Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year by Lester del Rey

[james_davis_nicoll]

Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year (Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, volume 1) by Lester del Rey

Comments

[james_davis_nicoll]

This caught my eye: "Publishers Weekly, in its annual report, listed 195 new s-f books and 109 reprints for 1971, for a total of 304 books labelled and marketed as science fiction."

[(Anonymous)]

My slog through Technic History stalled out once it became clear that Dominic Flandry was not going to be killed and fed to pigs anytime soon, and I had to resort to reference materials to tell if I had read that story or not. There are tables in Little Black Books that are more memorable than most Anderson.

[(Anonymous)]

Here is the table of contents for Donald A. Wollheim's
best of the year anthology for the same year:

"The Fourth Profession" by Larry Niven
"Gleepsite" by Joanna Russ
"The Bear with the Knot On His Tail" by Stephen Tall
"The Sharks of Pentreath" by Michael G. Coney
"A Little Knowledge" by Poul Anderson
"Real-Time World" by Christopher Priest
"All Pieces of a River Shore" by R.A. Lafferty
"With Friends Like These ..." by Alan Dean Foster
"Aunt Jennies's Tonic" by Leonard Tushnet
"Timestorm" by Eddy C. Bertin
"Transit of Earth" by Arthur C. Clarke
"Gehenna" by Barry N. Malzberg
"One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty" by Harlan Ellison
"Occam's Scalpel" by Theodore Sturgeon

-Joe

[(Anonymous)]

And the table of contents from Terry Carr's
best of the year anthology for the same year:

"Occam's Scalpel" by Theodore Sturgeon
"The Queen of Air and Darkness" by Poul Anderson
"In Entropy's Jaws" by Robert Silverberg
"The Sliced-Crosswise Only-on-Tuesday World" by Philip Jose Farmer
"A Meeting With Medusa" by Arthur C. Clarke
"The Frayed String on the Stretched Forefinger of Time" by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.
"How Can We Sink When We Can Fly?" by Alexei Panshin
"No Direction Home" by Norman Spinrad
"Vaster Than Empires and More Slow" by Ursula K. Le Guin
"All the Last Wars At Once" by George Alec Effinger
"The Fourth Profession" by Larry Niven

-Joe

[(Anonymous)]

I've seen that cover art used on an edition of Niven's Protector

https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-g-pFKFg2SRs/W18S7x4gW1I/AAAAAAAAQvM/8qPgUbkT_0gIB7xxPket4_rhmg8h_e10ACLcBGAs/s1600/Niven%2BProtector%2B4.JPG

[ba_munronoe]

Well, it's a cover, alright.

[jsburbidge]

It was indeed; my replacement copy, bought in the UK -- it replaced the original Ballantine edition -- had that cover art. It always puzzled me, as the Pak clearly looked nothing like that (wings? multiple eyes on stalks?). If it was some form of generic SFNal cover art being reused that makes more sense.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you!

[connactic]

Why did you stop reviewing Silverberg? Did he do something recently?

[(Anonymous)]

James has stated that he can't provide an objective review of Silverberg- dating (I think) to Silverbob's comments about NKJ's acceptance speech.

[connactic]

ah, yeah, I missed that particular moment in asshattery.

[chrysostom]

My understanding is that it's less "can't objectively review" and more "don't want to deal with a writer who is an asshat AND is still alive." You'll note that various dead assholes - Garrett, for example - have been reviewed lately.

[supergee]

Lester del Rey leaving out Orbit stories is unsurprising. There was a war between the del Reys and Orbit that led to No Award getting the Novella award and Isaac Asimov famously announcing it wrong at the Nebula banquet. In retrospect they represent the two opposite answers to what was wrong with 70s sf.

[(Anonymous)]

I remember reading the Dayworld novel as a teenager and thinking it was really, really stupid.

--
Nathan H.

[chrysostom]

The first one was a reasonably entertaining exploration of a nutball idea. The second and third were lousy.