ISFDB

Other reviews:1

Charles N. Brown, Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine (January/February 1978).

John O’Neill, Black Gate

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Editor, Terry Carr

Fiction:2

I See You • short story by Damon Knight ∗∗∗∗

The Phantom of Kansas • novelette by John Varley ∗∗∗∗

Seeing • novelette by Harlan Ellison ∗∗

The Death of Princes • short story by Fritz Leiber ∗∗+

The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats • novelette by James Tiptree, Jr. ∗∗

The Eyeflash Miracles • novella by Gene Wolfe ∗∗∗

An Infinite Summer • novelette by Christopher Priest ∗∗

The Highest Dive • short story by Jack Williamson ∗∗∗

Meathouse Man • novelette by George R. R. Martin ∗∗∗+

Custer’s Last Jump • novelette by Steven Utley and Howard Waldrop ∗∗∗∗

The Bicentennial Man • novelette by Isaac Asimov ∗∗∗∗∗

Non-fiction:

Introduction • by Terry Carr

Story Introductions • by Terry Carr

The Science Fiction Year • essay by Charles N. Brown

Recommended Reading—1976 • essay by Terry Carr

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As I’ve previously read two ‘Best of the Year’ volumes for 1976 (as well as the Nebula Award Winners collection), the only stories I haven’t read in this anthology are the Varley, Leiber, Tiptree Jr., Wolfe, and Martin. The reviews of these stories are immediately below; the reviews of the stories I’ve read previously are pasted in at the end for the convenience of anyone who hasn’t yet read them.

John Varley makes a third appearance in the ‘Best Of’ volumes with another of his ‘Eight Worlds’ tales, a series which is set in a solar system where the Invaders have thrown humankind off of Earth to live in the rest of the solar system—an unrecognisable future of disneyland habitats, memory recordings, resurrection by cloning, sex-changes, and much else.

The Phantom of Kansas is set on Luna, and opens with a memory recording scene similar to that in Overdrawn at the Memory Bank (Galaxy, May 1976; The 1977 Annual World’s Best SF, edited by Donald Wollheim). The difference this time is that Fox, the female narrator, isn’t doing a routine update but is there to replace a previous recording—her bank has been robbed and the memory cubes deposited there destroyed. These robberies are sometimes used as cover by killers so they can permanently murder others, i.e., they kill the person and their memories.

When Fox wakes up she discovers, of course, that she has been dead for two and a half years, and murdered three times. As none of the previous three versions of her have made any subsequent memory recordings she is no more knowledgeable than they were when they woke up:

[Fox 3] took extraordinary precautions to stay alive. More specifically, she tried to prevent circumstances that could lead to her murder. It worked for five lunations. She died as the result of a fight, that much was certain. It was a very violent fight, with blood all over the apartment. The police at first thought she must have fatally injured her attacker, but analysis showed all the blood to have come from her body.

So where did that leave me, Fox 4? An hour’s careful thought left the picture gloomy indeed. Consider: each time my killer succeeded in murdering me, he or she learned more about me. My killer must be an expert on Foxes by now, knowing things about me that I myself did not know. Such as how I handle myself in a fight. I gritted my teeth when I thought of that. [My mother] told me that Fox 3, the canniest of the lot, had taken lessons in self-defense. Karate, I think she said. Did I have the benefit of it? Of course not. If I wanted to defend myself I had to start all over, because those skills died with Fox 3. p. 25

She later discusses her security situation with a police detective called Isadora, who fills her in on the case, and urges her to stay inside her apartment while the police computer programs track the killer down. Fox reluctantly agrees to this, and thereafter spends her time composing a “weather symphony” for the Kansas disneyland (a huge simulated environment under the Moon’s surface).

Fox also discusses her case with the Central Computer:

“The average person on Luna deals with me on the order of twenty times per day, many of these transactions involving a routine epidermal sample for positive genalysis. By matching these transactions with the time and place they occurred, I am able to construct a dynamic model of what has occurred, what possibly could have occurred, and what cannot have occurred. With suitable peripheral programs I can refine this model to a close degree of accuracy. For instance, at the time of your first murder I was able to assign a low probability to ninety-nine point nine three percent of all humans on Luna as being responsible. This left me with a pool of 210,000 people who might have had a hand in it. This is merely from data placing each person at a particular place at a particular time. Further weighting of such factors as possible motive narrowed the range of prime suspects. Do you wish me to go on?

“No, I think I get the picture. Each time I was killed you must have narrowed it more. How many suspects are left?”

“You are not phrasing the question correctly. As implied in my original statement, all residents of Luna are still suspects. But each has been assigned a probability, ranging from a very large group with a value of 1027 to twenty individuals with probabilities of 13%.”

The more I thought about that, the less I liked it.

“None of those sound to me like what you’d call a prime suspect.”

“Alas, no. This is a very intriguing case, I must say.”

“I’m glad you think so.”

“Yes,” it said, oblivious as usual to sarcasm. “I may have to have some programs re-written. We’ve never gone this far without being able to submit a ninety percent rating to the Grand Jury Data Bank.” p. 33-34

Eventually, Fox’s completes her weather symphony, and subsequently insists on attending the premiere. While she watches the performance she notices someone interfering with the programming and realises it must be the murderer. Fox sneaks off alone armed only with a knife to one of the weather-control locations.

The identity of this murderer provides a clever surprise for the reader, and leads to a story resolution which ties in not only the original bank robbery but several other threads: the Fox 3 murder scene, the draconian population laws of the Eight Worlds, and the omniscience and compassion of the Central Computer. There is also a . . . ah, interesting sex scene.

I should note in passing that while Fox is cooped up in her apartment we get a lot of ‘Eight Worlds’ background (there is information about the disneylands, population laws, etc.), as well as some philosophical reflection about the nature of personal identity in a world of replacement bodies:

Human consciousness is linear, along a timeline that has a beginning and an end. If you die after a recording, you die, forever and with no reprieve. It doesn’t matter that a recording of you exists and that a new person with your memories to a certain point can be created; you are dead. Looked at from a fourth-dimensional viewpoint, what memory recording does is to graft a new person onto your lifeline at a point in the past. You do not retrace that lifeline and magically become that new person. I, Fox 4, was only a relative of that long-ago person who had her memories recorded. And if I died it was forever. Fox 5 would awaken with my memories to date, but I would be no part of her. She would be on her own.

Why do we do it? I honestly don’t know. I suppose that the human urge to live forever is so strong that we’ll grasp at even the most unsatisfactory substitute. At one time people had themselves frozen when they died, in the hope of being thawed out in a future when humans knew how to reverse death. Look at the Great Pyramid in the Egypt disneyland if you want to see the sheer size of that urge.

So we live our lives in pieces. I could know, for whatever good it would do me, that thousands of years from now a being would still exist who would be at least partly me. She would remember exactly the same things I remembered of her childhood; the trip to Archimedes, her first sex change, her lovers, her hurts and her happiness. If I had another recording taken, she would remember thinking the thoughts I was thinking now. And she would probably still be stringing chunks of experience onto her life, year by year. Each time she had a new recording that much more of her life was safe for all time. There was a certain comfort in knowing that my life was safe up until a few hours ago, when the recording was made. pp. 27-28

The best of the ‘Eight Worlds’ stories I’ve reread so far.

The Death of Princes by Fritz Leiber is a conversational tale in which the narrator tells of a lifelong, if intermittent, friendship with a man called François Broussard. Broussard is known for being able to answer almost any maths question (but needs between ten and twelve hours to do so), and has other peculiarities as well. These latter include a recurrent dream about swimming around in space surrounded by various large objects, and a fascination with a observing a particular part of the night sky:

Speaking of the astral reminds me that there was one particular part of the heavens that Francois Broussard was especially interested in and somehow associated with himself—particularly in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, when he was living in Arizona with its clear, starry nights that showed the Milky Way; he had some sort of occult coterie there, we learned; he’d stare and stare at it (the spot in the heavens) with and without a telescope or binoculars through the long desert nights, like a sailor on a desert island watching for a ship along a sea lane it might follow. In fact, he once spotted a new comet there, a very faint one. Not very surprising in an astrologer, what with their signs, or constellations of the zodiac, but this spot was halfway around the heavens from his natal sign, which was Pisces, or Aquarius rather by his way of figuring it. p. 99

Eventually (spoiler), he is linked to Haley’s Comet, and a “seed of the Gods” idea. This isn’t particularly convincing, but the pleasure of the story is in the narrator’s erudite and atmospheric account of the recent historical periods which he and Broussard pass through. There is also a lot of literary name-dropping (which, among the mainstream names, includes five mentions of Heinlein—and two of his novels—and a one of Willy Ley).

The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats by James Tiptree, Jr. gets off to an engrossing start with an account of a post grad student, Tilly Lipsitz, who works in a university psychology department where they vivisect animals. The sadistic ghastliness of this environment is chillingly and hypnotically described (at times I forgot I was reading, a rare event), and it soon becomes clear that Lipsitz has problems with the way they treat the animals. Both his suspected views, and lack of progress in his experimental work, result in a car crash interview with his supervising professor, one of the few moments of light relief—if you can call black comedy that—in the story:

And to his utter horror [Lipsitz’s] mind has emptied itself, emptied itself of everything except the one fatal sentence which he now hears himself helplessly launched toward. “Take us here. I mean, it’s a good principle to attack problems to which one has easy access, which are so to speak under our noses, right? So. For example, we’re psychologists. Supposedly dedicated to some kind of understanding, helpful attitude toward the organism, toward life. And yet all of us down here—and in all the labs I’ve heard about—we seem to be doing such hostile and rather redundant work. Testing animals to destruction, that fellow at Princeton. Proving how damaged organisms are damaged, that kind of engineering thing. Letting students cut or shock or starve animals to replicate experiments that have been done umpteen times. What I’m trying to say is, why don’t we look into why psychological research seems to involve so much cruelty—I mean, aggression? We might even . . .”

He runs down then, and there is a silence in which he becomes increasingly aware of Welch’s breathing.

“Doctor Lipsitz,” the older man says hoarsely, “are you a member of the SPCA?” p. 125

After this, Lipsitz returns to the labs, where the horror continues:

A wailing sound alerts him to the fact that he has arrived at the areaway. A truck is offloading crates of cats, strays from the pound.

“Give a hand, Tilly! Hurry up!”

It’s Sheila, holding the door for Jones and Smith. They want to get these out of sight quickly, he knows, before some student sees them. Those innocent in the rites of pain. He hauls a crate from the tailboard.

“There’s a female in here giving birth,” he tells Sheila. “Look.” The female is at the bottom of a mess of twenty emaciated struggling brutes. One of them has a red collar.

“Hurry up, for Christ’s sake.” Sheila waves him on.

“But . . .”

When the crates have disappeared inside he does not follow the others in but leans on the railing, lighting a cigarette. The kittens have been eaten, there’s nothing he can do. Funny, he always thought that females would be sympathetic to other females. Shows how much he knows about Life. Or is it that only certain types of people empathize? Or does it have to be trained in, or was it trained out of her? Mysteries, mysteries. Maybe she is really compassionate somewhere inside, toward something. He hopes so, resolutely putting away a fantasy of injecting Sheila with reserpine and applying experimental stimuli. p. 127

That evening, Lipsitz reflects on his situation and decides to get with the program: he decides that going to the lab and euthanizing his rats—rather than appearing to treat them as pets—will be a good first step. On his arrival he begins the process, attempting to be as compassionate as he can, but then finds (spoiler) a tangle of rats in a tunnel behind one of the cages.

The fantasy sequence that follows has him realise he is looking at a “king rat” and, after Lipsitz follows it into the space it inhabits, he meets a young woman. They talk. Eventually, the king rat leads the lab animals away to some other world. Although Lipsitz wants to go with them, the woman explains that he cannot. He later wakes up on the lab floor (I’m not sure I’ve described this passage entirely accurately, but this is the gist of it).

Lipsitz then does the usual Tiptree-rejected-man stuff, i.e., brutally kills all his rats (he tips the squealing mass into a large bin with a bottle of ether), and then thinks about his plans to develop a commercial procedure to increase the intensity of animal behaviour (so, for example, a racehorse will be able to run faster than ever—even if its bones break in the process).

The first part of this story has some excellent description and scene-setting, but I didn’t find the midway fantasy swerve convincing. However, if you’re looking for another Tiptree tale about death, pain, and rejected men becoming psychotic rapists/murderers (e.g. Houston, Houston, Do you Read?), then this will be right up your street.

(The page of illustrations above for the Tiptree story are by “Racoona Sheldon”.)

The Eyeflash Miracles by Gene Wolfe begins with a blind boy called Little Tib meeting two men near a railway track: one of the men is Nitty, who is the assistant of the other man, Mr Parker. The latter has lost his job as a school superintendent due to computerisation and now has mental problems.

Parker asks Little Tib to come with them to a computer building in another city to help them break in. There, Parker will be able alter the computer’s programming so that he gets his job back. Little Tib agrees.

As the three travel we learn that in this future society everyone’s retinal scans are stored on a central computer, which uses this information to provide benefits. Tib doesn’t have any retinas, and so doesn’t exist as far as the state is concerned. More importantly, we find out that Little Tib has parapsychological powers that enable him to produce “miracles” (Carr unnecessarily telegraphs this in his introduction). When Tib performs these miracles, they coincide with strange dreams or visions, such as when the three are tear-gassed by two female railway cops:

Little Tib could hear the sound of the women’s boots on the boxcar floor, and the little grunt Alice gave as she took hold of the ladder outside the door and swung herself out. Then there was a popping noise, as though someone had opened a bottle of soda, and a bang and clatter when something struck the back of the car. His lungs and nose and mouth all burned. He felt a rush of saliva too great to contain. It spilled out of his lips and down his shirt; he wanted to run, and he thought of the old place, where the creek cut (cold as ice) under banks of milkweed and goldenrod. Nitty was yelling: “Throw it out! Throw it out!” And somebody, he thought it was Mr. Parker, ran full tilt into the side of the car. Little Tib was on the hill above the creek again, looking down across the bluebonnets toward the surging, glass-dark water, and a kite-flying west wind was blowing. p. 161

Little Tib neutralises the gas, and we later find that Parker’s mental problems have also gone.

This is almost immediately followed by a longer dream/fantasy sequence where Little Tib walks down a path with talking birds in the trees above, and where he later meets a “copper man”. This sequence rambles on for some time before Tib wakes up in a doctor’s office. There he cures a crippled girl.

The three later meet a travelling prophet called Dr Prithivi and, shortly after this, Tib ends up levitating in front of a number of other people. Dr Prithivi involves Tib in his plans for an upcoming religious service but, before this takes place, Tib breaks into the computer building and lets Parker in (this involves another fantasy/vision sequence).

At the festival, Tib’s supposed father appears in disguise as one of the characters in a religious play, and we get a lot of backstory about how Tib is the product of an experimental government eugenics program where all the other children were killed. The father later attempts to do the same to Tib.

This sightly hackneyed finale is somewhat at odds with the rest of the narrative, and the enjoyment provided by the story largely comes from its quirkiness, the way it slips between reality and fantasy, and its various levels of religious, historical, and literary allusion (e.g. there are various Wizard of Oz references in the story—Dorothy and the skipping in the final scene, the metal man, etc.3).

Although I thought this pleasant enough, it’s not up to the level of Wolfe’s best work.

Meathouse Man by George R. R. Martin is one of his ‘Corpse Handlers’ series of stories, and gets off to a disturbing start when Trager visits a “meathouse”, a brothel, on Skrakky:

He came to the bed slowly and sat, to a chorus of creaking springs. He touched her and the flesh was warm. Of course. The body was alive enough, a heart beat under the heavy white breasts, she breathed. Only the brain was gone, replaced with a deadman’s synthabrain. She was meat now, an extra body for a corpse handler to control, just like the crew he worked each day under sulfur skies. She was not a woman. So it did not matter that Trager was just a boy, a jowly frogfaced boy who smelled of Skrakky. She (no, it, remember?) would not care, could not care.

Emboldened, aroused and hard, the boy stripped off his corpse handler’s clothing and climbed in bed with the female meat. He was very excited; his hands shook as he stroked her, studied her. Her skin was very white, her hair dark and long, but even the boy could not call her pretty. Her face was too flat and wide, her mouth hung open, and her limbs were loose and sagging with fat.

On her huge breasts, all around the fat dark nipples, the last customer had left toothmarks where he’d chewed her. Trager touched the marks tentatively, traced them with a finger. Then, sheepish about his hesitations, he grabbed one breast, squeezed it hard, pinched the nipple until he imagined a real girl would squeal with pain. The corpse did not move. Still squeezing, he rolled over on her and took the other breast into his mouth.

And the corpse responded. p. 261

In this dark interplanetary future, criminals (and the unfortunate victims of kidnappers and people traffickers) have their brains replaced with bioelectronic units that enable their “corpses” to be controlled by qualified handlers. Trager is a one of these handlers, and works a five-crew at an open mine. Although he considers himself a good operator, he is in awe of the handler at the meathouse, and starts to fantasise about meeting her someday—until, that is, one of his work colleagues scathingly tells him that the corpses at the meathouse have no controller, but a biofeedback unit (which is why the sex is so good). Trager stops going.

Later, when one of his automills breaks down, he meets a female tech called Josie, and starts seeing her socially. After a year of friendship Trager professes his love for her but is rejected.

He eventually leaves the planet and goes to Vendalia intending to become a handler in the gladiatorials. However, he is repelled by the butchery of the contests, so instead gets a job with a forestry crew:

They had a tight-knit group: three handlers, a forester, thirteen corpses. Each day they drove the forest back, with Trager in the lead. Against the Vendalian wilderness, against the blackbriars and the hard gray ironspike trees and the bulbous rubbery snap-limbs, against the tangled hostile forest, he threw his six-crew and their buzztrucks. Smaller than the automills he’d run on Skrakky, fast and airborne, complex and demanding, those were buzztrucks. Trager ran six of them with corpse hands, a seventh with his own. Before his screaming blades and laser knives, the wall of wilderness fell each day. Donelly came behind him, pushing three of the mountain-sized rolling mills, to turn the fallen trees into lumber for Gidyon and other cities of Vendalia. Then Stevens, the third handler, with a flamecannon to burn down stumps and melt rocks, and the soilpumps that would ready the cleared land for farming. The forester was their foreman. The procedure was a science.

Clean, hard, demanding work; Trager thrived on it by day. He grew lean, athletic; the lines of his face tightened and tanned, he grew steadily browner under Vendalia’s hot bright sun. His corpses were almost part of him, so easily did he move them, fly their buzztrucks. As an ordinary man might move a hand, a foot. Sometimes his control grew so firm, the echoes so clear and strong, that Trager felt he was not a handler working a crew at all, but rather a man with seven bodies. Seven strong bodies that rode the sultry forest winds. He exulted in their sweat. p. 275

The next chunk of the story charts Trager’s first proper relationship with a woman called Laurel, but (spoiler) she eventually ends up with his friend Donnelly. Trager finds this breakup even worse, and the story ultimately ends with him, after much angst and soul-searching, as a successful gladiator handler:

The enemy corpse is huge and black, its torso rippling with muscle, a product of years of exercise, the biggest thing that Trager has ever faced. It advances across the sawdust in a slow, clumsy crouch, holding the gleaming broadsword in one hand. Trager watches it from his chair above one end of the fighting area. The other corpsemaster is careful, cautious. His own deadman, a wiry blond, stands and waits, a morningstar trailing down in the blood-soaked arena dust. Trager will move him fast enough and well enough when the time is right. The enemy knows it, and the crowd.

The black corpse suddenly lifts its broadsword and scrambles forward in a run, hoping to use reach and speed to get its kill. But Trager’s corpse is no longer there when the enemy’s measured blow cuts the air where he had been.

Sitting comfortably above the fighting pit/down in the arena, his feet grimy with blood and sawdust, Trager/the corpse snaps the command/swings the morningstar—and the great studded ball drifts up and around, almost lazily, almost gracefully. Into the back of the enemy’s head, as he tries to recover and turn. A flower of blood and brain blooms swift and sudden, and the crowd cheers.

Trager walks his corpse from the arena, then stands to receive applause. It is his tenth kill. Soon the championship will be his. He is building such a record that they can no longer deny him a match. pp. 288-289

The story finishes with Trager returning to his trophy partner who is, of course, a corpse. After they have sex (or after Trager masturbates), there is a bitter coda about the impossibility of finding one’s dream, and how “of all the bright cruel lies they tell you, the cruelest is the one called love”.

This is a downer story written, one suspects, by an author who did not have a happy love life when he was younger, and spent far too much time brooding about it.4 Probably not one to read if you have just been dumped.

That said, even if the story’s concerns are those of a young man, the description is well done and there is a strong story arc. If the darkness and loss don’t turn you off, you’ll find it pretty good.

The following story reviews appeared here previously, and are presented below for easy reference. If you have already read them and do not wish to do so again (perhaps your insomnia has improved?) then skip down to the discussion of the non-fiction content below.

I See You by Damon Knight has, for such an accomplished writer and editor, quite a confusing start (and there are one or two other passages that have this problem too). Fortunately, the rest of it is an accomplished story about the development of a device called an Ozo, a time and space viewer that can be used to see any place at any time. The first half follows the inventor’s development of the device, and then his anonymous production and distribution of it. Once it becomes widespread, and any person can see what any other is doing (now, or in the past), it transforms society:

You are watching an old movie, Bob and Ted and Carol and Alice. The humor seems infantile and unimaginative to you; you are not interested in the actresses’ occasional semi-nudity. What strikes you as hilarious is the coyness, the side-long glances, smiles, grimaces hinting at things that will never be shown on the screen. You realize that these people have never seen anyone but their most intimate friends without clothing, have never seen any adult shit or piss, and would be embarrassed or disgusted if they did. Why did children say “pee-pee” and “poo-poo,” and then giggle? You have read scholarly books about taboos on “bodily functions,” but why was shitting worse than sneezing? p. 276

Apart from the story’s “if this goes on” inevitability, its other strength is the sense of wonder buzz, the feeling of infinity, that several of the passages provide:

You are forty, a respected scholar, taking a few days out to review your life, as many people do at your age. You have watched your mother and father coupling on the night they conceived you, watched yourself growing in her womb, first a red tadpole, then a thing like an embryo chicken, then a big-headed baby kicking and squirming. You have seen yourself delivered, seen the first moment when your bloody head broke into the light. You have seen yourself staggering about the nursery in rompers, clutching a yellow plastic duck. Now you are watching yourself hiding behind the fallen tree on the hill, and you realize that there are no secret places. And beyond you in the ghostly future you know that someone is watching you as you watch; and beyond that watcher another, and beyond that another . . . Forever. p. 279

Seeing by Harlan Ellison is a story about Lorna, a prostitute in the urban squalor that surrounds a future Polar Interstellar Exchange spaceport in the Artic. Her clients include the many alien species that frequent the area. More significantly, she has mutant eyes that provide a different type of sight:

She told the old woman of seeing. Seeing directions, as blind fish in subterranean caverns see the change in flow of water, as bees see the wind currents, as wolves see the heat auras surrounding humans, as bats see the walls of caves in the dark. Seeing memories, everything that ever happened to her, the good and the bad, the beautiful and the grotesque, the memorable and the utterly unforgettable, early memories and those of a moment before, all on instant recall, with absolute clarity and depth of field and detail, the whole of one’s past, at command. Seeing colours, the sensuousness of airborne bacteria, the infinitely subtle shadings of rock and metal and natural wood, the tricksy shifts along a spectrum invisible to ordinary eyes of a candle flame, the colours of frost and rain and the moon and arteries pulsing just under the skin; the intimate overlapping colours of fingerprints left on a credit, so reminiscent of paintings by the old master, Jackson Pollock. Seeing colours that no human eyes have ever seen. Seeing shapes and relationships, the intricate calligraphy of all parts of the body moving in unison, the day melding into the night, the spaces and spaces between spaces that form a street, the invisible lines linking people. She spoke of seeing, of all the kinds of seeing except. The stroboscopic view of everyone. The shadows within shadows behind shadows that formed terrible, tortuous portraits she could not bear. p. 200-201

The old, powerful, and rich 26-Krystabel Parsons has had a number of transplants in the past, and desires a pair of eyes like Lorna’s for her next surgery. She commissions a “Knoxdoctor” called Bream to find her a set, and he in turn sends two “prongers” called Berne and Grebbie to search.

This isn’t an entirely successful work and there are various reasons for this. One is that Ellison can’t seem to get out of his own way. There is one early passage that introduces extraneous camera directions (“From extreme long shot, establishing, etc.”) which distanced me from the story just I was getting into it. Another aspect of the story that had a similar effect was some of his word choices, which had me stop reading on more than one occasion and reach for a dictionary.5 I also wasn’t that impressed with the scene where an angry customer, in the form of a giant slug, comes looking for Lorna: this read like some sleazy update of a Planet Stories tale.

The story improves somewhat towards the end but is definitely a mixed bag. It’s a pity that he didn’t write the story that the quoted passage above suggests.

An Infinite Summer by Christopher Priest is set partly in Victorian times, so this is probably a non-associational spin-off from his contemporaneous novel The Space Machine. A man wanders around a 1940s London visited by “freezers”—people from the future who use humans to create frozen tableaux. These are not visible to the people of the time but they are to Thomas, although this is never explained. It materialises that he and Sarah, a woman he was in the process of proposing to, were frozen in 1903 but that his part of the tableaux decayed in 1935. Since then he has been waiting for the release of Sarah, and visits her every day. His vigil ends with a nice final image.

This one is perhaps best appreciated on an subconscious level as it doesn’t bear too much analysis: judging by the number of tableaux Thomas notices on his short journey so see Sarah, you would think the police would notice the massive number of missing persons.

The Highest Dive by Jack Williamson is an old-school SF story that opens with a young man called Max caught in a violent storm on Atlas, a massive alien planet with very low gravity and high winds. As Max struggles to avoid being blown away he lapses into unconsciousness, and the story flashbacks to his time on Earth, his decision to go to the planet, and his familiarisation on arrival. This latter includes a trip to a pool:

He saw no water anywhere. The ridge was nearly flat on top, flaked and cracked with time. Ropes stretched along its rim. The reddish desert lay far, far below. Feeling bewildered, he looked back at Komatsu.

‘There’s our pool.’ Komatsu leaned out to point straight down. ‘The only open water we’ve found on Atlas.’

He gripped the rope and looked. The time-worn wall of something like black rock dropped straight down so far it made him giddy. At last he found the pool—a small round mirror of bright blue water tucked under the very foot of that frightening cliff.

‘It’s deep enough.’ Queerly casual, Komatsu pointed at another hand-rope, stretching from their feet to a rock down in the pool. ‘We climb that to get back.’ He grinned at Max. ‘Want me to go first?’

‘You’ve got to be kidding!’ Max stared at his dark, gaunt face. ‘We’re too . . . too high!’

‘Just a thousand feet.’ Komatsu’s grin grew wider. ‘About the same as ten at home. You fall slow here, kid. With air resistance, your terminal velocity is about fifteen feet a second. From any height, you never fall faster. Watch me.’

He peeled off his yellow suit, moved to the rim in a lazy, one legged dance, floated over it. Max leaned out to watch him drifting slowly down, arms spread like wings to guide him. He was a long time in the air, and his body had dwindled to a far dark speck before he broke the blue mirror of the pool. p. 3

When Max recovers consciousness he finds himself miles up in the air. As the near-permanent clouds temporarily clear, he sees (spoiler) a huge alien city. Max contacts his team, and they gain an insight into what the planet really is . . . . After this conversation, Max’s only chance of survival is to try control his descent to dive into a body of water beside the camp.

This has a slightly dated feel, and there is no explanation as to why the alien city wasn’t revealed earlier by ground radar, but the story isn’t bad, and the final scene gives a mini-sense of wonder buzz.

Custer’s Last Jump by Steven Utley and Howard Waldrop is an alternate world non-fiction account about Custer and Crazy Horse and the Battle of Little Big Horn—which, in this world, involves the 7th Cavalry parachuting into action from dirigibles!

The story starts much earlier than the battle however, and rather slowly, with an account of formation of the 1st Western Interdiction Wing of the Confederate States Army Air Corps. Their early monoplanes affect the course of the American Civil War.

The second section tells of Crazy Horse and Custer’s deployment during that war, and how Crazy Horse and other members of his tribe agree to give land to the CSAAC for an airfield in return for pilot training:

It fell to Captain Smith to train Crazy Horse. The Indian became what Smith, in his journal,144 describes as “the best natural pilot I have seen or it has been my pleasure to fly with.” Part of this seems to have come from Smith’s own modesty; by all accounts, Smith was one of the finer pilots of the war.

[. . .]

Smith records146 that Crazy Horse’s first solo took place on August 14, 1864, and that the warrior, though deft in the air, still needed practice on his landings. He had a tendency to come in overpowered and to stall his engine out too soon. Minor repairs were made on the skids of the craft after this flight.

All this time, Crazy Horse had flown Smith’s craft. Smith, after another week of hard practice with the Indian, pronounced him “more qualified than most pilots the CSAAC in Alabama turned out147 and signed over the aircraft to him. Crazy Horse begged off. Then, seeing that Smith was sincere, he gave the captain many buffalo hides. Smith reminded the Indian that the craft was not his: during their off hours, when not training, the Indians had been given enough instruction in military discipline as Moseby, never a stickler, thought necessary. The Indians had only a rudimentary idea of government property. Of the seven other Indian men, three were qualified as pilots; the other four were given gunner positions in the Krupp bi-wing light bombers assigned to the squadron. p. 34

Custer, meanwhile, becomes a parachutist at Jump School.

Later in the war Crazy Horse’s squadron is almost completely destroyed during a Union attack on his unit’s airfield, and he and a few others escape with a handful of aircraft, which they hide in tribal caves. Around the same time, Custer leads a parachute assault on another Native American tribe’s settlement (even though they are, unknown to Custer, a Union ally). Custer massacres the natives and, when Crazy Horse visits the scene after the Union troops have left, Custer’s fate is sealed.

The next section is a Collier’s Magazine article called Custer’s Last Jump, which describes The Battle of the Little Big Horn:

Few events in American history have captured the imagination so thoroughly as the Battle of the Little Big Horn. Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer’s devastating defeat at the hands of Sioux and Cheyenne Indians in June 1876 has been rendered time and again by such celebrated artists as George Russell and Frederic Remington. Books, factual and otherwise, which have been written around or about the battle, would fill an entire library wing. The motion-picture industry has on numerous occasions drawn upon “Custer’s Last Jump” for inspiration; latest in a long line of movieland Custers is Erroll Flynn [see photo], who appears with Olivia de Havilland and newcomer Anthony Quinn in Warner Brothers’ soon-to-be-released They Died with Their Chutes On. p. 42

The penultimate part is a more detailed account written by Mark Twain, composed after his interview of one of the battle’s participants, Black Man’s Hand. He tells Twain that Custer lost the fight because (spoiler) Crazy Horse’s monoplanes attacked the 7th Cavalry’s dirigibles, and brought most of them down.

There follows a short, vainglorious extract from a history of the 7th Cavalry (written by Edgar Rice Burroughs), just before an extensive bibliography of alternate historical texts.

This is not only a very good parallel world story, with every section making this world more detailed and convincing, it’s an entertaining one too.

The Bicentennial Man by Isaac Asimov, is probably one of the best stories of his I’ve read—vastly superior to his early work in the various 1940s Astoundings I’ve read recently (there is nothing like thirty years of practice to improve your writing).

The story concerns Andrew, a valet robot who is the property of a family who discover that he can carve wood and “enjoy” the experience. His owner begins selling the carvings, and puts half the money in an account for the robot. Andrew becomes increasingly human-like, and he eventually has enough money to “buy” his freedom. His owner doesn’t want the money, but he does institute a court case to give Andrew’s wishes legal foundation, and they win. Nonetheless, years later, after the death of the owner, and even though Andrew is legally free, he almost comes a cropper at the hands of two yobs as a result of his programming, which means he must obey their orders to dismantle himself. Andrew is only just saved in time by the son of the family. Andrew then determines to write a history of robots, which eventually results in the establishment of robot rights.

This first part of the story mirrors, in some respects, the emancipation of American slaves, but the rest of it goes somewhere else entirely in that it details Andrew’s long struggle to become human. This begins after the “Little Miss” of the story, the young girl that Andrew used to care for, dies in her eighties, and Andrew goes to United States Robots with one of the grandsons to pressure them to give him one of their new android bodies. Andrew eventually gets his way, but causes US Robots to change their business model so they never deal in autonomous robots again.

Even after getting his android body, Andrew wants to become even more human, and this leads him into the design of ever more sophisticated prosthetics:

He accepted membership in several learned societies, including one that was devoted to the new science he had established—the one he had called robobiology but which had come to be termed prosthetology. On the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his construction, a testimonial dinner was given in his honor at U.S. Robots. If Andrew saw an irony in this, he kept it to himself.

Alvin Magdescu came out of retirement to chair the dinner. He was himself ninety-four years old and was alive because he, too, had prosthetized devices that, among other things, fulfilled the function of liver and kidneys. The dinner reached its climax when Magdescu, after a short and emotional talk, raised his glass to toast The Sesquicentennial Robot.

Andrew had had the sinews of his face redesigned to the point where he could show a human range of emotions, but he sat through all the ceremonies solemnly passive. He did not like to be a Sesquicentennial Robot. p. 153

The rest of the story describes the processes which make Andrew completely “human” (spoiler): first, there is a court case which defines him so; second, he has surgery which makes him mortal. The last scene has the World President arriving at Andrew’s deathbed to sign the new law, and to declare him The Bicentennial Man.

This is an exceptional piece which is smoothly written, has a number of smart set pieces, builds a great story arc (which stretches over generations), and has a great last line.

Terry Carr provides a short Introduction at the start of the book and various Story Introductions throughout. Both provide interesting snippets of opinion and information (read the Story Introductions above and you will see what I mean):

I have a theory that short stories don’t thrive today because people don’t like to think.

It’s been said that a good short story is essentially the pivotal chapter of a novel, embodying all the elements that could go into a longer story but inviting readers to extrapolate the background and aftermath for themselves. But evidently people prefer to have their thinking done for them by the authors: they’d rather spend an extra hour or two reading someone else’s thoughts, in a novel, than thinking for themselves. They want writers to tell them what Maria said to her lover when she found out he was her uncle, and whether or not he knew it himself. Who wants to speculate?—we live in a world that worships data. pp. vi-vii

Carr also adds a Recommended Reading—1976 list at the back of the book, which adds another couple of dozen stories to his picks in this book (see the table below to see what they are6).

Finally, there is a good, concise summary of 1976 by the then Locus editor Charles N. Brown, The Science Fiction Year, which covers just about every aspect of the field including, of course, the magazines:

The sf magazine field showed a number of changes in 1976, most for the better. The average circulation was up and several new magazines appeared or were announced. Odyssey, a large-size magazine marred by poor production, had two issues in 1976 before folding; the British magazine Science Fiction Monthly also ceased publication. But two new magazines appeared to take their place. Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine is a new digest size magazine which hopes to capitalize on Dr. Asimov’s name and fame. Galileo is a large-size effort with no newsstand distribution. Cosmos, another large-size magazine, has been announced for 1977 publication. The two leading magazines, Analog and Fantasy and Science Fiction, continued to dominate the field. Galaxy skipped several issues and the other two, Amazing and Fantastic, dropped back to quarterly publication. Analog announced a price hike to $1.25 per issue and the other magazines will probably follow in due course. pp. 383-384

In conclusion, this volume has one excellent and two very good stories as well as a number of other worthwhile pieces but, unlike the Dozois and Wollheim entries, it also has a number of stories that are less impressive and perhaps should not be here. The only material this collection adds if you have read those other two volumes are the Varley and the Martin pieces.

If I had to pick one of the three it would probably the Wollheim. ●

_____________________

1. According to ISFDB, there appears to be only one magazine review of this volume, and that was done by Charles N. Brown (of Locus fame), who reviewed it along with the Carr and Wollheim volumes in the January-February 1978 edition of Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine:

There are now three “best of the year” volumes published (down from four last year). The Best Science Fiction of the Year #6 edited by Terry Carr is the longest and best with four stories I consider excellent: “I See You” by Damon Knight, “The Phantom of Kansas” by John Varley, “Seeing” by Harlan Ellison, and “The Bicentennial Man” by Isaac Asimov. There are seven others, including four I’d rate as “B” and only three I didn’t care for. The 1977 Annual World’s Best SF edited by Donald Wollheim is nearly as good with six of the ten stories rates “B” or better. The Asimov and Knight stories also appear here as do two other “A” stories, “Appearance of Life” by Brian W. Aldiss and “The Hertford Manuscript” by Richard Cowper. Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Sixth Annual Collection has a new editor, Gardner Dozois, replacing Lester del Rey. I’d rate only two of the eight stories as excellent, “The Samurai and the Willows” by Michael Bishop and “The Diary of the Rose” by Ursula K. Le Guin. There is also a good summary of the year. (There’s also one in the Carr volume, but I’m prejudiced since I wrote it.) On the whole, all three volumes are worth having although you should probably wait for the paperback on the Dozois book. p. 128

2. The stories are taken from F&SF (Knight), Galaxy (Varley), Andromeda #1 (Ellison,* Priest), Amazing (Leiber), New Dimensions #6 (Tiptree), Science Fiction Monthly (Williamson), Future Power (Wolfe), Orbit #18 (Martin), Universe #6 (Utley/Waldrop), Stellar #2 (Asimov). There is nothing from Analog or Fantastic magazines.

* Ellison’s story also appeared in the American anthology, The Ides of Tomorrow: Original Science Fiction Tales of Horror, edited by Terry Carr (published in October 1976 vs. Andromeda #1’s May—see ISFDB).

3. There is a list of the Wizard of Oz references in Wolfe’s The Eyeflash Miracles here.

4. Unsuccessful/unrequited love is a common feature of George R. R. Martin’s early work (A Song for Lya and his first novel, After the Festival, have a similar theme if I recall correctly).

5. I’m not suggesting that writers use an 800 word vocabulary, but:

“As though they had been wind-thrown anemophilously,” p.187. “Anemophilous” not only needs to researched (by me, anyway) but means, “(of a plant) wind-pollinated,” which would seem to make the quoted phrase a tautology.

“. . . clearly identifiable as but’n’ben prongers . . .” p.188. I’m Scottish so I thought that I knew a “but’n’ben” was a small holiday cottage in the country. Apparently (thanks internet) it is a two bedroomed house with the “but” the living room/kitchen, and the “ben” the bedroom. What chance would anyone in 1977 have of figuring that one out?

There is also a drink called a “chigger”. That is either an insect or a cocktail of melon liqueur with orange juice. It didn’t appear to be a cocktail bar she was drinking in . . . .

6. If you want a better idea of how this book measures up against what I might pick for a 1976 ‘Year’s Best’, or learn what other anthologists chose, look at the table below (this is the same one which appears at the end of the review of the Dozois and Wollheim volumes). I’ll update it as and when I find stories I like, or citation sources that should be included (for more on the latter see below).

The first to fourth column give the story titles, authors, lengths and place of publication (see below the table for abbreviation legend).

The ‘T’ column lists Terry Carr’s choices with an ‘x’, and his recommendation list with an ‘o’.

The ‘D’ column lists Gardner Dozois’ choices with an ‘x’, and his other recommendations (comments in his introduction and in Walton’s An Informal History of the Hugo Awards) with an ‘o’.

The ‘W’ column lists Donald Wollheim’s choices with an ‘x’.

The ‘A’ column lists Lin Carter’s choices with an ‘x’.

The ‘S’ column shows my (SF Magazine’s) current choices an ‘x’ (historical choices are an ‘o’). A dash means read but passed over (I only select stories better than ∗∗∗+ and above, and not all of them). Blank means unread.

The ‘C’ column shows how many of the anthologies and/or polls used in the Classics of Science Fiction list included the story in their collections or lists (note that CoSF is SF only and skews against fantasy), minus the anthology or award citations which have their own column (Carr, Dozois, Wollheim, Hugo, Nebula, etc.).

The ‘O’ column shows the number of inclusions in other major anthologies or recommendation lists not on the CoSF (Classics of SF) list. These are selected by me (usually to include fantasy retrospectives or awards that CoSF doesn’t include) but I may not yet have done this for some/all of the stories.*

The ‘H’ column shows the story’s 1977 Hugo award placing (F for finalist, W for winner).

The ‘N’ column shows the story’s 1977 Nebula award placing (F for finalist, W for winner).

The ‘U’ column shows stories that were one of the 1977 Locus Poll’s top ten short stories, novelettes, or novellas.

The ‘T’ column shows the total points that each story gets (they get a point for being in each column and for each of the CoSF and other anthology citations).

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

A good way to sample 1976’s best short fiction may be to start at the top of the table and work down until you get to the last of the 2-point stories. Bear in mind this is statistically invalid, but it will give you something to aim at. Enjoy.

Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories 1976

Title Author L P T D W A S C O H N U TO I See You Damon Knight ss FSF x x x 1 F x 6 The Phantom of Kansas John Varley nv GAL x o x 1 1 F x 7 Seeing Harlan Ellison nv AND x - x 2 The Death of Princes Fritz Leiber ss AMZ x - 1 x 3 The Psychologist Who Wouldn't [. . .] James Tiptree, Jr. nv NED x - 1 x 3 The Eyeflash Miracles Gene Wolfe na FUT x o - 1 F x 5 An Infinite Summer Christopher Priest nv AND x - 2 1 4 The Highest Dive Jack Williamson ss SFM x - 1 Meathouse Man George R. R. Martin nv ORB x - 1 x 3 Custer's Last Jump S. Utley & H. Waldrop nv UNI x x x 1 F x 6 The Bicentennial Man Isaac Asimov nv STE x x x 4 1 W W x 11 The Diary of the Rose Ursula K. Le Guin nv FUT o x x 1 F W x 7 Air Raid (1) John Varley ss ASI x x 0 Ladies and Gentlemen [. . .] Kate Wilhelm ss ORB x - 1 Back to the Stone Age Jake Saunders ss LON x - F 2 Armaja Das Joe Haldeman ss FRI x x 2 Mary Margaret Road-Grader Howard Waldrop ss ORB o x - 1 F x 5 The Samurai and the Willows Michael Bishop na FSF x x 1 F F x 6 Appearance of Life Brian W. Aldiss ss AND o x x 1 x 5 Overdrawn at the Memory Bank John Varley nv GAL o x x 1 x 5 Those Good Old Days of Liquid Fuel Michael G. Coney ss FSF x x 2 The Hertford Manuscript Richard Cowper nv FSF o x x x 4 Natural Advantage Lester del Rey ss AMZ x - 1 The Cabinet of Oliver Naylor Barrington J. Bayley nv NEW x - 1 My Boat Joanna Russ ss FSF o x - 1 3 Houston, Houston, Do You Read? James Tiptree, Jr. na AUR o x - 6 W W x 11 By Any Other Name Spider Robinson na ANA W x 2 Piper at the Gates of Dawn Richard Cowper na FSF o 2 F F x 6 Gotta Sing, Gotta Dance John Varley nv GAL o o 1 F x 5 Tricentennial Joe Haldeman ss ANA - 1 W F x 4 A Crowd of Shadows Charles L. Grant ss FSF o - F W x 4 Custom Fitting James White ss STE 1 F x 3 In the Bowl (2) John Varley nv FSF x F 0 His Hour Upon the Stage Grant Carrington nv AMZ F 1 Stone Circle Lisa Tuttle ss AMZ F 1 Breath's a Ware That Will Not Keep Thomas F. Monteleone ss DYS - F 1 The Anvil of Jove G. Benford & G. Eklund na FSF x 1 Weather War William Cochrane na ANA x 1 Media Man Joan D. Vinge na ANA o x 2 Birthdays Fred Saberhagen na GAL o x 2 The Greenhouse Defect Andrew J. Ouffutt na STN x 2 Bagatelle John Varley nv GAL x 1 Paradise Beach Richard Cowper ss FSF x 1 The Tower of Ashes George R. R. Martin ss ANB 1 x 2 The Barrow Ursula Le Guin ss FSF 1 1 Codemus Tor Age Bringsvaerd ss ROW 1 1 Dead in Irons Chelsea Quinn Yarbo nv FTL 1 1 Pairpuppets Manuel Van Loggem ss ROW 1 1 Party Line Gerald Klein nv ROW 1 1 Screwtop Vonda N. McIntyre nv TCS 1 1 The Seventh Voyage Stanislaw Lem ss TSV 1 1 Spider Silk Andre Norton nv FLA 1 1 2 Strange Wine Harlan Ellison ss AMZ 1 1 A Case of the Stubborns Robert Bloch ss FSF x 1 The Ladies of Beetlegoose Nine Reginald Bretnor na FSF x 1 The Incredible Umbrella Marvin Kaye na FAN x 1 A Beast for Norn George R. R. Martin nv AND o x 2 The Giant Killers Andrew M. Stephenson nv AND x 1 Eudoric's Unicorn (1) L. Sprague de Camp ss YBF x 0 Shadow of a Demon Gardner F. Fox nv DRA x 1 Ring of Black Stone Pat McIntosh ss ANU x 1 The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr George R. R. Martin ss FAN x o 2 Two Suns Setting Karl Edward Wagner nv FAN x 1 The Stairs in the Crypt L. Carter & C. A. Smith ss FAN x 1 The Goblin Blade (1) Raul Garcia Capella nv YBF x 0 The Dark King (1) C. J. Cherryh ss YBF x 0 Black Moonlight Lin Carter nv FAN x 1 The Snout in the Alcove (1) Gary Myers ss YBF x 0 The Pool of the Moon Charles R. Saunders ss x 1 Journey to the Heartland Brian W. Aldiss nv UNI o 1 Jamie's Smile Alan Bennert nv IOT o 1 The Second Soul Alan Brennert ss GAL o 1 How You See It, How You Don't Rich Brown nv AMZ o 1 The Cinderella Machine Michael G. Coney nv FSF o o 2 O, Brave Old World Avram Davidson nv BET o 1 In the House of the Worm George R. R. Martin na IOT o 1 Skirmish on a Summer Morning Bob Shaw na COK o 1 In the Land of Clear Colors Robert Sheckley nv NEC o 1 The Never-Ending Western Movie Robert Sheckley ss SFD o 1 Under the Generator John Shirley nv UNI o 1 Predators Steven Utley ss IOT o 1 Beneath the Hills of Azlaroc Fred Saberhagen nv ODY 1 1 When I Was Ming the Merciless Gene Wolfe ss IOT 1 1 Men of Greywater Station H. Waldrop & G. Martin nv AMZ o 1 Bloody Man Avram Davidson na FAN o 1 Tharquest and the Lamia Orbiquita Brian Lumley ss FAN o 1 Title Author L P T D W A S C O H N U TO

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

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

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

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