On Rereading The Best of the Nebulas Edited by Ben Bova; Part Two
And now we come to the novelette “Gonna Roll the Bones” by Fritz Leiber, which first appeared in Harlan Ellison’s groundbreaking anthology Dangerous Visions. It is ostensibly a classic deal-with-the-devil fantasy, albeit unusually rich in descriptive detail and stylistic depth. However, Leiber takes the traditional form several steps further by setting the tale in a future world in which spaceships can be glimpsed in the heavens and the outer planets have been explored and colonized. This background exists on the periphery like an ornate picture frame. It adds a layer of nuance to the story of Joe Slattermill, who works underground in mines by day and at night escapes a slovenly domestic scene to go into the town of Ironmine and “roll the bones,” or gamble with dice. He comes across a joint called “The Boneyard,” which may or may not actually exist, and gets into a high stakes game with the Big Gambler, a skeleton in a black suit. The story is great fun and builds up to a terrific ending.
The longest story in the book by far is “Dragonrider” by Anne McCaffrey. It originally appeared in Analog magazine, and together with her novella “Weyr Search,” which won a Hugo Award, became Dragonflight, the first of the long and popular Dragonriders of Pern series. Despite the many volumes that followed, “Dragonrider” stands well on its own. This reading rekindled the fascination I felt when I first discovered the world of the Dragonriders through this novella. McCaffrey’s Pern, in which dragons and their riders, telepathically united, must face world-threatening alien spores called threads that descend when their planet is aligned with another nearby planet, is rich with complex characters and intricate world-building. It is dragon fire that destroys the alien menace, but Pern has been without a thread infestation for hundreds of years, causing landowners to doubt the value of maintaining the dragons on alert. When the threads arrive, the Dragonriders must move quickly to avert disaster. This novella is gripping, suspenseful, and well-written.
One of the strangest stories in a book full of strange stories is “Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death” by James Tiptree, Jr. It is told from the perspective of a six-legged alien beast roaming a bizarrely different world. After its mother drives it away, it comes upon a tiny bright creature it takes as its mate, which it nurtures and protects until… I don’t want to give away the ending. What makes this story unique and unforgettable is the beast’s emotional, poetic monologue as it explores its world and tries to figure out what the ultimate plan of existence is.
Another highly stylized story told in first person is “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” by Samuel R. Delaney. The protagonist is a solar system-roaming thief who returns to Earth to sell some items he has acquired. With a detective from a special government department in pursuit, he attends a high society gathering at the top of an exclusive residential tower in New York, where four of the elite celebrities known as Singers are in attendance. The story’s title comes from a method used by nefarious characters throughout the solar system to communicate with each other: every month the name of a semi-precious stone becomes the new password of the underworld, but only if you know how to use it correctly. Like the previous tale, this story’s strength is in its idiosyncratic style; its main character is inherently complex and duplicitous, and this is reflected in the tone of the narration.
As I reread the novella “A Boy and His Dog” by Harlan Ellison, I felt that it had become somewhat dated. At the time that it first appeared it was cutting edge, but since its first publication in 1969 there have been many tawdry imitators in print and in video games. It is told in first person by the protagonist Vic, as he wanders with his dog Blood through a bleak post-apocalyptic landscape. Vic’s narration is loaded with expletives, and his primary aim in life, apart from survival, is to “get laid.” Since Blood is telepathic, he is able to assist Vic in finding women, although there is a paucity of them on the surface amidst the devastated landscape. Most of them live in underground shelters with “decent folks.” However, the men in these underground enclaves have become sterile, and so a young woman named Quilla June has been sent to the surface to lure a man down for breeding purposes. When I first read this story back in the early seventies I was deeply impressed. At that time no other science fiction writer had dared to be so blatantly explicit. It could not have been published in the science fiction digests of the sixties. The novella inspired a 1975 film of the same name, which won the 1976 Hugo Award for best dramatic presentation. Personally, though, I have always found the novella more succinct and powerful.
After the frantic activity and expletive-filled narration of “A Boy and His Dog,” the next two stories take a comparatively quiet, thoughtful, and subdued approach. The short story “The Day Before the Revolution” by Ursula K. Le Guin concerns an old woman who was a revolutionary in her youth and even spent fifteen years in prison for her beliefs. She is now an icon that the young look up to and adulate, but after a recent stroke she struggles with mere survival. Not much happens in this story; it is a character study. The anthology’s editor, Ben Bova, writes in the introduction that this is a prequel to Le Guin’s acclaimed novel The Dispossessed, which won a Nebula in the same year as “The Day Before the Revolution.” Without this back story, however, there is little to distinguish it from a contemporary literary story. By that I mean that there are no overt science fictional elements that make it recognizable as genre fiction. What it does have, of course, is Le Guin’s elegant prose and ability to give her characters depth and bring them to life. I personally could empathize with the portrait of old age and the feeling that most of life’s struggles are in the past instead of in the future.
(To be continued.)
