ISFDB link

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

_____________________

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

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

Non-fiction:
Introduction • by Donald A. Wollheim

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Wollheim goes on to add:

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

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

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

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

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

_____________________

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. If you want a better idea of how this book measures up against what I might pick for a 1976 ‘Year’s Best’, or learn what other anthologists chose, look at the table below (this is the same one which will appear at the end of the reviews of the Carr and Wollheim volumes). This will be updated as and when I find stories I like, or citation sources that should be included (for more on the latter see below).

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

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

A good way to sample 1976’s best short fiction may be to start at the top of the table and work down until you get to the last of the 2-point stories. Bear in mind that this is all statistically invalid, wildly so, but will give you something to aim at. Enjoy.

Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories 1976

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

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

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