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Go Forth and Multiply: Being an Anthology of Science Fiction Stories on the Subject of Repopulation
GO FORTH AND MULTIPLY
Edited by Gordon Van Gelder
“If we’re careful,” he said, “and if we eliminate as much inbreeding as possible, we can have this planet populated within a few centuries.”
There was a time when science fiction magazines abounded with tales of repopulating a planet. Brave (well, sometimes they were brave) men and women teamed up in great acts of self-sacrifice to save humanity.
These stories fell out of fashion over time, but now this volume collects a dozen of the finest — and a fine batch they are!
‘Mother to the World,’ Richard Wilson’s award-winning novella about the last man and woman on Earth.
‘No Land of Nod’ by Sherwood Springer, perhaps the paradigm of the repopulation story.
‘Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang’ by Kate Wilhelm, a classic of repopulation through cloning.
‘The Queen Bee’ by Randall Garrett, one of the most controversial stories ever published in the SF genre.
Other contributors to the book include Poul Anderson, Marion Zimmer Bradley and John Jay Wells, John Brunner, Rex Jatko, Alice Eleanor Jones, Damon Knight, Robert Sheckley, and E. C. Tubb. Some of these stories are classics, others have never before been reprinted. Combined, they make for a great reading experience and a fascinating look at a compelling subgenre.
Edited by Gordon Van Gelder
“If we’re careful,” he said, “and if we eliminate as much inbreeding as possible, we can have this planet populated within a few centuries.”
There was a time when science fiction magazines abounded with tales of repopulating a planet. Brave (well, sometimes they were brave) men and women teamed up in great acts of self-sacrifice to save humanity.
These stories fell out of fashion over time, but now this volume collects a dozen of the finest — and a fine batch they are!
‘Mother to the World,’ Richard Wilson’s award-winning novella about the last man and woman on Earth.
‘No Land of Nod’ by Sherwood Springer, perhaps the paradigm of the repopulation story.
‘Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang’ by Kate Wilhelm, a classic of repopulation through cloning.
‘The Queen Bee’ by Randall Garrett, one of the most controversial stories ever published in the SF genre.
Other contributors to the book include Poul Anderson, Marion Zimmer Bradley and John Jay Wells, John Brunner, Rex Jatko, Alice Eleanor Jones, Damon Knight, Robert Sheckley, and E. C. Tubb. Some of these stories are classics, others have never before been reprinted. Combined, they make for a great reading experience and a fascinating look at a compelling subgenre.
- GenresScience Fiction
329 pages, Kindle Edition
Published June 14, 2018
24 people want to read
About the author
Gordon van Gelder
308 books27 followersGordon Van Gelder (born 1966) is an American science fiction editor. From 1997 until 2014, Van Gelder was editor and later publisher of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, for which he has twice won the Hugo Award for Best Editor Short Form. He was also a managing editor of The New York Review of Science Fiction from 1988 to 1993, for which he was nominated for the Hugo Award a number of times. As of January 2015, Van Gelder has stepped down as editor of Fantasy & Science Fiction in favour of Charles Coleman Finlay, but remains publisher of the magazine.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
June 5, 2020
"The Queen Bee," by Randall Garrett, 32 pg. (1958): 7.75
- A nice distillation of the bastardized plot macchinations that occur once you mix Golden Age misogyny and sex madness into hack-y whole. Nonetheless, the whole thing -- dare I say -- hangs together (?) well as a purely paint-by-numbers construction.
"Prime Essential," by E.C. Tubbs (1955): 6.5
- Tubbs (writing here as Frank Weight) does the near impossible--he looks at the broad swathe of pre-New Wave sf and says 'oh, you think you're horny?!' The story: in preparation for attempts to colonize new world, men and women are put in 'conditioning pods' to prepare them for the harshness of the environment they'll be entering. The two, so we're to believe, hindrances that they'll most need to shed before landfall: tobacco/caffeine (hilarious) and clothes, since, of course, it's gonna be hot down there. [NOTE: if there's one thing to point to as a reason for the welcome addition of the Social Sciences into the sfnal slate, start here]. The mixed group starts in skivvies, and our protagonist ends naked. Along the way, he forces himself on another woman (a common pre-Russ trope) before a woman comes onto him and he refuses (I mean, really, just such rich mining here for the sexual psychologist). Whatever. It ends with him horny and realizing that, 'oh, the other thing we need to shed is any concern for the specific person we're fucking, since propogation in itself is the virtue'--as a new woman joins him naked in the release pod, after we'd been following this whole other Big-Brother group the whole time. Just a *chef's kiss* perfect little nugget of the genre here.
"Two by Two," by John Brunner (1956): 7.5
- Very straightforward apocalypse scenario. Oh god, I just realized that the astronaut's name is "Arkwright."
"No Land of Nod," by Sherwood Springer (1952): 8.5
- Here's how to do the classic last man (aka sex perv) story well.
“The Girls and Nugent Miller,” by Robert Sheckley (1960): 8
- Minor Sheckley, but, being Sheckley, a smart sendup of a pulp theme nonetheless underwritten by a type of meaningful ambiguity, i.e. is this some sort of preternatural exposition on the pervasiveness of toxic masculinity, on the particular amalgam of circumstance and strained ego possible to corrupt even the best men? Or, was it a victim-blaming screed particularly unreasonable feminists? How do we read this outside of time? There's an answer there, just depends how you want to approach it.
“Mother To The World,” by Richard Wilson (1968): 6.5
- The interesting thing about these exceptionally horny (and this one, I think it’s fair to say, is hornier than the rest) genre stories is that the line between kink and conceit effectively vanishes. This is, obviously, a shame-free zone, but at the same time, some psyches are more naked than others. To wit, our protagonist here (hilariously, as we later learn, basically a woods-dwelling sovereign citizen) finds himself alone with only one other: a halfwit 20-something. In this and many other ways, the story is a true curio: the apotheosis of precisely those subconscious desires (desk jockeys unencumbered! grab the rifle, tame the beasts, and roam free [cause god forbid anything but holocaust cause Americans to take up Freikörperkultur]) and cruelties so many critics have identified animating precisely these sorts of dystopias, exemplified by his overriding concern for animals (all those pets!) not two days after literally everyone on the planet has been tortured to death. As a story, just wildly scattershot, moving from the Portnoys Complaint predilections of the beginning to the elegiac, Earth Abides penultimate section, and the Spahns Ranch suspicious serenity of the free love finale. Basically, a fitting memento to 1968.
- A nice distillation of the bastardized plot macchinations that occur once you mix Golden Age misogyny and sex madness into hack-y whole. Nonetheless, the whole thing -- dare I say -- hangs together (?) well as a purely paint-by-numbers construction.
"Prime Essential," by E.C. Tubbs (1955): 6.5
- Tubbs (writing here as Frank Weight) does the near impossible--he looks at the broad swathe of pre-New Wave sf and says 'oh, you think you're horny?!' The story: in preparation for attempts to colonize new world, men and women are put in 'conditioning pods' to prepare them for the harshness of the environment they'll be entering. The two, so we're to believe, hindrances that they'll most need to shed before landfall: tobacco/caffeine (hilarious) and clothes, since, of course, it's gonna be hot down there. [NOTE: if there's one thing to point to as a reason for the welcome addition of the Social Sciences into the sfnal slate, start here]. The mixed group starts in skivvies, and our protagonist ends naked. Along the way, he forces himself on another woman (a common pre-Russ trope) before a woman comes onto him and he refuses (I mean, really, just such rich mining here for the sexual psychologist). Whatever. It ends with him horny and realizing that, 'oh, the other thing we need to shed is any concern for the specific person we're fucking, since propogation in itself is the virtue'--as a new woman joins him naked in the release pod, after we'd been following this whole other Big-Brother group the whole time. Just a *chef's kiss* perfect little nugget of the genre here.
"Two by Two," by John Brunner (1956): 7.5
- Very straightforward apocalypse scenario. Oh god, I just realized that the astronaut's name is "Arkwright."
"No Land of Nod," by Sherwood Springer (1952): 8.5
- Here's how to do the classic last man (aka sex perv) story well.
“The Girls and Nugent Miller,” by Robert Sheckley (1960): 8
- Minor Sheckley, but, being Sheckley, a smart sendup of a pulp theme nonetheless underwritten by a type of meaningful ambiguity, i.e. is this some sort of preternatural exposition on the pervasiveness of toxic masculinity, on the particular amalgam of circumstance and strained ego possible to corrupt even the best men? Or, was it a victim-blaming screed particularly unreasonable feminists? How do we read this outside of time? There's an answer there, just depends how you want to approach it.
“Mother To The World,” by Richard Wilson (1968): 6.5
- The interesting thing about these exceptionally horny (and this one, I think it’s fair to say, is hornier than the rest) genre stories is that the line between kink and conceit effectively vanishes. This is, obviously, a shame-free zone, but at the same time, some psyches are more naked than others. To wit, our protagonist here (hilariously, as we later learn, basically a woods-dwelling sovereign citizen) finds himself alone with only one other: a halfwit 20-something. In this and many other ways, the story is a true curio: the apotheosis of precisely those subconscious desires (desk jockeys unencumbered! grab the rifle, tame the beasts, and roam free [cause god forbid anything but holocaust cause Americans to take up Freikörperkultur]) and cruelties so many critics have identified animating precisely these sorts of dystopias, exemplified by his overriding concern for animals (all those pets!) not two days after literally everyone on the planet has been tortured to death. As a story, just wildly scattershot, moving from the Portnoys Complaint predilections of the beginning to the elegiac, Earth Abides penultimate section, and the Spahns Ranch suspicious serenity of the free love finale. Basically, a fitting memento to 1968.
Displaying 1 of 1 review