“The 1977 Annual World's Best SF”
is an anthology of short stories from 1975-1976 edited and published
by Donald A Wollheim (1914 - 1990) in, quite naturally, 1977.
It begins with a forward by Wollheim
himself, discussing the then-current state of science fiction in the
year 1976 and applauding how the genre has finally “achieved its
rightful place as a branch of the world stream of literature.” His
words, not mine. This is a phrase I've read and heard repeatedly over
the years in various SF anthologies and articles, so either someone
is talking out of their ass, or REAL science fiction hasn't been
tried yet. After crowing about how science fiction can finally be
taken seriously now, the rest of the introduction discusses the
struggling state of a lot of science fiction magazines at the time.
Circulation wasn't growing and several startups died only after a
couple of issues. Given the selection of stories chosen to represent
the “World's Best SF” in this volume, its not a surprise, but I'm
getting ahead of myself. Wollheim discusses how the state of the
genre was both optimistic (because as an editor and publisher the
genre had achieved the form he'd worked so hard to shape ever since
he delivered the Futurians' “Mutation or Death!” speech at the
Third Eastern Science Fiction Convention in 1937) and pessimistic at
the same time (because the readership was, somehow, mysteriously, not
interested in the thinly veiled Communist propaganda that the
Futurians wanted to see take over the genre, but more on that at the
very end).
The first story, "Appearance of Life" by British New Wave
author Brian W. Aldiss (1925 – 2017) concerns itself with an
unnamed academic identified as a “Seeker” who travels to a world
with a curious geography. The Northern hemisphere is all land and the
Southern is all sea. Belting the entire planet is a massive
structure, part wall and part underground tunnel that circumnavigates
the equator. It was built by a precursor race about whom nothing is
known except for their ruins and their name: Korlevalulaw.
Finding it empty, Galactic Humanity,
which has “matured” past much of its past into an allegedly
enlightened, intellectual society, has decided to use that free real
estate as a museum and started filling the space with artifacts of
human space exploration history and whatnot. The Seeker has been sent
to the planet archive because while anyone can access the archive
remotely for research, a Seeker has the incredibly rare talent of
being able to put two-and-two together to find four. He is able to
contextualize information in an atomized society losing the
capability to do so.
Rooting through preserved spaceships
that were destroyed by various disasters, he finds a wedding ring and
is baffled by it. Then he finds a holocube that is keyed to only play
its message for the woman who recorded it's husband. Soon after he
finds her husband's holocube to her, which is also the result of her
living on a planet whose population was destroyed by a virus
bombardment from a warship that her (ex) husband was stationed on.
The two recordings register the spouses' faces and play their
messages while Seeker watches.
The marriage broke up. He drove her
away, she had an affair, and ultimately he left her to pursue a
career in the stars. He returned 15 years later as a mercenary
fighting for one navy, negotiations broke down, and then everyone on
the planet as well as the fleet died because the disease that virus
bombed the planet was super virulent and spread to the fleet. They
would have all been dead anyway by the time the story takes place,
since the events happened some 60 thousand years prior. It's easily
the best part of the story, and the most clever.
The little twist is that the recordings
were done 15 years apart. The wife's is from when the husband left
her and he took it with him as a memory of her. In it, she is talking
about how much she loves him and wants the marriage to last. The
other recording is from when he returns, hoping to get a message to
her. Its full of regret at his actions driving her away, bitterness
at the affair, and so on. The sense is that that this was a slice of
two people who loved each other but were separated by
miscommunication and later regret, and then they were all snuffed out
by war because mankind had not “matured” past it.
Seeker finishes watching and reflects
that he joked with a fellow seeker that he wanted to find the “secret
of the universe.” Except instead of love, which is what the two
hologram recordings were about, he comes to the conclusion that
humanity is just like those recordings: a projection. A projection
created by the Korlevalulaw, and just like those recordings, humanity
itself was fading away. His conclusion causes him to despair to such
a level that he abandons his work, abandons the museum, and flies off
to some uninhabited planet to live out the rest of his life as a
hermit lest he talk to someone and spread this theory, which could
somehow spread and destroy human civilization.
The entire last page of the story feels
rushed and forced. This “enlightened” product of an already
atomized society, where love and marriage are replaced by the
“Breeding Centre” himself states that he barely sees another
human being on his home planet for most of the year. Solitude is the
natural state of this supposedly mature and evolved form of humanity.
Him freaking out and turning into a recluse is barely a stretch
beyond his default bugman existence. He has to come to this
conclusion, because the alternative would lead to the beginning of a
longer, and, frankly, much more exciting story. But then he remembers
he abandoned the museum in such a hurry that he left the recordings
playing. Another seeker could potentially find it and come to the
same conclusion and humanity would be doomed. More than it already
is.
Or the androids cleaning the place
would find the recordings and put them away. This is not mentioned in
the story, but since I too can put two-and-two together, this is
another possible second order outcome.
The human elements of the story are
strong, and the most interesting SF elements are the archive planet
with the weird empty structure precursor structure turned into a
museum. The other sci-fi elements, like glimpses of far future
society, are just that, glimpses. Hints. Not much happens besides a
smug future nerd experiencing an existential crisis because he saw
recording of two more “primitive” humans trying to come to terms
with each other across the void of time with more emotion than he's
capable of understanding.
An interesting central nugget wrapped
between a mildly interesting setup and a slapdash ending. 5/10
John Varley was born in 1947 and as of
this writing, is the only writer in this anthology still alive. He's
perhaps most notable for writing the novel “Millennium,” and
later the scrip for the 1989 movie of the same name.
Perhaps more famous now, thanks to
MST3K, as an American-Canadian public television co-production from
1984 starring the late, great Raul Julia called “Overdrawn at the
Memory Bank” which appears here.
Earth was made uninhabitable, and
humanity lives underground on the Moon. Despite this, boring data
entry jobs still exist, and Fingal is one such office schlub. He's
about to embark on a vacation in Disneyland Kenya, which is a domed
nature preserve under the Moon's surface where Fingal's brain is
transferred to a lioness to experience a weekend of being a Great
Cat. That part works out fine, but Fingal's body gets misplaced
thanks to an annoying kid messing with the tags on his body, and
after his time in the lioness, his mind is placed into a computer
system to keep him alive while the staff try to find where the hell
his body went.
Fingal's only contact with the outside
world is Appolonia Joachim, a troubleshooter for a data company that
specializes in these kinds of accidents. She tells him to stay calm
and to ride it out. Fingal tries, and finds he's able to affect the
simulated world like a lucid dream. Cloning replacement bodies is a
common thing in this future, and most people keep backups of their
memories in insurance vaults, so if the body can't be found in time
before the simulation world burns out, Fingal's backup memory could
be uploaded to his current or a replacement body. It's very Cyberpunk
several years before Cyberpunk existed.
But that's cold comfort to this
Fingal. That backup would have none of the experiences since being
backed up, including this weird adventure.
Time passes and he tries to occupy
himself, eventually deciding to improve himself by taking computer
programming courses, eventually passing. He's also grown quite
attached to Appolonia, and she's able to pull him back to the real
world. Except there's one little wrinkle, which I won't spoil because
you should actually read the story, but it ends on an up note, which
is rare for critically lauded science fiction of the 70s.
The story is incredibly charming, with
a lot of well-executed humor, likable characters, and immediate
stakes that put the main character in peril, which is not common with
a lot of SF stories from this era, or in this anthology, for that
matter. Moreover, the advanced tech and science-fiction concepts
about the meaning of consciousness and digitizing minds isn't just
window dressing. They're integral parts of the setup, complications,
and resolution. If you've seen the movie, a surprising amount of the
short story was directly translated to it. The Casablanca plot,
however, was not. I think that was added to give the movie an actual
runtime. Highly recommended and easily the best story in the
anthology, 9/10
Michael G. Coney (1932 – 2005), was
another British science fiction author, wrote “Those Good Old Days
of Liquid Fuel” which is a reflection on nostalgia through the lens
of the very British pastime of trainspotting. Only instead of trains,
it's rockets. And instead of England, its the Pacific Northwest.
The narrator, Sagar, returns to his
boyhood stomping grounds on business as a middle-aged man and learns
that the old derelict rockets that he watched land as a youth at the
local spaceport will finally be broken down for scrap. With time to
kill before his business requirements, he drives down to reflect on
his childhood, and the events that led to the dissolution of his
closest friendship.
Sagar is an unhappy narrator. He rears
animals called slithes for their skins on “an impoverished farm.”
He is surrounded by the technological marvel of antigravity engines,
but considers them soulless compared to the old liquid-fueled
rockets. His disdain for the technological wonders of his day bleeds
over to the reader. It's all mundane for him, and so it is for us.
What's a slithe? Don't know. Don't care. It's never explained. Might
as well be cows for the effect they have on the story.
Sagar was evidently an unimpressive
student, and in his own words the type to knock a girl down during a
brawl, so he was kind of an asshole from the start. But he loved
watching the rockets come in. A bunch of the lads did, including
Charlesworth, his best friend. Even then, the narrator noted
differences in their enjoyment of the hobby. Charlesworth became
obsessed with spotting the ships and then marking them down in his
book, organizing all of the ships he's seen. Sagar, meanwhile, just
did it for the love of the sport, maaaan. This somehow makes him a
better person than Charlesworth. This is also assuming Sagar's
assessment of Charlesworth is correct.
Anyway, one summer, Charlesworth
discovers girls, specifically a rich bitch named Antonette, and
drifts apart from his loser friend. This pisses Sagar off because
he's got an unspoken crush on Charlesworth, though later in the story
he says he likes girls with big boobs so he's totally not gay, guys.
Antonette has a psionic cat that's a luxury pet, but they're only
psionic with their own kind, which is kind of useless. Eventually,
the last rocket on Charlesworth's list comes in for a landing, and
the girl's dad bought a female psionic cat to breed with the one they
already have, only it senses the incoming mate, breaks its leash, and
runs into the landing pit where it promptly dies in the only element
of science-fiction that isn't window dressing. Sagar left the scene
without finding out what happened to the arguing couple, and that was
it for decades.
The story ends with Sagar on his way
back to town and he sees the contractors arrive to begin the
scrapping of the ships. He recognizes his old friend Charlesworth as
the owner of said contracting company, and thinks about reconnecting,
but then chooses not to because they're so different now. The end.
Sagar is obviously seething that Charlesworth made a successful life
for himself while he himself is a bitter loser, though the story
doesn't admit it.
An ending like that serves two
purposes. It saves the author from having to write any more, and a
vague, inconsequential ending is suitably “literary” for genre
authors trying to be taken seriously by people who already hate genre
fiction.
Charlesworth is the protagonist because
he's the one who actually undergoes a character arc and grows as a
person. He's also the one who actually has tough decisions to make.
Sagar's just an unlikable narrator and the rockets could be replaced
by trains and nothing at all would change. 2/10. Very dull, Ewan MacGregor doesn't climb out of a toilet.
Richard Cowper was the pen name of John
Middleton Murry Jr. (1926 – 2002), yet another Englishman in the
anthology, and the son of John Middleton Murry, a prominent
publisher, essayist, and author moving in the Modernist circles of
the early 20th Century.
“The Hertford Manuscript” concerns
an unnamed narrator discussing the death of his Great-Aunt, a
formidable intellectual woman of the early 20th Century
who lost her husband in World War I, became a book antiquarian, and
had a brief fling with H. G. Wells. This last little namedrop feeds
into what this story's actually about. After a reasonably charming
but meandering portrait of the old dame, she croaks and leaves the
narrator a very curious book, one that she insisted was used by Wells
as a primary source, of sorts. Skeptical, the narrator reads it, and
the actual plot begins.
It's a sequel to “The Time Machine.”
After the events of Wells' book, the protagonist, here named Robert
James Pensley, finds himself stuck in 1665 England, with one of the
crystals powering his time machine broken. He sets out for London to
find a lens grinder who can carve a replica. Only, he realizes that
its the same year as the Great Plague of London. Nevertheless, he is
determined to return to the 1800s and finds one such craftsman in the
city, but it will take some time.
While waiting, Pensley contracts the
plague and dies after the completed replacement crystal is delivered
to him.
That's it.
All of the science fiction elements
happen offscreen and if you wanted to know what happened to the hero
of the Time Machine, he gets the plague after interacting with a
dying, infected man in the street, doesn't realize it for a few days,
and he dies in some London flophouse.
The sentences are competently written
and imitate the Victorian style, but they all serve a meandering,
nihilistic, and ultimately pointless plot. The section describing the
old spinster was more interesting. Dreadfully boring. 2/10.
Lester Del Rey (1915 – 1993) was a
prolific author during the 50s and 60s before turning to editing and
publishing. Ever ready anything put out by Del Rey Books? That was
founded by him and his wife, fellow editor Judy-Lynn del Rey.
“Natural Advantage” concerns itself
with three aliens on a ship who travel to our solar system because
radio signals were detected and they were morally obligated to warn
the locals of an impending anti-matter cloud that would wipe out all
life in the system in ten years. After some hesitancy, the aliens
make peaceful contact with the humans, and despite their obvious
physical and language differences, they get to know each other, and
like each other. After delivering the bad news, the aliens decide to
share their technical manuals with the humans in exchange for a trove
of history, literature, and other such books because 1) It will take
them 10 years to get back to their home system and 2) if the human
race is doomed, the aliens want at least some kind of record of their
existence to survive.
There's a fun little twist at the end
that these aliens who've grown rather fond of humanity and are sad
that they died out reach their homeworld around the time the
anti-matter cloud should have destroyed Earth, and find humans
waiting for them. They managed to reverse-engineer the space travel
technology to such a degree that not only could they travel faster
than the aliens, but they've also moved the entire Solar System out
of harm's way. It's a funny little ending, but not what the core of
the story is.
The core is the inherent “humanity”
(for lack of a better word) of the alien protagonists. They're good
guys. And likable, despite having weird physiology. You feel bad
alongside them when they ruminate on mankind's fate, and for a story
with no antagonist besides an unthinking cosmic phenomenon, likable
characters are crucial to hang the audience's perspective on.
Wollheim implies its a throwback to the old fashioned style SF
stories of the 50s with its “Mankind Overcomes All Challenges”
message.
but honestly, its an entertaining story
that well told, which puts it head and shoulders against the majority
of the stories in this collection. There's a reason why it's the
cover story on my hardcover copy. 7/10
Isaac Asimov (1920 – 1992) is the
biggest name in the anthology, and if you're aware of the genre,
you're aware of him. Asimov was involved in too much stuff to list
here, although the most important for our purposes is that he was
Futurian in the 30s and 40s, and ideological fellow-traveler with
Wollheim.
“The Bicentennial Man” is a far too
clever title for the story that you actually get. It was turned into
a Robin Williams movie in 1999 which was a significant flop.
Andrew Martin is a robot: a robot in
the service of a family that has somehow become self-aware. This
starts by displaying a curious aptitude at woodworking. Encouraged by
the family, Andrew makes a lot of money as an artist, and the Martins
set up a bank account for his earnings and let him keep a substantial
chunk of it for himself. After a while, he decides he wants to be
free, and offers to buy his freedom. While hesitant at first, the
patriarch of the house generally goes through the legal proceedings
to grant Andrew his freedom.
Now a free robot, Andrew starts wearing
clothes like a human , because at this point it's obvious he wants to
be a real boy like Pinocchio. Bored with art, he decides to write a
history of robotics, written by a robot. It too is successful, and
while the Martin family members in his existence age and die, they
all like him and go through the court system to grant him special
privileges and rights, since he is the only self-aware robot in
history; and it will stay that way since he's an embarrassment to the
company that built him and has set up safeguards to prevent any
further standalone complexes like this from happening. He does,
however, eventually use corporate loopholes to get the company to
upgrade his body to make it more human-like, including giving him
facial expressions.
This repeats. Andrew keeps using
lawfare to get himself more rights, he feels a vague bit of sadness
when the human family members in his life die of old age, but he's
more focused on his transhuman journey to become human.
Over time it gets weird. He upgrades to
literal skinsuit made of synthetic materials. He installs a simulacra
of a digestive system that allows him to “eat.” He discusses
installing genitalia, though thankfully, it's never confirmed whether
he goes through with that or not.
Eventually he pushes for the big one:
to be legally recognized as a human being. The court drags their feet
and Andrew determines that the last stepping block to being declared
legally human is the ability to die. So he goes to a robot surgeon
and gets a procedure done that is never explained, but gives his body
a ticking time clock that will shut down in a year, conveniently
timed with his 200th “birthday.” The World Court is
impressed by this and grant him his legal humanity in a ceremony on
that very special day, dubbing him the Bicentennial Man.
He gets to enjoy this legal equality
for at most 12 hours and then he dies. The end.
As a science-fiction story, the
technological elements are all hand-waved. It does start off with a
recap of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics, which lays out the themes
early on, but the nitty-gritty is glossed over. As is Andrew's desire
to be human, and even the reason why he becomes self-aware in the
first place. It could be random chance. It could be a woman in a
sparkling dress touched his head with a magic wand while a cricket in
a top hat sang a song. Don't know.
There is virtually no conflict in the
story. The Martins all love and accept Andrew for what he is. The law
firm partners he spends over a century using all like him. The
government functionaries he interacts with all like him. He has a
very smooth journey towards equal rights.
The only part where he's ever in any
kind of danger is when he decides to walk to a library to do some
research, and this supposedly very intelligent robot gets lost.
While standing stupidly in a field,
Andrew is accosted and bullied by two cartoonishly racist caricatures
of rednecks who are racist to him because a robot ain't shouldn't be
wearin' no human clothes.
Before something interesting has a
chance of happening that could actually set Andrew back, one of his
human “relatives” rescues him and it's back to the repetition.
As a civil rights allegory, it falls
flat on it's face. Andrew isn't fighting for the rights of all of his
kind. He's the only one of his kind. As he becomes more and more
human in appearance, he bosses the other robots around just as much
as the real humans. He bosses the humans around too, as he's become
an expert in robotics and would outlive all his human underlings.
Andrew's obsession with fabricating a
skin suit is just missing “Goodbye Horses” playing in the
background. For all of his striving, for all of his
making lawyers do the work for him, Andrew goes through all that
effort to become a human legally on paper and then he dies. There's a
nice little touch at the end where Andrew is fiercely clinging on to
his pride at finally being a human in his final moments, only for his
last words to be “Little Miss,” the name he referred to the
youngest Martin daughter when he became active. That single, final
moment of nostalgia being the first actual human behavior in the life
of an otherwise selfish, insane robot.
There are some fun touches. Andrew's
continued disapproval of society's increasingly silly fashion trends
while he wears the same style suit he wore were worth a chuckle. The
sentences are competently constructed. But it's boring. Oh so boring
and repetitive. 3/10
Barrington J. Bayley (1937 – 2008)
was yet another British New Wave author, and a friend of Michael
Moorcock. In 1999 he wrote “Eye of Terror” for the Warhammer
40,000 franchise among a couple other stories. I bring that up because all the kids like the
Warhams these days.
“The Cabinet of Oliver Naylor”
is...trippy. It begins with a film noir pastiche that turns out to be
the procedurally generated workings of a device called a thespitron
which can generate new content, characters and stories by drawing
from all human fiction...somehow. So credit where it's due to Bayley
for conceptualizing Chat GPT 40+ years ahead of time.
It's inventor, Oliver Naylor, is like
many Englishmen of his era, traveling through space at incredibly
high speeds with entire galaxies whizzing by because he wants some
alone time to think. Naylor is a character who would rather think and
contemplate on the nature of identity than actually do anything. He
has, however, picked up a passenger named Watson-Smythe, a polite
young man who is obviously a cop but Naylor is too blind or dumb to
realize it. Watson-Smythe (hereafter called Space Cop for brevity)
wants to find a reclusive artist named Corngold.
Instead of a plot where things happen,
the majority of the story is concerned with showing off that it knows
a lot about 19th and 20th century philosophers,
as well as pages and pages of absurdly advanced technology with names
that sound like they belong in third-rate steampunk, like the
“Harkham Velocitator.” There's very little room for plot because
most of the page count is the spent with the story's head up it's own
ass.
Anyway, they reach Corngold's habitat
on the edge of a “matterless lake” which a huge patch of the
cosmos without anything in it. For reasons. Ships that go in there
too far get too disconnected from known space and get lost
permanently. So there's likely a little bit of matter stuck in there.
Whatever, Corngold is a fat, disgusting
pervert who has stolen a piece of jewelry and a maid who's a solid
six whom he physically and sexually abuses. You know he's a rebel
because he says “fuck.” Space Cop reveals himself to be a space
cop with a warrant for Corngold's arrest. Corngold refuses to comply
and instead of shooting him with the very stun gun in his hands,
Space Cop decides to chill out until dinner.
Because God forbid anything exciting
like a shootout should happen when a character's got a future gun in
his hands.
Instead, Corngold uses his own hand to
do something obscene to humiliate the poor girl he's kidnapped even
further. It's brief, but it's very explicit and jarring enough to
knock me out of the story with how vile the moment is. I get that
it's a deliberate choice by the author to showcase Corngold's abusive
cruelty, but a lot of sensible editors would axe that entire segment
as being too much. Very bad taste, and honestly, it doesn't belong,
especially in an anthology that appears to be aimed at “all
audiences.”
Anyway, Watson-Smythe is teleported to
his death because he's stupid, and Naylor flees back to his ship to
escape, only to be sent into the matterless lake to die slowly
because he's also stupid. The thespitron makes a final appearance for
the themes of identity before it shuts down because it's too far from
any signals.
There is a very good reason why you've
heard of Moorcock and not Bayley. Despite Moorcock's deliberate
subversions to create an Anti-Conan with Elric, he still had enough
of an adventurous sense to tell exciting stories in interesting
settings with likable characters despite himself. “The Cabinet of
Oliver Naylor” has none of these. Pages are devoted to showing off
how well-read the author is and navel gazing about the nature of
identity until the plot intrudes, leading to the main character's
eventual off-screen death, rendering the philosophical discussion of
identity moot. Isn't it all just so pointless?
While “The Hertford Manuscript”
suffers from a dearth of science fiction in this science fiction
collection, “Cabinet” suffers from a surfeit of it. It's
overstuffed with sci-fi concepts and tech names for things that, at
best, vaguely explain why the tech level is so very advanced, and yet
fails to sufficiently explain why all of the people using it are so,
so boring. There's some implication that the thespitron is an
obsession for Naylor, since he uses all of his free time watching it,
but like everything else in the story, that too goes nowhere. 1/10.
Offensively bad.
(Yes, two of the stories appeared in the same magazine)
Joanna Russ (1937 – 2011) was an
American author noted for being a Socialist, Feminist, Lesbian. The
themes she wrote about should be self-evident.
“My Boat” is called a
“Lovecraftian” story because it goes out of its way to namedrop
several of his books as well as the Necronomicon, Kadath and some
other words found in his stories. The tone and themes, however, are
nothing like the cosmic dread and horror found in Lovecraftian
fiction.
The story takes the form of one half of
a conversation, where a fast talking narrator does all the talking
and there are pauses for implied replies that are never recorded.
It's annoying, but whatever. The narrator is speaking to a literary
or talent agent and recollecting something that happened in 1952 when
their school was integrated. The narrator and a pal, a manlet named
Al who was big into Lovecraft stories, befriend one of the black
girls integrated into their school. The girl's very shy, which is
explained as having witnessed her father get gunned down by,
presumably, white people because this is thick with social
commentary, and she became very withdrawn after the shooting. Yet she
is also incredibly smart and the most talented member of the theater
kids.
So anyway, this weird, withdrawn,
mousey girl that everybody likes because she's the best at acting
brings Al and the narrator to a boat that she and her cousin own down
by the docks, imaginatively named “My Boat” which is where actual
weird things happen in this alleged weird tale.
Once they get on the boat, parts begins
shifting between glances. It starts as row boat, then turns into a
yacht, then gets fancier and fancier, with Al and the girl both
getting more and more elaborate costumes. Remember those Old Spice
“Look at your man, now look at me” ads? Yeah, it plays out like
that.
The girl, Cissie, turns into some kind
of Abyssinian princess type and Al turns into Francis Drake and both
age up to adulthood and they talk about all the strange places they
go to and sights that they see, like going to Atlantis or the Queen
of Saba (not Sheba, that's the wrong
pronunciation, she'll have you know).
At
risk of having to deliver on all of these potential interesting
scenarios, the narrator jumps out to untie the boat from the dock, is
interrupted by some hick cop, who is almost certainly racist, even
though he does nothing, and the boat vanishes, bewildering them both.
Some
20 years later, the narrator (Jim), runs into Al, who hasn't aged a
day since school who's come back to get the Necronomicon from his
house, which is the same as it was 20 years ago. Of course, after he
gets the book, the house completely vanishes also.
First
off, there's no science fiction in this story whatsoever. Pure
fantasy, only of the magical realism kind where its ambiguous whether
it's really real or not, because that's like, really deep, man.
Curious for a science fiction anthology, isn't it? But of course,
Russ' activism and politics are why she was chosen for the anthology.
Not a Futurian, but most definitely a political fellow traveler of
Wollheim's.
Like
so many other stories in this, the plot threatens me with a good
time, then backs down in cowardice. The writing style is annoying,
and the narrator's voice sounded like a female writing instead of the
“Jim” it was supposed to be.
The
only Lovecraft elements are the various name drops of his works or
words of places and things that were in his stories. There's zero
horror, existential, cosmic or otherwise. Cissie as this weird
timeless traveler of strange places seducing Al into being her
traveling companion who never ages, like some kind of Lost Boy from
Neverland could be horrific. It should be horrific, like the stories
of faeries stealing people away for decades only for them to return
suddenly, but the prose never does that. Of course, a proud liberal
like Russ wouldn't really say something as absurd as “Black People
are eldritch fey creatures” but that's how Cissie comes across in
the story.
It's
boring. It's preachy. It doesn't have any science fiction in it. It's
not Lovecraftian horror. It's not good fantasy. It is a painfully
dull relic of the 1970s and of an author with aspirations being taken
seriously by the Serious Literature crowd slumming it in the science
fiction scene. The lesson of the story is "don't trust theater kids" 2/10.
James Tiptree Jr. was the pen name for
Alice Bradley Sheldon (1915 – 1987). She didn't use a man's name
because of sexism in the industry, but because she was an academic
and an intelligence officer for the US government and wanted to
protect her professional reputation. She and her second husband,
Huntington D. Sheldon would join the CIA in the 50s. She began
publishing science fiction stories in 1967, in a career that would
last until 1987 when she shot her husband and then herself what was
either a murder/suicide or a suicide pact with her ailing husband.
Quite sad.
“Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”
begins with a male scientist deliriously waking up in a spaceship
cabin flashing back to a time in junior high school where he was in
the girl's room with his dick in his hand.
The review could stop right there and
be sufficient enough to tell you whether it's worth reading or not.
Unfortunately, there are 53 pages of story.
The three-man crew of the Sunbird,
an American spaceship with a three-man crew on a shot around the sun
head back to Earth, but something went wrong and it turns out they
passed through a solar flare and they got shot three hundred years
into the future. Lost, but not realizing it, they eventually get
picked up by a spaceship from Earth called the Gloria which is
crewed entirely by women and one androgynous “boy” creatively
named “Andy.”
The crew of the Sunbird are:
pilot Bud Geirr, who is a cartoonish stereotype of a cad who talks
about nothing but sex, constantly; Mission Commander Norman “Dave”
Davis, who is a serious, mission-oriented man who is quietly but
firmly Christian; and Science Officer Orren Lorimer, our viewpoint
character. With the flashback to his dick in his hand. Lorimer has a
bad case of impostor syndrome where he doesn't feel like he's a
legitimate scientists. This spills over into him being insecure,
indecisive, and subconsciously jealous of his “manly-man”
crewmates. When the Sunbird gets lost, he's completely
useless. Oh, and he's also incredibly repressed and has rape
fantasies about the women, because of course he does.
The structure of the story bounces from
the current time to flashbacks of how three American astronauts were
stuck on their spaceship, which is deliberate because the astronauts'
food was drugged by their supposed rescuers. The rescuers are all
pretty women (and Andy) and Earth gave them an order that they have
to be quarantined for a year before they can reach Earth because
there's no idea what kind of diseases could transfer to or from the
men.
Oh, and aside from the jumpy structure,
which makes sense, it's also written in the present-tense. “Bud
says” instead of “Bud said.” It's VERY annoying.
“But this review has been written in
present tense!”
Yes. It's a review/essay. The structure
is different because the writing is different. Environment dictates.
Anyway, after very long and very
drawn-out dialogues between Lorimer and various women on the Gloria
it's ultimately revealed that there was an epidemic that created a
mass-sterility situation among humanity and the Y chromosome (men)
died off. The surviving 11,000 women developed cloning and that's how
humanity continues now. Society has progressed to a non-hierarchical
structure. There's no leader. There are five industries that they
work: food production, communications, transport, space, factories,
and producing/raising children. Yes, that's six things. The clone
strains are separated out into these industries according to their
abilities, but its totally not Communism because they can go and do
other things if they want. Dave is particularly shocked when he
learns that the society has no religion or faith, but the women say
they “have faith in themselves.” which is a deeply Gnostic
notion. There's no war, no conflict. As Lorimer explains:
"It's
a form of loose social credit system run by consensus," he says
to Dave. "Somewhat like a permanent:' frontier period. They're
building up slowly. Of course they don't need an army or air force.
I'm not sure if they even use cash money or recognize private
ownership of land. I did notice one favorable reference to early
Chinese communalism,"
That's where Tiptree shows too much of
her hand, revealing the propaganda angle of the story. Very
interesting that a former CIA agent wrote a story about a feminist
future built obliquely off of Communist principles. Very interesting
indeed.
The story eventually decides to go
somewhere: Rape. Bud, who's been horny on main the entire story,
forces himself on one of the girls in a scene that can best be
described as awkwardly pornographic. Lorimer watches in horror, but
as usual, he's useless and does nothing, and ultimately Dave puts a
stop to it and separates him from the group.
Dave, who has been 100% correct in his
suspicions that the women were lying and hiding things from the
astronauts while cozying up to them, now starts trying to reassert
the patriarchy and starts quoting Bible verses. He brandishes a
pistol and a crucifix and attempts to commandeer the ship. This is
presented as a bad thing instead of based, and the first time Lorimer
does something of his own initiative, is to stop Dave. The
self-described beta male sides with the women and the androgyne.
Before passing out from a sedative, Dave calls Lorimer a Judas,
continuing his streak of being correct.
The women decide that the men cannot be
reintroduced to Earth because they are too dangerous to society and
must be killed. Even the traitor Lorimer, who was “most like the
women.” Lorimer volunteers to take an “antidote”, which is
implied to be a poison, but if they die it happens after everything
fades to black.
It's meandering and full of bloviating
preachiness surrounding a story that, at its heart is “girls rule,
boys drool.” The worst, direct crime is that it's very long and
very boring. Nothing happens for long stretches of time. The science
fiction elements are vague set dressing for what is, functionally, a
play taking place on a single stage. The men are absurd caricatures
and the females all sound exactly the same no matter who they are
aside from some attempts at accents during initial radio chatter. The
sex stuff is awkward and unpleasant. The whole thing reads like the
kind of thing a bitter old woman who would go on to shoot her husband
and herself a decade later would write. It's the kind of story that
has been winning science fiction awards for the last 50 years.
Dave did nothing wrong. 1/10
Damon Knight (1922 – 2002) was a
short story writer and critic from Oregon who was yet another member
of the Futurians who moved into a position of influence after the
1940s. His most famous story is “To Serve Man” which was made
into a Twilight Zone episode, but he's more significant for his
actions in the “fandom” scene. He was the founder of the Science
Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) which hosts the Hugo
awards and he co-founded the the Milford Writer's Workshop and
Clarion Writers Workshop. As a critic, Knight is probably most famous
for savagely tainting the reputation of the highly talented A. E. Van
Vogt with a string of viciously negative reviews, probably because
Van Vogt expressed criticism of Communism and was at least somewhat
favorable to monarchy. A Futurian like Knight would have despised
that kind of “reactionary” thought. Later, better, authors than
Knight, such as Philip K Dick and Harlan Ellison have cited Van Vogt
as a major influence on their own work. But enough about my distaste
for Knight, how's his story?
“I See You” is a mercifully short
story to cap off the anthology. Structurally, it bounces back and
forth between normal third-person, past-tense and second-person,
present-tense, which is even more annoying than the previous story
structure. It concerns itself with an old inventor who develops a
machine that allows the viewer to see across space and time (only
looking to the past) for some...reason. Then retires from his other
business, assembles and sells a slightly more limited version to the
masses for...some reason. Naturally, a device that allows people to
voyeuristically watch their own past and that of their neighbors
leads to initial resistance, but soon everybody has them. Somehow,
everyone being able to watch their own parents have sex and conceive
them leads to a peaceful, Utopian society where everyone ends up
understanding each other instead of using it to discover new and
exciting ways to invent grudges with the neighbors. Knight must not
have known many Eastern Europeans. The second-person moments are
sprinkled in as bits of flavor and/or wonder, but come across as just
being clever for the sake of high literature bona fides. The inventor
used the device to solve the JFK assassination, but that thread goes
nowhere, either in the plot or for the ramifications. Either would
have led to a more interesting story.
It's dumb fluff, but it's at least
short. 3/10
Two good and one okay story out of ten
does not indicate a “year's best” of quality within this
anthology. Sturgeon's Law might indicate that, but Wollheim was a
veteran editor and publisher by 1977 and no dummy. His work at Avon
and Ace and got a lot of reprints of legitimate pulp titans like
Lovecraft, Merritt and Brackett made as readily available paperbacks.
He published the first paperback version Lord of the Rings in the
United States, which, while ultimately not legal, did help that book
become a smash hit. As an editor, Wollheim was a tastemaker and
curator of what got put out on market, and you might ask why these
stories? Some of them won Hugo and Nebula awards. Why this cavalcade
of mostly garbage? These were all deliberately chosen.
In 1937, Wollheim gave a speech on
behalf of the Futurians at the Third Eastern Science Fiction
Convention that was written by co-founder John B. Michel. Known as
the “Mutation or Death!” speech, it was a stentorian declaration
that science fiction had a moral imperative to promote progressive
causes, international democracy (such as supporting the Communists in
Spain), and other Far Left Wing talking points. Science Fiction was
at a terminal crossroads, and needed to mutate or die. There was only
one way for it to thrive: their way. Everything else should be
destroyed.
It's fiery and bold, but also reads
like an over-dramatic villain speech from a bad fanfiction. I suppose
it is, in a way. You can read it here.
The other members of the convention
voted the proposal down, but the Futurians were undeterred. The group
disintegrated due to infighting in 1945, but they kept at it. They
worked their way into the publishing industry, securing editorial
positions, then buying stories from Futurian writers and slowly but
surely, conducted a mini Long March through Science Fiction to shape
it into their vision. This 1977 anthology reads like an apotheosis of
that speech made 40 years prior in 1937. The stories oppose
militaristic ideologies, promote a unified world, and a Utopian
peace. The good stories manage to sneak in by checking the boxes. The
speculative science has been largely pushed to the background in
favor of messaging, so it lacks the educational aspirations of John
W. Campbell's “men with screwdrivers” solving problems vision of
science fiction, and the antiseptic lack of adventure flies in the
face of the pulp stories like “A Princess of Mars” and “Skylark
of Space” that actually built the damn genre. There's sex in the
anthology, some of it quite graphic (and the Futurians were also big
into sexual liberation because of course they would be), but only
“Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” has an honest-to-God love story.
It and Del Rey's “Natural Advantage” are the only two that end on
hopeful, optimistic notes, and its not a coincidence that they're the
best stories in the anthology.
Of course, 1977 was the same year that
a certain retro-inspired space opera throwback blew the doors off of
the stultifying ennui which had taken over the field. Star Wars
reclaimed Science Fiction from the dorks that championed these kinds
of anthologies and shoved them back into the lockers where they
belonged. At least temporarily.
Do I recommend “The 1977 Annual
World's Best SF?” Hell no. Not for two good stories. Lester Del
Rey's “Natural Advantage” is great fun and John Varley's
“Overdrawn at the Memory Bank” is a charming and funny
proto-Cyberpunk story that is highly recommended and worth tracking
down.
Just not in this anthology.
