Summary: An assured solo ‘Best of Year’ anthology for 1971 from Terry Carr, whose choices seem to split pretty evenly between crowd-pleasers (Clarke’s excellent A Meeting With Medusa, Anderson’s A Queen of Air and Darkness, and the Niven), experimental and literary work (Le Guin’s Vaster Than Empires and More Slow, the Silverberg and Panshin), and humour and satire (work from Farmer, Spinrad, and Effinger, etc.). A reader-friendly combination.
[ISFDB] [Archive.org]

Other reviews:¹
Charlie Brown, Locus #129, December 15, 1972
Avram Davidson, F&SF, March 1973
Dave Hartwell, Locus #125, October 27 1972
P. Schuyler Miller, Analog, May 1973

_____________________

Editor, Terry Carr

Fiction:²
Occam’s Scalpel • novelette by Theodore Sturgeon ∗∗
The Queen of Air and Darkness • novella by Poul Anderson ∗∗∗∗
In Entropy’s Jaws • novelette by Robert Silverberg ∗∗
The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World • short story by Philip José Farmer ∗∗∗+
A Meeting with Medusa • novelette by Arthur C. Clarke ∗∗∗∗∗
The Frayed String on the Stretched Forefinger of Time • short story by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. ∗∗
How Can We Sink When We Can Fly? • novelette by Alexei Panshin ∗∗∗
No Direction Home • short story by Norman Spinrad ∗∗∗∗
Vaster Than Empires and More Slow • novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin ∗∗∗+
All the Last Wars at Once • short story by George Alec Effinger ∗∗
The Fourth Profession • novelette by Larry Niven ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Introduction • by Terry Carr

_____________________

The fiction in Terry Carr’s debut solo ‘Best of the Year’ volume (he co-edited a series with Donald A. Wollheim for the years 1964 to 1970 previously) leads off with Occam’s Scalpel by Theodore Sturgeon (If, July-August 1971), which in some respects reminds me of another story of his I’ve read recently, When You Care, When You Love (F&SF, September 1962)—but I’ll come back to this at the end.
This one opens with a man called Joe, an out of town inventor, receiving a discrete visit from his brother Karl. We learn that Karl is the private doctor of an exceptionally wealthy and elderly man whose designated successor is an over-achiever called Wheeler. Karl has concerns about what Wheeler will do with the company, and its vast wealth and influence, when he takes control. There is then a long data dump giving Wheeler’s life story, which ends with the brothers deciding what they should do.
After the set-up the story plays out in the rest of the story, starting with Karl and Wheeler at the old man’s funeral. Long story short (spoiler), Karl takes Wheeler through to a back room in the crematorium, where the coffin, rather than having been burnt, is waiting for them.
Karl opens the coffin and proceeds to perform an autopsy on the old man. During this procedure Karl excises odd-looking body parts which he displays to Wheeler, while suggesting that their erstwhile boss was an alien. Then Karl floats the theory that this creature’s natural habitat is an atmosphere similar to a badly polluted Earth, and that the deteriorating condition of the environment is part of an alien plot to terraform the Earth for its species. Wheeler is convinced, and leaves on a mission to reverse this trend.³
The story’s short last section has Karl talking to Joe about what we now find out was a hoax (Joe makes medical specimens for a living). The final twist involves a further discussion between them about Occam’s razor, which suggests that their hoax theory is actually true.⁴
This tale, like When You Care, When You Love, marries up Sturgeon’s considerable story-telling skills with an far-fetched plot. Individual reader’s enjoyment will vary according to what extent they allow the first to mask the second: in my case, not so much.

•

Reviewed here recently was The Queen of Air and Darkness by Poul Anderson (F&SF, April 1971), which seems at first as if it is going to be a Midsummer Night’s Dream-like fantasy:

A shape came bounding over Cloudmoor. It had two arms and two legs, but the legs were long and claw-footed and feathers covered it to the end of a tail and broad wings. The face was half human, dominated by its eyes. Had Ayoch been able to stand wholly erect, he would have reached to the boy’s shoulder.
The girl rose. “He carries a burden,” she said. Her vision was not meant for twilight like that of a northland creature born, but she had learned how to use every sign her senses gave her. Besides the fact that ordinarily a pook would fly, there was a heaviness to his haste.
“And he comes from the south.” Excitement jumped in the boy, sudden as a green flame that went across the constellation Lyrth. He sped down the mound. “Ohoi, Ayoch!” he called, “Me here, Mistherd!”
“And Shadow-of-a-Dream,” the girl laughed, following. The pook halted. He breathed louder than the soughing in the growth around him. A smell of bruised yerba lifted where he stood. “Well met in winterbirth,” he whistled. “You can help me bring this to Carheddin.”
He held out what he bore. His eyes were yellow lanterns above. It moved and whimpered.
“Why, a child,” Mistherd said.  p. 188

In the next section the story changes into a planetary colonisation tale, which starts with a woman called Barbro Cullen visiting an investigator called Eric Sherrinford in a town called Christmas Landing. Her child has gone missing on a field trip to the north of their planet, Roland, and she fears he may have been abducted.
Sherrinford agrees to take the case, and it isn’t long before they head north to an outpost called Portolondon. In a video interview with the local constable, Sherrinford probes the officer about the incident, and also the local myths:

[Sherrinford] cradled his pipe bowl in both hands and peered into the tiny hearth of it. “Perhaps what interests me most,” he said softly, “is why—across that gap of centuries, across a barrier of machine civilization and its utterly antagonistic world view—no continuity of tradition whatsoever—why have hard-headed, technologically organized, reasonably well-educated colonists here brought back from its grave a belief in the Old Folk?”  p. 201

Later, Sherrinford and Cullen head north and, one night at their campsite, he tells Cullen his theory that there is an advanced indigenous race on Roland which is hiding from the human race. Little do the couple know that they are being spied upon by Mistherd, a previous human abductee, who now swears allegiance to the Queen of Air and Darkness.
The rest of the story follows the pair as they track down the child.
This is an impressive piece, and what is particularly notable is the texture of this world. Not only do we see things from both the indigenous alien’s and settler’s point of view, but we also learn about the myths and legends that have been created by the limited contact between the two. This is perhaps most evident in two sequential scenes: the first takes place in the house of William Irons, a settler who lives in the far north, and who tells the couple about the rules and customs that apply there with respect to the “Queen”; the second is when Cullen and Sherrinford are later at their campsite talking about a folk song performed by Iron’s son but interrupted by an emotional outburst from Cullen. She finishes the song for Sherrinford, and he hears of a story about a ranger, Arvin, and how he refuses to become part of the Outling folk. The Queen tells him he will regret his choice:

I do not need a magic
to make you always mourn.
.
I send you home with nothing
except your memory
of moonlight, Outling music,
night breezes, dew, and me.
And that will run behind you,
a shadow on the sun,
and that will lie beside you
when every day is done.
.
In work and play and friendship
your grief will strike you dumb
for thinking what you are—and—
what you might have become.  p. 216

It is a stunning moment which not only elegantly and succinctly lends the story hundreds of years of history, but also dangles the prospect of human uplift or transcendence in front of the reader. And, as if all this doesn’t already build a convincing world, there are also a couple of short passages that sketch the spread of humanity through space, something that gives the tapestry of the story even more colour and depth.
If the piece has a flaw it is probably the ending (spoiler), which degenerates into a guns blazing rescue of the boy, a rather crude end to such a sophisticated story—although, to be fair, that event is preceded by a haunting section where Cullen is kidnapped and telepathically induced to think that her dead husband is taking her to the Queen of Air and Darkness.
A deserving Hugo and Nebula Award winner.

•

In Entropy’s Jaws by Robert Silverberg (Infinity #2, 1971) the protagonist, Skein, is a man on a passenger spaceship about to make an FTL jump when he has the first of a number of fugues that see him “swept in shards across time.” The rest of the story is a non-linear sequence of many of Skein’s life events both past and future and, during these, he meets a skull-faced man he has never met (so this must be from his future). As he watches himself talk to the skull-faced man Skein realises that the man has a cure for his condition, so he eventually makes his way across interstellar space to him. When Skein finally reaches the skull-faced man, he is taken to a healing “amoeba,” and (spoiler) his condition resolved: it then becomes apparent who the skull-faced man is (although some readers will already have figured this out already).
Between the initial set-up on the spaceship and the story’s ironic ending, Silverberg uses all the toys in the artistic toolbox—pseudo-intellectual musings about time and entropy (some of which sounds as if it is straight out of Pseud’s Corner), the listing of many book titles, etc.—there are even a couple of “What I did on my Summer Holidays” scenes (the ones inside the mosque, and on the boat). These are wrapped up in a kitchen sink’s worth of standard SFnal gimmicks, e.g. starships, telepathy, and time loops. And the story is also heavily padded, as you can see from this almost stream-of-consciousness section:

Skein spends nearly all of this period in his cabin, rarely eating and sleeping very little. He reads almost constantly, obsessively dredging from the ship’s extensive library a wide and capricious assortment of books. Rilke. Kafka. Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World. Lowry, Hear Us O Lord From Heaven Thy Dwelling Place. Elias. Razhuminin. Dickey. Pound. Fraisse, The Psychology of Time. Greene, Dream and Delusion. Poe. Shakespeare. Marlowe. Tourneur.
The Waste Land. Ulysses. Heart of Darkness. Bury, The Idea of Progress. Jung. Buchner. Pirandello. The MagicMountain. Ellis, The Rack. Cervantes. Blenheim. Fierst. Keats. Nietzsche. His mind swims with images and bits of verse, with floating sequences of dialogue, with unscaffolded dialectics. He dips into each work briefly, magpielike, seeking bright scraps. The words form a scaly impasto on the inner surface of his skull. He finds that this heavy verbal overdose helps, to some slight extent, to fight off the fugues; his mind is weighted, perhaps, bound by this leaden clutter of borrowed genius to the moving line of the present, and during his debauch of reading he finds himself shifting off that line less frequently than in the recent past. His mind whirls.
Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—A rope over an abyss. My patience is exhausted. See, see where Christ’s blood streams in the firmament! One drop would save my soul. I had not thought death had undone so many. These fragments I have shored against my ruins. Hoogspanning. Levensgevaar. Peligro de Muerte. Electricidad. Danger.  p. 89

This goes on for a page and a half.
A story that is too long and too self-indulgent.⁵

•

The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World by Philip José Farmer (New Dimensions #1, 1971) is an amusing piece about a man who lives in an overpopulated world where people only live one day in seven. When they are not conscious they are kept in suspended animation chambers, which they call “stoners”.
The first part of the story introduces us to Tom Pym, an actor who lives in Tuesday, and who wakes up to find his house has burnt down. After a few days in a public facility he finds a new place to stay and, on the evening of his first day there, he sees a beautiful woman in the stoner opposite. Pym is instantly infatuated with her, but she lives in Wednesday, and it is nearly impossible to transfer between days (and to do so illegally would result in permanent stonerdom).
The rest of the piece concerns Pym’s attempts to contact her by leaving a tape-recorded message (he receives a polite but dismissive reply), and then his journey through the bureaucratic process required to transfer between days. This latter requires the approval of both his astrologer and psycher:

The psycher had said that he was incapable of a true and lasting bond with a woman, as so many men were in this world of easy-come-easy-go liaisons. He had fallen in love with Jennie Marlowe for several reasons. She may have resembled somebody he had loved when he was very young. His mother, perhaps? No? Well, never mind. He would find out in Wednesday—perhaps. The deep, the important, truth was that he loved Miss Marlowe because she could never reject him, kick him out, or become tiresome, complain, weep, yell, insult, and so forth. He loved her because she was unattainable and silent.  p.125

Although Pym (spoiler) eventually succeeds in transferring to Wednesday, the ironic ending sees his psycher running off with the woman, who has meantime transferred to Tuesday.
An original and entertaining piece.

•

A Meeting with Medusa by Arthur C. Clarke (Playboy, December 1971)⁶ has a spectacular opening sequence that sees Howard Falcon, the captain of a huge future airship called the Queen Elizabeth, walk through the interior of the craft (and past the superchimp, “simp” crew) and up to the craft’s observation area. There he watches as a nearby camera platform approaches the ship to land. However, the operator loses control, and it crashes into the airship, damaging it badly. Falcon rushes down to the bridge:

Halfway down, he paused for a second to inspect the damage. That damned platform had gone clear through the ship, rupturing two of the gas cells as it did so. They were still collapsing slowly, in great falling veils of plastic. He was not worried about the loss of lift—the ballast could easily take care of that, as long as eight cells remained intact. Far more serious was the possibility of structural damage; already he could hear the great latticework around him groaning and protesting under its abnormal loads. It was not enough to have sufficient lift; unless it was properly distributed, the ship would break her back.
He was just resuming his descent when a superchimp, shrieking with fright, came racing down the elevator shaft, moving with incredible speed hand over hand along the outside of the latticework. In its terror, the poor beast had torn off its company uniform, perhaps in an unconscious attempt to regain the freedom of its ancestors.
Falcon, still descending as swiftly as he could, watched its approach with some alarm; a distraught simp was a powerful and potentially dangerous animal, especially if fear overcame its conditioning. As it overtook him, it started to call out a string of words, but they were all jumbled together, and the only one he could recognize was a plaintive, frequently repeated “Boss.” Even now, Falcon realized, it looked toward humans for guidance; he felt sorry for the creature, involved in a man-made disaster beyond its comprehension and for which it bore no responsibility.
It stopped opposite him, on the other side of the lattice; there was nothing to prevent it from coming through the open framework if it wished. Now its face was only inches from his and he was looking straight into the terrified eyes. Never before had he been so close to a simp and able to study its features in such detail; he felt that strange mingling of kinship and discomfort that all men experience when they gaze thus into the mirror of time.
His presence seemed to have calmed the creature; Falcon pointed up the shaft, back toward the observation deck, and said very clearly and precisely: “Boss—boss—go” To his relief, the simp understood; it gave him a grimace that might have been a smile and at once started to race back the way it had come. Falcon had given it the best advice he could; if any safety remained aboard the Queen, it was in that direction. But his duty lay in the other.  p. 136-137

The airship crash lands and, after Falcon’s blackout, the story recommences some time later with him pitching an airship exploration of Jupiter to a man called Webster, the head of long range planning. Then the story cuts to Falcon en route from Ganymede to Jupiter;  when he arrives his spaceship, the Kon Tiki, enters the atmosphere and the balloons deploy, leaving him floating in the Jovian atmosphere.
The main part of the story is a mixture of exotic travelogue and sense of wonder:

The five hours of daylight were almost over; the clouds below were full of shadows, which gave them a massive solidity they had not possessed when the Sun was higher. Color was swiftly draining from the sky, except in the west itself, where a band of deepening purple lay along the horizon. Above this band was the thin crescent of a closer moon, pale and bleached against the utter blackness beyond.
With a speed perceptible to the eye, the Sun went straight down over the edge of Jupiter, 3000 kilometers away. The stars came out in their legions—and there was the beautiful evening star of Earth, on the very frontier of twilight, reminding him how far he was from home. It followed the Sun down into the west; man’s first night on Jupiter had begun.  p. 149

We witness the various events that unfold as Falcon travels through the Jovian atmosphere (spoiler): there are bands of racing bioluminescent light in the clouds below; a massive radio storm; ball lightning on the Kon Tiki; he sleeps and has a recurrent nightmare about the simp on the airship (which died along with all the others)—then he spots a massive life-form rising out of the clouds towards him.
When Falcon later sees that the medusae (he later comes upon a herd of the medusa-like creatures) have radio arrays, the first contact protocols are invoked:

Dr. Brenner was back on the circuit, still worrying about the Prime Directive.
“Remember—it may only be inquisitive!” he cried without much conviction. “Try not to frighten it!”
Falcon was getting rather tired of this advice and recalled a TV discussion he had once seen between a space lawyer and an astronaut. After the full implications of the Prime Directive had been carefully spelled out, the incredulous spacer had exclaimed: “So if there were no alternative, I must sit still and let myself be eaten?” The lawyer had not even cracked a smile when he answered: “That’s an excellent summing up.”
It had seemed funny at the time; it was not at all amusing now.
And then Falcon saw something that made him even more unhappy. The medusa was still hovering a kilometer above him—but one of its tentacles was becoming incredibly elongated and was stretching down toward Kon-Tiki, thinning out at the same time. As a boy, he had once seen the funnel of a tornado descending from a storm cloud over the Kansas plains; the thing coming toward him now evoked vivid memories of that black, twisting snake in the sky.  p. 171

The medusa’s attentions eventually cause Falcon to prematurely end his trip. He jettisons the balloons and ignites the rockets that will boost him out of Jupiter’s atmosphere—which delivers a line that will satisfy the inner twelve year old in all SF readers:

Now he was master once more—no longer drifting helplessly on the winds of Jupiter but riding his own column of atomic fire back to the stars.  p. 173

In the final scene Falcon is revealed as a cyborg (something that is hinted at in several places in the story), which produces the story’s unexpectedly elegiac ending:

Howard Falcon, who had once been a man and could still pass for one over a voice circuit, felt a calm sense of achievement—and, for the first time in years, something like peace of mind. Since his return from Jupiter, the nightmares had ceased. He had found his role at last.
He knew now why he had dreamed about that superchimp aboard the doomed Queen Elizabeth. Neither man nor beast, it was between two worlds; and so was he.
He alone could travel unprotected on the lunar surface; the life-support system inside the metal cylinder that had replaced his fragile body functioned equally well in space or under water. Gravity fields ten times that of Earth were an inconvenience, but nothing more. And no gravity was best of all.
The human race was becoming more remote from him, the ties of kinship more tenuous. Perhaps these air-breathing, radiation-sensitive bundles of unstable carbon compounds had no right beyond the atmosphere; they should stick to their natural homes—Earth, Moon, Mars.
Someday, the real masters of space would be machines, not men—and he was neither. Already conscious of his destiny, he took a somber pride in his unique loneliness—the first immortal, midway between two orders of creation.
He would, after all, be an ambassador; between the old and the new—between the creatures of carbon and the creatures of metal who must one day supersede them. Both would have need of him in the troubled centuries that lay ahead.  p. 174-175

This is an excellent piece of hard science fiction, and a truly magisterial performance from Clarke.

•

The Frayed String on the Stretched Forefinger of Time by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. (F&SF, May 1971) begins in Minority Report territory with Inspector Commander Graham and his assistant Proller reviewing Pre-Crime data:

Proller consulted his notebook. Pre-Murder suspects were always odd, but this one seemed spectacularly so. He had invested a small fortune in plastic, life-sized images of a business rival, and he arranged them in various postures about his estate and each evening strolled around throwing knives at them. The doctors thought this a healthy purge of murderous impulses. The inspector-commander had a hunch that Clingman wasn’t purging himself of anything; he was just having target practice.  p. 178

When Proller reads the notes on another suspect, a man called Stamitz, the owner of a life suspension facility, it becomes clear that the latter has acquired a weapon, and intends to kill his rival Bryling.
The rest of the story plays out at Stamitz’s labs. When Graham and Proller interview him there, Stamitz agrees to a hypnotic examination the next day, which lets Graham know that he plans to kill Bryling that evening. The police arrange protection for Bryling, but he slips away from them and goes to Stamitz’s life-suspension facility.
The denouement (spoiler) involves Bryling (unconvincingly) agreeing to suspended animation at Stamitz’s facility to avoid the threat to his life. Stamitz’s manages to poison Bryling during the process (but does not kill him—Bryling won’t die until he is revived). This murder, or attempted murder, is later discovered by Proller and a medic, but they keep this information from Graham (for the unlikely reason that it would affect his “confidence” as a pre-crime detective).
This has an intriguing setup but the resolution does not convince. At all. Very much a game of two halves.

•

How Can We Sink When We Can Fly? by Alexei Panshin (Four Futures, 1971) uses most of its length to give us an autobiographical account of the writer and his partner Cory’s life in rural Pennsylvania, and begins with the couple driving to the nearest bus station in New Jersey to pick up a couple of visitors, Rob and Leigh.⁷ When the Panshins arrive to pick them up, they find that a quiet young man called Juanito is with them. He doesn’t say much but asks the odd question, such as the one on the way home:

This Pennsylvania countryside offers you just about anything you want. We’ve been here the better part of a year and still discover surprises within five miles, and even within one, or within three hundred yards: wild onion, wild strawberries, poison ivy. In the space of a mile on a single road you can find high-speed intersection, three-hundred-year-old farmstead, random suburbia, crossroad community, and woodland in any order and combination you like, strung across little valleys, hidden in hollows, up and over hills.
There are even pockets of industry.
“What is that?” Juanito asked.
It’s part of the scenery, but you have to be particularly quick to see it. If you could see more of it, perhaps it would have been closed down sooner. I stopped our old Plymouth tank and backed up the hill to the curve. In early April, with the trees still bare or only barely budding, you can see it from one vantage on the road. Tinny prefab buildings and the half a dozen chemical lagoons perched overlooking the creek, with blue and yellow gullies staining the hillside.
“Every time it rains there’s overflow,” I said. “That’s the Revere Chemicals dump. It was put in in 1965, and the State Health people said at the time that it was going to do this, and it took them five years to close it down. Now it just sits there and leaks. The manager is trying to start a new operation in the next township.”
“I hope the deer doesn’t drink from that stream,” Leigh said.
“He has to take his chances the same as the rest of us,” Rob said. Growing up in Springfield has left Rob with more than a little sourness.  p. 199

This illuminates one of the story’s main concerns, Panshin’s pessimistic view of the world and its future. This surfaces at various other points in the story, such as the two page gloomfest on p. 207-208:

Spring this year was wet and late, and the only thing in bloom was the weeping willow in the back yard, with its trailing yellow catkins. The trees spread over the running hills to the next farm were still winter sticks. The day was cool enough for a light jacket in spite of the work, and the sky was partly overcast. Gardening was an act of faith that the seasons would change and warmth and flower come. Gardening is an act of faith. I’m a pessimist, but still I garden.
It’s much like the times.
Our society is imperfect. That’s what we say, and we shrug and let it go at that. Societies change in their own good time, and there isn’t much that individuals can do to cause change or direct it. Most people don’t try. They have a living to make, and whatever energies are left over they know how to put to good use. They leave politics to politicians.
But let’s be honest. Our society is not just imperfect. Our society is an unhappy shambles. And leaving politics to politicians is proving to be a dangerous a business as leaving science to scientists, war to generals, and profits to profiteers.
I read. I watch. I listen. And I judge by my own experience.
The best of us are miserable. We all take drugs—alcohol, tobacco, and pills by the handful. We do work in order to live and live in order to work—an endless unsatisfying round. The jobs are no pleasure. Employers shunt us from one plastic paradise to another. One quarter of the country moves each year. No roots, no stability. We live our lives in public, with less and less opportunity to know each other. To know anybody.
Farmers can’t make a living farming. Small businessmen can’t make a living anymore, either. Combines and monoliths take them over or push them out. And because nobody questions the ways of a monolith and stays or rises in one, the most ruthless monoliths survive, run by the narrowest and hungriest and most self-satisfied among us.
The results: rivers that stink of sewage, industrial waste, and dead fish. City air that’s the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Countryside turned to rubble. Chemical lagoons left to stain hillsides with their overflow. Fields of rusting auto bodies. And all the while, the population is growing. Progress.
New consumers. But when I was born, in 1940, there were 140 million people in this country, and now there are more than 200 million, half of them born since 1940. Our institutions are less and less able to cope with the growth. Not enough houses. Not enough schools. Not enough doctors or teachers or jobs. Not enough room at the beach. Not enough beaches.
Not enough food. The world is beginning to starve, and for all the talk of Green Revolutions, we no longer have surplus food. We are importing lamb from Australia and beef from Argentina now. How soon before we all start pulling our belts a notch tighter?  p. 207-208

This eventually loops back to gardening being an act of faith.
I suspect that people’s reactions to this passage—and the story more generally—will depend on how pessimistic or optimistic they are, and will range from plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same) to the observation that some people worry too much.
The story also has a pronounced metafictional aspect, which sees Panshin discussing the writing of the story we are reading with Rob. Panshin tells him that he is finding it difficult to get started on the story. He then shows Rob the outline for the commissioned story, which proposes a future society with few children, and their consequential status:

Rob finished reading, looked up, and said, “It’s like something you’ve done, isn’t it?”
“What’s that?”
“Rite of Passage”
Rite of Passage was my first novel. It’s about a girl, a bright superchild on the verge of adulthood in a low-population future society. Otherwise it’s not much the same.
“Hmm. I guess I see what you mean, but I don’t think the similarity has to be close enough to be any problem. The thought of repeating myself is not what’s hanging me up. What do you think of the proposal?”
“Well,” said Rob, “when did you say the story is supposed to take place?”
I flipped to the front page of the proposal to check.
“The next century. The only date mentioned is 2025. After 2025, I guess.”
“Fifty years from now? Where do all the five-hundred-year-olds come from?”
I waved that aside. “I’m willing to make it one hundred or one hundred and fifty plus great expectations.”
“These people would have to be alive now,” Rob said.
“True,” I said. “It’s something to think about.”
It was a good point, just the sort of thing I wanted Rob to come up with. It raised possibilities.
“Are there any restrictions on what you write?”
“Fifteen thousand words and no nasty language.”
“What about nasty ideas?”
“Nothing said about that, but I don’t suppose they are worried. Everybody knows I never had a nasty idea in my life.”  p. 204

The conversation leads on to the mission statement from The Whole Earth Catalog⁸ (a countercultural publication of the time) about personal power, and the first chapter eventually ends with an example of that, when Alexi awakes one morning to find that Juanita has gone, but has left a trash can on the porch full of rubbish he has picked up from the highway verges.
The short second chapter that follows this lengthy autobiographical section appears to be the story that Panshin writes for the anthology, and features a child called Little John in the far-future (he is actually thirty year old, but is not considered mature enough to be deemed an adult). He is repeatedly being sent back in time to 1381 by his mentor, but wants to go somewhere else. Eventually the mentor lets him go to 1970, but Little John comes back shocked:

“You were right,” he said simply. “I wasn’t ready. Send me back to 1381 again. Please.”
“Perhaps,” Samantha said.
“I don’t understand. I don’t understand. I knew things weren’t right then, but I didn’t think they would be like that. Taxes was what they cared about. They didn’t even see what was going on. Not really. And it was just before the Revolution. Are things always that bad before they change?”
“Yes,” she said. “Always. The only difference this time is the way things changed. And you didn’t see the worst of it. Not by half, Little John.”
“I didn’t?” he said in surprise. “I thought it must be.”
She was too kind to laugh. “No.”
“But it was so awful. So ruthless. So destructive.”
Samantha said, “Those people weren’t so bad. As it happens, they were my parents.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said.
“And your grandparents weren’t so different. And they did learn better. That’s the important thing to remember. If you take away nothing else, remember that. If they hadn’t changed, none of us would be here now.”  p. 225

The very short third chapter ties things together (if, like me, you didn’t realise that Little John is actually the Juanita of the first autobiographical chapter):

Endings of stories come easy. It is the beginnings, when anything is still possible, that come hard.
Start now.  p. 226

This is a thought provoking and technically clever piece that I feel I should have perhaps scored more highly, but the story’s overdone pessimism (as with many similar works) is a flaw. This gloominess tells you more about the writer’s perceptions than reality.⁹

•

No Direction Home by Norman Spinrad (New Worlds Quarterly #2, 1971) is set in a future where drug use has become legal and widespread, and each of the story’s scenes show different characters and related situations. The first opens with two garage chemists discussing their new drug, and how the multinationals will eventually copy it; the next has a general and a scientist discussing the side effects of a drug given to Moonbase military staff to combat claustrophobia—violence and “faggotry”—and how a second drug will help supress the sexual desire caused by the first. The third section has two cardinals arguing about using a psychedelic host during communion, something that can give the recipient a direct experience of God (and thus threaten the Church’s role as an intermediary). And so on.
The final scene (spoiler) has a man suffering not from drugs, but from the ultimate bad trip, reality:

“You don’t understand, Kip,” he said. “This is reality, the way it really is, and man it’s horrible, just a great big ugly machine made up of lots of other machines, you’re a machine, I’m a machine, it’s all mechanical clockwork. We’re just lumps of dead matter run by machinery, kept alive by chemical and electric processes.”
Golden sunlight soaked through Kip’s skin and turned the core of his being into a miniature stellar phoenix. The wind, through random blades of grass, made love to the bare soles of his feet. What was all this machinery crap? What the hell was Jonesy gibbering about? Man, who would want to put himself in a bummer reality like that?
“You’re just on a bummer, Jonesy,” he said. “Take it easy. You’re not seeing the universe the way it really is, as if that meant anything. Reality is all in your head. You’re just freaking out behind nothing.”
“That’s it, that’s exactly it, I’m freaking out behind nothing. Like zero. Like cipher. Like the void. Nothing is where we’re really at.”
How could he explain it? That reality was really just a lot of empty vacuum that went on to infinity in space and time. The perfect nothingness had minor contaminations of dead matter here and there. A little of this matter had fallen together through a complex series of random accidents to contaminate the universal deadness with trace elements of life, protoplasmic slime, biochemical clockwork. Some of this clockwork was complicated enough to generate thought, consciousness. And that was all there ever was or would ever be anywhere in space and time. Clockwork mechanisms rapidly running down in the cold black void. Everything that wasn’t dead matter already would end up that way sooner or later.  p. 242-243

Despite the bleak passage above, this is a witty and interesting piece that crams a lot into its short length.
I also note that, even though I last read this decades ago, I could remember the opening narrative hook:

“But I once did succeed in stuffing it all back in Pandora’s box,” Richardson said, taking another hit. “You remember Pandora Deutchman, don’t you, Will? Everybody in the biochemistry department stuffed it all in Pandora’s box at one time or another. I seem to vaguely remember one party when you did it yourself.”  p. 227

•

Vaster Than Empires and More Slow by Ursula K. Le Guin (New Dimensions #1, 1971) opens with a data dump beginning that describes the time distortion felt by passengers in FTL flight through space. It then goes on to explain how the crews that have to suffer this are, essentially, crazy people:

No sane person who has experienced time slippage of even a few decades between near worlds would volunteer for a round trip of a half millennium. The Surveyors were escapists; misfits; nuts.  p. 247

This unlikely idea yields a volatile cocktail of characters, one of whom, Olsen, is an empath. As he is defenceless to the other crew members’ unshielded feelings and neuroses, he is a particularly hostile and prickly character, which sets up a negative feedback loop that accentuates the others’ problems.
Eventually they arrive at the planet they have been sent to investigate, and Olsen leaves to do field work at the request of the crew-co-ordinator. Morale improves. Then Porlock, one of the other crew members, reports seeing a large man-sized animal in the forest. More teams are sent out.
Later, Olsen doesn’t complete a routine check-in with base, so Tomiko, the crew co-ordinator, and another crew member go looking for him and find him lying in the forest—he has been attacked by something or someone, but is still alive.
When they get Olsen back to the ship, Tomiko eventually manages to break through his defensive shell when he recovers consciousness: he then tells her the forest is “afraid.” Morale and the general situation on the ship deteriorates, and it becomes clear that the consciousness in the forest is transmitting its fear to the humans—Olsen later explains the feedback effect with the forest is similar to what happens with him. As a result of this some of the crew either become catatonic or have other mental problems or breakdowns (Porlock, who is revealed as the one who attacked Olsen, eventually has to be restrained).
Tomiko then decides to move the ship to the other side of the planet to escape the forest’s transmissions, but the message that the humans are to be feared reaches their location several days later. At this point the team realise that all the vegetation on the planet (even the pollen) is one vast consciousness. Olsen explains to them what this feels like:

“Now you know why I always want to get out, get away from you,” Osden said with a kind of morbid geniality. “It isn’t pleasant, is it—the other’s fear? . . . If only it were an animal intelligence. I can get through to animals. I get along with cobras and tigers; superior intelligence gives one the advantage. I should have been used in a zoo, not on a human team. . . . If I could get through to the damned stupid potato! If it wasn’t so overwhelming. . . . I still pick up more than the fear, you know. And before it panicked it had a—there was a serenity. I couldn’t take it in, then, I didn’t realize how big it was. To know the whole daylight, after all, and the whole night. All the winds and the lulls together. The winter stars and the summer stars at the same time. To have roots, and no enemies. To be entire. Do you see? No invasion. No others. To be whole . . . .
He had never spoken before, Tomiko thought.
“You are defenseless against it, Olsen,” she said. “Your personality has changed already. You’re vulnerable to it. We may not all go mad, but you will, if we don’t leave.”
He hesitated, then he looked up at Tomiko, the first time he had ever met her eyes—a long, still look, clear as water.
“What’s sanity ever done for me?” he said, mocking. “But you have a point, Haito. You have something there.”
“We should get away,” Harfex muttered.
“If I gave in to it,” Osden mused, “could I communicate?”  p. 272-273

Eventually (spoiler) Olsen convinces them to take him to the forest so he can try to communicate with the consciousness and stop the fear. The crew realise he has succeeded when the transmissions stop, but Olsen does not return. They leave the planet without him.
The synopsis above only scratches the surface of this story as it is a particularly dense piece that covers a lot of territory: apart from a the standard SF furniture (the FTL drive, expeditions to alien planets), there is more emphasis on characterisation than normal, and that’s before you get to the exploration of the planetary vegetable consciousness and the literary overlay of Andrew Marvell’s poem To His Coy Mistress.¹⁰
If the story has a problem it is that there is maybe too much going on, and that not all the parts fit together smoothly. An example of this is the time distortion passage at the very beginning of the story: this has a connection with the way the vegetable consciousness experiences time, but it is a badly placed data dump that appears too early in the story.¹¹ Still, an interesting piece, and one that would reward a repeated reading.

•

All the Last Wars at Once by George Alec Effinger (Universe #1, 1971) starts with two men, one white and one black, announcing on live news that there will be a thirty day race war. The story then cuts to a hitchhiker called Stevie who has a car stop for him. When the female occupant hands a Women’s Lib factsheet to him before he can get in, he realises that women and men are now fighting each other too, and he only just manages to shoot the driver before she tries to kill him. There are several similar sections that detail various other us vs. them conflicts: Catholics shooting up a Protestant church before all creeds end up fighting with each other, producers vs. artists, lefties vs. righties, young vs. old. etc.
As the thirty day period of hostility comes to an end Stevie goes to Times Square to celebrate. There he talks to a young woman circulating among the celebrating survivors who suggests that they should get on with The Last War . . . which turns out to be the one against yourself:

“What do you mean?” asked Stevie.
The woman touched Stevie’s chest. “There. Your guilt. Your frustration. You don’t really feel any better, do you? I mean, women don’t really hate men; they hate their own weaknesses. People don’t really hate other people for their religion or race. It’s just that seeing someone different than you makes you feel a little insecure in your own belief. What you hate is your own doubt, and you project the hatred onto the other man.”  p. 291

She then starts passing out bottles of kerosene to everyone and, as Stevie leaves he square, he sees “scores of little fires, like scattered piles of burning leaves in the backyards of his childhood.”
If you like blackly satirical work you will find this, as I did, an amusing piece—but the ending didn’t work for me. It certainly completes the “if this goes on” trajectory of the story, but I wasn’t convinced by the reasoning in the passage above.

•

When I read the SF magazines in the mid- and late-1970s, I’d occasionally come across a ‘Draco Tavern’ tale by Larry Niven, one of several series of stories by various writers that are set in bars.¹² The Fourth Profession by Larry Niven (Quark #4, 1971) is also set in (or around) a bar, and starts with an FBI agent called William Morris visiting the home of Edward Harley Frazer, owner of the Long Spoon Bar. He wants to question Frazer as an alien ‘Monk’ was drinking there the previous night:

He came in an hour after opening time. He seemed to glide, with the hem of his robe just brushing the floor. By his gait he might have been moving on wheels. His shape was wrong, in a way that made your eyes want to twist around to straighten it out.
There is something queer about the garment that gives a Monk his name. The hood is open in front, as if eyes might hide within its shadow, and the front of the robe is open too. But the loose cloth hides more than it ought to. There is too much shadow.
Once I thought the robe parted as he walked toward me. But there seemed to be nothing inside.
In the Long Spoon was utter silence. Every eye was on the Monk as he took a stool at one end of the bar, and ordered.
He looked alien, and was. But he seemed supernatural. He used the oddest of drinking systems. I keep my house brands on three long shelves, more or less in order of type. The Monk moved down the top row of bottles, right to left, ordering a shot from each bottle. He took his liquor straight, at room temperature. He drank quietly, steadily, and with what seemed to be total concentration.
He spoke only to order.
He showed nothing of himself but one hand. That hand looked like a chicken’s foot, but bigger, with lumpy-looking, very flexible joints, and with five toes instead of four.
At closing time the Monk was four bottles from the end of the row. He paid me in one-dollar bills, and left, moving steadily, the hem of his robe just brushing the floor. I testify as an expert: He was sober. The alcohol had not affected him at all.  p. 295

As the story unfolds we find out that the alien returned on a second night and started giving Frazer RNA memory pills which gave him specific knowledge and skills. We learn fairly quickly that one of these is language—he can talk the Monk’s whispering language—and then we learn that he has an enhanced sense of position and balance (the result of a pill that gives him the knowledge needed to teleport, if humans were capable of such).
Much later on in the story Frazer tries to impress on Morris the importance of humanity building a laser cannon on the Moon so the aliens can relaunch their light sail ship on the next leg of their trip (if we don’t they’ll turn our sun into a nova and get their launch boost that way). During this conversation we find out what the third pill Frazer took was for:

“The lovely thing about the laser cannon is that if anything goes wrong with it, there’s a civilized world right there to fix it. You go sailing out to the stars with trade goods, but you leave your launching motor safely at home. Why is everybody looking at me funny?”
“Don’t take it wrong,” said Morris. “But how does a paunchy bartender come to know so much about flying an interstellar trading ship?”
[. . .]
“Oh,” I said. “Damn, I must be stupid today. Morris, that was the third pill.”
“Right,” said Morris, still nodding, still glassy-eyed. “That must have been the unusual, really unusual profession you wanted. Crewman on an interstellar liner. Jesus.”
And he should have sounded disgusted, but he sounded envious.
His elbows were on the table, his chin rested on his fists. It is a position that distorts the mouth, making one’s expression unreadable. But I didn’t like what I could read in Morris’s eyes.
There was nothing left of the square and honest man I had let into my apartment at noon. Morris was a patriot now, and an altruist, and a fanatic. He must have the stars for his nation and for all mankind. Nothing must stand in his way. Least of all, me.
Reading minds again, Frazer? Maybe being captain of an interstellar liner involves having to read the minds of the crew, to be able to put down a mutiny before some idiot can take a heat point to the mpff glip habbabub, or however a Monk would say it; it has something to do with straining ketones out of the breathing-air.
My urge to acrobatics had probably come out of the same pill. Free fall training. There was a lot in that pill.
This was the profession I should have hidden. Not the Palace Torturer, who was useless to a government grown too subtle to need such techniques; but the captain of an interstellar liner, a prize too valuable to men who have not yet reached beyond the Moon.
And I had been the last to know it. Too late, Frazer.
“Captain,” I said. “Not crew.”
“Pity. A crewman would know more about how to put a ship together. Frazer, how big a crew are you equipped to rule?”
“Eight and five.”
“Thirteen?  p. 316

There then follows a conversation about the Monk’s numbering system.
This passage is a good example of the multiple threads running through the story, its general loopiness, and that, at times, it feels like a widescreen galactic space opera squeezed into a barroom.
The second half (spoiler) has Frazer’s barmaid Louise, who has also taken a pill, falling in love with him (or so it seems). As this welcome complication develops, another Monk turns up and forces Frazer to take two pills to remove his illegally-given knowledge.
At this point what had been a very good and highly entertaining story suffers from a suspension of disbelief problem: we find that the “language” pill that Frazer took was actually a “prophet” pill which, apart from giving him the ability to communicate with everyone (he realises he has been listening to and understanding the Spanish-speaking cleaners as well as the Monk) it also gives him the ability to perform miracles—such as disappearing the two pills that would undo his powers. The problem with this development, apart from the fact that it seems like magic, is that it also raises the question of why an alien race with abilities like these would bother roaming the galaxy as traders.
Ignore the ending, and read it for the rest of the story.

•

Terry Carr also contributes a short Introduction which briefly covers the New Wave controversies (which had by this time more or less died down) and makes a number of interesting observations:

In the past half-dozen years, for instance, we’ve seen an influx of fine new writers who brought with them the so-called “new wave” styles of writing: experimental prose, hard-edged realism, shiftings of reality, or sometimes straightforwardly angry “downbeat” stories. The readers, critics, fans and other writers in the field were either delighted or appalled by such writing, and authors like Thomas M. Disch and Norman Spinrad became centers of rather fierce controversy.
Reading the manifestos and denunciations produced during this internecine battle, and hearing the arguments that so often sprang up at gatherings of science fiction people, a person could easily have come away with the impression that the sf field was falling apart, losing coherence and direction. But through it all I remembered a delightful description that I read years ago of the audience reaction to the premiere performance of Stravinski’s Rite of Spring: There were boos and catcalls; there were cheers and clapping; and there was, before long, a full-scale riot as the members of the audience fought over their differing reactions to the music. “That is what I call a strong aesthetic response,” said the narrator.  p. vii

By now the “new wave” as such has come and gone; those stories that could stand on their own merits have done so, and those writers whose work stood up to the glare of controversy have become respected “regulars” within the field. And already another generation of writers is upon us, people who read the best experimental sf and the best of all other kinds, and who have gone on to create stories that range the entire spectrum of science fiction’s possibilities. Ursula K. Le Guin is such a writer; so is Alexei Panshin; and so is at least one man who was writing science fiction for ten years before the “new wave” hit the field: Robert Silverberg.
These writers, and many others, realize a truth basic to all art, not just the art of science fiction writing. Innovations are positive to the extent that they open doors, and an avant garde which seeks to destroy rather than build will only destroy itself all the faster. And when a “wave” has passed, what it leaves behind will be its positive contributions, so it behooves us to become literary beachcombers.  p. viii

He ends with this:

The specific technique isn’t important. It may be beautiful romantic imagery, such as in Poul Anderson’s “The Queen of Air and Darkness”; it may involve detailed descriptions of the exploration of alien worlds, as in Arthur Clarke’s “A Meeting With Medusa”; it may be a vivid evocation of internal experience, such as Robert Silverberg’s “In Entropy’s Jaws,” or satire, like George Alec Effinger’s “All the Last Wars At Once,” or any of an endless variety of approaches to fictional creation. What matters is the pleasure we experience in reading these stories, and when the whole range of literary technique is used to evoke the wonder, scope and beauty of the universe—yes, and its dangers too—then we have a genre that cannot fail to be exciting.  p. x

•

This ‘Best of the Year’ anthology is an assured solo debut.¹³ Carr’s choices seem to split pretty evenly between crowd pleasers (the Anderson, Clarke and Niven), experimental and literary work (Silverberg, Panshin, Le Guin), and humour and satire (Farmer, Spinrad, Effinger).
A reader-friendly combination, and one drawn, atypically, mostly from original anthologies rather than genre magazines (seven of the eleven stories).  ●

_____________________

1. Avram Davidson (F&SF, March 1973) notes that Wollheim and Carr are now doing their own anthologies and that both retain some of the flavour of their previous collaboration. This is what he adds about the Carr volume (he previously notes in the Wollheim review that the Niven story “contains material for two effective stories”):

Now, onward, with Carr. All you need to know about Occam’s Scalpel is that it is by Theodore Sturgeon . . . I’ll add that the wind-up packs not one but three successive punches. In The Queen of Air and Darkness Poul Anderson draws on everything from physics to runic rhyme . . . with throwaway lines like, “One light year is not much as galactic distances go. You could walk it in about 270 million years.” Not with my feet. (I do wish Poul would take the verb fleer and give it back to the Skraelings.) And Robert Silverberg’s In Entropy’s Jaws is a fine novelette like a recurrently in-and-out view of a Byzantine mosaic of the ouroboros serpent.
The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World of Philip Jose Farmer is daft, deft, impeccably logical, with an O. Henryesque ending, too. Reading a story by Arthur C. Clarke is like seeing a Chesley Bonestell painting as a color film; subtitle A Meeting With Medusa as See Jupiter and Live. Quite a different pattern of molecules, Lloyd Biggle, Jr.’s The Frayed String on the Stretched Forefinger of Time, a wry, clever suspense thriller.
How Can We Sink When We Can Fly? is a two-part harmony by Alexei Panshin which, I am afraid, was ahead of its time. Longlong ago a friend told me, “If something’s bothering you, drink whiskey,” and I have found this advice good. Nowadays people who are the age we were then say, “Even if something isn’t bothering you, take dope.” Can I resist the antique tale of the Good Woman who asked T.S. Elliot, this was about 1930, see, “Mr. Eliot, what gives you the strength to write such beautiful poetry?” His answer? “Gin and drugs, madame; gin and drugs.” The point? Norman Spinrad’s No Direction Home. The Theme of Ursula K. Le Guin’s Vaster Than Empires and More Slow is the familiar one of the planetary probe team, but first she tells us that her people are all insane…and then she proves it . . . It’s a kick in the head, but by far even kickier is All The Last Wars At Once, by George Alec Effinger. Jesus Christ. Wow.  p. 37

P. Schuyler Miller (Analog, May 1973) reviews all five (!) of the Best of the Year collections in one combined review. Here are some extracts that are relevant to this volume:

Only one story was selected by three of the six editors: Theodore Sturgeon’s “Occam’s Scalpel.” It’s a good enough story, but need not even be science fiction except for the old-fashioned “snapper” ending (are there really aliens among us?). I’m afraid this is a “Thank God Sturgeon’s back!” choice.
Seven other stories are in two of the five books, and three of these seven authors are tapped for other stories, as are four others represented by two or more different stories. The seven (again alphabetically) begin with Poul Anderson’s “A Little Knowledge,” one of four from Analog (I prefer his “Queen of Air and Darkness,” which won both a Hugo and a Nebula and is in Terry Carr’s book). B. Alan Burhoe’s “Omithanthropus” is a fine story of winged men living symbiotically with balloon-like creatures. No quarrel—nor have I one with Arthur C. Clarke’s Playboy dazzler, “A Meeting with Medusa,” which placed second in the Hugo voting. His “Transit of Earth” is in a third book.
Philip Jose Farmer has well earned his place with “The Sliced-Crosswise -Only-on-Tuesday World,” which extends the parallel worlds concept to parallel lives as a solution to the population problem. I don’t see why it is in only two books. [. . .] Larry Niven’s “The Fourth Profession”—which profession did the alien’s knowledge pills teach our hero?—placed twice, but I much prefer his “Inconstant Moon,” a lovely “hard SF” story about the end of the world, which Pohl also liked. Niven has a fourth story, “Rammer,” in del Rey’s book.
Finally, Norman Spinrad’s “No Direction Home” is a chilling story of two chemists designing drugs that will custom-tailor life styles. Relevant SF? Certainly. New wave? I suppose so. More of the editors should have picked it.
I’ve listed two of my own druthers in passing: stories that are in one of the five books, and should be in more. Here are some more:
[. . .]
Ursula Le Guin’s “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,” about a world-girdling vegetable being. It was runner-up in the Hugo voting.
[. . .]
Which do I recommend? All of them—but I find that I starred more outstanding stories in Terry Carr’s collection, with Harrison/Aldiss next, then Wollheim, then Lester del Rey, and Pohl last. Since Donald Wollheim left Ace Books to form his own paperback company, his and Terry Carr’s anthologies are a spinoff for the book they used to do together, and Pohl was their replacement. Harrison and Aldiss have been picking winners for five years, and this is del Rey’s first “best” collection.
It bothers me that there are a dozen or so other excellent stories—stories I marked for comment—that I haven’t even mentioned. Make that “dozens”: these editors choose well.  p. 169-171

2. There is nothing from Analog, Amazing, Fantastic, Galaxy, Worlds of Fantasy or Worlds of Tomorrow magazines in this collection (among others).
In the poll that we did after our group read, these were the results (three votes per person max.): Clarke (9), Sturgeon (5), Le Guin (5), Silverberg (4), Spinrad (4), Farmer (3), Niven (2), Anderson (2), Biggle Jr. (1), Panshin (0), Effinger (0).

3. Sturgeon’s piece is one of a number of eco-fiction stories that appeared during this period. I remember reading a related anthology at the time, Thomas M. Disch’s The Ruins of Earth.

4. Occam’s razor, “the simplest explanation is most likely the right one,” at Wikipedia.

5. For some reason or another I had it in my head that Robert Silverberg started writing more literary and experimental work in the mid to late 1960s, but I see from the author’s introduction to In Entropy’s Jaws (in the collection Something is Loose) that it was later:

This is a story that I began in January, 1970 and finished, after taking a little break for a winter holiday in a warmer place than the one in which I lived, early in March of that year. It was written at a time when I was still reasonably comfortable with the conventions of science fiction and had not yet entered into the period of literary and personal chaos that would complicate my life from 1973 or so through the early 1980s. And so I blithely tackled this long, complex, challenging story, which moves among changing levels of ureality and shifting zones of time, with the sort of confidence that I would later lose and be a long time regaining. I don’t recall much about the genesis of “In Entropy’s Jaws,” only that I wrote it for the second issue of Bob Hoskins’ paperback anthology, Infinity. Hoskins, a long-time science-fiction figure whom I had known glancingly for many years, paid me well and gave me a free hand artistically, a combination that–not too surprisingly–I found irresistible, and so I did a story for each of the five issues of his anthology that appeared between 1970 and 1973. Some of my best work, too.

6. The illustrations for Clarke’s story in Playboy magazine:

The official Playboy archive is here.

7. When we did this story as a group read the speculation was that Rob was Ted White and Leigh was Lee Hoffman.

8. The Whole Earth Catalog for 1968 can be viewed at the Internet Archive.

9. Is humanity making progress? That’s what the data says: from around 04:30 here. All of Steven Pinker’s lecture is worth watching, and I learned lots (including the fact that the average person spends fifteen hours a week doing housework—which is presumably why I live in a pig sty).

10. Andrew Marvell’s poem To His Coy Mistress. Le Guin’s story title comes from the couplet “My vegetable love should grow, Vaster than empires and more slow”. The story echoes the elongated sense of time portrayed in the poem.

11. Jim Harris has a blog piece, What Makes a Great SF Story?, that shows how the beginning of Le Guin’s Vaster Than Empires was revised for book publication.

12. Other ‘Bar SF’ series include Arthur C. Clarke’s ‘Tales From the White Hart’ and Spider Robinson’s ‘Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon’. The Clarke, being British, is probably ‘Pub SF’ rather than ‘Bar SF’.

13. If you want a better idea of how this book measures up against what I might pick for a 1971 ‘Year’s Best’, or learn what other anthologists chose for their books, look at the table below (this is the same one which will appear at the end of the review of the Wollheim, Pohl, del Rey, and Harrison & Aldiss 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 Lester Del Rey’s choices with an ‘x’.
The ‘W’ column lists Donald Wollheim’s choices with an ‘x’.
The ‘P’ column lists Frederik Pohl’s choices with an ‘x’.
The ‘A’ column lists HArry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss’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 1971’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 compilation is statistically invalid, but it will give you something to aim at. Enjoy.

Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories 1971

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

ABY, Abyss; AMZ, Amazing Stories; ANA, Analog; ATM, All The Myriad Ways; BET, Being There; CAN, Cancerqueen and Other Stories; CLA, Clarion; CYF, Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?; DAG, De achtjaarlijkse god; ECO, Eco-Fiction; FOU, Four Futures; FSF, Fantasy and Science Fiction; GAL, Galaxy; IN4, Infinity #4; N19, New Writings in SF #19; ND1, New Dimensions #1; NW1, New Worlds Quarterly #1; NW2, New Worlds Quarterly #2; NYT, New York Times; OR8, Orbit #8; OR9, Orbit #9; PLA, Playboy; PRO, Protostars; QU4, Quark #4; TNL, The National Lampoon; TMW, The Many Worlds of Science Fiction; TNY, The New Yorker; UN1, Universe #1; WOI, Worlds of If.

* The ‘O’ (Other) recommendations column will be added as and when. ●