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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.0876Literature English (North America) American fiction By type Genre fiction Adventure fiction Speculative fictionLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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“Discovery of the Ghooric Zone -- March 15, 2337”, Richard A. Lupoff -- This strange H. P. Lovecraft tribute tale is the reason I read this anthology. Set exactly 400 years after Lovecraft’s death, mentioning several elements in Lovecraft stories. Specifically, most of the references are from Lovecraft’s sonnet cycle “Fungi from Yuggoth”. Yuggoth is a planet beyond Pluto in this story though in Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in the Darkness” it was Pluto. The Ghooric zone is from sonnet 22 “Alienation”. Thog comes from sonnet 10 “The Pigeon-Flyers”. Thok shows up in sonnet 20 “Night-Gaunts”.
“The Magnificent Conspiracy”, Spider Robinson -- This is a hippy wish fulfillment and doesn’t seem to have much of a speculative element. Though not a big fan of his, I expected more from Robinson than giving us a professional assassin narrator and a billionaire with unexplained uses for him. The billionaire has some plan to reform the world. (One of the hippy elements is the playing of the Peter, Paul, and Mary song “The Great Mandella”.) There is no speculative element, not even of some unusual technology. The story has some interest as a Vietnam era tale since the narrator, a former hero from that war, feels guilty that his conscientious objector brother died in Leavenworth. However, because of the vagueness of the story, we’re not sure what the billionaire means when he scorns the two brothers as “tragic expiators” and the narrator is chided for being an “egocentric bastard” who doesn’t realize he can do some good in the world.
“Allies”, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro -- This is one of those seventies sf stories that had a point. Unfortunately, it’s a feminist point that each sex responds to the terrors and discomforts found in adventure sf in identical ways thus we get a plethora of carefully chosen, sexually ambiguous names and prose which deliberately conceals the gender of the characters. This contrivance is unconvincing and annoying -- much like trying to conceal the race of a character but even less justifiable. The protagonist Chris seems to have been involved in a homosexual relationship but has, perhaps, a sexual attraction to Jes who is of the opposite sex.
“The Curandeiro”, Thomas F. Monteleone -- Inspired by Arigo the psychic surgeon of the “rusty knife” who was the subject of a 1975 book, this tale’s central point of interest is the idea of an undercover alien cop pursuing an alien doctor on our world -- interesting because extending life via medicine is forbidden, abandoned idea on the aliens’ worlds and punishable by death. The alien society practices a form of social Darwinism.
“Harry’s Note”, Theodore Sturgeon -- The variety of ideas and plot devices whipped together here show why Sturgeon was a short story master. Not only do we have the oh-so-seventies motif of a possible energy shortage, but Timothy Leary’s speculations on untapped human potential, an invisible alien who talks to our hero, the person of Sturgeon detailing what the protagonist sent to him, the sad stories the protagonist collects (including one about the parrot of the explorer Humboldt and how he speaks in the language of an extinct Amazon tribe), statistical typing, and the narrow window the human mind has for language acquisition.
“Mindseye”, Elizabeth A. Lynn -- Aliens and telepaths are probably my two least favorite themes in sf, and this story has both. One of my problems with telepath stories is the seem to always involve the manipulation of images to assault the mind via emotional associations. While that may lead to flashy writing, the seeming inevitability of the plot can’t be disguised. Still, I liked this story all right. I liked, even though it wasn’t very original, the idea that hyperspatial travel could lead to autism. This is another story weakened by a vague ending -- maybe I wasn’t paying that close of attention because I wasn’t that interested.
“The Man Who Was Pregnant”, Elizabeth A. Lynn -- As I recall, it was in the late 1970s when the speculative idea of male pregnancy, spurred on by some medical idea I don’t know of, enjoyed a brief vogue. This story is more of a vignette on the sensuality a male pregnant with child might find than any serious exploration of the idea. While there is some attempt to suggest the actual and possible reactions of the medical community and regular people at the novel reality of a pregnant male, mostly we have the subjective feelings of the pregnant male and his eventual delivery of a child. We don’t even get an explanation for how the pregnancy occurred.
“The Dark of Legends, the Light of Lies”, Charles L. Grant -- This attempt (according to the introductory notes -- and there are some similarities) to do a Ray Bradburyesque exploration of a future where a beloved art form (here novel writing) is dying out was interesting for a while.
"How's the Night Life on Cissalda?", Harlan Ellison -- This is Harlan Ellison operating in full bravado, hyperbolic, deliberately offensive and funny mode. One Enoch Mirren, pioneering temponaut, comes back literally sexually entangled -- almost unbreakably so -- with a very alien, extra-dimensional Cissaldan. The Cissaldans, who descend on the Earth to have sexual congress with all sorts of people famous (including one of Ellison’s favorite targets, Anita Bryant), are disgusting. They are also “the most perfect fuck in the universe” and irresistible. (The list of attempts to pry Mirren away from the first Cissaldan is told in very much the same rhetoric as the list of brainwashing techniques used in Ellison’s “’Repent, Harlequin!’, said the Ticktockman”.) After Mirren and the Cissaldan are separated after being locked up in an underground government research facility (the vaguely detailed escape from that facility is self-consciously compared to a bad pulp story), Mirren finds that there are no more Cissaldans to pair off with, that the aliens will eventually retire from Earth, and the cockroaches will supplant man on Earth. ( )