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A review by gengelcox
Robert Silverberg's Worlds Of Wonder by Robert Silverberg, Terry Pastor
4.0
“Four in One,” Damon Knight — There’s a bit of info dump early on in this story that almost throws you out. Almost. The 1950s SF was filled with infodump, but, as Silverberg points out in his afterword, some writers could get away with it—as long as they had sufficiently hooked you before going into it. Knight does this fairly well, as the beginning sets up a pretty horrific idea of a man falling into a gelatinous alien creature that has basically consumed his entire body, but leaving his brain, ganglia, and eyes—things that the man can use to control the alien. As Silverberg mentioned early, it’s a classic SF plot—the shapeshifting alien—but it works again because Knight approaches it from a new angle. But even more amazing is how the story ends, basically, in one of the hoariest of SF clichés, and instead of feeling duped or tricked or groaning, in this story, it makes sense and is well-earned. The other three characters are a bit cardboardish, while the main scientist character is amazingly calm and even-headed, but, as Silverberg notes, the story works and works well.
“Fondly Fahrenheit,” Alfred Bester — One of the best Bester stories, and most of his stories are great as it is, so this is like the Best of the Best(er). Like much of his work, there’s more going on here than just the plot—Bester plays with narrative structure here, confounding the use of first person, second person, third person in order to help you get into the mindset of the two main characters here. And, like the advertising man he was, he also weaves in a little jingle into the mix. Most critics talk about Bester’s prose being pyrotechnic—if you want to understand what that means, this is your story to find out. Highly recommended.
“No Woman Born,” C. L. Moore — Spoiler alert for what’s to come in case you haven’t read this classic SF story. The premise is simple: beloved dancer, singer, actress Deirdre is caught in a theater fire and dies—but they get to her before braindeath and preserve it, then craft a new body for it to live in. What hubris! What horror! Can the mechanical body get anywhere close to the Deirdre of old? But this is the future, and she was so beloved hundreds of geniuses and artists work to do so, and then there she is. But not quite. Instead of a face, she has something that reminds people of a face, an abstraction of a face. Instead of flesh, she has a metal body that moves with grace and fluidity, but is obviously metal. But instead that, her brain is there, and that’s Deirdre. But will it always remain Deirdre, cut off from humanity, able to see and hear, but not to taste, or smell, or feel? That’s the story in a nutshell, and I encourage you to read it to find out Moore’s conclusion. It’s a rework of the uber-SF story of them all, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, except the creature isn’t one that the world fears, but born from someone they loved, even though this creature’s creator, the artist who led all those others in the assemblage of this body for this brain, fears that they will come to fear and hate her. It’s been some time since I read Frankenstein, and of course the book competes in our memories with the movies and countless poor derivations thereof, but what Moore captures here better than Shelley is the question of what is humanity, years before Philip K. Dick made it his lifework and scores of SF writers pondered the question for the future of AI. While it shows its age somewhat—it probably could have been cut by a few thousand words—it still retains its power a half decade longer, just as Shelley’s work does. Highly recommended.
“Home is the Hunter,” Henry Kuttner — This one didn’t work for me as well as for Robert Silverberg. It’s not that it didn’t work at all, and the reason this story is told in first person makes sense, but the voice of Bellamy, the Hunter, didn’t come across for me. There’s multiple reasons for that, one of them being the mental state that Bellamy is in (answered by the end), but it’s a bit much to get through, even in this short of a story.
“The Monsters,” Robert Sheckley — This story likely wouldn’t get published today based on part of its premise, even though it makes sense in the context, i.e., these are aliens, and what aliens see as right and moral and natural will not be what we see as the same. In fact, what we view as right and moral and natural isn’t the same as what people 100 or 200 years thought. But I suspect an editor today would have Sheckley go for something a bit less misogynistic for his differentiation point. As social satire, this is outstanding even if it is a bit hard to take with our current sensibilities.
"Scanners Live in Vain," Cordwainer Smith — A classic about a group of workers who are being downsized. Unions and management today might take a look at this one. Part of how this story works is that Smith was able to use his main character to empathize with both the workers and how upset they are about their plight being changed by the discovery that would make them obsolete and the non-changed humans and how they would react to the solution voted upon by the Scanners. The funny thing is that I do feel sorry for the oysters, though. Cordwainer Smith wasn't quite as pyrotechnic as Alfred Bester, but his prose is surprising and exciting.
"Hothouse," Brian W. Aldiss — There are some stories that are simply sui generis, amazing achievements in and of themselves. This is one. The endless inventiveness of this world is astounding, and yet with each new vegetation that Aldiss names, you aren’t lost, but get an idea immediately of what danger it poses. And this is a world of danger, incredibly hostile to those last humans striving to live among a plantlife that has taken over everything. A story set in such a far future like this is possibly less realistic and belies its pulp origins at times (I mean, really, traveling from the Earth to the Moon on gossamer threads—that’s a Jules Verne or earlier concept, and yet Aldiss makes it work), it obtains its force by the sheer imagination that holds everything in check. Highly recommended.
"The New Prime," Jack Vance — While this might have worked for Silverberg, I was less than impressed. I’ve bounced off Vance before; he uses more description that I normally care for, and that description can be ornate and flowery, to an amount that just causes my eyes to gloss over. The structure of this story, with its five separate story lines that only come together at the end, frustrated me rather than incited my imagination and curiosity. That said, I did appreciate the ending, although even then, I felt it fairly heavy-handed. And such are the vagaries of taste.
"Colony," Philip K. Dick — I’m a fan of PKD, so it doesn’t come as a surprise that I enjoyed this story. It’s a bit darker than some of his other stuff—as Silverberg rightly ascribes, this is SF horror, not just SF—but it contains the same underlying theme of how we distinguish reality from unreality. In this case, that unreality has an SF expression: a new lifeform that can mimic inanimate objects perfectly…well, perfectly until it tries to kill you, like the microscope where the lens pieces grab the researcher’s throat, or the run that wraps around the feet of the person on it. That said, I do think the ending wasn’t perfect: I can see how the mimic is good, but to mimic the last thing it does is a bit more unrealistic, even if it had been foreshadowed in the mimic of the automobile-like item.
“The Little Black Bag,” C. M. Kornbluth — For what is a classic story — and a very interesting and fun one, for some definitions of fun — the construction of it is somewhat crude and wouldn’t hold up in today’s market, for it relies too much on coincident in its timings. The bag just happens to appear in a doctor’s apartment, for example, someone who could understand, if only somewhat, how it can be used. Similarly, at the end, the technologist turns off the bag just at the moment of its being used in a particular manner. That said, the depiction of these characters—from the alcoholic Dr. Full to the guttersnape blonde who befriends him and his bag—is what really drives the story, as well as provides the motivation that brings it to its conclusion. Read it for what it was, in the 50s, rather than compare it to today’s stories.
“Light of Other Days,” Bob Shaw — This is a lovely story that both introduces a great SF concept and then goes directly to the heart of showing what it could mean to people. While not as surprising today, the emotional arc of the story for the protagonist begins in a very negative space: a couple is unhappy in general and with each other because of an unwanted pregnancy. But that simply sets up the end, however, where their unhappiness is contrasted to the unhappiness of the slow glass seller. The story is simple, but that’s also part of its power. It doesn’t need to be adorned. Anything more would take away from its gut punch.
“Day Million,” Frederik Pohl — There are many stories from SF’s early days that don’t age well, but there are a few stories that get better with age, like this one. Yes, there’s some elements that reflect the time it was written, but the concept, the idea itself? So extremely relevant today. It’s not so much a story, although there’s the most basic story of the world in there, as a thought piece, a challenge, to the reader to consider the changes that have occurred in the 2000 years since the start of the Christian era, not to mention thousands of years before that, and what might change by Day Million. Just one example, Pohl begins the story by saying it’s about a boy, a girl, and a love story, then he says the boy is not a boy, since he is 187-years-old, and the girl is not a girl, because while she’s got XY chromosomes, she also has all the accoutrements we assume someone female would have. “If we find a child with an aptitude for music we give him a scholarship to Juilliard. If they found a child whose aptitudes were for being a woman, they made him one.” Pohl was one of those authors who could imagine the possibilities for change, albeit he had to set it thousands of years in the future, rather than just in the next century. Worthwhile reading.