Distillations: Short Fiction Reviews, July 1977

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

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F&SF 6/97

Asimov’s 8/97

Analog 7-8/97

Free Space, Brad Linaweaver and Edward E. Kramer, eds. (Tor 0-312-85957-0, $23.95, 352pp, hc)

Spec Lit, Issue No. 1 (Phyllis Eisenstein, editor)

The June F&SF is the first issue under new editor Gordon Van Gelder. Since editors generally maintain an inventory of stories bought and waiting to be published, we may assume that stories acquired by previous editor Kristine Kathryn Rusch will still be appearing for some time. On the other hand, new editor Van Gelder might well have deferred material from the previous administration for at least his inaugural issue, making room for stories selected to set the tone for the new reign. This is all speculation, of course. Several of the authors in the June issue have appeared frequently in the magazine before, and the issue shows no dramatic shifts in overall style or balance of content. But the net result, for whatever reason, is that the June issue is an unusually good issue of F&SF.

It starts with Robert Reed’s "Graffiti", set in Riverview, a quiet city whose dark secret is discovered by two high school athletes, Macon Lewis and Eddie Cane. It’s the legacy of an itinerant mystic’s solution to the town’s disreputable past: a wall in the city sewer covered with paintings. The paintings show, in clinical detail, crimes in the acts of commission. The police chief comes down once a day, Macon has learned, to see if any new paintings have appeared; if so, he can see who to apprehend.

A while after this discovery, Macon conceives of a plan to remove his chief rivals in a big cross-town football match. He has Eddie, a skilled artist, create a painting on the sewer wall showing the rival players assaulting an unidentified person. All they intend is a temporary suspicion—since there’s no identifiable victim—but the wall does not work the way they expect it do. The result leaves Eddie mortified and Macon victorious. Years later, Eddie returns to the town and finds that Macon is now police chief, and he's obviously using the magical paintings to manipulate businessmen and destroy enemies. So Eddie decides to bring it all to an end.

This is a strong, well-crafted story that’s good in many small, cumulative ways. The chief strength is that it doesn’t stop when many lesser stories would; it follows the protagonists and the effects of their discovery to the very end. The characters and the plot are functions of each other, not appearing contrived by the author to reach a particular end. And the writing is tight and controlled; the understated flourish of the second to the last paragraph is particularly effective.

Kit Reed’s "Rajmahal" is similarly well crafted. It gives three points of view of a tourist trip to a recently opened monument in India. First is that of Sally, a tourist from Minnesota traveling with her boyfriend Gary; second is Prem Kumar, the manager of the monument; and third is Tamas, one of the nearby villagers who’s angriest about their exploitation by the monument’s owners and the rich foreign tourists. To some extent their perspectives are predictable—the Americans are ignorant and quickly bored—but Reed develops a real story by having Sally and Tamas meet and, at least briefly, fall in love. There’s no fantastic content at all, but the culture clash is a suitable theme for a sf magazine, with its implications for the future of a culture in transition.

M. Shayne Bell’s "Bright, New Skies" is set in a near-future when the ozone layer is gone, species around the world are dying from UV exposure, and people need goggles and protective clothes to go outdoors. Nadya, a scientist from Siberia, has arrived in Manhattan to attend a conference. She’s made a discovery that can stop the blindness in all species, but she’s hesitant about revealing it, first because it would mean changing those species irrevocably, and second because it would make the corporation controlling the discovery wealthy at the expense of those changes. She goes into a shop to replace her own broken goggles, and realizes that the place is a set-up by the very corporation she likes the least. Her anxiety is motivated by memories of her mother’s life in Irkutsk, of how the changes made by the communists were the same kind of forced adaptation that would be imposed upon the species Nadya could now save. The story goes on a bit too long after all its points have been made, and it probably oversimplifies the scientific problem. (Can single species be saved when presumably entire ecosystems are dying?) But it’s quite effective in pondering the idea of forced adaptations in both cultural and scientific contexts. In the way it relates a creeping biological crisis to the lives of individual people, it recalls Bell’s earlier story "With Rain, and a Dog Barking" (F&SF 4/93).

Ron Goulart’s "Why I Never Went Steady with Heather Moon" is about a college senior at Brimstone University, Will Harkins, plagued by demons loosed by Professor Krouch, a rival for Harkins’ girlfriend. Will surrenders, then needs a new date for the fraternity dance. His pal fixes him up with Heather Moon, whose family has an estate in the country. The Moons are Goulart’s version of the Addams Family: mother casts spells; little brother Buddy plays at being invisible; Grandpa Plum floats in a trance above the floor. Will and Heather hit it off—until Krouch strikes again. The comedy is in Goulart’s familiar style, light and quick, with conversational gambits flying off on tangents before being dragged back to the point at hand.

Robin Aurelian’s "Jelly Bones" is also a comedy, though of a more quirkish sort. The narrator is a blob creature named Morty that finds itself in a vat of acid. Fortunately it can melt its bones, and reshape its body, and manages to escape. He learns that he was found by a crime boss, Shilling, and his henchman, Peterson, in the trunk of a mint-green Cadillac. They wanted just to be rid of him, but now Shilling reconsiders Morty’s potential as a bodyguard and puts him in Peterson’s charge. Peterson doesn’t trust Shilling, so he takes Morty and heads for Las Vegas. The story is more a series of funny scenes than a problem with a resolution. Morty is content to discover a meaning of life, of sorts, to make up for the mystery of his origins.

The narrator of Pat MacEwen’s "The Macklin Gift" is 15 year old Will Macklin, who lives with his family near the St. Lawrence river in the year after Prohibition was repealed. His father is big and ugly and brutal, but he has a way with women: he can charm any woman he gets near, and takes advantage of most of them, including his mother-in-law. Will, disgusted by his father’s behavior but unable to leave the family, realizes that he has the same "gift." One night Will and his father, rowing out to a still on a lake island, catch something in the water—a fairy woman. As his dad goes to work on her, Will tries to intervene, realizing that here is the key to the family gift.

MacEwen’s writing is strong and powerful, though the dialect evident in the opening lines ("she’s the one stayed in bed of a morning") doesn’t last. The fairy element, introduced half way through the story, seems at first an unnecessary complication to an already substantial story about the particular problems of this young man’s adolescence; fortunately the author weaves the themes together to bring about a suitably strong conclusion.

Finally, Brian Stableford’s "The Pipes of Pan" is a hard sf tale that reifies a famous fantasy situation, the world of Peter Pan’s immortal children. Cleverly, the scenario is presented as a natural solution to a familiar science fictional problem: when everyone becomes immortal, how do you prevent the overpopulation that would result if people kept having children? Stop having children? In Stableford’s future the solution is to maintain a world with children by engineering them so they stop growing at a certain age, like 8 or 13.

The viewpoint character is Wendy, who’s come to realize that she’s been 13 years old for about 30 years now—up until the last few months. Both her body and her mind are changing, but she hasn’t told her parents, and is unsure if they’ve noticed or not. She tries to act normally innocent while keeping alert for information about "progeria," the plague that is causing children to start aging. Of course, her parents have noticed, and are trying to pretend that nothing has happened for as long as possible, while debating how to protect their child. Soon the problem is taken out of the family’s hands when officials from the Ministry of Health arrive to take charge.

Stableford as usual thoroughly explores the social and technological implications of his premise. The plague itself is the result of humanity’s perverse tendency toward chaos, he suggests. Wendy’s dreams resonate with images of the goatish pan-pipe player, who’s a million years old and will never grow up. We’re left to wonder if the idea of human immortality is a naïve one that must inevitably give way to something else.

The August Asimov’s includes a good Robert Silverberg story, "Death Do Us Part", that appeared last December on Omni Online and was reviewed then. There’s also Judith Berman’s "Lord Stink", a long fantasy of the sort that leaves me unmoved, one way or the other, positively or negatively. It’s about a king’s daughter who’s kidnapped and forced to live as the wife of a bear.

Among the remaining stories is Michael H. Payne’s "The Language of Ghosts", a complicated story about a human colony on a planet where the native race, the tayshil, lives in symbiosis with creatures called the metin. Apparently in part to mimic the alien hosts, the humans carry rachnoids on their shoulders, robots which serve as companions and translators. Two human teenagers are on a shopping trip in a tayshil village when a disturbance erupts between factions of tayshil. Lynn realizes that when a tayshil isn’t properly killed, its metin lingers on, becoming one of the "ghosts" they’ve heard about but never understood. Lynn’s rachnoid’s ability to translate the metin’s thoughts becomes the key to resolving a crisis between the humans and the tayshils.

Unfortunately, but time I figured all this out, I didn’t care. There didn’t seem to be any problem at the start that this crisis resolved. And the story was irritating for technical reasons. The beginning is needlessly confusing, going on for a couple of pages before it’s clear that "Orel" isn’t a human character like Lynn and Malcolm, but rather a rachnoid, one of the robots. And it goes even longer before we understand why it (Orel) should be talking about eggplants in the first line of the story—and even when that’s clear, it’s still not significant. It can be a good thing to start a story in the middle of the action, as writing guides suggest, but not if the reader can’t figure out what’s going on.

Mary Rosenblum, on the other hand, is good at explicating the intricacies of complex human relationships, as she does in "The Botanist", which also opens with two teenagers. Daniel and Keri have jobs on a tree farm in the Pacific Northwest, tapping bio-trees that produce various genetically engineered biological and chemical substances. They meet a man, Albert, who runs an illicit greenhouse in the woods full of rare plants—plants on "the List" of endangered species. At home Daniel suffers the taunts of his father, a logger perpetually angry over the impact of environmental rules on his industry. Daniel befriends Albert and learns that Albert had a relationship with his mother before she broke it off and married Daniel’s father. Eventually he learns more than he expects about the various members of his family.

The science fiction element is more than incidental, but only slightly so. The theme of adaptation is carried through, similar to the treatment in M. Shayne Bell’s story in F&SF, as a function both of people and of plants. But it’s only a gloss for Rosenblum, not the key as in Bell; as usual Rosenblum’s concerns put her story closer to soap opera than to thoughtful science fiction.

Karen Joy Fowler’s "Standing Room Only" opens on Good Friday, 1865, in Washington D.C. Anna, 17, daughter of boarding house owner Mary Surratt, is excited by the presence in town of actor John Wilkes Booth. She notices a couple strange men at the boarding table who don’t seem to appreciate their meals and who speak strangely, and a similarly strange woman at the play rehearsals later that day. Booth comes by the house that evening and Anna is hurt that he doesn’t even glance in her direction. Later that night she’s drawn out into the commotion in the streets, but she, unlike the reader, still doesn’t know what’s really going on. Fowler casts a keen historical eye on a situation overly familiar to sf readers; only the slightest hint is necessary to suggest the presence of time travelers visiting an important historical event. The naïve viewpoint gives Fowler a fresh perspective and a dramatic way to illustrate the difference between the concerns of history and those of people living their everyday lives.

A historical perspective also underlies Geoffrey A. Landis’s "Winter Fire". It’s set in the early 22^nd century as the city of Salzburg comes under siege. Leah, then a girl of 10 and remembering the events later as an adult, recalls that it started with the fall of the federation of free European states, the rise of the Pan-Slavic unity movement, and the purging of the Orthodox church. The Asians in Salzburg, including Leah’s family, are among the first victims. Leah is taken in by a neighbor, Johann Achtenberg, who becomes her "foster-father." He’s a member of the resistance that keeps the city from being taken, year after year. The city is shelled, bridges and tunnels destroyed, and the world does nothing, not even the orbital sky-cities overhead. Leah learns of Johann’s molecular still, a device for leaching heavy elements from the air, and the means for the continued resistance.

Leah’s tale is a typically harrowing account of war. The focus of Landis’s story isn’t the molecular still or any other bit of technology, it’s the sociopolitical speculation, made all too plausible, that the global culture of the future will not prevent the ethnic conflicts that lead to war.

The July-August double issue of Analog features a long novella by Timothy Zahn, "Starsong", that begins solidly as Jake Smith, the captain of an interstellar transport, greets a new passenger, scholar Andrula Kulasawa. Shortly after the ship is underway Kulasawa offers to buy out the whole trip if Jake will help her reach Freedom’s Peace, one of five ark ships launched 130 years before from the Jovian colonies and only now rediscovered. She convinces him that her university will back up this secret mission to reach the ark before anyone else. Jake and his crew agree, and change course.

Zahn has one extravagant premise alluded to by the title. Spaceships achieve FTL travel with the assistance of "flapblacks," huge creatures of interstellar space who are stimulated by human music. When the ship plays music, the flapblacks attracted by the particular style played (classical, baroque, romantic, etc.—a rather simplistic, Eurocentric classification, actually) wrap themselves around the ship and propel it at hyperlight speeds in the direction the ship was pointed. Each ship carries a "musicmaster" in the crew whose duty is to program a selection of music of the appropriate style and length for the ship’s itinerary.

When Jake and his crew reach the ark, a hollowed-out asteroid, the ark contacts them via radio before they contact it. It’s at this point that Zahn’s story goes awry: Freedom’s Peace greets its visitors as if it has guest ships docking every day, not as if it has been out of contact with the rest of humanity for 130 years—and Jake’s crew and passenger don’t think anything of it. Following scenes are increasingly contrived and stagy, resembling corny situations from old Star Trek episodes. There’s even a scene in which the "king" of the asteroid tells Jake "You can’t leave, my friends. I’m afraid you’re going to have to stay with us for the rest of your lives." Predictably, the scholar is revealed as someone with more dastardly motives than mere knowledge, while the ark’s inhabitant’s relationship with the flapblacks (there had to be one) becomes the key to saving the day.

Bud Sparhawk’s "Sam Boone’s Dry Run" also plows interstellar space, and though it’s more extravagant than Zahn’s story, it’s not as insulting because it doesn’t expect to be taken seriously. Boone, an "itinerant investigator," is sent by his agent to handle a minor problem on the planet Bingnagia. En route he deals with a flatulent ox-like creature in his cabin, a scaly alien wearing orange tennis shoes named Dratte Five, and an autochef that can’t prepare anything remotely edible. Once on Bingnagia he deals with a territorial dispute and finds himself framed for murder. The murder mystery is no subtler than the story’s humor (it’s obvious what happened to Dratte aboard the freighter), but it’s all concluded in a reasonably clever manner.

Other stories in the issue stay closer to home, several considering the application of technology to familiar social problems. Walter F. Cuirle’s "Billy’s Bunter" concerns a third grader who’s reprimanded by his teacher for being a "disruptive influence" when he gives an imaginative, overly-correct answer to a classroom problem. His concerned father ponders the influence of a socially conservative society on the school system, which seems to encourage conformity above all else. Meanwhile Billy’s older brother Jim is developing an automated assistant that monitors a person’s activities and records phone numbers, addresses, names, and so on, and has limited interactive speech capabilities as well. Jim sets one up to respond to Billy, naming the device "Bunter" after a famous butler. As Billy’s father becomes more frustrated with his options in dealing with the schools, he hits upon the companion "Bunter" devices as a solution. The end of the story suggests that a bright new era of educational reform is about to dawn.

Of course, the story does not convince, mostly because we know that social problems such as the one depicted are not so easily solved, by simple technological fixes or by any other simple solutions. Writers with optimistic technological perspectives—who frequently appear in Analog—make their fictional tasks very difficult for themselves by addressing problems in this way. In Cuirle’s case the problem he poses is obscured and exacerbated by the conservative social influences he describes, but at root it’s nothing more than age-old difficulty of how a single teacher fairly addresses the individual needs of many different students. And the proposed solution, setting aside the considerable achievement in AI that it presumes, boils down to setting up a custom tutor for each student that’s ideally suited to the student’s need. Who could argue with that? The approach of Brian Plante’s "Already in Heaven" is the flip side of the approach of stories like Cuirle’s. Plante looks at the effects of a technological solution in one particular case, as it affects one particular individual. The technology is a computerized church confessional, actually an AI modeling of the late Father Thomas Carpenter. Among the confessions it hears every week are those of a serial arsonist, once an altar boy at the church. The confessional tries to convince the man to turn himself in, but it is bound, of course, not to betray any confidences of the booth. The action it finally takes would not be possible of a human priest, but the story suggests, is possible of a computer replacement. Plante leaves for the reader to judge whether the computer’s possible culpability is comparable to a human being's.

Jerry Oltion’s "The Space Program" is a good example of the yearning to rebuild an active manned space exploration program that is regularly expressed in the pages of Analog. (The same theme drives the author’s "Abandon in Place", from F&SF last year and on this year’s Hugo ballot.) Sometimes this yearning seems to befuddle otherwise routine critical capabilities. In this story an inventor approaches a candidate for governor of Wyoming with a computer program and database that can forecast sales, and by extension, anything else that might be needed to help win elections. Soon Wyoming is the site of a heavy launch facility, the candidate is running for president, and an O’Neill colony is being built in orbit. But wait! How could such a database possibly forecast so precisely? And if it existed, what other things might it be used for? Alas, the story gives only perfunctory attention to such details, more interested in the "program" as a rhetorical device for showing that a space program is the key to economic prosperity, just as we always wanted to believe.

The same attitude is even more nakedly apparent—almost irrationally so—in David J. Strumfels’s "Payoff". Larry Kraus, head of the Department of Energy, is approached by an old girlfriend, now working for NASA, with an amazing discovery—something NASA has found on Mars has turned out to be the key to cold fusion. She demonstrates with a crystal globe that spins madly when a drop of water is put on top. But NASA can’t go public with the discovery, she says; instead she wants him to divert the soon-to-be-surplus DOE funds through various international fronts to help restart the space program, to make it into what it needs to be to finally pay off. She’s quite serious, and though Kraus is skeptical at first, she persuades him with memories of a night they spent beneath the stars.

The leap of illogic is breathtaking. A simple reality check might suggest that, if something discovered on Mars were the key to cheap power, the announcement itself would be all that’s needed to re-energize the space program—in order to find out what other marvels might lie out there.

But what’s especially disappointing in this story is the short shrift given to the protocols of doing science—you’d think stories in Analog, if anyplace, would be more savvy and less susceptible to simplistic myths about scientists "ahead of their time" being ignored by a cruel, heartless, unfair world. The story claims that NASA can’t go public with cold fusion because of the brush-off given Pons and Fleischmann. In fact, the world did pay them attention—it just couldn’t reliably reproduce their results. If results are now reliable, as the story states, there’s every reason they should go public. That’s how science works.

In contrast, Rick Shelley’s "Safari" captures a scientific investigation that is more modest in scale but more realistic. It starts when a woman from a Chicago ghetto contacts Professor Griffin at the University of Chicago about a strange mouse she’s caught in her house, a mouse with an elongated, elephant-like nose. With only one partially decomposed specimen to go on, Griffin and a couple grad students mount an expedition into the woman’s house to capture, on videotape and in traps, some more of the mice. The irony of the title is not just the urban setting, but the different kind of danger they face in that setting. The threat from gang members lurking on the street sets up a surprising conclusion.

Robert R. Chase’s "Clamoring Voices" is the least-typical Analog story in the issue. Norm wakes up in bed next to a woman he doesn’t recognize. An AI doctor convinces him he’s a successful composer with memory problems. He’s summoned to the theater where his Richard IV, an opera about Richard Nixon, is being staged, but the company says they didn’t summon him. Assassins attack and Norm finds himself possessing god-like powers. It’s all refreshingly different from the staid tone of the surrounding stories, but it’s also a case in which a little more cohesion might have been called for.

Last but not least, Jeffery D. Kooistra’s Probability Zero segment, "The Worry Wart", a pert satire on government programs designed to address social problems without actually doing anything to solve them.

Brad Linaweaver and Edward E. Kramer’s anthology Free Space is a libertarian mosaic anthology. The stories follow a consistent timeline going 300 years into the future, beginning in the recent past (1975), as humanity expands into interstellar space in a three-way split between an Earth-based Federation, libertarian Free Spacers, and habitat-based Jeffersonians, or Jeffies. Many of the authors—the initial set of invitees—are winners of the Prometheus Award of the Libertarian Futurist society.

The stories don’t recount this history so much as illuminate it from various angles, often obliquely. Gregory Benford’s "Early Bird" is actually a reprint of an Analog story from a couple years ago, "A Worm in the Well", about capturing a wormhole in the atmosphere of the sun. Its relevance to the anthology is apparently to establish the mode of interstellar travel, something that, like most of the other technological underpinnings of the future history, might have been done offhand more directly relevant to the political theme of the anthology. (But it’s a good story anyway, on its own terms.)

The oddest piece in the book is a fragment (even vignette would be an overstatement) by William F. Buckley, Jr., the first piece in the book, called "Crisis in Space". Set in 1975, it recounts a Soviet defection during the Apollo-Soyuz mission. Somehow I suspect the story of how Buckley came to write it would be more interesting than the story itself, but that background is not given. (Nor is any copyright information, in the galleys copy I have; perhaps it’s a reprint.)

Dafydd ab Hugh’s "Nerfworld" is virtually a rewrite of a familiar Analog theme of recent years: the drive to get private industry space launch capability going, despite the US government. In ab Hugh’s version Janna Wylie, the head of a laser-launch vehicle project, is stymied by government committees afraid of the possibility of failure. Janna is not a very nice person, contemptuous of anything standing in her way: she can’t be bothered to get the committee members’ names straight; she has no patience for cab drivers with no vowels in their names. She defies the government, she fails, but then she wins in the long run. Of course.

J. Neil Schulman’s "Day of Atonement" describes the mission of an operative from the Jeffersonian space habitat to sabotage a Hebrew fundamentalist state on Earth. Brad Linaweaver’s "No Market for Justice" is a monologue by one of the founders of the Jeffersonian habitat Monticello as he resigns his citizenship, convinced that the habitat is going the same bad way that Earth did before it. This is the most overtly political piece in the book—more a lecture about the principals of libertarianism than a story.

The first piece in the book that does work well as a story as William F. Wu’s "Kwan Tingui". It describes a meeting aboard the orbital cylinder Zhang-E between a visitor from Earth, Kwan Douhak, and an elderly woman leader of the habitat, Kwan Tingui. They have tea and spar conversationally. The Earth man is looking for a long lost sister, and believes Kwan Tingui may be her; but the woman denies it, denies ever having parents or having lived anywhere besides the habitat. Elegantly and subtly, the story suggests that complete freedom may require a drastic price.

James P. Hogan’s "Madam Butterfly" is a cleverly constructed piece that involves ice mining ships in the outer solar system, the threat of Federation spies, and a mother’s concern on Earth for her son far out in space. Linking them together is a for-want-of-a-nail sequence of events that begins with the mother, a janitor in a Tokyo office building, transplanting a lonely flower from the parking lot to an empty office, and ends with a sheared bolt triggering a dramatic collision involving an ice cargo. Without being overtly political the story suggests how history gets made, and keeps in mind the personal emotions involved.

Poul Anderson’s "Tyranny" addresses the broad theme of its title without being directly connected to the Free Space future history at all. The story opens with five men climbing a mountaintop on the planet Jacob. They plan to blow up a fusion reactor and wreck the tyranny of the computer, Cyberon, which partially runs the planet’s government. Each of them tells his story of oppression. One was denied a grant for a expensive science project (Cyberon controls government spending); another is angry the government would not rescue his sister, who became a drug addict—of her own free will—in a place called Stinktown. It’s soon apparent where Anderson is heading, not just from the nature of these tales, but because the overall story would be too simplistic to be merely about an oppressive machine. The culmination is a persuasive lesson in the tradeoff between selfishness and self-restraint necessary for true liberty.

Anderson’s is the exception to the general rule that the overtly political pieces in the book are the least interesting as stories. Victor Koman’s "Demokratus" tells about a free trader, weary of having to be so responsible for his life, who decides to banish himself to the next planet his ship passes by. Once there he discovers an absurdist society in which everyone votes on absolutely everything, including what to have for breakfast. The story has some Sheckley-esque moments of wicked satire, but it’s never convincing even on its own terms for a moment. And the story takes too long getting the guy down to the planet.

L. Neil Smith’s "A Matter of Certainty" does have a bizarre alien race going for it. The aliens have four limbs, each ending with a face and a facelid covering a central mouth. This race has been warring with a neighboring race for ages. Now it receives a human who’s come to tell them how to bring about peace. The first contact scenes, and a subplot about one of the aliens dying, are handled with considerable imagination. But the sermon on avoiding war is distressingly academic and philosophical; there’s no attempt to suggest how to put the lesson into practice.

Robert J. Sawyer’s "The Hand You’re Dealt" is only obliquely concerned with the anthology’s theme; Sawyer takes the notion of a utopian habitat and takes off at right angles with it. Toby Korsakov is a private cop in a society where crime is rare—especially a murder, such as he is summoned to investigate. One of the few laws in this society is that everyone has two soothsayings—that is, readings of their genetic propensities—in their lives, once at birth, the other at age 18. A soothsayer’s murder involves evidence pointing to the victim’s brother, a nephew who just had a soothsaying done by a different soothsayer, and a household inhabited by four that contains traces of only two kinds of DNA. The solution is clever, perhaps too clever—the timing of relationship between the two brothers is pretty complex—but the story is an imaginative exploration of the consequences of genetic knowledge in an almost unrestricted society.

Like Anderson’s story, Arthur Byron Cover’s "The Performance of a Lifetime" addresses a larger theme, in this case free will, without directly tracing the development of the book’s future history. The story is about the trial of a notorious criminal, Harry C. Barbusse, who confesses to a series of terrorist attacks against Free Space habitats, attacks in the form of bizarre plagues that kill thousands. His defense: it was performance art, designed to demonstrate that a good man with free will will not necessarily choose to do good. Cover displays mordant wit in the grotesquely ironic natures of the plagues that befall habitats of various philosophical persuasions, and in Barbusse’s final attack that forms the climax of the story.

The book ends with the two least typical stories. Jared Lobdell’s "The Last Holosong of Christopher Lightning" is explicitly inspired by the work of Cordwainer Smith. It tells about two Jeffie commanders whose exploits have become the subjects of songs and myths, and their subordinate Christopher Lightning, and their battles over the concepts of free will and common sense. The flamboyant style is so effective a rendition of Smith’s that the connection to the book’s future history is obscured.

John Barnes’s "Between Shepherds and Kings", aptly described by the editors as Malzbergian, is a present tense story about a writer named Ray who’s been invited to contribute to the Free Space anthology. But he’s put off starting it, more concerned about drinking beer, a girlfriend he doesn’t love, and talking to his mother on the phone. When his friends Dafydd and Brad stop over one afternoon, he thinks on his feet about the story he will write. He considers the three [Heinleinian] types of stories and the necessity for putting a UMWAM, a usual muscular white American male, in the story as a shield between the reader and the vast void. As he examines the implications of capitalism and privateers and FTL, Ray (or rather Barnes) comes dangerously close to undermining the plausibility of the entire future history—and much other standard interstellar sf as well. It’s a sly metafictional commentary on the book’s themes, and a courageous way for the editors to end their book.

Spec Lit is a literary journal published by Columbia College Chicago, where editor Phyllis Eisenstein has taught a course in science fiction writing for the past seven years. The stories are by her students (except for two reprints by Gene Wolfe and Algis Budrys, previous instructors at the college), almost all unknowns in the sf field. The intriguing point made by Eisenstein in her introduction is that most of her students, even those who turn out stories as good as many stories published in the professional sf magazines, never pursue professional publication themselves; instead their stories go into dark drawers at the end of the semester. This journal is the mode for bringing such stories into the light of day.

Eisenstein’s claims for the quality of the stories are generally fulfilled. The stories are at least as good as those appearing in the annual Writers of the Future volumes, and several would not be out of place in the old Clarion anthologies. Despite the alarming news we hear about the writing skills of college students, most of these stories are quite well written. The worst one can say about most of them is that their authors are unfamiliar with the extent their themes are already overworked.

The opening story, Sam Weller’s "Chief", is about Vic, a New Mexico resident in 1946, who picks up a hitchhiking alien along the highway. Everyone in the area knows about aliens; Vic and his buddies swap alien stories at the bar. The hitchhiker has a cauliflower head and is scared. It has an accident in Vic’s truck. Once home, Vic cleans it up and puts it to bed. Then in the morning Vic’s dog is missing, and so is the neighbor’s son. Vic’s patience soon wears thin. The hick-dialogue is a bit heavy-handed, and I didn’t believe the alien as described could eat as much as we’re told, but neither objection is a serious one for the type of tall tale this story made out to be.

Tom Traub’s "Dr. Max Gets His Questions Asked" is about a virtual reality program debugger who becomes obsessed with questions about the nature of reality. These questions are pretty sophomoric—if that’s not an unfair comment about a story written by someone who was probably not far beyond sophomore himself; the issues are passe in the sf field by now.

Similarly Don Franke’s "The Orbs", about huge alien ships that descend to Earth, and J. T. Monahan’s "Spukknapped!", about a toy store worker kidnapped as an alien child’s science project, both concern groaningly familiar sf situations. Franke’s story is redeemed by a dramatic character confrontation that ends in betrayal, while Monahan develops some amusing interplay between the worker and her dweebish Star-Trek-fan coworker.

"Rough Beast" is by William McMahon, the one writer with some credits given for other activity in the sf field—he was a recent runner-up for the Asimov’s Undergraduate Writing Award, among other things. This story is about, we’re told in the first sentence, the end of the world. It describes a man coming home to his apartment and stripping off the reeking protective suit he wears to plumb a reclamation pit full of mutagens and noxious chemicals. As he and his wife make love and settle in for the night, the residues from his suit mix with other household garbage and come to life—like Theodore Sturgeon’s "It". Then the entity moves out through the infrastructure of the world and rouses Gaia, the mother entity of the world. The mystical nature of the premise is grounded in McMahon’s detailed, specific prose.

My favorite piece in the volume is George Alan’s "Fugue", a story with an icy cyberpunkish sheen. The setup verges on cliché but proves well justified: a man wakes up in a luxurious but unfamiliar hotel room next to an unfamiliar woman. They remember their names, Tyler and Rebecca, and they find themselves in a resort at Biarritz, on the French Atlantic coast, gradually triggering each other’s memories. They are both part of the Program, former criminals now under the control of some secret organization, their memories of their activities as terrorists or assassins blotted out. Alan explores their situation, follows their attempts to escape and their submission to their duties, and finally shows them devising a way to retain records of their activities to serve as pseudo-memories for their future selves. The story is a bit overwritten in places, with too many intrusive typographical interruptions, but is overall smooth, imaginative, and professional. It justifies Eisenstein’s motive for putting out this volume--and makes us regret that Alan, who’s now a "middle-manager for the Hilton Corporation" has not further pursued writing sf.