Tag: Orbit #1

The Deeps by Keith Roberts

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Deeps by Keith Roberts (Orbit #1, 1966) begins with a short data dump that describes an over-populated future Earth where the cities have spread towards the coasts and moved under the seas.1 The rest of the story concerns two undersea residents, Mary Franklin and her daughter Jennifer,2 and begins with the teenager going to a party (“And for land’s sake child, put something on . . .”)
There is really not much plot after this (spoiler): we follow Jennifer to the party and get some description of the undersea colony before the narrative cuts back to her mother, who later becomes increasingly concerned when Jennifer doesn’t return on time, eventually going out to search for her. The story ends with both mother and daughter floating underwater above a deep, dark void, and her daughter telling her to listen to the sounds of the Deeps. Mary does so, and almost becomes hypnotised to the point she runs out of oxygen:

She could hear Jen calling but the voice was unimportant, remote. It was only when the girl swam to her, grabbed her shoulders and pointed at the gauges between her breasts that she withdrew from the half-trance. The thing below still called and thudded; Mary firmed reluctantly, found Jen’s hand in her own. She let herself float, Jen kicking slowly and laughing again delightedly, chuckling into her earphones. Their hair, swirling, touched and mingled; Mary looked back and down and knew suddenly her inner battle was over.
The sound, the thing she had heard or felt, there was no fear in it. Just a promise, weird and huge. The Sea People would go on now, pushing their domes lower and lower into night, fighting pressure and cold until all the seas of all the world were truly full; and the future, whatever it might be, would care for itself. Maybe one day the technicians would make a miracle and then they would flood the domes and the sea would be theirs to breathe. She tried to imagine Jen with the bright feathers of gills floating from her neck. She tightened her grip on her daughter’s hand and allowed herself to be towed, softly, through the darkness.  p. 191-192

Although there is not much in the way of a story here, the description of the settlement is pretty good, probably Arthur C. Clarke level stuff, and Roberts skilfully generates enough atmosphere and mood to make up for the not entirely convincing idea of sounds luring people to the Deeps (scattered through the text there are rumours about the phenomenon, and recalled conversations with Mary’s husband about how there may be a racial memory drawing humanity down there).
It’s an effectively  hypnotic story.
*** (Good). 7,000 words.

1. In his early period Roberts worked through a number of conventional SF themes before doing his own thing: alien invasion in his first novel, The Furies; psi powers in his third, The Inner Wheel, and in some short stories, Manipulation, The Worlds That Were; time travel in Escapism; androids in Synth; and post-nuclear holocausts in many others.

2. Roberts used the name Jennifer in another undersea story called The Jennifer, (Science Fantasy #70, March 1965) although that one is about Anita, a teenage witch, being taken by a mermaid to see a gigantic sea serpent. Still, it’s worth a look, if you can cope with Granny Thomson’s Northamptonshire accent (it gives them the vapours on one review site). His cover painting for that story appeared on another issue.

Kangaroo Court is by Virginia Kidd

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Kangaroo Court by Virginia Kidd1 (Orbit #1, 1966) starts off as a satire about bureaucracy with Tulliver Harms, the First Exec of the Middle Seaboard Armies, sidelining other branches of government so he can deal militarily with an alien landing on Earth. Then Wystan Godwin, the story’s main character, arrives after six months in a Tibetan lamasery oblivious to all of this. Most of the rest of the first part of the story concerns Godwin’s readjustment to society (he buys some depilatory cream to make his hairstyle conform with the times, etc.), and his gradual awareness that he is being kept in the dark:

Still serenely certain that somehow, somewhere, the traditional Liaison packet was on its traditional way to him, Wystan Godwin—lacking even the one or two bits of information that might have triggered an assessment of the true situation—sat and waited for a sheaf of papers to bring him up to date. As Harms had foreseen, he never even thought of demeaning his position by actively seeking data from anyone in the complex. The only man of status equal to his, Harms himself, never spoke directly to him. Their sole contact was via dispute protocol, a procedure as ritualized as the mating dance of the bower bird. Harms’ dictum of later swallowed up fourteen days.  p. 101

This wordy and slightly affected semi-satire swallows up about a third of the story, until the point where Godwin (after a peculiar dispute between Harms and a draughtsman) eventually gets his hands on the briefing documents concerning the aliens. Then the story switches to become a first contact piece, beginning with a data dump of several pages from the liaison packet.
These papers reveal that the aliens are called the Leloc, and they are intelligent marsupial creatures virtually identical to the kangaroos on Earth (we later find that the latter are a devolved colony of Leloc left behind millions of years ago). We also learn about Leloc technology in general, and their Hilbert space drive in particular, which apparently causes temporal distortions (initially, if I recall correctly, the Leloc think they have been away from Earth for six months, not millions of years).
The final part of the story sees Godwin meet the Leloc in their spaceship, where he has to quickly learn their strange movement and number customs (there is a lot of standing up and sitting down, and people and Leloc coming and going with chairs). When the Leloc later learn that Harms is threatening to attack the ship they refuse to go to Australia to meet their descendants, and say they’ll stand their ground. Matters eventually proceed (spoiler) to an ending where Harms is kidnapped by the Leloc, and the latter’s leader is deposed and left behind.
This very much feels like the work of an amateur or neo writer: apart from the fact that it seems to be two stories fused into one, and has a huge data dump in the middle, it is buried under far too many words. And, to be honest, a lot of the incident in the story is of little interest.
It’s not dreadful, but it’s far from being any good; why Knight thought it would be a good idea, after eight months of reading submissions, to devote almost a third of the anthology to this is a mystery.
* (Mediocre). 18,200 words.

1. Kidd was previously married to James Blish, and was better known and an agent and editor than a writer. Her ISFDB page is here, and her Wikipedia page here.

5 Eggs by Thomas M. Disch

Posted on by Paul Fraser

5 Eggs by Thomas M. Disch (Orbit #1, 1966) begins with a man finding his bride to be has gone, after which he decides to go ahead with the post-wedding party anyway. As the story unfolds we find that she was a bird-like creature of alien origin, and that she has left him 5 eggs to incubate.
At the party we see the narrator greet and talk to a couple of guests and then, towards the end of the event, he can’t find the eggs. Eventually (spoiler) he finds cracked, empty eggshells in the kitchen, and finds a recipe card for Caesar salad (needing a similar amount of eggs). He then realises that the note was left for the cook by his avian fiancée and, at this point, he remembers her hilarity at cannibalism scene in Titus Andronicus.
For the most part this is a quirky but enjoyable enough story, but it morphs into a weak and contrived black joke at the end (and not one that is saved by referencing Shakespeare).
* (Mediocre). 2,650 words.

Splice of Life by Sonya Dorman

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Splice of Life by Sonya Dorman (Orbit #1, 1966) begins with a woman in hospital getting a hypodermic syringe inserted between her bottom eyelid and eye. The rest of the narrative is a surreal nightmare-ish piece where she sees things (even though her eyes are bandaged), thinks there is a dog under her bed, learns she was probably in a car accident, and talks to a ten-year-old boy, and a nurse with an odd verbal tic.
The story finishes with her overhearing a doctor’s conversation (spoiler), which gives her the impression she is continually being wounded so the hospital can re-use her for ophthalmologist training courses (I think).
I didn’t get this at all the first time around, and even on reread I’m not sure it is particularly clear, or convincing.
* (Mediocre). 2,400 words.

How Beautiful with Banners by James Blish

Posted on by Paul Fraser

How Beautiful with Banners by James Blish (Orbit #1, 1966) begins with Dr Ulla Hillstrøm on the surface of Titan wearing a molecule thick “virus space-bubble”. After some description of this space suit, her environment (which includes a view of the rings of Saturn), and of an alien “flying cloak,” the latter hits her in the small of the back and knocks her over.
The second chapter of the story sees her recover consciousness, and which point she starts thinking about a post-divorce affair that she had at a Madrid genetics conference. There is another page or so of background which, in part, focuses on her generally unhappy love life.
In the third chapter she realises that her suit isn’t working correctly but can’t remember what happened. Then she realises that the alien cloak creature has wrapped itself around her, and may have bonded with her suit, but this doesn’t stop further self-absorption:

And suppose that all these impressions were in fact not extraneous or irrelevant, but did have some import—not just as an abstract puzzle, but to that morsel of displaced life that was Ulla Hillstrøm? No matter how frozen her present world, she could not escape the fact that from the moment the cloak had captured her she had been simultaneously gripped by a Sabbat of specifically erotic memories, images, notions, analogies, myths, symbols and frank physical sensations, all the more obtrusive because they were both inappropriate and disconnected. It might well have to be faced that a season of love can fall due in the heaviest weather—and never mind what terrors flow in with it or what deep damnations. At the very least, it was possible that somewhere in all this was the clue that would help her to divorce herself at last even from this violent embrace.  p. 58

The final part of the story has her notice another of the flying creatures in the distance and, thinking that it might attract the one that surrounds her, she goes to the thermal beneath which it is soaring. She blocks up the vent, the creature descends, and then the cloak surrounding her departs, along with her spacesuit. She has time to think “You philanderer—” but not to realise that she has started a long evolution in the cloaks that will end sixty million years later.
This is a complete muddle of various parts, some of which are quite good (Ulla’s character is much more three-dimensional than usual for the time; there is some good descriptive writing; and there is a sense-of-wonder-ish ending) but some of it is awful (who wakes up from an attack on an alien and starts relationship navel gazing? What on Earth is the silly “philanderer” comment about?) None of this works as a coherent whole. God only knows what Blish was trying to achieve here.
** (Average). 3,800 words.

The Disinherited by Poul Anderson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Disinherited by Poul Anderson (Orbit #1, 1966) starts with two starship pilots in orbit around a planet called Mithras, where a human science expedition landed a century before. Their discussion provides various bits of background information, most pertinently that all interstellar travel is to be stopped.
After this setup the bulk of the story is from the viewpoint of Thrailkill, who is the son of one of the science team, and we join him as he returns from expedition upriver of Point Desire, the only city on the planet. With him are his wife, child, and an indigenous alien called Strongtail, a kangaroo-like creature with long arms and a head like a bird. When they arrive at an inn in Point Desire they are greeted with the news of the starship’s arrival, and that the arriving crew “say you can now go home”.
The remainder of the story focuses on the plan to remove the science mission, which leads Thrailkill and the other colonists to realise that they want to stay. In amongst all this, there is some good description of the planet and Thrailkill’s life there:

When he and Tom Jackson and Gleam-Of-Wings climbed the Snowtoothe, white starkness overhead and the wind awhistle below them, the thunder and plumes of an avalanche across a valley, the huge furry beast that came from a cave and must be slain before it slew them. Or shooting the rapids on a river that tumbled-down the Goldstream Hills, landing wet and cold at Volcano to boast over their liquor in the smoky-raftered taproom of Monstersbane Inn. Prowling the alleys and passing the lean temples of the Fivedom, and standing off a horde of the natives’ half-intelligent, insensately ferocious cousins, in the stockade at Tearwort. Following the caravans through the Desolations, down to Gate-of-the-South, while drums beat unseen from dry hills, or simply this last trip, along the Benison through fogs and waterstalks, to those lands where the dwellers gave their lives to nothing but rites that made no sense and one dared not laugh. Indeed Earth offered nothing like that, and the vision-screen people would pay well for a taste of it to spice their fantasies.  p. 73

Eventually Kahn, the starship captain, assembles all the humans and speaks to them while he waits for his men to arrive. He tells them that their colony isn’t a viable size, and they cannot be allowed to stay because, if they do, they will expand their numbers and overwhelm the planet and the aliens who live there. During his speech he refers to some of the indigenous populations of Earth’s past (Native Americans, etc.) who were overwhelmed by new arrivals. Then a shuttle from the starship arrives, armed men enter, and the story ends.
This is a picturesque story, but it poses a false dichotomy1 and the last scene resembles one of those didactic Analog story-lectures. It also ends far too abruptly, and feels like the beginning of a longer, better story.
** (Average). 5,500 words.

 1. The ending of this piece made me realise that a lot of stories probably have simplistic either/or endings for dramatic reasons—in this case it means you can either finish the story as above (armed arrest), or you could have a “resistance and independence” ending (in what would be a longer story). A more pragmatic, fudged solution, where the humans covenant with the aliens to limit the size of their colony, for instance, probably wouldn’t be as satisfying.

The Secret Place by Richard McKenna

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The Secret Place by Richard McKenna (Orbit #1, 1966) has as its narrator a geologist called Duard Campbell, one of a team sent to a small town to search for a vein of uranium:

It began in 1931, when a local boy was found dead in the desert near Barker, Oregon. He had with him a sack of gold ore and one thumb-sized crystal of uranium oxide. The crystal ended as a curiosity in a Salt Lake City assay office until, in 1942, it became of strangely great importance. Army agents traced its probable origin to a hundred-square-mile area near Barker.  p. 31

After the team finds nothing (the whole area is overlaid by Miocene lava flows) Campbell is left behind to maintain a skeleton operation to keep the army happy. He is angry and feels betrayed by his boss, and decides he will find the vein to spite him. Then, one night at dinner, Campbell speaks to Old Dave, one of the townsmen, who tells him about a local myth of a lost mine, and how the deceased boy’s sister, Helen, might know something about its whereabouts.
Campbell then hires Helen (who is described in part as “elfin”) as his secretary, and the main part of the story concerns itself with Campbell’s manipulation of her to obtain the information he wants. Initially this proves unsuccessful, but one day he makes a breakthrough:

I was trying the sympathy gambit. I said it was not so bad, being exiled from friends and family, but what I could not stand was the dreary sameness of that search area. Every spot was like every other spot and there was no single, recognizable place in the whole, expanse. It sparked something in her and she roused up at me. “It’s full of just wonderful places,” she said.
“Come out with me in the jeep and show me one,” I challenged.

During this trip, and subsequent ones, Helen tells him of the “fairyland” that she and her brother used to play in, and talks about “big cats” that chase dogs, “shaggy horses with claws, golden birds, camels, witches, elephants and many other creatures,” “the evil magic of a witch or giant,” “sleeping castles,” “gold or jewels,” and “magic eggs” amongst other things. Throughout this Campbell sketches the topology of Helen’s fantasy land (noting that she is remarkably consistent with her descriptions) and later convinces her to show him the “magic eggs,” which turn out to be quartz pebbles that could never have originated in the basalt desert around Barker.
Throughout all this Helen becomes increasingly unhappy and unstable, and there is a crisis point where she says that her brother Owen stole the “treasure” and later died because of her family’s poverty (when he was found he had lacerations of his back consistent with a cougar attack, although there were no such animals in the area). Old Dave eventually intervenes, tells Campbell about the townfolk’s displeasure about Helen’s condition, and states that she needs to go home.
Before he can arrange this Campbell receives a map of the prevolcanic Miocene landscape of the area, and is stunned when he realises it is a point for point copy of the map he has made of Helen’s fairyland. All of a sudden he realises, “The game was real [. . .] All the time the game had been playing me,” and he rushes out to find Helen, only to come across Dave who says she is missing.
Campbell drives out to the desert in the jeep ahead of the search party and, when he finds her, declares his love:

“Wait for me, little sister!” I screamed after her. “I love you, Helen! Wait for me!”
She stopped and crouched and I almost ran over her. I knelt and put my arms around her and then it was on us.
They say in an earthquake, when the direction of up and down tilts and wobbles, people feel a fear that drives them mad if they can not forget it afterward. This was worse. Up and down and here and there and now and then all rushed together. The wind roared through the rock beneath us and the air thickened crushingly above our heads. I know we clung to each other, and we were there for each other while nothing else was and that is all I know, until we were in the jeep and I was guiding it back toward town as headlong as I had come.
Then the world had shape again under a bright sun.  p. 45

There is a minor confrontation with the townsfolk when they get back, but Helen says she is going away with Campbell to be his wife.
A short postscript takes place sixteen years later, where Campbell tells of his professorship and the son they have had. Campbell also says that they don’t have any books of fairy tales in the house, but goes on to quote a cryptic remark from the son:

“You know, Dad, it isn’t only space that’s expanding. Time’s expanding too, and that’s what makes us keep getting farther away from when we used to be.”  p. 47

When I first finished this story (I skimmed it again later) I found it a bit of a muddle to be honest, and wasn’t sure whether “The Secret Place” was located in a different time or in a different reality, or both.1 Part of this was down to expectation (I’d previously read a review—which I can’t now find—of McKenna’s Fiddler’s Green which states that the characters in the story generate their own reality to escape the current one), and part of it was McKenna’s execution of the story itself, which trowels in so much talk of fantasy and magic that it almost drowns out the evidence suggesting the children (and later Campbell and Helen) are actually playing make-believe games in another time: the gold, the uranium, the quartz pebbles, the topology map, and the comment by the son.
I also thought the sudden declaration of love by Campbell a bit unlikely, and have no idea what is happening in the earthquake scene above (is it really a timequake—“now and then all rushed together”—or is it just an emotional climax to the story?)
It’s a very mixed bag and by no means a worthy Nebula winner. Bob Shaw’s Light of Other Days should have won that year, but was probably pipped by this as McKenna had recently died, and the film of his best-selling book, The Sand Pebbles, was in the cinemas.
** (Average). 6,150 words.

1. It took me a couple of days of scratching my head, Algis Budry’s October 1966 Galaxy review (“a minor story by a major writer,” “about time travel, love and maturation”), and reading the other comments on my Facebook group read thread before I could make sense of the story.

The Loolies Are Here by Ruth Allison and Jane Rice

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The Loolies Are Here by Ruth Allison and Jane Rice (Orbit #1, 1966) isn’t so much a story as an account of a mother of four’s various domestic problems and accidents. In a mainstream story these would mostly be the fault of the children, but here they are ascribed to the “loolies”:

Anyhow, to the inevitable queries—Why are they called loolies? Where do they come from, et cetera?—I can only reply through a mouthful of clothespins, I haven’t time to hat this over the head with a rolled-up research paper. I guess they’re called loolies for the same reason that brownies are called brownies. It is their name. Maybe they come from the same place. Et cetera. Wherever that is. However and whereas a brownie is a good-natured goblin who performs helpful services at night (that’s what I need, begod, a reliable brownie, with an eyeshade and some counterfeiting equipment) a loolie will leave you lop-legged. And probably already he has. I’m not sure a loolie is a goblin either.  p. 85-86

Deliver all this in Rice’s high-energy, madcap style1 for half a dozen pages, until which time the loolies turn their attention to the wife’s less than helpful husband, and you are done.
Not bad, just froth that would have been better off in Good Housekeeping.
* (Mediocre). 2,150 words.

1. For better examples of Rice’s solo humorous style, I recommend The Elixir (Unknown Worlds, December 1942), or The Magician’s Dinner (Unknown Worlds, October 1942).

Staras Flonderans by Kate Wilhelm

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Staras Flonderans by Kate Wilhelm (Orbit #1, 1966) opens with two humans and a long-lived alien called Staeen closing in on a wrecked and tumbling spaceship that appears to be abandoned. Throughout their craft’s approach to the wreck, which they intend to investigate, we learn various things about Staeen, including the fact that he is tulip-shaped, is very long lived, can survive unsuited in space, and is able to sense the men’s emotions. Staeen also, in common with the rest of his race, feels a paternalistic concern for the men (who they call Flonderans):

When the Flonderans had come to Chlaesan, they had been greeted with friendliness and amusement. So eager, so impulsive, so childlike. The name Earthmen was rarely used for them; they remained the Flonderans, the children. It amused Staeen to think that when they had still been huddling in caves, more animal than man, his people already had mapped the galaxy; when they had been floundering with sails on rough seas, engrossed in mapping their small world, his people already had populated hundreds of planets, light-years away from one another.  p. 14

When the three of them go aboard the wreck they come to realise that the missing crew used all the lifeboats to abandon the ship, a course of action that would only have kept them alive for a few hours longer because of the limited oxygen carried. Mystified, they leave. However, when they return on a further search, Staeen picks up various vibes that make him realise that the crew left the ship “in the madness of fear,” but he does not tell the humans as he thinks they will not accept his discovery.
The final act of the story involves the three of them subsequently encountering a Thosar spaceship, a race who only pass through the galaxy every twelve thousand years, and who mankind have never come into contact with. Staeen explains to the men that the Thosars are huge creatures, and that they will send representatives to the ship but stay outside. When they get close enough to be seen (spoiler) the humans go into a blind panic and accelerate their ship away at a pace that almost kills the three of them. Staeen eventually manages to turn off the drive but, when the men come around, they get into their suits and flee through the airlock, dragging Staeen with them.
Staeen then floats in space contemplating his demise, and concludes that the human’s panic response must be down to a previous visit to Earth by the Thosars in prehistoric times, where they inadvertently terrified the primitive humans and some sort of genetic or race memory was laid down.
There is much to like in the first part of this story—it is a readable example of a traditional SF tale, the kind of thing you could easily imagine finding in Analog—but the ending is just ridiculous. Apart from the fact that the reason for the human’s terror is never specified (the Thosars have one eye and there is a brief mention of “Bi—”), you would hide in the ship if something terrified you, not jump out the airlock to a place you are even more exposed. And the generational chicken-fleeing-from-chickenhawk response that Staeen uses to explain the human’s behaviour could not have been imprinted on mankind in one visit. It all just falls apart.
PS According to Staeen, Staras eku Flonderans means “poor, short-lived Earthmen.”
* (Mediocre). 5,800 words.