The Science Fiction Book Club Reviews Revisited: 1967

[james_davis_nicoll]

List and price comment courtesy of Andrew Wheeler

1967 -- when the standard club price went from $1.00 to an amazing $1.49!

1967 was a very important year up here in Canada:

January EARTHBLOOD by Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown

I remember reading a reprint of this in the 1970s and not caring for it but frankly so much time has gone by that I can not remember why. Maybe humans could crossbreed with aliens or something, I know that always irritated me back then.

If memory serves, Baen is going to/has reprint/ed this.


February THE ARTIFICIAL MAN by L.P. Davies

Don't know this one


March THE LITTLE PEOPLE by John Christopher

Or this one

April THE PAST THROUGH TOMORROW by Robert A. Heinlein

But this one was pure gold. It includes

Introduction (Damon Knight)
Life-Line
The Roads Must Roll
Blowups Happen
The Man Who Sold the Moon (novel)
Delilah and the Space Rigger
Space Jockey
Requiem
The Long Watch
Gentlemen, Be Seated
The Black Pits of Luna
It's Great to Be Back!
We Also Walk Dogs
Searchlight
Ordeal in Space
The Green Hills of Earth
Logic of Empire
The Menace from Earth
If This Goes On-- (novel)
Coventry
Misfit
Methuselah's Children (novel)

OK, there are some duds in here (Gentlemen is minor and Roads got an old customer of mine to drop RAH forever) but you get three novels, two pretty good, for a couple of bucks and some of the shorts aren't bad either. The only other thing that should have been in here is Orphans of the Sky, so all of the Future History novels RAH wrote* would be in one place.

It seems churlish to point out at least one of these stories is used as background in a novel set in a non-Future History setting (Space Cadet had something very like the Long Watch, as I recall) and that it is very very difficult to reconcile "We Also Walk Dogs" with the rest of the FH.

* Lah lah lah I can't heeeaaarrr youuuuuuuu.


May FAHRENHEIT 451 by Ray Bradbury


This is one of the few things I have read by Bradbury that I will willingly reread for free. This has as its protagonist a man whose job it is to find and burn books, lest the people who read them make their neighbors uncomfortable with nonconformity.


June THE KILLER THING by Kate Wilhelm

I missed this. I think we lost Wilhelm to mystery. The bastards probably did something underhanded like buy her books and pay her money for them.


July COLOSSUS by D.F. Jones

This is the classic story about the project to built a mighty computer to run America's half of the Cold War and how it and its opposite number on the Soviet side came up with a final solution for the problems of the US/SU conflict.


Summer THREE NOVELS by Damon Knight


Contains

The Dying Man
Natural State
Rule Golden

I have only read the third one, which features a nonviolent alien sharingthe gift that deters violence in his society with Earth. Pretty sure the years after the story has an extinction event the magnitude of the one at the end of the Permian.


August THE TIME HOPPERS by Robert Silverberg

I think I read this but don't recall what it was about.

(googles)

Nasty crowded dystopia as seen by a mid-level bureaucrat.

September PSYCHOGEIST by L.P. Davies

Missed this one.

October ELEMENT 79 by Fred Hoyle

And this one.

[This is the gold asteroid one, isn't it?]


November THE EGG-SHAPED THING by Christopher Hodder-Williams

And this one.


December DANGEROUS VISIONS edited by Harlan Ellison

But I have -this- in paperback.

Contains:
Auto-Da-Fe (Roger Zelazny)
Aye, and Gomorrah (Samuel R. Delany)
Carcinoma Angels (Normad Spinrad)
The Day After the Martians Came (Fredrik Pohl)
The Doll-House (James Cross)
Encounter with a Hick (Jonathan Brand)
Ersatz (Henry Slesar)
The Escaping (David R. Bunch)
Eutopia (Poul Anderson)
Evensong (Lester del Rey)
Faith of Our Fathers (Philip K. Dick)
Flies (Robert Silverberg)
Foreword 1: The Second Revolution (Isaac Asimov)
Foreword 2: Halan and I (Isaac Asimov)
From the Government Printing Office (Kris Neville)
Go, Go, Go, Said the Bird (Sonya Dorman)
Gonna Roll the Bones (Fritz Leiber)
The Happy Breed (John Sladek)
If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister
(Theodore Sturgeon)
Incident in Moderan (Chris R. Bunch)
The Jigsaw Man (Larry Niven)
Judas (John Brunner)
Land of the Great Horses (R.A. Lafferty)
Lord Randy, My Son (Joe L. Hensley)
The Malley System (Miriam Allen DeFord)
The Man Who Went to the Moon - Twice (Howard Rodman)
The Night That All Time Broke Out (Brian W. Aldiss)
The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World (Harlan Ellison
and Robert Bloch)
The Recognition (J.G. Ballard)
Riders of the Purple Wage (Philip Jose farmer)
Sex and/or Mr. Morrison (Carol Emshwiller)
Shall the Dust Praise Thee? (Damon Knight)
Test to Destruction (Keith Laumer)
Thirty-two Soothsayers (Harlan Ellison)
A Toy for Juliette (Harlan Ellison & Robert Bloch)
What Happened to August Clarot? (Larry Eisenberg)


Even given that I read this under the worst possible circumstances (the day I was scheduled to undergo a painful and irrationally terrifying dental procedure, about an hour of which was spent in the dentist's waiting room listening to the shrieks of a 4 year old who had badly burned his mouth chewing through an electrical cord some months previously, who was even worse than I was wrt dental work thanks to his reconstructive surgery) I remember a lot of these.

The idea was to shake SF up a bit at a time when it had become pretty conservative and dull. It's not the array of SFnal shock jocks like Farmer or Spinrad you might expect, either: look at the Anderson* and the Laumer, the del Rey and the Leiber. Despite the fuss surrounding the third book in this series I'd say this still stands up, especially if one considers when this was written.



* Imagine living in a mileau so dull that the *shocking* and *startling*
revelation about the protagonist is that he is gay.

Compare and contrast the use of lesbians in Oath of Fealty and _Island in the Sea of Time_ [both by arch conservatives], for an idea of how things have changed.

[Pournelle used lesbians to scare his fans, Stirling to titillate them. Although the character in Island isn't as fanservicey as one might expect from SMS.

I completely misremembered the Anderson or forgot what it was about; the reader is supposed to be revolted by the revelation that the protagonist is gay. I can't help but wonder if the Bay Area was the best place Anderson could have settled.

Sadly, I made the mistake of trying to reread this work. Nothing ages faster than edgy SF]

Comments

[oh6]

"Element 79" is the gold asteroid story, and also the title of a story collection. I read it out of the library while I was in high school. Here's the table of contents from Wikipedia:

Zoomen
Pym Makes His Point
The Magnetosphere
A Play's the Thing
Cattle Trucks
Welcome to Slippage City
The Ax
Agent 38
The Martians
Shortsighted
A Jury of Five
Blackmail
Element 79
The Judgment of Aphrodite
The Operation


I remember the title story and "Jury of Five", where which of two men survived an automobile accident becomes subject to quantum superposition, which collapses when the body is identified. I recognize the title "Welcome to Slippage City" but don't remember what it's about.

"The Escaping" and "Incident in Modern" are both by David R. Bunch.

I mostly thought the punchline to "Eutopia" was kind of silly, and irrelevant to the other questions raised in the story.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

Poul Anderson in 1968: "Most science fiction has also preserved its own traditional virtues. It still tells stories, wherein things happen. It remains more interested in the glamour and mystery of existence, the survival and triumph and tragedy of heroes and thinkers, than in the neuroses of some sniveling fagot." Sic.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

In his defense, the spell check software available for manual typewriters was notoriously buggy.

(That said the Donald E. Westlake MSes I got were photocopies of manually typewritten pages, no typos ever]

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

I wonder how he got along with fellow early SCAdian Walter Breen.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

I was born in 1967 and read DV sometime in the early 80s. I didn't pick up that we were supposed to be repelled by "Eutopia"'s protagonist. My impression at first reading was that the punchline was supposed to come as a tremendous shock for 1967. I have to admit that I fell for it, and spent the next five minutes headdesking, because I really should have figured it out rather earlier in the story.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

That's what backspace, erasers, and whiteout are for.

Eraser dust bunged up the keys something fierce.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I remember an early 70s collection of short stories by David Gerrold and coming away with the impression that he thought ``... and it turns out the protagonist is gay!'' was such a great punch line it had to be used over and over and over and over and over and over again.

(One of them actually was a tolerably clever use of the punch line: the protagonist's problem is he loves making love to aliens, any aliens, but it's just impossible finding another species with women-folk whose genitals that don't in some way inconvenience, hurt, or endanger the human male. The kindly bartender, I think, since this kind of story is always about kindly bartenders who fix problems, finds a species where the experience is just magnificent for both parties, and then the punch line is the alien identifies as male. There's probably a pretty good in-class discussion to be had about whether this is ``really'' homosexual, come to think of it.)

[(Anonymous)]

"It seems churlish to point out at least one of these stories is used as background in a novel set in a non-Future History setting (Space Cadet had something very like the Long Watch, as I recall) and that it is very very difficult to reconcile "We Also Walk Dogs" with the rest of the FH."

Agreed. "Space Cadet" describes the character from Long Watch both by name and by description of his actions, and it's very hard to reconcile Space Cadet with the FH.

[(Anonymous)]

This is the heyday of L.P. Davies!

I must have read both of those but don't recall them. That is not a slam at LP, as I do recall enjoying his work. As I recall it was strongly plotted and he had a good sense of the eerie. But forty five plus years has stolen my memoires of these.

"The time hoppers" featured one of those meritocratic dystopias we see from time to time (i.e. "The caves of steel"). IIRC the protagonist is level seven (lower is better) having recently been advanced from level eight. At level seven you get your own room, and we hear him rejoicing that he will never see his roomate again. There is some spectacularly awkward sexual conversation (I suppose that somewhere, sometime, a man spoke to his girlfriend about her "secondary sexual characteristics", but not twice).

All of which sounds pretty negative, but I read the book at least twice and enjoyed it. Though I didn't like the ending. I'd rather be a level seven person in the dystopia than a skilless and unfit hunter-gatherer. One day I might be level six! And who knows what the reward is? Two rooms? Meat on Mondays?

As to the Anderson, I really didn't get the impression that the reader was supposed to be revolted, either from the story or from Anderson's afterword (though his jocular comment that he had been accused of being a facist and would now "be accused of worse" grates). You've read this more recently than I, but isn't there a key scene where our protagonist declines to cheat on his lover? Not because he doesn't feel desire, but out of loyalty. I got the impression that Andersson wanted to shock, but not revolt. Though in those days doubtless it did revolt some, even many.

I didn't react much to the ending. Possibly this was because I read the story towards the end of another fourteen hour reading streak and I was getting mentally numb. Or possibly because the number of ways the story could be "dangerous" had narrowed to one by the final page. Or Anderson could have planted subtle hints throughout the story, but I am excellent at missing such things.


William Hyde

[readsalot.livejournal.com]

I was very upset by EARTHBLOOD because the dust-jacket copy said that some character ended up achieving something, I don't remember what any more, and then that character died about halfway through the book. I was young enough that actual errors in something that had been professionally printed did not seem possible, and I kept going back and looking at the that blurb and feeling betrayed.

[raglegumm.livejournal.com]

This is the heyday of L.P. Davies!

I must have read both of those but don't recall them. That is not a slam at LP, as I do recall enjoying his work. As I recall it was strongly plotted and he had a good sense of the eerie. But forty five plus years has stolen my memoires of these.

PSYCHOGEIST by L.P. Davies I have never seen, but I inherited the Scholastic edition of THE ARTIFICIAL MAN from my older siblings. Its plot resembles that of TIME OUT OF JOINT in that the protagonist is living with false memories in a bucolic vaguely contemporary community, and discovers the reality of the situation. P appears to be connected with TAM.

[(Anonymous)]

March THE LITTLE PEOPLE by John Christopher

What it sez on da box. Horror story about finding the title [Nazis/guys] .

I liked it more than Bob, who said "Not bad, for an Irish-nazi-dwarf story."

rgl

Eutopia

[(Anonymous)]

is one of the few stories from _DV_ I actually remember and thought was still "dangerous" at the time I read it (late nineties). But the reveal in the last sentence isn't that the protagonist is gay, it's that he's a pedophile, and that pedophilia is implicitly a norm of his society.

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

> I can't help but wonder if the Bay Area was the best place Anderson could have settled.

He might have gotten along great with the prison doctor who saved us so much money on unwanted criminal children.

There are conservatives in the Bay Area, they tend to be the rich to very rich, or else the poorer ones don't talk about it. There are also people so far to the left they meet the John Birch Society coming the other way.

[maruad.livejournal.com]

I knew it was going to be Bobby Gimby. There should be some other stereotype of Canada in 1967 besides Bobby Gimby and Expo 67. Sadly the only other thing I can think of is hitchhikers who are stranded for days at the Wawa Goose.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Anderson lived in Orinda. Think Orange County, Northern California.

Re: Eutopia

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Would straight readers in 1967 known or cared about the difference? Either one would have been almost as shocking at the time.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

My impression of SMS's primary lesbian character in IitSoT is that the male reader is intended to identify with her.

[erikagillian.livejournal.com]

We were landscapers, installation and we did one regular maintenance, we were in Orinda a lot :) It's not as bad as some of the ones farther out (Danville, I'm looking at you), but yes. The maintenance job we did was for a wonderful woman, but she married money late in life, so I'm assuming that's why she was so cool. Her husband wasn't bad either, but he was self made (Simpson Strong Ties). Not that born rich can't be good people but I think you're more likely to get generous and empathetic people who grew up with less.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

I moved to Orinda halfway through high school. THAT was an eye-opening experience.

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

> [This is the gold asteroid one, isn't it?]

Yes, as far as I recall. I read it a few times in childhood when it was on the stack shelves at the East Cleveland Public Library; I don't think I've re-read it since I moved away.

--Dave, so apply cum grano salis