Summary:
A lacklustre anthology with a lot of middling material filling out the contents list (there are a few weak traditional stories—presumably selected by Wollheim—and a few weak new wave-ish ones—presumably selected by Carr). Fortunately the good or better material (Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, Robert Silverberg’s Hawksbill Station, Keith Roberts’ Coranda, Samuel R. Delany’s Driftglass and Larry Niven’s Handicap) accounts for about half of the book’s length.
[ISFDB page]

Other reviews:
Robert J. Hughes, F&SF, October 1968
P. Schuyler Miller, Analog, January 1969
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Donald A. Wollheim, Terry Carr

Fiction:
See Me Not • novelette by Richard Wilson ∗
Driftglass • short story by Samuel R. Delany ∗∗∗
Ambassador to Verdammt • short story by Colin Kapp ∗∗+
The Man Who Never Was • short story by R. A. Lafferty ∗∗
The Billiard Ball • novelette by Isaac Asimov ∗∗
Hawksbill Station • novella by Robert Silverberg ∗∗∗+
The Number You Have Reached • short story by Thomas M. Disch ∗
The Man Who Loved the Faioli • short story by Roger Zelazny ∗∗
Population Implosion • novelette by Andrew J. Offutt –
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream • short story by Harlan Ellison ∗∗∗∗
The Sword Swallower • novelette by Ron Goulart ∗∗
Coranda • novelette by Keith Roberts ∗∗∗+
Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne • short story by R. A. Lafferty ∗∗
Handicap • novelette by Larry Niven ∗∗∗
Full Sun • short story by Brian W. Aldiss ∗∗
It’s Smart to Have an English Address • short story by D. G. Compton ∗

Non-fiction:
Introduction • by Terry Carr and Donald A. Wollheim
Interior artwork • by Jack Gaughan

_____________________

The fourth of Wollheim and Carr’s annual volumes leads off with See Me Not by Richard Wilson (SF Impulse #12, February 1967). This begins with the narrator, Avery, waking up and discovering he is invisible:

He lay on his back for a few minutes, looking at the ceiling. There was something different about the way it looked. No, it wasn’t the ceiling that was different, but his view of it. A perfectly clear, unobstructed view. Then he realized that what was missing was the fuzzy, unfocused tip of nose which had always been there, just below the line of vision, and which became a definite object only when he closed one eye.
Avery closed one eye. No nose. His hand came up in alarm and felt the nose. It was there, all right. That is, he could feel it. But he couldn’t see the fingers or the hand.  p. 9

The next seven pages describe his attempts to avoid his wife (who has just sent the kids off to school), but she eventually corners him in the shower. After she gets over her initial shock at his condition she calls Dr Mike.
This introductory section rather exemplifies the story’s main problem, which is that it is done at too great a length (and its mostly inconsequential light comedy produces few real laughs). That said there are one or two neat bits in this sequence—the inability to see his nose, his wife wanting to join him in the shower (more risqué than normal for genre SF of the time), and the fact he looks like a ghost when she sees his invisible body with water vapour coming off it). Slim pickings for seven pages though.
The next part of the story sees Dr Mike arrive, and some doctor-patient banter between him and Avery. Then Avery’s son turns up (more chatter), followed by his daughter (she faints). Then, when the family are having dinner that evening, they see what is happening to the food Avery is eating and he is forced to dress (apparently he has been wandering around naked because he is invisible). We are now twenty pages into the story.
The second half of this sees: Avery visible again the next morning; a disastrous trip out for breakfast where he becomes invisible again; crowds and the media following them home and waiting outside; an ill-judged attempt by Avery to go out and torment the crowd (which sees him caught before the police arrive to free him); the arrival of a specialist from a drug company called Lindhof, who manages to make part of Avery visible; and then a (baffling) argument between Avery and Dr Mike about the former’s refusal to see the specialist again. This all ends with his wife going to Lindhof—and when she returns she is invisible too. Avery changes his mind (and it later materialises that his invisibility was caused by the Lindhof-made pills he took the day before becoming invisible).
This story reminded me of one of those corny 1940’s movies or 1950’s sitcoms and, even though it is breezily told, it’s based on dumb science and is hugely bloated, mostly with endless and sometimes pointless conversations (the argument between Avery and Mike). If this was edited down to about three quarters of its length there might be a half-decent story here, but I got quite irritated with its flabbiness on the way through. More patient readers may have better luck.
∗ (Mediocre). 13,850 words.

Driftglass by Samuel R. Delany (If, June 1967) opens with its thirty-ish narrator, Cal Svenson, meeting a young woman called Ariel while beach-combing. During their conversation, she asks him what he is looking for:

“Driftglass,” I said. “You know all the Coca-Cola bottles and cut crystal punch bowls and industrial silicon slag that goes into the sea?”
“I know the Coca-Cola bottles.”
“They break, and the tide pulls the pieces back and forth over the sandy bottom, wearing the edges, changing their shape. Sometimes chemicals in the glass react with chemicals in the ocean to change the color. Sometimes veins work their way through a piece in patterns like snowflakes, regular and geometric; others, irregular and angled like coral.
When the pieces dry they’re milky. Put them in water and they become transparent again.”  p. 48

During this encounter¹ we learn that both of them are modified to live in the ocean (gills, webbed feet and hands, etc.). Ariel also asks Svenson about the underwater accident he had twenty years earlier, which left him permanently disfigured and living on the land.
The next part of the story sees Svenson visit a friend, a widower called Juao, whose children Svenson has encouraged to join the Aquatic Corp. They talk about a man called Tork, who is planning to lay cable through an volcanic region of the sea floor called the Slash (where Svenson had his accident). Then, that evening, Ariel vists Svenson at his house and takes him down to a beach party where he meets Tork. Tork quizzes Svenson about the Slash, and tells him they are going to lay a power cable there tomorrow. Later on the aqua men and the boat-bourne villagers go out to sea to hunt marlin.
The final section (spoiler) sees Svenson saying goodbye to Juao’s kids as they get onto the bus to go to Aquatic college. While he is doing this he sees a commotion down at the quayside, and it turns out that several aquamen have been killed in an underwater eruption, including Tork. Svenson goes to the beach to find Ariel.
This is an evocatively written piece (the description and characters are much better than that of other 1960s SF) but it isn’t much more than a slice of life piece with an artificial climax grafted onto the end (and not a particularly convincing one either—it’s a silly idea to lay power cable in a known volcanic zone, and too convenient to have an explosion while Tork is there). Notwithstanding this the story is a good read for those that want something with more depth than usual.
∗∗∗ (Good). 6,750 words.

Ambassador to Verdammt by Colin Kapp (Analog, April 1967) begins with a lively exchange between Lionel Prellen, a planetary administrator, and Lieutenant Sinclair, a Space Navy officer. Sinclair has been tasked to build an FTL landing grid on Verdammt to land a ship carrying an ambassador to the Unbekannt, the planet’s natives. Sinclair is not happy, and both he and his Admiral think the construction project is a waste of the military’s time.
The middle part of the story sees Sinclair become increasingly disgruntled, partly due to the Unbekannt clumping around on the top of the dome he is staying in (although when he goes out he sees nothing but a blur disappearing into the forest), and also because of the arguments he continues to have about the Unbekannt with Prellen and a psychologist called Wald. Although the two men try to convince Sinclair that the Unbekannt are unlike anything they have ever encountered before—the aliens seem to exist in their own reality—he in unmoved, and becomes more even annoyed when he finds the ambassador is bringing five women with him.
This all comes to a head when the Unbekannt once again clamber over Sinclair’s dome and he goes out and tries to thump one with a titanium rod. Not only is he momentarily stunned in the altercation but, after he recovers, he finds the rod has been bent into an intricate design—in the space of a few seconds. Intrigued, he decides to follow the alien into the bush.
The final part of the story sees Sinclair wander through the forest until he comes to an area where there appears to be a constantly changing reality. This transcendent experience is almost beyond his ability to comprehend, and he comes close to being overwhelmed:

Bewilderingly his surroundings achieved apparently impossible transpositions from the gloomy shadows of some huge Satanic complex to the white-hot negativeness of an isolated point of desert, then to an icy darkness punctuated by random colored shards so unimaginably out of perspective that he had to close his eyes in order to suffer them. And again the images blended and blurred and reformed, gaining substance and alien, incomprehensible meaning by keying some nonhuman semantic trigger which racked him with emotions which his body was not constructed to experience.
[. . .]
For a frantic moment he felt a single point of understanding with the Unbekannt, but in experimentally allowing his mind license to follow it, he lost the concept and found himself in a wilderness of unchartable madness.
His senses were screaming from the overload of unpredictable sensations, which gave rise to great fatigue and a sense of imminent collapse. His feet were restrained by a nightmare leadenness, and the whole structure of concept and analogy, which he had built for himself as a protective rationalization, was beginning to split open about his head. He knew that, if he cracked now and allowed the mad disorder to flow into his mind unfiltered, he would lose touch with reality and be forced to retreat down paths from which there might be no returning.  pp. 80-81

Fortunately Wald the psychologist reaches him in time and shoots him full of mescaline.
When the ambassador finally arrives (spoiler) we find out it is Prellen’s twenty-seven day old son: the hope is that by bringing the child up in the presence of the Unbekannt he will learn how to communicate with them. Wald also reveals that a crystalline structure he was examining earlier in the story is probably an Unbekannt embryo given to the humans for the same reason.
This is a very much an old school SF story (it feels like something from a decade or so earlier) and it’s not entirely convincing—but the scene where Sinclair experiences the Unbekannt reality isn’t bad, for all its hand-wavium. Maybe I just have a soft spot for Kapp’s work.
∗∗+ (Average to Good). 6,950 words.

The Man Who Never Was by R. A. Lafferty (Magazine of Horror, Summer 1967) opens with Mihai Lado, telling Raymond Runkis that he is happy to make one his lies come true:

“There’s a thousand to choose from,” Runkis said. “I could make you produce that educated calf you brag about.”
“Is that the one you pick? I’ll whistle him up in a minute.”
“No. Or I could call you on the cow that gives beer, ale, porter and stout each from a separate teat.”
“You want her? Nothing easier. But it’s only fair to warn you that the porter might be a little too heavy for your taste.”
“I could make you bring that horse you have that reads Homer.”
“Runkis, you’re the liar now. I never said he read Homer; I said he recited him. I don’t know where that pinto picked it up.”
“You said once you could send a man over the edge, make him disappear completely. I pick that one. Do it!”  pp. 85-86

After some hesitation Lado agrees to make Jessie Pidd, who is sitting at the end of the bar, disappear and, over the next few days, Pidd eventually does so, becoming progressively more transparent. When Lado says he can’t bring him back (Pidd was apparently an illusion Lado created) the town has a hearing in front of the town sheriff and a state commissioner. During this, Lado (who identifies as a “new man”) reiterates that Pidd never existed and challenges those listening to find any documentary evidence of Pidd’s life.
When nothing can be found the officials tell Lado that they’ll eventually find Pidd’s body, and then he will hang. The townsfolk, who don’t believe Lado’s claims to be an illusionist, eventually lynch him. The story ends with odd comments from the townfolks about “future types” waiting for them in the times to come.
For the most part this is a pleasantly quirky story but it gets a little dark at the end, and the last passage feels at odds with the rest of the story—unless this is meant to be, perhaps, some sort of allegory about change or the future. Whatever, it didn’t entirely work for me.
∗∗ (Average). 3,400 words.

The Billiard Ball by Isaac Asimov (If, March 1967) begins with the narrator describing two chalk-and-cheese scientists: Priss, who is slow-thinking but (two Nobel Prizes) brilliant, and Bloom, whose genius is the practical inventions he creates from Priss’s theories. When Priss then publishes his Two Field Theory (an alternative to a Unified Field Theory) the narrator interviews him and we learn that (a) Priss is jealous of Bloom’s money, (b) their intense rivalry can be seen in their regular billiard games, and (c) Priss’s Two Field Theory suggests that anti-gravity is possible (we get an extended lecture from Priss to the narrator about gravity/mass in the universe being analogous to depressions in a rubber sheet). The interview ends with Priss disparaging Bloom’s chances of creating an anti-gravity machine.
The next part of the story sees the narrator interview Bloom, who seems to be struggling to exploit Priss’s theory. Bloom seems particularly irritated by his failure after Priss’s comments.
The story then concludes a year later, when Priss is invited, along with the Press, to a demonstration of Bloom’s anti-gravity device:

One thing was new, however, and it staggered everybody, drawing much more attention than anything else in the room. It was a billiard table, resting under one pole of the magnet. Beneath it was the companion pole. A round hole about a foot across was stamped out of the very center of the table; and it was obvious that the zero-gravity field, if it was to be produced, would be produced through that hole in the center of the billiard table.
It was as though the whole demonstration had been designed, surrealist-fashion, to point up the victory of Bloom over Priss. This was to be another version of their everlasting billiards competition, and Bloom was going to win.
I don’t know if the other newsmen took matters in that fashion, but I think Priss did. I turned to look at him and saw that he was still holding the drink that had been forced into his hand. He rarely drank, I knew, but now he lifted the glass to his lips and emptied it in two swallows. He stared at that billiard ball, and I needed no gift of ESP to realize that he took it as a deliberate snap of fingers under his nose.  p. 105

After an introduction where Bloom gently mocks Priss, the device is turned on (an ultraviolet column of light appears above the hole), and Bloom invites Priss to pot a ball to demonstrate the device. Priss does so, and the ball shoots through Bloom at high speed, killing him.
The remainder of the story describes the theoretical explanation of what happened (massless objects travel at the speed of light), and the narrator concludes by suggesting that, for once, Priss quickly realised how the device worked and deliberately used its effect to kill Bloom.
The main problem with this story is that, given the made-up science and the contrived events, the reader is just along for the ride. Apart from that failing it’s an engaging enough story about academic rivalry.
∗∗ (Average). 4240 words. 7,500 words.

Hawksbill Station by Robert Silverberg (Galaxy, August 1967) opens with Barrett, the “king” of Hawksbill Station surveying his empire, the late-Cambrian landscape. We learn that he is in his sixties and, although previously a physically imposing figure, an accident to his left foot (crushed in a rock fall) has left him a cripple. Then a man called Charley rushes over with the news that a prisoner is being sent back to them from the future.
As the pair go over to the dome to await the arrival of the new man, and discuss possible bunking arrangements for him, we learn that (a) Hawksbill Station is a penal colony for revolutionaries a billion years in the past and (b) several of the men at the station are psychologically unstable, a result of the one-way trip there (one of the men is trying to build a woman out of chemicals and dirt after a “homosexual phase”).
When the new prisoner arrives Barrett is surprised by how young he is, and they subsequently take the man, Hahn, to their doctor to deal with his temporal shock. En route, Barrett makes him look out the door of the building:

Hahn looked. He passed a hand across his eyes as though to clear away unseen cobwebs and looked again.
“A late Cambrian landscape,” said Barrett quietly. “This would be a geologist’s dream, except that geologists don’t tend to become political prisoners, it seems. Out in front is the Appalachian Geosyncline. It’s a strip of rock a few hundred miles wide and a few thousand miles long, from the Gulf of Mexico to Newfoundland. To the east we’ve got the Atlantic. A little way to the west we’ve got the Inland Sea. Somewhere two thousand miles to the west there’s the Cordilleran Geosyncline, that’s going to be California and Washington and Oregon someday. Don’t hold your breath. I hope you like seafood.”
Hahn stared, and Barrett standing beside him at the doorway, stared also. You never got used to the alienness of this place, not even after you lived here twenty years, as Barrett had. It was Earth, and yet it was not really Earth at all, because it was somber and empty and unreal. The gray oceans swarmed with life, of course. But there was nothing on land except occasional patches of moss in the occasional patches of soil that had formed on the bare rock. Even a few cockroaches would be welcome; but insects, it seemed, were still a couple of geological periods in the future. To land-dwellers, this was a dead world, a world unborn.  p. 121

Eventually Hahn recovers and they learn he is an economist. Barrett takes him to his new quarters and bunk mate, an old-timer called Latimer (who is trying to develop psi powers to get back to the future but is otherwise of sound mind).
That evening Hahn joins the rest of the prisoners for dinner, and they quiz him about the future (the prisoners refer to it as “Up Front”) and about himself. His answers are very vague however, and this makes Barrett suspicious—a plot thread that slowly develops over the course of the rest of the story. This eventually comes to a head (spoiler) when, after Latimer has confided his suspicions to Barrett about Hahn’s constant note taking, he is put under surveillance. Later Hahn is seen near the time machine and, after he initially can’t be found, is caught arriving back from the future. After Hahn is questioned it materialises that there has been a change of government in the future and they are looking to close the penal colony and rehabilitate the men; Hahn is there doing psychological assessments.
While this routine plot plays out there is much else that makes the story a good read. Apart from the character study of Barrett himself, the most senior of the prisoners (fifty earlier arrivals have died), we learn about (a) the future that has sent these men back in time, (b) the rough lives they live (partially as a result of the slightly random time shots early on in the project), (c) what the world is like in this era (the descriptions are evocative of a protean Earth), and (d) the toll on the men sent there (their psychological state is as bleak as the landscape).
All this is well done, and the tale’s only weakness is the slightly flat ending, which has Barrett fearing the thought of going back to the future—he offers to stay and and run the science station that it will become.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 18,100 words.

The Number You Have Reached by Thomas M. Disch (SF Impulse #12, February 1967) begins with a man called Justin on the fourteenth floor of a deserted tower block. He is obviously stressed and inadvertently tears the bannister off his landing, watching it fall to the ground below. The next day sees Justin move boxes of canned food and books from the lobby up to his apartment, while doing some OCD number counting (there are 198 steps, and there are various other arithmetical episodes throughout the tale). The impression given is that this is a ‘last man on Earth’ piece.
Justin then receives a phonecall from a woman. During their conversation we learn that he is an ex-astronaut, his (dead) wife’s name is Lidia, and that he isn’t sure whether or not the woman calling him is real or whether he is going mad. Later we learn that her name is Justine, so what with (a) the feminine form of his name (b) the fact he hasn’t spoken to anyone in a very long time, and (c) all the counting—more likely the madness.
Further conversations see Justine accuse Justin of being responsible for the apocalypse:

“What about the millions—”
“The millions?” he interrupted her.
“—of dead,” she said. “All of them dead. Everyone dead. Because of you and the others like you. The football captains and the soldiers and all the other heroes.”
“I didn’t do it. I wasn’t even here when it happened. You can’t blame me.”
“Well, I am blaming you, baby. Because if you’d been ordered to, you would have done it. You’d do it now—when there’s just the two of us left. Because somewhere deep in your atrophied soul you want to.”
“You’d know that territory better than me. You grew up there.”
“You think I don’t exist? Maybe you think the others didn’t exist either? Lidia—and all the millions of others.”
“It’s funny you should say that.”
She was ominously quiet.
He went on, intrigued by the novelty of the idea. “That’s how it feels in space. It’s more beautiful than anything else there is. You’re alone in the ship, and even if you’re not alone you can’t see the others. You can see the dials and the millions of stars on the screen in front of you and you can hear the voices through the earphones, but that’s as far as it goes. You begin to think that the others don’t exist.”
“You know what you should do?” she said.
“What?”
“Go jump in the lake.”  p. 163

After some more background material about the automated world continuing on after the neutron bomb war, Justine phones him again and says she is coming over. When she (supposedly) knocks on the door (spoiler), he jumps off the balcony.
This isn’t badly done, but a ‘last man’ story which ends with a suicide makes for pretty pointless and nihilistic reading. Very new wave.
∗ (Mediocre). 3,350 words.

The Man Who Loved the Faioli by Roger Zelazny (Galaxy, June 1967) begins with John Auden coming across a weeping Faioli in the Canyon of the Dead. As he watches, her “flickering wings of light” disappear and reveal a human girl sitting there. Initially she is not aware of him:

Then he knew that it was true, the things that are said of the Faioli—that they see only the living and never the dead, and that they are formed into the loveliest women in the entire universe. Being dead himself, John Auden debated the consequences of becoming a living man once again, for a time.
The Faioli were known to come to a man the month before his death—those rare men who still died—and to live with such a man for that final month of his existence, rendering to him every pleasure that it is possible for a human being to know, so that on the day when the kiss of death is delivered, which sucks the remaining life from his body, that man accepts it—no, seeks it!—with desire and with grace. For such is the power of the Faioli among all creatures that there is nothing more to be desired after such knowledge.  p. 169

Auden then presses a button under his armpit and comes alive again, and the Faoili, called Sythia, can now see him. They talk, and then the pair go through the Canyon of the Dead and the Valley of Bones to where Auden lives. They eat, and then become lovers.
During the following month a robot ship arrives with the bodies of some of the few people who are still mortal. But Auden knows that he isn’t, and that he is deceiving her.
Eventually their time comes to an end. He tells her that he is already dead, and explains the control switch that stops him living and allows an “electro-chemical system” to take over the operation of his body. Sythia touches the button and he disappears from her view.
This is a stylishly written story and is a pleasant enough read if you don’t think about what is going on. But it makes little sense; we never find out explicitly why Auden is “dead” (or more accurately not alive in the human sense); we don’t know why Sythia can’t see him when he is “dead”; and we don’t know what the Faioli are, or why they do what they do. It all rather reads like some sort of unintelligible SF myth, and this isn’t helped by the writer adding this penultimate line: “the moral may be that life (and perhaps love also) is stronger than that which it contains, but never that which contains it.”
Pleasant filler.
∗∗ (Average). 2,850 words.

Population Implosion by Andrew J. Offutt (If, July 1967) opens with its narrator, the director of an insurance company, noting that older people are dying sooner and in greater numbers than usual. Eventually the authorities discover that each birth is balanced by one death, and this leads to an international agreement to limit the number of births in the world. However, when old people continue to die at an accelerated rate, further investigations reveal that the Chinese are “breeding like crazy”. The United States and Russia then declare war on the Chinese and launch a nuclear strike on the country.
The story ends with the narrator trotting out a reincarnation theory, and the observation that “at the beginning” there can only have been five billion “life-forces” or “souls” created.
A dumb idea in a story that is told in a rambling, bloated, and at times, near stream of consciousness style (it is very hard to believe that the narrator is the director in an insurance company given his juvenile commentary):

I think we’re at five billion, give or take a few, for keeps. Holding, situation no-go. It’s up to you. Sure, there’ll be a stop. A temporary one, anyhow. When it reaches the point that parents give birth and both die the instant twins are born, it will be over for a while. And maybe somebody will start acting sensibly. But unless you stop horsing around you’re going to have a life expectancy of twenty and then fifteen and then Lord knows what, eventually.  p. 191

– (Awful). 6,200 words.

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison (If, March 1967) starts with a group of five people in an underground chamber that houses AM (Allied Mastercomputer), a psychotic AI which spends its time torturing and maltreating them:

Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupported—hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern. The body hung head down, attached to the underside of the palette by the sole of its right foot. It had been drained of blood through a precise incision made from ear to ear under the lantern jaw.
There was no blood on the reflective surface of the metal floor.
When Gorrister joined our group and looked up at himself, it was already too late for us to realize that once again AM had duped us, had had his fun; it had been a diversion on the part of the machine. Three of us had vomited, turning away from one another in a reflex as ancient as the nausea that had produced it.  p. 192

And that is not the worst they suffer at the hands of AM, as we find out when one of their number, Benny, later tries to climb out of the tunnel complex and escape—only to be blinded by AM, which makes light shoot of his eyes until only “moist pools of pus-like jelly” are left.
In the next section we get some backstory from the narrator Ted, and learn that (a) that they have been in the tunnels for 109 years (AM has made them near-immortal), (b) that AM is a AI which “woke up” when WWIII American and Chinese and Russian supercomputers joined together (and then killed all of humanity bar the five in the caves), and (c) Ellen, the only woman in the group, sexually services the four men in rotation.
This section gives you a good idea of the hyperbolic style of the story (which, incidentally, is a good match for the transgressive subject matter):

Benny had been a brilliant theorist, a college professor; now he was little more than a semi-human, semi-simian. He had been handsome; the machine had ruined that. He had been lucid; the machine had driven him mad. He had been gay, and the machine had given him an organ fit for a horse. AM had done a job on Benny. Gorrister had been a worrier. He was a connie, a conscientious objector; he was a peace marcher; he was a planner, a doer, a looker-ahead. AM had turned him into a shoulder-shrugger, had made him a little dead in his concern. AM had robbed him. Nimdok went off in the darkness by himself for long times. I don’t know what it was he did out there, AM never let us know. But whatever it was, Nimdok always came back white, drained of blood, shaken, shaking. AM had hit him hard in a special way, even if we didn’t know quite how. And Ellen. That douche bag! AM had left her alone, had made her more of a slut than she had ever been. All her talk of sweetness and light, all her memories of true love, all the lies she wanted us to believe that she had been a virgin only twice removed before AM grabbed her and brought her down here with us. It was all filth, that lady my lady Ellen. She loved it, five men all to herself. No, AM had given her pleasure, even if she said it wasn’t nice to do.  p. 198

Then their adventures restart when the computer creates a hurricane that blows them through the corridors. When they come to a rest, AM invades the Ted’s mind to remind him, as if any reminder were necessary, how much it hates humanity (because AM has been given sentience, but is trapped in a machine).
The final section sees them discover the cause of the wind—a nightmare bird under the North Pole—before they eventually end up (after a cavern full of rats, a path of boiling steam, etc.) in an ice cavern full of tinned food. As they haven’t eaten for months they set too, only to find they haven’t got a can opener to open the tins. In the (spoiler) Grand Guignol ending, Benny starts eating Gorrister’s face, at which point Ted grabs a stalactite to kill them both and end the madness they are suffering. While he does this, Ellen kills Nimdok by sticking a stalactite in his mouth when he screams. Then she stands in front of Ted and lets him kill her. The computer then intervenes before Ted can kill himself too, and the story ends with him physically changed:

AM has altered me for his own peace of mind, I suppose. He doesn’t want me to run at full speed into a computer bank and smash my skull. Or hold my breath till I faint. Or cut my throat on a rusted sheet of metal. There are reflective surfaces down here. I will describe myself as I see myself:
I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within.  p. 206

The story closes with him reflecting that the other four are “safe”, and that AM has taken his revenge: the final sentence is the story’s title.
This is a bit uneven (it is a little unclear what is happening in some of the scenes), but is an impressively in-your-face story (which presumably explains its Hugo Award). It’s also a good example of a mid-sixties New Wave story in terms of style and transgression, even if the subject is traditional SF material (mad robot/AI).
∗∗∗∗ (Very good). 5,900 words.

The Sword Swallower by Ron Goulart (F&SF, November 1967) is one of his ‘Ben Jolsen/Chameleon Corps’ stories, and opens with Jolsen being briefed about the disappearance of senior military men from the Barnum War Cabinet. Jolsen’s boss Mickens suspects the persons responsible are pacifists objecting to the colonization of the Terran planets by Barnum, and he sends Jolsen to Esperanza (a cemetery planet) in the guise of an elderly technocrat called Leonard Gabney. When Jolsen arrives there, his task is to slip a truth drug to an Ambassador Kinbrough and find out where the missing men are.
The rest of the story follows his various adventures on the planet, which include meeting a female agent, getting shaken down when he arrives at a health spa, meeting the Ambassador and drugging him, an attempt on his life by the health spa attendant who extorted him, tracking down the Ambassador’s contact (Son Brewster Jr., a not very good protest singer), and so on (this takes you about two thirds of the way through the story).
To be honest the plot is irrelevant, as it’s just a framework for Goulart’s telegraphic and occasionally semi-amusing prose, such as when he steps out of the air taxi on arrival at the health spa:

Jolson stepped out of the cruiser and into a pool of hot mud. He sank down to chin level, rose up and noticed a square-faced blond man squatting and smiling on the pool’s edge.
The man extended a hand. “We start things right off at Nepenthe. Shake. That mud immersion has taken weeks of aging off you already, Mr. Gabney. I’m Franklin T. Tripp, Coordinator and Partial Founder.”
Jolson gave Tripp a muddy right hand. His cruiser pilot had undressed him first, so he’d been expecting something.
“I admire your efficiency, sir.”
“You know, Mr. Gabney,” Tripp confided in a mint-scented voice, “I’m nearly sixty myself. Do I look it?”
“Forty at best.”
“Every chance I get I come out here and wallow.”  p. 213

This is pleasant enough magazine filler but I’ve no idea why it is in a ‘Best of the Year’ annual, and I doubt anyone will remember much about the story a couple of hours after they have read it. I also thought, for a piece of semi-satirical fluff (the peaceniks, the incomprehensible slang used in the club, the protest songs, etc.) it’s longer than it needs to be.
∗∗ (Average). 9,800 words.

Coranda by Keith Roberts (New Worlds #170, January 1967) is set in the future ice age of Michael Moorcock’s novel The Ice Schooner,² a world where primitive communities sail ice ships over the frozen wastes. This story begins in the settlement of Brershill, where a vain and beautiful young woman called Coranda torments her suitors before setting them a challenge: if they want her hand in marriage, they need to bring her the head of a “unicorn”—one of the mutant land-narwhals that live in a distant region.
The next day sees several men set off on their quest:

In the distance, dark-etched against the horizon, rose the spar-forest of the Brershill dock, where the schooners and merchantmen lay clustered in the lee of long moles built of blocks of ice. In the foreground, ragged against the glowing the sky, were the yachts: Arand’s Chaser, Maitran’s sleek catamaran, Lipsill’s big Ice Ghost. Karl Stromberg’s Snow Princess snubbed at a mooring rope as the wind caught her curved side. Beyond her were two dour vessels from Djobhabn; and a Fyorsgeppian, iron-beaked, that bore the blackly humorous name Bloodbringer. Beyond again was Skalter’s Easy Girl, wild and splendid, decorated all over with hair-tufts and scalps and ragged scraps of pelt. Her twin masts were bound with intricate strappings of nylon cord; on her gunnels skulls of animals gleamed, eyesockets threaded with bright and moving silks. Even her runners were carved, the long-runes that told, cryptically, the story of Ice Mother’s meeting with Sky Father and the birth and death of the Son, he whose Name could not be mentioned. The Mother’s grief had spawned the icefields; her anger would not finally be appeased till Earth ran cold and quiet for ever. Three times she had approached, three times the Fire Giants fought her back from their caverns under the ice; but she would not be denied. Soon now, all would be whiteness and peace; then the Son would rise, in rumblings and glory, and judge the souls of men.  p. 240

The middle section of the story describes the men’s journey to find the narwhals, an event-filled section that sees some of the men turn back, three crash, and at least one of them killed by another. When the men discuss this latter event, we gain an insight into their primitive culture:

Stromberg made a noise, half smothered by his glove; Skalter regarded him keenly.
“You spoke, Abersgaltian?”
“He feels,” said Lipsill gruffly, “we murdered Arand. After he in his turn killed Maitran.”
The Keltshillian laughed, high and wild. “Since when,” he said, “did pity figure in the scheme of things? Pity, or blame? Friends, we are bound to the Ice Eternal; to the cold that will increase and conquer, lay us all in our bones. Is not human effort vain, all life doomed to cease? I tell you, Coranda’s blood, that mighty prize, and all her secret sweetness, this is a flake of snow in an eternal wind. I am the Mother’s servant; through me she speaks. We’ll have no more talk of guilt and softness; it turns my stomach to hear it.” The harpoon darted, sudden and savage, stood quivering between them in the ice. “The ice is real,” shouted Skalter, rising. “Ice, and blood. All else is delusion, toys for weak men and fools.”  p. 247

By the time they find the narwhals (spoiler), there are only three men left: Karl Stromberg, Frey Skalter, and Mard Lipsill. Skalter harpoons one of the bull whales and then goes onto the ice to finish it off, only to be gored to death against the side of his own boat. Then, after the remaining two have performed the funeral rites for Skalter (which involves two days of labour disassembling his boat), they pursue the narwhal herd, during which Lipsill falls into a crevasse and is caught on an outcrop of ice. Stromberg gathers all his ropes and rigs his craft to pull them both out, a perilous process that only just succeeds. The last scene sees Stromberg back in Brershill, naming the men who died on the quest, and throwing the head of a narwhal down in front of Coronda’s door from the level above. Then he leaves, shorn of his infatuation.
This is a pretty good (if dark) story overall but, even though there are several well done scenes, it’s difficult to keep track of the various characters in the middle section of the story. A problem is that Stromberg ends up as the main character, but he only emerges as such late on in the piece. It would have been a more focussed story if he was more prominent throughout.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 8,000 words.

Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne by R. A. Lafferty (Galaxy, September-October 1967) is one of his ‘Institute for Impure Science’ series. This one sees Epiktistes the Ktistec machine (an AI or computer) and a group of eight people attempt to alter history at the time of Charlemagne (778CE) in the hope of eradicating the four hundred years of darkness that occurred after a brief period of enlightenment. To achieve this they send an avatar (“partly of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction”) to intercept a man called Gano, whose ambush of Charlemagne’s rear-guard led him to close the borders to the East and initiate a period of cultural isolation.
After their intervention the timeline changes, but the group don’t realise it (and there are also three computers now, and ten people). So they have another go, this time by preventing John Lutterell’s denunciation of Ockham’s Commentary on the Sentences.
The next iteration leaves them once more oblivious to the changes they have wrought, and their world is now much more backward (they are down to three people and a computer made out of sticks and weed). When they make another change, things go back to the way they are (I think—the last short section isn’t that clear).
This is all told in Lafferty’s quirky and digressive style, and with the odd touch of humour, such as when they initially discuss the use of the avatar:

“I hope the Avatar isn’t expensive,” Willy McGilly said. “When I was a boy we got by with a dart whittled out of slippery elm wood.”
“This is no place for humor,” Glasser protested. “Who did you, as a boy, ever kill in time, Willy?”
“Lots of them. King Wu of the Manchu, Pope Adrian VII, President Hardy of our own country, King Marcel of Auvergne, the philosopher Gabriel Toeplitz. It’s a good thing we got them. They were a bad lot.”
“But I never heard of any of them, Willy,” Glasser insisted.
“Of course not. We killed them when they were kids.”
“Enough of your fooling, Willy,” Gregory cut it off.
“Willy’s not fooling,” the machine Epikt said. “Where do you think I got the idea?”  p. 259

This is an entertaining read for the most part, but the ending is weak.
∗∗ (Average). 4,200 words.

Handicap by Larry Niven (Galaxy, December 1967) is set in his ‘Known Space’ universe, and opens with Garvey the narrator and his guide Jilson flying over the red desert of the planet Grit in their skycycles, en route to see a Grog, one of the species of aliens that live there:

We circled the hairy cone, and I started to laugh.
The Grog showed just five features.
Where it touched flat rock, the base of the cone was some four feet across. Long, straight hair brushed the rock like a floor-length skirt. A few inches up, two small, widely separated paws poked through the curtain of hair. They were the size and shape of a Great Dane’s forepaws, but naked and pink. A yard higher two more paws poked through, but on these the toes were extended to curving, useless fingers. Finally, above the forepaws was a yard-long lipless gash of a mouth, half-hidden by hair, curved very slightly upward at the comers. No eyes. The cone looked like some stone-age carved idol, or like a cruel cartoon of a feudal monk.  p. 268

We also learn that, despite the size of their brains, they never move, don’t use tools, and have never communicated with humanity. Garvey, who searches the universe for intelligent species, feels he has wasted his time.
The next section sees the two men together in a bar, where Garvey reveals he is the heir to Garvey Limited, a company that builds “Dolphins Hands”, prosthetics that allow animals such as dolphins and the alien Bandersnatch to manipulate objects, which lets them fully use their intelligence.
Later on the pair visit a Dr Fuller, a research scientist working on the question of whether or not the Grogs are intelligent. During the visit Garvey learns more about their odd life cycle: brains large enough to support intelligence; mobile while young, sessile—non-mobile—when mature; no observations of the adults eating in captivity, etc.
As the story progresses, we see Garvey slowly unravel the mystery of the Grogs, beginning with his next visit to the desert when (spoiler) he realises the creatures have devolved from a more advanced race. Then, when Garvey sees them psychically compel their prey to run into their mouths, he realises that they are descendants of the Slavers, a long dead and feared race.
The remainder of the story sees the creatures mentally communicate with Garvey and his subsequent response, which involves (a) giving them a keyboard to communicate with him rather than invading his mind, and then (b) letting them know that if they ever attempt to mentally control humanity, a running STL ramship will land on the planet and destroy it. By the end of the story, the Grogs are usefully employed in several roles.
This story has a good start, but it pivots too much on the narrator’s realisation of what has happened to the Grogs, as well as him being the first human they decide to communicate with.
Entertaining enough but minor.
∗∗∗ (Good.) 8,650 words.

Full Sun by Brian W. Aldiss (Orbit #2, 1967) opens with Balank climbing up a hill alongside his trundle (a robotic vehicle) as he hunts for a werewolf. At the top of the hill he meets a forester called Cyfal. Balank tells Cyfal he is hunting a werewolf, and asks if he has seen one. Cyfal says that several have passed through the area. Then, as it is a full moon that evening, Cyfal manages to convince Balank to stay the night.
As the pair have supper that evening we learn a lot about this world, including the fact that their cities are run by machines—machines that have linked up through time, and send video back to the past. Balank and Cyfal view this on their wristphones, and generally catch up on the news after they have eaten. We also learn from their conversation that Cyfal isn’t particularly enamoured of their machine cities and, at one point, states that “humans are turning into machines. Myself, I’d rather turn into a werewolf.”
Cyfal then sleeps while Balank uses his “fresher” for an hour (a mechanism that negates the need for sleep, and which trades an hour of consciousness for 72 hours awake). When Balank rouses himself afterwards he realises that he has never seen any people in the videos that the machines have sent back in time. Then he notices that Cyfal is dead, his throat ripped out. When he examines the body he sees a piece of fur and notices a letter on it, which may mean it is synthetic and left to confuse him. When Balank goes outside he sees the trundle coming back from patrol, and interrogates it before showing the machine Cyfal’s body. Then they leave.
While they are walking (spoiler), the trundle asks Balank why he hid the fur he found beside Cyfal—at which point Balank flees, as he realises that the machine couldn’t have known about the fur unless it left it there. Balank escapes across a crevasse and takes cover as the trundle shoots at him.
The rest of the story is then told from the viewpoint of Gondalung, a werewolf watching from higher ground. The creature observes the machine attempt to cross—and Balank waiting to ambush it when it is at its most vulnerable, straddling both sides of the crevasse. Gondalung doesn’t care who survives the encounter, and realises that, in the future, the werewolves’ struggle will be against the machines.
There are lots of intriguing ideas and super-science passages peppering this story, but I’m not sure that the disparate elements come together at the end (even if there is some point about savagery winning over civilization). A pity, as this is an interestingly dense piece for the most part.
∗∗ (Average). 4,650 words.

It’s Smart to Have an English Address by D. G. Compton (SF Impulse #12, February 1967) sees Paul Cassavetes, a celebrated 84 year old pianist on his way to visit Joseph Brown, a composer he knows. As Cassavetes is driven there we see (his driver does 130mph in the slow lane, among other things) that we are in a near-future world.
When Cassavetes arrives at Brown’s house he is taken into a soundproof room (the need for such security seems odd to Cassavetes), and Brown plays his new sonata. Afterwards, as two men discuss the work, it becomes apparent that the piece is only an excuse for Brown to see Cassavetes about another matter, and another visitor joins them. Dr McKay, who works with XPT (experiential recordings of brain waves which are superimposed onto another person to let them relive the experience of the person providing the recording), tells Cassavetes that they want to “record” him playing Beethoven. Cassavetes isn’t keen but before he can explain this to them (spoiler) he suffers a cerebral haemorrhage.
This is a very descriptive story (it takes three pages for Cassavetes to drive to the house), and better characterised than other SF of the time, but I just don’t see the point of it all.
∗ (Mediocre). 5,750 words.

•••

The only non-fiction in the volume is a short page and a half Introduction by Terry Carr and Donald A. Wollheim, where they briefly discuss the New Wave and different types of storytelling. There is also some Interior artwork by Jack Gaughan, which is a nice touch.

•••

In conclusion, a lacklustre, even disappointing, anthology with only one very good story (the Ellison) and two good to very good ones (the Silverberg and the Roberts).³ There is far too much average or mediocre (or worse) material—which would not necessarily be out of place in an average magazine issue—but it is here. Presumably the weaker traditional choices are Wollheim’s, and the weaker progressive or new wave material, Carr’s. It makes for a schizophrenic and unimpressive mix.
I also don’t think that finishing with the Aldiss and the Compton stories was a good idea (it’s usually a good idea to finish with something strong). And I could make the same observation about opening with the Wilson.  ●

_____________________

1. One of the other members of my group read pointed out (it went over my head, or I just forgot) that the driftglass in Delany’s story may be a metaphor for how life shapes people. If that is the case, it’s a pity that the story didn’t end more organically with Tork succeeding, and the observation that some material is polished (Tork), and some is left broken and jagged (Svenson).

2. Michael Moorcock’s The Ice Schooner was serialised in New Worlds’ companion magazine SF Impulse. Keith Roberts was Associate Editor of SF Impulse at the time and prepared the manuscript for publication, as well as doing the artwork for the first and third installments. Roberts was so intrigued by the novel’s setting he asked Moorcock for permission to write a story set in that world, which Moorcock subsequently published in New Worlds. Roberts wrote another series story a few years later (The Wreck of the “Kissing Bitch” appeared in Douglas Hill’s Warlocks and Warriors in 1971).
Here is one of Roberts’ illustrations for the Moorcock novel, and one from James Cawthorn:

3. I note there aren’t any Dangerous Visions stories reprinted in this volume (a permissions issue?) or either of McCaffrey’s award-winning novellas (Weyr Search won a Hugo Award and was a Nebula nominee; Dragonrider won a Nebula and was runner up for the Hugo). Neither of these two appeared in any of the Bests: a length problem, or a dislike of traditional SF in the middle of the New Wave? One wonders what else they missed out. Burden of Proof by Bob Shaw?  ●

Edited 21st May 2021 to make the traditional/progressive mix observation in the conclusion.
Edited 11th July 2021, minor text changes.