Summary:
A mixed bag that won’t satisfy the traditional SF audience or a more progressive one. The former will probably not appreciate the stories from Bartheleme, Auerbach, Landolfi, etc., and the latter will dislike the Clarke, Blish, Burhoe, etc. If you’ve read the Carr ‘Best of the Year,’ I wouldn’t bother with this one.
[ISFDB page][Archive.org copy]

Other reviews:¹
Charlie Brown, Locus, #129 December 15, 1972
Dave Hartwell, Locus, #130 December 29, 1972
P. Schuyler Miller, Analog, May 1973

_____________________

Editors, Harry Harrison & Brian W. Aldiss

Fiction:²
Doctor Zombie and His Little Furry Friends • short story by Robert Sheckley ∗∗∗+
Conquest • short story by Barry N. Malzberg ∗
Gehenna • short story by Barry N. Malzberg ∗
A Meeting with Medusa • novelette by Arthur C. Clarke ∗∗∗∗∗
The Genius • short story by Donald Barthelme ∗
Angouleme • short story by Thomas M. Disch ∗∗
If “Hair” Were Revived in 2016 • short story by Arnold M. Auerbach ∗
Statistician’s Day • short story by James Blish ∗∗
The Science Fiction Horror Movie Pocket Computer • short story by Gahan Wilson ∗
The Hunter at His Ease • short story by Brian W. Aldiss ∗∗
The Cohen Dog Exclusion Act • short story by Steven Schrader ∗∗∗+
Gantlet • short story by Richard E. Peck ∗∗
The Pagan Rabbi • novelette by Cynthia Ozick ∗∗∗+
 (Untitled) • short story by Tommaso Landolfi –
An Uneven Evening • short story by Steve Herbst ∗
Ornithanthropus • short story by B. Alan Burhoe ∗∗∗+
No Direction Home • short story by Norman Spinrad ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Introduction • by Harry Harrison
Report • poem by Kingsley Amis
Fisherman • poem by Lawrence Sail
The Ideal Police State • poem by Charles Baxter
Afterword: A Day in the Life-Style of. . . • by Brian W. Aldiss

_____________________

Following on from my review³ of Terry Carr’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year #1 is another 1971 ‘Best SF of the Year’ entry, this time from Harry Harrison (Aldiss, although credited, is only a European scout). Harrison, as we shall see, emulates Judith Merril by presenting a random grab-bag of stories that are presumably meant to show how the 1970’s SF field was diversifying—diverse in this case meaning literary styles and subject matter as well as work taken from outside the genre (as opposed to today’s “diverse” which usually means politically left-wing and/or female and/or LGBQT and/or POC material).
That said, the volume gets off to a good start with Doctor Zombie and His Little Furry Friends by Robert Sheckley (Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?, 1971), which has an interesting opening passage:

I think I am fairly safe here. I live at present in a small apartment northeast of the Zocalo, in one of the oldest parts of Mexico City. As a foreigner, my inevitable first impression is how like Spain this country seems, and how different it really is. In Madrid the streets are a maze which draws you continually deeper, toward hidden centers with tedious, well-guarded secrets. Concealment of the commonplace is surely a heritage of the Moors. Whereas Mexican streets are an inverted labyrinth which leads outward toward the mountains, toward openness, toward revelations which remain forever elusive. Nothing is concealed; but nothing in Mexico is comprehensible. This is the way of the Indians, past and present—a defense based upon permeability; a transparent defense like that of the sea anemone.
I find this style profound and compatible. I conform to insight born in Tenochtitlan or Tlaxcala; I conceal nothing, and thus contrive to hide everything.  p. 14

Although the story is ostensibly concerned with Doctor Zombie and the hybrid creatures he breeds in his small rented house, the focus is the local area and its characters:

I claim to be a scholar on extended leave from my university. I tell them that I am writing a book about the Toltecs, a book in which I will collate evidence of a cultural linkage between that mysterious race and the Incas.
“Yes, gentlemen, I expect that my book will create quite a stir in Heidelberg and Bonn. There are vested interests which will be offended. Attempts will doubtless be made to represent me as a crank. My theory, you see, could shake the entire world of pre-Columbian studies . . .”
I had prepared the above personality before coming to Mexico. I read Stephens, Prescott, Vaillant, Alfonso Caso. I even went to the trouble of copying out the first third of Dreyer’s discredited thesis on cultural diffusion, in which he postulates a Mayan-Toltec cultural exchange. That gave me an opus of some eighty handwritten pages which I could claim as my own. The unfinished manuscript was my excuse for being in Mexico. Anyone could glance at the erudite pages scattered over my desk and see for himself what sort of man I was.
I thought that would suffice; but I hadn’t allowed for the dynamism inherent in my role. Senor Ortega, my grocer, is also interested in pre-Columbian studies, and is disturbingly knowledgeable. Senor Andrade, the barber, was born in a pueblo within five miles of the ruins of Teotihuacan. And little Jorge Silverio, the shoeshine boy whose mother works in a tortilleria, dreams of attending a great university, and asks me very humbly if I might use my influence at Bonn . . .
I am the victim of my neighbors’ expectations. I have become their professor, not mine. Because of them I must spend endless hours at the National Museum of Anthropology, and waste whole days at Teotihuacan, Tula, Xochicalco.
My neighbors force me to work hard at my scholarly pursuit. And I have become quite literally what I purported to be: an expert, possessed of formidable knowledge, more than a little mad.  p. 17-18

It is only in the back half of the story that we learn (spoiler) about Doctor Zombie’s plan to release his hybrids in an attempt to control the human population, and to stop mankind exterminating other species.
This is a pretty good mash-up of literary and mad-scientist stories, and an interesting (and more unusually, entertaining) example of seventies eco-fiction.

•

Harrison includes two stories by Barry N. Malzberg in this volume, the first of which is Conquest (New Dimensions #1, 1971). This tells of a man called Redleaf sent to conduct negotiations with an alien visitor. When he arrives, Redleaf finds an alien who sounds like a high-pressure salesman:

What we want you to do is to brief up, take a load off your minds, join our federation, turn in the heavy weaponry and live good. You can keep the rockets of course, that’s fine. And you can have the whole solar system as a trade zone. There’s nothing really worthwhile to us in it; we consider it a sort of ghetto area if you dig what I’m saying. You wouldn’t see us for eons and eons. But the weaponries gotta go. We can defuse them for you easy.”  p. 27

As well as the negotiations there is some domestic flashback about Redleaf’s wife. Eventually (spoiler), Redleaf shoots the alien. I couldn’t see the point of this.
The second story Gehenna (Galaxy, March 1971) starts with Edward meeting Julie at a party, and later marrying her after she jilts her boyfriend. After a short section touching on the birth of their child and domestic life, she (spoiler) commits suicide.
The second and third sections are alternate takes on the lives of the three characters: in the second the husband kills himself; in the third the jilted boyfriend suicides. A short fourth section is told from the viewpoint of Edward and Julie’s child. Although this is interesting enough, the individual strands do not cohere or make any point.

•

The Genius by Donald Barthelme (The New Yorker, February 1971) is a satirical and slightly surreal story about the life and thoughts of a genius. I suspect the only reason it is here is because it is from a famous mainstream/literary writer.

•

Angouleme by Thomas M. Disch (New Worlds Quarterly #1, 1971) is from his ‘334’ series, which is set in a near-future New York. The story itself concerns a group of (unconvincingly) precocious seventh-graders and their plot, suggested by their leader, Little Mister Kissy Lips, to murder one of the vagrants that frequent Battery Park:

He loved, and what seventh grader doesn’t, the abstracter foxtrots and more metaphysical twists of a Dostoevsky, a Gide, a Mailer. He longed for the experience of some vivider pain than the mere daily hollowness knotted into his tight young belly, and no weekly stomp-and-holler of group therapy with other jejune eleven-year-olds was going to get him his stripes in the major leagues of suffering, crime and resurrection. Only a bona fide crime would do that, and of all the crimes available murder certainly carried the most prestige, as no less an authority than Loretta Couplard was ready to attest, Loretta Couplard being not only the director and co-owner of the Lowen School but the author, as well, of two nationally televised scripts, both about famous murders of the twentieth century. They’d even done a unit in social studies on the topic: A History of Crime in Urban America.  p. 91

As you can perhaps gather from the passage above, the story is written in a voice that is more mainstream, descriptive, and better characterised than the run-of-the-mill SF of the time. If you are happy with this alone then you’ll probably enjoy the story—but the idea of precocious and bored child-killers never really flies, and the piece has a (spoiler) decidedly anti-climactic ending. A mixed bag.⁴

•

If “Hair” Were Revived in 2016 by Arnold M. Auerbach (The New York Times, 1971) is a one page review of a 45^th anniversary revival of Hair, the musical. You may crack a half-smile or two but it’s minor stuff.

•

Statistician’s Day by James Blish (Science Against Man, 1970) is set in a near future world that has instituted population control after “the fearful world famine of 1980.” The story opens with a man called Wiberg, supposedly a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, arriving at the house of Edmund Darling to interview him. However, we get an early hint that this is not the case (after some scene setting about the house and the surrounding English countryside) when there is a reference to Darling’s obituary, which is “not due to be published for nearly a year.”
When the two men meet the story’s gimmick becomes apparent:

“Are you,” the novelist said, “only the advance man for the executioner, or are you the executioner himself?”
Wiberg managed an uncertain laugh. “I’m afraid I don’t understand the question, sir.”
In point of fact, he understood it perfectly. What he did not understand was how Darling had come by enough information to have been able to frame it. For ten years, the chief secret of PopCon had been extremely well kept.  p. 113-114

Darling then explains to Wiberg that (spoiler) his research into the mortality statistics has led him to conclude that the government is secretly controlling the size of the world’s population by planning the deaths of people in various groups and professions. At this point, any suspension of disbelief I had quickly vanished—the idea that any government would have the competence to undertake such an extensive task and keep it secret makes this the silliest story I’ve read for some time. That said, it’s improved by the biter bit ending, so if you can park your brain for a while you’ll probably find this okay.

•

The Science Fiction Horror Movie Pocket Computer by Gahan Wilson (The National Lampoon, November 1971) isn’t a story but a short introduction and flow-chart for the plots of formulaic SF movies. I didn’t think this worth four pages in a SF magazine, never mind a ‘Best of the Year’ anthology.

•

The Hunter at His Ease by Brian W. Aldiss (Science Against Man, 1970) begins with its protagonist Yale surveying part of an island in the Indian Ocean that is to become a “speck-bomb” airbase. Then he is clubbed into unconsciousness by one of the local creoles.
When Yale comes around later on he finds he is the village chief’s hut. The latter, Mr Archipeligo, has taken Yale from his attackers, the Hakabele brothers, and has sent for help. While Yale waits to be picked up we learn about the local political situation (some of the locals are opposed the construction of the airbase) and the global one (there is mention of limited nuclear conflict in parts of the globe). We also learn that Yale has had his wrist terminal for the “Global Information Network,” presumably a proto-internet, stolen.
When a hovercraft eventually arrives to collect Yale, we are introduced to van Viner, one of the story’s other main characters. The man is belligerent towards Archipelago, and threatens to attack the village with helicopters if he doesn’t arrange the handover of the brothers responsible for Yale’s abduction.
Later, back at base, Yale and van Viner argue about what they should do next:

The pigeon curry came in. As they seated themselves, van Viner said, “They clobbered you, right? They must be taught they can’t do that to a white man and get away with it.”
“You can’t expect them to want us here. We’re not only wrecking their island, we’re building an installation to be used against their kind on the mainland.”
“Let’s go hunting the Hakabeles! Use nerve gas—we’ve got plenty of it. Give everyone a scare!”
“Mister Archipeligo will persuade them to hand themselves over to us.”
“They’re all the lousy same! I’d kill the lot! Archipeligo told them to attack you, crafty black sod!”
“Aren’t you forgetting he’s half-Irish—a product of the last white invasion here in the eighties?”
“Wipe the lot off the face of the map! World Government’s too scared. If my brother was alive—did I ever tell you Herman killed the last blue whale in existence? Down in the Antarctic, that was. It’s extinct now. The Aussies put a price on Herman’s head, but you think that bothered my brother? He’d have killed an Aussie soon as look at him!” He burst into laughter and opened another beer, washing down forks-full of curry between his shouts of mirth. “He was a right one, my brother Herman—wouldn’t stand nonsense from any man!”  p. 136

The story comes to a climax when (spoiler) the brothers sneak into the base to see Yale. There is an argument about the construction project and how it will destroy the local tribe’s way of life before Yale pulls a gun on the pair of them. However, when Yale is distracted by someone walking past the window, he shoots at them. Then Vine intervenes with nerve gas.
The story’s epilogue take place at the funeral of Archipeligo (who was the one walking past the window), and Yale learns that he killed him.
In conclusion, this is a bit of a mixed bag: it’s rather gloomy, and there is probably too much packed into the story’s short length. Apart from its examination of the disruption of indigenous populations’ lives by external forces (presumably based on the Diego Garcia clearances of the late 1960s and 1970s⁵), and the cold war/hot war in the background, there is also a hologram conversation between Yale and his adapted daughter that briefly limns an adapted Martian environment. And there are various philosophical asides here and there as well. An interesting piece but, again, one that does not cohere particularly well into a larger whole.

•

The Cohen Dog Exclusion Act by Steven Schrader (Eco-Fiction, 1971) is, and I don’t believe I’m saying this, an ‘If this goes on’ story about the increasing amount of dog poo in the street:

Conditions grew worse. Wherever you looked there was dog shit. In the morning young ladies who had moved to the renovated brownstones on my block walked their German shepherds on the sidewalk, in the curb, and the center of the street. Some of the dogs were unleashed, all of them sniffing away, peeing and shitting. The owners gossiped to one another, and some men, I’m sure, bought dogs for the sole purpose of meeting girls. I thought of it myself, could imagine smooth conversations with them while our dogs took craps at our feet. But I’m not a hypocrite. I can’t hide my feelings. I don’t understand how people can chat casually while their dogs shit all around them.  p. 145

I found this quite funny, but I suspect it depends on your attitude to scatological humour.

•

Gantlet by Richard E. Peck (Orbit 10, 1972) is a future eco-disaster story that has the narrator taking his turn to drive an armoured and armed train from “City” to “Workring.” To do this they gave to go through “Opensky,” an outdoor area where a violent underclass live in polluted conditions.
This is mostly a polluted Earth travelogue; there is not much plot.

•

The Pagan Rabbi by Cynthia Ozick (The Pagan Rabbi, 1966) is a dense Jewish fantasy that begins with one of two Jewish boys who grew up together learning of the suicide of the other. We learn that Isaac Kornfeld, the dead man, had a successful life and had become a rabbi.
The narrator first goes to the site of the suicide, a tree beside a polluted bay, before going to speak to Sheindel, Kornfeld’s widow (who the narrator once loved). She tells him of Kornfeld’s secret habits, the family’s trips to the countryside with the children, and the strange fairy tales he told:

“I think he was never a Jew,” she said.
I wondered whether Isaac’s suicide had unbalanced her.
“I’ll tell you a story,” she resumed. “A story about stories. These were the bedtime stories Isaac told Naomi and Esther: about mice that danced and children who laughed. When Miriam came he invented a speaking cloud. With Ophra it was a turtle that married a blade of withered grass. By Leah’s time the stones had tears for their leglessness. Rebecca cried because of a tree that turned into a girl and could never grow colors again in autumn.  p. 174

We also learn that Kornfeld had purchased a number books about plants, and that he kept a notebook, which the narrator is given:

“I am writing at dusk sitting on a stone in Trilham’s Inlet Park, within sight of Trilham’s Inlet, a bay to the north of the city, and within two yards of a slender tree, Quercus velutina, the age of which, should one desire to measure it, can be ascertained by (God forbid) cutting the bole and counting the rings. The man writing is thirty-five years old and aging too rapidly, which may be ascertained by counting the rings under his poor myopic eyes.” Below this, deliberate and readily more legible than the rest, appeared three curious words:
.
Great Pan lives.
.
That was all. In a day or so I returned the notebook to Sheindel. I told myself that she had seven orphans to worry over, and repressed my anger at having been cheated.
She was waiting for me. “I am so sorry, there was a letter in the notebook, it had fallen out. I found it on the carpet after you left.”  p. 178-179

The long letter that Isaac left for his wife forms much of the rest of the story. In this the narrator learns about Kornfeld’s theories that every living thing has a spirit, but only in humans is it contained and not free to roam. Then Kornfeld (spoiler) gives an account of how he manages to conjure a dryad from the tree he later hangs himself from.
In a passage about the joy of the different kind of life and love he experiences with the dryad there is a sense of transcendence not unlike that you get in more conventional SF stories.
The story lost me a little at the end, however, when Kornfeld discovers that, while he has been enjoying his tryst with the dryad, his soul has freed itself from his body, something he discovers when he finds his body walking along while reading a religious text. His body is oblivious to the natural world that surrounds it, as per the opening quotation at the beginning of the story:

Rabbi Jacob said: “He who is walking along
and studying, but then breaks off to remark,
‘How lovely is that tree!’ or ‘How beautiful is that
fallow field!’— Scripture regards such a one
as having hurt his own being.”  p. 165

I’m not entirely sure what this last part (and the quotation) tells us, but I suspect it is related to Rabbinical law⁶ (there are earlier references to “fences”) and proscriptions against forsaking one’s spiritual life for the physical world.
I said in my opening comments that this is a dense piece, and the account I’ve given so far only scratches the surface of what is here. Much of the story’s length concerns Jewish society and religion, and the characters’ relationships: it is both an ethnic and literary piece of writing. I suspect readers’ reactions will depend on both their tolerance of mainstream work, and of finding fantasy in what appears to be a science fiction collection (not to mention a 1966 story in a 1971 volume!) Personally I found it an interesting piece (and certainly one that would reward re-reading), and I’d include it in my own ‘Best Fantasy of the Year’.

•

(Untitled) by Tommaso Landolfi (Cancerqueen, 1971) is a short fragment that has two woman outside a building talking about their bodies as they queue for an unknown procedure. This reminded me of the type of pointless chaff that you used to get in the later large-size issues of New Worlds.

•

 An Uneven Evening by Steve Herbst (Clarion, 1971) has as its protagonist Peter, a man dissatisfied with both his wife and himself. After he makes this observation in the opening paragraphs of the story his friends pick him up to go to the pool hall. En route it becomes apparent that they aren’t going there but are going “torming” instead. Peter has no idea what they are talking about, but keeps quiet.
The rest of the story involves a description of their night, during which we discover that torming involves diving down magnetic tubes (wearing a repelling harness) and trying to avoid hitting the sides.
His ignorance isn’t explained, but there is a mild ironic twist at the end concerning his wife’s knowledge of this strange pastime. Presumably this is meant to distract from the lack of explanation.

•

Ornithanthropus by B. Alan Burhoe (If, November-December 1971) gets off to a great start with a clan of winged humans abandoning their “sky-hunter,” a huge gas-balloon beast that is their home. It is dying, and they watch from a distance as it eventually suicides by igniting the hydrogen in its bladders.
The rest of the story is more routine, and we learn that this is taking place on a colony planet called Pishkun, which has a single antigravity city called Starport where unmodified humans live.
Some of the occupants of Starport (called “fangs”) turn up in their anti-grav packs while Schadow (the leader of the winged people) is trying to tame another sky-hunter to provide a home for his clan. After a three-way stand-off (spoiler), Schadow realises that the fangs can’t see the thermal air currents like he can, so he leads them to the downdrafts at the cliffs, and their deaths. He gets the sky-hunter.
This has a fairly thin plot, but it’s a colourful piece of off-world adventure.

•

I’ve previously reviewed the Clarke and Spinrad stories in the Carr volume post but have cut-and-pasted them in here for the convenience of those who haven’t read them yet (and for those who still haven’t managed to get to sleep).
A Meeting with Medusa by Arthur C. Clarke (Playboy, December 1971)⁷ 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.

•

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

•••

The Introduction by Harry Harrison, written as it was in the months after John W. Campbell’s death at the end of 1971, begins with a eulogy:

It is not an exaggeration to say that his death—as did his life—had worldwide impact. An obituary issue of the fanzine Locus containing tributes from the many writers who knew him was published in New York. John W. Campbell: An Australian Tribute was published in Australia, where two Melbourne groups also organized a John W. Campbell Symposium that was held in the Classics Theatre at Melbourne University. In England the Science Fiction Foundation has arranged the publication of a collection of the best stories of John Campbell, who was a respected author as well as editor.
In the United States a memorial volume consisting of new stories and articles by the writers who worked with him through the years is being prepared. Science fiction will continue, but an era is over.  p. 10

The rest of the piece covers various subjects, including the increasing number of original anthologies coming on the market, college SF courses, mention of the genre in mainstream publications and its increasing worldwide reach, the titling of the volume, and excuses/reasons for the non-1971 items. Harrison finishes by noting the story choices are all his and that Aldiss’s role is was as a British and European scout.

•

There are three poems included in this volume: Report by Kingsley Amis has a not bad ending, Fisherman by Lawrence Sail has a good image at the end but not much more, and The Ideal Police State by Charles Baxter is (I guess) a political poem about the police or police brutality. Plus ça change . . .

•

Afterword: A Day in the Life-Style of. . . by Brian W. Aldiss closes the volume with an essay that, like the Harrison, covers a number of subjects. He starts with a bit of futurology (the rise of credit cards and the death of cash) before moving on to the increasing amount of SF available:

Time was, in a simpler world, when a reader could easily read all the SF being published. Such a reader would probably consider that the only SF worthy of the name appeared in pulp magazines, and those were what he would read and collect. The typical fan, now middle-aged, was such a reader and probably maintains some such collection of pulp magazines still—a hoard increasing in financial worth even as the paper decreases in physical viability. Complete collections of all the American SF magazines (ninety-one titles in all) fetch about $8,500 or $9,000 and go to big libraries.
Nowadays a contemporary private SF library is much more likely to contain paperbacks, plus maybe one of the few surviving SF magazines—Analog, say, or F&SF. Paperbacks now publish much of the field’s original material. It is also true to add that, demand being what it is, they publish nearly as much junk as did the old magazines, for the presses must be kept rolling.  p. 243

No doubt Aldiss would make the same comment about the free online stories that are everywhere today. He goes on to make a comment about the newer (circa 1971) writers in the field that is equally as pertinent now:

Many of the stories in the Clarion anthology are not concerned directly with science. It seems to me that they are often directly concerned with life-style, which, like drugs, Jesus, and pollution, has become one of the great or at least trendy topics of our day.  p. 244

He then goes on to examine older (1927-30) lifestyle work by writers in Russia’s Lost Literature of the Absurd, edited by George Giban, before wandering back to the SF field and commenting on a number of current works, such as James Blish’s The Day after Judgement—which he discusses at length. He dismisses several other books, including Keith Roberts’ The Inner Wheel, “whose otiose mixture of telepathy and English teashops offers as much intellectual fare as an old macaroon.”
Aldiss ends with a bit more futurology. His essay very much mirrors the anthology: rambling, esoteric, and partisan.

•••

In conclusion, this collection is not only wildly uneven but appears to be directed at no specific audience. I can’t see those who like Clarke’s story also liking the Batheleme, Auerbach, Landolfi, Wilson, etc. stories, and vice versa (that is if there are any people who like the latter—apart from the fact that these aren’t to my taste, I have doubts about their quality). If you’ve already read the Carr volume, I don’t think this one is worth your time; if you haven’t, then it may be.⁸  ●

_____________________

1. 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, F&SF, Worlds of Fantasy or Worlds of Tomorrow magazines in this collection.
In the poll (small sample size) that we did after our group read, these were the results for the people’s favourite stories (click on image for larger size):

3. My review of Terry Carr’s Best Science Fiction of the Year #1 can be found here.

4. The rest of the 334 series (collected as the novel/collection, 334, in 1972) at ISFDB. I recall the novella 334 was better than Angouleme, and Bodies, a very good piece of black comedy, better than both.
The completely unrelated cover on the edition I bought:

5. The Wikipedia page for Diego Garcia is here.

6. Rabbinic Fences are discussed here.

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

The official Playboy archive is here.

8. 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. ●