Summary:
This is a disappointing follow-up to Carr’s debut, with around half the stories not up to ‘Best of the Year’ standard: Carr seems to have a penchant for work without a decent plot or other arc that provides structure or a point.
The best material comes from Joe Haldeman and Gene Wolfe (the novellas Hero and The Fifth Head of Cerberus), Ben Bova and William Rotsler (the novelettes Zero Gee and Patron of the Arts), and Robert Silverberg (the short story, When We Went to See the End of The World).
There is also good work from C. M. Kornbluth & Frederik Pohl, Naomi Mitchison, and James Tiptree Jr—and a decidedly peculiar introduction by Terry Carr.
[ISFDB page]

Other reviews:¹
Cy Chauvin, Amazing, March 1975 p. 117
David G. Hartwell, Locus, #153, 30^th December 1973
P. Schuyler Miller, Analog, December 1973, p. 165
Uncredited, Vertex, December 1973, p. 11

_____________________

Editor, Terry Carr

Fiction:²
The Meeting • short story by C. M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl ∗∗∗
Nobody’s Home • short story by Joanna Russ ∗
Fortune Hunter • short story by Poul Anderson ∗∗
The Fifth Head of Cerberus • novella by Gene Wolfe ∗∗∗+
Caliban • short story by Robert Silverberg ∗∗∗
Conversational Mode • short story by Grahame Leman ∗∗
Their Thousandth Season • short story by Edward Bryant ∗∗
Eurema’s Dam • short story by R. A. Lafferty ∗∗
Zero Gee • novelette by Ben Bova ∗∗∗+
Sky Blue • short story by Alexei Panshin and Cory Panshin ∗
Miss Omega Raven • short story by Naomi Mitchison ∗∗∗
Patron of the Arts • novelette by William Rotsler ∗∗∗∗
Grasshopper Time • short story by Gordon Eklund ∗∗
Hero • novella by Joe Haldeman ∗∗∗∗
When We Went to See the End of the World • short story by Robert Silverberg ∗∗∗+
Painwise • novelette by James Tiptree, Jr. ∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Honorable Mentions • by Terry Carr
Introduction • by Terry Carr

_____________________

The Meeting by C. M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl (F&SF, November 1972)³ initially seems like a mainstream story, opening as it does with Harry Vladek attending a PTA meeting at a special school his son attends for his psychological and developmental problems. Here he talks to several of the other parents about their children and the school. and then the meeting commences:

Mrs. Adler was tapping her desk with a ruler. “I think everybody who is coming is here,” she said. She leaned against the desk and waited for the room to quiet down. She was short, dark, plump and surprisingly pretty. She did not look at all like a competent professional. She looked so unlike her role that, in fact, Harry’s heart had sunk three months ago when their correspondence about admitting Tommy had been climaxed by the long trip from Elmira for the interview. He had expected a steel-gray lady with rimless glasses, a Valkyrie in a white smock like the nurse who had held wriggling, screaming Tommy while waiting for the suppository to quiet him down for his first EEG, a dishevelled old fraud, he didn’t know what.
Anything except this pretty young woman. Another blind alley, he had thought in despair. Another, after a hundred too many already. First, “Wait for him to outgrow it.” He doesn’t. Then, “We must reconcile yourselves to God’s will.” But you don’t want to. Then give him the prescription three times a day for three months. And it doesn’t work. Then chase around for six months with the Child Guidance Clinic to find out it’s only letterheads and one circuit-riding doctor who doesn’t have time for anything.
Then, after four dreary, weepy weeks of soul-searching, the State Training School, and find out it has an eight-year waiting list. Then the private custodial school, and find they’re fifty-five hundred dollars a year without medical treatment!—and where do you get fifty-five hundred dollars a year? And all the time everybody warns you, as if you didn’t know it: “Hurry! Do something! Catch it early! This is the critical stage! Delay is fatal!” And then this soft-looking little woman; how could she do anything?
She had rapidly shown him how. She had questioned Margaret and Harry incisively, turned to Tommy, rampaging through that same room like a rogue bull, and turned his rampage into a game. In three minutes he was happily experimenting with an indestructible old windup cabinet Victrola, and Mrs. Adler was saying to the Vladeks, “Don’t count on a miracle cure. There isn’t any. But improvements, yes, and I think we can help Tommy.”
Perhaps she had, thought Vladek bleakly. Perhaps she was helping as much as anyone ever could.  p. 5

The story pivots in the final section, when Vladek returns home and his wife tells him to phone Dr Nicholson. During the subsequent conversation we learn that Nicholson—mentioned earlier—is not connected with the school but is (spoiler) a surgeon offering to transplant the brain from an child who has been badly injured in a car accident—and who won’t survive—into their son. After the call the couple go upstairs to watch their son sleeping in his crib before they make their decision.
The choice most readers would make here is the obvious non-eugenics one, i.e. do not proceed with the operation—but they don’t have to deal with the burden of a child like Tommy (as Kornbluth did⁴), and may not realise that there is a Trolley Problem here (whatever choice is made, a child dies, so opting for the status quo isn’t necessarily any better than going ahead with the switch). I must admit it messed with my head for a while until I thought it through and decided on the status quo, largely based on the idea that people shouldn’t have to shoulder the burden of another’s bad luck (or at least not to a life-altering extent).
This is a thought-provoking piece, and I suspect John W. Campbell would loved to use this one in Analog to push his readers’ buttons.

•

Nobody’s Home by Joanna Russ (New Dimensions #2, 1972) opens with the story’s female protagonist Janina meeting a friend in the middle of a series of teleport booth jumps. We learn from their conversation that this future not only has teleportation, but enhanced intelligence and polygamous group marriage.
After the pair finish talking Janina continues on to her group home, where we are introduced to her family members (which include their unrealistically precocious children). Some of the family teleport in from around the world as she catches up on the family gossip, but most of the conversations are utterly vacuous:

“The best maker of hand-blown glass in the world,” said Chi, “has killed in a duel the second-best maker of handblown glass in the world.”
“For joining the movement to ceramics,” said Use, awed. Jannina felt a thrill: this was the bitter stuff under the surface of life, the fury that boiled up. A bitter struggle is foreseen in the global economy. Good old tax-issue stuff goes toddling along, year after year. She was, thought Jannina, extraordinarily grateful to be living now, to be in such an extraordinary world, to have so long to go before her death. So much to do!  p. 24

Presumably this is one of the aspects of this future society that is alluded to in the title—that, and the fact everyone seems to be perpetually travelling.
What little complication the story has arrives in the form of a new family member called Leslie Smith, who does not have enhanced intelligence, and is socially clumsy. When she joins them for dinner that evening it does not go well.
At this point I was puzzled as to the point the story was attempting to make—and then it lost me completely by ending with Janina telling one of the children a creation myth. Mystifying.⁵

•

Fortune Hunter by Poul Anderson (Infinity #4, 1972) is set in the near future, and has a media creator (“sensies”) coming to the end of an assignment in one of the few remaining natural spaces in this future overpopulated Earth. He doesn’t want to leave, so he plans to seduce one of the female rangers who comes to his temporary shelter for dinner. He hopes that, if he is successful, they will marry and he can stay on as her assistant. His plan fails.
The last part of the story sees him at home in the violent and overpopulated city where he lives with his wife. When the couple watch the footage he has taken in the park they see that it isn’t his best work. He explains that he was “too involved in the reality.” but privately realises that he was distracted by his plan to marry the ranger and discard his wife.
This is okay, but the protagonist’s plan isn’t convincing, and it’s essentially another gloomy early-70s eco-disaster story.

•

The Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe (Orbit #10, 1972) is a story that is highly regarded by some,⁶ perhaps because it is an early genre example of literary fiction (I’ve seen a more specific reference to Gothic fiction) fused with SF. In service of the former the story is set on the colony planet Sainte Croix (which has a sister planet, Sainte Anne), a place that feels like a slightly steampunk version of French Indochina—many of the place names are French, there are references to past “French-speaking days,” there is slavery (including a trade in children), and there are robotic machines as well as human lamplighters. All very decadent. (And, although much of this suggests a connection to the Vietnam War—ongoing at the time of the story’s publication—this doesn’t appear to be the case.)
There are also multiple literary (Virginia Woolf, etc.) and mythological (Cerberus, the Styx, etc.) references in the text, and a significant lack of fast genre thrills—if anything, the text demands the reader’s full attention for the images or passages that suggest much more that is immediately apparent.
The story itself largely relates the childhood memories of the narrator (he is later identified as “Number Five” by his father) who, with his brother David, lives in a bordello called La Maison du Chien (on account of the statue of Cerberus, the three-headed dog outside the property), both of whom are tutored by a cybernetic machine called Mr Millions.
After some establishing scenes with Mr Millions—the lessons with him take place against the backdrop of their house and the town library, and include hints about shape-shifting aboriginals on the sister planet Sainte Anne (who may or may not have learned how to mimic humans and may or may not be extinct)—the boys are individually summoned by their rather distant father late one evening for the first of a long series of interviews.
While these (mostly offstage) interviews are in progress other events take place, such as the night where Five sneaks up onto the roof of the bordello and hides from a party of patrons watching a fireworks display. There he is caught by an elderly woman who seemingly floats above the ground (we later find she uses an anti-gravity unit to help with an unspecified disability), and she takes him below to her office to question him (she descends down the centre of a circular stairway at one point). When they talk Five discovers that she is his aunt and, in among some conversation about their family, they discuss Veil’s Hypothesis (this posits that the inhabitants of Sainte Croix are descendants of aboriginals from Saint Anne who mimicked humans). After seeing an old photo (perplexingly so) of his mother, he returns to his room. That night his father injects him with drugs before he is questioned, something that is the norm thereafter.
Following a number of subsequent drug-fuelled interviews Five has a temporal fugue, and awakes one day to find it is winter, and that he is in poor health (the constant use of drugs has affected him badly).
Five then meets a girl in the park called Phaedria, whom he befriends (we later learn she is destined for “marriage or sale”). At the same time his father talks to him about his inheritance and scientific inclinations, and tells Five that he will in future answer the door of the their establishment. Then (spoiler), a visitor from Earth called Marsch arrives at the bordello, looking for a “Dr Veil” (of Veil’s Hypothesis). Five realises from Marsch’s conversational comments that he, Five, may be a clone, and also that his aunt is Dr Veil! He also learns that Mr Million is a “ten nine unbound simulator”—a machine that can host a copy of a human brain (Mr Million later reveals to Five he is a copy of his great-grandfather, who died during the imaging required to make this copy of him).
The next long section obliquely reiterates and confirms a lot of the information that has already been hinted at or disclosed, and starts with Phaedria, Five, and David putting on a number of plays in the local town:

[That] is all I can now remember of our first performance, except that at one point some motion of mine suggested to the audience a mannerism of my father’s and there was a shout of misplaced laughter—and that at the beginning of the second act Sainte Anne rose, with its sluggish rivers and great, grassy meadowmeres clearly visible, flooding the audience with green light.  p. 82

(Later, just before Five (spoiler) murders his father/clone—presumably in revenge for the treatment he has suffered—much is made of the greenness of Marsch’s eyes. That said, the aboriginal strand of this story proves something of a red herring, or at least it is in the novella version—I believe the novel’s other two parts are about/narrated by aboriginals).
Five’s fugues subsequently become more frequent, and at one point he awakes from a dream of being in a boat piloted by a dead man (presumably this is Charon and/or his father, and they are on the River Styx) to find himself in the middle of a burglary that he, Phaedria and David have planned to fund their theatrical productions. After working their way down through floors of fighting dogs and slaves, the three get to a strongbox in an office, only to find it guarded by a seemingly sick but surprisingly aggressive four-armed slave. During a fight to overcome him, there is other information (and images) that suggests Five’s true origins:

There is one other thing to tell about that incident—I mean the killing of the slave—although I am tempted to go on and describe instead a discovery I made immediately afterward that had, at the time, a much greater influence on me. It is only an impression, and one that I have, I am sure, distorted and magnified in recollection.
While I was stabbing the slave, my face was very near his and I saw (I suppose because of the light from the high windows behind us) my own face reflected and doubled in the corneas of his eyes, and it seemed to me that it was a face very like his. I have been unable to forget, since then, what Dr. Marsch told me about the production of any number of identical individuals by cloning, and that my father had, when I was younger, a reputation as a child broker. I have tried since my release to find some trace of my mother, the woman in the photograph shown me by my aunt; but that picture was surely taken long before I was born—perhaps even on Earth.  p. 96

There is more of this later on:

A young male, a sweeper, was brought to the [slave] block. His face as well as his back had been scarred by the whip, and his teeth were broken; but I recognized him: the scarred face was my own or my father’s. I spoke to him and would have bought and freed him, but he answered me in the servile way of slaves and I turned away in disgust and went home.
That night when my father had me brought to the library, for the first time in several nights. I watched our reflections in the mirror that concealed the entrance to his laboratories. He looked younger than he was; I older. We might almost have been the same man, and when he faced me and I, staring over his shoulder, saw no image of my own body, but only his arms and mine, we might have been the fighting slave.  pp. 97-98

Eventually the story comes to the anti-climactic murder scene: Five goes to see his father/clone with the intention of killing him but Marsch unexpectedly turns up. During the subsequent conversation there is the revelation that the family has been cloning itself for many years to improve the strain’s “self-knowledge.” Five eventually gets rid of the green-eyed Marsch by accusing him of being an aboriginal (which, given his green eyes, he probably is).
The rest of the story (the murder scene takes place off-stage) is told by the current day Five, who, it turns out, is narrating the story from prison. After nine years he is finally released and goes back to the house, which he has inherited from his aunt.
This latter section, after dodging what would have been the climax in a more conventional story, makes for a pretty flat ending.
In conclusion, I’m not actually sure the above account gives much of an idea of what the story is really like: it is a complex piece whose many layers and subtle clues will reward careful reading. But it also seemed to me quite a nihilistic, violent, and ultimately pointless piece. For all of the heavyweight literary artillery it deploys, the story doesn’t actually seem to say anything concrete about the constantly alluded to issue of identity. Still, well worth a look to experience what is one of the more complex literary SF stories.

•

Caliban by Robert Silverberg (Infinity #3, 1972) sees a man taken from the present into a future where everyone looks the same apart from him:

Let me tell you I felt out of place. I was never touchy about my looks before—I mean, it’s an imperfect world, we all have our flaws—but these bastards didn’t have flaws, and that was a hard acceptance for me to relate to. I thought I was being clever: I said, You’re all multiples of the same gene-pattern, right? Modem advances in medicine have made possible an infinite reduplication of genetic information and the five of you belong to one clone, isn’t that it? And several of them answered, No, this is not the case, we are in fact wholly unrelated but within the last meta-week we have independently decided to standardize our appearance according to the presently favored model. And then three or four more of them came into my room to get a look at me.
[. . .]
In the beginning I kept telling myself: In the country of the beautiful the ugly man is king.  p. 118

Most of the story is about the man’s sexual experiences in this strange future world but, no matter how much various women desire him, he can’t get over the fact that he doesn’t look as perfect as the others. Eventually he convinces his doctors to change him so he looks as perfect as they are but (spoiler) he awakes from the operation to find that everyone has changed to look like him.
A mordantly amusing and ironic (if minor) tale about, I suppose, alienation.

•

Conversational Mode by Grahame Leman (New Writings in SF #20, 1972) is a story in the form of keyboard terminal conversation between a Nobel prize winning scientist who has been committed to an asylum after a nervous breakdown, and a psychotherapeutic program:

where am i?
.
TO START CONVERSATION U MUST ENTER ‘START’ ON THE TERMINAL KEYBOARD AND WAIT FOR THE INSTRUCTION ‘READY’ ON THE DISPLAY AT THE FOOT OF YOUR BED ф
.
Start
.
0321/42 READY ф
.
who are you?
.
HARDWARE IBM 490/80; SOFTWARE JOHN S HOPKINS PSYCHO-THERAPEUTIC PROGRAM XIXB, WRITTEN IN PSYCHLAN VII DIALECT 324 (SEE MANUAL IN YOUR BEDSIDE CUPBOARD); MIDDLEWARE MACHINE-INDEPENDENT OPERATING SYSTEM CALTECH PIDGIN XVIII (SEE MANUAL IN YOUR BEDSIDE CUPBOARD) ф
.
what do i call you?
.
U MAY DECLARE A NAME IN PLACE OF THE STANDARD ‘START’ ENTRY ф TO DECLARE A NAME, ENTER ‘DECLARESTARTNAME:’ FOLLOWED BY A NAME OF NOT MORE THAN TEN CHARACTERS ф
.
declarestartname: boole; query AOK?
.
BOOLE DECLARED AOK ф
.
where am i, boole?  pp. 124-125

.
The back and forth between the patient and the computer (which would have seemed dated before the advent of webchat) gives us some background detail about his world and shows the totalitarian nature of his confinement. It’s okay I guess, but it’s mostly wordplay.

•

Their Thousandth Season by Edward Bryant (Clarion #2, 1972) is one of his ‘Cinnibar’ stories, a series set in a city of the future. This one opens with a number of media types at a party: Tournalmine, a successful actress, Francie, Sternig, etc. Most of the story, in between the various sex scenes, concerns Sternig and Francie’s relationship breakup and (spoiler) how they eventually get back together again—possibly a recurrent event due to the ability of these people to have their memories edited:

“Can’t remember? Or won’t?”
“Can’t,” [Sternig] says. “I think it’s can’t. I’m not really sure. I have my mind sponged periodically. Don’t you?”
Tourmaline nods. “Occasionally. As seldom as I can. I prefer to keep as many memories as possible. Otherwise I tend to repeat my mistakes.”
“In time,” says Sternig, “we all repeat.”
“Some of us more often than others.” She gestures across the hall. “Francie goes to the sponge once a year, maybe more. I suspect her of monthly visits, even weekly.”
“I suppose she doesn’t like her memories,” he says.  p. 151

This is okay, I guess, and, if you are interested in the dysfunctional emotional lives and ennui of jaded near-immortals, you’ll probably like it more than me.

•

Eurema’s Dam by R. A. Lafferty (New Dimensions #2, 1972) is about an idiot savant called Albert, who is a genius inventor:

Even his mother had to admit that Albert was a slow child. What else can you call a boy who doesn’t begin to talk till he is four years old, who won’t learn to handle a spoon till he is six, who can’t operate a doorknob till he is eight? What else can you say about one who put his shoes on the wrong feet and walked in pain? And who had to be told to close his mouth after yawning?  pp. 158-159

We then see the various adventures (and misadventures) Albert has while growing up: he makes a smarter copy of himself called Danny, which goes off with his girlfriend Alice; he solves the problem of smog and teenagers; he makes a hunch machine; and so on.
Eventually he wins the Eurema trophy (named after synthetic Greek goddess of invention) and gives a disconcerting speech:

“Eurema does not look like that!” Albert gawked out and pointed suddenly at the trophy. “No, no, that isn’t her at all. Eurema walks backward and is blind. And her mother is a brainless hulk.”
Everybody was watching him with pained expression. “Nothing rises without a leaven,” Albert tried to explain, “but the yeast is itself a fungus and a disease. You be regularizers all, splendid and supreme. But you cannot live without the irregulars. You will die, and who will tell you that you are dead? When there are no longer any deprived or insufficient, who will invent? What will you do when there are none of us defectives left? Who will leaven your lump then?”
“Are you unwell?” the master of ceremonies asked him quietly. “Should you not make an end of it? People will understand.”
“Of course I’m unwell. Always have been,” Albert said. “What good would I be otherwise? You set the ideal that all should be healthy and well adjusted. No! No! Were we all well-adjusted, we would ossify and die. The world is kept healthy only by some of the unhealthy minds lurking in it. The first implement made by man was not a scraper or celt or stone knife. It was a crutch, and it wasn’t devised by a hale man.”
“Perhaps you should rest,” a functionary said in a low voice, for this sort of rambling nonsense talk had never been heard at an awards dinner before.  pp. 166-167

Eventually his hunch machine suggests to him that, rather than serving mankind, he can take advantage of them.
This Hugo Award co-winner (Best Short Story 1972, along with the Kornbluth & Pohl piece above) is a pleasant enough read, and is occasionally amusing, but it rather drifts to a halt at the end. Perhaps Lafferty’s whimsical story telling is an acquired taste.

•

Zero Gee by Ben Bova (Again, Dangerous Visions, 1972)⁷ is one of his ‘Kinsman’ series of stories featuring the eponymous astronaut, and it opens with a group of Air Force guys and press reporters discussing Kinsman’s forthcoming mission in orbit with an attractive Life magazine photographer:

“I know this mission is strictly for publicity,” Calder said, “but Kinsman? In orbit for three days with Life magazine’s prettiest female? Does Murdock want publicity or a paternity suit?”
“Come on, Chet’s not that bad . . .”
“Oh no? From the stories I hear about your few weeks up at the NASA Ames center, Kinsman cut a swath from Berkeley to North Beach.”
Tenny countered, “He’s young and good-looking. And the girls haven’t had many single astronauts to play with. NASA’s gang is a bunch of old farts compared to my kids. But Chet’s the best of the bunch, no fooling.”
Calder looked unconvinced.
“Listen. When we were training at Edwards, know what Kinsman did? Built a biplane, an honest-to-God replica of a Spad fighter. From the ground up. He’s a solid citizen.”
“Yes, and then he played Red Baron for six weeks. Didn’t he get into trouble for buzzing an airliner?”
Tenny’s reply was cut off by a burst of talk and laughter. Half a dozen lean, lithe young men in Air Force blues—captains, all of them—trotted down the carpeted stairs that led into the bar.
“There they are,” said Tenny. “You can ask Chet about it yourself.”
Kinsman looked no different from the other Air Force astronauts. Slightly under six feet tall, thin with the leanness of youth, dark hair cut in the short flat military style, blue-gray eyes, long bony face. He was grinning broadly at the moment, as he and the other five astronauts grabbed chairs in one comer of the bar and called their orders to the lone bartender.  pp. 171-172

The rest of the opening becomes progressively more risqué as the group discuss the problems of zero gee sex—and then Kinsman is told that the third member of the crew will be another woman. Intended, presumably, as a chaperone.
The rest of the story takes place in orbit, and largely concerns the interplay of the three characters, Kinsman, Linda (the photographer), and Jill (the other astronaut). Kinsman spends a considerable amount of time and thought trying to get Linda in the sack, something that is made easier when Jill eventually gives him a free run.
Notable moments during this section are the scenes where Kinsman and Linda are EVA during sunset, and when Linda reveals that she had a baby when she was younger but gave it up.
The story ends, of course, with Kinsman (spoiler) wanting more than just casual sex from Linda, but she isn’t interested.
I thought this was a pretty good story that was well told, but it seems pretty dated nowadays and I doubt it will satisfy anyone. People will either take issue with Kinsman’s sexism (which will also be taken as the story’s and the author’s sexism—nowadays these viewpoints are all too often represented as the same thing, all based on a reader’s subjective impression of the text), or they will be entirely unconvinced by Kinsman’s change of heart (why would a man who has had so many women suddenly go all doe-eyed over Linda?) I’d have to concede that the latter feels like a liberal writer’s feminist cop-out, although without it there wouldn’t be much of a story.

•

Sky Blue by Alexei Panshin and Cory Panshin (Amazing, March 1972) follows up Alexi’s appearance in last year’s volume with a collaboration with his partner Cory.
The story opens with a spaceship getting lost, after which the pilot wrecks the engines trying to solve the problem before killing himself. Three of the passengers bemoan their fate:

Being lost so suddenly was as painful and frustrating to Triphammer and Puddleduck as an interrupted fuck.
Suddenly their answers were of no use to them. Oh, it hurt.
Triphammer, Puddleduck and Mount Rushmore were the highest huddle of all. They gathered by a candle in one room. Triphammer paced frantically, Puddleduck nodded at appropriate moments, and Mount Rushmore loomed. Harold looked out through the curtains into the universe.
Triphammer said, “Oh, losings. Screamie! The action, pop-a-dop.” Her face could not contain her regret.
Puddleduck nodded. “Misery,” he said.
“Misery,” said Mount Rushmore.
Harold said, “There’s somebody walking by outside.”  p. 204

A tenticular alien has arrived. Harold, the son of Triphammer and Puddleduck, is not incapacitated by fear like they are and manages to communicate with the alien, who then changes into an old man to calm the parents down. The alien then points out its nearby home world, and says the humans can use it.
The humans (spoiler) subsequently trash the planet looking for something called The Third Thing, so they put Harold (now called Sky Blue) on an orbiting moon to ambush the Landlord Thing (the alien) when he returns. Sky Blue shoots the alien when he turns up but does not kill him.
The Landlord Thing then tells Sky Blue to heal the planet, which he miraculously does. Sky Blue’s parents then arrive to tell him about the reversal of all the harm they have done, and how the material they’ve mined has vanished. Sky Blue tells them they have been given a second chance, and then he leaves with the Landlord Thing.
If you want an ecological fairy tale told in sub-Laffertyesque cutesy with added random events, then this will be right up your street. For me, it was the joint worst story in the anthology along with the Russ.

•

Miss Omega Raven by Naomi Mitchison (Nova #2, 1972)⁸ is an account of an uplifted raven (the bird’s intelligence has been experimentally increased) who goes from Omega to Alpha in her flock:

This way each took orders and gave orders, each pecked in punishment and was herself pecked; it was the same with the husbands. Only the most beautiful, the bravest, the top raven Alpha Corax, gave orders. Nobody pecked him. He led the flock to roost or to hunt. He watched and warned for enemies and sometimes attacked. His beak was sharpest.
But I was lowest of the low. She—the other unmated—pecked me and I had to accept this, jumping away from food, not pecking back. All that was in the deep part of me. I could not escape being how I was. There was no choice. But also I was angry and that anger was in the other part of me driving me to plan. That part of me thought of a future in which I would not be pecked. I knew I was becoming ugly. My feathers were draggled. I was thin, for I always got the worst share, either of flesh or eggs or the rarer grain and nuts. No wonder I was a pecked on with nobody to peck. Had God-man made me this? If he had not made me something other I could not have questioned what I was.  pp. 217-218

I thought this story, though short and slight, was an interesting and intriguing piece.

•

Patron of the Arts by William Rotsler (Universe #2, 1972) initially tells tell us about the life of Brian Thorne, a wealthy patron of the arts in our near future. Thorne is married to a younger woman, Madelon, and they have an open relationship. This latter, along with some of the other background detail, makes this world seem a little like an extrapolated version of the 1960s or 1970s.
Then Michael Cilento comes on the scene. Cilento is an artist who creates “molecular constructs,” works of art that are part holographic image and part emotional transmitter. Trent attempts to commission a construct of Madelon from Cilento, but the latter refuses, saying he will do it for nothing.
The next part of the story (spoiler) sees Trent learning of the pair’s travels, and their affair. But not, as normal, from Madelon. Eventually, the construct is finished, and Trent goes to view it:

It drew me from the doorway. Everyone, everything was forgotten, including the original and the creator with me. There was only the cube. The vibrations were getting to me and my pulse increased. Even knowing that pulse generators were working on my alpha waves and broadcast projectors were doing this and sonics were doing that and my own alpha wave was being synchronized and reprojected did not affect me. Only the cube affected me. All else was forgotten.
[. . .]
The figure of Madelon sat there, proudly naked, breathing normally with that fantastically lifelike movement possible to the skilled molecular constructors. The figure had none of the flamboyance that Caruthers or Raeburn brought to their figures, so delighted in their ability to bring “life” to their work that they saw nothing else.
But Mike had restraint. He had power in his work, understatement, demanding that the viewer put something of himself into it.
I walked around to the back. Madelon was no longer sitting on the throne. It was empty, and beyond it, stretching to the horizon, was an ocean and above the toppling waves, stars. New constellations glowed. A meteor flashed. I stepped back to the side. The throne was unchanged but Madelon was back. She sat there, a queen, waiting.
I walked around the cube. She was on the other side, waiting, breathing, being. But in back she was gone.
But to where?  p. 252

Trent then finds out, of course, that she is leaving him for Cilento, which sets up the story’s neat closing line:⁹

The cube is more than Madelon or the sum of the sum of all the Madelons who ever existed. But the reality of art is not the reality of reality.  p. 254

If this story has a weakness it is in attempting to convey the effect of art of the viewer or listener (this is nearly always a shortcoming in stories about music, for example), but it’s still a pretty good piece, and a worthy Hugo and Nebula Award finalist (I thought it was a winner).

•

Grasshopper Time by Gordon Eklund (F&SF, March 1972) begins with an alien or mutant called Angel (we learn later his mother was human, his father something else) who finds two young children in the desert. He takes them back to his cave and there he learns (partially by telepathy, partially by listening) that their parents were recently shot and killed. Strangely, they aren’t grieving.
After a week or so Angel and the girl go to collect wood, during which he ends up having to save her from a man who attacks her. He also picks up from the man’s mind that people are looking for the children, and that search parties will shortly arrive in the area of the cave. Then he and the girl find some baby rabbits whose mother is dead, so they take them back to the cave.
Days later Angel senses the search parties in the area are beginning to leave but, at one point when he is distracted by Sarah showing him a picture she has drawn on the cave wall, Richard is shot. Angel rushes outside and fights with the man (in a somewhat confusing scene). Later we find Angel was shot and badly injured but has subsequently regenerated.
Sarah then leaves him because he can’t die. He looks at her painting once more before also leaving the cave.
This, like a number of stories I’ve read by Eklund, is a competently told piece but the (sometimes almost random) events and situations that unfold in this do not sum to a normal story. Barely okay.

•

Hero by Joe Haldeman (Analog, June 1972)¹⁰ is the first of a handful of ‘Forever War’ stories¹¹ that appeared in Analog in the early to mid-1970s (and which were eventually fixed-up into the Hugo and Nebula Award winning novel of the same name).
The story—told from the cynical viewpoint of one of the grunts, Private William Mandela—gets off to a cracking start with a sergeant showing a squad of soldiers an “Eight Silent Ways to Kill” film—which uses brainwiped criminals as subjects. During the subsequent Q&A it becomes apparent that the soldiers are being trained to fight an alien race called the Taurans, and that this is a very different army:

“That’s the important thing.” He stabbed a finger at the screen. That’s why those eight convicts got caulked for your benefit . . . you’ve got to find out how to kill Taurans, and be able to do it whether you have a
megawatt laser or just an emery board.”
[. . .]
“Any more questions?” Nobody raised a hand.
“OK.—tench-hut!” We staggered upright and he looked at us expectantly.
“Screw you, sir,” came the tired chorus.
“Louder!”
“SCREW YOU, SIR!”
One of the army’s less-inspired morale devices.  p. 278

After this eye-opening beginning (well, it was in the mid-seventies) the surprises come in an almost constant stream: we find out that Mandela is in an elite conscripted army (the UN Expeditionary Force recruits all have IQs of over 150) formed to fight a war with the alien Taurans at relativistic distances; marijuana is legal; casual sex between the co-ed recruits compulsory; and then, just as all this is sinking in, they shoot off on a three week trip to Pluto (at a constant 2g) for advanced training.
This next part of the story is a riveting read that combines a brutal training regime (armoured spacesuits, live ammunition and capital punishment) and a brutal environment (there is a lot of science involved in staying alive at just over zero K). But, despite their training, some of them die in accidents.
After a number of war games, some of which are lethal (three more die in the final exercise) they move to Stargate, where they do some construction work before jumping to the system where they will attack a Tauran base.
The concluding part of the story (spoiler), which covers the combat operation, sees them dodging a missile attack on the way down to the planet that houses a Tauran base: there, they find that the terrain is similar to South American jungle (so much for all that training on Charon). Then, when they end up killing a group of upright herbivores (they discover this from the stomach contents of one of the corpses), several of the platoon’s Rhine-sensitive personnel develop everything from headaches to fatal cerebral haemorrhages (the creatures are obviously telepathic and their dying transmissions have proved lethal to some). Finally, when they reach the base and discuss the plan of attack, Potter (Mandella’s partner) starts arguing with the sergeant about unnecessarily killing all the Taurans. This becomes academic when the sergeant triggers a post-hypnotic battle command:

I hardly heard him, for trying to keep track of what was going on in my skull. I knew it was just posthypnotic suggestion, even remembered the session in Missouri when they’d implanted it, but that didn’t make it any less compelling. My mind reeled under the strong pseudo-memories; shaggy hulks that were Taurans—not at all what we now knew they looked like—boarding a colonist’s vessel, eating babies while mothers watched in screaming terror—the colonists never took babies; they wouldn’t stand the acceleration—then raping the women to death with huge veined purple members—ridiculous that they would feel desire for humans—holding the men down while they plucked flesh from their living bodies and gobbled it . . . a hundred grisly details as sharply remembered as the events of a minute ago, ridiculously overdone and logically absurd; but while my conscious mind was reflecting the silliness, somewhere much deeper, down in that sleeping giant where we keep our real motives and morals, something was thirsting for alien blood, secure in the conviction that the noblest thing a man could do would be to die killing one of those horrible monsters . . .  pp. 332-333

The final scenes are realistically grisly, especially when it becomes apparent that the Taurans have no concept of hand to hand fighting (for those who were around at the time, there may be echoes of the My Lai massacre).¹²
In general, this was a much darker and more cynical story than I remembered and, although it is very good or better for most of its length (and an exemplar of how traditional SF was being remade by the New Wave in the early seventies), it tails off a little towards the end. Still, a more than worthy Hugo finalist, and I’d probably have put it at the top of my list.

•

When We Went to See the End of the World by Robert Silverberg (Universe #2, 1972) is his second story in the volume, and another in which he continues to channel his inner Robert Sheckley. This one has a couple at a party who describe their recent time-travel trip to the end of the world—and then the other couples talk about their trips there, all of which are different:

“How long ago did you do it?” Eddie said to Nick.
“Sunday afternoon. I guess we were about the first.”
“Great trip, isn’t it?” Eddie said. “A little somber, though. When the last hill crumbles into the sea.”
“That’s not what we saw,” said Jane. “And you didn’t see the crab? Maybe we were on different trips.”
Mike said, “What was it like for you, Eddie?”
Eddie put his arms around Cynthia from behind. He said, “They put us into this little capsule, with a porthole, you know, and a lot of instruments and—”
“We heard that part,” said Paula. “What did you see?”
“The end of the world,” Eddie said. “When water covers everything. The sun and the moon were in the sky at the same time—”
“We didn’t see the moon at all,” Jane remarked. “It just wasn’t there.  p. 343

Meanwhile, in the background, we learn a lot about the current state of the world and its many ongoing catastrophes: earthquakes, mutant amoeba, cholera outbreaks, presidential assassinations, etc. (My favourite line from the story is, “It looked like Detroit after the union nuked Ford.”)
The irony of time-travelling to the end of the world when it is happening around you is highlighted in the closing lines of the story:

Nick and Jane discussed where they would go for their next vacation. “What about going to see the end of the world all over again?” Jane suggested, and Nick laughed quite a good deal.  p. 349

Pretty good.

•

Painwise by James Tiptree, Jr. (F&SF, February 1972) has a great hook opening (and one similar to John Baxter’s The Hands in New Writings in SF #6, reviewed here last week):

He was wise to the ways of pain. He had to be, for he felt none.
When the Xenons put electrodes to his testicles, he was vastly entertained by the pretty lights.
When the Ylls fed firewasps into his nostrils and other body orifices, the resultant rainbows pleased him. And when later they regressed to simple disjointments and eviscerations, he noted with interest the deepening orchid hues that stood for irreversible harm.  p. 350

The protagonist is wired to experience pain as colour and, as he completes his repeated missions to observe aliens (who variously mutilate or torture him), a boditech mechanism called Amanda puts him back together again.
Eventually there is a battle of wills between him and Amanda—he wants her to provide conversation—and he eventually realises that their mission is overdue and she is faulty. At this point Amanda malfunctions and he is marooned in space.
The second part of the story sees him picked up by a starship occupied by three aliens, a bushbaby like creature called Lovebaby, the butterfly-like Ragglebomb, and the python-like Muscle. None of them can stand the pain experienced by the universe’s creatures (they are empaths/telepaths) so they use him to go and get them the foodstuffs they desire. Initially he complies, but then stops helping them when he realises they are not going to take him back to Earth.
In the final part of the story (spoiler) he hears the phrase “snap, crackle and pop” from their descriptions of the sounds picked up on one of the planets. He knows this is Earth, so he recites a long list of enticing foodstuffs to encourage them to go there.
The story ends with him back on Earth, where he suddenly experiences a massive amount of pain. When he empathically transmits this to the other three they all try to get back to the shelter of the ship. For whatever reason, he makes the decision to stay rather than leave with them.
This is an original, entertaining, and trippy piece, but it appears to get off to a false start (the Amanda section), and I’m not sure that any of the rest of it bears close examination.

•••

Terry Carr’s Introduction is an odd piece about the cancellation of the Apollo space program in 1972. Carr notes that the American public has lost interest in this, and (eventually) states that any future programs must relate more directly to the people. But he takes a odd route to get to that point, first by judging the delayed launch programming against other TV entertainment like the Mary Tyler Moore show, and then by making flippant suggestions about how they could make the coverage more interesting:

So imagine, if you can, how much more interesting those routine transmissions from space could be if, say, a couple of the astronauts began to kibitz about getting vasectomies after they splash down. Or if, nearing the end of a long orbiting mission, one of them confided to Houston Control that he’d had a nocturnal emission.
For that matter, how the ratings might perk up if one of those bored and boring news analysts were to say “I’m going to do something I promised myself I’d never do. I’m going to go take a leak while we’re waiting.”  p. x

Bizarre, or puerile, or both.
Honorable Mentions by Terry Carr is a page of story recommendations (presumable the also-rans that didn’t make it into the book).¹³ I guess if Carr had a larger volume than this 370 pp. Ballantine paperback—a Dozois bug-crusher for instance—several of these would also have also been selected. Looking at the list I’m not sure this would have improved the overall quality. I’m particularly surprised that Poul Anderson’s Goat Song (F&SF, February 1972) a Hugo and Nebula winner, and obvious crowdpleaser, isn’t in this book or on that list.

•••

After a good start to Carr’s ‘Best of the Year’ series last year, this is a disappointing follow-up, with much of the first half containing stories that are average at best (by the time I finished the Panshin story, I wondered what on Earth was going on). The remainder of the book pulls out of the dive but that still leaves us with, by my count, five stories that deserve to be here (out of sixteen), four I wouldn’t quibble about, and seven that shouldn’t have been included.¹⁴
Part of the problem here is that Carr seems to have a penchant for non-story stories, i.e. those without a visible plot or other arc that gives them some structure or point, and which don’t appear to bring anything else to the table.  ●

_____________________

1. Cy Chauvin (Amazing, March 1975) opens his review with this comment:

Terry Carr and Donald Wollheim used to edit The World’s Best SF series for Ace Books, generally considered for many years the best of the ‘best’ collections. Now both Carr and Wollheim have left Ace and started best-of-the-year collections of their own. Carr’s is easily the better of the two. He has managed to steer a course between the more conservative, traditional—and I’m afraid occasionally stodgy—tastes of Wollheim, and the experimental and too often mainstream mixture of prose and poetry that turns up in the Harrison-Aldiss Best SF (the other longest running best of the year series).  p. 117

Fair comment perhaps, although I’ve only read one Wollheim volume, for 1976, and I thought that was better than the Carr. I’d add that perhaps Carr drifted too far towards Harrison and Aldiss in this volume but, on reflection, I don’t think many of Carr’s story choices are too experimental or New Wave: they’re just not very good.
Chauvin goes on to say:

Of course, ‘best’ collections are still no substitute for the actual original publications themselves, no matter how ably edited, since no reader’s and editor’s tastes will ever completely agree. I, for instance, cannot understand why Carr failed to include Ursula K. Le Guin’s Hugo-winning novella “The Word For The World is Forest” in his collection, or even on his list of Honorable Mentions.

As for the stories themselves, he seems lukewarm about the Panshin (“unsubtle ecological message,” “simplistic moralizing”), but thinks the Russ a “very strong” story about a Utopian world where “all the problems have been solved except that of the human condition.” He adds:

Russ has that rare ability to drop the reader into a strange future world and just let him figure out what is going on, without resorting to explanatory lectures or other artificial devices. She relies instead on realistically-placed dialog and description, and makes the story a puzzle that the reader has to put together. There are certain rewards gained by doing this, and I don’t think Russ makes her stories “difficult” or obscure for their own sake; there is as much reason and logic behind what she makes difficult and obscure in her stories as there is in what she makes easy and clear.  p. 117-118

Chauvin likes the first of the Silverberg stories better than the second (“a much weaker effort”). He thinks the Tiptree and Eklund stories will bear rereading, and that Haldeman’s Hero is “a solid meaty novella,” although it does not need to be an SF story. He finishes by rating the Wolfe as “excellent,” and the Lafferty, “fair.”
It’s an interesting, and perhaps illuminating, review. Worth reading.

P. Schuyler Miller (Analog, December 1973) says this volume is the best of the ‘Bests’ he has read so far (his review of the Carr volume is followed by one of Forrest J. Ackermann’s).
He notes that five of the stories come from three of the field’s magazines (Amazing, Analog, and three from F&SF) and eleven come from original anthologies (but, surprisingly, only one from Again, Dangerous Visions). Miller says that:

The theme of most of the stories—and perhaps Terry Carr is saying that this is the theme of most present-day science fiction—might be called “Our world and welcome to it!” The stories project all too visible forces and trends in our own society into the near future.  p. 165

He adds later:

[These] stories, in one way or another, are about ourselves. You can think of them as distorting mirrors reflecting the present, or as plane mirrors showing what may be.  p. 165

Miller excludes the Wolfe from the above categories (“the best story in the book”), and the Haldeman (a cruder, more cynical extension of Heinlein’s ‘Starship Troopers’”), Tiptree, Jr., and Bova. He also omits the Mitchison, Panshin and Eklund stories at the end, which takes him up to about half the book—so probably not “most of the stories” then. Oh well.
His two favourites apart from the Wolfe story are Anderson’s Fortune Hunter, and William Rotsler’s Patron of the Arts, but he thinks “there isn’t a bad story in the book.” Some people are easily pleased.

The uncredited review in Vertex, December 1973 praises Carr’s author choice but then has this:

Our only disagreement with Mr. Carr is his obvious leaning towards the “new wave’’ type of fiction, and his apparent abhorrence of anything which smacks of plain, old-fashioned story telling. If that’s your bag (new wave), this is your book.  p. 11

They have a point about the aversion to “storytelling,” old-fashioned or otherwise.

2. These were the results from our group read poll (11 voters/33 votes):

3. The editor’s introduction to the Kornbluth & Pohl story in F&SF states:

Cyril Kornbluth died in 1958, still a young man, but now that Fred Pohl is writing sf again we have this new story (based on notes made while Kornbluth was alive) to add to a memorable body of work under the most famous collaborative byline in sf.  p. 5

According to Mark Rich’s book, C. M. Kornbluth: The Life and Works of a Science Fiction Visionary, there were more than notes left:

Frederik Pohl, 1958, May 23: letter to Mary Kornbluth (SU). “Harry Altshuler turned up a story of Cyril’s called The Meeting which he turned over to me. I suppose you’ve read it—it’s about a PTA meeting at a thinly-disguised Berman School. Harry diligently sent it out to half a dozen markets or so, but there’s one obvious possibility he missed—The New Yorker—so so I’ve banged it out to them, just on the chance.” Although Pohl obviously thought it worth trying in that market, it was the only one he tried. (Chapter 28 footnote 7.)

Later on, Pohl spoke to Mary Kornbluth about revising several unsold mainstream stories into SF ones:

“It occurs to me that some of the non-science-fiction shorts might be reworkable into science fiction—assuming they won’t sell in their present form. This has the definite advantage, assuming I do the reworking, of building up the inventory of Pohl and Kornbluth collaborations, to the point where we might be able to get Ballantine to do a collection. But The Meeting doesn’t, offhand, seem like an easily adaptable one.” (Chapter 29)

4. The Kornbluths had a child, John, with similar problems. According to Mark Rich’s biography:

His story “The Meeting” was about a PTA meeting at a school that was essentially Berman School, which John had been attending. (Chapter 28)

One wonders what dark night of the soul led to the writing of this story.

5. It wasn’t just me that was baffled by Russ’s story: the half-dozen people who bothered to comment in our Facebook group read thread were equally baffled, bar one person, who didn’t explain further. Read their comments for yourself.

6. In Jo Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugos, Gardner Dozois says that Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus is “one of the best SF novellas every written.” Rich Horton echoes this with his comment that it is “one of the most amazing SF novellas ever.” This may be a widespread view on the literary side of the field, but I’m not sure that the story was viewed quite so glowingly elsewhere (e.g., it was nominated for the Hugo and Nebula Awards but won neither, and was #3 in the Locus Poll for that year—the usual caveats apply about award winners being partly determined by work availability, author popularity, zeitgeist etc.)

7. Ben Bova’s Zero Gee is the only story from Harlan Ellison’s major anthology Again, Dangerous Visions that makes it into Carr’s volume this year. I wonder if that is because Carr didn’t want to use too many stories that people would have seen or if, like me, he just wasn’t that impressed with the vast bulk of it.

8. As I’ve noted before, Harry Harrison encouraged Naomi Mitchison (aka Lady Haldane) back to writing SF after her 1962 classic Memoirs of a Spacewoman. He first published her in The Year 2000 anthology (1970), and then in all four of the Nova volumes (Mary and Joe in the first volume, also 1970, was an extract from the previously mentioned novel). There were later stories in Peter Weston’s Andromeda #1, and a couple of other anthologies. Her ISFDB page is here.

9. Well, that was the last line in the Universe #2 version of Patron of the Arts (and reprinted in Nebula Award Stories #8), but the Carr anthology uses a version which appeared in Vertex #1, April 1973 (and which also appears to be the first four chapters from the subsequent novel). This latter version adds three pages of text where the couple go missing, and then suggests that another of Climento’s works is a portal to an alien planet. I’m not sure this adds to the original novelette, and probably spoils it a little (it turns a story about love lost into the start of an interplanetary adventure). It certainly doesn’t make me want to pick up the novel version.

10. Haldeman’s story was one of at least two stories that Ben Bova published in Analog in 1972 (another was Frederik Pohl’s The Gold at Starbow’s End) which showed that the magazine was under new management.

11. The stories that originally formed Haldeman’s The Forever War novel were: Hero (Analog, June 1972), We Are Very Happy Here (Analog, November 1973), This Best of All Possible Worlds (Analog, November 1974) End Game (Analog, January 1975). However, I believe that We Are Very Happy Here was replaced by You Can Never Go Home (Amazing, March 1975) in later versions of the novel. This latter story was the original darker and more dystopian version of the story (the beginning and end of both stories are similar—about 10% of the length, according to Haldeman in the author’s note that accompanies You Can Never Go Home).

12. The Wikipedia page on the My Lai massacre, the mass murder of unarmed South Vietnamese civilians by U.S. troops in 1968, is here.

13. The Honorable Mentions list is:

Conway, Gerard F.: “Funeral Service,” Universe 2, Ace, 1972.
Eklund, Gordon: “Stalking The Sun,” Universe 2, Ace, 1972.
Moon, Brian: “Catholics,” New American 15.
Neville, Kris: “Medical Practices Among The Immortals,” Galaxy, September 1972.
Pangborn, Edgar: “Tiger Boy,” Universe 2, Ace, 1972.
Pohl, Frederik: “Shaffery Among The Immortals, Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1972.
Robinson, Frank M.: “East Wind, West Wind,” Nova 2, Walker, 1972.
Rocklynne, Ross: “Ching Witch!” Again, Dangerous Visions, Doubleday, 1972.
Russ, Joanna: “Useful Phrases For The Tourist, Universe 2, Ace, 1972.
—“When It Changed,” Again, Dangerous Visions, Doubleday, 1972.
Silverberg, Robert: “Now + n, Now — n,” Nova 2, Walker 1972.
Tiptree, James Jr.: “Filomena & Greg & Rikki-Tikki & Barlow & The Alien,” New Dimensions II, Doubleday.
—“The Milk Of Paradise,” Again, Dangerous Visions, Doubleday, 1972.
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr.: “The Big Space Fuck,” Again, Dangerous Visions, Doubleday, 1972.
Wolfe, Gene: “It’s Very Clean,” Generation, Dell, 1972.

14. There would normally be a table below giving the contents of all the ‘Best Of’ anthologies and all the award nominees, and what my choices for the year would be, etc.—but I don’t have the time, inclination, or energy to do this at the moment. I’ll try and get to it when I review one of the other 1972 volumes (both the Harrison & Aldiss and the Ackerman look promising).  ●