The Science Fiction Book Club Reviews Revisited: 1971

[james_davis_nicoll]

List courtesy of Andrew Wheeler


1971
January FIVE FATES by Anderson, Herbert, Dickson, Ellison & Laumer

Contents:

The Fatal Fulfilment (Poul Anderson)
Murder Will In (Frank Herbert)
Maverick (Gordon R. Dickson)
The Region Between (Harlan Ellison)
Of Death What Dreams (Keith Laumer)

This is a collection of five stories connected by sharing the same opening scene. It was memorable enough to have come up on this newsgroup [rec.arts.sf.written] multiple times in YASID threads but not memorable to me: all I recall of this is the cover art and what I read on the threads.


INTER ICE AGE 4 by Kobo Abe

I saw this but never bought it. Abe (1924-1993) was a Japanese author who seems to have had a remarkable rate of translation into English but I seem to have missed them all.


Winter THE GODS OF MARS & THE WARLORD OF MARS by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The last two books of the initial Mars trilogy by Burroughs. I don't think they are very good, even taking into account when they were written and for who.


THE YEAR OF THE CLOUD by Kate Wilhelm and Ted Thomas

Never even saw this one. Wilhelm is a talented author lost to mystery. Thomas I don't know from Adam.


February BEST SCIENCE FICTION STORIES OF CLIFFORD D. SIMAK by Clifford D.
Simak

Contains:

Founding Father
Immigrant
New Folk's Home
Crying Jag
All the Traps of Earth
Lulu
Neighbor


No doubt I read some of these but I don't own this and the titlesare not triggering memories.



OUR FRIENDS FROM FROLIX 8 by Philip K. Dick

I missed this as part of my comprehensive miss almost everything by PKD program.


March RED MOON AND BLACK MOUNTAIN by Joy Chant

And I missed this.


DIMENSION X compiled by Damon Knight

Contents:

The Man Who Sold the Moon (Robert A. Heinlein)
The Marching Morons (C.M. Kornbluth)
Fiddler's Green (Richard M. McKenna)
The Saliva Tree (Brian W. Aldiss)
The Ugly Little Boy (Isaac Asimov)


This looks like a pretty good collection, although anyone who had been an SFBC member for a while would likely already have all of these except for the Asimov and the McKenna.

I wonder on average how long the SFBC keeps stuff in print?

[The Heinlein is about a rich man who uses various means to get a Moon rocket built and launched. It's a prequel to his earlier story Requiem and if you've read that or listened to any of the adaptations you know how this has to end.

The Kornbluth is an obnoxious story about population control. It's very popular.

The McKenna is hard to describe and if I recall correctly involves a sort of pocket universe.

The Asimov was discussed before, I think.

I don't know the Aldiss]


April THE HOUSE IN NOVEMBER by Keith Laumer

On the other hand, this is much more frustrating: I know I read this because I can google up me recommending it a decade ago )now about 20 years) but exactly which Laumer novel about superhuman protagonists this is escapes me.


FUN WITH YOUR NEW HEAD by Thomas M. Disch

Good SF writer, dodgy critic. In keeping with much of the rest of 1971, I missed this.


May THE ROBOT NOVELS (omnibus of THE CAVES OF STEEL and THE NAKED SUN) by
Isaac Asimov

This is an onmibus of the two Lije Baley/R Daneel, previously reviewed.


STURGEON IS ALIVE AND WELL by Theodore Sturgeon

Foreword
To Here and the Easel
Slow Sculpture
It's You!
Take Care of Joey
Crate
The Girl Who Knew What They Meant
Jorry's Gap
It Was Nothing--Really!
Brownshoes
Uncle Fremmis
The Patterns of Dorne
Suicide


I remember what must have been a Ballantine MMPK reprint of this but I never read it. Better than having forgotten it, I suppose.

[Although not from the author's point of view]

Spring DOWN IN THE BLACK GANG by Philip Jose Farmer

I missed this.


THE ICE PEOPLE by Rene Barjavel

But not this tale of mysterious people retrieved from the ice. It's not actually very good, though.


June ALONE AGAINST TOMORROW by Harlan Ellison


Contents:

The Song of the Soul
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream
The Discarded
Deeper Than the Darkness
Blind Lightning
All the Sounds of Fear
The Silver Corridor
"Repent, Harlequin!" Said the Ticktockman
Bright Eyes
Are You Listening?
Try a Dull Knife
In Lonely Hands
Eyes of Dust
Nothing for My Noon Meal
O Ye of Little Faith
The Time of the Eye
Life Hutch
The Very Last Day of a Good Woman
Night Vigil
Lonelyache
Pennies off a Dead Man's Eyes


A fair number of these ended up in The Essential Harlan Ellison.
I can't say I really *enjoyed* most of them but they were well written.

[Also, screw Ellison. I am not investing the time to discuss these]


A TIME OF CHANGES by Robert Silverberg

One of the few classic Mid-Period Silverberg novels I missed.


July DRIFTGLASS by Samuel R. Delany

On the other hand, my lack of knowledge about Delany is almost all encompassing [so me missing it is no surprise].


FREEZING DOWN by Anders Bodelson

And I have not even heard of this author.


August WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? Edited by Isaac Asimov

Contents:

Introduction (Isaac Asimov)
A Martian Odyssey (Stanley G. Weinbaum)
Night (John W. Campbell)
The Day is Done (Lester del Rey)
Heavy Planet (Milton Rothman)
"--And He Built a Crooked House" (Robert A. Heinlein)
Proof (Hal Clement)
A Subway Named Mobius (A.J. Deutsch)
Surface Tension (James Blish)
Country Doctor (William Morrison)
The Holes Around Mars (Jerome Bixby)
The Deep Range (Arthur C. Clarke)
The Cave of Night (James E. Gunn)
Dust Rag (Hal Clement)
Pate de Foie Gras (Isaac Asimov)
Omnilingual (H. Beam Piper)
The Big Bounce (Walter Tevis)
Neutron Star (Larry Niven)


This looks like a fairly good introduction to SF stories of a certain type from a certain period. I have forgotten Bixby inflicted that particular shaggy dog story on SF but the others, or at least the others I recall, are pretty good and don't end with stupid stupid punch lines. That said, I miss Bixby.

It seems to me that there's a connection between Deutsch and that guy whose wife could bring him lunch but not a nickel but I am blanking on its exact nature. This is Deutsch's only published SF story (He and Asimov were at Boston together, and Asimov was the one who urged him to submit it) but it was a memorable story.

THE DANCER FROM ATLANTIS by Poul Anderson

This is a moody tale of a modern man cast back in time with a number of people from other eras. Complicating matters is when and where they end up: near the volcanic island that will soon give rise to the legend of Atlantis by erupting and flatlining Cretan and Greek civilization.


September WORLD'S BEST SF: 1971 edited by Donald Wollheim & Terry Carr


Introduction (Wollheim & Carr)
Slow Sculpture (Theodore Sturgeon)
Bird in the Hand (Larry Niven)
Ishmael in Love (Robert Silverberg)
Invasion of Privacy (Bob Shaw)
Waterclap (Isaac Asimov)
Continued on Next Rock (R.A. Lafferty)
The Thing in the Stone (Clifford D. Simak)
Nobody Lives in Burton Street (Gregory Benford)
Whatever Happened to the McGowans (Michael G. Coney)
The Last Time Around (Arthur Sellings)
Greyspun's Gift (Neal Barrett, Jr.)
The Shaker Revival (Gerald Jonas)
Dear Aunt Annie (Gordon Eklund)
Confessions (Ron Goulart)
Gone are the Lupo (H.B. Hickey)


At the risk of cementing my repution for forgetting, even the ones in here I know I read (The Niven) don't seem to have left much
impression.

[Is the Asimov the one about fiddling with viscosity to turn water into a weapon?]


JACK OF SHADOWS by Roger Zelazny

I really have to sit down and read all of the RZ I missed. Oh well, at least it isn't that damn Rose story.

{which I did eventually read!]


Fall THE BEST FROM FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION, 19TH SERIES edited by Edward
L. Ferman

Contents:

Gone Fishin' (Robin Scott Wilson)
Selectra Six-Ten (Avram Davidson)
Longtooth (Edgar Pangborn)
Sundance (Robert Silverberg)
The Brief, Swinging Career of Dan and Judy Smythe (Carter Wilson)
Dream Patrol (Charles W. Runyon)
Calliope and Gherkin and the Yankee Doodle Thing (Evelyn E. Smith)
Notes Just Prior to the Fall (Barry N. Malzberg)
Confessions (Ron Goulart)
Get a Horse! (Larry Niven)
The Man Who LEarned Loving (Theodore Sturgeon)
Litterbug (Tony Morphett)
An Adventure in the Yolla Bolly Middle Eel Wilderness (Vance Aandahl)
Starting From Scratch (Robert Sheckley)
Benji's Pencil (Bruce McAllister)
Six Cartoons (Gaham Wilson)


The Niven is a Svetz story about a hapless time traveller whose expeditions never lead him back to true history and always entangle him with thing he likely would have chosen to avoid (In this case, an ornry unicorn). I am failing to come up with interesting commentary onthe rest, though.


ORN by Piers Anthony

This I missed but don't feel so bad about missing.


October THE TIME MASTERS by Wilson Tucker

I think I missed this one as well.


THE EDICT by Max Ehrlich

I missed this.

November THE LATHE OF HEAVEN by Ursula K. Le Guin

This is a short novel about a man whose dreams can shape the world. OK story but avoid the recent adaptation of it.


CHRONOPOLIS AND OTHER STORIES by J.G. Ballard

Contents:

The Voices of Time
The Drowned Giant
The Terminal Beach
Manhole 69
Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer
The Sound-Sweep
Billenium
Chronopolis
Build-Up
The Garden of Time
End-Game
The Watch-Towers
Now Wakes the Sea
Zone of Terror
The Cage of Sand
Deep End


Someone familiar with Ballard will have to handle this one.


December DUNE by Frank Herbert

Take some Lawrence of Arabia, mix in ASF Psi Powers and what do you get? Dune, a story about a boy and his jihad. I suspect that this is one of those books that seems much more impressive if you are a teen when you encounter it. And if you don't think about the energy it takes to plow through sand.

I think it's still an OK read but avoid the sequels starting with God (Does Nothing Happen in this Book) Emperor of Dune and be warned that
both movie versions are seriously flawed, although in different ways.


THE RUINS OF EARTH edited by Thomas M. Disch

Contents:

On Saving the World (Thomas Disch)
Deer in the Works (Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)
Three Million Square Miles (Gene Wolfe)
Closing with Nature (Norman Rush)
The Plot to Save the World (Michael Brownstein)
Autofac (Philip K. Dick)
Roommates (Harry Harrison)
Groaning Hinges of the World (R.A. Lafferty)
Gas Mask (James D. Houston)
Wednesday, November 15, 1967 (George Alec Effinger)
The Cage of Sand (J.G. Ballard)
Accident Vertigo (Kenward Elmslie)
The Birds (Daphne DeMaurier)
Do It For Mama! (Jerrold J. Mundis)
The Dreadful Has Already Happened (Norman Kagan)
The Shaker Revival (Gerald Jonas)
America the Beautiful (Fritz Leiber)

Well, I know -of- "The Birds". Otherwise it seems to be a clean sweep, although I suspect these are not happy stories.

[Disch was not the guy for happy stories, even before he became a bereaved crank issuing jeremiads against Muslims and immigrants]

Comments

[oh6]

I barely recall "Immigrant" as a tale of contact with infuriatingly superior aliens.

I've read most of Fun With Your New Head in White Fang Goes Dingo and Other Funny Science Fiction Stories, Getting Into Death and Other Stories, and Under Compulsion:

"The Roaches" - The hero hates roaches, but then discovers that they keep showing up because they love her. Eventually she reciprocates the sentiment.
"Come to Venus Melancholy" - A disembodied brain who kept house for a prospector or explorer or some such who smashed her cameras etc. after they had a falling out, tells her story to whoever might be listening.
"Linda and Daniel and Spike" - A woman's life is brightened by an imaginary boyfriend, and later, an imaginary child who is actually a malignant tumour.
"Flight Useless, Inexorable the Pursuit" - A tale of terror at the hands of a remorseless robot saint.
"Descending" - Discussed earlier.
"Nada" - Discussed earlier.
"Now Is Forever" - Unruly youngsters make use of matter replicators to live in an eternal present, as do their elders, if less (or wholly un-) knowingly.
"The Contest" - I never could figure this one out.
"The Empty Room" - Or this one.
"The Squirrel Cage" - Disch narrates this first-person tale of imprisonment and alienation.
"The Number You Have Reached" - A man (I think an astronaut) and a woman have angry telephone conversations after everyone else has died by some accident.
"1-A" - A businesslike tale of military recruitment which cuts out the middleman. This, along with "Linda and Daniel and Spike", was rejected for inclusion in Again, Dangerous Visions.
"Fun with Your New Head" - Hilarious sales brochure for a company selling disembodied human heads.
"The City of Penetrating Light" - A brief meditation on life suffused with creepy, vacuous cheer.
"Moondust, the Smell of Hay, and Dialectical Materialism" - A cosmonaut stranded on the Moon contemplates what purpose their impending death serves.
"Thesis on Social Forms and Social Controls in the U.S.A." - An economic system of alternating slavery and hedonism described in the form of a student essay.
"Casablanca" - Two stereotypical American tourists have trouble adjusting after the US is been destroyed in a nuclear war.

Some of these stories might be interpreted as sexist, or outright misogynist.

I read Driftglass some time ago but no longer call more than a few stories:

"The Star Pit" - People with some kind of power permitting interstellar travel are much put out by people able to travel beyond the galaxy.
"Dog in a Fisherman’s Net"
"Corona"
"Aye, and Gomorrah..." - The likelihood of birth defects from radiation in space leads to the creation of a class of asexual spacemen and people with a fetish for same.
"Driftglass"
"We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line" - A crew tasked with bringing electricity or the future equivalent to some hinterland encounter resistance and contemplate the ethics of disrupting the local economy.
"Cage of Brass"
"High Weir"
"Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" - Previously discussed.
"Night and the Loves of Joe Dicostanzo"

I haven't read "Night" but having read "Twilight" I would certainly like to.

FWIW, "Bird in the Hand" is a Svetz story which concerns an attempt to recreate the Roc from an ostrich, under the assumption that it developed via neoteny, complicated by an accident which prevents the development of the internal combustion engine.

"Selectra Six-Ten" is told in the form of a typescript from an author delighted by their new electric typewriter which apparently is picking up transmissions from ill-tempered aliens.

I will refrain from attempting to summarize Chronopolis and Other Stories and simply recommend the stories. The only ones I didn't connect with were "The Terminal Beach" and "The Cage of Sand".

I once knew someone who held God-Emperor of Dune as their favourite, believe it or not.

"Three Million Square Miles", upon checking, turns out to be about a man obsessed by the observation that 90% (or close to it) of the land in the US is unused.

[captaincrowbar.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

Aldiss's "The Saliva Tree" is about a meteorite containing alien life landing in a farm in Victorian England, with unfortunate results, told from the POV of a visitor who falls for the farmer's daughter. For some reason it won awards despite being a blatant ripoff of Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space".

[(Anonymous)]

(Not having read any Lovecraft) I though of this as a H.G. Wells pastiche, perhaps due to the elements shared with "The Food of the Gods".

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

You know, I'm pretty sure I've read "The Holes Around Mars," because I remember reading a story with that premise; but for some reason my mind insists that nearly all of the details were different, that it was a more Varleyesque story, the tiny moon of Mars was several feet wide and just punching through high hills, and the main plot of the story was actually about something else entirely.

But nobody would re-use the premise of something like "The Holes Around Mars" as colorful background in a completely different story, would they? So I think all this is just mental distortion of the Bixby story on my part, or maybe I'm combining it with an unrelated story in the same collection I read it in.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Maybe I never actually read this story in my youth, and my memories of it are fabricated secondhand from somebody else's description of it. That may be the most plausible hypothesis.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Might you be confusing it with George O. Smith's "Lost Art," which concerns engineers fiddling with ancient Martian electronics, and which everyone has read because it's in the Boucher two-volumes-for-a-dime SFBC anthology?.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think the "secondhand description from friend" hypothesis is more likely because I think I know who it was.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

Where Do We Go From Here? had an odd little gimmick in which Asimov included little essays about the science behind the various story gimmicks and I believe even offered ``for open discussion'' questions as if this could be turned into a Science Class Discussion panel. I guess it's an era where you could try something like that in a classroom, but I'd be curious to know if anybody, anywhere, ever had a class that tried this.

I believe ``Waterclap'' is a story about a struggle for funding between advocates of outer space exploration and a sub-oceanic base that's eating all the money for final frontier stuff etc and the protagonist coming to realize that they shouldn't be trying to destroy one another, but I really don't remember it all that well because it was one of those times Asimov got so wrapped up with the fun of his worldbuilding he didn't tell a story that I could remember.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

He was ahead of his time! Today, those would be book-club discussion questions.

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, that's the one - a pro-space terrorist, intending to destroy the sub-ocean station, is persuaded by one of his intended victims that the sub-ocean base is a trial model for Jupiter colonization. In a twist ending (of a sort) the fellow who comes up with that impromptu argument actually has the influence to make it happen.

[(Anonymous)]

IIRC, the person with the influence is the fellow's wife.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks. I'ts been a while since I've read it.

[carbonel]

Where Do We Go From Here? was in fact one of the textbooks for my Physics, Fantasy, and the Future course at Carleton. It was only a 5-week course (terms were 10 weeks then), but I read and wrote a humongous amount for that class, and enjoyed it immensely. The other anthology for the class was The Mirror of Infinity, edited by Robert Silverberg, which also had essays but was probably intended more for English classes.

There were also a bunch of photocopied handouts, of which "Kyrie" and "John Jones's Dollar" stick most clearly in my mind at the moment.

[jack-ryder.livejournal.com]

THE LATHE OF HEAVEN by Ursula K. Le Guin

This is a shart novel...

I think you're being rather unkind to Le Guin.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

"It Was Nothing--Really!" A guy realizes that the perforations in toilet paper are stronger than the paper, and makes the logical mental leap to fame and fortune.

"Ishmael in Love" A dolphin falls in love with his female human handler.

"The Shaker Revival" If I'm thinking of the right story, young people shock their parents' generation by living simply and eschewing sex, including sex toys.

"Sundance" Native American scientist has Issues with his white associates' treatment of alien life forms. Or, simply Issues in general. Highly unreliable narrator and shifting points of view.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Oh, I listened to a production of Sundance. It was unspeakably horrible.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

"Sundance" is one of my foremost examples of a story I liked a lot when I was young (the POV shifts and unreliable narration impressed me) that has almost certainly had a visit from the Racefail Fairy.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...though it could well be that the audio treatment James listened to made it worse. Discussion here:

http://james-nicoll.livejournal.com/4033529.html

[narmitaj.livejournal.com]

The Ballard collection looks solid, with some of his most famous stories represented, such as The Voices of Time*.

In fact, four of the stories in the SFBC collection are also used as the titles of some of Ballard's own collections: The Voices of Time and Other Stories (1962), Billennium (1962), The Terminal Beach (1964), Chronopolis and Other Stories (1971). Another collection, The Disaster Area (1967), is not named after a specific story, but Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer is the lead-off item and inspires the cover of my Panther edition (http://www.jgballard.ca/images/disaster_area/disaster_area_panther1969_250.jpg).

Six of the stories - The Voices of Time, The Sound-Sweep, Billennium, Chronopolis, Zone of Terror, Deep End - have their own individual Wikipedia entries of varying sizes (though I would have said that some of the others - such as The Watch-Towers, The Garden of Time and The Terminal Beach - were better known than one or two of those accorded that signal honour).

*"You're not alone, Powers, don't think you are. These are the voices of time, and they're all saying goodbye to you ... every particle in your body, every grain of sand, every galaxy carries the same signature... you know what the time is now, so what does the rest matter?"

[agharta75.livejournal.com]

"Orn" - the sequel to "Omnivore". Above-average dinosaur story. Far above-average Anthony story.

"Red Moon and Black Mountain" - YA portal fantasy before that became cliche.

"A Time of Changes" - Nebula winner. Protagonist lives in a supposedly selfless society that is actually repressed and hypermacho. Drugs enlighten him.

"Our Friends from Frolix 8" - the last Dick our host will have to worry about for a while, as PKD's personal life was beginning to crash him.

"A Subway Named Mobius" - sorry, the Boston MBTA isn't _that_ topologically complex, but its buses and trains do tend to vanish. (The bus to/from Readercon in particular, this last weekend. Very annoying.)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine insists that he's read a version of "A Subway Named Mobius" that is exactly the same story, but with the setting changed to London, with the stations and such renamed accordingly (and assumed that the London version was the original, since the London system is topologically gnarly in a way that Boston's really isn't).

Anyone know what he's talking about? What's the history of this story?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Hmm, while I can find no other references to a London version of "Mobius", it seems to have been republished in Argosy magazine a few years later. Maybe that version was Londonized?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...there was a film adaptation set in Buenos Aires.

It's the other way about

[john cowan (from livejournal.com)]

The original version was indeed set in London, but was changed for American readers. As a result, the descriptions make no sense in terms of the Boston T.

[mr-mediocre.livejournal.com]

Jack of Shadows has Zelazny's standard antagonist (the Cosmic Smartass as the late Tom Dietz named him) but in this case he's a tad more antiheroic than usual. The setting is another variation of the SF/Fantasy meld. A thin book, you could probably read it on a single bus ride.

And my favorite nickname for the fourth Dune novel is God-Awful of Dune.

[(Anonymous)]

It's a fun read, but light. Jack's brief tenure in academe was amusing. The Sexism Fairy has been at it (as she has at a lot of Zelazny's work) but not enough to make it unreadable.


Doug M.

[dbdatvic.livejournal.com]

The canonical-a-while-back list was Dune, Dune Meshuggenah, Men Women Children and Pets of Dune, Oh God Not Another Dune Novel, Here It Is Folks Yet Another Dune Novel, and Charnelhouse: Dune.

For me, God-Emperor was where they started getting more readable again. Dune
Messiah, I think it was, took a lot out of me to struggle through the first time around, but 4-6 were enjoyable.

--Dave, but by all means stay FAR AWAY FROM his son's pulp-fiction extensions of the franchise

[dsrtao]

Roommates (Harry Harrison) is an overcrowded Earth story which, strangely, is pulled out of Make Room! Make Room! rather than being the origin thereof.

Not recommended for sanity. ISTR that the overcrowded USA has 340M people in it, which is only about 10% higher than the current population.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Usual case of not having bothered to do the math, I suppose.

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Driftglass is a dynamite collection, and an excellent introduction to Delany. I particularly like "The Star Pit."

[carbonel]

Red Moon and Black Mountain is a favorite of mine. Strangely enough, the thing I think it's closest to in style is Guy Kay's Fionavar Trilogy, which has the same mix of high fantasy and out-in-the-sticks tribal stuff. I always wondered if it was an influence.

[(Anonymous)]

Have we lived and fought (er, typed) in vain?

`"The Saliva Tree" is a long story written in the style of Wells, very different from the typical Aldiss (imagine that Wells has in 1898 written Lovecraft's "the colour out of space"). It tied for the nebula. I read it fairly recently, and found that the first time around I'd missed a lot of humour.'

"The House in November" was another part of my evil plot to get people reading SF. I left it lying around and both my sisters read and liked it. The plot failed, though, as nothing else by Laumer had that horror feel to it. If I'd had "Conjure, Wife!" that might have worked.


"Our Friends from Frolix 8". Humanity is divided into three subspecies, a super-smart group, a group with some odd powers, and the majority, with no special powers. The majority gets help from aliens. IMHO very poor Dick - I can't remember a single character.

"Red Moon and Black Mountain". As I recall, an excellent fantasy. Other people posting here seem to agree. I should reread it.

We're getting to the point where I have some of these books, and I have "Freezing down" by Anders Bodelsen, complete with a picture of our pipe-smoking author on the back page. Does he look faintly like Poul Anderson, or is that my imagination?

The blurb explains: "Anders Bodelsen is Danish. He has written for television and the stage; he reviews films for Politiken, a Copenhagen daily; and he has published five novels and two collections of short stories."

Translated by Joan Tate.

The plot revolves around a young man who has incurable cancer. He is frozen to be awoken in 1995, by which time his cancer will be curable. He awakes with his cancer cured, all right, but one unsettling detail is that his kidneys were "borrowed" in the great kidney shortage of 1982. He now sports somebody else's kidneys, after the great kidney surplus of 1986. He's also been sterlized, this new world is a tiny bit big-brotherish, and he eventually decides to escape again into the future, which doesn't do him much good.

"The Shaker Revival" has proven quite memorable. The human race ends when everyone decides to become shakers. It may be that a teenage boy found the concept of never having sex to be (a) too horrible to contemplate and (b) all too familiar, hence rendering this slight story unforgettable. At least I learned who the shakers are.

Another poster has discussed "Chronopolis" so I will spare you the ten page posting. Suffice to say that this is an excellent collection, and if you don't like anything in it you won't like Ballard. And in the more than sufficent to say department, "The Voices of Time" scared the heck out of me as a kid. Which may well not have been Ballard's intention. Now I recall it as a thing of beauty.

William Hyde

[(Anonymous)]

" He awakes with his cancer cured, all right, but one unsettling detail is that his kidneys were "borrowed" in the great kidney shortage of 1982. He now sports somebody else's kidneys, after the great kidney surplus of 1986. "

I'm not sure i like the idea of a boom-bust cycle in bladder supply...

[(Anonymous)]

I mean kidney....

[(Anonymous)]

I've been browsing the book. The bust occurs when transplant surgery is perfected and demand skyrockets. To meet this demand a law is passed allowing organs to be extracted from the frozen. With some unspecified clause saying that they have to be replaced.

Shortly later artificial kidneys, which function perhaps somewhat better than natural ones, are perfected. Now there is a surplus of donations, but the above law is worded so that the frozen must have their kidneys replaced with natural ones. The protagonist can choose to have his kidneys replaced with artificial ones now that he is awake.

William Hyde