249 pages
Published 1966
Read May 19
Rating: 1.5 out of 5
The editors of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, until recently, made a regular habit out of anthologizing the “best” stories from the magazine. This culminated in two volumes of The Very Best of Fantasy & Science Fiction (1, 2), both of them excellent reads. But the anthology market is different now, and I guess no one is clamoring for a current best-of-F&SF series. Which is a shame, because the issues from the Sheree Renée Thomas era are the best issues of the magazine’s history, consistently.
In decades past, though? The editors of F&SF were happy to crank out a new best-of anthology every year or two, and evidently the market was able to support this. It’s unfortunate how sci-fi and fantasy today don’t have the monetary support they did in the 20th century, back when 98% of it was garbage. Where’s that support now that the genres are the best they’ve ever been?
I got this volume from a used bookstore. It’s an ex-library copy from Randleman, North Carolina. It’s falling apart and moderately stained. The pages smell of dust and a sun-warmed attic. It isn’t the first in its series, I doubt it’s anything special — it’s merely the one I have.
This volume anthologizes stories from 1965, the tail end of the Avram Davidson era and the beginning of the Edward L. Ferman era.
“The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” by Roger Zelazny. Short sci-fi of the 1960s, in my limited experience, often has this characteristic style: half tryhard manly cynicism, half impenetrable technobabble that may or may not get explained later. A sample:
“Carl,” he finally observed, poker playing, “they’re shaping Tensquare.”I could have hit him. I might have refilled his glass with sulfuric acid and looked on with glee as his lips blackened and cracked. Instead, I grunted a noncommittal.
That’s the flavor of the whole piece. It’s a man-vs-nature-in-space affair, a Venusian Hemingway pastiche in which our narrator Carl has an emasculated score to settle with leviathan. Carl is a “baitman” hired by Miss Luharich, a spoiled rich cosmetics queen, to help her fish for “Ichthyform Leviosaurus Levianthus,” a gargantuan sea beastie that has never been landed by any of the solar system’s finest sportsmen, Carl included. Any hope that this novelette might live up to its exquisite title is dashed when Carl, unhappy with his hireling position in the hierarchy, snarks that Miss Luharich “wasn’t blonde” when he knew her years ago. Because she’s also his “neo-ex,” you see. It’s that kind of story.
Carl helpfully underlines the point for us: “Fish are a very ancient masculinity symbol, you know.” And again: “I stood and looked down at her, because that usually makes me feel superior to women.” Pretty sure that was meant with humorous self-deprecation from the narrator, but still, we’re just laying it all out here, aren’t we? Hemingway did this with more subtlety. If you embrace the testosterone-addled pulp of it all, I could see giving this a C
“Love Letter from Mars” by John Ciardi. Mostly forgettable Old Mars poem with one quite lovely phrase: “This gravity / works through me.”
“Rake” by Ron Goulart. Begins in media res with a chaotic bar fight, then immediately doubles back to lay out how our hero, Ben Jolson of the Chameleon Corps, arrived at Taragon University. Jolson has been sent on assignment from the interplanetary powers-that-be on Barnum to meet and impersonate a ne’er-do-well son of an ambassador, blah blah blah. Giant, intelligent bacteria that march and drill in formation somehow get involved. “I’m against spies,” our shapeshifting spy protagonist proclaims, in the midst of his spy work. And get this: when the story finally loops back around to the opening scene, the two scenes don’t even match! “Rake” is a disconnected sequence of cartoon-logic hijinks that are likely meant to be funny, but none of it succeeds. If Zelazny’s piece above had flavor, this one is a chewed up wad of Austin Powers-flavored gum. It’s almost impressively bad. No surprise this guy went on to ghost-write TekWar. F
“The History of Doctor Frost” by Roderic C. Hodgins. Dr. Frost, present-day mathematician and physicist, is visited in the night by Azuriel, a devil who desires to nurture Dr. Frost’s intellect in exchange for devouring the information in the mathematician’s mind once his natural lifespan has ended. It could have been an interesting spin on the standard Faustian theme. Some of its social commentary is solid — working in nuclear physics because that’s where the military funds are is rather like selling your soul, is it not? — but much of the rest hasn’t aged so well, or just isn’t that stimulating. The level of insight is that of an edgelord libertarian in freshman philosophy: the priest, the psychologist, and the infatuated woman all want the same thing Azuriel wants from our brilliant lone wolf Dr. Frost, but at least the devil is honest about it. The misogyny, in particular, soured me on this one. D
“Four Ghosts in Hamlet” by Fritz Leiber. A ghost (maybe) afflicts a touring company of Shakespearean actors; 1960s misogyny (definitely) afflicts a Fritz Leiber story. This one is altogether too long, rambling along for ages while it establishes the company and their little personalities (which never amount to anything like full characters) before it gets close to anything interesting. And in the end it tries to pull the “maybe it all had a mundane explanation” trick, at least to some degree. C-
“Treat” by Walter H. Kerr. Perfectly functional little poem about those who don’t need to wear masks on Halloween, probably more suited to children’s poetry than anything else. Nothing special.
“Keep Them Happy” by Robert Rohrer. Ugh. Sixties concepts of “what a woman really wants” were fucking disgusting, weren’t they? Couple that with a regressive satire about keeping prisoners “happy” for humanitarian(?) reasons and you get this dreck. Abysmal. F
“A Murkle for Jesse” by Gary Jennings. “Jet age” leprechaun fantasy in which a young boy befriends one of the wee folk, who crashed in his corner of Vermont on a wayward airliner. Overall it has potential. In places it could be a pleasant throwback to the Big Apple urban fantasy of Unknown in the 1930s (what little I’ve read of that). But the weird cishet sex and gender norms of the era make for awkward reading, as the 400 year old fae lass gets, erm, proprietary toward our 7 year old protagonist, sizing Jesse up as a future husband and getting jealous of his concern over a girl missing from the crash site. Nonetheless, this is the best story so far (or at least it hasn’t aged as badly as the others have). “I’ve found an owl who knows the way to New York City” might be one of the best lines in fantasy from the entire decade; the leprechaun is the least misogynistic portrayal of a woman in this collection so far. Which isn’t saying much, but still. B-
“Eyes Do More Than See” by Isaac Asimov. Absolutely killer opening line: “After hundreds of billions of years, he suddenly thought of himself as Ames.” I haven’t read much Asimov — a novel he coauthored, a collection of his short stories I read in my teens. My general sense is that his reputation rests on two strengths: his skill as a science communicator, and his craft with short story structure. It certainly isn’t in characterization. Ames and Brock, energy-wave beings a trillion years old, sound just like two estranged lovers in a suburban melodrama. Even a trillion years as an energy being aren’t enough to separate the once-woman Brock from an emotional convulsion once she is reminded that she is a woman, a woman who once knew love. It’s a bleakly misogynistic perspective, alas, and one that sours this tidy little trifle for me. D-
“The House the Blakeneys Built” by Avram Davidson. Six hundred years after a handful of polygamist fugitives survived a spaceship crash, their severely inbred descendants play the role of cultish inbred hicks when they encounter a new handful of survivors. Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets space opera. The result is grotesque and feels somewhat unsavory, but aside from the thinness of its characters, it works well as a story. C+
“The Eight Billion” by Richard Wilson. Science fiction was long used to pushed the narrative of “overpopulation.” It’s a staple plot in ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s sci-fi, and probably later. Overpopulation is such an entrenched narrative, thanks in large part to sci-fi, that it wasn’t until maybe a decade ago that I stopped taking it for granted. The real world problem, of course, is not there are too many people. The problem is the rich, the billionaires and the investor class, using up more resources than the rest of humanity put together. All that makes it extra difficult to appreciate this piece, which takes the overpopulation of Manhattan to absurd conclusions. It’s kind of an exercise in silliness all on its own, with thousands of courtiers crowded cheek to jowl around the King of New York, the lot of them fed via sprinkler system. Things don’t go as planned when the King invites the public to accompany him to the great dig downtown, the one meant to open up new lands underground for the population to enjoy. D+
“Something Else” by Robert J. Tilley. This one was a pleasant surprise. Despite its antique, fully 1960s prose, the general plot — Dr. Williams, a cultural historian specializing in old jazz music, is the sole survivor of a spaceship crash on a wild planet, but at least he has access to his cherished records — feels startlingly fresh, something I could easily imagine coming out of the ’80s. The giant, lemon-scented cerise alien that responds to the impromptu Duke Ellington broadcast is, of course, purestrain ’60s, bringing an inevitable sort of “Purple People Eater” vibe to the piece. But it’s a delightful story regardless. B-
“Aunt Millicent at the Races” by Len Guttridge. Dear dowdy Aunt Millicent turns into a horse thanks to an encounter with fairy fruit, and greedy Father puts her in the races. This could have been a charming domestic fantasy with a touch of humor, but of course, this being the 1960s, there's a distasteful undertone of "women are basically just livestock anyway," which is hard to ignore. C-
“Sea Bright” by Hal R. Moore. Honestly, for the time period, this one is pretty solid, a good subtle contemporary horror-adjacent fantasy. Eleven year old Kellie instinctively yanks away an exotic shell her friend found on the beach. She can't explain why, only stick stubbornly to her story that she had to do it, and can't say anything more. A local creep comes along while Kellie attempts to throw the shell back into the ocean, and vaguely eldritch things happen when the creep succeeds in putting it to his ear. B-
“From Two Universes…” by Doris Pitkin Buck. For its time this was probably a nifty little poem. I enjoyed it! It's charming! But nowadays you have to do more with a poem than merely couple the concepts of Univacs and unicorns, which makes this one, like “Treat” above, feel a tad unsophisticated to modern sensibilities.
“Hog-Belly Honey” by R. A. Lafferty. Another wacky number in which a smug prick of a tech bro (or the 1960s equivalent of a tech bro) talks fast and slaps shoulders and helps invent a philosophical machine, a "nullifier" which can make its own moral and ethical decisions and, well, nullify "junk" out of existence. This story is... here, I guess? It exists on the paper, certainly. It didn't do anything for me. D+
“No Different Flesh” by Zenna Henderson. A quietly domestic tale of alien encounter, in which grieving parents find a young child fluttering through the trees. The child is, of course, not quite what she seems. I dislike the trope of "grieving mother finds replacement baby to care for," and of course the standard 1960s cishet gender norms are at play, as well as some cloying religious overtones, as well as a random parenthetical bit of eugenics from a visiting doctor. But once you get past all that, this might be the best story here. Naturally it's the only story here by a woman. Maybe I'll be a bit generous and give it a full-fledged B
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