Terry Carr (1937–1987)

It is nice to read an old anthology with very good to excellent stories. I just wish there were more of them in here. Terry Carr selected eleven stories from 1976 that includes one of the better stories Isaac Asimov ever wrote. He writes a nice introduction for each story.

The included material is:
ix • Introduction • essay by Terry Carr
1 • I See You • (1976) • short story by Damon Knight
18 • The Phantom of Kansas • (1976) • novelette by John Varley
64 • Seeing • (1976) • show more novelette by Harlan Ellison
93 • The Death of Princes • (1976) • short story by Fritz Leiber
115 • The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats • (1976) • novelette by James Tiptree, Jr.
145 • The Eyeflash Miracles • (1976) • novella by Gene Wolfe
217 • An Infinite Summer • Dream Archipelago • (1976) • novelette by Christopher Priest
243 • The Highest Dive • (1976) • short story by Jack Williamson
258 • Meathouse Man • (1976) • novelette by George R. R. Martin
291 • Custer's Last Jump • (1976) • novelette by Steven Utley and Howard Waldrop
332 • The Bicentennial Man • (1976) • novelette by Isaac Asimov
380 • Recommended Reading - 1976 • essay by Terry Carr
382 • The Science Fiction Year (1976) • essay by Charles N. Brown

As the editor points out in his introduction, reading short stories is harder work than most novels. The reader has to figure out a lot that is not written. The first story here, Damon Knight's "I See You" is one of those. At first I couldn't figure out what was going on. Slowly the reader realizes that some sort of viewer that can see through time is being used - it can see anywhere and any time, even as is done in the story to see each moment of the assassination of JFK. The ramifications of the invention of such a device is left open but the suggestion is that it will lead to world peace and little crime because everything can be found out via the viewer. Disturbing but thought provoking story.

John Varley's novelette 'The Phantom of Kansas' I thought I had read before but I didn't remember it. I have read a number of his shorter works over the years in the science fiction magazines and in best of the year collections. This is one of his earliest stories, and quite intriguing as a sci fi mystery of a woman who is murdered again and again ... I liked it a lot and this was full of a lot of ideas. It was a finalist for the 1977 Hugo award which was won by Asimov's 'Bicentennial Man' that appears at the end of the collection.

The third story, Harlan Ellison's 'Seeing' is a science fiction horror story. Ellison's stories have always been a little hard to digest, but he was one of the most influential writers for a reason. That said, he could be a nasty person and some of his stories seem to reflect that nastiness. This is a dark future story about kidnapping people to harvest their special gray-blue eyes. Unsettling to put it mildly. Having a dictionary helps - when was the last time you used anemophilously in a sentence? Well if you were a dandelion, say, you would know about throwing anemophilously into the wind. Despite the skill in creating this story, it is one I would prefer to have not read.

Rather than a lengthy blow by blow of the remaining stories I'll quickly mention a few highlights. There were a couple stories that were uncomfortable or that didn't impress me and I got rather bored with the strangeness of Gene Wolfe's novella and skimmed the latter half of it.

Christopher Priest's 'An Infinite Summer' intrigued me. I think it had a happy ending but I was slightly unsure. In the story people from the future come visiting the past and for unknown reasons (presumably they are artists of some sort) they use a device to freeze people in moments of time. There are consequences to this which the story shows us. I liked the whole thing.

George R R Martin's story Meathouse Man is an incredibly dark horror story about a man who works with reanimated corpses. I didn't finish it. I skimmed. I wish I could unread it.

I skipped Custer's Last Jump because I read it before and didn't think I needed to revisit.

The final story in the collection won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards for best novelette. It is one of my favorite stories by Isaac Asimov and I've read it more than once before including when it first came out and I bought the Asimov collection that included it. I was avidly reading a lot of fiction and science fiction in the mid 70's, fresh out of college. Perhaps because Alex Haley's 'Roots' was out and so popular at the time I couldn't help but think that the 'Bicentennial man' was at least in part an allegory for slavery. It is the story of a robot who yearns to be a free man and it takes 200 years for that to happen. More than an allegory however it looks at the meaning of being human. Robin Williams did an excellent job in the film adaptation which made me like the story even more. It had probably been 20 years since I last read this story and I enjoyed it almost as much as the first time.

So, in sum, there were four stories I liked and a few too many that I did not. show less

Pfft. I'm so tired of novelettes and novellas. Wanderings and musings and sometimes even adventures, neither as fleshed out as a novel nor as pointed as a story. I'm also tired of SF from the 70s. The most memorable piece in here had all males going mad and killing all females, thinking that would please God... well, it certainly doesn't please me to think they were so ready to believe the teachings... and the climax, well, let's just say a competent writer could have gotten to that point in show more a short-short piece. show less

3/5

A short story anthology define by it's highs an lows. Carr was able to pull together a number of excellent pieces, and while the shorter works were mostly filler, they weren't immediately terrible for the most part. I've heard good things about Carr as a creator of these anthologies, and I'm glad to find that reputation backed-up here.

The highlights include:

The Queen of Air and Darkness, by Poul Anderson
An ethereal and suspenseful tale about how folklore gets twisted into the stories of show more humans. Great characters an a wonderful concept.

In Entropy’s Jaws, by Robert Silverberg
Some of my favorite Silverberg writing I've read so far, as a psychic mediator slowly begins to loose his sense of self, an of the timeline of events. The prose is excellent, a wonderful portrayal of mental illness. Wonderful ending to boot.

A Meeting with Medusa, by Arthur C. Clarke
This is classic Clarke, through and through. An ace pilot floats a balloon into the upper atmosphere of Jupiter an beholds the planet's wonders. The characters fall to the background, letting the location itself take main stage.

Vaster Than Empires and More Slow , by Ursula K. Le Guin
The first writing that I've had the pleasure to experience from Le Guin. A team of colonists settle a vast forest world, with an empath leading the show. The characterizations are top notch, and the message of nature's ability to form complex relationships is great.

Overall, not a bad selection, with a few stand-outs that will stick with me for awhile. Definitely looking for more anthologies by Terry Carr in the future. show less

Another of my re-reads of old collections, revealing interesting perspectives when looking at short stories with forty years' (!) hindsight.

There are stories in this collection that are very much of their time but still resonate (Ian Watson's 'Slow birds', which is an allegory of the cruise missile debate); there are some that seem very dated (Frederik Pohl's 'Servant of the people', about civil rights for robots; and Robert Silverberg's 'Amanda and the Alien'). There were two stories that I show more just did not connect with at all - Connie Willis' 'The Sidon in the Mirror' and Greg Bear's 'Hardfought' (which won a Nebula, so someone must have liked it, but not me!). Richard Cowper's 'The Tithonian Factor' was elegiac and sweet; John Sladek's 'Scenes from the Country of the Blind' was typical Sladek and none the worse for that. And then there was Michael Bishop's 'Her Habilene Husband', about a woman in the US South who discovers a prehistoric hominid in her garden. This story was a great surprise for me; I remembered it as a story very much set in place, with the attitudes expected from the South. By our standards, it reads as fairly non-PC; but it was perhaps the stand-out story of the collection for me (along with 'Slow Birds'). show less