Tag Archives: John D. MacDonald

[June 18, 1968] I Just Read It for the Stories (February-June 1968 Playboy)


by Erica Frank

Introduction

After looking over Playboy in January and finding Vonnegut's gem of a story, I decided to check out the next few issues. This time I skipped all the political commentary (which is mostly "money is good and women should wear fewer clothes") and focused on the stories and articles potentially of interest to science fiction fans.

March 1968 Playboy cover - a naked woman with a bunny painted on her back looks over her shoulder
Cover of March 1968's Playboy. I found this the least-boring cover of the set – the only one that looks like she's having fun.

I read everything that looked remotely like it might be a science fiction story, even though some of them were a stretch. I also looked at the science-related articles. There are quite a few of them, since this covers a five-month period.

A Day in the Life of…, by Ralph Schoenstein (February)
The full title of this story is "A Day in the Life of President George Romney—Or Robert Kennedy, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Martin Luther King, Charles Percy, Hubert Humphrey, Nelson Rockefeller, Lurleen and George Wallace." It's a satire inspired by Jim Bishop's A Day in the Life of President Johnson, speculating about the biographies of other potential presidents. I had hoped this involved some kind of parallel universe setting, or time travel… but no. This is just mild political commentary, a few paragraphs of satirical character study on each.

Romney awakens at 5 a.m. and scowls at his wife for addressing him by his first name. Kennedy leaps from his bed and cartwheels into the bathroom. Nixon polls his public to find out if he should get out of bed in the morning. Reagan is refraining from sex for the duration of his presidency to avoid the risk of marks. King never smiles and never argues. Humphrey worships LBJ and calls him "Big Daddy."

As satire: 3 stars. As science fiction: 1 star–there's some vague hint of multiple universes, but that's all.

Hat Trick, by Robert Coover (February)
Certainly interesting. A magician performs a hat trick – pulling bunnies, doves, another hat, and eventually, a whole assistant out of his hat. And then the story turns dark. This had some surprising twists and a disturbing ending.

4 stars; this one will stick with me.

The Chronicle of the 656th, by George Byram (March)
The set-up: a former student brings his professor a locked box, found buried under a house he'd purchased. The box contains Civil-War-era documents and objects – and a notebook dated 1944. After establishing that this was not a hoax, he'd read through the notebook: an entire army combat team had vanished from their WWII training area and found themselves in 1864. They help win a major Civil War battle, although several of the team members are conflicted – their families and ancestors are from the South.

The writing is good, but the story is not. Everyone dies, so there's no time paradox to address. It reads like normal fiction, not like a series of diary entries. I guessed the big secret as soon as they established what happened. (Secret atomic bomb testing sent them back in time! How shocking!) This must be what the mundanes think science fiction is supposed to be.

2 stars. Unless you enjoy war stories, in which case, it may be 3.

The Origin of Everything, by Italo Calvino (March)
This "story" is two vignettes that take place at the beginning of the universe – one before the Big Bang (or, mostly before), and one a bit after. They are both whimsical explorations of the idea of "people" in places where people obviously cannot exist.


The art by George Suyeoka nicely captures the feel of the story.

There's a surreal conjunction the everyday and the cosmic: Mrs. Ph(i)Nko taking Mr. De XuaeauX to bed, but since they are all in a single point before the expansion of the universe,

…"it isn't a question of going to bed, but of being there, because anybody in the point is also in the bed. Consequently, it was inevitable that she should be in bed also with each of us.

After the creation of the universe, all of the residents of the point hope to find Mrs. Ph(i)Nko again, but alas, she cannot be found; only the memory of her love for them all survives.

In the second vignette, astral children play marbles with hydrogen atoms; one child has stolen all the new atoms, and one of his companions then tricks him with fake atoms made of junk.

4 stars; this was delightful.

The Bizarre Beauties of "Barbarella" (March)
This is a pictorial review of the movie that's coming out later this year, based on the French comic, "The erotic space adventures of Barbarella." I'm not familiar with the comic, but I gather it has

  • Beautiful women
  • Wearing very few clothes
  • Having sex
  • In space


The Black Queen enjoys a dream interlude with the angel Pygar, whom she's forced to obey her will.

Fashion of the future on the planet Lythion

Barbarella rescues Pygar, and then Pygar rescues Barbarella.

I'm not rating this, but I am looking forward to the movie when it comes out.

Bucking the scientific Establishment, by Theodore J. Gordon (April)
This is a nonfiction article about innovative scientists who were initially faced with derision and insults, and were later proved to be correct. …Or rather: this is an article about innovative historical scientists, and a handful of current scientists whose theories are still considered more in the category of "crackpot" than "fact," which the author would like you to believe are very plausible, as shown by the fact that several other scientists used to be considered crackpots but are now lauded as groundbreakers in their fields.

Author seems to have skipped over the thousands of so-called scientists who were widely believed to be crackpots and later were still believed to be crackpots.

2 stars. Reasonably entertaining writing; good facts; bad science.

Papa's Planet, by William F. Nolan (April)
This is short and I wish it were forgettable. Fortunately, it's incoherent enough that most of the details will fade with time. Philip, our protagonist, is Cecile's fourth husband; her father recently died and left him the deed to a planet. The story is obviously not meant to be taken seriously ("Five million miles out from Mars, we turned sharp left and there it was: Papa's Planet"), and while it's obviously science fiction–the planet is inhabited by nothing but Hemmingway clones–there's not really any actual story here. (Is this what the mundanes think science fiction is?)

2 stars. It's not anything like good but it's not overtly bad enough for me to rank it at 1 star.

The Annex, by John D. MacDonald (May)
I had hopes for this one. It started out interesting: a nurse tending an unconscious patient, discovering he's dislodged his IV needle. Then it shifts perspective entirely: Mr. Dave Davis visits a huge, strange building, in the process of being torn down while its residents refuse to leave. There are hints that he's on some kind of assignment from an agency; he tries not to reveal exactly why he's visiting or how he got access. His guide, Mrs. Dorn, refuses to let him find his own way, insisting he'd just get lost. (It is clear that yes, he would quickly get lost.) When they reach his destination–

The story loses focus. It gets a bit surreal; while I generally enjoy surreal–see my notes about the Calvino story above–this lacks the whimsy or allure that would allow it to be more than somewhat nonsensical. Then the story shifts back to the nursing ward, where Silvia Dorn is a nurse, her beloved Dave is being kept alive by machines, and the reader is obviously meant to draw meaning from these details in a way that eluded me.

3 stars, I suppose–I can tell there's a decent story here even if it seems to want a set of assumptions I don't share.

Henne Fire, by Isaac Bashevis Singer (May)
This is told folktale-style, a story of Jewish fantasy (of a sort) rather than classic science fiction. Henne Fire is a terrible woman–she has been so awful, all her life, that she basically became a demon. Or perhaps she was born as one. She was nasty to everybody. Eventually, she became prone to random attacks of hellfire–her clothing would catch fire, or little flames would start around her. She could not even move into the poorhouse; nobody wanted a boarder who would catch houses on fire. She pleaded with the rabbi to help her, and eventually, the town made her a small brick house–basically a shack made of stone, with a tin roof.

Illustration by Bernard McDonald

The neighbors might've just shunned her after that, but one of her daughters married a rich American and started sending her money. Suddenly everyone wanted to befriend her. (This did not make her a nicer person.) One day people noticed that Henne hadn't been around for a few days, and they found her remains at home–a burnt skeleton, sitting in a chair with no mark of fire on it.

3 stars; entertaining enough.

The Dead Astronaut, by J. G. Ballard (May)
After the space age is decades past–shut down after a bloody history of orbital accidents–a married couple awaits the crash landing of their friend who died 20 years ago, so they can gather his remains.

Charle Schorre's illustration is eye-catching and does not actually capture the tone of this semi-post-apocalyptic story.

I enjoyed this story, although it is not a happy tale and it does not end well for anyone. I especially enjoyed: Mrs. Groves had been (was still?) in love with the astronaut, and her husband does not seem to have been jealous–mostly amused, and a bit concerned for her. I did not enjoy: The revelation of the ominous secret (a bit too predictable), and the final moments where the husband says, "I never asked you–" and then looks at her, and realizes he has his answer.

What that answer was, what the question was, I do not know. This was obviously written for men of a certain class, of a certain culture, who would understand the unspoken words. I can recognize the poignancy of the ending but I don't know what actually happened.

3 stars. If I'd been part of the intended audience, it probably would be 4.

The Snooping Machine, by Alan Westin (May)
Another nonfiction piece, positing a cashless, computer-data-driven society by 1975. It mentions that computer tape is so efficient a storage medium that one could hold 2000 pages of data for each of America's two hundred million citizens in a single room, on as few as a hundred reels of tape.

It discusses some history of government data-gathering, which includes both "big brother" hysteria and a pressing need for accurate data on which to base decisions. (Which regions need better school funding? Which areas might need new roads?) Government officials have admitted it may be impossible to separate personal identity details from the data they need, and that sorting out the conflicting interests in privacy and data is an ongoing problem.

3 stars. A nice overview of data technology and both the problems and possibilities it brings, but a bit pedantic in approach.

The Man from Not-Yet, by John Sladek (June)
Epistolary fiction, told through letters. Two friends in 1772 discuss an incident some ten years past, in which they had a visitor who claimed to be from the future. He was questioned by Samuel Johnson, who asked disparaging questions–"You will want to tell me no doubt of carriages that operate without benefit of horses. Of engines that carry men through the air like birds. Of ships without sails."

The visitor is astounded that he has guessed the future so correctly, but Johnson just scoffs, until the man offers to bring him to the future. They visit his time machine; the two enter the device; after a few moments of silence, it glows and explodes, leaving Dr. Johnson in the wreckage but the traveler gone.

The remaining few letters let the readers know what happened, while the men themselves remain unaware.

3 stars. I have little interest in this kind of historical fiction, and there is almost no point to the story: too much exposition with a "gotcha" twist at the end.

Ghost, by Hoke Norris (June)
The protagonist of this story is a somewhat conservative, ambitious man who has a "ghost" that speaks to him constantly, urging wild and rebellious acts. The ghost was the previous inhabitant of his body, and he cannot get rid of it even though he is now in control. He is also dating the boss's wife's sister (instead of the girl he loves). He wants the money and status that comes with the high-class connections but he also wants the comfort and joy he finds with Marie; he is caught between these two issues (with the ghost constantly berating him for his ambition) until Marie turns up pregnant.

They have a fight, he goes for a walk, and everything changes.

4 stars–this one will (heh) haunt me.

Conclusion

Playboy is about on par with most science fiction magazines for quality, and better than some… if you can accept that it has only one to three pieces per issue that are relevant to science fiction fans. Although the stories are okay, with some much better than that, many of the best-written stories have dark themes or unhappy endings or both. It seems the average Playboy reader is not expected to be interested in stories of otherworldly exploration or how technology might solve our problems, but how people with psychic powers or spaceships are just as likely to be miserable as the average person today. It's heavy on pedantic verbosity and all rather depressing.

If you also like the libertarian politics, there is more entertainment per issue, and of course, if your interests include pictures of young women with their shirts off, it has quite a bit to offer.






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[November 24, 1966] Middling (December 1966 Amazing)


by John Boston

Better Red than . . . ?

The December Amazing, all business, with the editorial and letter column seemingly dropped permanently , makes a nice-looking package, with a cover by Frank R. Paul shamelessly dominated by near-fire engine red.  It’s taken from the back cover of the January 1942 Amazing, where it was titled “Glass City of Europa.” The caption there says "Transparent and opaque plastics make this a wonder city of ersatz science.  Transportation is by means of giant, domesticated insects." 


by Frank R. Paul

Interestingly, this cover is not only cropped from the original, as is usual, but altered: someone has airbrushed Jupiter from the upper left-hand corner!  There’s nothing in its place but more red.  Now that’s editing!  Of a sort.

Born Under Mars (Part 1 of 2), by John Brunner

The featured fiction on the cover is the beginning of John Brunner’s two-part serial Born Under Mars.  As usual I will withhold comment (and reading) until both parts are available.  A quick inspection suggests that this one represents Brunner the capable post-pulp storyteller and not the author in his highly variable philosophical mode, the poles represented by his worthy The Whole Man and his unfortunate mess The Bridge to Azrael.


by Gray Morrow

Vanguard of the Lost, by John D. Macdonald

John D. Macdonald is best known for crime fiction—a lot of it.  Since 1950 he has published 40-odd crime novels, most if not all original paperbacks.  His current project is a series of novels about a private eye named Travis McGee—eight of them in three years.  In all this criminous fecundity it’s easily forgotten that Macdonald was once an up-and-coming SF writer, and pretty prolific at that too.  From 1948 to 1952 he published almost 50 stories in the SF magazines, in addition to a number in the borderline-SF pulp Doc Savage, all the while maniacially generating crime stories as well.  He used multiple pseudonyms and sometimes had multiple stories in the same magazine issue.  In his spare time he cranked out two decently-received SF novels, Wine of the Dreamers and Ballroom of the Skies.  A lot of his work was excellent, too; highlights include A Child Is Crying, Flaw, Game for Blondes, and my own favorite, the compact and nasty Spectator Sport, all of them promptly anthologized.


by Julian S. Krupa

Then it all stopped.  He had one last story in 1953 in Fantasy and Science Fiction, and since then it’s been all crime, almost all the time.  He did appear in the Merril annual “best SF” volume a couple of years ago with a weak fantasy from Cosmopolitan, The Legend of Joe Lee, and in 1962 published The Girl, the Gold Watch, and Everything, a crime novel (rather, a farce with some crime and attempted crime in it) with an SF premise: the time-slowing gimmick of Wells’s The New Accelerator and its numerous successors, including Macdonald’s own Half-Past Eternity, a novella for the pulp Super Science Stories in 1950.

Crime, it appears, paid—at least better than SF.  And in fact the SF market of the 1950s could never have accommodated the number of novels he produced.  His post-1952 short fiction, meanwhile, was split between the crime fiction magazines and the more lucrative likes of Cosmopolitan, Collier’s, and the Saturday Evening Post.

After that buildup, it’s unfortunate that Macdonald’s Vanguard of the Lost, from the May 1950 Fantastic Adventures, doesn’t amount to more.  Aliens have landed!  Well, not landed yet, but their fleet of ships is traversing the globe.  Larry Graim, statistician by day and SF writer by night, goes up to his building’s roof to check them out, and meets there Alice, a feisty young woman who proves to be the one who denounces Graim’s work relentlessly in the SF magazine letter columns (“the poor man’s Kuttner and the cretin’s van Vogt”).

Graim is disoriented by the fact that these aliens’ rather beat-up-looking, uncommunicative spaceships first seem to be mapping the earth, and then land and release large machines that start building things with no visible sentient direction.  It’s completely different from the plots he’s familiar with from the SF magazines, so he and Alice go try to figure out what’s behind the seemingly mindless display.  En route there is much mild satire of Everyman reacting to the unprecedented.  The denouement is uninspiring and ends on a note of slapstick, to be followed by wedding bells to complete the meet-cute plot.  It’s readable and vaguely amusing.  Three stars.

The Revolt of the Pedestrians, by David H. Keller, M.D.

The second novelet in the issue is David H. Keller’s first, and probably most famous, story, The Revolt of the Pedestrians (Amazing, Feb. 1928).  In the future, everybody is on wheels, all the time.  The mania for speed has overtaken everything else; the roadways are progressively more dominated by automobiles; pedestrians first become fair game and then are banned altogether, and hounded out of existence—or so it is thought.  By the time of the story, the legs of the ordinary citizen have atrophied, and everyone gets around the house and the office in miniature personal cars.  But . . . hidden in the wilderness, a remnant population of pedestrians is thriving, and scheming, and perfecting their science, and soon they shall declare themselves and their demands. 


by Frank R. Paul

This of course is all quite ridiculous.  But aside from that minor problem, this story is actually pretty good.  It’s well paced in a rambling sort of way, very smoothly written, with engaging central characters, with Keller’s soon-to-be-characteristic expositional chunks going down smoothly, and without the cranky and rancorous ideological overtones of some of his later stories.  And bear in mind that the absurd extrapolations here are a cruder version of the satirical method that later served Galaxy so well (compare Pohl’s The Midas Plague).  Three stars—four if one compares it only to other works of its time.

Dr. Grimshaw's Sanitarium, by Fletcher Pratt

I pinned Fletcher Pratt long ago as one of the more tedious SF writers going (actually, gone: 1897-1956).  I remember as a child trying to force my way through his Double Jeopardy, thinking that if Doubleday published it and it was reprinted as a Galaxy Novel, there must be something to it.  Then I encountered Invaders from Rigel, in which elephantine extraterrestrials turn humans into metal by manipulating radiation, and realized the futility of persevering with it, or with him.  (In fairness, Pratt’s outright fantasy, both his collaborations with L. Sprague de Camp and his unaccompanied work, was much superior.)

The Pratt-fall du jour is Dr. Grimshaw’s Sanitarium, from the May 1934 Amazing.  Our hero John Doherty is sent to the sanitarium by his employer for a rest after his courageous thwarting of a train robbery, which left him with some psychological difficulty.  It soon becomes apparent that Dr. Grimshaw is a sinister character and there’s something funny going on.  He’s turning people into midgets!  Soon enough the Doctor gets wise to Doherty and his friends and really gives them the midget treatment, so they end up having to survive in the grass, which is now apparently taller than they are, and subsist on insects that they manage to kill with makeshift weapons (reportedly, June bugs are reasonably tasty but houseflies are disgusting).  But now the end is near!  Grimshaw’s got a cat, and all is lost.  Two stars, barely.


by Leo Morey

Interestingly (sort of), when editors Leo Margulies and Oscar J. Friend solicited self-nominations for an anthology to be titled My Best Science Fiction Story, published in 1949, Pratt submitted this one, though he did acknowledge rewriting it for a more modern audience.  I did not investigate the revision.

The Flame from Nowhere, by Eando Binder


by Julian S. Krupa

Eando Binder’s The Flame from Nowhere (Amazing, April 1939) is a routine period adventure story: forest fire proves impossible to stop, turns out it’s really an atomic fire, must have atomic fire-fighting methods, our hero quickly whips them up in a flurry of mumbo-jumbo, making the penultimate sacrifice, two stars.  Next!

The Commuter, by Philip K. Dick


by Bill Ashman

Philip K. Dick’s The Commuter, from the August/September 1953 Amazing, during the magazine’s brief flirtation with high pay rates and a stab at higher quality, is one of many facilely clever stories from his early period of prolific glibness.  It starts with a small man asking a railroad clerk for a ticket book to Macon Heights, being told there is no Macon Heights, and disappearing.  It happens again.  A railroad official takes the train and finds it does stop at Macon Heights, which research shows was a proposed development that was rejected by the authorities years ago.  So what’s happening to reality?  The story, which foreshadows more substantial work by Dick on the same theme, is a trifle with a barb; it effectively conveys the official’s fear for his familiar world and life.  Three stars.

He Took It with Him, by Clark Collins

The issue concludes with He Took It With Him, by Clark Collins, actually a pseudonym of Mack Reynolds, who mostly used it for articles in men’s magazines, such as Beat’s Guide to Paris, in French Frills for October-December of this year (Beat?  In 1966?  What a square.) and Guide to Fallen Women in Sir Knight in 1961.  This story is from the April 1950 Fantastic Adventures. Bentley, a selfish rich guy with cancer who’s got a year to live, buys a noted scientist with a promise to build the research institute the scientist dreams of if he will only figure out how to preserve Bentley until such time as he can be revived and cured.  The new Institute will be charged with keeping him safe, and also hiding his money, converted to gold and diamonds, until he is awakened to (of course) a nasty surprise that’s not too obvious to the reader.  Readable, modestly clever, three stars.


by H. W. MacCauley

Summing Up

So, a middling reading experience—nothing too terrible, most of it at least agreeably readable, one surprise from the unlikely source of Dr. Keller, and the prospect of the Brunner serial pending. 



(For an excellent experience, you don't want to miss Part 2 of "The Menagerie", the next episode of Star Trek — join us tonight at 8:30 PM (Pacific AND Eastern — two showings)!!)

Here's the invitation!



[December 24, 1965] Gallimaufry du Saison(The Year's best Science Fiction and Paingod and Other Delusions)


by John Boston

Adventures in Miscellany

If it’s 1965, then it must be time for Judith Merril’s annual anthology from 1964.  Admittedly, it’s pretty late in the year, which likely has to do with Merril’s change of publishers.  After five years with Simon and Schuster, the new volume is from Delacorte Press, an imprint of Dell Publishing, which has published these anthologies in paperback since their inception in the mid-1950s.  But here it is, styled 10th Annual Edition THE YEAR’S BEST SF, in time for the Christmas trade.


by G. Ziel

Over the years these anthologies have become larger.  The growth is mostly in density; the page count has gone up a bit (400 pages this year), but the amount of text per page has grown remarkably from the early Gnome Press volumes. 

The books have also grown much more miscellaneous.  Their contents were initially drawn mostly from the familiar SF magazines, with a few other items from the well-known slick magazines.  No more.  This volume includes a gallimaufry of stories, quasi-stories, satirical essays, and what have you from sources as various as The Socialist Call, motive (sic—official magazine of the Methodist Student Movement), New Directions, and Cosmopolitan.  (No cartoons this year, unlike last year’s book.)

This is all in service of Merril’s editorial philosophy of science fiction, which is that it doesn’t exist—or, at least, that there’s no difference between it and everything else, or at least something else.  (See her soliloquy in the previous volume on what “S” and “F” really stand for, quoted in my previous comment on this series.  The theme is continued here in her between-stories commentary, like a background noise you stop noticing after a while). You may find this view intellectually incoherent, but, like the feller (or Feller) said, by their fruits ye shall know them, and Merril makes a pretty interesting fruit salad.  (Even if I have a bone to pick with parts of it.)

Unfortunately it’s hard to review a salad this big without sorting out its ingredients, which Merril might say defeats her purpose.  Nonetheless, onwards.  The book can only be discussed in layers.

Usual Suspects

The top layer, analytically speaking, is the first-class, or at least pretty good, SF and F from genre sources.  The outstanding items here are J.G. Ballard’s The Terminal Beach from New Worlds and Roger Zelazny’s A Rose for Ecclesiastes from F&SF—and stop right there: Merril’s benign eclecticism is nowhere better illustrated than in the contrast between Ballard, driving avant-garde style and imagery and his preoccupation with psychological “inner space” into the genre’s brain like an ice pick, and Zelazny, rehabilitating the old-fashioned pseudo-other-wordly costume drama of the pulps with high style and intellectual decoration.  Runners-up include Thomas Disch’s chilly Descending from Fantastic, John Brunner’s well-turned gimmick story The Last Lonely Man from New Worlds (the only story also to have appeared in the Wollheim/Carr best of the year volume), Norman Kagan’s audaciously zany The Mathenauts from If, and Kit Reed’s sprightly self-help/morality tale Automatic Tiger from F&SF

Barely making the cut is Mack Reynolds’s Pacifist, also from F&SF, a sharp piece of political didacticism about a pacifist underground that uses decidedly non-pacifist means to fight against warmongering politicians, unfortunately too contrived to have much impact.  Surprisingly, Arthur Porges, perpetrator of the dreadful Ensign Ruyter stories in Amazing, rises briefly from the muck with the affecting Problem Child, from Analog, about a professor of mathematics whose wife died bearing a mentally retarded child; the child proves to be anything but retarded in one significant way.  This one gets “better than expected” credit.  So does Training Talk, by the militantly eccentric David R. Bunch (Fantastic), in which he outdoes himself in grotesque lyricism (“It was one of those days when cheer came out of a rubbery sky in great splotches and globs of half-snow and eased down the windowpanes like breakups of little glaciers.”), complementing his even more grotesque plot.  Edging into this category is The Search, a poem by (Merril says) high school student Bruce Simonds, from F&SF, which is minor but clever, pointed, and readable. 

All right, downhill to the next layer, the less distinguished selections from the SF magazines, ranging from the merely competent or inconsequential to the actively dreary. There are several supposedly humorous trifles.  Fritz Leiber’s Be of Good Cheer, from Galaxy, is an epistolary satire, a letter from a robot at the Bureau of Public Morale to a Senior Citizen (as they are known these days) reassuring her unconvincingly that the absence of humans and prevalence of robots that she observes is nothing to worry about.  Larry Eisenberg’s The Pirokin Effect, from Amazing, is a more slapsticky satire about extraterrestrial signals received in a restaurant kitchen which may or may not be from the Lost Tribes of Israel, now resident on Mars; this one is distinguished from the Leiber story by actually being mildly amusing.  The same is true of Family Portrait by new author Morgan Kent, from Fantastic, a vignette about the mundane domestic life of a family that proves to have unusual talents. 

The same is unfortunately not true of The New Encyclopaedist, from F&SF, by Stephen Becker, a novelist (see last year’s A Covenant with Death) and translator of some repute, with no prior SF credits.  This comprises several satirical encyclopedia entries about events in the near future, but their main purpose seems to be to prove the author’s superior sensibilities, and they’re more tedious than funny.  I’m guessing the New Yorker rejected them.  Czech author Josef Nesvadba’s The Last Secret Weapon of the Third Reich belongs here as much as anywhere—it’s from his collection Vampires Ltd., which is apparently devoted to SF stories.  It’s a frenetic black comedy about a last-ditch Nazi effort to generate a new fighting force with a process for developing embryos to adulthood within seven days of conception; the story is less effective than it should be since . . . gosh . . . Nazis are kind of hard to satirize.

There are also a couple of yokel epics here, which is almost always bad news.  Sonny, by Rick Raphael, from Analog (where else?) is a dreary attempt at humor about a kid from West Virginia whose psionic talents come to light after he is drafted into the Army.  The Man Who Found Proteus, by the always promising but never quite delivering Robert H. Rohrer, Jr., from Fantastic, features a caricatured semi-literate miner encountering a hungry shape-changing monster and coming off no better than you’d expect.

Several other more conventional SF stories are just not very lively.  Richard Wilson’s The Carson Effect, from Worlds of Tomorrow, like much of his work to my taste, is a rather limp account of strange human behavior in what everybody thinks are the last days, but prove not to be, a denouement explained by a gimmick reminiscent of Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter.  The Carson of the title is Rachel.  Jack Sharkey’s The Twerlik, from Worlds of Tomorrow, is an alien contact story in which the alien, a planet-encompassing plant, tries to make sense of explorers from Earth landing in a spaceship; it’s an earnest effort (unusually for this author) that doesn’t quite revive a hackneyed theme.  A Miracle Too Many, by Philip H. Smith and Alan E. Nourse, from F&SF, concerns a doctor who wishes he could save all his patients, and suddenly he can, with grim consequences that are all too obvious.  Its problem is not ennui but predictability. 

That’s an awful lot of lackluster for a book with “Best” in the title.  More on that problem later.

Neighboring Provinces

The next stratum consists of fairly straightforward SF/F that Merril has trawled or excavated from the established mainstream magazines in the way of SF/F.  A couple of these are by well-established (or –remembered) genre names.  One of the best in the book is Arthur C. Clarke’s The Shining Ones, from Playboy, about an encounter with the fauna of the sea, rendered with the same dignified enthusiasm as Clarke’s portrayals of human encounters with the Moon and the other planets.  This is a writer who will never lose his sense of wonder, or his discipline in writing about it.  Interestingly, the plot takes off from the notion of powering a city with energy derived from temperature differentials between oceanic depths and the surface.  Maybe somebody should try that sometime.  The other big name is John D. MacDonald, who wrote a lot of quite good SF from 1948 to 1953 but gave it up for crime fiction.  Unfortunately his The Legend of Joe Lee from Cosmopolitan is unimpressive, a lame sort of ghost story about a teen-age hot-rodder whom the cops can’t catch, for reasons revealed at the end. 

The others in this category are all satirical extrapolations of things the authors have seen around them, a standard maneuver in standard SF and a game that anyone can play—though not always well.  The best of the lot is A Living Doll by Robert Wallace, from Harper’s; Wallace is said to be a photographer for Life, and the story to have been inspired by an encounter in a toy store with a doll that spoke to him and nibbled his finger.  The narrator’s sullen and sadistic daughter wants a doll for Christmas, along with some needles and pins and a book on Voodoo.  He discovers that dolls have become more sophisticated than he realized, and purchases one who proves to mix a mean Martini and to discourse knowledgeably about Mexican art—a considerable improvement over his daughter.  The rest follows logically.  Almost as good is Frank Roberts’s It Could Be You, from the Australian Coast to Coast (which seem to be an annual anthology of stories from the previous year, just like this one).  In the future, it posits, the populace will be kept entertained by a televised game: one person in the city is selected to be killed, with a hundred thousand-pound prize to the winner; and clues narrowing down the victim’s identity are given through the day to build suspense (a man; never wears a hat; black hair; blue eyes; etc.).  This is not exactly a new idea to readers of the SF magazines, but it’s sharply written and no longer than it needs to be.  James D. Houston’s Gas Mask, from Nugget, one of many cheap Playboy imitations, is a reasonably well done “if this goes on” piece about future traffic problems and people’s adaptation to them. 

And there are selections from places you wouldn’t think to look, but Merril always casts a wide net.  The satirical motif continues, unfortunately in combinations of facile, arch and ponderous.  Russell Baker’s A Sinister Metamorphosis is apparently one of his regular columns from The New York Times, taking off from the theme that sociologists “thought the machines would gradually become more like people.  Nobody expected people to become more like machines.” James T. Farrell’s A Benefactor of Humanity—the one from the Socialist Call—is about a man who can’t read but loves books; however, he dislikes authors, and devises a machine to replace them.  It’s overlong and not funny.  Hap Cawood’s one-page Synchromocracy, from motive, is a rather undeveloped sketch of government by computer and constant public opinion polling.

Farther Out

From here, things just get weird, for better or worse.  Donald Hall, a well-known poet and former poetry editor of the Paris Review, is present with The Wonderful Dog Suit, from the Carleton Miscellany (literary magazine of Carleton College), about a precocious child who is given a dog suit, and takes to it; the dog becomes rather shaggy by the end.  I suppose this is brilliance taking a day off.  The Red Egg, by Jose Maria Gironella, apparently a well-established Spanish writer, is a jolly tale about a cancer which flees its home on the skin of a laboratory mouse and takes to the air, feeding on industrial smoke and other toxic delicacies, terrorizing the populace while contemplating which human victim to descend upon.  It’s quite entertaining, but the point is elusive; too profound for me, I guess.  This first appeared in a collection titled Journeys to the Improbable, collecting the author’s “psychic experience” over a period of two years. 

Probably the weirdest item here—since I can detect no element of anything resembling S or F even by Merril’s ecumenical standard—is Romain Gary’s Decadence, from Saga (the men’s magazine?  Really?) by way of Gary’s collection Hissing Tales.  A group of mobsters goes to Italy to meet their charismatic leader, who after taking over a union was prosecuted and deported; now he’s eligible to return, but they find he has meanwhile become an acclaimed modernist sculptor with a rather different outlook than they had expected.  M.E. White’s The Power of Positive Thinking, from New Directions, is a first-person story told by a smart, fanatically religious schoolgirl which amounts to a horror story with no trace of fantasy, the horror only suggested, but heightened by the relentless mundanity of the account. 

The book closes with Yachid and Yechida by Isaac Bashevis Singer, from his collection Short Friday.  Singer is among other things the book reviewer for the Jewish Daily Forward, and the story was translated from Yiddish.  It is a theological fantasy about dead souls condemned to Sheol, a/k/a Earth, and their posthumous lives there, and it is absolutely captivating, one of the best things in the book.  This Singer really has something going; if he works at it, he might crack F&SF.

Summing Up

So, what to make of this “best SF” anthology, in which much of the SF/F is just not very interesting and is outshone by some of the loose marbles Merril has found in other yards?  At least part of the problem is her seeming unwillingness to include longer stories, which of course would displace multiple shorter ones and yield a less crowded contents page.  But much of the best SF writing these days is at novella length or close to it; consider Jack Vance’s The Kragen and Roger Zelazny’s The Graveyard Heart, from Fantastic, and Gordon R. Dickson’s Soldier, Ask Not and Wyman Guin’s A Man of the Renaissance, from Galaxy.  Merril would probably be better advised to devote a little more space to substance and less to short trifles.

But still, there’s a lot here—much of it quite good, much of it unexpected, and some of it both.  This anthology series is still in a class by itself.



by Gideon Marcus

Paingod and Other Delusions

Three years ago, Harlan Ellison released his first collection of science fiction stories.  It was a fine collection, representing the era of his writing career before he struck out for Hollywood to become a big-time screenwriter (some of his work not surviving to the small screen unscathed…)

Now he's back with a new collection.  A mix of stories recently written and others excavated from the vault, it offers up a strange combination of mature and callow Ellison, though none of it is unworthy.  Dig it:


by Jack Gaughan

Introduction

After seven stabs at it, Harlan reportedly threw up his hands and decided he wasn't going to write an introduction.  Instead, we get a several page nontroduction that is probably worth the price of the book in and of itself.  I read it aloud to my family while we were waiting to get into a new sushi place in town.  It's excellent, funny, self deprecatory, and illuminating.

Paingod

If God is Love, why does He allow pain to exist?  This moving, brilliant story tries to answer this question.  Nominated for the Galactic Star last year and covered previously by Victoria Silverwolf, there's a reason it leads this book.

Five stars.

"Repent, Harlequin!" said the Ticktockman

In an increasingly time-ordered world, the wildest rebel is he who would gum up the works of society.

I didn't much care for this story when I first reviewed it, finding it a bit overwrought and consciously artistic.  Ellison's introduction, in which he explains his congenital inability to mark time accurately, makes the piece much more understandable.  I'd had trouble relating in part because my time sense is preternaturally perfect (I can tell you what time it is even after being asleep for hours).  So, with the story now in context, I can understand the enthusiasm with which it's been received.

Four stars.

The Crackpots

An exploration of a planet of misfits, who it turns out are the real movers and shakers of the galactic federation.

Based on the odd characters Ellison observed when manning an adult book stand on 42nd Street, this is an older piece, and it shows.  About ten pages too long and a little obtuse, but even young, imperfect Ellison is usually worth reading.

Three stars.

Bright Eyes

The former masters of the Earth have been diminished by war to just one representative and his oversized rodent sidekick.  Like a salmon swimming upstream, he returns to the blasted surface to witness the destruction one last time.

Inspired by a piece of art (that later accompanied the story—you can see it at Victoria's original review—it's a vivid piece.

Four stars.

The Discarded

A plague turns a number of humans into "monsters", who are exiled to an orbiting colony.  When a new outbreak occurs, suddenly the discarded find themselves valued as the potential source of a cure.  But will normal humans ever really tolerate the deviant?

I will go out on a limb here — this is my favorite story of the collection, one I enjoyed when I first read it in the 1959 issue of Fantastic.  It's a much more effective "misfit" piece than the previous story.

Five stars.

Wanted in Surgery

Automated surgeons displace their human counterparts.  Are they truly infallible?  And is it ethical to find fault in them?

This piece doesn't work on a lot of levels, plausibility-wise and narratively, as even Ellison concedes.  I suppose it's here to fill space and to make sure it got in some collection.

Two stars.

Deeper than the Darkness

Another misfit, this time about a pyrokinetic recruited to destroy the star of an enemy race.  Fools be they who expect a hated rebel to suddenly be overcome with patriotism…

This is another flawed, early piece that shows Ellison's potential without realizing it.

Three stars.

Summing Up

Two fives, two fours, two threes, and a two, not to mention a great Intro.  If that's not worth four bits, I'm not sure what is.  Get it!