There are ten stories in The 1977 Annual World's Best SF; let's read five. One of the five we won't be reading today, John Varley's "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank," I read before I started this blog, and I have to admit I remember very little about it.
(Joachim Boaz read and blogged about The 1977 Annual World's Best SF in August of 2019; click the link to check out what he had to say. I reread his blog post after I drafted mine below and we have differing opinions and focus on different elements of the stories so reading both of our posts isn't going to feel redundant.)
"Appearance of Life" by Brian W. Aldiss (1976)
It is the far future, like 100,000 years from now! Mankind has colonized the galaxy. On many planets human explorers have discovered evidence of a now-vanished alien race, a race so advanced they transcended the need for the written word! On one world, Norma, these ancients left a building so huge it girdles the equator of the entire planet; the building was empty when humans found it, and for centuries have been using it as a museum, filling it up with specimens and artifacts.
Our narrator is a guy who as a child was identified by the authorities as one with special skills; he can intuitively see the connections between things. So he got the job of "Seeker," and travels around the galaxy, collecting evidence for other scholars and researchers. He is at the museum on Norma with a list of assignments from those other brainiacs.
The narrator's exploration of the museum allows Aldiss to contrast the people of the Seeker's far future society who are cold and live alone and have little intercourse with each other and let robots do all the work with people of like 45,000 years from now, people who are much like us, passionate people who fall in love and have tumultuous marriages and go to war and so forth. The narrator has one of his intuitive leaps and suddenly realizes that those ancient aliens created the human race as an experiment or an inferior reproduction of themselves or something, and that the human race is running down, becoming less connected to each other and less energetic. Not wanting to reveal this depressing news to the human race, the narrator abandons his job and becomes a hermit on a desert planet!
A pretty good story. "Appearance of Life" is a little ambiguous: one might argue Aldiss is portraying the future of 100,000 years from now as some kind of feminist or commie utopia--women outnumber men ten to one, marriage and the family have been abolished, and there are no possessions--but I think you can also interpret the story as presenting the people of the Seeker's far future as barely alive, while the people of the past--our present--though a bunch of greedy bigots who are always betraying and murdering each other, are vibrantly alive. One interesting little thing about the story are its references to Indians--Aldiss, of course, served in Burma during World War II.
"Appearance of Life" made its debut in the anthology Andromeda (isfdb lists it as Andromeda I, though the number does not appear on the cover) and has been reprinted in several anthologies and Aldiss collections, including a "best of" collection.
"Those Good Old Days of Liquid Fuel" by Michael G. Coney (1976)
You know how The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society is full of songs about how life gets worse as time passes because you lose contact with your friends and fail to realize your dreams and all the fine things that were around when you were a kid are discarded and replaced? Well, this story is like that. Also, there is a whole plot thread about how women manipulate you and come between you and your friends and you and your other interests. "Those Good Old Days of Liquid Fuel" feels like conventional mainstream fiction clad in SF clothing--there is little of the crazy ideas or exploitation elements, the outrageous satire or sense of wonder, that we associate with genre fiction and especially SF; I guess some will consider this a bug and others a feature.
It is the future of starships! These starships remain in orbit and people and goods move between them and planetary surfaces via shuttles. As a kid our narrator and his friend loved to watch the shuttles, which were loud because they were powered by rockets. But then his friend got involved with some chick and this girl didn't want to watch the shuttles anymore. Our narrator reminisces about this stuff when, as an adult who has some lame job in which he doesn't use his college degree in alien languages, he learns the rocket-powered shuttles, which have been sitting around rusting after being replaced by quiet anti-grav shuttles, are going to be torn up for scrap.
This is a competent story with themes with which I can totally identify, and there is a decent twist ending and a black humor joke I actually laughed at, so I am judging it acceptable or maybe marginally good.
"Those Good Old Days of Liquid Fuel" is part of a series called "Peninsula,"isfdb is telling me, and first appeared in F&SF. I don't see evidence there that the Peninsula stories were ever collected in English, though there was a French collection.
"Natural Advantage" by Lester Del Rey (1976)
"Natural Advantage" appears to be a throwback to the kind of stories written by Edmond Hamilton (e.g., "Thundering Worlds" and "Crashing Suns") in which humans deal with aliens and entire star systems are threatened with destruction and planets are moved about via high technology.
A spacefaring race of people with three eyes, one of which can "see time" or something like that, have finally made contact with another intelligent species--they have discovered Earth. The E. T.s have bad news for us--in ten years a cloud of antimatter is going to sweep through our solar system and kill us all. These aliens and the humans exchange scientific and technical knowledge. The fact that the aliens can "see time" or whatever has somehow meant that they have never developed an interest in two-dimensional representations like drawing, painting, or TV. And it has limited them in other ways as well. After becoming familiar with the technology of the aliens it only takes a couple of years before humankind has improved upon it to they point that we have bigger and faster starships than they do, and can even move our solar system out of the way of the anti-matter cloud.
Acceptable. "Natural Advantage" debuted in the 50th Anniversary issue of Amazing and does not seem to have appeared elsewhere after being selected by Wollheim and Saha.
"The Cabinet of Oliver Naylor" by Barrington J. Bayley (1976)
"The Cabinet of Oliver Naylor" is a long tedious thing, at times surreal and philosophical, with references to major thinkers and schools of philosophy, and at times feeling like an extended absurdist joke that is not funny, full of pop culture allusions and references. It posits a near future in which the United Kingdom embraces protectionism and closes off all trade with the world, and this somehow causes an explosion of technological and cultural growth, so that British scientists invent not only a device that can create anything you might want (don't they have this in Star Trek?) but also a space drive that can safely propel you at 186 times the speed of light for so modest a price that many private individuals own one-man intergalactic space vessels.
Our hero, the Naylor of the title, is an inventor and philosopher who has one of these intergalactic spacecraft and who is travelling between the galaxies at random to get the solitude he needs for his next big project. His last big project was inventing a TV that constantly produces original movies, mostly Elizabethan dramas and noirish thrillers; these dramas are so well-realized that you can interact with them, talk to the characters about their "worlds." Naylor picks up a passenger (there are so many people crisscrossing the universe in these space ships that some people live a life of intergalactic hitchhiking) who is looking for an artist. When they catch up to the artist's space ship it turns out the passenger is a space cop and he arrests the artist.
Or tries to. The artist is something of a mad scientist--he has an arsenal of powerful devices which he has acquired from some nearby aliens. The story briefly comes to life as the artist and the cop confront each other, and as we learn about the artist and his "common-law wife," a woman he is charged with kidnapping, whom he abuses verbally and physically, though there are hints she is a willing participant in a sado-masochistic relationship. (The shocking treatment of the woman in this story, by all the characters and by the author, may well enrage feminists. These disturbing scenes were like an oasis of feeling in the vast lifeless desert of this boring story.) The artist may also have the key to clearing away the obstacles to the completion of Naylor's current project.
Alas, it is not to be. The artist outwits the cop and Naylor, killing the lawman and sending Naylor's ship, with Naylor in it, into a "matterless" area of space from which he cannot return. In complicated ways that are described at length in the story, being in this sea of matterlessness is going to cause Naylor to lose his identity and consciousness. (Don't worry that the artist is getting away scot-free--it is strongly implied his ship is soon going to explode.)
This is one of those stories that had me counting every page the way I'd count every minute at the office or count every mile on a cross country trip. I liked the sex and violence section with the artist, but that is like a quarter of the page count; the remainder of the text has no human feeling and no tension, all that exposition, philosophical discussion, and homage to Hollywood detective films making my eyes glaze over. Gotta give this one a thumbs down.
"The Cabinet of Oliver Naylor" made its debut in New Worlds Ten, and would be included in the Bayley collection The Knights of the Limits.
"I See You" by Damon Knight (1976)
I remembered this story the instant I started it; this is a memorable and powerful story whose title, but not its content, I had forgotten. A scientist invents a device, a viewer, which can display any point in the universe at any previous time,; the device is affordable and he distributes it widely. Knight discusses the technical issues of the device and relates the devious way it is initially distributed, but more importantly he considers what life would be like in a society in which there is no privacy, no secrets, no mysteries.
One can quibble with some of Knight's decisions (he indulges JFK conspiracy theories, and the Mary Celeste section is too long) but this is a classic of hard science fiction and social science fiction: how would some new piece of technology revolutionize our lives? It has sense of wonder in abundance: anybody reading it can imagine how he would use the viewer to indulge his interests, say, study military tactics in the Crusades or watch every single performance of the Beatles in Germany or become intimately familiar with the painting techniques of Raphael and Michelangelo or whatever, and how having zero privacy and zero ignorance might wreak psychological and social harm. Very good--this is a great example of a science fiction story that buttresses the argument that SF is a "literature of ideas" distinct from other genres.
"I See You" debuted with some fanfare in F&SF and has been reprinted many times.
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Taken as a whole, a decent crop of stories. Even the one I thought was a drag was ambitious and the product of deep thought and hard work. A good anthology.
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| Hardcover edition cover (Corben seems to be illustrating the Del Rey selection) and back of my paperback copy |
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