5) Backdrop of Stars, edited by Harry Harrison

I picked up this collection (first published in 1968, though I got the 1975 paperback) in Dublin the other month, and Ken MacLeod, no less, commended my choice, saying that it had made quite an impression on him when he first read it. A baker’s dozen of stories by well-established authors (Aldiss, Anderson, Asimov, Ballard – they are printed by alphabetical order), some of which go some way to challenging comfortable political preconceptions (though one – L. Sprague de Camp’s “Proposal” – is I fear serious rather than satirical in its anti-feminism). It also struck me that a lot of the stories were really about death; the very first, Aldiss’ “Judas Danced”, is about an execution and the last, Mack Reynolds’ “Retaliation”, is a post-nuclear holocaust vignette (with a sting in the tale – the viewpoint characters, for whom the author has developed our sympathy, are Russians not Americans). Anyway, a good collection.

A few weeks back (maybe even a few months back) someone asked me, or else I saw a question posed to the internet at large, about the World SF Writers Conference held by Harry Harrison in Ireland in 1978 and whether there was any information about it on-line.

While looking for something else today, I discovered that John Brosnan's contemporary write-up of it has been republished here. (Presumably not by Brosnan himself, as the livejournal entry is dated September and he died last April.)

If you asked me the question, sorry for not remembering who you are and replying directly.

[Edited to add: I see the person responsible for putting it online is kimhuett.]

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.