Best SF: 1968: B Shaw, D I Masson, & J D MacDonald

I guess I've had my copy of Best SF:1968, edited by Harry Harrison of Stainless Steel Rat fame with some help from Brian Aldiss, for years now; today I finally get around to reading some of it.  Mine is the US paperback edition of an anthology first printed over on the sceptered isle as The Year's Best Science Fiction, No. 2 and reprinted several times over the years under various titles and with slightly differing contents--my edition includes a story by Aldiss but in some other editions a story by Theodore Sturgeon takes its place.  

Obviously I love the Paul Lehr cover on the American editions-- the color, the little human figures, the crags, the domed ship or building sheltering structures that echo the crags, the little dart-like craft, the mist obscured planet, and the monstrous eyes.  Awesome.  Then we have Harry Harrison's intro, in which he trumpets the success of SF in getting mainstream and academic attention and minimizes the drama surrounding the New Wave, arguing that there "there is no new wave, save in the eye of the beholder"; after all, there have always been experimental SF authors and there have always been writers whose prose is "dense, impressionistic, and bad."  Frustratingly, Harrison doesn't back up his assertions with a lists of SF writers active before and after the heralding of the New Wave who meet the criteria of "experimental," "dense," "impressionistic" and "bad," and goes on to say stuff like "One of the foremost writers in the 'new wave' admitted that my own writing fits into both [new wave and old wave] camps" without telling us who this "foremost" writer is.  I find these kinds of blind items annoying.      

Then come the stories.  Today we'll deal with the contributions by Bob Shaw, whom we have read several things by and whom I like, David I. Masson, with whom I am not at all familiar, and detective writer John D. MacDonald, whose work I think we have encountered five or six times.

 "Appointment on Prila" by Bob Shaw (1968)

When we read Shaw's "A Full Member of the Club" in 2020 and his "The Weapons of Isher II" in 2018, I compared them to the work of beloved Canadian madman A. E. van Vogt, and in his intro to it here in Best SF: 1958, Harrison compares "Appointment on Prila" to the output of good ol' Van.  The comparison is appropriate--as in many of the stories that ended up serving as raw material for Voyage of the Space Beagle and The War Against the Rull, in "Appointment on Prila" humans are confronted by an alien monster with special powers and have to figure out how to survive the encounter.

First we meet the alien monster, witnessing its tremendous abilities and getting a sense it is a callous exploiter of our kind.  Then we meet the humans, who are exploring the inhospitable world on which the monster has been marooned by a third group of enigmatic aliens who sought to exile the dangerous creature.  The human ship has a complement of six ground vehicles; these have sallied forth to map the planet.  But when the mapping is done, it is seven vehicles that approach the mother ship--one is the shape-shifting monster!  Can the Terrans puzzle out which machine is an enemy in disguise before it devours them?

A fun classic-style science fiction tale full of astronomy, high technology and cool aliens that is all about how awesome science, logic and explorers are, has a twist ending, and is well-written and well-structured.  Thumbs up for "Appointment on Prila."   

Having debuted in Analog, "Appointment on Prila" reappeared in two 1969 anthologies by Harrison, this Best of book and Worlds of Wonder.  When our friends in the Netherlands got around to translating Best SF:1968 in 1979 they titled the anthology after this Shaw story.  "Appointment on Prila" seems to be the first in a series of stories about the starship crew it depicts; maybe I should check them all out.  On the other hand, it kind of looks like the stories all served as the source material for a 1979 fix-up novel, Ship of Strangers, so maybe I should read that.

"Lost Ground" by David I. Masson 

In his intro to "Lost Ground," Harrison really talks up Masson, saying, among other things, that "overenthusiasm in the past has discovered too many bright lights of authors--who become darkened cinders after emitting only a handful of protons.  This will not be true of Masson."  isfdb lists ten short stories by Masson, only four of them appearing after "Lost Ground," so maybe Harrison got over his skis a little here.    

It is the surreal future.  The air is full of particles that manipulate human emotion; these particles are pushed around by natural weather patterns, to the point that the feelings and behavior of people can be predicted like the weather, with radio newscasters saying stuff like 

"A system of depressions and associated troughs will follow one another in quick succession over Scotland and the north....Insecure, rather sad feeling today and tomorrow, followed by short-lived griefs, some heavy, some stormy, with cheerful intervals.  By midweek griefs will be dying out...."

"Lost Ground" is full of sentences like "...a squall of rage and grief burst upon him" and "The chilliness was becoming palpable hostility...."  Somewhat muddying the picture of emotion-determining particles behaving like the weather, later in the story we learn that certain areas generate certain emotions in people and that each time of year also has a characteristic effect on people's psychological state.  Maybe this is a satire of how little the "experts" really know about both the weather and human psychology?

People in the third world are at the mercy of this "mood-weather," and it retards their development, while in the developed world (this story is set in England, which when the story was written was still considered developed, ha ha ha please don't take offense at my little joke) people mitigate the effects of the mood-weather by using air purifiers and air conditioners inside and by taking drugs--everybody keeps close at hand a battery of pills and aerosol sprays to stabilize and improve their moods and employ them at the drop of a hat.  Try wrapping your head around a society in which everybody is constantly on drugs, dear reader! 

This crazy world is dramatized for us through the experiences of a middle-class family whose head of household is a TV journalist.  An "unexpected pocket of terror in a dip in the road" causes a driver to crash, killing the journalist's son, and his wife loses her will to live and stops taking all the drugs everybody is on.  The journalist and his wife move to a rural area to get away from it all, leaving their surviving child, a little girl, with relatives.  There is a weird phenomena taking place near the little village where they are staying--the fields of an abandoned farm inexplicably seem to change, with hedges and walls and rocks appearing one day and disappearing the next; animals that venture onto the farm sometimes vanish.  The bereaved mother walks into the fields and disappears, and her husband becomes a member of the team investigating the phenomenon.  It turns out that, with bewildering inconsistency, some sections of the fields are moving forward in time and others backward, and people and animals that move from one section to another can cross the barrier of time and find themselves unable to return.

The journalist searches through time for his wife.  He winds up sixty years in the future, and is collected by scientists who are studying this region of time-chaos, which has been growing over the decades to encompass more and more of England, necessitating migrations of people out of its path.  The journalist is interrogated by future journalists.  He has a conversation with his daughter, who has grown up and become old without her parents.  Then he joins a team trying to map the region of time-distortion; the plot is resolved when the journalist finds himself in some Early Modern era in which the men wear lace and breeches and are religious, and learns that his wife got stuck in that period, became a respected and even beloved member of the community, and died of old age--this was foreshadowed earlier in the story, back in the 20th century, when he saw her old weathered headstone but didn't know it was hers because the inscription was partly worn away.    

"Lost Ground" feels long and slow.  Masson spends a lot of time explaining the story's two uncanny phenomena and providing examples of them in operation, so that the story feels repetitive and the phenomena become boring.  The characters are not compelling and you don't care what happens to them.  The two gimmicks and the plot are not bad in and of themselves, but the delivery is kind of flat and uninspiring.  Also, I'm not sure why the story has two gimmicks--the mood-weather gag doesn't affect the plot, which revolves around the time-travel gag, and both gimmicks make the same point, that the universe is inexplicable and we are at the mercy of outside forces and all that.  

We'll call it acceptable.

"Lost Ground" debuted in 1966 in an issue of New Worlds with a cover like something out of the credits sequence of a James Bond movie.  It was included in Masson's 1968 collection Caltrops of Time, which I guess is how Harrison justifies including it in a best of '68 book.  "Lost Ground" would go on to appear in European anthologies with some pretty cool spacey covers.

"The Annex" by John D. MacDonald (1968)

"The Annex" debuted in an issue of Playboy alongside stories by J. G. Ballard and Isaac Bashevis Singer, a bunch of film stills of a nude Julie Newmar, and an elaborate chart constructed by Len Deighton that tells you what to do, eat and buy in 21 European cities.  In his intro to the story, Harrison talks about how MacDonald is one of the best living American authors but the critics don't recognize it.  It kind of reads like Harrison being some sort of suck up, hoping the famous crime writer will rejoin the ranks of the SF community after a long absence or just say something nice about SF.  Sad.

"The Annex," like Masson's "Lost Ground," has surreal elements, and Harrison in his intro tells you the story is "Kafkaesque."  For example, a guy walks through a labyrinthine building, following a red pipe that vibrates in time with a big thumping machine somewhere in the building--I guess the machine is like a heart and the pipes are like veins or arteries, so that the building is like a body.   The protagonist has to navigate his way through the building to some upper floor room, I guess representing the brain, at the behest of inexplicable authorities. 

The guy meets a woman who acts in an inexplicable manner and complains about arbitrary authorities.  Then she guides him through the maze-like building.  MacDonald wastes our time describing the corridors and stairways, and reminds us this story was first printed in Playboy by describing the woman's ass and the guy's fantasies of feeling her up.  MacDonald fails to imbue these scenes with any kind of emotion or excitement--in real life being guided though a baffling series of corridors and stairways might be scary and studying the movements of a woman's ass might be sexually arousing, but MacDonald, I guess intentionally, to keep the story dreamlike and surreal, makes sure to not ascribe such emotions to his protagonist or to inspire such emotions in the reader.  I find this kind of surrealism that doesn't generate any emotion beyond "wow, this is surreal" to be a waste of time.

The pair gets to the door of the room the guy was assigned to perform some task within, but when the door is opened the room is not there, just a sheer drop, 40 or whatever floors down to the street.  The body the building represents is dying, even actually brain dead, we readers must assume.  The pair then retires to another room, still intact, and undress but do not, I guess, actually have sex.  

Finally comes the scene in which it is made clear this mission in a maze-like skyscraper was all the dream of a dying man and/or a metaphor for a doctor's failed attempt to heal a dying patient or something like that.  The doctor tells the loved one of the dying man that she can hold his hand as he dies and he will know she is there, even though the doctor knows the patient is already technically dead or dead by any practical measure.

A laborious and pretentious waste of time.  Maybe MacDonald really is a once-in-a-generation genius at writing about a guy in a boat unravelling a pyramid scheme or whatever the hell he usually writes about, but this pseudo-literary goop is not providing any evidence of that fact.  Thumbs down!

In 1976, "Annex" reared its ugly head in another anthology, The Late Great Future, and in 1978 appeared in the MacDonald SF collection Other Times, Other Worlds.

Nobody, no way, no how, is ever going to convince me that Beat or
Three of a Perfect Pair is half as good as Islands 

**********

The Masson and MacDonald stories are ambitious and you might call them "New Wave" what with their surrealism and pessimism but they are long and belabor their points and lack human feeling even though they are both about people's loved ones dying.  Shaw's story is a conventional old-fashioned science fiction story that is actually entertaining and easily the best of today's crop.  Score one for the old wave.

We'll probably read more stories from Best SF: 1968 in the near future.  Feel free to tune in for more of my bitter musings about the state of the world.