Andromeda: An Original SF Anthology

Andromeda #1

by Peter Weston

First Thus Edition hardcover with unclipped dust jacket, in very good condition. Jacket is slightly sunned, lower board corners are bumped, and page block is somewhat tanned. Pages are clear and unmarked throughout. LW

Genres: Anthologies, Science Fiction, Fiction, Short Stories

3 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

Reviews

[Craig · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was the first volume of an English original anthology series than lasted for three volumes in the mid-1970's. I remember liking the Michael G. Coney and Bob Shaw stories, and George R.R. Martin's A Beast For Norn, one of his Tuf stories. My favorite was Seeing by Harlan Ellison.

[Prospero · Rating 3 out of 5]

This short story collection dates from the mid- 70's, a time when the anthology market was dominated by such well known editors at Terry Carr and Damon Knight. Peter Weston - active in the UK scene as a fanzine writer and editor - would be relatively unknown to North American readers, but here he puts together a pretty solid collection. Contributions come from both sides of the pond and include pieces by Brian Aldiss, Harlan Ellison, George R.R. Martin, Christopher Priest, and Robert Holdstock, among others.

[Darnoc Leadburger · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know if there's a technical term for this strand of SF short story collection (largely from the 70s + 80s) which anthologized brand new stories with no central theme and usually came in sequentially numbered editions - if you know of one, please let me know. The first books of this fashion that I read were from Roy Torgeson's Chrysalis series - I read numbers seven and eight when I was pretty new to science fiction. They're usually pretty forgettable, although some - like Terry Carr's *Universe* series - have gone down in the canon of science fiction. I was expected this first of three *Andromeda* anthologies to be forgettable as well, but I had a little bit of hope because it's got some really good names in here: Christopher Priest is one of my favorites, Bob Shaw is always a delight, etc. Thankfully, I was proven wrong, and I think that a lot of the stories here punch above their weight class and deserve to go down into the annals of science fiction themselves. Let's talk about 'em one-by-one.

--Brian Aldiss kicks this off with "Appearance of Life." I've read some Aldiss fiction and nonfiction as of late that's disappointed me a bit, so I didn't go in with high hopes, and I read it on a morning that I was very distracted. So I didn't have expectations of a quality reading experience. And yet, I could tell there's something special about this story. It features a theorist looking for connections and patterns exploring a museum that inhabits the entire equator of a planet. This structure was likely built by a long-dead race that humanity now frowns upon and is now filling up with human relics. The researcher looks at some old ships and finds recordings from two lovers at different times in their lives, fifteen years and one separation apart. He ends up setting the two recordings next to each other to interact with for, as far as they're concerned, eternity. This is a tender moment wrapped up in big questions of perception and galactic memory and purpose while being framed by a very cool science fiction concept that could've felt cheap but didn't because of Aldiss' well-mannered prose. I need to re-read this if I'm going to go any higher, but I think it deserves an 8.25/10.
--Michael G. Coney has been described as tender and humanist in his SF writings, but "Starthinker 9" has a layer of transgressiveness grafted onto it no matter how silly it might seem here in 2026. It's about this Worldthinker, a person with the ability to receive messages broadcast to them across space. They seem to serve as communication hubs for their planets. The main character talks about travelling seventy-five lightyears to meet Starthinker 9, imagined to be a beautiful woman, after she reached out to the worldthinker and they discover they can talk to each other - something Starthinkers and worldthinkers shouldn't be able to do - before falling in love. Now the worldthinker is trying to visit 9 in person, but uniformed guards are holding it off, saying this isn't real love. And at the end, the worldthinker is appalled by their lack of tolerance and says that back home they're much more tolerant, tolerant of the fact that other worlds have created such as *men*. So... yeah, it's a lesbian thing. It feels a little cheap and doesn't do any great worldbuilding that modifies anything we found out earlier, but at the same time I can imagine it being a bigger deal in 1976. This was well-written an easy to picture and it's just the right length; I wouldn't mind more stories on worldthinkers versus Starthinkers easier; it's a cool thing. I'll give it 7.75/10 for the writing, if not the punch.
--If you need a bit of fun and crime in your SF-reading diet, look no further than Bob Shaw's "Waltz of the Bodysnatchers." In a world where murder victims are revived and their minds are transferred into their murderers' bodies, Lorimer plots to hire a suicidal stranger to kill his lover Fay's husband, which will get the husband transferred into the stranger, Raymond, so their marriage can be declared null by the body change. But on the big night, when Raymond kills Fay's husband, things go awry and traces lead back to Lorimer, and then Fay testifies against him. It looks like Fay set this up to get her husband into a brand new body. And yes, Raymond was one part of the plan - and when they're celebrating it later, he finds out that his drink might just be poisoned... this is pretty cleanly and smoothly written as Shaw's work tends to be, and it doesn't waste any time when settings things up. Like the Coney story, this is bolstered by knowing just how long it needs to be. The SF concept is a little light and not wonderfully explored, but it also doesn't require a crazy amount of worldbuilding. I enjoyed it, and while it didn't change my conception of this wonderful genre or anything, I had a lot of fun watching these interactions. 8/10.
--Robert P. Holdstock's "Travellers" is an unconventional time travel story. That's one of my favorite kinds of stories. There's this man named Jaim (he's the first-person narrator) travelling with Herok. They're licensed time travel agents who have official business to conduct when travelling to different "nodes" - there seem to be these portals which open up randomly which allow people to travel to certain points in the future - who mildly abuse their credentials to go through a newly re-opened node so Jaim can reconnect with the woman of his dreams who he was with many years ago before the node closes again and they're officially cut off between the third and fourth millenniums once again. He also hopes to meet the child that he thinks he fathered there. After a few weeks without success he starts thinking that he travelled in vain, but then he finds her. Well, he thinks he does - in all actuality, after sleeping with her and things not feeling quite like he remembered, he sees a file of the person Herok is hunting, and it's his lover's daughter. He just slept with his daughter... later on in the story we find out that it's customary in the fourth millennium for fathers to take their daughter's virginity, which is both just not right by our standards today and awfully contrived. Like, I see the twist that Holdstock was trying to go with here, but there were a lot of ways to show them interacting without going there and making things seem really contrived. The ending is also a bit contrived - Jaim finds Herok hunting his daughter and kills him and they step outside the nodes or whatever together to a time period before the nodes to test his daughter's theory of being able to travel through time freely once you experience that or... something along those lines. It just doesn't make complete sense. But it's good, and there's a certain pull to this strange time travel story and the era-hopping that happens. I'll give it a 7.5/10.
--Speaking of not making sense, I didn't find much to appreciate in "Valley of the Bushmen" by Naomi Mitchison. There's this indigenous, probably island tribe, that's visited by people in helicopters who ask questions and want to see things. There might be better value, but I read it in a rush and this is a pretty short story which I'm not predisposed to, so I'll forego rating it this time.
--Do you ever really like a story without fully knowing or caring what the main point of it was? That's my take on "An Infinite Summer." I'm a fan of Christopher Priest's barebones yet elegant writing style, and this is no exception. He tells the story of this Englishman during World War II who's never grown out of his hometown after a mysterious day when the woman he loved was frozen in time. The story begins during World War II as he's walking around his village, and it's peppered with frequent flashbacks about his family setting him up to court this local girl only for him to realize that her little sister is the one he wanted to marry; so he got his cousin to come along and woo both his suitor and her mother while he got some time alone with the little sister. It's delightful and charming, and at the end of the story, during a little London bombing action, she falls out of being frozen when he's making his daily pilgrimage to where the mysterious people who freeze people in time froze her. Bizarre, but with really good imagery and some nice emotion that really make this stick. 8/10.
--I don't know Terry Greenhough, but if the rest of work is anything like "Doll" is, he's not half bad. This story lacked some worldbuilding on how Earth got to where it is (nuclear mutations, plague, etc), but it's primarily about this parasitic relationship that exists between humans and these things called Dolls. In some ways, they're indestructible, and they protect against radiation or toxic waste. But human diseases are very lethal towards them; still, if a newborn doesn't get a Doll fitted specifically for their body and mind, they're sure to die very soon. So the story's about a Doll-Moulder, a class both very needed and very frowned upon by people who distrust them and their strangeness. The first Doll he moulds doesn't take affect, with is taking on some disease and dying in the kid's place in the process, and the second doesn't work, and the kid dies. Our principal character isn't the point, but showing off this strange symbiotic relationship is. I don't know if I really buy that the Dolls would be extinct without humans as the narrative shows, especially because the action doesn't depict anything good happening to Dolls - they die, suffer on our behalf, etc. So I'm not quite buying it. But it was a decently written story and I think the world Greenhough envisioned could be pretty cool with a little more weight behind it; 7.25/10.
--George R. R. Martin's early SF book *Tuf Voyaging* has been an in-joke in some of the online science fiction circles I'm in for years, but I didn't realize it was a fixup novel. I also didn't realize that the first-ever story in that continuity was here in little old *Andromeda 1*. In it, beast trader Haviland Tuf (aided by his psychic cat to help tell him if the people he works with are honest or not) is approached by a man from one of the small houses of his planet which settles conflict and drives their economy with arena matches between their beasts, and their specially bred wolves just aren't cutting it anymore, and they keep losing. He wants a different kind of monster to send into the arena, and despite Tuf's apparent disdain for the practice, he agrees and gives him the choice of specimens to raise. But then once that house, formerly the bottom one, starts winning all the time, other houses come to Tuf for new creatures as well, until each one has received beasts from him, each better than the last, restoring everything to their natural order while depleting the economy of the world (by charging it for his services). His true cleverness comes through when he tells the head of that first house that all the creatures will soon expire - the cats he bought aren't breeding, others will soon go into hibernation, tree-slugs thrown in as free foodstock to one clan will soon override their land, etc. As an ecologist, Tuf has found a way to make a lot of money and sabotage their cruel sport. This has this really clever twist to it just like a Golden Age SF story, but there's this more modern environmental thing going on. A clever twist and a story being all about a variety of alien creatures of a great combination for me, and while not the most serious story, I have to give this 8/10.
--My father passed down Keith Laumer's Bolo stories about autonomous tanks to me, and "The Giant Killers" by Andrew M. Stephenson carries on in Laumer's footsteps, albeit with a darker feeling; the principal characters are two soldiers, one very fresh and one very experienced, on a mission together. The land they're in has horrible weapons of mutated warfare at night that don't care is their targets are on the side of their creators or their enemies; it's harsh, and it culminates in a duel with their target, a Voyo. It's an intelligent tank. The soldiers corner it, thinking it's out of ammunition. An interesting philosophical conversation about the value of man vs machine ensues before it fires down the more experienced soldier. It leaves the other alive, and he assumed it was merciful, but when it asks it why it was left to live, it says something like "why would I waste a bullet on you to do what the night will very soon do?" Chilling, but effective. The first chunk of the story isn't terribly good and it's a little dredgey and forgettable, but overall it's good. I think I'd appreciate it more if I re-read the stuff with the tank towards the end... 7.25/10.
--Finally, Harlan Ellison, who I've never been too fond of. I have to say, though, that between some of the standout stories in *Stalking the Nightmare* and this... it's growing on me. The principal character is a prostitute who services a bunch of aliens and other disgusting clientele. What's interesting about her is the way she's introduced in a way to make most people reading this story, even though liable to judge a prostitute for being a prostitute, really feel for her. The whole story kicks off with her being hunted by two discomforting men at a bar; she'll do, they say, she's got the eyes. We soon learn that a rich offworld woman has hired a local surgeon to implant these special eyes into her, and those eyes are what the prostitute possesses. She's captured and led back to the surgery, where the rich woman ensures that no harm will come to her; she even wants the procedure to be painless. But having these eyes in her is very illegal, so she'll be cleaning up all these people who know what she did sooner rather than later... before the operation the girl explains seeing through these eyes as seeing everything, all these unnatural colors, all at once in a beautiful passage. And after the operation, the rich woman screams, for she wasn't prepared to see what her donor didn't warn her about: the fact that the mutant eyes can see when everyone around her will die, what their deaths will look like. The girl hides in a bin, hoping to escape her, imaging the terror the rich woman will experience when she sees her reflection for the first time, and she gets offworld on a transport, relaxed without sight, satisfied in a way those on the ship pitying her could never understand... between the stylization of starting and ending the story with quotes and using little italicized taglines for each segment and the quickly rotating perspectives, this is a pretty well-written story, with a lot of clever framing. This is one of the better Ellison's I've read, and it deserves a pretty good rating. 8.25/10, I'd say.

The average of all these ratings is 7.8/10, which for a short story collection for me is pretty dang high. Half of the stories got 8/10 or higher - that's also really rare. And that's with each story maintaining a distinct flavor; this is a special little collection, and I'm sad that it's part of a "random" line and that not many people will ever read it. There's some real winners, and I'll be sure to pick up *Andromeda 2* + *3* if I'm lucky enough to come across them in the wild. I think it's time for a bigger, more cohesive book now - *Inhibitor Phase* by Alastair Reynolds, I think - but this was plenty of fun and I hope to read more like it soon. Thanks for reading this review, and I hope you had fun; till next time, this is Darnoc Leadburger from a galaxy near you, signing off...

[Marijana Ivanova-Lazarova · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this gem buried at the bottom of a box at a second-hand bookstore. I was drawn to the cover at first. When I checked all the authors of the stories none of them were familiar to me, except George R. R. Martin. I liked all the stories. I think they would make great scenarios for a season of Black Mirror. xD

[Nick Carraway LLC · Rating 4 out of 5]

1) '''Seeker, you are expected. Welcome to Norma Museum.'
So said the android who showed me into the airlock and guided me through into the hotel. Here as elsewhere, androids occupied all menial posts. I glanced at the calendar clock in the foyer, punching my wrisputer like all arriving travellers to discover where in time Earth might be now.''

2) ''[Ed.] I know almost nothing about George R R Martin except that he lives in Chicago and is another writer rapidly making a name for himself in science fiction. With the allies he has, how can he lose?''

3) ''So Granton died, with no one there to help him in his last seconds of life. He died in pain and horror at his own condition; it is likely that he was mad at the end, before the slimy mass enveloped his heart and covered his staring eyes, for the gurgle that escaped his lips bore a close resemblance to a laugh. Then even his helmet visor was shrouded in obscenity.
They left his body. In time the earth would reclaim the metal and the bones, and the tackymat would perish itself in the sun.''

[Ed]

ISFDB 2649. OCLC 59882500.