1971 stories by Michael Coney, Poul Anderson, & Christopher Priest

Let's continue reading The 1972 Annual World's Best SF, the work of DAW Books and its founder, Hugo- and Nebula-winner Donald A. Wollheim.  Are these really three of the best science fiction stories of 1971?

"The Sharks of Pentreath" by Michael G. Coney (1971)

MPorcius Fiction Log superfans will be well aware that I recently aquired a copy of Charles Platt's 1980 book Dreammakers, a collection of what you might call "New Journalism" interviews of SF authors.  This book is a treasure trove for the reader of 20th century SF.  One of the interviewees is Hank Stine, who currently goes by the name Jean Marie Stine and identifies as a woman.  Stine's interview is fun in part because he was not afraid to take a hatchet to many individuals, from Dean Koontz and Piers Anthony to Lin Carter and John Varley, as well as wide swathes of the American population, from Catholics to the middle class to those who think science can solve our problems.  Stine picks out Michael Coney for particular criticism when he suggests that too many SF novels of the 1970s are based on outlandish, "unworkable" premises; he uses Coney's Friends Come in Boxes as an example.

Stine's opinion does not appear to be a consensus one: Theodore Sturgeon, Brian Aldiss, tarbandu and Joachim Boaz all seem to have a soft spot for Coney--Joachim praises Friends Come in Boxes specifically.  I read some Coney stories myself in the period before I started this blog, and while I have to admit I don't remember them at all well, my notes suggest I thought them acceptable.  Stine's interview has got me curious not only about Stine herself, but about Coney, so I'm eager to see what's up with "The Sharks of Pentreath."

Like the novel Friends Come in Boxes (which I myself have not read),"The Sharks of Pentreath" is about a drastic societal response to the problem of overpopulation. Reminding me a little of Philip Jose Farmer's novel Dayworld and the story upon which it was based, 1971's "The Sliced-Crosswise Only-On-Tuesday World," in Coney's story the human race has been split into three groups ("rotations" or "shifts.")  Every two years out of three, people are confined to steel cabinets and survive on an IV drip; this period is called "Stilllife."  During Stilllife people are conscious, and control robots called "remoters."  Through the remoters people act as tourists, travelling as widely across the world as their budgets allow.  During their "Fulllife" periods people work at jobs, accumulating the money they will spend on trips during their next Stilllife period.

Pentreath is an English seaside town which survives on the tourist trade.  Our main characters are a married couple; the husband, our narrator, is one of the "sharks" of the title, one of the not-quite-scrupulous small businessmen who take advantage of the tourists.  (His wife acts as a foil, being generous and kind, "putting people before profits" as the pinkos propose.)  Over the course of the story we learn the background of this future world, and get to know the protagonist, who is kind of a jerk, and the other "sharks."  An encounter with an elderly couple (who are visiting via remoters) works a change in our callous and misanthropic narrator; we have reason to believe that in the period after the story he will turn over a new leaf and endeavour to have a warmer and more human relationship with his wife and with his community.

Coney's style is good, and the physical settings and all the characters are believable, so I enjoyed the story.  "The Sharks of Pentreath" is certainly vulnerable to the charge Stine lays against Friends Come in Boxes, that its premise is unrealistic--I don't think people in a free society (and the England in the story still has freedom of association and private property and all that) would accept the system it describes--but this didn't diminish the pleasure I derived from reading it.

Another possible criticism is that the science fiction element of the story is superfluous--this is a story about how the example set by another couple opens a man's eyes to how to better interact with his own wife and community, it is a conventional piece of fiction about "the human heart" with an unnecessary SF element just laid on top of it.  Again, while a valid criticism, this "problem" didn't stop me from enjoying the story.  

"A Little Knowledge" by Poul Anderson (1971)

I compared an earlier story from The 1972 Annual World's Best SF, Stephen Tall's "The Bear with the Knot on His Tail," to a weak version of a Poul Anderson tale.  Well, here's the real deal!  Our buddy Poul starts us off with a two-page astronomy lecture.  (If you don't already know what Roche's Limit is, Anderon provides you incentive to look it up on google.)  You see, there's this big planet, which under ordinary circumstances would be an uninhabitable "subjovian," but it's got this oversized moon in a lopsided orbit, see, that has been scooping away at the atmosphere for millennia....
    
This is a fun, entertaining story that comfortably fits in the classic SF template of hard science, engineering, space ships, blasters and aliens embedded in an adventure plot.  And if you are wondering what interstellar trade might be like (I know with the election going the way it is going some of you businesspeople out there are scrambling for a way to get off the planet), "A Little Knowledge," like Larry Niven's "The Fourth Profession" in this same volume, presents some ideas.

Three human career criminals hijack a space ship piloted by a single small alien, a member of a sophisticated, artistic, and ambitious culture.  (I thought Anderson had perhaps based this alien society, with its elaborate courtesy and embrace of Terra's high technology, on Japan.)  The pirates have a scheme to get rich using the ship as the nucleus of a space navy they will build among belligerent aliens who are at a pre-hyper drive technological level.  The short alien triumphs over the pirates and spares galactic civilization a border war through his superior knowledge of the hard sciences and engineering.

"A Little Knowledge" first appeared in Analog, and is set in the period of Anderson's Polesotechnic League--Nicholas Van Rijn, whom we have read about several times during the course of this blog's life, even gets a mention!

Just the right length, density and tone--I liked it.

"Real-Time World" by Christopher Priest (1971)

I liked Priest's Inverted World (check out tarbandu and couchtomoon's laudatory reviews of that BSFA-winning novel), but the ending disappointed me, partly because I couldn't understand the science behind it, partly because it undermined the exciting setting the first part of the book had so evocatively described.  (Sometimes I regret finding out what the man behind the curtain is up to.)

"Real-Time World," which first boggled the mind in New Writings in SF19, is reminiscent of Inverted World in a number of ways--people in an enclosed structure discover they have been deceived about the nature of the outside world, and that their perceptions are perhaps not to be trusted.  There is also some science which I couldn't quite wrap my brain around.

The setting is what the narrator calls an "observatory."  He tells us that mankind has developed a time machine (hooray!) but it can only send you back in time a nanosecond (awwww....)  But don't be discouraged--if you are a nanosecond back in time you are invisible to everybody else!  This invisibility can negate the observer effect (sometimes colloquially called Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle) and so one of these time machines, this very observatory, was deployed on an alien planet where a bunch of scientists can observe the life and environment there surreptitiously.

But studying the alien world isn't the only research going on in the observatory!  The researchers themselves are the subject of an experiment!  "Real-Time World" is, in part, about "the news."  In an effort to figure out how much "the news" affects a person's life, the people running the experiment only dole out a small, carefully selected, portion of the news from Earth to the observatory staff.  (There is a lot of exciting news from Earth because of all the Cold War tensions, food shortages, pollution, race riots, and other 1970s obsessions going on.)  Of the observatory staff, only our narrator is in on the experiment, and he carefully records the effects of the lack of news on the scientists.  In a way I didn't understand, the change in their diet of news gave the scientists the ability to predict the future.  As the story draws to a close, they reveal their most shocking prediction: that a catastrophic war between East and West has erupted on the Earth's surface!

The scientists have also realized what the narrator already knows, that the observatory is not on an alien planet at all!  The researchers were hypnotized into believing this lie, a deception bolstered by prerecorded films played on their viewscreens that simulate views of the fictional alien planet.  But there is something the narrator and the eggheads disagree about.  The narrator believes the observatory is on Earth's moon. The boffins are sure they are in fact on Earth.  Who has been conditioned to believe an illusion, and who recognizes the truth?  The stakes in this dispute are high because the scientists insist on opening the airlock and going outside!  They have no space suits, so if the airlock opens onto the surface of the moon they will be killed at once! As the story ends, the narrator sits safely in his office, and we can't be sure whether the scientists are dead on the lunar surface or exploring an Earth ravaged by atomic war.  In fact, we can't be sure anything in the story was true and not simply an illusion inflicted on our narrator.

I wanted to like this story because I liked the claustrophobic setting described in the first few pages (for example, the observatory is apparently beset by dangerous cracks that could let in the outside vacuum) and that the narrator was the sole non-scientist among a group of scientists, and thought of himself as the only sane man among a multitude of insane people.  I've often found myself the only grad school drop-out among college professors, the only Easterner among MidWesterners, the only white person among nonwhites, the only American among foreigners, and so forth, and identify with this kind of situation (in our modern world of diversity, nonconformity and cheap travel I think many people have these kinds of experiences.)  But Priest doesn't do much with these themes, instead moving on to many other ideas (I guess those cracks were just an illusion seen only by the narrator.)

These stories which end with you doubting every single thing that happened in the story make important philosophical points (our senses are not to be trusted, free will is a myth, maybe you should have paid more attention to the lectures on Descartes and Hume back in Philosophy 101) but are not necessarily fun to read.  In our last episode I gave the "doubt everything" story by Joanna Russ in The 1972 Annual World's Best SF, "Gleepsite," a sort of guarded passing grade, but her story was short and tight, and made me furrow my brow as I tried to figure out the puzzle.  In comparison, "Real-Time World" seems long and unfocused, full of extraneous matter, and made me roll my eyes; I think I have to give this one a marginal thumbs down.

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Taken as a group, not bad; I enjoyed the human-centric Coney and the meat and potatoes hard SF Anderson, and I am sure lots of people are keen on the Priest.

In our next installment, three more pieces from The 1972 Annual World's Best SF: we've got one-of-a-kind scribe R. A. Lafferty, movie-tie-in machine Alan Dean Foster, and Leonard Tushnet, about whom I know nothing.

1971 stories by Larry Niven, Joanna Russ and Stephen Tall

I recently purchased a coffee-stained copy of the hardcover edition of Donald Wollheim's The 1972 Annual World's Best SF.  This Book Club Edition has a Frazetta cover with a weird color scheme that celebrates the beauty of the human body, exudes confidence, and includes a wacky robot in the background.  Let's check out some stories first published in the year of my birth!

"The Fourth Profession" by Larry Niven (1971)

This story first appeared in Quark/4, which I also purchased recently. Wollheim, in his intro to "The Fourth Profession," calls Quark "probably the farthest out of the 'New Wave' original collections."

As Wollheim hints, "The Fourth Profession" isn't really very New Wavey.  It is a very good traditional SF story, with aliens, science, a guy developing super mental powers, and a "humanity is on the brink of exploring the stars" sense of wonder ending.  I really enjoyed it.  Niven writes it in an economical style, without any extraneous distractions, but still manages to include clues and foreshadowing and interesting astronomy, chemistry, psychology, and religion, as well as speculation on how interstellar merchants might behave.

"The Fourth Profession" has a sort of detective story structure, beginning in medias res, the morning after a bartender, our first person narrator, served an alien at his bar. Through flashbacks and an interview of the bartender conducted by a Secret Service agent curious about the extraterrestrial, we gradually learn what happened last night at the bar.  The aliens are purveyors of pills that alter the brain chemistry of those who eat them, giving them memories--by eating the correct pill you can, almost instantly, become an expert in a complicated topic like a foreign language or the history of a civilization, or learn a complex skill, like how to pilot a spaceship or how to build a fusion reactor.  The pills can also alter your personality.  The alien fed the narrator and the bar's waitress some pills, and the three main characters, bartender, waitress and government agent, scramble to figure out what the pills did to them and what the alien's purpose in giving them out was.  They begin to suspect the aliens are absolutely merciless (considering civilizations like our own that have not achieved interstellar flight to be no better than animals) and that the human race is in grave danger!  In the final part of the story the bar is again visited by an alien, and our narrator uses his wits and the abilities he has gained from those earlier pills to save the day and set the human race on the course to an heroic future.  

The story I read before this one shook my faith in the written word, as I chronicled in my last blog post.  But Larry Niven has restored that faith!  "The Fourth Profession" is a very entertaining, well-structured and well-executed tale--Wollheim (and Samuel Delany and Marilyn Hacker, editors of Quark) were wise to publish it!  

"Gleepsite" by Joanna Russ (1971)

I've spent way too much time (in what the kids call "meatspace") with leftist college professors to relish reading fiction by one.  But when I took a chance on Joanna Russ's Hugo-winning "Souls," I found it was actually a pretty good story!  Let's see if lightning strikes twice.  "Gleepsite" first appeared in Orbit 9, and in his intro Wollheim suggests we read it multiple times.

This five-page story is a little opaque, but let's try to figure it out.  (I did read it twice!)

The setting: a future Earth in which the air is a deadly acid poison, and people now live in buildings retrofitted to be airtight.  Ninety-seven percent of the population is female because the authorities deemed men to be "inefficient."

The characters: Two middle-aged women, twins, who work in a travel office on the 31st floor of a skyscraper, and our narrator, some kind of shape-shifting creature who can breathe the poison air.

The plot:  Our narrator, at night when few people are in the skyscraper, accosts the twins and tries to sell them a device.  This device, consisting of a ring and a necklace, allows you to experience preprogrammed daydreams and even (I think) transmit your own daydreams to others; in practice the device seems to conjure up vivid and realistic illusions.  The narrator convinces the women to purchase the device, and then opens an airtight window and, sprouting bat wings, flies out into the deadly atmosphere.

"Gleepsite" is all about illusion and deception and how forms and identities are malleable and names are changeable, are arbitrary.  (As Wollheim indicates in his intro to the piece, there is no clue what "gleepsite" means.)  The narrator creates illusions and peddles an illusion-generating device, deceives and manipulates her customers, and starts calling them by names that are not their own, but which she thinks appropriate.  Thanks to the narrator, the twins will soon be creating illusions of their own and themselves acting deceptively (breaking the law in their use of the device.)

The narrator seems to have a lot in common with traditional depictions of the Devil: her bat wings, her shape-shifting nature, her seductive and dishonest bargaining, the way she corrupts the twins, and the use of the word "hell" to describe the post-apocalyptic Earth.  If we accept the fire and brimstone apocalypse at face value, it certainly makes sense for the Devil to be there, right?

But in a story about illusion, deception, and daydreams, does it make sense to accept the setting (or anything?) at face value?  Especially when we remember that one of Russ's most famous stories, "The Zanzibar Cat," is a nonsensical story in which the story itself is a fabrication of one of its characters?  I am boldly going to suggest that the setting and plot of "Gleepsite" are the daydream of a person who might find a world with almost no men congenial.  Russ herself may be such a person-- consider that (Wikipedia is telling me) she was a lesbian and anti-pornography activist, and that in "Souls" she portrays men as creeps and heterosexual sex as something disgusting. The text of "Gleepsite" itself paints men in a pretty negative light, not only suggesting they are "inefficient" but, by referring to how women in pre-apocalyptic days would dance on tables for the pleasure of male viewers and engage in prostitution, portraying the typical man as an exploiter of women.  A clue that suggests to me that the setting is not "real" but a fictional construct conceived by the narrator for her own gratification is that parts of it read like an incomplete draft of a story, with dates and minor characters' names yet to be filled in ("In the year blank-blank, when the great neurosurgical genius, Blank, working with Blank and Blank, discovered in the human forebrain....")

"Gleepsite," appears to be, in whole or in part, an insoluble puzzle.  It is hard for me to recommend it based on conventional criteria; I can't tell you it is fun or entertaining or beautiful or anything like that.  But as an unusual, mysterious, dense and thought-provoking piece, I think reading it has been a worthwhile experience.

"The Bear With the Knot on His Tail" by Stephen Tall (1971)

I didn't recognize Tall's name; isfdb indicates he published something like 20 stories and a single novel. ("Stephen Tall" was the pen name of biology professor Compton Crook.) "The Bear With the Knot on His Tail" is one of Tall's series of stories about the exploration ship Stardust.  One collection of Stardust tales, The Stardust Voyages, has the phrase "In the great tradition of Star Trek" emblazoned on its cover.  Even though I had never heard of its author, "The Bear With the Knot on His Tail" was a cover story for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and this wasn't the only time Tall's name would appear on the cover of a magazine like F&SF or Worlds of If.  I guess editors considered him a draw.

I wanted to like this traditional first contact story, and the plot is fine, but I found the story poorly structured.  There are too many boring scenes of people sitting around having boring conversations, and too much time is spent introducing these characters and setting the scene.  The beginning feels like the start of a novel.  It makes sense to spend a dozen pages introducing us to characters and setting in a full-length novel, but this story is less than forty pages, so those 12 pages feel like too big of an investment, especially since there is really no payoff--the characters' personalities don't have any real impact on the plot and they don't change over the course of the story.

Speaking of personality, the characters feel a little silly, too flat, too stock, too obvious.  There's the sophisticated English gentleman who has impeccable taste in clothes and always keeps a stiff upper lip; the gruff and cynical guy who lost a leg on an earlier mission; the sexy wife of the narrator who is a talented musician as well as a scientist; and the eccentric artist who has a "sixth sense" which provides her with uncanny insights.  The Stardust is staffed with the best scientists in the galaxy, and we hear again and again how each member of the crew is the best in his or her field--every character in this story is a genius!

The plot: Stardust is in orbit near Luna, listening to a mysterious and untraceable transmission of alien music.  None of the ship's technology can figure out where the transmission is coming from, but the crazy painter has an intuition that she expresses in her latest painting, a canvas depicting the constellations.  The evocative music is, she senses, coming from the direction of Ursa Major's tail, so thither flies the Stardust. The transmission turns out to be the swan song, dirge and S.O.S. of an alien civilization whose sun is about to go nova--the Stardust arrives just 33 hours before this intelligent species is about to be exterminated!  The narrator's sexy wife communicates with the aliens via the universal language of music (she is a guitarist) and the Stardust takes aboard the recorded history and culture of the doomed aliens, and a box full of tiny larval aliens, to be planted on a suitable planet so this noble race will not truly expire, but be reborn on a new world.

This story isn't exactly bad, but it stretches 15 or 20 ages of material to double that length--there are no villains or challenges for the geniuses to use their genius to overcome, so we end up with an  idea/mood story whose idea/mood is "how would you act if your civilization was doomed?" with lots of superfluous character descriptions appended to it.  (This story would work at least as well if the Stardust was a one-man rocket.)  Maybe the story works better as part of a body of linked stories?  I sure hope every single Stardust story doesn't spend the amount of time introducing the characters and the ship that this one does!

"The Bear With the Knot on His Tail" reminded me a little of something Heinlein or Anderson might do (supercompetent people, themes of nobility in the face of adversity, a sense of the tragic, a "liberated" attitude about sex) but lacks any style or intellectual or ideological commitment: Heinlein and Anderson usually use a story to speculate about the future, give you advice on how to run your life, and/or express their beliefs about society, economy, religion, or the government.  Tall's story doesn't do anything like that.

Acceptable, but I don't think it belongs in this book of "Best" stories alongside the well-crafted Niven or the challenging Russ.  Maybe Wollheim thought he needed a space ship story to balance the volume's more experimental content?

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None of these stories is actually bad, and the Niven is a gem, so we have a good start to The 1972 Annual World's Best SF.  Three more selections from the volume (by Michael Coney, Poul Anderson and Christopher Priest) in our next episode!