by Brian Collins

There must be a growing demand for original anthologies of science fiction, because they keep coming—both standalone titles and series. Infinity One is, going by its title, the first in yet another series of these, although notably there is one reprint between its covers (really two reprints, as you'll see), a story that many readers will already be familiar with. Robert Hoskins is an occasional author-turned-agent-turned-editor, whose high position at Lancer Books has apparently resulted in Infinity One. Will there be future installments? Does it really matter? We shall see.

The tagline for Infinity One is “a magazine of speculative fiction in book form,” which strikes me as a sequence of words only fit to come from the mouth of a clinically insane person. This is a paperback anthology and nothing more nor less. I mentioned in my review of Nova 1 last month that Harry Harrison claimed that he simply wanted to put together an anthology of “good” SF, although I’m not sure if Hoskins had even such a basic goal in mind.

Infinity One, edited by Robert Hoskins

Introduction, by Isaac Asimov

This is a rambling introduction from someone who really loves the sound of his own voice, even when it’s in writing. Asimov talks about mankind’s future in possibly inhabiting the most inhospitable corners of the globe, and even in the depths of space. He goes on a rather mind-numbing tangent about baseball on the Moon, or “moon-ball” as he calls it. Looking at the copyright page reveals that “much of the material” in Asimov’s introduction first appeared in some mainstream publication I have never heard of a few years ago; it’s only in the last section, which feels stapled on after the fact, that he mentions Infinity One at all. Asimov is a lot of things, but he is not a lazy writer, which makes me think Hoskins is the one who was being lazy in not being able to procure an original piece from the Good Doctor.

No rating.

A Word from the Editor, by Robert Hoskins

Thankfully, Hoskins’s own introduction is much shorter than Asimov’s, although it somehow has even less to do with the book he has gosh-darn put together. We get a rather alloyed ode to the late Hugo Gernsback, not so much as an editor of magazines but as a gadgeteer who speculated on the potential real-world technology such as TV. Hoskins posits that, given how quickly TV has become ubiquitous as a commercial item, the likelihood of technology being nigh-unrecognizable in just a few decades is considerable.

No rating.

The Pleasure of Our Company, by Robert Silverberg

Yet again I am writing about Robert Silverberg, because I am unable to get rid of him. While Silverberg’s recent output has been mixed, his outing here is quite decent. Thomas Voigtland is the former president of a colony known as Bradley’s Planet, having been overtaken by a military junta and forced to flee in a spaceship—by himself. He has taken with him several “cubes,” which are really personality tapes replicating real-life people, including his wife and son, along with historical figures such as Ovid and the late Ernest Hemingway. Silverberg’s thesis is obvious, the story being about Voightland’s guilt and his decision to flee from the junta instead of staying and probably dying alongside his family and supporters. Most of Silverberg’s bad habits are absent here, which helps.

A high three stars.

The Absolute Ultimate Invention, by Stephen Barr

This is one of three “fables” in Infinity One. A scientist has made an age-reversing machine, which through some Looney Tunes logic is able to literally reverse the digits in a person’s age, so that a 41-year-old man would become 14. However, the machine does not quite work like how the scientist intended. Hilarity ensues.

Whatever, man. Two stars.

The Star, by Arthur C. Clarke

I remember seeing this one in print some 15 years ago, in the November 1955 issue of a now-forgotten magazine called Infinity Science Fiction. “The Star” is pretty famous and even won Clarke a Hugo. I like this one more the older I get. An unnamed Jesuit has been accompanying a spacefaring team as its chief astrophysicist, but the discovery of a planet that only narrowly avoided being engulfed by an exploding sun has shaken his faith. It’s a mood piece; not much happens and there’s really only one character. Yet Clarke’s style, which normally is not much to write home about, is splendid here, and I have to say there’s something moving about it, regardless of one’s own religious standing. You probably already know the ending, but I dare not give it away.

Four stars.

Echo, by Katherine MacLean

A spaceship crash lands on a planet filled with vegetation, and said vegetation is apparently sentient. The plants and trees are not happy about the lone astronaut, whose existence they can barely comprehend. MacLean has played with perspective before, but “Echo” sees her most strongly resembling the A. E. van Vogt of yore; in fact “Echo” reminds me of a van Vogt story from about 20 years ago, called “Process.” This is by no means a point against MacLean. It mostly reads as prose poetry, but while it only has the bones of a story, you could find much worse examples of poetic style in SF—just open the latest Orbit.

A high three or low four stars.

The Great Canine Chorus, by Anne McCaffrey

Peter is a cop on the beat with Wizard, his K-9 unit, when they find a lonely and malnourished girl in a condemned building by herself named Maria. The girl turns out to be a telepath, albeit very young and weak, with her mother dead and her father on the run from the law. There’s a plot involving a gang leader and Maria’s almost supernatural ability to communicate with dogs. It’s too cute by half. Incidentally, this is the first story in Infinity One to not involve space travel or futuristic technology. McCaffrey has her audience, but I’m not part of that audience. Her style here is especially grating in its childishness.

Two stars.

Pacem Est, by Kris Neville and K. M. O’Donnell

Neville and “O’Donnell” (actually Barry Malzberg) come in with a short and moody story, about a war happening on an alien planet and a nun who got killed in the line of duty. Hawkins, the company commander, is trying to understand why this order of nuns would journey out to this hostile alien world in the first place. Putting aside for the moment the fact that “Pacem Est” is only SF insofar as it involves a war that could just as easily be the one in Vietnam, it’s a perfectly evocative piece that sees Neville and Malzberg in a less vicious and more introspective mood than is either author’s normal routine.

Three stars.

Keeping an Eye on Janey, by Rob Goulart

Goulart has been around for a while, and his experience shows with this story, which similarly to the McCaffrey story has to do with urban crime. The editor of a publisher that specializes in cheap gothic trash gets involved with a dimestore hood who’s due to be assassinated, as well as a robot private detective named Carnahan. The robot is at least endearing, despite talking mostly in detective cliches. Raymond Chandler must be rolling in his grave. There’s a bit of detective fiction, a bit of gangster action, a bit of satire on book publishing, but it’s simply not enough of any one element. The message ultimately seems to be that computers can’t be relied on for everything. No shit.

Two, almost three stars, for what it’s worth.

The Packerhaus Method, by Gene Wolfe

I’ve seen Wolfe’s writing evolve over the past few years, and he seems like he is on the cusp of making something truly special. He’s almost there. The premise of his latest story is that the dead have been brought back to life—although not quite. These are robotic replicas of the originals, with mechanical and rather circular minds that, while replicating the wants, fears, and verbal tics of the dead, are unable to process new information. The results are disturbing, although the story’s potential for horror is held back somewhat by almost nonstop expositional dialogue that can overburden the reader.

A light four stars.

The Water Sculptor of Station 233, by George Zebrowski

Zebrowski is one of the new generation of writers, and this here is a fine mood piece, if not much more than that. Two astronauts are stuck in space, each in his own station, due to some disgraceful prior incident. Life on Earth has gone to shit, but things are not much better in space when you have minimal contact with other humans and only so many things to occupy your time with. One of these astronauts has developed a unique method of sculpting, whereby he uses water, plastic, and the vacuum of space to make his art. The climax comes pretty suddenly, but maybe that’s the point.

A solid three stars.

Operation P-Button, by Gordon R. Dickson

Here’s the second of the three “fables,” and I really don’t understand the point of these things other than to pad out the book. Dickson recreates the story of Chicken Little with military higher-ups, complete with a report about the sky falling. That’s really all there is to it.

Only avoids being one star because it goes down quickly.

The Tiger, by Miriam Allen deFord

Bart Holland is a 20-year-old young man who craves adventure—only nothing too dangerous. He finds it when he meets a strange girl who seems to be a “foreigner,” along with her traveling sideshow, featuring the most docile Bengal tiger in existence. Even before reading this one, I suspected deFord would do a twist on the lady-and-the-tiger routine, and she sort of does. Unfortunately the two main characters, especially Holland, read as flat, and the SFnal element doesn’t really make any sense when one stops to think about it. As with a few other stories in Infinity One, including Asimov’s “introduction,” this feels hastily written.

A high two or low three stars.

Hands of the Man, by R. A. Lafferty

As with the Neville-Malzberg story, this one is only nominally SFnal. Hodl Oskanian, a “skyman” who consults the lines of his hands, is challenged to a game of cards, with a precious stone being the reward. I have to say I resent Hoskins basically giving away the story’s ending in his introduction, even if said ending is far from unpredictable. I also wish Lafferty had inserted more of what has become his trademark strangeness, leaving aside the obligatory nod to Catholic theology. “Hands of the Man” is a rather humorless tale that does not play to Lafferty’s strengths.

Two stars.

Nightmare Gang, by Dean R. Koontz

Koontz is very young, but he already has a few novels to his credit, plus quite a few short stories. “Nightmare Gang” is Koontz’s attempt at hopping on the biker gang bandwagon, and it’s honestly too dark for its own good. Louis, the leader of a biker gang, is a telepath who is able to coordinate with his gang members via mind control, but he also has a few other abilities that the narrator finds hard to explain. It’s gory and bleak, but also I don’t really understand what the point of it is, which is not helped by Koontz being such an inelegant stylist.

Whatever. Two stars.

These Our Actors, by Edward Wellen

I’m not familiar with Wellen, possibly because he hasn’t written much in the past decade. “These Our Actors” is really two vignettes, the first about an unnamed man on a hostile alien world and the second about an anxiety-ridden TV actor. Neither of these vignettes is substantive enough on its own, especially the first one, but how they’re connected is rather interesting. Unfortunately, given that he wrote something of a prose poem, Wellen is not fine enough a stylist to make it a consistently engrossing experience. The ending is pretty good, though.

Three stars.

Inside Mother, by Pat de Graw

A first story by a new author, one whom not even Hoskins knows anything about. Making good on the Freudian implications of its title, “Inside Mother” has to do with sex and adolescence, about a group of kids (teenagers?) who are evidently the survivors of a crashed satellite. The adults who ran the satellite did not give the kids names, so they go by numbers; and they also neglected to have the satellite’s computer teach the kids basic things like sex or how to build a fire in the wilderness. How these kids have survived up to this point is thus a mystery, bordering on nonsensical. I think I understand what de Graw is doing, but what he or she has written is too abstract and lacking in consistency for my liking.

Barely three stars.

The Communicators, by Poul Anderson

Hoskins, in his introduction for this story, gloats that he was able to get pieces from Asimov, Clarke, and Anderson, whom he considers the three most popular SF writers at the moment. Given that Asimov’s introduction apparently was not written for Infinity One, and that “The Star” is a reprint, that leaves only one original piece Hoskins was able to procure. He also calls “The Communicators” a “short novel,” which is being overly generous since I’m not even sure it’s long enough to qualify as a novella. Finally, and I do not mean this as an insult towards Anderson, since his work ethic is tremendous, but the man will basically write for anybody, so long as the paycheck is serviceable enough. For better or worse, he has been one of the most reliable workhorses in the field for the past couple decades.

As for “The Communicators” itself, it’s the kind of far-future speculative fiction that Anderson writes in his sleep, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Two members of the Communicators, a pseudo-religious order that forsakes race and national borders in the service of preserving human knowledge, meets with a colonel from the Domination of Baikal (an “Oriental” power whose real-life equivalent is probably supposed to be Maoist China) to discuss what seem to be alien signals coming from Kappa Ceti. Roban, the junior member of the Communicators, still holds a grudge over his homeland (clearly the United States) losing its status as a world superpower, a conflict with his position as a Communicator that adds spice to the debate. This might be Anderson’s response to Asimov’s famous Foundation trilogy, in which the protectors of human knowledge are beholden to a near-perfect series of predictions, whereas the Communicators, while being intelligent, are still prone to human foibles.

It’s quite readable. A high three stars.

The Man on the Hill, by Michael Fayette

This is the last story and also the last of the “fables.” It’s also easily the best, given that it does not insult my intelligence. The last human survivor of some hostile environment, having grown tired of living in solitude, decides to take off his helmet and breathe some fresh air for the first time in decades. It’s a perfectly fine little mood piece that does not demean the reader with bad jokes, and incidentally its sense of weariness captures my own feelings after having read all of Infinity One.

Three stars.

Conclusion

The increasing ubiquity of paperbacks has been a double-edged sword. Paperbacks are both more affordable and easier to handle than hardcovers, but that also means they tend to come cheap. I get the impression that Hoskins, seeing the success of Damon Knight’s Orbit books, as well as the growing paperback market generally, saw an opportunity to make a bit of extra money with relatively little effort. The best story here is unquestionably Clarke’s “The Star,” a Hugo winner from 15 years ago that you probably already have in a couple anthologies and/or collections. And maybe SF was better 15 years ago; certainly there were more authors active and more SF at short lengths being written back then. My point is that if the original anthology craze is to survive then we need to do better than Harrison’s Nova 1 from last month, which was middling, or Infinity One, which is even worse.

[New to the Journey? Read this for a brief introduction!]

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