"We're all human, and the sooner we understand that, the better chance we'll have to overcome this Effect.  Nobody can lie anymore.  Suddenly the human race must become honest, and about time, too.  It's easy for me, because I've always had the money to be able to afford to say what I think.  It's going to be difficult for some of you...."

I've only read two short stories by Michael G. Coney over the course of this blog's apocalyptic life, "Those Good Old Days of Liquid Fuel" from 1976 and 1971's "The Sharks of Pentreath."  (Joachim Boaz and tarbandu are far more familiar with Coney than I am.)  But just recently I purchased a copy of Coney's 1973 novel Syzygy because I was hypnotized by Gene Szafran's blondetastic cover illustration--it's like a Botticelli for the modern age!  Well, I liked those two stories of Coney's I blogged about, so, hey, might as well read this novel whose title I can't recall the meaning of and can't pronounce, either.

(Joachim wrote about Syzygy in 2019, but I can't really remember what he said about it, so I am still going in cold; after I have read the book myself and drafted this blog post I'll reread Joachim's post and see to what extent we disagree and to what extent we are on the same page.)

It is the interstellar future!  For like 130 years humans have been on planet Arcadia, a world with six moons, a world with no sizable land predators.  Our story takes place in a small village of fishermen and farmers on the coast next to a research station; the head of the research station is our narrator, marine biologist Mark.  Even though this is the space-faring future and the colony has been on Arcadia for over a century, almost all the technology and culture in the story feels like the mid-20th century, like the story is taking place in a 1950s in an English coastal village or a little New England town--Coney makes almost no effort to make the novel feel like it is in the future; the sea life in the story all has clear Earth-analogues, so it doesn't even really feel like the village is on another planet.  People drink brandy and smoke pipes and cigarettes, they kill sharks with knives and spear guns, they catch plankton in nets, they listen to government communications and the news on the radio, they hang around in the pub, they get around in rowboats and sailboats and motor boats that run on "petrol."  (My edition has American spellings, but Coney is British and the text has some Briticisms: young troublemakers are called "tearaways," people don't "dump" a handful of small items into a bag or a truckload of material into a river, they "tip" it, and boring stick-in-the-mud politicians are called "blimps.")  Coney does insist on calling the village a "colony" or "sub-colony" and the villagers "private colonists;" the pub is the "Social Club" and everybody calls his house his "unit," but this just feels odd instead of evocative of another time or another planet.

Narrator Mark was engaged to blonde beauty Sheila, but six months ago, a few days before their wedding, Sheila was found dead on the shore, perhaps victim of an accident, perhaps a victim of murder.  Had she just fallen of a seaside cliff, or been slain by a blow to the head and tossed into the water?  This murder mystery is woven into the story's main plot, and so we get detective fiction scenes here and there--people find clues and commit burglaries to steal the clues and that sort of thing.  

The main plot has to do with a unique natural phenomena which, as the novel begins, is just beginning and will peak in a few weeks.  Every fifty-two years all six of Arcadia's moons are on the same side of the planet, something most people on the planet have never experienced.  Records from the past are vague, but there are lots of stories about how when this happened 52 years ago, the village was struck by a ferocious crime wave that featured riots and murders, and there are even stories of people enjoying strange psychic powers during that period of a few weeks before and after the conjunction of the moons.  Significantly, the crime wave was confined to coastal villages like Mark's--inland towns did not experience the disaster.

A psychiatrist, Arthur, has arrived in the village to observe the villagers during the approaching conjunction, and asks Mark to help observe.  Mark, however, has his hands full with the extreme tides caused by the conjunction of the moons; water is already rushing at terrible speed in and out of the estuary upon which the village and research center are built, and at the peak of the conjunction the ocean will rise up the coast a hundred feet higher than usual, which threatens the research center's fish farms and will force quite a few villagers to temporarily move out of their homes.

As the conjunction approaches, there are lots of inexplicable fights, villagers just flying off the handle in ways they themselves can't explain.  Mark himself takes a crazy risk on impulse, jumping into murky water to fight a shark hand-to-hand to protect his fish farms.  The native wildlife acts strangely, as well.  A small animal, I guess like a monkey or squirrel, presents to Mark a clue about Sheila's death.  The unusual movements of the water in the local estuary have lead to a high volume per cubic foot of plankton, and when some people from another village come by to gather the plankton to sell, sharks attack their boats and kill them, acting not like individual fish but like organized members of an attack group.

In the second quarter of the novel Mark and Arthur figure out that the plankton have psychic powers and use those powers to enlist the sharks to defend them during the once-in-52-years extreme tides, the only time the plankton can mate and reproduce.  These powers are causing telepathic feedback among nearby humans; people can subconsciously sense others' feelings and sometimes even involuntarily read their thoughts, especially the pervasive negative feelings we all have for each other but hardly ever voice.  Sensing these feelings of hostility is what is causing all the unaccountable outbursts of violence in the village.  Mark learns he may be at  particular risk of being attacked because some people already suspect he murdered Shelia to get his hands on Sheila's nineteen-year-old sister, Jane, who is always hanging around thirty-two-year-old Mark; her behavior makes it clear to the reader that she is in love with Mark, and when the telepathic phenomenon really gets going her desire for Mark becomes clear to everybody.  

In the third quarter of the novel we witness the responses to the now universally acknowledged crisis of telepathic broadcasting: the efforts of scientists to communicate with the plankton, the efforts of the government to lockdown people so they can't harm each other (Coney contrives reasons why the coastal population can't just move in inland for a few weeks--there isn't enough housing or whatever), and all the ways the villagers, involuntarily picking up others' hostility and responding with their own hostility which is in turn detected so that a whole cycle of rage develops, get into fierce and dangerous disputes.  The government decides to kill all the plankton by poisoning the coastal waters, which of course will destroy the jobs of all the fishermen and ruin years of progress at Mark's research station; it will also take the government two days to get the poison ready, during which time many more people will be killed in violence.  So, a village mob rises up with the aim of dynamiting the local plankton.  As we sort of expect in old SF stories, Mark, the man of science, acts as a foil for the stupid common people and the stupid government and the stupid religious authorities, but in this novel the man of science is pretty ineffectual; Mark's efforts to guide others come to nothing, the dynamite attack goes forward and is a total disaster, and a lynch mob comes after Mark.  A blunt and domineering old rich woman who has been quartered with Mark because her home is too close to the shore saves him from the mob by threatening the angry populace with a pistol, and he flees on foot to hide at a farm just beyond the village limits.  The action scenes that follow his flight are a high point of excitement in this talky and slow book.

In the same way that Mark was surprised that that jerk of an old rich woman turned out to be more level-headed and helpful than almost anybody, he is amazed when a troublemaking young man turns out to be adept at resisting the powers of the plankton and helps Mark escape from the village mob.  In the final quarter of Syzygy, Mark learns that this young man's resistance to the plankton is thanks to his habitual use of a drug made from Arcadian grass.  "It doesn't get a hold of you; you can leave it off whenever you want.  It just makes you feel good for a while," he says, comparing it to habit-forming and carcinogenic nicotine and cognition-impairing alcohol.  These SF stories we read here at MPorcius Fiction Log often have elements of wish fulfillment fantasies, and we can add "opiate that has no ill side effects" next to "girl over ten years your junior chases you" on the Syzygy scorecard.

The discovery of the drug sort of feels like the resolution of the plot, but there are still like 50 pages to go in the 215-page novel.  Our heroes stop the poison from being put into their estuary by the government, but can only convince a small number of villagers to take the drug and thus get immunity from the plankton's psychic powers.  The plankton's abilities increase, and most of the villagers are hypnotized into worshipping the sea and seeking to commit suicide by jumping into the shark-infested waters.  (This is why there are no large land predators on Arcadia--every fifty-two years large animals that don't eat the local grass are impelled to commit suicide.)  The drug users take desperate measures to shock some senses into the hypnotized people, one of which is Jane's disguising herself as her sister Sheila.  Most of them are saved, though there are some fatalities, including the weak-minded rector who is the leader of the suicide cult and the man who turns out to be responsible for Sheila's falling off that cliff six months ago.  In these tedious final 50 pages we also get a resolution of the Mark-Jane relationship and a full explanation of the mystery of Sheila's death.     

Cover artists have striven mightily to make Syzygy look exciting, at least

Let's take DAW No. 240, The 1977 Annual World's Best SF edited by Donald Wollheim with Arthur Saha, off the shelf and take a look.  The fun cover, which exemplifies many themes we find in SF (explorations conducted at some risk made possible by the use of high technology), is by Jack Gaughan.  Wollheim's intro is about the publishing biz--is SF in 1977 in a boom period, and if so can such a boom be sustained?  Wollheim seems particularly worried about "overproduction" and the "flooding of the market;" I guess it makes sense for Wollheim, as a publisher, to discourage competition.  In the intro Wollheim takes a somewhat oblique swipe at The New Wave, and there is a similar attack from Don Hutchison printed on the back cover; I guess DAW saw as its market people unimpressed by the New Wave.  

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)

In their intro to "Appearance of Life" here in The 1977 Annual World's Best SF editors Wollheim and Saha tell us that lately Aldiss has been writing stories that "baffle the comprehension" and lie on "the margins of the sf sphere."  But then they put us at ease by informing us that "Appearance of Life" was a "pleasant surprise" that is "truly science fiction."

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)

I haven't read much Coney since I started this here blog--the last thing I read by him was "The Sharks of Pentreath," and that was in 2016.  But I liked that story, so let's give this one a shot.

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)

Del Rey is an important figure in the history of SF whom I have read very little of since this blog first cast its malignant shadow across the interwebs.  Back in 2014 I read his award-winning "Nerves" and found it remarkably boring and "I Am Tomorrow" and thought it alright.  Well, here I'm giving del Rey another chance to impress me. 

"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)

(Nota bene: I've never seen The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, one of those things every literate person is supposed to know all about.)

"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)

In their intro to "I See You" Wollheim and Saha suggest that many of the stories in Knight's famous Orbit series of original anthologies are not "science fiction" at all and express a wish that he would write more and edit less!

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.  

Hardcover edition cover (Corben seems to be illustrating the Del Rey selection) and back of my paperback copy

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 José 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.