Distillations: Short Fiction Reviews, Feb. 1977

From Locus, February 1997.
Copyright 1997 by Mark R. Kelly.

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Interzone 12/96

F&SF 1/97

SF Age 1/97

Asimov’s 3/97

short takes:

Analog 1/96, 2/96, 4/96, 6/96, 8/96, 11/96

The Williamson Effect, Roger Zelazny, ed

A Nightmare’s Dozen, Michael Stearns, ed

The December Interzone is guest-edited by Nicholas Royle, whose goal is to collect stories that appeal to readers whose tastes aren’t limited to particular genre sections of the bookstore. Toward that end he invited several non-genre writers to contribute to the issue. The results, as usually happens in such cross-cultural experiments, are more likely to please general readers with a tolerance or taste for surrealism and whimsical fantasy, than readers looking for the rigor and strengths of well-thought out fantasy and SF.

M. John Harrison opens the issue with "The East", in which the narrator, Michael, recalls living in London in the late 1980s after the Berlin Wall fell and refugees from eastern Europe began to pour into the west. He makes acquaintance with an old man in a park in Soho who tells stories about his homeland, and about the dangers of being a refugee. But his stories don’t quite make sense; his English is technically good, but what he says seems to lack context and reference. After a while Michael starts disbelieving him, and even breaks into the man’s room to learn his real story. What he discovers has a fantastic, even SF’nal, aspect to it (as in maybe he’s a refugee from some other time or place entirely) but ironically this is less interesting than the story’s overall sense of dislocation, the idea that the old man simply cannot shake the paranoia and oppression that he’s always lived with.

Jonathan Carroll invents another bizarre metaphysic in "Alone Alarm." A man despondent that his wife is seeing another man goes to a pickup bar to hang out. There he sees his rival, a man with a prominent Van Dyke, but he can’t bring himself to confront him. On his way out of the bar, he’s hit from behind, kidnapped in the trunk of his car, and taken to a lonely country road where he meets a group of men who are all—himself. He learns the truth about them, about himself, and about Mr. Van Dyke which makes his shattered marriage somewhat easier to bear. The whole wonky scheme is more amusing than plausible, though it makes sense at least metaphorically to the way people often compartmentalize their lives.

Christopher Burns is a writer who had stories in a couple early issues of Interzone and has gone on to a career as a mainstream novelist. In "Life Afterwards" a man, Alan, sees to the burial of his wife Iris the way she wanted, by sprinkling her ashes into a church garden. Alan has happened to meet another woman recently, and within a few months he is remarried. He starts getting phone calls from Iris, chastising him for abandoning her; Iris claims to be back in their old house, but of course when Alan goes there, the house is empty. What looks like a standard Twilight Zone fantasy, leading up to a predictable moral conclusion, instead ends with a surrealistic riff, without any sort of real conclusion at all in the sense of explanation.

The remaining four stories are by non-genre writers and critics. Nicholas Lezard’s "Planet of Shit" provides a cartoon-SF entrance into a Kafkaesque Twilight Zone; the narrator’s spaceship smashes into an asteroid (600 light years from Earth), where he discovers an oppressively boring society where it perpetually drizzles and everyone carries an umbrella, all the men are named Clive, the women are named Jean, and everyone drinks something called grach. His explanations of his origin are met with blank stares. The story is an adequate, if unsubtle, lesson in the oppression of conformity.

Elizabeth Young’s "The Canon" is more successful, offering some genuine extrapolation into the future of information processing and academic studies. It’s the narrative of a college instructor, Zee, who is disheartened by the ways that students in 2097 can mix and match classics of literature along with critical studies and amendations in order to create new texts to suit their tastes. Giving happy endings to Wuthering Heights, and Lolita, for instance. Zee decides to do something about it, and arranges an end of term party for her students, at which she shackles to each wrist a balloon containing a quotation from the literary canon and makes a party-game challenge to act out the quote in some way. The story recalls Bradbury stories like "Usher II"—a savage response to philistines who would destroy the literary heritage. But this story too can’t resist a surrealistic trill at the end, as if the SF’nal extrapolation itself is insufficient for the author’s literary sensibilities.

Two final stories are surrealistic fillips. Rikki Ducornet’s "Egyptian Gum" stages a generational gap squabble between a mother and children who are the results of a wave of mutability set off by the opening of an Egyptician tomb. Toby Litt’s "Zips" follows a writer on a road trip across the US, where his efforts to compose short stories are interrupted by the sounds of zipping and unzipping from the motel room next door. He takes violent, irrational action.

The January F&SF opens with an unusual Christmas story from Gene Wolfe, "No Planets Strike". The story’s double inspirations are lines from Hamlet about how at Christmas nothing bad can happen—"no planets strike" (or, aliens can’t attack)—and the legend that animals talk on Christmas Eve.

The narrator is a donkey named Donnie; he and Bully (a bull) are genetically enhanced animals from Earth. Recently acquired by Mango the Clown, they’ve toured from planet to planet, putting on comedic performances, and have now come to Sidhe, one of the few planets with an intelligent native race, the Beautiful People. This race has altered itself to be more beautiful than humans, and though they welcome humans to their planet, humans are not allowed to leave or to reproduce. When Mango tries to sneak off-planet, he is caught, and the two animals are soon on their own. One night a woman in their audience is about to give birth—an illicit human birth—and in an effort to help, the Donnie and Bully break their cover as dumb animals.

It’s impressive how Wolfe blends his two points of inspiration, and the familiar Christmas story, with themes familiar from his body of work, such as the Christian underpinnings of The Book of the New Sun and the shapechanging aliens of The Fifth Head of Cerberus. The result is a perfectly valid science fiction story that cleverly encases the Christmas narrative without being at all didactic about it.

At the other end of the issue is a story that also encases a more familiar story, in this case that of Cinderella. "Longing for Blood" is by Vilma Kadleckova, a Czech writer, and translated by Bruce Sterling and her husband Martin Klima. The setup is a melange of stock fantasy elements. Ashterat is one of the surviving members of the immortal Taskre family, whose destiny is to protect the World Inside from the beasts of the World Outside. Various members of the family have succumbed to one curse or another (father is entrapped inside an ebony clock), so Ashterat and her sister Hildur are in search of a man to insure this protection. The test for a suitable man is to drink a special Potion which will grant the power to travel between worlds; but the effect on unsuitable candidates is to poison them. Now Hildur has succumbed to overambition by turning into a kind of vampire, and Ashterat has had to encase Hildur in a granite coffin.

Meanwhile, there is a foster-sister, Shina, nicknamed Cinderella after a childhood incident. She’s a bit batty, and Astherate decides she should be married off. When she hears the Prince is officially looking for a bride, it occurs to her also that the Palace would be a good place to search for a suitably strong man. And so Ashterat arranges for both she and Shina to attend the ball.

The story has an outer arc, and satisfactory resolution, quite independent of the Cinderella tale, though the two storylines dovetail neatly. It’s difficult to judge the translation except to note that the story is more wordy, sometimes in the sense of being ornate (e.g., "She demanded limpid and crystalline justice for herself and stern and immediate punishment for him..."), sometimes in repetition, than would be expected for contemporary English prose. The necessity of finding a man to save the kingdom, so to speak, is a theme that might rub some western readers the wrong way. It’s fascinating, though, to see what elements of contemporary fantasy, and of classic myth, are present and recognizable in this tale from outside the English-language tradition.

Carroll Brown’s "The King of Seventh Avenue" updates yet another cultural myth, that of King Arthur. The narrator is Max, a roving photojournalist visiting friends in New York. One of them is Arthur, owner of a market, who has always half-jokingly been known as "King of the Britons." Max, anguished by witnessing senseless deaths in a new English war, calls the bluff, and demands to know why Arthur, if he were still alive, wouldn’t do something to stop the slaughter. The story addresses both the Arthurian legend, and the larger issue of how people believe what they need to believe. The writing is impassioned, though given to cliché at time—as in "the dark fires I was carrying inside me."

Charles de Lint’s "Crow Girls" is a chapbook Christmas story written for friends that is now published for general readership. Heather, a mother with two girls who’s decided to leave her husband, feels an enormous void in her life. She commiserates with best friend Jilly over coffee. They notice two dark-haired girls sitting at another table, and something about them makes Heather feel better, as if their mere presence reassures her that good things remain to be experienced in life. It develops that others know about the girls, and have been affected by them, too. The story’s occasional origin may explain its haphazard metaphysic; aside from insisting (typical for fantasy in general) that coincidences do mean something, there’s no overall strategy; the scenes do not make more than the sum of their parts. But it’s an emotionally feel-good story.

Linda Nagata’s "The Bird Catcher’s Children" is an SF story about a renowned sculptor from Earth, Harysen, who’s been granted special permission to set up house on the closed world of Weyken. He discovers squatters in the forest there, and finds spying on them more interesting than pursuing his art. There’s a father and two children, dressed in feathers from the dinosaur-like birds, avesaurs. The father insists to Harysen that he stop spying on them, taking Harysen’s photos and smashing his camera. Harysen meekly submits. But when Harysen’s own presence in the forest betrays the squatters to the planet’s wardens, he’s faced with a greater moral burden.

The story seems reasonable in outline but is irritating in numerous small ways: missing explanations, for why the squatters speak such perfect English, why Harysen at one point so quickly assumes the children are dead (when from the story’s title the reader knows they must not be), why in the constant rain Harysen leaves his patio doors open (so the birds can come in a wreck the place, of course). And odd anachonistic details of setting: Harysen sits in the "living room" of his manufactured "house" and drinks bourbon. Not to mention the amazing lapse of motivation in the sacrifice necessary for his final decision.

Robin Aurelian’s "The Santa Trap" is a fiendish inversion of Christmas in which children fear "Subtraction," the day when Santa comes to take away their favorite toys. Mike and Janie, two children who’ve discovered they can’t fake Santa out by pretending to like other toys, concoct a plan to give him a taste of his own medicine. The story has a macabre appeal in its odd idea, though its mixture of realistic details and absence of any hint of social rationale makes it an odd combination of parable and social satire.

Robin Wilson’s "Faster than a Speeding Bullet" involves, as the title suggests, yet another cultural myth (that seems to be the theme of this issue). Joshua Feineman, rich by virtue of a clever software invention years ago, is out camping with girlfriend Rainey Clarke, a county criminologist. He tries to explain why his life is almost but not quite perfect; sure he’s rich and has a nice girlfriend, but he wants to do good in the world. Then—unbeknownst to them—a tiny alien spacecraft falls to Earth and embeds itself in the skin of Josh’s neck. While Rainey returns to work to learn that her son has been arrested for possession of a handgun, Josh is at home discovering he suddenly has amazing physical abilities. Later Josh accompanies Rainey and her son to a meeting with a prosecutor, and he discovers a way, a very small subtle way, that he can do good. Wilson is quite a writer, as accurate and precise and authentic as some of the previous writers in this issue are sloppy; one almost feels he is squandering his considerable talents on this pleasant and finely wrought, but ultimately rather slight, riff on the Superman theme.

The centerpiece novella of the January SF Age is Ben Bova’s "Sam and the Prudent Jurist", another tale in the series about the roving entrepeneur Sam Gunn. This time Sam is pursuing mining in the outer solar system when he is brought up on charges of genocide, accused of destroying the green lichenoids of Europa. In Selene City Sam faces a panel of three judges, including one in charge of the consortium that has passed all the laws that Sam broke, and a prosecutor, the "Beryllium Blonde," with whom Sam has a history. Sam’s defense is a long story that begins with a distress call from the Party Twins, Cindy and Mindy, two girls in a spaceship who provide a much needed (virtual) service to lonely, horny space miners. The courtroom dynamics are not terribly plausible—surely in a real court, or even a TV or movie court, the prosecution would be objecting and interrupting Sam’s story far more quickly than they do here—but the tale’s a good one, fast paced and fun, and realism is not the intent.

At the far extreme from that story is the psychological intensity of Jack Dann’s "Blind Eye", in which Carlos Smlta, a wealthy lawyer and artist recovering from the accidental death of his artist wife, finds himself plagued by spectral visitors who roam through his house and ask him questions about the circumstances of her death. Carlos does feel guilty, though perhaps the death was merely an accident. Then the visitors, who seem to be time travelers, trigger a memory in Carlos that puts matters into a different perspective. The story is both a time travel paradox and a symbolic reification of memory and loss, being more evocative of these things than being entirely clear.

Don Webb’s "The Five Biographies of General Gerrahn" is the account of a starving artist, Thomas Dam-Seuh Lasser, whose fortunes change when he discovers that the woman he did a one-night stand with on Angkor III—which ended with her mysterious death—was General Helen Lyndon, a hero in the war against the alien Beletrin. The authorities, convinced he’s innocent of involvement, offer him a deal to write her biography. The success of the first book leads to a second, and then further volumes. Webb not only illustrates the need for the idealized war hero, and the way publicity machines can feed upon themselves, he wryly shows how decisions of art vs. commerce affect a writer’s life, a situation that Webb himself, renowned in the small press but not exactly a presence on any best-seller list, has probably pondered.

Robert Reed’s "Blooming Ice" is set on the planet Tempest, a colony world where young Civ lives with his father Illie and Illie’s new woman friend Yun. They are on a hike in the wilderness together, climbing over glaciers where animals lie trapped in ice, ready to revive when the planet’s cycle of extreme climatic changes swings back to warmth. Civ’s mother died recently in an accident, and Civ is uncomfortable and sullen to both his father and to Yun. They see a large creature, a surus, almost melted out of the ice, and that night Civ lies awake wondering if the creature has gotten loose. Reed does an excellent job portraying the confused emotions of a troubled young boy. Fortunately for the story, the implied danger of the story’s illustration doesn’t occur; instead the SF’nal premise about thawing monsters serves as an illuminating metaphor to an insight into human feelings.

Thomas M. Disch’s "The Children’s Fund to Save the Dinosaurs: A Charity Appeal" is a two-page letter addressed to [Name Here] soliciting funds to mount expeditions to remote parts of the world to find the last remaining dinosaurs, if any. It’s a perfect replica of such all-too-familiar letters, and Disch plays on the public’s gullibility and ignorance of science by slyly suggesting that the survival of dinosaurs is no more unlikely than, say, the existence of UFOs! If this letter were sent out, people would send money.

Paul Di Filippo’s "The Jackdaw’s Last Case" is an alternate history, of sorts, about Franz Kafka and superman. Or rather, Franz Kafka as superman. In 1925, New York thugs engaged in white slavery are foiled by a caped crusader called the Jackdaw. Meanwhile, Franz Kafka is employed by a newspaper writing an advice column called "Ask Josephine" that offers obscure, metaphorical answers to his readers’ domestic turmoils. He has a pert coworker Millie who chides him for being out of touch and notices that his name is like "kavka", the Czech word for jackdaw. Subsequently Kafka as Jackdaw faces a villain whose Zionist rant recalls disturbing feelings from his past. The story combines comic-strip action with lurid examples of Kafka’s worldview, parts that don’t mesh easily into a single story, though they’re inventive and insightful in turn.

The lead story in the March Asimov’s is Ian McDonald’s "After Kerry". Set in early 21^st century Dublin, it begins at the funeral of the narrator’s mother, who was roundly disliked by all her children; one sibling, Kerry, disappeared three years ago without a word, as if to escape. Now brother Stephen O’Neill sets about tracking her down, to bring her back into a family free of the mother’s oppression. He comes into contact with "multis," people who are "channeling" aliens from Epsilon Eridani, and he visits Kerry’s psychotherapist, who tells him about dissociative reactions and multiple personalities. Kerry has become involved in a multi research project to build a device that can rewrite memories—she has found a way to escape into being another person.

A recurring theme in the story is how fragmented 21^st century society has become, broken into various tribal groups or micro-cultures. But the themes and story elements don’t quite hang together; this reads like one in a series of stories, probably centering around the coming of the Eridani aliens, who are peripheral to Kerry’s story. This is, rather, a character-driven story, with an especially forceful portrait of the mother’s oppression and its impact on her family.

William Sanders, a writer whose Indian-themed stories have turned up in the last couple Dozois annual best anthologies, provides "The Undiscovered", a title which is a clue to the identify of the central figure. A Cherokee narrator tells of the time when a white man came to his town, a man marooned on a sea voyage to Virginia in 1591. The man’s name, pantomimed by waving a spear in the air, is apparently Spearshaker. He picks up the native tongue and is soon explaining to the bemused natives the idea of a "play," which is like pretending, and something like a dance, but not exactly like either. Eventually Spearshaker composes a version of the Hamlet story suitable for his audience, and Sanders describes the sometimes hilarious problems of putting on the show. Sanders ends with a set of notes about Elizabethan spelling, the Cherokee language, etc., which don’t seem particularly necessary except to reassure us of the author’s authority.

Andy Duncan achieves a different kind of linguistic intensity in "Beluthahatchie", a story told in steep southern vernacular by John, a blues singer on a train ride to Hell. John decides to stay on the train one further stop, where at the deserted station at Beluthahatchie he’s met by the devil himself, a sunburnt white man in an old Terraplane car who is an image of embedded white racism. Their interaction is both a contest of wits and battle of wills.

New writer Kage Baker’s "Noble Mold" is set in historical California at the Mission in Santa Barbara. The players are immortal operatives for the "Company" who get a priority one order to procure a certain grape vine. The local operative then has to engage in delicate negotiations with the family that owns the vine, a task that quickly complicates through a series of misunderstandings. I wish there had been a bit more about the nature and purposes of the Company; instead the scope of the story focuses on the seriocomedy of the vine negotiations, which is handled amusingly enough. (Except I wondered why the whole vine was necessary; wouldn’t any small genetic sample suffice?)

Stephen Dedman’s "Tour de Force" describes several scientists gathering at a remote spot in western Autralia. The time is some decades after aliens called the Lagva have contacted Earth and upset its economy with all sorts of new technology. Now an alien spaceship has been found buried in the rocks of Australia, not a Lagva ship, but something from even more advanced aliens. Scientists arriving to examine it are confronted by mercenary thieves, and two sides try to bluff each other with speculation on the function of the alien craft and the devices inside. The story gently parodies the presumption of a perspective influenced by reading science fiction—obviously, goes one suggestion, a spaceship would need a manual control for the airlock, right? The danger of making such rash assumptions provides the neat twist of the story’s climax.

Brian Stableford’s "Inside Out" concerns a woman undergoing therapy for the trauma she’s suffered in a Great War that has been underway for 17 years. She’s being given drugs that cause unsettling dreams of strange times and places. Scientists in her world are aware of parallel worlds, but none that correspond to anything in the woman’s dreams. They argue among themselves about the benefit of continuing the woman’s treatment as part of a research project in psychic boosting. The premise is less hard-edged than in most of Stableford’s work, but the story does give insight into rivalry among scientists and how remote scientists’ concerns can be from those of the patients.

Ben Bova and Rick Wilber’s "The Babe, the Iron Horse, and Mr. McGillicuddy" is a baseball fantasy that begins with a collection of famous players (including, incidentally, Fidel Castro) gathering in a field while a morose Babe Ruth watches from the stands. Unlike the baseball stories of a few years ago by John Kessel and Bruce McAllister, which focused more on character, this story quickly gets deep into a play by play account of a long game. The story requires readers with more knowledge of and interest in baseball than I can muster.

S. N. Dyer’s "The Nostalginauts" provides a welcome antidote with a science fictional bite as two high school technonerds debate going the prom. Time travel has been, or will be, discovered, but a very limited time travel that allows only trips 25 years into the past, for 30 seconds at a time. The only way people of the story experience it is in anticipating their future selves—the nostalginauts—appearing at events like weddings and proms to advertise their prosperity to their earlier selves. Gar, who hopes to be the one to invent time travel, and his friend do go to the prom, and what happens there more than fulfills their expectations.

In the course of compiling the year-end list of recommended reading over the past few weeks (of December), I spot read stories in a number of magazines and anthologies that I didn’t get around to reviewing in full this past year.

My sporadic reading in Analog first turned up G. David Nordley’s "Martian Valkyrie" in the January issue, a new story in his near-future series about the exploration of the solar system. Two manned expeditions embark for Mars, the first a UN-sponsored mission, large, elaborately planned, and conservatively crewed (mostly by Islamic men), the second a daredevil rival mission by an ex-UN planner using riskier maneuvers and a smaller crew—including an outspoken, uninhibited woman, the Valkyrie of the title. Inevitably, and safe mission has problems and the daredevils come to the rescue. The story shows, dramatically and excitingly, how complex missions are subject to spectacular failures—all too reminiscent of some recent NASA failures. Nordley’s premise that the dichotomy between over-engineering and lean & mean corresponds to personality differences between men and women is not particular convincing; a better distinction might have been bureacratic over-planning vs. individualism.

February’s issue included a fine James White story, "Un-Birthday Boy". The title character is a boy who is estranged from his family; he’s kept in a separate room, he washes himself so he doesn’t smell, and he doesn’t have birthday parties like the other children in the family. And sometimes his father comes into his room and does nasty things to him. These oddities are explained in a revelation that depends on a classic science fictional shift of perspective; things we thought literal turn out to be figures of speech, and vice versa. David Brin’s "An Ever-Reddening Glow" in the same issue describes an encounter between a human starship and aliens from the intergalactic Corps of Obligate Pragmatists. The starship’s propulsion, using "basic implosive geometrodynamics," is having drastic effects on the ecology of the universe, and the aliens beg the humans to stop. The premise is a clever bit of physics-based technobabble, more abstruse yet more plausible than the Star Trek equivalent.

April’s issue has Paul Levinson’s "The Copyright Notice Case", a sequel to a couple earlier stories about a forensic scientist, Phil D’Amato, who doubles as a criminal investigator. This one is a puzzling murder mystery: a scientist working on the human genome project is found dead of mysterious causes beneath a computer screen displaying the words "copyright notice." Levinson relates D’Amato investigates into the genome project in huge chunks of explication, and then raises the stakes with further deaths in the same mysterious circumstances. The hypothesis that D’Amato pursues involves a message encoded in DNA from some ancient branch of humanity—something like the god-code in pi in Sagan’s Contact. Levinson strains plausibility with endless speculative dialogue about how such a code could trigger modern day computers to cause someone’s death—but that he can suggest a way it could happen at all is pretty amazing.

The same issue has Sarah Zettel’s "Under Pressure", a prototypical hard-sf puzzle story of the near future. It’s about an ambitious project to restore life in the Great Lakes using artificial symbiotes to leach out toxins from host organisms, like fish. Now the fish have mysteriously started dying, and the project director is ready to scapegoat the designer of the symbiote and shut down the project, unless the scientists working on the lake can find the correct answer first. The speculative hypothesis—the artificial symbiotes—is an essential though not central component of the story; the payoff is in perceving unforeseen consequences of the complexity of a system, a fundamental and seldom depicted aspect of the pursuit of science.

In the June issue is Ben Bova’s "Appointment in Sinai", which refers to an area on Mars that is the site of the first manned expedition there. Through VR technology, millions of people on Earth witness the event. Bova follows four of them, in cyclic fashion: a female astronaut rejected for the mission; a Latino student lacking motivation in L.A.; a scientist who believes robot explorers could do the job just as well; and a Proxmire-like senator eager to end such wasteful spending. All of them tune in, even the senator, and Bova demonstrates that the near-personal experience of witnessing the landing changes all of their opinions, one way or another, and not necessarily the way one might predict.

The August issue has Spider Robinson’s "Orphans of Eden", a meditation about a story more than a story. The narrator is the author, sitting down in his dining room to write, when a man, obviously a time traveler, pops into the room. The traveler has come to Robinson, as the writer of certain novels dealing with human dilemmas, for help with an ancient problem: how to solve human conflicts and create a perfect society. Their dialogue comprises a thought experiment about isolating a group of infants and raising them free of any cultural constraints. The discussion is interesting to a point, but then disappointing because Robinson gives no clue that he’s aware of the possible answers to these questions that real science of the past couple decades (namely "evolutionary psychology") has offered. Instead the story only asks the questions, as if the answers are too horrible to contemplate even in fiction.

November’s issue has a novella by G. David Nordley, "Fugue on a Sunken Continent", set on the fictionally engineered planet of Epona. (An accompanying article by Wolf Read describes the details, and the genesis, of Epona.) Humans have set up a colony on Epona among the native Uthers, avian beings whose names are sequences of four tones. The Uthers are primitive technologically compared to humans but are catching on fast. Two humans get lost in the jungle and are captured by an Uther faction competing with humans to build a starbase in the inner system. There’s a lot of good stuff in the story—especially a scene in which the two humans have to crawl up inside a giant, living snail—but it doesn’t add up to a cohesive whole, as if this is only the first story in a series. (Thus a strong-willed character named Anna, and a cybernetic theme, are introduced at the beginning of the story and then forgotten.)

The Williamson Effect is a tribute anthology to Jack Williamson composed mostly of stories that play off the themes of Williamson’s most famous works—the humanoids, seetee, etc. The best stories are those that do something a little different.

Frederik Pohl’s "The Mayor of Mare Tranq" is an alternate history exercise that traces the life of Johnny Williamson from humble beginnings in Arizona to an elected office in Washington and then a military career during the war. He’s in Dallas on a certain fateful day in 1963, and as a reward for saving JFK’s life, he’s granted a waiver to the age requirement for becoming an astronaut. A berth on Apollo 11 leads to a further sequence of events that ends with the his involvement in establishing an actual lunar colony. It’s a far-fetched but clever story, as if Pohl tried to imagine what possible history could have put Jack Williamson on the moon.

Ben Bova’s "Risk Assessment" starts on a lunar colony run by a triumverate of two people and one master computer called Alpha One. The two people, one a woman named C.T. Shockley, argue about the risks of staging an experiment using antimatter, an experiment crucial toward the lauching of a starship to Alpha Centauri. The computer dispassionately sides with her opponent because of the small but finite risk that the moon will be blown out of its orbit. The story makes a valid point about considering potential rewards as well as risks, but the story’s main accomplishment is to imitate the flat, gosh-wow style of science fiction from the early part of Williamson’s career.

John Brunner’s "Thinkertoy" is something of a cross between "The Humanoids" and "Mimsy Were the Borogoves". Two children become fascinated by department store gizmos with which they build an over-protective robot. Their father is concerned; he doesn’t understand his children ever since an accident killed their mother. The story is unfortunately thin, ending with a weak payoff involving a revelation about the accident that killed the mother rather than anything essential to the SF’nal premise.

Fred Saberhagen’s "The Bad Machines" brings together Williamson’s Humanoids and Saberhagen’s own famous SF machines, the berserkers. A two person ship reaches a battle zone surrounding a region of negative gravity space, where lies a space station besieged by berserkers. On board they find other machines, guardian Humanoids, who refuse to let the humans fight at all for their own protection. In their frustration, the humans gradually perceive that maybe the two races of machines need each other, in some symbiotic fashion. This is a fasctinating idea, but it’s laboriously arrived at and might have better served as the premise, rather than the conclusion, of a more interesting story.

Poul Anderson’s "Inside Passage" plays off the theme of Williamson’s Darker Than You Think, about a race of vampire-like creatures. Anderson tells of Bulosan, a physicist, and Ed Mihalek, a detective, who become friends through the Sierra Club in the San Francisco Bay area. Ed describes a crazy case about someone who believes in a mutant race that can take other shapes. Soon thereafter Bulosan witnesses a wraithlike creature attack Ed, and then Ed collapses with a heart attack. Now Bulosan is pursuing Ed’s story on a cruise ship heading up the coast to Alaska. He follows a suspect from the ship via a private airplane deep into the interior of the Alaskan wilderness. The story is better written, more fleshed out, than most of the stories in the book, with an unusual setting and an effective sense of ominous dread. There’s also an interesting subtheme, recalling Saberhagen’s story, about the dependency of this mutant race on humans, compared to humans’ dependency on other creatures.

The best story in the book is Connie Willis’s "Nonstop to Portales", a story that, like Pohl’s, concerns Jack Williamson as subject. Carter Stewart arrives in Portales, New Mexico, the day before an interview for a job he’s not even sure he wants. There’s nothing to do in town except hitch along with a bus tour he spots. The bus goes to various sites connected a certain famous writer, one that Carter has never heard of; it stops at the ranch where he grew up, the shack where he did his writing, etc. Carter begins to wonder why the tourists aboard the bus have no cameras, and about the host’s odd turns of phrases, and sets off to research this writer on his own. What he learns helps him resolve his dilemma about his new job. The story is both a nifty science fictional mystery as well as a tribute to Jack Williamson through his life and his ideas.

Michael Stearns’ A Nightmare’s Dozen is a Young Adult anthology of fourteen horror stories, most of which, unsurprisingly, feature youthful protagonists, basic horror themes, and familiar aspects of contemporary life such as absentee parents and nasty teachers. A good example is Nina Kiriki Hoffman’s "Wonder Never Land", about Sarah, her parents, and her pesky brother Bradley all on a trip to the eponymous theme park. Sarah is annoyed that Bradley always seems to get his way, so when the two get stranded inside the Abracadabra Fantasti-Ride, and the ride attendants encourage Bradley to stay inside the mountain with them, Sarah is not particularly concerned. There are some subtleties, like the implication that the parents helped arrange Bradley’s fate, and the creepy suggestion about the origin of a certain class of people.

Also worthwhile are Nancy Springer’s "Yeah, Yeah", in which Jessie feels guilty over the recent death of her brother Jeremy. Now she starts dressing slovenly like him, and encouraging people at school to call her by his name. The predictable occurs, and then more—Jeremy somehow appears and starts taking over for real. In Jane Yolen’s "Bolundeers" a sibling tease about "volunteers" in a compost heap (that is, vegetables that grow from discarded seeds) grows into a bogeyman fear in a young boy, whose rash reaction triggers an unexpected resolution to the family’s crisis over the father’s death.

The best story in the book is Martha Soukup’s "Alita in the Air", which has a particularly intriguing setup. Alita is a young girl flying to Arizona to spend the summer with her Uncle Roy, whom she dislikes. When she disembarks at the airport, she pulls a prank and exclaims that the man meeting her isn’t her uncle at all. The flustered airport personnel send Uncle Roy away, and put Alita back on the plane home. Then, worried over her mother’s reaction to her prank, Alita pulls the same prank again on her mother. From there the story slides gently in Twilight Zone land and Alita’s fate leads to an insight into the secret lives of an anonymous class of service personnel. The story’s effective for young adults not because it puts the youthful character in a position of vulnerability, but by creating a situation where only a young person would get herself into trouble the way she does.