15) Tomorrow's Worlds: Ten Stories of Science Fiction, ed. Robert Silverberg

A muscular collection this, of what was already old-fashioned sf when it was published in 1969 (presumably to cash in on the imminent moon landings): ten stories, set on each of the planets of the solar system plus the Moon. It's a striking contrast to the two New Wave sf anthologies I recently read which were published around the same time, Dangerous Visions and England Swings SF. Includes two stories that I already knew, Clarke's "Before Eden" (Venus) and Miller's "Crucifixus Etiam" (Mars). Looking the rest up in the isfdb, all the inner planets stories are in fact widely reprinted, whereas Silverberg obviously had to scrabble a bit harder for the outer planets (Panshin's "One Sunday in Neptune" seems to have been published first in this volume).

There are a couple of things in here that sf writers would never write about now. First up, the concept of any actual manned landing on the gas giants is generally discounted these days (indeed, Panshin knew enough in 1969 to discount it then). It's generally considered that the surface is very far down, possibly not even a meaningful concept due to the phase changes in the lower atmosphere, and it would be impossible to recover anyone from there. Harry Harrison has to use a matter transmitter for his characters to return from Saturn in "Pressure", and even then there are problems; Panshin's characters don't even try to touch bottom. On the other hand the Jupiter of Simak's "Desertion", and the Uranus of Weinbaum's "Planet of Doubt", could basically be any hostile planet anywhere in the galaxy.

Second, and tying into a previous dicussion of Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations", we have the portrayal of women. The ten stories feature precisely three women characters between them. The narrator's mother in Heinlein's "The Black Pits of Luna" is straight out of Stereotype Central. Miss Stanley in Simak's "Desertion" operates a machine that turns men into... something else. The central character, Fowler,

...wasn't exactly afraid of her, but he didn't feel quite comfortable when she was around. Those sharp blue eyes saw too much, her hands looked far too competent. She should be somebody's Aunt sitting in a rocking chair with her knitting needles. But she wasn't.

And in the end Fowler almost seems to be escaping from Miss Stanley as much as from humanity.

The third woman character is both the most interesting and from the oldest of the ten stories, Weinbaum's "Planet of Doubt" which was first published in 1935. Pat Hammond (née Burlingame - she apparently hooked up with our hero, Ham Hammond, in a previous story, "Parasite Planet") is an expert biologist, is deferred to on science issues by the men she shares the spaceship with, and works out the scientific puzzle on which the plot is based. Although admittedly she also bickers with her husband, wanders off and gets lost, and has to be rescued by the men, I was surprised to discover Weinbaum, whose brief career's reputation rests much more on sensawunda than on social issues, writing such a strong female character, and frankly puzzled that none of the other nine authors managed to do so. Perhaps if Weinbaum had lived, he might have taken Astounding and science fiction as a whole in a completely different direction.

I'm sure there's something to be written about attitudes to race (especially from Miller's immigrant Mars in "Crucifixus Etiam") and homosexuality (what are all these men locked up in spaceships doing to relieve tension?) but will have to leave that for others.

( plot summaries and similarities )

The best sentence from the best story in the book, starting off with boring detail and then ending in a quite unexpected alliterative lyricism:

The encampment was at the north end of the Mare Cimmerium, surrounded by the bleak brown and green landscape of rock and giant lichens, stretching toward sharply defined horizons except for one mountain range in the distance, and hung over by a blue sky so dark that the Earth-star occasionally became dimly visible during the dim daytime.

From Miller's "Crucifixus Etiam", of course.

So, it being an Easter Monday blessedly free of work comitments, I decided to take the first steps in exploring Belgium's megaliths. F and I set off to do the cluster around Tienen, finishing up with the caves of Folx-les-Caves.

Stop 1: ( Lange Steen )

Stop 2: ( Our Lady of the Stone )

Stop 3: ( Middelwinden tumulus )

Stop 4: ( Folx-les-Caves )

On the way back I saw a rarity - a hitch-hiker, trying to make it from his home near the caves to Brussels. He told me he had just dropped out of his politics degree in ULB; but since he already had a degree in physical education he was not too worried. I told him that I'd managed to get a job in politics despite having no academic qualifications whatsoever, so he can always go back to it if he really wants. Dropped him at the service station near Leuven and came home.