenji. I thinkin’ ’bout buyin’ that bush. What you think of that?”
“That you probably won’t be able to afford it.”
“I a saver, Basenji. Since I come on bidness, you boun’ to show me what I come to see. You has to.”
“That willow’s worth—”
“Uh-uh,” she said. “No, sir. I gonna see it before you sen’ me packin’ with yo’ prices.”
What could he do? A black Amazon with grits in her mouth and something a little more substantial than that beneath her scalp cap of neo-nostalgic cornrows; elegant, artificial braidwork recalling an Africa that probably no longer existed. (The same went for his mother’s homeland, the very same.) Poor Basenji. These were the very words he thought as he stoically motioned Queequeg around the counter: Poor Basenji. He had even begun to call himself by the name she had given him. p. 139-140
Despite this friction they grow closer and closer together (even though Georgia has a boyfriend), and they eventually wind around each other like the bonsai that Simon grows. One of the final scenes (spoiler) has them sleep together shortly before she gets married to the boyfriend; after their coupling we learn much more about Simon’s mother, and it seems like Simon may finally have extirpated his grief and will stop his descent. However, he later commits suicide, and we realise that all Georgia did was shrive, not save, him.
The ending of this surprised me when I first read it decades ago (and not in a good way), but reading it now—perhaps without the optimism of youth—it seems an entirely obvious ending.
So, a desperately sad story, but a lovely one too, and you can see why Dozois says in his introduction that is “is one of the best SF stories I have read in years.”
The Introduction—Summation: 1976 by Gardner Dozois is a much shorter version of the longer pieces he would do in his second series of ‘Best of the Year’ anthologies, but is still a hugely interesting review of the year. It begins with a short disclaimer that his tastes aren’t the same as Lester del Rey, the editor of the first five volumes of this series, and he makes no claim to present anything other than the stories he most liked (and adds that the volume would be better titled Gardner Dozois Picks the Stories He Liked Best This Year).6, 7 He goes on to survey the various magazines and anthologies published, looks at the the films that were released, comments on various publishing deals, and adds an obituary or two as well. This essay is not only informative but, in places, is hilariously blunt, and I could have quoted pages of it:
Hollywood continues to produce big-budget SF films, most of which are very poor. One of the biggest celluloid turkeys of the year was The Man Who Fell to Earth, an asinine, pretentious, boring, and fundamentally incoherent film. Logan’s Run managed to be less actively offensive, without attaining to any real merit. It’s an earnest, silly, and hackneyed movie with lots of extras in the background, and it conforms to the seemingly universal Hollywood assumption that the future is going to look just like a shopping center in Dallas. p. xiv
.
[As most current] magazines struggled to stay alive (If and Vertex both folded within the past couple of years), three or four new SF magazines were in the planning stage.
First out, and first to fail, was Odyssey, edited by Roger Elwood, which lasted for two quarterly issues consisting mainly of second or third-rate work by first-rate authors. It was also an ugly, shoddy-looking magazine, printed on cheap paper and jampacked with offensive pulp ads of the “Men, Throw Away That Truss!” variety. Poor distribution and limited newsstand display were other nails in Odyssey’s coffin.
Another new magazine, and another bitter disappointment, was Galileo, a subscription-only quarterly edited by Charles C. Ryan. Galileo was somewhat more handsome than Odyssey, but if anything the quality of its fiction was even lower. The magazine will have to improve enormously with subsequent issues if it is to have any chance of establishing itself.
Of all the year’s new magazines, the only other one that need be taken seriously, and the only one to achieve any real measure of success, was Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, edited by George H. Scithers. The first quarterly issue appeared late in the year.
You may, if you like, dismiss my opinion in this case as prejudiced; I am associate editor of ASF. And, of course, I’m not even going to try to pretend that the first issue of IASF was flawless: the magazine is gray and dingy, and, like all issues of all magazines, it contains some mediocre fiction. Nevertheless, it also contains a high percentage of first-rate stories and is at least as good as most good issues of Analog or F&SF. IASF deserves to survive, and I have hopes that it may, if the luck is with it. p. xviii
.
Sleeper of the year in the nonseries original anthology category was Lone Star Universe (Heidelberg Publishers, Inc.), an anthology of SF stories by Texans. Lone Star Universe, unfortunately, besides being the most expensive anthology of the year, is also likely to be a difficult book to find. There’s some very good material here by Saunders, Utley, Tuttle, Sterling, Waldrop, and a few others, but there’s some appalling crud here as well, making for an amazingly uneven book.
On the other hand, in Faster Than Light (Harper & Row) edited by Jack Dann and George Zebrowski almost every story is of exactly the same quality: good, solid, competent stuff that would be snapped up instantly and gratefully by any SF magazine to be used as second-string backup material behind the lead novelette.
With one possible exception (Harlan Ellison’s original script for The Starlost, a superior example of its kind), nothing in Faster Than Light is really outstanding, and the book is doomed to the gray fate of sitting squarely in the middle of the scale. p. xix
I strongly recommend the whole essay if you need of a memory jogger for 1976.
At the back of the book is Honorable Mentions—1976, which is a three page list of around eighty recommended stories (there are six by John Varley alone, not counting his story here, which should give you an idea of his prominence in the field at the time; James Tiptree Jr./Racoona Sheldon is the runner-up with five citations; Jack Dann (one collaboration with George Zebrowski), Felix Gotschalk, and Gene Wolfe have three.
This is a more than worthwhile anthology, especially for those interested in stories that have a more character-driven and literary bent than normal. Highly recommended. ●
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1. According to ISFDB, there appears to be only one review of this volume, and that was by Charles N. Brown (of Locus fame), who reviewed it along with the Carr and Wollheim volumes in the January-February 1978 edition of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine:
There are now three “best of the year” volumes published (down from four last year). The Best Science Fiction of the Year #6 edited by Terry Carr is the longest and best with four stories I consider excellent: “I See You” by Damon Knight, “The Phantom of Kansas” by John Varley, “Seeing” by Harlan Ellison, and “The Bicentennial Man” by Isaac Asimov. There are seven others, including four I’d rate as “B” and only three I didn’t care for. The 1977 Annual World’s Best SF edited by Donald Wollheim is nearly as good with six of the ten stories rates “B” or better. The Asimov and Knight stories also appear here as do two other “A” stories, “Appearance of Life” by Brian W. Aldiss and “The Hertford Manuscript” by Richard Cowper. Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Sixth Annual Collection has a new editor, Gardner Dozois, replacing Lester del Rey. I’d rate only two of the eight stories as excellent, “The Samurai and the Willows” by Michael Bishop and “The Diary of the Rose” by Ursula K. Le Guin. There is also a good summary of the year. (There’s also one in the Carr volume, but I’m prejudiced since I wrote it.) On the whole, all three volumes are worth having although you should probably wait for the paperback on the Dozois book. p. 128
2. The stories in this anthology were first published in Future Power (Le Guin), Universe 6 (Utley/Waldrop), Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (Varley), Orbit 18, (Wilhelm, Waldrop), Lone Star Universe (Sanders), Frights (Haldeman), and F&SF (Bishop).
There is nothing from Analog, Galaxy, Amazing, or Fantastic.
3. I assume that Lester del Rey handed over the editorship as he and Judy Lynn del Rey were in the process of launching Del Rey Books at the time.
4. The ISFDB page with the “South America” quote for The Diary of the Rose.
5. Air Raid appeared in the Spring 1977 issue of IASFM, so it is not really a 1976 story.
6. In his introduction Dozois says:
I selected the novella I felt was the year’s best, Michael Bishop’s The Samurai and the Willows, but if I had included all of the other deserving novellas that I would have liked to include—Gene Wolfe’s brilliant The Eyeflash Miracles, James Tiptree, Jr.,’s Houston, Houston, Do You Read?, Gregory Benford’s and Gordon Eklund’s The Anvil of Jove, Vonda N. Mclntyre’s Screwtop, Richard Cowper’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn—I would have ended up with a book twice as long as the present volume and no room for novelettes or short stories at all. p. xii
He should have asked Dutton if he could edit a Best SF Short Novels of the Year as well.
7. If you want a better idea of how this book measures up against what I might pick for a 1976 ‘Year’s Best’, or learn what other anthologists chose, look at the table below (this is the same one which will appear at the end of the reviews of the Carr and Wollheim volumes). This will be updated as and when I find stories I like, or citation sources that should be included (for more on the latter see below).
The first to fourth column give the story titles, authors, lengths and place of publication (see below the table for abbreviation legend).
The ‘T’ column lists Terry Carr’s choices with an ‘x’.
The ‘D’ column lists Gardner R. Dozois’ choices with an ‘x’.
The ‘W’ column lists Donald A. Wollheim’s choices with an ‘x’.
The ‘S’ column shows my current choices an ‘x’ (historical choices are an ‘o’). A dash means read but passed over (I only select stories better than ∗∗∗+ and above, and not all of them). Blank means unread.
The ‘C’ column shows how many of the anthologies and/or polls used in the Classics of Science Fiction list included the story in their collections or lists (note that COSF is SF only and skews against fantasy), minus the anthology or award citations which have their own column (Carr, Dozois, Wollheim, Hugo, Nebula, etc.).
The ‘O’ column shows the number of inclusions in other major anthologies or recommendation lists which are not on the CoSF (Classics of SF) list. These are selected by me (usually to include fantasy retrospectives or awards that CoSF doesn’t include) but I may not yet have done this for some/all of the stories.
The ‘H’ column shows the story’s 1977 Hugo award placing (F for finalist, W for winner).
The ‘N’ column shows the story’s 1977 Nebula award placing (F for finalist, W for winner).
The ‘U’ column shows the 1977 Locus Poll’s top ten short stories, novelettes, and novellas.
The ‘TO’ column shows the total points that each story gets (they get a point for being in each column and for each of the CoSF and other anthology citations).
The titles, names, lengths, publications, and overall score columns are sortable.
A good way to sample 1976’s best short fiction may be to start at the top of the table and work down until you get to the last of the 2-point stories. Bear in mind that this is all statistically invalid, wildly so, but will give you something to aim at. Enjoy.
Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories 1976
(1) Air Raid is a 1977 story so no overall rating (it will be included in the 1977 table).
(2) In the Bowl is a 1975 story so no overall rating (it will be included in the 1975 table).
na=novella, nv=novelet, ss=short story
AMZ, Amazing Stories; ANA, Analog; ANB, Analog Annual; AND, Andromeda #1; ASI, Asimov’s SF; AUR, Aurora: Beyond Equality, DYS, Dystopian Visions; FLA, Flashing swords #3; FRI, Frights; FSF, Fantasy and Science Fiction; FTL, Faster Than Light; FUT, Future Power; GAL, Galaxy; LON, Lone Star Universe; NED, New Dimensions #6; NEW, New Worlds #10; ORB, Orbit #18; ROW, The Best from the Rest of the World; SFM, Science Fiction Monthly; STE, Stellar #2; STN, Stellar Short Novels; TCS, The Crystal Ship; TSV, The Seventh Voyage; UNI, Universe #6. ●
