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.

8) The Door into Summer, by Robert A. Heinlein.

As a child, I loved Heinlein's juvenile novels. As a teenager, I read almost all of his adult novels. I remember at a vulnerable age (I must have been 12, looking up the dates) reading the first installment of The Number of the Beast in Omni, my young mind boggling at the idea of nipples going "spung!". But once I'd found and read the complete novel, it gradually began to occur to me that while Heinlein's past works were great, his present ones were pretty, well, dire. I have a lingering affection for Job: A Comedy of Justice but the last two I tried, To Sail Beyond the Sunset and The Cat Who Walked Through Walls, well, while I'm glad I borrowed them from someone else and didn't pay my own money for them, I can never get those wasted hours of my life back.

So I was a bit surprised to discover that there were still a couple of novels from his earlier, good period that I hadn't read. One was Double Star, which I caught up with last November; the other was The Door Into Summer, of which I knew almost nothing; it cropped up at 79th on Neil Sykes' list of the top 100 SF novels, now I notice down to 92nd. I put it on my list of books to look out for in London last week, found it, bought it, read it.

And it's a good sf novel. Written in 1956, set in 1970 and 2000, hero is a bit of an asshole (alas, unintentionally - a hint of things to come), suspended animation takes you forward in time, the mad professor's time machine takes you back. I kept on recognising bits from films - surely that last was part of the inspiration for Back to the Future? Surely the scene with trying to get the cat into suspended animation is consciously echoed by Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and Jones (played by himself) in Alien? OK, there are one or two plot holes, and the hero's relationship with his colleague's stepdaughter could not possibly be written as an innocent friendship these days, but taken as a novel of its time it's pretty good. The hero is 30 in 1970, born in 1940, so the book's key target readership when it was first published would have been able to think of this as their own possible future.

Of course, now that we are four years beyond the year in which the end of the book is set it's also interesting to read it as futurology (as one can also read, for instance, Bellamy's Looking Backward: from 2000 to 1887). Heinlein has a mid-1960s nuclear war, and the capital of the USA moving to Denver, which of course didn't happen; nor was suspended animation commonplace in 1970 or even 2000. But the spread of household appliances (the source of our hero's wealth) is a good call, even if he got the modalities somewhat wrong; his nearest hit is the engineer's drawing board, not too far removed from our CAD. He hints (as far as you could in 1956) at a more liberal and liberated sexual culture in the future - indeed, some would argue that Stranger in a Strange Land helped to bring that about - but completely misses the improvement in rights for non-whites as far as I can tell. (Farnham's Freehold was still eight years in the future.) The English language, thank heavens, has not changed as much in the last thirty years (or fifty) as he predicted.

Anyway, that was worth the £4 or £5 I paid for it. Back to finishing River of Gods now.

6) Double Star by Robert Heinlein. Read it on my Palm Pilot thanks to getting the electronic version at Fictionwise. Of course it's The Prisoner of Zenda with spaceships, but I was interested to notice just how much of the plot was subsequently ripped off for the Kevin Kline/Sigourney Weaver movie Dave. Also his choice of the Dutch royal family as supreme rulers of the solar system gave me some private amusement given my own occasional contacts with the real Dutch royals. But what really grabbed me was Heinlein's effortless portrayal of grand political ideas, and indeed an election campaign, as background material to the main story. Compare with Philip K Dick's Cantata 140 which I recently reviewed for Infinity Plus, with one of the least realistically portrayed election campaigns I have ever encountered in literature. A very good read and worthy Hugo winner.