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)

Clap on your pith helmet!  Load your revolver!  Polish your binoculars, pack your mosquito net and fill your canteen!  Today we're exploring new territory!  Before us lie stories from New Worlds magazine, selected by editor Michael Moorcock as among that flagship of the New Wave's best, all by writers whose work I have never before read.  Let's go!

("The Countenance," "The Singular Quest of Martin Borg," and "The Transfinite Choice" I read in my copy of Berkley X1676, The Best SF Stories from New Worlds #2.  "The Ship of Disaster" I read in my copy of Berkley S1943, Best SF Stories from New Worlds 4.)

"The Countenance" by Barrington J. Bayley (as by P. F. Woods) (1964)

I shouldn't try to predict or promise things on this blog because I can't tell what I am going to do from one day to the next. I feel like a dozen times I've said, "I plan to read this soon," only to get distracted by some dozen other books and forget all about my "plans."  When I read a bunch of stories from Best SF Stories from New Worlds 4 back in July I said that I was skipping the Bayley story therein because I wanted to accumulate enough Bayley stories to read three or four at once and do a single author blog post about him.  But I recently became curious about his work, and having only two Bayley stories to hand, decided to read them today as part of this New Worlds post.

(Joachim Boaz has written quite a bit about Bayley's work; check out what he has to say here.  Tarbandu read a Bayley novel in 2015 and had good things to say about it.)

In the universe depicted in "The Countenance" the Cold War lasted until 2150 and the Soviet Union won!  Talk about a horror story!  For the two centuries since then, human society's guiding principle has been "Scientocratic Communism" and its rulers the elite caste of "scientocrats."

This is a philosophical story.  Our main characters are Brian and Mercer, childhood friends who meet by chance on an interstellar passenger ship after ten years of separation.  Brian is an oddball who doesn't fit in, is a little skeptical of the scientocrats and their philosophy (Scientocratic Communism bases "science on the Control of Nature by Man") and is always worrying over such philosophical problems as epistemology ("How was anything known?")

Brian becomes intrigued by the fact that the ship has no viewports looking out onto space, only TV screens.  Are the scientocrats keeping something from the people?  He starts sneaking around the outermost corridors of the ship, finds a bolted shut aperture, and opens it up to look upon the universe with his naked eyes.  The sight shatters his brain and kills him.  The ship's captain (a scientocrat, like all ship's officers) tells Mercer that this happens to anybody who looks out at interstellar space.

"The Countenance" is like a Golden Age SF story about space travel and the search for knowledge, but it turns optimistic sense of wonder stories like Robert Heinlein's famous "Universe" on their heads; like an H. P. Lovecraft story it is pessimistic, arguing that knowledge is bad for you.

"The Countenance" also reminded me a bit of Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 universe (I have Games Workshop on the brain lately, because I have been playing lots of Blood Bowl: Legendary Edition): a tyrannical government stands between the people and outer space because outer space is a hell which will destroy your mind!   Maybe Bayley was an influence on the GW people?  I see on isfdb that Bayley, from 1998 to 2000, wrote five stories in the WH40K setting.

I like the plot and ideas of the story, especially the idea that the sight of outer space is psychologically overwhelming, an idea I've seen a few other places (unfortunately the only title coming to mind is James White's "The Lights Outside the Windows.")  The style seems a little clunky, amateurish, but I am willing to forgive.  Thumbs up!    

"The Ship of Disaster" by Barrington J. Bayley (1965)

"The Ship of Disaster" reminds me of some of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion books, in which the ancient and sophisticated civilization of the elves (known as Melniboneans or Eldren in Moorcock's books) is collapsing under the pressure of the rise of brutish but vital humanity.  In Bayley's story an elf warship, its oars manned by troll galley slaves, searches the ocean for human vessels to destroy, its crew burning for revenge after their home port was destroyed.  A human merchant ship is sunk and one of its crew captured (the rest are mercilessly burned.)

The elf ship, lost in mist, sails into a ghost world of phantoms showing the future of the Earth.  The ghost images make it clear that in the future there will be no elves or trolls, only humans, and the humans will build vast cities and tremendous ships that will dwarf the achievements of the haughty elves.  The human captive is tossed overboard, where he finds himself transported back to his own dimension, safe, and bearing knowledge of the heroic future that awaits mankind.

The story's most unusual idea is that the Earth is sentient, and chooses which beings will live on her surface.  The crops of the elves and the dinosaur herds of the trolls are failing, not because of biological warfare, as the elves and trolls suspect, but because the Earth herself wants to clear away the elves and trolls to make way for her new favorites, the Men.

No big deal, but entertaining.

"The Singular Quest of Martin Borg" by George Collyn (1965)

This story was included in Judith Merril's England Swings SF, the famous anthology which we are told did so much to bring attention to the New Wave.  (Back in June I read a few stories from England Swings SF, you may recall.)  Collyn has ten short fiction credits at isfdb.

This is a joke story (maybe it is a parody of a Van Vogt story?), silly and cynical, presenting a sordid view of interstellar civilization.  There are interstellar dope pushers, a planet whose economy depends on sextourism, a mining planet where indentured servants are worked to death, and an asteroid where a pair of neglectful parents leave their offspring to be raised by reprogrammed second-hand veterinary droids.

A drug dealer and a gold-digging adventuress (maybe we should see her as a courtesan) meet on a freezing cold planet (we get a joke about how the courtesan is uncomfortable because she never wears more than a G-string), have a brief relationship and produce a child whom they leave in the care of the aforementioned veterinary robots.  The child's mother is killed in some kind of accident, so she never returns to the lonely asteroid to recalibrate the robots, so they treat her son (the Martin Borg of the title) like an infant, changing his diaper and feeding him formula for twenty-five years!  He gets rescued by bleeding heart do-gooders, who smother him with pity and condescension and prove more interested in using him in their grandstanding publicity campaigns than in actually helping him.  Luckily, his bizarre upbringing has fostered the development of tremendous psychic powers (!) and he teleports back to the asteroid and the veterinary robots.

The robots show Martin a photo of his mother, the beautiful courtesan, and he uses his mental powers to change his body, turning himself into a simulacra of his mother! Somehow he gets his mother's memories (this story doesn't make sense) and follows a career like hers on a pleasure planet, first as a dancer and then as a high class prostitute serving the richest and most powerful of the galaxy's men. Decades into Martin(a)'s career of prostitution the galaxy's red light district is conquered by the space fleet of a dictator who is expanding his empire.  He rapes and murders all the space prostitutes but when he gets to Martin(a) he dies of shock--the dictator is the drug dealer, Martin's father!  Martin moves his mind into his father's body and rules the space empire until he is bored.  Then he tries to use his psychic powers to tinker with the stars, only to arouse the ire of the soul of the universe! The "Cosmic Mind" overwhelms Martin and alters history to end all this evil dictator business; Martin's parents in this revamped universe are decent people with a stable marriage who have a normal son.

"The Singular Quest of Martin Borg" is absurd in its design and tedious in its execution, and feels very very long.  Bad!

"The Transfinite Choice" by David Masson (1966)

Masson has ten stories listed on isfdb.

Naverson Builth is a scientist working at a "five-mile linear accelerator" in 1972.  There is some kind of accident ("trouble in subquark domain" is suspected) and he is transported to the year 2346.

2346 is a totalitarian nightmare due to overpopulation.  Most people live in tiny government-assigned apartments in vast warrens that cover almost all land mass, where they watch TV and eat algae goop.  Luckily (for Builth), the cognitive elite, into which Builth is ushered, has some more greater degree of freedom.  Builth works on a method of teleporting masses of people to other dimensions ("shunting") to relieve the population pressure.  At first this seems to work, and thousands of shunters are built and hundreds of millions of colonists are sent to other dimensions.  Then we get our Twilight Zone-style ending--the Earths of those other dimensions aren't uninhabited as was hoped, but just as crowded as Builth's own!  Those other Earths have also developed shunters and are sending just as many colonists to Builth's Earth as he is sending to them!  Only plague and inter-dimensional war can solve the population crisis!

Much of this story consists of complicated scientific conversations in the streamlined English of the 24th century, an English with fewer articles, verbs, and prepositions. This was irritating to read--I promise to never again take the words "a," "the" and "to" for granted!

The plot of "The Transfinite Choice" is OK (though iffy), but the execution is too annoying and boring.  Marginal thumbs down.  (Masson, however, deserves recognition for his unprecedented enthusiasm in the use of the word "quark.")

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Bayley's stories are good enough that I am not put off reading more of his work, but I feel I need never read a Collyn or Masson story again; their stories are not bad in a garish or amusing way, but in a frustrating and mind-numbing way.  Why did Moorcock and others, like Merril, think highly of them?  Maybe their irreverence, misanthropy and pessimism fit a 1960s zeitgeist and suited an agenda that saw a need to shake up the SF establishment.  But while a talented writer like Thomas Disch (in 334, Camp Concentration or On Wings of Song, for example) can make irreverence, misanthropy and pessimism work, the Masson story is hobbled by poor technique and foolish artistic choices and the Collyn is just a dumb stunt.  

In our next episode SF stories from 1974; any bets on whether we will see more dumb stunts?