Epoch Book

This collection starts off with a bang. Larry Niven's "ARM", Gordon Ekliund's "Angel of Truth", Ursula K. Le Guin's "Mazes", R.A. Lafferty's "For All Poor Folks at Picketwire", Frederik Pohl's "Growing Up in Edge City", Ward Moore's "Durance", and Clifford D. Simak's "The Ghost of a Model T" were all above average'both for this book and science fiction in general. Those are the first seven stories in the book.

The highlight of those seven for me was Frederik Pohl's, about a boy growing up in an underground planned city, in which any deviation from the plan for his life is punished. He's smart enough to evade the controls, but not the punishments.

Kate Wilhelm's "Planet Story" is an interesting experiment in first-person present, about a planet that taps into primal fears in a way that we never discover. It's almost Lovecraftian, though not to the extent of, say, C.L. Moore's Northwest Smith.

Lou Fisher wrote a nice old-school twist ending in "Bloodstream".

I did not particularly enjoy Joanna Russ's "Existence", but she in her author's note following the story she describes her "quixotic dream for the paperback-book industry".


…a giant Sears-Roebuck-ish, centralized store which will carry remaindered books at lowered (or raised) prices (depending on their bibliographic value and the rise due to inflation) and have wee beautiful catalogs in every hamlet, village, and town…
Of course, such an operation would require a vast capital outlay. Or would it? Specialized bookstores do this kind of thing already. At any rate, it points in the proper direction, I think. The first step is for some brilliant sociologist or computer programmer out there (hello, hello?) to get a grant to study just who buys books and why, something about which there are a lot of publishers' theories and no facts. A big grant. And then…?
Say, why don't one of you readers…?


She's pretty much describing the anti-Amazon, a grant-funded behemoth that would have operated based on what the grant-approving bureaucrats think people should read rather than what people actually want to read. Bonus points for being a typical "here's my great idea, now someone else go do the easy part" writer's fantasy.

A.A. Attanasio presents a seventh-grade story about dolphins and humans; there are some interesting ideas in it, but rather than take them up, he ends the story with a classic "and then everyone was hit by a bus".

Gregory Benford is "a theoretical physicist" and his "Cambridge, 1:58 A.M." name-drops several real physicists. I'm pretty sure "Tommy Gold" is my old advisor at Cornell, and Thorne must be Kip Thorne, since Benford writes about "Thorne's group at Cal Tech". The strange part of this story to me is that there are semi-undecipherable messages coming through time, but the main character doesn't do anything with these messages. The messages are fragmented, but there's enough that someone, somewhere, might understand them. The protagonist doesn't make them available, even through academic or professional backchannels.

Neal Barrett, Jr.'s "Nightbeat" looks like a story of tyranny, but the author's note at the end turns it into a moral tyranny, in a world where there are too many dreams, and so people need to be forced not to dream lest their dreams intrude upon others.

Harry Harrison's "Run From the Fire" is the kind of parallel-world story that Harrison excels at. Not going to spoil it, but travelers from other timelines come upon earth and softly shanghai the main character to help them in an Iroquois-run timeline. In his afteword, Harrison tries to shanghai other writers into taking up the parallel-alternate timeline story:


Writing the parallel-world story requires a lot of thought and some recourse to the history books. Both of these seem within the realm of possibility for practicing writers. Therefore I encourage my brethren in this field to consider not only the future but also the manifold possibilities for a changed present.


The last story makes up for any disappointment in the middle. It's a Jack Vance detective thriller set on a very discouraging planet. It is very difficult to solve mysteries when the detective is human and the races involved are alien to human thought.

Vance declines to write about how he wrote the story and instead writes about writers writing about their stories:


The less a writer discusses his work'and himself'the better. The master chef slaughters no chickens in the dining room; the doctor writes prescriptions in Latin; the magician hides his hinges, mirrors, and trapdoors with the utmost care. Recently I read of a surgeon who, after performing a complicated abortion, displayed to the ex-mother the fetus in a jar of formaldehyde. The woman went into hysterics and sued him, and I believe collected. No writer has yet been haled into court on similar grounds, but the day may arrive.