ISFDB

Other reviews:¹
Paul Walker, Galaxy Bookshelf (Galaxy, November-December 1978)
Stephen W. Potts, Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Review (July 1979)
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Gordon R. Dickson

Fiction:²
A Crowd of Shadows • short story by Charles L. Grant ∗∗
Breath’s a Ware That Will Not Keep • short story by Thomas F. Monteleone ∗∗∗
Tricentennial • short story by Joe Haldeman ∗∗∗
In the Bowl • novelette by John Varley ∗∗∗+
The Bicentennial Man • novelette by Isaac Asimov ∗∗∗∗∗
Houston, Houston, Do You Read? • novella by James Tiptree, Jr. ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Introduction • by Gordon R. Dickson
Science Fiction in the Marketplace • essay by Algis Budrys
The Academic Viewpoint • essay by James E. Gunn
Nebula Awards, 1975, 1976: Win, Place, and Show

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Although it isn’t a ‘Best of the Year’ volume for 1976, this collection of Nebula Award winners (chosen by the Science Fiction Writers of America) seems to be a natural fit for that group, hence this review. I have discussed the Asimov and Tiptree stories previously, but have pasted them in at the end for the convenience of those who haven’t seen them.

The first of the stories is the winner of the Nebula Award for best short story, A Crowd of Shadows by Charles L. Grant,³ which begins with the narrator going to a holiday resort called Starburst. While he is on the beach he sees a couple with an android boy (only obvious from the digits tattooed on the inside of his arm). Later, while having dinner in the hotel, he again sees the threesome, and notes the anti-android sentiment expressed by some of the other diners.
The next morning a detective arrives at the narrator’s door to investigate the murder of one of those diners overnight and, later that day, the narrator sees the detective again outside the hotel. He then watches as the detective tries to deal with anti-android hostility from the guests, many of whom think the boy did it because of the way he was treated the previous night. Then there is another murder . . . .
The story closes with (spoiler) the narrator waking that night to see a disturbance, a “crowd of shadows”, on the beach. When he goes down to investigate, he finds the boy is dead—and that he is not android but human (the parents later turn to be the androids).
This story unfolds smoothly enough (and generally reads like something you might find in a literary quarterly) but the motivation for the boy’s actions isn’t convincing, and the murders aren’t explained. The narrator’s final admission about his own potential prejudice also rings false.
This doesn’t seem like an obvious Nebula Winner to me, and I’m not even sure it works as a story.⁴

Breath’s a Ware That Will Not Keep by Thomas F. Monteleone is one of his ‘Chicago’ series, set in a dystopian future where people are eugenically produced by “Breeders”, host-mothers spoken to telepathically by their “Monitors”:

Technically speaking, Feraxa was human. Visually, however, she was an amorphous, slithering, amoeba-like thing. She was tons of genetically cultured flesh, a human body inflated and stretched and distended until it was many times its normal size. Lost beneath her abundant flesh was a vestigial skeleton which floated disconnected and unmoving in a gelatinous sea. Her bioneered organs were swollen to immense proportions and hundreds of liters of blood pumped through her extensive circulatory system.
Yet he knew, even as he activated the probes that plunged into her soft flesh, that she was still a woman to him. A very special kind of woman. From her earliest moments of consciousness, she had spent her life contained within the glassteel walls of the Breeder Tank. It was an immense cube, ten meters on each side, the back all covered with connecting cables and tubes which carried her life-support systems, monitoring devices, and biomedical elements that were necessary for her continued maintenance.  p. 21

Benjamin is Feraxa’s Monitor and, after some initial scene setting which limns their relationship, he notices that something is wrong with one of her routine biochemical tests. After discussing it with his boss it becomes apparent that there has been a malfunction, and that Feraxa, if left to go to term, will birth a batch of “randoms” rather than the administrators she was supposed to produce. The decision is made to terminate them.
When the surgical team arrives later (spoiler), we see that Feraxa’s psi powers are much more advanced than anyone realises, and she kills several of the medical technicians by inducing cerebral haemorrhages. Nevertheless, she is eventually overcome and killed.
Benjamin goes home and attempts to have biological sex with his partner, rather than the computer-assisted sex that is normal for citizens of this society; as he climaxes he thinks of Feraxa.
This is a competent piece of SF horror, but its 1970’s-style future dystopia feels dated, and it has the feel of a taboo-busting version of earlier 1950’s stories.

Tricentennial by Joe Haldeman starts just before America’s Tricentennial (2076), with a scientist from an L-5 colony trying to get political help to fund a project to send a radio signal to a newly detected alien civilisation. The scientist gets nowhere, and over the next few years the L-5 colonists build a starship to go to a nearby twin sun to harvest antimatter. They then plan to detour to 61 Cygnus (the source of the signals) on the way back. The ship departs during the Tricentennial celebrations on Earth.
The mission initially goes to plan but on the second leg (spoiler) an accident happens on the spaceship, and it continues accelerating to 99% of the speed of light. The effects of relativity cause an ever increasing time difference between the ship and Earth.
When the ship’s crew eventually manage to fix the problem and, after 1500 light years of travel, they settle on a nearby planet. At this point the ship time is 2093, whereas it is 5000 on Earth. This provides a suitably elegiac ending:

The season they began landing colonists, the dominant feature in the planet’s night sky was a beautiful blooming cloud of gas that astronomers had named the North American Nebula.
Which was an irony that didn’t occur to any of these colonists from L-5—give or take a few years, it was America’s Trimillennial.
America itself was a little the worse for wear, this three thousandth anniversary. The seas that lapped its shores were heavy with a crimson crust of anaerobic life; the mighty cities had fallen and their remains, nearly ground away by the never-ceasing sandstorms. No fireworks were planned, for lack of an audience, for lack of planners; bacteria just don’t care. May Day too would be ignored.
The only humans in the Solar System lived in a glass and metal tube. They tended their automatic machinery, and turned their backs on the dead Earth, and worshiped the constellation Cygnus, and had forgotten why.  p. 60

This is a competently done story with some good culture-drift/anti-science/dumbed-down-culture background, but I don’t think it is an obvious Nebula finalist (or a Hugo Award winner!)

In the Bowl by John Varley is one of his ‘Eight Worlds’ stories, this time set on Venus, where the narrator Kiku has gone to prospect for “blast jewels”. He gets off to an uncertain start:

Never buy anything at a secondhand organbank. And while I’m handing out good advice, don’t outfit yourself for a trip to Venus until you get to Venus.
I wish I had waited. But while shopping around at Coprates a few weeks before my vacation, I happened on this little shop and was talked into an infraeye at a very good price. What I should have asked myself was what was an infraeye doing on Mars in the first place?
Think about it. No one wears them on Mars. If you want to see at night, it’s much cheaper to buy a snooperscope. That way you can take the damn thing off when the sun comes up. So this eye must have come back with a tourist from Venus. And there’s no telling how long it sat there in the vat until this sweet-talking old guy gave me his line about how it belonged to a nice little old schoolteacher who never . . . ah, well. You’ve probably heard it before.  p. 62

There follows some travelogue that describes his trip into the deserted wastes of Venus, and Kiku eventually reaches the last human settlement; it is there that his eye finally stops working. His attempts to get it repaired lead him to the story’s second main character, Ember, a precocious eleven-year-old who he finds at a water fountain in the middle of the settlement—with her pet otter. Kiku feels optimistic about Ember’s medical abilities as she has a peacock fan of feathers on her head, and transplanted long blonde hair on her forearms and lower legs.
Ember fixes his eye, and then tells him she wants to go with him to look for blast jewels. Kiku fobs her off until he realises that she is the only one in town who will hire him a sky-cycle. Eventually he, Ember, and the otter set off.
The rest of the story details their journey towards the blast jewel site, during which their relationship develops (Ember agreed to guide Kiku for free as she wants him to adopt her and take her to the more civilised Mars; he doesn’t entirely agree to do this, and rather leads her on). We also learn more about blast jewels, and how the formative process is so unstable that all you have to do to find them is to stamp on the ground and listen for explosions.
The climax of the story occurs when (spoiler), Kiku tells Ember that he won’t take her to Mars; she then sexually propositions him (she is supposedly eleven, and he is seventy), but he refuses and leaves their shelter to sleep outside. When he wakes up later she (and her pet otter!) are lying beside him . . . and next to them both is a nascent blast jewel:

It was three meters away, growing from the cleft of two rocks. It was globular, half a meter across, and glowing a dull-reddish color. It looked like a soft gelatin.
It was a blast jewel, before the blast.
I was afraid to talk, then remembered that talking would not affect the atmosphere around me and could not set off the explosion. I had a radio transmitter in my throat and a receiver in my ear. That’s how you talk on Venus; you subvocalize and people can hear you.
Moving very carefully, I reached over and gently touched Ember on the shoulder.  p. 91

They initially try to figure out how to get far enough away from the explosion so that their force suits will be able to protect them (the suits are impermeable but don’t entirely stop the effects of noise and acceleration—why the suits can mitigate the pressure and heat of Venus’s atmosphere but not the pressure of sound waves isn’t explained). Then Kiku looks more closely at the proto-blast jewel, and the reader gets to visit the sense-of-wonder mother lode (last seen age 12):

The damn thing was moving.
I blinked, afraid to rub my eyes, and looked again. No, it wasn’t. Not on the outside anyway. It was more like the movement you can see inside a living cell beneath a microscope. Internal flows, exchanges of fluids from here to there. I watched it and was hypnotized.
There were worlds in the jewel. There was ancient Barsoom of my childhood fairy tales; there was Middle Earth with brooding castles and sentient forests. The jewel was a window into something unimaginable, a place where there were no questions and no emotions but a vast awareness. It was dark and wet without menace. It was growing, and yet complete as it came into being. It was bigger than this ball of hot mud called Venus and had its roots down in the core of the planet. There was no corner of the universe that it did not reach.
It was aware of me. I felt it touch me and felt no surprise. It examined me in passing but was totally uninterested. I posed no questions for it, whatever it was. It already knew me and had always known me.
I felt an overpowering attraction. The thing was exerting no influence on me; the attraction was a yearning within me. I was reaching for a completion that the jewel possessed and I knew I could never have. Life would always be a series of mysteries for me. For the jewel, there was nothing but awareness. Awareness of everything.  p. 92

What happens afterwards is predictable in hindsight.
This is an engrossing story with well-done world-building, lots of engaging character interaction, and a good sense of wonder scene to finish. However, there are a couple of things that spoiled this for me this time around. First, there is Ember’s age: not only is she a minor in our society, but she is one in the story too (the age of majority is twelve on Venus, and fourteen on Mars), so the idea of her propositioning a much older man makes for uncomfortable reading (even if the advanced biotech makes age—and birth sex—more mutable in this strange future world). And even if you don’t experience a cultural relativism fail as I did, having Ember as an eleven year old just doesn’t convince (I realise there is a history of peppy young female characters in some SF—but eleven?)
The second problem the story has is that at the end of it they both, having discovered the jewels’ sentience, plan to go back to civilization and say nothing—they have no objective evidence, and it would prove impossible for humans to get close enough to the jewels to observe them without causing an explosion. They then (fatalistically and unconvincingly) accept that the jewels won’t be able to exist near human cities, and that mankind’s expansion will eventually doom them.
Some of you will no doubt be able to overlook both these caveats—your prize will be a contemporary retelling of a Golden Age sense-of-wonder type story that is very well done. Those of you who develop the same reservations as me will still find it an entertaining and worthwhile read.

The reviews of the next two stories are reprints from previous posts here—skip down to the conclusion for the rest of this maunder if you have read them before.

The Bicentennial Man by Isaac Asimov is the Nebula (and Hugo) Award winner for best novelette, and it 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 the American slaves, but the rest of it goes somewhere else entirely when it proceeds to detail 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 as such; 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, and builds a great story arc (which stretches over generations). It also has a great last line which is both a call-back to the first part of the story and a revelation that Andrew’s humanity goes beyond prosthetics or laws.

Houston, Houston, Do You Read? by James Tiptree, Jr. is the Nebula Award winner for best novella, and it 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 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. 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 ghastly as the men supposedly do—will be lost on this latter group and, if it isn’t, I’m guessing this will be written off with the usual “the ends justify the means” zeal. After all, 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 malign (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

There are four pieces of non-fiction in this volume. Leading off is the Introduction by Gordon R. Dickson, where he discusses the remarkable quality of current SF, and suggests this is due to the wide freedom that writers have within the genre with regard to “idea, pattern, attitude or style”.
He finishes by saying that attempts at categorisation will not prevent this:

Consequently, science fiction, as a self-defining genre, has had to resist the impulses of some of its best friends to put it into different bags at different times in its history, right down to the present one—bags which in every case would have excluded work that properly belonged within its canon. The efforts continue; not merely on the part of some publishers and booksellers, but on the part of some scholars, academics, critics, and others without and within the field itself. Human nature being what it is, they can be expected to so continue into the future.  p. xii

I presume that the individual story and essay introductions also come from Dickson: I’ve included these for contemporary colour, and because they are sometimes of interest for other reasons (the Tiptree one obliquely refers to that writer’s real identity).⁷

There are also two essays in the middle of the book. The first of these is Science Fiction in the Marketplace by Algis Budrys⁸ (oddly by-lined as by Algirdas Jonas Budrys), which is, unusually for Budrys, quite a hard read. It took me about two and a half attempts to work out what he was saying (or part of it anyway).
Budrys begins by talking about the kinds of current SF which are worth buying (for readers) and selling (for publishers), before going back to look at when SF first became a commercial proposition under Gernsback and Campbell. After this he swerves into Campbellian SF (“Modern Science Fiction”), and how this had a monopoly in the field until Kingsley Amis arrived:

Kingsley Amis came to this country in the mid-fifties to present a series of lectures at Princeton. These were later collected as New Maps of Hell, the first nonCampbellian (and hence “nonKnightly”) body of SF criticism which had to be generally respected. It represented a view so shockingly disruptive of “modern science fiction” standards that many members of the SF community were unable to assimilate it.
For years, most reaction to Amis was less reasonable than it was outraged. In some quarters, it was puzzled; here was a consistent view of SF measured as social satire, embodying Amis’s “comic inferno” term, lent weight by ivied halls, and implying an artistic accomplishment at some hands—notably Frederik Pohl’s—where Campbellians had simply read competence underlying a kind of frivolity. (The Space Merchants,⁹ for instance, was a notably successful commercial property of its time, but most SF community members saw it as technically flawed and certainly not a serious social extrapolation.)  p. 107

Budrys then discusses Amis’s successors—the Milford and Clarion writing workshops, the New Wave, etc.—and how, after these various efforts to develop literary standards, “we have come to the present pass”. He then mentions (the information is gleaned from several editor interviews) that storytelling sells better than academic work (“gloom and doom”, “artiness”, “messages”), and discusses both types of fiction before concluding with this:

What does that maximum audience want? What is the essential ingredient that it finds attractive, and will search for? What makes it ignore the work of the conscious and acclaimed intellectualizer, in favor of writers who may appreciate academe and be appreciated by it, but who make no obvious bow to it in their writing?
If the endurance of Star Trek as a phenomenon is any indicator, the key ingredients occur most thickly in “modern science fiction.” The basic premise of the voyages of the starship Enterprise is solidly Campbellian, and most of the individual episodes of that TV series would, with a little fleshing-up, fit very nicely in a 1940 [Astounding Science Fiction]. There is something to be learned, however, from the fact that the “science” in Star Trek is pure set-decoration, and there is room to wonder just how essential “science”—i.e., consumer technology—is to “science fiction.” It’s also interesting to note that Star Trek has always been perceived as somehow different from the standard pulp-like TV adventure series—and more satisfying to those who like it at all.
This observation to my mind opens a door into an enormous room which ought to fill up with critics and scholars. Star Trek has undoubtedly created a major percentage of the SF reading audience today. There is no question but that “modern science fiction” is limited not only intellectually but artistically. It cannot illuminate as much of life as there obviously is. Yet Campbellianism may be stronger than ever today. Still, it cannot be true that the evolution of SF can go no further without leaving its audience behind, or else the readers are not in fact interested in going where no man has gone before on the ultimate frontier. That limitless frontier is the capacity of Man to be interested in himself.
I find it difficult to accept the proposition that SF is a somehow special form of literature, with its own rules, if those rules are assumed to be restrictive. I am much more ready to assert that there is evidence SF contains more of whatever essential it is that causes people to read fiction of any kind, and bit by bit over the years to come we are going to find it, by playing off “academe” and “commerce” against the private thing that happens within the mind of the artist, and which then communicates to the audience.  p. 111-112

There is a lot to unpack in this essay, and I may have to have yet another read of it. (I note in passing that there are some matters discussed here that overlap with Norman Spinrad’s recent review column in Asimov’s Science Fiction.¹⁰)

The Academic Viewpoint by James E. Gunn is an interesting essay about teaching sf. Gunn lays down a set of criteria and then discusses each of them:

1. CONSISTENCY OF STORY
2. STORY PREMISES
3. APPLICATION OF THE PREMISES
4. CREDIBILITY OF THE CHARACTERS
5. CONSISTENCY OF THEME
6. IMAGERY
7. STYLE
8. TOTAL ARTFULNESS
9. CHALLENGE TO THE IMAGINATION
10. OVERALL IMPRESSION  p. 120

I suspect Gunn’s classes were worthwhile educational experiences.
At the end of the book we have Nebula Awards, 1975, 1976: Win, Place, and Show, which gives the finalists and winners for this year and the one before:

I suppose I should leave my comments about the finalists for my 1976 overview, but I’d note in passing that it seems a weak year for short stories (Knight’s I See You presumably doesn’t appear as it is outside the qualification period, and Aldiss’s Appearance of Life—which appeared in a UK original anthology, Andromeda #1—presumably wasn’t seen by enough voters).

In conclusion: a book of two halves, with the latter half/two thirds stronger.  ●

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1. Paul Williams provides a long review of this anthology in his Galaxy Bookshelf (Galaxy, November-December, 1978)—it is almost three pages long—and it is worth a read. He says that “it is the most tolerable [. . .] of the Nebula Award volumes I have read”, and “has two excellent stories” by John Varley and Isaac Asimov, and “two equally good essays” by Algis Budrys and James Gunn. He goes on to say the Varley is “not his best, but pretty good” and that “the Asimov, however, is breathtaking”.
He comments further about the Asimov:

The story is really a series of short-shorts, nicely woven together. What makes them fascinating is the careful evolution of Andrew’s thinking from machine to man. Asimov has not simply taken a human character and called him a robot, but made Andrew wonderfully different and only gradually human. Part of his success depends on the constant contrast between him and his human family. They are not complex people, but warm and alive. As intricate as the philosophical and legal aspects of the story become, Asimov never loses the story’s humanity. Nor is anything assumed. If this were to be the first robot story you had read, you would not be confused by any of the terminology. p. 137

He is not as impressed by Grant’s story:

Less than first-rate is [the] award-winning, “A Crowd of Shadows.” To me, this is a typical “award-winner,” the kind of story people like Damon Knight and Harlan Ellison point to as evidence of science fiction’s maturation, the kind that is supposed to be comparable to anything in the mainstream.
[. . .]
The murders [. . .] have nothing to do with androids, or with the time and place of the story. They are acts of protest against an unfeeling world. The world itself is hardly described. It could as well as be Miami Beach. In short, change “android” to black, and the time of the story to twenty years ago, and you have the same story.
As in most “award-winners,” neither the theme nor the characters are in any way remarkable. By contrast with the Asimov story, one might say that Grant’s narrative technique is more sophisticated (i.e., more literary), but while both are working with familiar materials, Asimov’s style makes them seem fresh and alive, while Grant’s does not.  p. 137-138

He goes on to say the same is true, to a lesser extent, of the Haldeman and Monteleone stories, i.e., both “have familiar ideas given sophisticated literary treatment.” Walker finishes with the fiction by saying, “Finally, there is James Tiptree, Jr.’s Houston, Houston, Do You Read?—which I could not.”
He goes on to discuss the non-fiction essays at some length (although he seems to come to the mistaken conclusion that Budrys was “tsk-tsking” about “the predominance of story-oriented sf in the marketplace”). After some further discussion about why people read SF he concludes with this:

I can think of no better reason for a mature adult to read science fiction than because he or she enjoys it. Non-fiction is a much better source of ideas; the better mainstream literature is a considerably superior source of aesthetic pleasure. All the science fiction experience has to offer is itself. The experience of alien worlds and new technologies and far future adventures. For those who love it, it is enough.  p. 139

2. The stories are taken from F&SF (Grant, Varley), Dystopian Visions (Monteleone), Analog (Haldeman), Stellar #2 (Asimov), Aurora: Beyond Equality (Tiptree). There is nothing from Amazing, Fantastic, or Galaxy.

3. There was only one more ‘Starburst’ story from Grant, A Voice Not Heard in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, September 1984.

4. The Nebula Awards are as easily skewed by author popularity as the Hugos, if not more so (I don’t want to be unkind to the writer or his story, but Grant had been Executive Secretary of the SFWA for four years by this point). Remember, awards are decided by author popularity × story quality × story availability × zeitgeist.

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. The 1976 Nebula Award pages (p. 240 and p. 241) are a composite of three pages photoshopped into two for convenience.

8. I was always a bit “meh” about The Space Merchants myself, and couldn’t really see what the fuss was about.

9. Some of Budrys’ other essays are available in print at Lulu, and as ebooks at Amazon and Ansible Editions.

10. Norman Spinrad is not impressed with the current Nebula Award Winners volume, or the state of SF generally, judging by this review column in the current Asimov’s. It was taken down for a short period after complaints before reappearing with Shelia Williams’ (the editor of Asimov’s) disclaimer. (This latter seems rather spineless to me—I can see why you might want to say the author’s opinions are their own, but you don’t have to grovel.)
There is more about this hoo-hah on File770. Some of the comments are interesting (no, not really): apparently you don’t actually have to engage in reasoned argument nowadays, just describe your opponent as a “grumpy old white man”. I wonder if the people who post comments like this realise it says much more about them than those they are attacking.

11. 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 review of the Carr and Wollheim volumes). It will be updated as and when I find stories I like, or citation sources I feel should be included (for more on the latter see below).

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

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

A good way to sample 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 this is statistically invalid, but it will give you something to aim at. Enjoy.

Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories 1976

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

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

* The ‘O’ (Other) recommendations column currently includes a Rich Horton ‘Best Of’ list extracted from his comments in Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugo Awards, and a couple of anthology inclusions for the Norton ●