Horrors in Space

GALAXY READER OF SCIENCE FICTION (566 pp.)--Edited by H. L. Gold-Crown ($3.50).

One of the great dramatic moments in literature occurs when Robinson Crusoe, walking the sands of his supposedly uninhabited island, is "exceedingly surprised with the print of a man's naked foot on the shore." What gives this episode its magnificence is not its mechanical "plot value" but its power to set the reader's imagination flaring like a torch. Even while his startled intellect searches this way and that for an explanation of the footprint, his anxious heart is oppressed with forebodings as to what the footprint may mean for Crusoe.

Daniel Defoe conjured his sketch of a man at the edge of the unknown out of little but an island, a parrot, a goat, a musket and a Man Friday. The "science-fiction" writer, busy working the unknown nowadays, requires planets, galaxies, universes and all the latest portents of physics. He sets out, as Defoe did, to make the reader's imagination whirl with mingled curiosity and alarm; but where Defoe found novelty in a human footstep, the science-fictioneer stakes everything on such inhuman images as "a six-foot egg made of greenish gelatin" or "nine feet of slimy green trunk tapering ... to a pointed top." Where Defoe laid down his ideas in a prose as plain as his images, his successor revels in portentous complexity, e.g., "Remembrance occurs when, at all the synapses in a given network 'y,' the permanently echoing frequencies are duplicated as transient circulating frequencies."

Harmony on the Moon. Today, this gelatinous brain stuff, served up in pulp form, is selling at a rate never approached by Robinson Crusoe. In the Galaxy Reader, which presents 33 versions of the shape-of-things-to-come by 24 science-fiction writers, newcomers will have a chance to sample one of a half dozen such anthologies that have appeared so far this year. To help them over the bumps, Editor H. L. Gold supplies a commentary. Gold is mighty proud of his nest of singing birds, whose average age, he says, is 32 and whose work is distinguished by "fine ideas, sharp characterization and shrewd craftsmanship." Among the ideas:

P:Three space-gents, each composed of a triple "energy-entity" (which gives them the strength of nine) named RilRylRul, KadKedKud and MakMykMok. Since they walk on air and are constructed mainly of "intangible fluxes of force," Author Theodore Sturgeon has a hard time giving them the sharp characterization they deserve.

P:A precocious calculating machine named Junior. He restores Russo-American harmony by arranging--among other things--for a U.S. space captain to sleep with a Russian cybernetics technician named Anna on the moon. Neither Anna nor the captain has much to offer in the way of character, but Author Frederic Brown makes Junior sound quite a human fellow.

P: A U.S. citizen of New Century Three who is saved from a loveless life by a siren named LARA 339-827. "I would like to be in a mating booth with her . . . the full authorized twenty minutes," he mutters to himself, after brief study of her "rhythmic" torso. Author Walt Sheldon gives him the torso for keeps by bundling the pair of them into a rocket and heading it for Mars.

Women with Talons. The most striking feature of these stories, which are typical of most of the others in the book, is that they all seem to have been written by the same author. Except when they are wound up in a woolly snarl of technological jargon, they all employ one voice--that of the '203 and '303 tough guy, bounded on the rough side by "Huh," and on the smooth by slick patter ("Her voice was like _ a cello bowed up near the bridge"). All the objects of numbed horror are interchangeable, whether they are masked women wearing steel talons on their fingertips or vaporous robots created by "molecular integrators" out of the vagaries of spacetime.

It is no accident that the few imaginative glimmers that shine in this Galaxy do so in stories in which mechanical novelties are used merely as new surroundings for the Old Adam. If this trend can be encouraged, today's science-fiction, writers may develop to a point where their work will be almost as up to date as Daniel Defoe's.

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