Another Priest collection!—go find An Infinite Summer (1979)…
A collection by Yarbro—did not care for False Dawn (1978)…
A wonderful anthology with Robert Silverberg, Joanna Russ, Ron Goulart (whom I have never read), Gregory Benford, Gordon Eklund, Wilson Tucker, Edward Bryant, R. A. Lafferty, George Alec Effinger, Barry N. Malzberg, Gerard F. Conway, Edgar Pangbon…
And finally, the sole collection by one of the important (but lesser known) proponents of the New Wave…
Two (guess which!) are gifts from my wife who definitely knows my SF tastes…
Thoughts?
- Cautionary Tales, Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (1978)
(Uncredited cover for the 1983 edition)
From the back cover of an earlier edition: “A bizarre and haunting journey through inner and outer space—to alien worlds where an aging playwright is in danger of losing his soul to a monstrous organic computer…. a charming teeny-bopper ghoul solves the problem of hunger in the town morgue… a member of the patrol squad on a dreary, useless planet is lured by the sucking darkness of evil Scranton’s marsh… the frozen steerage passengers on a floundering space ship share a gruesome fate… malevolent forces on the other side of death are held at bay by a huge black swan… and other strange and wondrous events beguile the reader to the edge of human horror—and beyond!
2. The Eye of the Lens, Langdon Jones (1972) (MY REVIEW)
(Uncredited cover for the 1973 edition)
From the back cover: “Five tales of men struggling against warped time, fractured light, and mindless violence. langdon Joens is concerned wi3th the nature of time, time as a tyrannical machine, as a fragment of schizophrenic fantasy, as a purely psychological mechanism habing no objective existence. Delving in to the grotesqueness of psychic disorientation, he brings forth a new, daring kind of science fiction.
In The Eye of the Lens, the title story, the “eye” becomes the eye of the unconscious, the eye that sees through the appearance of reality. It exposes us to violence and insanity and gives them a strange honesty.
The Great Clock os a tome-terror trip reminiscent of Poe’s tale of the pendulum, but with consequences far more terrible.
The Time Machine destroys the boundaries of time as it moves its protagonists from prison to an intense love affair to a warped realization of freedom.
Symphony No. 6 in C Minor THE TRAGIC by Ludwig van Beethoven II is an extraordinary statement by a man cursed with a name.
The Garden of Delights is a mingling of memory, explicit sexual love, reality, and fantasy. beneath its deceptively clear surface crouches the possibility of what “would have been.”
Langdon Jones is one of the more highly esteemed writers of the new sci-fi. His stories have appeared in the British magazine New Worlds and in many prestigious anthologies.”
3. Real-Time World, Christopher Priest (1974) (REVIEW)
(Bruce Pennington’s cover for the 1976 edition)
From the back cover: “Starved of news, fed on rumour the crew of the observatory gain perceptual powers that anticipate the Earth’s events. But they’re on the moon—or so Winter, their observer, thinks. But the crew think they’re on Earth. And who knows who is right in ‘Real-Time World’.
The severed limps of Todd Alport, the Master, are tempted from retirement into another starring role as the greatest self-mutilator the stage has ever seen. And just what horror this superstar of the future can perpetrate ‘The Head and the Hand’ reveals.
How does a global environment deal with dissidents? Simple. Sentence them to correction—and achieve it by removing their minds from their bodies and setting them to work in a computer. And there is only one way out of a ‘Sentence To Binary Code.’
Just three mind-bending examples of the stories to be found in this collection by Christopher Priest, the author of INVERTED WORLD, who was voted ‘Best British Writer of Science Fiction 1974’ by fans.”
- Universe 1, ed. Terry Carr (1971) (MY REVIEW)
(Davis Meltzer’s cover for the 1971 edition)
From the back cover: “This anthology of never-before-published science fiction stories presents the best SF authors of today writing of human adventures in our infinite universe:
In GOOD NEW FROM THE VATICAN, Robert Silverberg tells of the election of the first robot Pope.
In MINDSHIP, Gerard F. Conway writes vividly of deadly stresses aboard a starship powered by a psi rive.
In TIME EXPOSURES, Wilson Tucker has an ingenious tale of crime-solving with a camera that photographs the past.
In THE ROMANCE OF DR. TANNER, Ron Guolart writes about a TV soap opera for lizards on the planet Murdstone.”