Best SF Stories of The Year #1 – Lester Del Rey (Ed) (1972)
A round-up of some of the best writing from the movers and shakers in the genre as of 1971.
James Tiptree Jr is featured, before she came out to the world (or at least the SF world) as Alice Sheldon. Interestingly, there are two stories which deal with environmental issues. There three tales of pilots being forced to man ships, two dealing with the Catholic Church and two dealing with lovers being separated by time, space or other factors.
The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World – Philip Jose Farmer (New Dimensions 1, 1971)
Interesting idea of a world where the huge population share the planet by a seventh of them having one day each, while the rest remain in stasis in transparent tanks, but what happens when one is living on Tuesdays and falls in love with someone from the Wednesday world?
Good News From The Vatican – Robert Silverberg (Universe 1, 1971)
This story, of the first robot Pope, has subsequently won awards and been reprinted countless times.
I’ll Be Waiting For You When The Swimming Pool is Empty – James Tiptree Jr (Protostars, 1971)
A light-hearted tale by Tiptree.
A young man visits a primitive planet and brings them the gift of western-style democracy. One wonders whether there isn’t a tinge of savage irony at the heart of this story. One also wonders what the relevance of the title is.
The Power of The Sentence – David M Locke (F&SF, April 1971)
A cleverly structured tale in which a lecture on grammar becomes a battle fought in words between extra-dimensional entities.
The Wicked Flee – Harry Harrison (New Dimensions 1, 1971)
Harrison seldom disappoints and here provides a beautifully atmospheric piece in which a renegade from a Catholic dictatorship of the future escapes into the past, pursued by an agent of the Church.
An interesting take on alternate pasts and presents.
When You Hear The Tone – Thomas N Scortia (Galaxy, 1971)
A poetic love story about a man who gets to know a woman through some form of time communication. Although he remains in his time frame he manages to call a woman through various periods of her life until he is brought up to date, and they can meet.
Not as schmaltzy as one would imagine.
Occam’s Scalpel – Theodore Sturgeon (If, Aug 1971)
A kind of double bluff from Sturgeon in which an employee of a multinational is worried by the new boss, now that the old dictator has died. He arranges for the new boss to examine the dead man’s body, and to see that it is not human, but what is really going on, and who is fooling whom?
Hot Potato – Burt K Filer (The Many Worlds of Science Fiction, 1971)
One of those quasi-humourous wise-cracking fast-paced pieces in which the opposing sides in a nuclear conflict learn how to store their arsenal in hyperspace.
The Human Operators – Ellison/Van Vogt (F&SF, Jan 1971)
This tells of a group of rogue ships which have enslaved individual humans within them to take care of them and perform maintenance duties. It is quite a melancholy tale, and tinged with a certain claustrophobia, since there is no way of knowing (in common with the human slaves) what human society is like outside of this system.
Ultimately though, there is an odd yet beautifully poetic ending.
Autumntime – A Lentini (Galaxy, Nov 1971)
An environmental tone-piece about a trip to see a tree, which, in the future, is a rare sight.
A Little Knowledge – Poul Anderson (Analog, Aug 1971)
Aggressive humans underestimate a quiet and obsequious alien whom they kidnap as a pilot for a ship which they plan to use for unimportant nefarious purposes.
One of those ‘twist in the tail’ pieces. Best SF of the year? Probably not.
To Make a New Neanderthal – W Macfarlane (Analog, Sep 1971)
Turning environmentalism on his head, Macfarlane posits a situation where pollution has helped to increase Humanity’s intelligence.
The Man Underneath – RA Lafferty – (If, Jan 1971)
Lafferty here plays with words and text as easily as he plays with our imaginations. A tale, oddly reminiscent of ‘The Prestige’, in which a magician is haunted by an echo of himself.
Ornithanthropus – B Alan Burhoe (If, Nov 1971)
Nicely detailed view of a world where humans have been adapted to meet the conditions, rather than the other way around.
Rammer – Larry Niven (Galaxy, Nov 1971)
One of Niven’s corpsicle tales, in which a revived cryogenically frozen body is awakened, but only to be trained to pilot a seeder ship, travelling round the galaxy dropping biological packages on dead worlds in order to kick-start them into a biosphere.
Now Begins Tomorrow – Damon Knight (Ed) (1963)
This fascinating paperback presents the first printed stories from some of the most famous names in the genre. The majority of them appeared in John W Campbell’s ‘Astounding ‘ with the exception of the Merrill & Aldiss stories which were published in ‘Space Science Fiction’ and ‘Nebula Science Fiction’ respectively.
Knight has arranged the stories chronologically so that we see not only the chosen author’s first published story but also a rough overview of the development of the SF short form (in particular the Astounding story) and the growing level of depth and sophistication over almost twenty years. Unsurprisingly, there is only one woman represented, since the sexism which was immanent within the publishing houses and the literary texts themselves did not begin to break down until the Nineteen Fifties and Sixties, at least in the US.
Many of the stories feature no females at all, and of those that do, they appear as only minor characters, such as Mrs Garfinkle in ‘The Isolinguals’ or the doomed young wife in ‘Life Line’.
‘The Isolinguals’ – L Sprague de Camp (Astounding 1937)
‘The Faithful’ – Lester Del Rey (Astounding 1938)
‘Black Destroyer’ – AE Van Vogt (Astounding 1939)
‘Life-Line’ – Robert E Heinlein (Astounding 1939)
‘Ether Breather’ – Theodore Sturgeon (Astounding 1939)
‘Loophole’ – Arthur C Clarke (Astounding 1946)
‘Tomorrow’s Children’ – Poul Anderson (Astounding 1947)
‘That Only A Mother’ – Judith Merrill (Astounding 1948)
‘Walk To The World’ – Algys Budris (Space Science Fiction 1952)
‘T’ – Brian Aldiss (Nebula Science Fiction 1956)
‘The Isolinguals’ – L Sprague de Camp (Astounding 1937) is a compact and humourous tale of an outbreak of genetic race memory. The people of New York are unaccountably struck with a strange malaise in that they begin to be possessed by the memories of their ancestors. An engineering officer of the XXXIInd legion of Rome finds himself in the body of a fruit vendor, a package dispatcher becomes a sergeant in Cromwell’s army, Mrs Garfinkle – a new York native, suddenly starts talking in the language of the ancient Goths, and the numbers of the affected are rising dramatically.
The logical thing happens of course in that people from the same era who speak the same language begin to band together into gangs of isolinguals.
Professor Lindsley and his son-in-law Pierre solve the mystery, which turns out to be a dastardly scheme by an extreme right-wing would-be dictator, which, in 1937 would have been a bit of a topical element.
‘The Faithful’ – Lester Del Rey (Astounding 1938) is a pastoral, somewhat romantic tale redolent of the work of Clifford D Simak who published stories based on a similar premise in Astounding which were fixed up as ‘City’.
Men have surgically and biologically modified dogs, increasing their intelligence and awareness, but shortly afterwards have destroyed themselves with war and biological weaponry.
Hungor Beowulf XIV sets out to collect the dogs together and they embark on a quest to find any men that remain. The last human, who is fighting off the plague with the help of longevity drugs, is discovered and leads the dogs to Africa where they find similarly engineered apes who become the hands of the dogs and ultimately, the dogs hope, will replace Man as their masters.
‘Black Destroyer’ – AE Van Vogt (Astounding 1939) is probably Van Vogt’s best-known short story and is often touted as the original inspiration behind ‘Alien’.
On the barren single planet of a star nine-hundred light years from its nearest neighbour, an Earth scientific expedition is discovered by one of the last remnants of an intelligent race, the Coeurl.
The Coeurl – desperate for the scarce and life-giving phosphorus which it drains from its victims – pretends to be harmless, but betrays itself as an intelligent being.
The most interesting aspect of this story is the discussion between the scientists in which they pool their expertise in order to deduce the nature of the beast.
By logical deduction (the rational man of logic is a frequent protagonist in Van Vogt novels) they deduce that the creature is not a descendant of the builders of the abandoned city, but one of its former residents, and therefore highly intelligent and practically immortal.
The story was later revised and expanded in order to comprise the first few chapters of Van Vogt’s fix-up novel ‘Voyage of The Space Beagle’. The rather inhuman ending of the original story, in which the crew plan to return and exterminate the Coeurl race is amended to a decision where the creatures are left to their own fate, presumably to die out from lack of essential phosphorus. It was not, however, a humane decision as much as one which presumably allowed the ship to continue its journey to other worlds unimpeded.
In ‘Life-Line’ – Robert E Heinlein (Astounding 1939) Heinlein grasps the opportunity to take a side-swipe at the scientific community who refuse to believe that Dr Pinero has developed a process by which he can measure a man’s lifeline, i.e. the length of his existence in the temporal dimension, and thus predict the date of his death. Heinlein explores the logical extrapolation of this, in that insurance companies, whose existence depends on statistical probabilities of mortality rather than certainties, would go out of business.
The actual science or mechanics of the process in unimportant, and indeed, Pinero refuses to discuss the nature of his invention. The notion forces one to ask oneself questions, such as ‘Do you really want to know the exact date and time of your death?’
‘Ether Breather’ – Theodore Sturgeon (Astounding 1939) is a slight but humourous tale in which mentalities who can perceive and manipulate wavelengths begin to interfere with experimental colour TV transmissions. Although the story, seen from our perspective in an age where Colour TV is a reality, seems somewhat dated, the characterisation and dialogue is excellent and even today says a lot about the attitude of Americans regarding what they find acceptable for broadcast.
Arthur C Clarke’s ‘Loophole’ (Astounding 1946) is an interesting example of a story written in the form of communications between individuals, in this case between High Level Martian officials, concerned as to Humanity’s recent developments in atomic power.
Unusually for Clarke, the solution is one of decisive military action which destroys the Martian civilisation threatening the Earth and seems at odds with his later, more pacifist work.
Another example of this literary technique (with a much cleverer twist ending) is AE Van Vogt’s ‘Dear Pen Pal’
Poul Anderson’s ‘Tomorrow’s Children’ (Astounding 1947) is the first of two consecutive stories which reflects America’s then paranoia of the consequences of Nuclear war and the ethics of dealing with Human Mutation. It is interesting to contrast this story – which is a male-perspective overview of the possible future of society as a whole – with the following story by Judith Merrill which focuses on one woman’s experience of pregnancy and childbirth in a world suffering from radiation poisoning, although both stories pose the question of whether mutation affects the integrity of the Human Race.
Judith Merrill’s ‘That Only A Mother’ (Astounding 1948) gives us a very personal and moving account of a mother’s story from late pregnancy (in a time of atomic radiation) through to childbirth and beyond, interspersed with correspondence to her husband, on active service in the Armed Services.
The daughter is a prodigy and learns to talk at an early age but it is only when the father eventually arrives home on leave that the true state of affairs is discovered.
It is refreshing to finally see a female perspective, and indeed a main female character, and particularly within the pages of ‘Astounding’.
Interestingly, Merrill seems to imply that fathers would not be so accepting of their mutant children as Anderson suggests, rather optimistically, in his tale.
Walk To The World – Algis Budrys (Space Science Fiction 1952) is another pastoral tale, this time of wanderlust, told by a the son of a retired Space Captain, now running a farm on a colony world.
It’s notable for its vivid and detailed descriptions of the characters involved, and though superficially a simple tale, is actually a fairly complex portrait of a man’s relationship with his wife, his son and his home as well as ultimately questioning the American way of doing things. It’s a subtle piece, well-written and again redolent of the work of Simak.
Brian Aldiss’ ‘T’ (Nebula Science Fiction 1956) is, surprisingly, rather weak in its premise, although very creatively constructed and well-written.
The denizens of another galaxy have seen Man spread out to colonise our own galaxy and now are invading theirs, so they create a fleet of twelve ships containing genetically-engineered beings (composed of merely an arm and a simple brain) which are sent off on a path back through Time and Space to destroy Earth before Man has even evolved.
Due to an elementary error on the part of the aliens, the wrong planet is destroyed and Earth is left to evolve as destined.
Although simplistic, the concept of the ships and their guiding hands are creatively and ingeniously conceived and described and foretell some of the brilliance and originality of Aldiss’ later work.
Venus Plus X – Theodore Sturgeon (1960)
‘HE WAS A STRANGER IN THE STRANGEST NEW WORLD EVER…
He awoke to terror. He was in a silver cell and all he could remember was his name: Charlie Johns.
Later they told him he was in Ledom – a country where the people were wise and gentle and kind. They tried to help Charlie Johns but they were… strange. He could see it in many ways – their clothes, their over-developed pectoral muscles, the odd silky sporrans they all wore. But it wasn’t until he noticed two of their men pregnant that he realised just how alien a land Ledom was…’
‘In a postscript to the original American edition of VENUS PLUS X, Theodore Sturgeon wrote that his aim had been to write ‘a decent book about sex.’ In a genre of writing where a genuinely adult approach to human sexuality has usually been conspicuous by its absence, Sturgeon’s novel is a triumphant demonstration that science fiction can extend the boundaries of human awareness in this problematic area just as it has done for decades in the less ‘personal’ areas of time, space and other cosmological topics.
VENUS PLUS X may very well shock and even disturb readers who are not prepared to face up to the complex nature of sexuality and human psycho-biology. That is their bad luck. For the reader with an open mind and questing intelligence, this haunting stimulating and moving novel offers richer rewards than most other fiction currently available’
Back cover and interior blurbs from the 1978 Sphere paperback edition
It’s hard to imagine what it would have been like, reading this novel in Nineteen Sixty when it was first published. This would have been shortly after I was born and consequently I didn’t get round to reading it until some twenty years later, by which time the world had changed.
Its message remains an important one, and I feel it is a classic that will be rediscovered by future generations, but the shock value of its original release has been somewhat diluted.
Charlie Johns is a young American of the late Nineteen Fifties, in love with his beloved Laura and with all his life ahead of him.
Suddenly Charlie is transported through time and space to the far future and the society of Ledom. Astute readers and most people over twelve years old will realise that this is the word ‘Model’ written backwards. Charlie is told that he can be transported back where he came from, but in return the people of Ledom expect him to study their culture and report on it objectively.
From the outset Charlie is confused by the androgynous look of the Ledomians and eventually discovers that they are a race of human hermaphrodites, each having the sexual organs of both sexes. They are intelligent, peaceful and wise.
The whole idea of Ledom is that Humanity throughout its history has had a legacy, ‘baggage’ if you like, of teaching its children that they have to conform to stereotypes of male and female roles. Ledom provides a slate wiped clean of any historical contamination and and a family life where the parents are essentially the same.
Likewise, Ledom realises the need for a spiritual and moral side to society and so a religion had been devised where what is worshipped is one’s own children or The Child as an abstract embodiment of the future.
The narrative is intercut with the lives of two couples from Sturgeon’s US of the time, where lives and attitudes both illustrate the ingrained attitudes that Ledom is seeking to wipe away and simultaneously demonstrate how the seeds of Ledom are already at work.
In one scene, for instance, a father hugs and kisses his young daughter as a goodnight ritual while merely shaking hands with his son, and cannot understand why the son subsequently bullies his sister.
There is also discussion of a contemporary cartoon strip which asks the question of how to tell boys and girls apart when they both have long hair. The answer is that the boys are the pretty ones.
The contrast between realistic life and Ledom life is a clever one, since although Sturgeon is painting a contemporary domestic scene, in comparison with Ledom society it comes over as being somewhat primitive and barbaric, which was no doubt the aim.
The novel does have a twist in its tail, however, and although Venus Plus X would have been considered a classic even without the surprise ending, this certainly pushes the book onto another level.
This is an important SF novel since its message is timeless and addresses some of the most fundamental aspects of human society. Sturgeon manages to make us take a long look at ourselves and employ some basic common sense, which at times borders on the profound.
More Than Human – Theodore Sturgeon (1953)
‘All alone – an idiot boy, a runaway girl, a severely retarded baby and twin girls with a vocabulary of two words between them. Yet once they are mysteriously drawn together this collection of misfits becomes something very, very different from the rest of humanity. Add to the group an embittered orphan and it acquires limitless potential – both for good and for evil.
Hailed on first publication as daring and original, this intensely written and moving novel is an extraordinary vision of mankind’s next step.’
Blurb from the Gollancz Classic SF 1986 paperback
It is indeed a daring and original novel, and still stands up – despite an occasional maudlin moment of sentimentality – as one of the classics of SF.
Sturgeon’s poetic and pastoral novel of the emergence of a gestalt Homo Superior (or Homo Gestalt as they term themselves) is redolent of the whimsical and nostalgic novels of Clifford Simak in its depiction of a rural Midwest America.
Sturgeon, however, does not paint so romantic a vision as Simak normally does. He looks behind the picket fences and chintz curtains to expose the nasty underbelly which lies beneath, such as the religious extremist Mr Kew who teaches his daughters that their bodies are intrinsically evil, while secretly reading (as we discover much later) Von Masoch’s ‘Venus in Furs’. Then there is Janie’s mother, a woman who admits quite openly that she hates her own daughter and apologises to her ‘gentleman callers’ for Janie having shamed her by bringing ‘niggers’ into the house.
The characterisation of these grotesques is actually quite subtle and is a beautiful contrast to the ‘freak’ children and adults who come together to form the gestalt.
Structurally the novel is divided into three very different sections, which link to and reference each other in surprising and revealing ways.
‘The Idiot’ tells the story of how Lone first ‘bleshed’ (as the members of the gestalt call the experience of melding into a unit) with another individual, the girl Mary Kew, murdered by her own father whom Lone subsequently compels to commit suicide. Lone is subsequently taken in by a farming couple who give birth to Baby, the mongoloid idiot savant who functions as the gestalt’s memory and processing unit.
The fantastic nature of the related events, however, is never at odds with the all-too human characters and the tragedies in their lives. The huge irony at the heart of this first section is that the Gestalt designs and creates an anti-gravity device simply in order to help Lone’s employer, Mr Prodd, to stop his truck getting stuck in the mud.
In a dramatic change of style and viewpoint, the second section, ‘Baby Is Three’, is told in flashback within the confines of a psychiatrist’s consulting-room. Gerry, who has replaced Lone as ‘the Head’ of the Gestalt since Lone was killed accidentally in the woods, is telling his story.
It’s an interesting device, used later in Frederik Pohl’s ‘Gateway’ to great effect and arguably in Anne Rice’s ‘Interview With The Vampire’; half-narrative, half-confession.
Gerry, like Lone, has the power to influence the minds of others and is seeking to understand himself. We slowly discover that he has murdered Alicia Kew, sister of the girl with whom Lone first bleshed all those years ago. The gestalt, or at least Gerry, has begun to learn that it possesses incredible potential and few restraints.
The restraint finally arrives in the form of Hip, introduced as a child in the first section of the novel and now a disgraced ex-serviceman, jailed and emotionally crippled. He is released into the care of Janie who slowly nurses him back to sanity, piecing his memory together. From this we learn gradually that he has spent his life in search of Lone and the anti-gravity device. We also learn that Janie is now in hiding from Gerry after the murder and fears that if she is discovered, that Hip will be killed.
It’s a daring turn of events, not least because it shows for its time an unusual fallibility and weakness in Homo Superior/ Homo Gestalt. For the gestalt to make mistakes might be expected. For this new human of the future to kill and then have its individual units turn against each other is a surprising and refreshing move.
Despite its perhaps sometimes over-sentimental passages it is a wonderful denouement to a masterful piece of literature, rich with poetic imagery and deft minimal brushstrokes of characterisation.
‘Outside an oriole made a long slender note, broke it, and let the fragments fall through the shining air. A stake-bed truck idled past, busily shaking the string of cowbells on its back, while one hoarse man and one with a viola voice flanked it afoot, chanting. In one window came a spherical sound with a fly at its heart and at the other appeared a white kitten. Out by the kitten went the fly and the kitten reared up and batted at it, twisted and sprang down out of sight as if it had meant all along to leave; only a fool would have thought it had lost its balance.’
The ending is transcendent and optimistic, for Hip, after a showdown with Gerry, becomes in effect the gestalt’s conscience; the architect of its personal ethos. At that moment the group discovers it is not alone and is welcomed into a community of Gestaltia who had been observing the unit to see if it emerged as an ethical gestalt.
Like van Vogt’s ‘Slan’ it is a wish-fulfilment fantasy for those who believe themselves outcast, but it is also a sharply observed portrait of small-town America at a certain point in time.
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