Black Gate

Legacy by James H. Schmitz (Ace Books, 1979). Cover by Bob Adragna

Although I purchased several of his paperbacks in my teens, I didn’t really learn to appreciate the work of James H. Schmitz until I read and reviewed Gardner Dozois’ terrific 1998 anthology The Good Old Stuff: Adventure SF in the Grand Tradition, which contained Schmitz’s story “The Second Night of Summer.” In his intro for that tale Gardner wrote:

Although he lacked van Vogt’s paranoid tension and ornately Byzantine plots, the late James H. Schmitz was considerably better at people than van Vogt was, crafting even his villains as complicated, psychologically complex, and non-stereotypical characters, full of surprising quirks and behaviors that you didn’t see in a lot of other Space Adventure stuff… And his universes, although they come with their own share of monsters and sinister menaces, seem as if they would be more pleasant places to live than most Space Opera universes, places where you could have a viable, ordinary, and decent life once the plot was through requiring you to battle for existence against some Dread Implacable Monster; Schmitz even has sympathy for the monsters, who are often seen in the end not to be monsters at all, but rather creatures with agendas and priorities and points-of-view of their own, from which perspectives their actions are justified and sometimes admirable — a tolerant attitude almost unique amidst the Space Adventure tales of the day, most of which were frothingly xenophobic.

“The Second Night of Summer” is a superb tale of an attack on the planet Noorhut by mysterious and deadly inter-dimensional invaders — an attack thwarted single-handedly by the coolly competent Granny Wannattel and her friendly alien companion. That single story sparked an enduring interest in Schmitz, and I’ve read and enjoyed a lot of his short fiction in the past few decades.

That in turn stirred an interest in those 70s novels that have been gathering dust on my shelves. I recently picked up the 1979 Ace Books edition of Legacy, set in Schmitz’s richly-imagined galactic federation of The Hub, and find myself much more interested in reading it than any of this month’s new SF releases.

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Year’s Finest Fantasy (Berkley Books, 1978). Cover by Carl Lundgren

The first Year Best volume I ever read was Terry Carr’s The Best Science Fiction of the Year #6, published in paperback by Del Rey in 1977 and filled with stories that blew my 13-year old mind, including the fascinating gadget tale “I See You” by Damon Knight,  John Varley’s futuristic murder mystery “The Phantom of Kansas,” the raunchy and bizarre “Meathouse Man” by George R. R. Martin, and Isaac Asimov’s classic “The Bicentennial Man.”

I kept an eye out for Terry Carr’s anthologies after that. The next one I spotted was Year’s Finest Fantasy, published by Berkley in July 1987. It was a fine demonstration of Carr’s far-ranging and discerning eye, for it included names both expected — Avram Davidson, Stephen King, a Dying Earth tale by Jack Vance, and Harlan Ellison with one of his finest stories, “Jeffty Is Five” — and unexpected, including T. Coraghessan Boyle, Woody Allen, and a horror novella by Robert Aickmanm. It also contained Steven Utley and Howard Waldrop’s Frankenstein story, “Black as the Pit, from Pole to Pole,” and an long novella from a virtual unknown, Julian Reid, his only known fantasy work, originally published in Universe 7.

Year’s Finest Fantasy was successful enough to kick off a series that lasted for five volumes, changing name to Fantasy Annual with #3. Terry Carr, a fine writer in his own right, provided a thoughtful introduction to the first volume, arguing convincingly that “contemporary fantasy tells us more truly of the nature of humanity than any collection of “realistic” stories could.” 43 years after I first read them, I find Carr’s words still resonate strongly.

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There are prolific anthologists, and there are very prolific anthologists, and there’s Isaac Asimov. The Internet Science Fiction database lists nearly 200 anthologies with his name on them, averaging around seven per year between 1963 and his death in 1992. (If you’re thinking, Geez that seems like a lot, let me clarify for you. Yes. It’s a lot.)

Of course, the vast majority of those were produced later in his career and in partnership with a team of editors, especially Martin H. Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh. In the early days Asimov compiled anthologies the old-fashioned way: by himself. It was the enduring, decades-long success of those books that paved the way for the massive literary-industrial complex to spring up around Asimov in the 80s and 90s. And he may have had no original anthology more successful or popular than Where Do We Go From Here?

Where Do We Go From Here? was published in hardcover by Doubleday in 1971, reprinted by Fawcett Crest in 1972, and kept in print in paperback for nearly ten years. It was one of the most popular and discussed SF anthologies of the decade, by a wide margin, and cemented Asimov’s reputation for curating — and selling — top-notch short fiction collections. It gathers stories by Stanley G. Weinbaum, John W. Campbell, Jr., Lester del Rey, Robert A. Heinlein, Hal Clement, James Blish, Jerome Bixby, Arthur C. Clarke, James E. Gunn, H. Beam Piper, Walter Tevis, Larry Niven, and others. Here’s the complete Table of Contents.

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Star Colony (Ace Books, 1983). Cover by Attila Hejja

Keith Laumer was an Air Force officer and a diplomat in the United States Foreign Service before becoming a full-time SF writer in the late 50s. He was a familiar face in the digest SF mags, with four stories nominated for Hugo or Nebula Awards, and A Plague of Demons was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1966. His most famous series, the satirical adventures of the cool-headed galactic diplomat Retief, and the military future-history focused on Bolo super-tanks, were popular for many years.

Laumer famously suffered a stroke in 1971 that left him unable to write for many years; a long rehabilitation eventually enabled him to pick up a pen again, but his work suffered noticeably. As Wikipedia notes:

The quality of his work suffered, and his career declined. In later years, Laumer also re-used scenarios and characters from earlier works to create new books, which one critic felt limited their appeal: “Alas, Retief to the Rescue doesn’t seem so much like a new Retief novel, but a kind of Cuisinart mélange of past books.”

Laumer’s editors and publishers, and many of his readers, remained loyal for many years, publishing, promoting and reading many books that were markedly different from his earlier output. In 1983 Ace put substantial marketing dollars behind the 400-page space opera Star Colony, advertised as “His Long-Awaited Epic Novel.”

Reviews weren’t kind. Kirkus called it,

A disjointed pseudo-docudrama detailing the “”history”” of star colony Omega, with only a few flashes of the old Laumer wit… Less a novel than a set of intermittently amusing stories weakly cobbled together — with lots of comic-book action, silly dialogue and little overall coherence.

Modern readers haven’t been much more generous. Star Colony has a 3.06 rating at Goodreads; this review by James is fairly typical.

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