The best science fiction of the year, #6 Book

This is a strong collection of stories published in 1976. Most are true science fiction, as promised by the title, but a few of them are better described as speculative fiction, approaching horror ("The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats") or magical realism ("The Eyeflash Miracles") due to their mythical monsters and otherworldly interventions.

Whether this is a good thing or not depends on your interests, of course. Your taste likely won't agree with mine, and neither will align with the editor's, so this anthology is as much of a mixed bag as most. For example, there is apparently a substantial audience who can appreciate an alternate-history description of Plains Indians flying airplanes in the Civil War, written in dry, scholarly style. This explains why "Custer's Last Jump" has a number of fans, but I can't count myself among them. I simply can't imagine how anyone enjoys this story, and could barely force myself to finish it. Similarly, I didn't like "The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats", and not just because it made me uncomfortable in the ways it was supposed to. But personal taste aside, these stories are all masterfully written, without exception. Whether not I want to read fictional commentary by Mark Twain about Crazy Horse's aeronautical exploits, I certainly can't imagine it having been written any better.

For every story that didn't resonate with me, there was another that was truly exceptional. Asimov's "The Bicentennial Man", about a robot that aspires to become human, will be familiar to many, if not in this Hugo- and Nebula-winning short form, then in its later incarnations as a novel (The Positronic Man( or movie (Bicentennial Man). It's one of Asimov's best, and carries more punch as a novella than a full-length novel. (Incidentally, I hadn't previously appreciated that both the 200-year age and the struggle for freedom of the eponymous "Bicentennial" robot would have had some additional significance to readers reading the story in the bicentennial year of its original publication.) George R.R. Martin's "Meathouse Man" is another standout: a hope-filled tale of love and humanity in a bleak and dehumanizing future, where the march of progress has not left much room for individual dreams. A powerful story that will stay with me for a quite a while.

Overall, the hits are more frequent than the misses in this collection, and they kept me eager to see what was next. None of these stories has aged poorly in the thirty-five years since they were published, and all can still hold their own with more contemporary science fiction.