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)

Let's read some stories printed in 1956 (give or take a few months) by authors whose names begin with the letter S and which famous anthologist and mover and shaker in the SF community Judith Merril saw fit to recommend.  There are many such stories, and we've already read a few of them, like Clifford Simak's "Honorable Opponent" and Theodore Sturgeon's "And Now the News," and today four more of them will be thrust under the hot lights and face the third degree here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

"Syllabus" by Len Shaw (1956)

Shaw has eight short story credits at isfdb.  "Syllabus" appeared in the same issue of Science Fantasy as the debut of Brian Aldiss's Non-Stop, a book version of which we read way back in 2014 (when we were young and the world was free), and while Non-Stop has been reprinted a billion times and even won some kind of retro award in 2007, it looks like "Syllabus" has languished in obscurity ("success walks hand in hand with failure....")

The halting words gave Gretana an intuitive and empathetic glimpse into a life other than her own, a life claustrophobically bounded by dark palisades of sickness and pain and all the wretched parameters of Earth, yet one which was lit from within by courage and imagination.  And she, Gretana ty Iltha, had once regarded herself as the unluckiest creature in the universe because of a slight disproportion of her features.

I feel like it has been a while since I have read a serious outer space-focused piece of science fiction with space suits and space stations and speculations on what life will be like in the future.  I've had good experiences with Bob Shaw's fiction in the past*, and there is a Vincent Di Fate space station and the invocation (albeit somewhat disparaging) of science guy Arthur C. Clarke on the cover of my DAW copy of 1984's The Ceres Solution, so let's give that a try.

*"Light of Other Days," "A Full Member of the Club," Tomorrow Lies in Ambush, Orbitsville, Night Walk, Fire Pattern, One Million Tomorrows, Who Goes Here?

The Prologue of the 185-page book introduces us to Denny Hargate, a bitter and sarcastic boy who is suffering a debilitating disease.  One day he limps over on his crutches to a clearing in the woods of upstate New York (Shaw is British, but his setting and main character are American, which makes the Anglicisms--like how Denny is intimately familiar with William Blake's "Jerusalem"--that creep in a little jarring) that he thinks of as his special place; there he sees a beautiful young woman and watches while she looks to the sky, waves her hand in the air, and vanishes.

As the main text begins we are introduced to an advanced interstellar human society centered on planet Mollan.  Mollanians live for four or five thousand years, and their culture is Mollanian society has a culture characterized by a rigid definition of beauty, such that our female lead, Gretana, who is a little short and has a face of below average looks, finds seeing her reflection in a mirror or a glass surface disturbing and has developed elaborate and exacting strategies of how to hold her head and manipulate her facial muscles so that she always looks her best.  Because of her "physical shortcomings" she is relegated to a lower social class and will not be able to have children. 

Mollanians are emotionally attuned and intellectually aware of the many "lines of force" which crisscross the universe and can teleport between the "nodes" where these lines intersect by thinking of complex mathematical formulae.  Via "major nodes," of which planets typically have a half dozen or so, people can travel interstellar distances, and almost 200 planets host human populations, descendants of teleport-capable human colonists.  Due to successive collapses of civilizations on both the interstellar and planetary levels, many of these populations, including that of Earth, have no memory of their alien origin and lack the ability to teleport.  The Mollanian Bureau of Wardens studies these planetbound populations secretly, hoping to learn by observing them why human civilizations always eventually collapse, and prevent the collapse of the Mollanian civilization.

Gretana is recruited by the handsome top Warden, Vekrynn, to work for the Bureau on Earth.  Hundreds of thousands of years of independent evolution mean Earth humans and Mollanians look very different, so Gretana will have to get extensive cosmetic surgery so she can blend in.  As a sort of quasi-illegal reward for her service, when her tour of duty on Earth is over and Gretana's face is reconstructed the surgery will not restore her current unsightly facial structure but give her a face that will conform to her society's rigorous standards of beauty--she will have very high class status and, Vekrynn suggests, be able to move in lofty social strata which high status people like Vekrynn himself call home.  Such inducements to serve on Earth are necessary because the Mollanians, among whom poverty, war and crime are almost entirely unknown, consider Earth, where people live for less than a century and want and violence are common, a horrifying place.

Gretana arrives on Earth in 2002, teleporting into that clearing in upstate New York we saw in the Prologue, which is one of the handful of major nodes on Earth.  (It feels special to Denny because his subconcious can dimly perceive the node.)  American society is a total mess due to overpopulation, environmental degradation, and tensions with the still-extant Soviet Union, with rampant crime, terrorism, and endemic labor strikes.  The U.S. government strongly discourages private travel, blocking the highways and striving to relegate all commerce and passenger traffic to the unreliable public nuclear-powered rail network.  

Gretana's cosmetic surgery has made her look like a real Earthling, and, unexpectedly, one of considerable beauty (measured by Terran standards), which causes her some complications.  Her job on Earth is simply to live the low key life of a middle-class person of independent means and no regular job, observing Earth life and every few months teleporting from that upstate NY node to a Mollanian outpost twenty light years away to have her memories downloaded for Vekrynn's files.  It was Gretana whom Denny saw a few years after her arrival on Earth, teleporting away to one of these downloading sessions.  

We readers catch up with Denny in 2024.  Now in his early thirties, Denny is confined to a wheel chair, half of his face is paralyzed, and the doctors think he only has a few years to live.  Inspired by the way the beautiful woman in the clearing had waved her hand in the air, drawing a series of curves, Denny has become an expert in the mathematics of curves, and lands a job on Earth's single space station, an international project of the Western powers.  There is hope that living in a low-gee environment will extend Denny's life span.

As the middle third of the novel begins it becomes evident that there is a diversity of views among Mollanians about Earth.  Verkynn, head of the Bureau of Wardens has a strict policy of nonintervention--Mollanians are to keep their presence secret from humans and observe, not interfere, as any effort to help the Earth will spoil the data they are collecting.  (Shaw directly refers to the "uncertainty principle.")  But we witness a Mollanian sabotage the space station, forcing its evacuation and an end to the Earth's space program (the Western governments are too cash strapped to finance any repairs.)  And a fellow Warden breaks all of Verkynn's rules and contacts Gretana--Lorrest is the leader of a pro-intervention faction of Wardens who want to help Earth people--while Verkynn and Gretana have refused to become emotionally involved with Terrans, this guy admires Earth people and has gone native.  He wants Gretana's help, or so he says, but Gretana, like almost all Mollanians, is a conservative rule-follower and implicitly trusts her benefactor Verkynn, and, instead of joining the rebels, hurries to the upstate node to report her contact with Lorrest.  When Gretana gets to the node she finds Denny there--with the possibility of living in space denied him, Denny has come to his special place to commit suicide by exposing himself to the elements (it is winter.)  Gretana does something no Mollanian has ever done before--she teleports the near-death Denny along with herself to the Mollanian outpost 20 light years away.   

In the final third of The Ceres Solution Denny and Gretana become directly involved in the struggle between the mainstream Wardens led by Verkynn and Lorrest's interventionist faction.  Which faction will Gretana side with when the leaders of both seem to be acting kind of crazy?  How will wheelchair-bound Denny fare on alien planets?  The dramatic "solution" of the title is revealed to us.  One reason Earth humans have so many problems is because the Moon is so big and so close to Terra that it interferes with those networks of force that are such a prominent feature of this novel, causing all kinds of disruption to our genetic make up.  Some Mollanians want to take Ceres and propel it into Luna, blasting the moon to bits and regularizing Earth's relationship with all those lines and nodes of force.

Shaw is a good writer and The Ceres Solution is a good novel.  The personalities of Denny and Gretana are are interesting and believable, and the worlds they inhabit, crisis-ridden early 21st-century Earth and the Mollanian culture of people who live to be 5,000 years old but are paralyzed by a fear of death, are well-drawn and absorbing.  Shaw's speculations about such things as how lifespan drives culture--for example, how Mollanian buildings have only one story because nobody wants to risk falling to his death and thus forfeiting thousands of years of life, but we short-lived Terrans cover our planet with towering skyscrapers--and the philosophical issues he addresses--is a brief life of challenge or a long life of peace to be preferred? to what extent should the superior interfere in the lives of the inferior?--are clever and thought-provoking.  I am sick of those SF stories in which the aliens are treehugging greens or utopian pinkos or free-lovin' swingers or peace-lovin' peaceniks and are used by the author to denounce how Americans or Earthlings in general are despoilers of the environment or money grubbing capitalists or uptight prudes or warmongering war pigs, and so I liked how Shaw tried to portray both virtue and vice among, and pros and cons about, both Earth people and the Mollanians.  The network of force and the attendant system of teleporting, the van Vogt-style two-competing-secret-factions-of superior-beings-are-deciding-the-fate-of-Earth plot, the various high-tech devices, and the wish fulfillment elements (you are both a total loser and a genius and then a gorgeous girl comes out of nowhere to make life worth living) are all fun.  The action and suspense scenes are successful.  There are many reasons to praise this thing.

So a big thumbs up for Bob Shaw and The Ceres Solution!

Don't let these Continental covers fool you: Mollanians have almost no interest in sex or family, and Denny Hargate has been rendered impotent by disease

Leila!  I killed Leila!  I'm not the person I always believed myself to be.  I'm a murderer!

Today on MPorcius Fiction Log, we take my copy of Ace's 1982 paperback printing of Bob Shaw's 1979 novel Dagger of the Mind off the shelf and embark on an adventure which, if the covers of the book are any indication, involves a guy fighting a blob with Molotovs.  Sounds good!

Dagger of the Mind is a story about a telepath; we seem to read about telepaths a lot here at MPorcius Fiction Log--we even ended up reading about telepaths when the plan was to read grim crime fiction.  But let's just run with it.

John Redpath is an Englishman, an epileptic who lives in an apartment building on a busy road above a row of shops.  He works at the nearby Institute, where they are experimenting on him, studying the effect of drugs on his slight telepathic abilities.  The story begins on a morning on which he feels quite odd, and when he looks out the spyhole in his apartment door he sees a hideous visage, the bloody face of a man who has apparently been skinned alive!  (The cover of the Pan edition of the novel seems to be trying to illustrate this.)  When he opens the door there is nobody there!  Are the drugs driving him insane?  

As the day proceeds, more reasons to believe Redpath is going bonkers crop up.  He is having a casual relationship with a promiscuous scientist who works in a different department of the Institute, Leila Mostyn, and he begins having irrepressible feelings of jealousy and possessiveness about her which quickly escalate into a violent rage.  Is Redpath's personality changing?  He continues to have hallucinations, and abruptly decides to make major life changes, quitting his job and finding a new place to live.  Could his horrifying visions and changes in character be a reaction to the experimental drugs, or is his psychic ability picking up thoughts from other people, as one of the researchers at the Institute suggests?  The climax of the first third of the novel sees Redpath murder Mostyn just after deciding he was truly in love with her.  After fleeing the scene of the crime, Redpath falls asleep in his new apartment in a disreputable house full of questionable characters who are extremely friendly to him; when he wakes up he finds himself in a similar house in the United States!

Dagger of the Mind is kind of dull and flat.  Redpath is not a very interesting character--Shaw actually takes pains to remind you he is ordinary and unremarkable, outside his epilepsy and his (quite weak) telepathy--and none of the other people in the book are interesting, either.  There are many pages devoted to descriptions of the visions that could be dreams or hallucinations or others' thoughts, and Shaw also describes at great length quotidian details of architecture, interior design, and the natural world--the pebbled glass of a window, the sunlight reflecting off this or casting shadows of that, etc.--and these details don't add up to a mood or paint fascinating images, they just bog the reader down.

Because the text wasn't doing much to hold my interest, I was disappointed when Shaw decisively undermined the most exciting thing that happened in the beginning of the book--Redpath's murder of the female lead--by returning the scene to suburban England and revealing that Mostyn had not been killed; Redpath had just cut up her apartment in her absence.  If Shaw had got me to like Redpath or Mostyn, or at least excited some curiosity about them, maybe this would have been a cause for relief, but instead I was disappointed that the most dramatic and compelling thing in the book had not actually happened.  

Redpath wakes up back in Britain, and there is some detective stuff as he talks to the police and Institute staff and everybody tries to figure out what is going on.  In the final third of the book, Redpath has a telepathic epiphany and suddenly realizes exactly what is up.  Decades ago, an alien criminal or revolutionary fled to Earth.  This renegade's species are big blobs with psychic powers that eat keratin, which is what your skin and hair are made of.  (That is why in his visions--some of which are not visions at all but real life--our boy Redpath has been seeing people and animals denuded of their skin.)  The alien fugitive was afraid to use his psychic powers very much because that might expose him to detection by the forces of the establishment pursuing him, so, from his hiding place in an English basement, he has been giving humans psychic powers and hypnotizing them into serving him.  Redpath is one of the people the alien gave psi powers years ago, when as a kid he was in the alien's neighborhood, and this novel's bizarre events are related to the monster using its powers to summon Redpath to join his team of human slaves.  You see, the overly friendly weirdos in the house he has moved to are that team, one a guy who can teleport, one a guy who can see the future, and so on; their telepath recently died, and they need Redpath to round out the roster.

This is bad enough, but Redpath realizes, via telepathic insight, that even worse developments are in store.  The conservative forces vengefully pursuing the alien rebel have finally caught up to him, and in a day or so are going to bomb England into oblivion.  Redpath has to slay the monster in the basement fast to prevent the destruction of his home country and an interruption of the world's supply of authentic Marmite.  Redpath tries to get Mostyn to help him, but this book was written before the current feminist era and her half-hearted efforts to aid him come to nothing, though Shaw tries to add suspense to his book by having us follow her for many pages on her abortive trip to America before, in the face of some mundane obstacles, she abandons her assigned task of being the New World prong of Redpath's planned Molotov pincer movement.  Luckily, one of the alien's slaves--the teleporter guy--resists the monster's control and he and Redpath together destroy the beast and the forces of justice in orbit above call off their attack.  As the story ends Redpath decides that he will pretend all this never happened and it looks like Mostyn is going to settle down and marry him, confident that his crazy ideas about aliens and teleporting human slaves--which she never believed--were drug induced.

Dagger of the Mind works on a mechanical level as a detective story; when in the end all the crazy stuff that has happened are explained, we see that all the plot elements mesh and make internal sense.  Shaw also comes up with clever little schemes and ploys for the alien and Redpath and the teleporting slave to put into operation.  For example, reminding us of Fredric Brown's "Arena," in which a guy knocked himself unconscious as a means of getting through a forcefield, Redpath has the idea of triggering one of his epileptic seizures as a means of breaking free of the psychic influence of the alien.  The actual SF elements of Dagger of the Mind are OK.  

But Dagger of the Mind does not work as entertainment or literature; the cool SF stuff takes up very little of the word count, and Shaw fails to captivate or move the reader via style or characters.  Leila Mostyn has no personality, doesn't really contribute to the plot (the alien makes Redpath hallucinate killing her in order to drive him away from the Institute and his apartment and into the arms of the team of slaves, but some other hallucination would have worked just as well) and Shaw fails to offer any plausible reason why Redpath is in love with her and why she might want to marry him.  The rebel alien, the pursuing alien, and the human slave who can teleport and who resists the alien could all have been compelling characters with interesting personalities and motivations if Shaw had gone to the trouble of fleshing them out, but they get very little screen time, so they are just gears rotating in Shaw's mechanical plot.  I didn't care who lived or died and I didn't care who had sex with who or who was going to marry who. 

I have enjoyed Shaw's work in the past, but this one didn't hold my interest, and often when I would sit down to read it I would find myself instead rereading randomly selected installments of Rumiko Takahashi's Urusei Yatsura.  I'm afraid I have to give Dagger of the Mind a marginal thumbs down.  You hate to see it.       

Some interesting (maybe?) notes.  Shaw fills Dagger of the Mind with cultural references both high-falutin', like those to Shakespeare and Van Gogh, and popular, including nods to the TV show The Tomorrow People and the 1945 film Scared Stiff.  Redpath likes old movies, apparently, and in his italicized thoughts refers to a dozen or more actors, many of whom I didn't recognize.     

A scan of the Pan edition of Dagger of the Mind is available at the internet archive, and a brief look indicates that at least one change (beyond the typical spelling and punctuation changes) was made to the text in the production of the American edition I own.  What appears as "World War II" in my 1982 Ace printing is "Second World War" in the 1981 Pan.  Why the publisher felt the need to change this easily understood phrase, but left unmolested "saloon car" (we Yanks say "sedan") and "kitchen tissue" (US: "paper towels") is a mystery.

*********

Behold, links to coverage of Bob Shaw here at MPorcius Fiction Log that is more sympathetic than is today's:

"Light of Other Days"

"A Full Member of the Club"

Tomorrow Lies in Ambush

Orbitsville

Night Walk

Fire Pattern

One Million Tomorrows 

Who Goes Here?

I have to wonder about the discussion behind the decision to drop  Davidson's name and replace it with Lafferty's on the cover.

In 1970, Ace republished its paperback anthology World's Best Science Fiction: 1967, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr, under the title World's Best Science Fiction: Third Series.  I own a copy of World's Best Science Fiction: Third Series, so let's crack 'er open and check out well-regarded stories from 1966 by authors we care about here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

"Light of Other Days" by Bob Shaw

"Light of Other Days" made its debut in John W. Campbell's Analog, and it seems to have been a huge hit--it looks like almost every famous SF editor--Judith Merril, Damon Knight, Robert Silverberg, Martin H. Greenberg, Brian Aldiss, and James Gunn, as well as Campbell, Wollheim and Carr--included it in an anthology at some point.  "Light of Other Days" is in at least three books I own, but this will be the first time I read it.

Judith Merril, in my copy of SF 12, stresses in her intro and afterword to "Light of Other Days" that Shaw's story is "actually science fiction" (her italics): it presents a new idea about light and time and the effects of technology on human life, and isn't just a detective story or action tale set on another planet or outer space.  Perhaps more importantly for those of us who care more about sex and death than particles and waves is the fact that this story is a total heartbreaker about disastrous love relationships! 

Shaw's new scientific idea is "slow glass," sheets of glass through which light passes very slowly.  A new piece of slow glass (AKA a "scenedow") is black as night, because no light has yet passed through it.  But if the pane is, say, "one-year-thick," after it has stood for a year a person looking at the glass will see through it what happened in its environs a year ago.  This has great decorative value, as one can take a five-year-thick scenedow that has stood on a tropical beach or before a bucolic meadow for five years and bring it to his city apartment and for the next five years enjoy a 100% authentic view of natural beauty, the pane of glass displaying all the vagaries of weather and season and animal life in a country spot of the recent past while living in the middle of the metropolis.

Personally I loved city life, was thrilled to see skyscrapers and subway trains every day, and find living in the country where I see cows and tractors every day an endless source of dismay, but it is normal to assert the opposite and Shaw in this story exploits that typical attitude--scenedows are big business, as city dwellers yearn to decorate their apartments with living country views.  (Presumably somebody like me could get a scendeow of Times Square or the Manhattan skyline for his camel-cricket-infested country house.)

On to the heartbreak.  Our narrator is a poet in an unhappy marriage; he and his wife are sick of each other (he even admits to hoping she will be killed in an accident) and their misery is compounded by the fact that they are expectant parents.  (I guess nowadays the narrator's wife would just get an abortion, but in Britain in 1966 legal restrictions on abortion were pretty strict and it was more common to think of a fetus as a human being and not just some nuisance to be casually destroyed like the camel crickets in my new home--at least that is the idea I got from watching Michael Caine's finest film, Alfie.)

The narrator and his wife are in Scotland on a vacation (they say "holiday," of course) and the narrator wants to buy a scendow from some old dude who lives in an old farmhouse overlooking a loch.  Shaw skillfully foreshadows the depressing revelation that comes at the end: this guy's wife and child were killed in an automobile accident some years before, but their last few years were recorded by one of his pieces of slow glass, and he has set it up in a window of the farm house to provide the illusion that they are still alive.  I believe Shaw gives us room to hope that this demonstration of love and the fragility of life will trigger some kind of reformation in the attitudes of the narrator and his wife and save their marriage.

Shaw handles both the science/technology stuff and the human drama stuff quite well in this short and pungent story--I have to concur with all those editors: "Light of Other Days" is very good.  Recommended!

Two German anthologies which include "Light of Other Days;" "Nymphenburger" is going to be my new pet name for my wife

"Bumberboom" by Avram Davidson

Let's pull a volume off the paperback anthology shelf of the MPorcius Library and read three SF stories by British authors that appear in editor Mike Ashley's 1977 book The Best of British SF 2.  The Best of British SF 2 contains 14 stories over its 378 pages, and I have already read and blogged about two of them, Arthur C. Clarke's 1971 "Transit of Earth," and John Wyndham's "The Emptiness of Space," AKA "The Asteroids, 2194."  That leaves a dozen tales new to me; let's start with three authors of whom I already have a good opinion: James White, Bob Shaw, and Brian Aldiss.  The stories in The Best of British SF 2 by White, Shaw, and Aldiss were selected by the authors themselves and represent personal favorites, and each is preceded by an intro by Ashley that includes a long quote from the author himself which discusses such topics as narrative strategies and recurring themes in his work--these intros, along with Ashley's intro to the volume which discusses the work of British SF writers who do not have stories in the anthology, make The Best of British SF 2 particularly valuable to the student of SF from the UK.


"Tableau" by James White (1958)

I don't think I've read anything by White since I started this blog, but, in that prehistoric era when I read SF and kept my opinions about it to myself, I enjoyed White's novel All Judgement Fled (check out Joachim Boaz's review of it) and his stories "Grapeliner" and "The Lights Outside the Windows;" those two stories, I felt, had interesting and unusual takes on space travel.

isfdb lists "Tableau" as one of the earliest-written stories in White's famous and long-running Sector General stories, which, I think, are about doctors in space dealing with alien patients, or something like that.  I generally find medical stuff boring, so I have sort of avoided these stories, but today I dip my toe in the Sector General water and read this piece, which was a cover story at New Worlds during the period that periodical was edited by John Carnell and was later selected by Michael Moorcock for 1965's The Best of New Worlds.

"Tableau" starts with an italicized prologue describing an anti-war war memorial on planet Orligia, what appears to be a sculpture of the meeting of an Orligian and a human on the deck of a wrecked spacecraft; the human's guts are falling out of a wound he has suffered during a space naval battle against the alien's ship.  Then we get a narrative of the dogfight which led to the scene depicted by the memorial, and the meeting itself.  Integrated into the description of the battle and the meeting of the two pilots after their crippled ships crash land on a planet is the revelation of how the war began years ago.  The Orligians look like teddy bears, inspiring the first human to meet to be overly friendly to them, because they were so damn adorable!  This premature familiarity backfired, because we humans look like a species of carnivore that haunts Orligia and uses guile to prey on immature teddy-bear people!  In reflexive, almost involuntary,  response to the human's invading the aliens' personal space, the teddy bears killed him and his crew thus starting the war.  (This is a little like Poul Anderson's 1954 "Butch," which we just read in January, in which an alien's instincts led it to kill humans who were actually no threat to it.  "Butch" appeared in New Worlds three years before "Tableau."  Hmmm...come to think of it, Anderson, in collaboration with Gordon R. Dickson, wrote some stories of his own in the early '50s about aliens who look like teddy bears....)

"Tableau" is an anti-war story with a happy ending.  Since the start of the war, the Orligians have developed a telepathy device, and the two crash-landed pilots use one to communicate--they overcome their prejudices, and start the peace process.  "Tableau" also has a twist ending.  That memorial in the prologue is not a work of art, but the two pilots and part of a ship frozen in time by a special device; when medical science has advanced enough the pilots will be unfrozen and the human's mortal wound healed.  White explicitly stresses that these two pilots are true heroes who deserve to be celebrated because they ended the war, and the last line of the story is a reminder that "there was nothing great or noble or beautiful about war."

This story is cleverly constructed, has interesting elements (the weapons and tactics used in the space battle are quite good) and is competently written, but somehow it didn't really excite me.  The teddy-bear business is a little silly, the "this-war-has-no-villains-it-is-all-just-a-misunderstanding" business felt a little contrived, and I thought that the scenes of the telepathic discussions at the end dragged a little.  White tries to inspire in the reader a revulsion at war with his descriptions of the physical and psychological wounds suffered by the servicemen of both Earth and Orligia, but this stuff failed to move me.  I'm judging "Tableau" marginally good, though maybe my own coldness and cynicism are leading me to rate it lower than other people might.

"A Full Member of the Club" by Bob Shaw (1974)

In 2018 I read an entire book of Bob Shaw short stories, and one of them was an affectionate homage to A. E. van Vogt.  (Wikipedia suggests that Shaw's first exposure to SF was reading a story by van Vogt he found in Astounding.)  Well, here in "A Full Member of the Club" we have another story that is reminiscent of a van Vogt tale and is perhaps itself an homage to the Canadian Grandmaster.  In van Vogt's 1943 story "The Search" (later integrated in a somewhat different form into the 1970 fix-up novel Quest for the Future) a guy meets a woman who has some very high tech consumer products, including a super pen, and his investigation into these items gets him mixed up with competing factions of people from the future.*  Well, in "A Full Member of the Club" a guy notices that his girlfriend has a super efficient cigarette lighter on the same day she dumps him, and his investigation of this lighter (and other supergadgets to which she has access, including a super pen) leads him to get mixed up with space aliens!

Basically, the story is about how a bold and persistent businessman who is willing to bend or flout the rules to achieve his goals (he breaks into a mansion in one scene, for example), after discovering the existence of the super consumer goods (better tasting tobacco and coffee and more sharp TVs, as well as the super efficient lighter and other devices) obsessively leaves no stone unturned until he has figured out where the items have come from.  He finds out that aliens are teleporting the items to Earth and renting them to the very rich in exchange for Earth paintings and sculptures.  The aliens consider seizing him and sending him to outer space, but our hero is such a smooth talker and such a talented man of business that he convinces them to let him join their firm, and his contributions make their operations much more efficient and profitable. 

Shaw adds a layer of interest, and I guess what you could call satire, to the story by having the two main human characters expose themselves as shallow nouveau riche types--they care more about accessing the consumer goods and the status they represent than about love and human companionship or high culture.

For some reason (perhaps because the characters in the story are materialistic status-seekers and that is how Shaw--and maybe British people in general--see us Americans) Shaw, born in Northern Ireland and resident in England when The Best of British SF 2 was published (as noted by editor Mike Ashley in the intro to the story) set "A Full Member of the Club" in the northeast United States--Trenton, New Jersey and Philadelphia, PA and their environs--and the story includes what appear to be little mistakes, like having an American say "differently to" instead of "differently from."  Curious, I looked at the version of the story that appeared in Galaxy (you can read it at the link earlier in this blog post) and found in that version the proper Yankee lingo, "differently from."  Did Ashley or somebody else at Orbit simply fail to notice the error fixed by somebody more familiar with US English at Galaxy, or make a conscious decision to retain British usage because an accurate portrayal of US speech (which of course would be appropriate given Shaw's chosen setting and characters) might throw UK readers?   

A good story; the pacing is good, the gadgets are fun, the style engaging.  I prefer the more subtle commentary on materialism and bourgeois striving Shaw employs here to White's in-your-face "war is terrible--look, this guy's guts are falling out!" approach in "Tableau."  Similarly, in Shaw's story here, the rational way the human and alien characters go about their business feels more like how things work in real life than White's wacky "they look like teddy bears to us but we look like ghouls to them so we all act irrationally" premise.

"A Full Member of the Club" has been well received not only by me, but the wider professional SF community, Donald Wollheim including it in the 1975 edition of World's Best SF and Ellen Datlow in 2003 in her 2000-2005 webzine Sci Fiction.

*I read the magazine version of "The Search" at the internet archive today after reading "A Full Member of the Club," and found a reference to Nazis that dated the story had been altered to something more vague in the version of "The Search" that appears in my 1964 copy of Destination: Universe!  

"Manuscript Found in a Police State" by Brian Aldiss (1972)

Aldiss has a large and diverse body of work, including nonfiction and mainstream fiction as well as SF that ranges from the pretty traditional to the very experimental and New Wavey.  I have been unimpressed by some of his more pretentious or boring "literary" SF, but "Manuscript Found in a Police State," first published in the eighteenth volume of Winter's Tales, a yearly anthology of short stories edited by A. D. Maclean and published from the '50s to the early '80s, is a success.

Despite the title, this is not a first person narrative, though it does focus on one character and his thoughts and psychological state.  Axel Mathers is one among a group of people being imprisoned in Khrenabhar Mountain, in one of several thousand cells embedded in the perimeter of a colossal wheel buried deep inside the mountain.  This miles-wide wheel rotates on a huge axle when the prisoners during the daily three-hour work period all pull on chains.  It takes ten years for the wheel to make one revolution, and thus each prisoner's sentence is ten years.  Presumably this is all an allegory for life and for society, the environment in which we are all trapped, truly alone, forced to work for individual survival and destined to work together, either voluntarily or at the behest of oft inscrutable and arbitrary authorities, if any progress is to be achieved, though said progress may very well be illusory.

Aldiss describes the various ways the people about to be imprisoned respond to the prospect of their ten-year sentence, their delusions and coping mechanisms, and the impact upon their minds of solitary confinement.  We follow Mathers as he explores his cell and learns the ways of Khrenabhar Mountain and faces unforeseen circumstances, like faults in the tremendous and ancient mechanism that provide access to dangerous creatures and hold out the slim possibility of escape or at least some kind of psychological relief.  We also gradually learn about the origin of the centuries-old prison and the myth-shrouded history of Mathers's world, apparently a planet colonized by humans many generations ago who displaced a native race of primitives and set up the tyrannical state of the title, which is in a perpetual state of civil war.

As I have said on this blog before, I always enjoy the portions of adventure stories in which some guy is confined in a cell and studies the graffiti on the walls and tries to contact the other prisoners and undergoes all kinds of psychological trauma and all that, and I certainly enjoyed "Manuscript Found in a Police State."  This is no adventure story--one of the "literary" aspects of the tale is that there is no plot resolution, Mather's ultimate fate and even the true nature of the planet he lives on being quite ambiguous--but while things like self-delusion and the questions of free will are the meat of the story's themes, Aldiss includes plenty of the horror and violence and strange technology we expect in our genre fiction.  I can heartily recommend this one.

Besides here in The Best of British SF 2, "Manuscript Found in a Police State" has been reprinted in Betty Owen's 1974 Nine Strange Stories.

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Three stories worth reading, each supported by insightful ancillary matter--I'm glad I picked up The Best of British SF 2 and hopefully I'll have time to return to it in the future.