Spectrum IV

Spectrum #4

by Kingsley Amis (Editor), Robert Conquest (Editor)

Marching Morons by C.M. Kornbluth;Gadget vs. Trend by Christopher Anvil;Such Stuff by John Brunner;The Sellers of the Dream by John Jakes;The Large Ant by Howard Fast;Barrier by Anthony Boucher;The Great Nebraska Sea by Allan Danzig;Compassion Circuit by John Wyndham;A Planet Named Shayol by Cordwainer Smith;Into the Shop by Ron Goulart;The Secret Songs by Fritz Leiber;Stranger Station by Damon Knight;Hot Planet by Hal Clement;The Choice by Wayland Young.

Genres: Science Fiction, Anthologies, Fiction, Short Stories, Science Fiction Fantasy

335 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Best known novels of British writer Sir Kingsley William Amis include Lucky Jim (1954) and The Old Devils (1986).

This English poet, critic, and teacher composed more than twenty-three collections, short stories, radio and television scripts, and books of social and literary criticism. He fathered Martin Amis.

William Robert Amis, a clerk of a mustard manufacturer, fathered him. He began his education at the city of London school, and went up to college of Saint John, Oxford, in April 1941 to read English; he met Philip Larkin and formed the most important friendship of his life. After only a year, the Army called him for service in July 1942. After serving as a lieutenant in the royal corps of signals in the Second World War, Amis returned to Oxford in October 1945 to complete his degree. He worked hard and got a first in English in 1947, and then decided to devote much of his time.

Pen names: [authorRobert Markham|553548] and William Bill Tanner

Reviews

[A.L. Sirois · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent anthology containing some seminal science-fiction tales. These stories are thought-provoking, which is generally the whole idea of science fiction: to provoke (and promote) thought. The overall theme is. What does it mean to be a human being? And, What happens when we come up against things (and "people") we can't handle?
I'm not going to review all the stories in the book; I'll mention just a few.
C.M. Kornbluth's famous story "The Marching Morons" has been reprinted many times. Kornbluth died young, and it's tempting to wonder what he might have achieved had he lived longer. Here he posits a future in which the general IQ has diminished to the point where the average person is little more than a cheery doofus. The few remaining "above average" people have to monitor and care for these "morons." What Kornbluth did NOT foresee was that the "morons" would turn out to be bigoted, hateful bastards, not unlike MAGA types today. Even so, the burden of caring for them leads the future guardians to a drastic solution.
John Brunner contributes "Such Stuff," in which dream deprivation studies push one man into a waking nightmare.
"The Seller of the Dream" by John Jakes, who wrote a fair bit of science fiction before turning his attention to blockbusters, details the attempts of Finn Smith to rescue the girl he loves from a mega corporation that is using her body and personality as a template to market to other women.
"The Large Ant" by Howard Fast concerns the discovery of a race of tool-using "ants" as big as small dogs, that seem to be encroaching on humanity. It's scarier than it sounds.
"Compassion Circuit" by John "Day of the Triffids" Wyndham, is a creepy story about a man whose sick wife is cared for by a robot nurse, who takes her brief to save the woman far beyond the pale.
In "A Planet Called Shayol," by the brilliant Cordwainer Smith, people regarded as criminals are exiled to a world on which microscopic "dromozoa" infect the inmates, causing extra body parts to grow. These parts are harvested by the bull-like warden, and sent offworld to assist people in need of them. Because the process is painful, the inmates are drugged periodically. Beautifully written, as with all his work, but dark -- yet with a hint of redemption.
Damon Knight was another writer whose work has been neglected. His story, "Stranger Station," puts a lone human in a distant space station, along with a monstrous alien whose secretions prolong human life. Why have the aliens agreed to provide this "service"?
Anyway, this short review can't do justice to the stories. Among the other writers are Ron Goulart, Hal Clement, Fritz Leiber and Christopher Anvil. It would be worth your while to dig it up, maybe on eBay. This is science fiction the way it used to be written, with the idea of "story" preeminent.

[Tony Ellis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely a better-quality collection of SF of its time. That time being 1942 to 1965, some of it does read like the SF grandad used to read. I fell in and out of love with Barrier by Anthony Boucher several times before I finished the damn thing: at 50-plus pages it's easily the longest story in here. But when I realised it was also the oldest story, written when WWII wasn't even half over, I cut it some slack.

There's also commendable variety - much, much more than I saw in a more recent TOR anthology. Whatever your tastes, pretty much any collection that has CM Kornbluth, Cordwainer Smith, Hal Clement and Fritz Leiber in it has to have something worth your while, and this collection has all four.

[Steve Stuart · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a best-of anthology, with stories drawn from the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s. Although I would normally think of the first two of those decades as the heyday of engineer-driven rocketship stories, there is just one example from that category here, and considerably more in the way of literary or mildly experimental approaches than I would have expected for that time period. I’m not sure whether to attribute that to early signs of the New Wave beginning to take shape, or the literary leanings of Kingsley Amis as editor.

While the editorial voice does show up in the story selection, the editing was otherwise fairly lazy, with no introductions or story notes. The only commentary from either editor comes in the form of a transcript of an interesting, but contextless conversation between Amis, CS Lewis, and Brian W. Aldiss. It’s curious that this was included, as it’s basically a literary fencing contest, in which Amis comes off as a snobby egotist and Lewis as an effete academic.

As with any anthology that is decades old, the story themes provide a fascinating lens through which to view the obsessions of an earlier era. In this case, there is a clear sense that the fifties were a time when there were frontiers to be explored everywhere. Not just the physical unknown, like outer space, but also psychological territory like dreams, the subconscious, and ESP. It’s easy to dismiss these as faddish preoccupations from our vantage point, but these stories were written at a time when the discovery that depriving yourself of dreams would drive you insane was a cutting-edge scientific result, rather than a cliché.

Although these brave new inner frontiers must have seemed exciting at the time, the associated predictions are just as short-sighted as technological predictions often are, dwelling on details that now seem unimportant while missing the obvious. Fear of robots, for example, is a prevalent theme in several stories, but with the primary concern being the effects of automation, rather than speculation about conscious machines.

None of the stories were standouts, but at several were decent enough to be memorable. Among them are John Brunner’s “Such Stuff”, a mild horror story of mental parasitism that works only because it is so grippingly written; Cordwainer Smith’s “A Planet Named Shayol”, an effective story that raises questions about pleasure drugs, organ harvesting, punishment and consent, all set on a prison planet; and Damon Knight’s “The Stranger Station”, a multilayered, lonely story about the complete inability to communicate with an alien species that asks when one is justified in harming one group to save another. All three of these, and indeed most of the good stories in the book, are psychological internal dramas, rather than action-adventure stories. Anthony Boucher’s “The Barrier” should have been the perfect combination of topics for me: a loopback time travel story that featured linguistics fairly heavily (two of my soft spots), but it fell somewhat short. It’s interesting in part because it’s an alternative history story, but written in the early 1940's when the author didn’t yet know who would win World War II.

I’m not familiar (yet) with any of the other entries in the Spectrum series, but I’m now interested to read them. Is the quality relatively lackluster in this entry because the editors had already mined their favorites? Or do they each have a different thematic feel? I’m curious to find out.

[David Layton · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of science-fiction short stories published between 1942 and 1962 is likely to reveal its age quickly. This one does, to some extent, though there are some stories that stand up well. The collection begins with a conversation between Kingsley Amis, Brian Aldiss, and C.S. Lewis about the role of science fiction in literature. This was done just a couple of months before Lewis's death. The conversation is, sadly, not terribly enlightening. It is very informal and does not get into much depth. Basically, the message is that the academic critics are missing out on an important phenomenon when they dismiss or ignore science fiction. Next up are the stories. The idea of the Spectrum series was to show the variety of science fiction, so there are several types of stories. The collection begins with satires by C.M. Kornbluth and Christopher Anvil, followed by two cutting edge (for the time) stories by John Brunner and John Jakes, and then a series of more traditional stories in various modes. None of the stories is unreadable, though some are less engaging than others. At the bottom is the oldest of the stories, "Barrier" by Anthony Boucher, a time-travel tale in which the protagonist saves the future. It has some very noticeably sexist attitudes. Hal Clement's "Hot Planet" is typical hard-science storytelling in which the most compelling element is the problem, in this case a technical matter of communication on Mercury. The characters are interchangeably bland, just competent, professional engineers solving a problem. Allan Danzig's "The Great Nebraska Sea" reads as a kind of general interest article of the future after a giant earthquake has nearly split the North American continent down the middle. The best stories in the book are true classics. C. M. Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons" tells of a future when society is split between geniuses and idiots, and the geniuses are desperately searching for a method to cull the idiot population. Damon Knight's "Stranger Station" relates what is probably the most unusual type of alien invasion imaginable, an invasion by kindness designed to prevent an interplanetary war. The best story, in my view, is Cordwainer Smith's remarkable "A Planet Called Shayol." Not enough critical attention has been focused on Smith, who in many respects is a kind of precursor to Philip K. Dick. Smith has set his story in a far future so culturally remote from present day that there is little chance of the story's becoming "dated." Smith has smartly ignored the habit of stepping out of the story and explaining, so that the reader is immersed in a very foreign environment in which characters act according to assumptions of which the reader has no knowledge. In this respect, the very unreal and bizarre elements read realistically. This story is a true tour de force. To summarize, Spectrum 4 provides the curious reader with a snapshot of the state of American and British science fiction in the mid 20th century.

[Nicholas Whyte · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1979182.html[return][return]I was really impressed by this historical account of religious fundamentalism (well, of Christian, Jewish and Islamic fundamentalism) over the centuries up to 1999. I have not always been convinced by Armstrong's approach of parallelling changes in different cultures that happened at the same time, but this worked really well for me, disposing breezily with the importance of balancing logos and mythos, tracking the different religions' responses to the Enlightenment and modernisation, and then exploring the parallel rise of hardline fundamentalist reaction in all three traditions during the late twentieth century. For the most recent period, Armstrong also restricts her geographical focus down to the USA for Christianity, Israel for Judaism, and Egypt and Iran for Islam, which means of course that all kinds of interesting material from elsewhere is simply omitted. But those are all fascinating countries, and I found her analyses of the religious politics of Israel and Iran particularly illuminating.[return][return]Writing in 1999, Armstrong thought that fundamentalism was establishing a new equilibrium after a period when it had appeared insurgent and had then suffered a series of defeats in the 1980s and 1990s. I think she would now agree that we have seen a distinct rise in the strength of fundamentalism in all three traditions in the years since. In the last few pages she looks at how the rest of us should deal with fundamentalism. Repression does not work, she points out, and indeed makes these movements stronger; we must remember that they are based on fear and incomprehension. Rather we should challenge fundamentalists on their own ground, on their lack of compassion for their fellow human beings; this is where they miss a crucial core value to all three of the religious traditions. Definitely worth reading if you are interested in understanding the extremists.

[Charles · Rating 3 out of 5]

My copy has a different cover. A pretty good collection of older SF stories, pre-1970s. Kornbluth's is probably the best. Worth reading though.