Scan barcode
urikastov's review
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.0
reasie's review against another edition
4.0
So much thought-provoking in this slender volume and not always for the reasons expected. The introduction and the afterward - decrying the lack of originality in the state of SF at the time - give once a sense of time-travel. ("Perhaps the editor of the 2000 AD Nebula anthology has not been born yet!" they decry after declaring boldly that the Nebula Award will last that long. I had to look it up - Gregory Benford, editor of the 2000 Nebula Award Showcase, was born in 1941. Sorry guys.)
Still, these are the names I grew up reading, and it felt a bit like returning to old friends. I got a little choked up when the last story, by editor Brian W. Aldiss, is prefaced with a note that the rest of the editorial staff snuck it in behind his back. OMG BESTIES ALL THE FEELS
ahem. Now let's talk about the stories themselves:
The Secret Place by Richard McKenna - 1966 Nebula for short story - as a Geology major its dense passages of Geologic jargon appealed, though those of other persuasions may find their eyes glazing over. Ostensibly a romance, the manic pixie dream girl heroine (an early prototype thereof) has so little agency and the author so little appreciation for her inner life that it feels like she could have been replaced with a lamp, or I suppose a journal the main character could refer to and carry around. He's downright rapey toward her and her response is to fall madly into his arms. Gripe.
Oh, and, like, she can see the landscape as it was a geologic age ago while in some trance state but he really loves her when she doesn't know where she is or who he is... and she dutifully has a son and it is the narrator's concern for how this affects his male offspring that bookends the story. Comma patriarchy.
Light of Other Days by Bob Shaw - this one stood the test of time in all but one minor aspect. It's SF conceit is charming: "Slow Glass" which slows the passage of light so that a pane can be set up in a field for ten years and then for the ten years after put in a city apartment to show the very real view of that field for the next ten years. (The story does not go into the recycling industry with pane after pane of ugly alleyway views overlooking Loch Lomond.) The tech story is perfectly meshed with a very touching human story - the inevitable passage of time and taking ones family for granted. It's a little corny, but I was in just the right mood to get all sniffly for it.
Now here's the part that doesn't stand the test of time. It involves gender roles. Surprised?
The main tension in the story is between the main character and his wife. They have just learned that she is pregnant and now they are under financial strain because she MUST LOSE HER JOB, and as he is a poet, she was the primary breadwinner. Yeah. You have a hovercar, dude, and slow glass - I think we can invent stay-at-home dads now.
Who Needs Insurance? By Robin S. Scott - a military adventure that starts with bombing runs over Romania that land in Benghazi and then skips to Vietnam, it set my dramatic-irony-time-awareness tingling. Especially ironic when there is a time-traveler in the story, who is a guardian angel for the main character, guiding his unlikely survival. Scott did guess right that we'd slang the heck out of our to be verbs, I guess. Some amusingly odd details, lots of smoking, computers that think things through just by having them typed in (another prototype cliche!) and a computer-gal who is smoking hot, young, and shockingly single. (Manic Pixie Dream Girl number two and it's only story number three!) Yeah, she's only plot significant because she has a womb.
Among the Hairy Earthmen by R. A. Lafferty - Super powerful alien children are responsible for Earth's medieval wars while adhering strictly to gender roles. Really. Wasn't this a Star Trek episode?
The Last Castle by Jack Vance - winner Nebula for best Novela - Manages this neat trick of having the main characters be utterly despicable yet you're still rooting for them. Sorta. Enough to keep reading. Mankind has become a hideously exploitative, corrupt slave-owning race, where picking up a tool is beneath 'gentlemanly' standards. (And gender roles are super super conformed to in a medieval way because even with all this technology and no work to do women apparently can't do anything but host parties. cough.) I really liked the description of the alien race, the Meks. They were super cool.
Day Million by Frederick Pohl - I'd read before, and it's a bit slight and flippant, but it is notable for having a transgender main character in a romantic role. In 1966. Go Fred.
When I Was Miss Dow by Sonya Dorman - the preface to this story insultingly reads "all of the capable female writers of science fiction can be counted on one truncated hand". *teeth gnashing* This story is quite complicated and involves a sexless alien race who can transform into humans and who seem to mostly pick human female forms so that they may infiltrate human society via flirting. Despite being written by a woman our alien can't help but fall in love with her human contact. It gets confusing, but in the end I guess it's all just about aliens being alien, yo.
Call Him Lord by Gordon R. Dickson - Nebula winner for best Novellete - There's a female character at the beginning just to fall in the hero's arms and beg him not to risk his life for the next 80 pages, even if it IS his job and the universe is depending on him. There follows a very cowboy-feeling story of a far future in which Earth is a sort of humanitarium/ nature preserve, where humanity is free to live as the 1800s intended. It's gritty and tough and there's a bar fight and a hard lesson for a man to learn from another man and aw okay I really liked it.
In the Imagicon by George Henry Smith - manages to be the most offensive portrayal of women in the whole book! Well done, Smith. Saw the twist a mile away, not to spoil it for you - okay I'll spoil it - it's "Mudd's Women" done in reverse. Subservient, servile sex kittens are just sooo boring if you don't have an artificially created shrew wife to escape to now and then.
We Can Remember It for You Wholesale - by Philip K. Dick - the classic story "Total Recall" was based on. Only this Douglas Quail is a mild-mannered clerk to start, and after the whole 'what do you mean I'm really a secret agent?' there's a second 'what do you mean I'm really?' Oh, and what problem DOES Dick have with wives? I swear every Dick story I read has the same wife who is portrayed unsympathetically and then leaves. Though unlike in the movie versions, our hero doesn't get a compensatory girlfriend. (Favorite Outdated Gender Norms Moment: hero thinking about how his wife has never done a thing for him as she is putting away the groceries she just bought. and is putting away. prior to cooking. for him. Get it?)
Man In His Time by Brian W. Aldiss - aaaaw this one gets women right. Way to go, Aldi! His female MC has a rich inner life, yearns for physical intimacy with her husband, and suffers lots of misogynistic asides from this creep doctor. And for once I get the feeling the author knows the creep is being a creep and wants us to think so, too. Unlike other stories where being a creep was, you know 'being the hero'. The SF premise is a bit janky, but I like how he explores it - her husband, having been the first man to return from Mars, finds himself exactly 3.077 minutes off from the rest of time. He sees and hears everything before it happens. Conversations are difficult.
Still, these are the names I grew up reading, and it felt a bit like returning to old friends. I got a little choked up when the last story, by editor Brian W. Aldiss, is prefaced with a note that the rest of the editorial staff snuck it in behind his back. OMG BESTIES ALL THE FEELS
ahem. Now let's talk about the stories themselves:
The Secret Place by Richard McKenna - 1966 Nebula for short story - as a Geology major its dense passages of Geologic jargon appealed, though those of other persuasions may find their eyes glazing over. Ostensibly a romance, the manic pixie dream girl heroine (an early prototype thereof) has so little agency and the author so little appreciation for her inner life that it feels like she could have been replaced with a lamp, or I suppose a journal the main character could refer to and carry around. He's downright rapey toward her and her response is to fall madly into his arms. Gripe.
Oh, and, like, she can see the landscape as it was a geologic age ago while in some trance state but he really loves her when she doesn't know where she is or who he is... and she dutifully has a son and it is the narrator's concern for how this affects his male offspring that bookends the story. Comma patriarchy.
Light of Other Days by Bob Shaw - this one stood the test of time in all but one minor aspect. It's SF conceit is charming: "Slow Glass" which slows the passage of light so that a pane can be set up in a field for ten years and then for the ten years after put in a city apartment to show the very real view of that field for the next ten years. (The story does not go into the recycling industry with pane after pane of ugly alleyway views overlooking Loch Lomond.) The tech story is perfectly meshed with a very touching human story - the inevitable passage of time and taking ones family for granted. It's a little corny, but I was in just the right mood to get all sniffly for it.
Now here's the part that doesn't stand the test of time. It involves gender roles. Surprised?
The main tension in the story is between the main character and his wife. They have just learned that she is pregnant and now they are under financial strain because she MUST LOSE HER JOB, and as he is a poet, she was the primary breadwinner. Yeah. You have a hovercar, dude, and slow glass - I think we can invent stay-at-home dads now.
Who Needs Insurance? By Robin S. Scott - a military adventure that starts with bombing runs over Romania that land in Benghazi and then skips to Vietnam, it set my dramatic-irony-time-awareness tingling. Especially ironic when there is a time-traveler in the story, who is a guardian angel for the main character, guiding his unlikely survival. Scott did guess right that we'd slang the heck out of our to be verbs, I guess. Some amusingly odd details, lots of smoking, computers that think things through just by having them typed in (another prototype cliche!) and a computer-gal who is smoking hot, young, and shockingly single. (Manic Pixie Dream Girl number two and it's only story number three!) Yeah, she's only plot significant because she has a womb.
Among the Hairy Earthmen by R. A. Lafferty - Super powerful alien children are responsible for Earth's medieval wars while adhering strictly to gender roles. Really. Wasn't this a Star Trek episode?
The Last Castle by Jack Vance - winner Nebula for best Novela - Manages this neat trick of having the main characters be utterly despicable yet you're still rooting for them. Sorta. Enough to keep reading. Mankind has become a hideously exploitative, corrupt slave-owning race, where picking up a tool is beneath 'gentlemanly' standards. (And gender roles are super super conformed to in a medieval way because even with all this technology and no work to do women apparently can't do anything but host parties. cough.) I really liked the description of the alien race, the Meks. They were super cool.
Day Million by Frederick Pohl - I'd read before, and it's a bit slight and flippant, but it is notable for having a transgender main character in a romantic role. In 1966. Go Fred.
When I Was Miss Dow by Sonya Dorman - the preface to this story insultingly reads "all of the capable female writers of science fiction can be counted on one truncated hand". *teeth gnashing* This story is quite complicated and involves a sexless alien race who can transform into humans and who seem to mostly pick human female forms so that they may infiltrate human society via flirting. Despite being written by a woman our alien can't help but fall in love with her human contact. It gets confusing, but in the end I guess it's all just about aliens being alien, yo.
Call Him Lord by Gordon R. Dickson - Nebula winner for best Novellete - There's a female character at the beginning just to fall in the hero's arms and beg him not to risk his life for the next 80 pages, even if it IS his job and the universe is depending on him. There follows a very cowboy-feeling story of a far future in which Earth is a sort of humanitarium/ nature preserve, where humanity is free to live as the 1800s intended. It's gritty and tough and there's a bar fight and a hard lesson for a man to learn from another man and aw okay I really liked it.
In the Imagicon by George Henry Smith - manages to be the most offensive portrayal of women in the whole book! Well done, Smith. Saw the twist a mile away, not to spoil it for you - okay I'll spoil it - it's "Mudd's Women" done in reverse. Subservient, servile sex kittens are just sooo boring if you don't have an artificially created shrew wife to escape to now and then.
We Can Remember It for You Wholesale - by Philip K. Dick - the classic story "Total Recall" was based on. Only this Douglas Quail is a mild-mannered clerk to start, and after the whole 'what do you mean I'm really a secret agent?' there's a second 'what do you mean I'm really?' Oh, and what problem DOES Dick have with wives? I swear every Dick story I read has the same wife who is portrayed unsympathetically and then leaves. Though unlike in the movie versions, our hero doesn't get a compensatory girlfriend. (Favorite Outdated Gender Norms Moment: hero thinking about how his wife has never done a thing for him as she is putting away the groceries she just bought. and is putting away. prior to cooking. for him. Get it?)
Man In His Time by Brian W. Aldiss - aaaaw this one gets women right. Way to go, Aldi! His female MC has a rich inner life, yearns for physical intimacy with her husband, and suffers lots of misogynistic asides from this creep doctor. And for once I get the feeling the author knows the creep is being a creep and wants us to think so, too. Unlike other stories where being a creep was, you know 'being the hero'. The SF premise is a bit janky, but I like how he explores it - her husband, having been the first man to return from Mars, finds himself exactly 3.077 minutes off from the rest of time. He sees and hears everything before it happens. Conversations are difficult.
More...