I always enjoy these "little slice of history" anthologies... this one, while not dramatically outstanding for me, was good as always, as most of this series is...
I'd read the Cowper, Del Rey and Tiptree stories before, but long enough ago that I read them over...

Appearance of Life - Brian Aldiss
Holographic recordings of a long-dead couple lead to an insight(?) about the nature of our universe.

Overdrawn at the Memory Bank - John Varley
A futuristic 'vacation' technique involving transfer of consciousness leads to a man being stuck inside a computer system in this playful tale.

Those Good Old Days of Liquid Fuel - Michael Coney
A nostalgia-fest for the future - pretty original gimmick, actually. The 'classic' early spaceships are being phased out by new technology. A man remembers his boyhood watching the dramatic launches and landings with his best friend - who has grown up to be a very different person.

The Hertford Manuscript - Richard Cowper
Could H.G. Wells have been telling the truth when he wrote The Time Machine? Excellent recreation of the Victorian literary style.

Natural Advantage - Lester Del Rey
Humans are smart, and underestimated by some rather fatalistic aliens.

The Bicentennial Man - Isaac Asimov
A classic tale investigating the nature of humanity through the story of a robot who wants to be human. Won the Hugo and Nebula that year, but honestly, I thought the robot was way too whiny and frustratingly stupid. And WHY does he want to be human, anyway? Is it just pressure to conform and be like everyone else?
OK, so I haven't read it in many years, but I really thought "Pinocchio" did a better job with this same theme. (Did you know that in the original (1883), Pinocchio dies at the end? I didn't, until just now! Collodi apparently was pressured by publishers to write a 'happy ending.')

The Cabinet of Oliver Naylor - Barrington Bayley
The inventor of the 'thespitron' (a sort of automatic movie generator) is asked to transport (unbeknownst to him) a government agent in his spaceship in order to apprehend a petty criminal. Things go badly.

My Boat - Joanna Russ
I haven't been a huge Joanna Russ fan - I've sort of WANTED to like her work, but I've read Extra(ordinary) People and We Who Are About To, and neither of them really did it for me. But I liked this story quite a lot - featuring a couple of kids who escape the mundane misery of life in 1960s America into glorious history and the worlds of H.P. Lovecraft(!) - from the perspective of one who doesn't go. Really nice piece!

Houston Houston Do You Read - James Tiptree, Jr.
Also won the Hugo and Nebula.
Strangely, this story reminded me a lot of Joanna Russ' short story "When it Changed," which was retrospectively awarded the Tiptree award. "When it Changed" was written first (1972.) Both feature a situation where, due to a plague or epidemic, only women have survived, and have created a self-sufficient, peaceful all-female society. Men arrive, and don't get it.

I See You - Damon Knight
Shortlisted for the Hugo. Inventor creates a "far-seeing" machine which can view both through space and time. He disseminates these machines widely, and they become omnipresent, changing the nature of society radically. ( )

Rather intermittently I’ve written about sci-fi and I find that if I don’t take the time to slow down and write something out then I promptly forget whatever it is that I just read. This post is not only an attempt to share but also one of self-preservation for my own recollection.

Appearance of Life – Brian W. Aldiss

The introductory paragraph for this story says, and I quote, that Brian has been writing stories that “baffle the comprehension.” I don’t find personally that this story is completely beyond my comprehension but I will say that such a statement does little to recommend such a narrative. The bits that stand out for me, many days after reading this story, center around a planet-wide museum constructed by an ancient and extinct race. Our narrator visits the locale and spends many months seeking out some greater truth about our history as a species. Eventually, he comes to a conclusion which his mind cannot accept, that drives him mad, that causes him to extract himself from humanity entirely lest he loose this knowledge upon the universe and create havoc.

Overdrawn at the Memory Bank – John Varley

If this book were a pop song, this story would be “the hook.” Our narrator, in a far distant time is visiting the equivalent of Disney World. He’s having his consciousness implanted into an African lion for a few weeks to relax and disconnect from the world around him. Unfortunately, when he returns from his excursion he finds that his real body has been misplaced. In the months and months which follow while Uncle Walt looks for his body, he discovers a few key truths about himself and about mankind in general.

Those Good Old Days of Liquid Fuel – Michael G. Coney

The Wonder Years meets Trainspotting. ’nuff said.

The Hertford Manuscript – Richard Cowper

In this short tale Cowper does a fairly reasonable job of filling in some of the narrative holes left in H.G. Wells “The Time Machine”. Cowper’s protagonist doesn’t come to anything approaching a happy ending but it is good nonetheless to have an answer, even if it isn’t the most uplifting one.

Natural Advantage – Lester Del Rey

Aliens are nice enough to visit Earth, but sadly, it’s with nothing but bad news. A solar flare is coming to wipe us off the face of the planet within the decade. This particular race has trinocular vision and that allows them to not only perceive depth of field but depth of time and thus they can see that our puny race is about to snuff it. At least they’re nice enough to tell us though, right? After delivering their news they agree to an exchange of technology with our sadly doomed race and go on their way. When they return to their homeworld years later they find that humanity had a little more ingenuity than they bargained for.

The Bicentennial Man – Isaac Asimov

In this old and familiar story we find a robot with an ambition. Before the story of this robot there was a wooden marionette with the same ambition. So many are the articles of furniture which yearn to be human. Why do we write of such things? Is it possibly because we want to make our finite and human frailties seem somehow valuable? The Bicentennial Man yearns to be human, to expire, to pass on from a mortal existence. How many of us would give everything to NOT be human?

The Cabinet of Oliver Naylor – Barrington Bayley

Mankind’s technology has outpaced his morality. He can travel not only faster than light but exponentially faster. He can cruise about the cosmos and watch every possible sitcom produced mechanically by a simple box. (Not that there are all that many possible combinations mind you). So what WOULD happen if the entirety of the omniverse became the equivalent of the wild west?

My Boat – Joanna Russ

A young black girl close on the heels of the civil rights movement proves to be more than she might seem. In fact she might be downright alien…

Houston, Houston, Do You Read? – James Tiptree Jr.

Our protagonists were on a mission. All they had to do was loop around the sun and come back to Earth. Unfortunately for them, the Earth has changed since they left, especially since 300 years passed when they approached perihelion. Pesky temporal distortions. Plague has ravaged the planet they’re returning to and they’re the last three human males in the universe. What greater paradise could there be? Or perhaps it’s really hell in disguise….

I See You – Damon Knight

Television has come a long way. Now you can dial in the time and location of whatever you want to view, even your next door neighbor. What exactly WOULD happen if all of history both distant and recent was wide open to scrutiny from a hoard of people with a $7 gadget from Radio Shack? ( )

Traditional SF anthology. I liked this collection from my teens. ( )

This is a bit of an interim review, as I haven't finished the anthology yet, but one of the stories demanded reviewing.

As far as I can tell, all of the authors here are American or British, which is a bit sad for the "World's Best SF". Half are old standbys--Brian W. Aldiss, Lester Del Rey, Isaac Asimov, James Tiptree, Jr. and Damon Knight. The other half--John Varley, Michael G. Coney, Richard Cowper, Barrington J. Bayley and Joanne Russ--are unknown to me outside this volume.

Brian Aldiss's "Appearance of Life" had me shrugging my shoulders, like most of Aldiss's fiction I've read. It's clearly written and I think I get the point, but the story falls flat for me, perhaps because the only two characters that manage to be as much as two dimensional are holographic recordings doing monologues, and the central conceit falls flat.

"Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" is a cute story, with appropriate characterization and plot twists, about a man on the Moon trapped in a virtual reality waiting for his body to be recovered. It's hardly a grand story, but an enjoyable one.

"The Good Old Days of Liquid Fuel" by Michael G. Coney is an excellent story about two young ship watchers and the troubles of young love. So far, it's probably second best in the book.

"The Hertford Manuscript", by Richard Cowper, is basically a sequel to H. G. Wells The Time Machine. It's a pale, unnecessary addendum to the original.

"Natural Advantage" by Lester Del Rey harkens back to an older school of science fiction, in a story of first contact amid potential destruction of humanity. While not ground-breaking, it's a good read, the third best in the book at this point in my reading.

"The Bicentennial Man", by Isaac Asimov, has always been one of my favorite stories, and is the only story I've read here of undying value; it's also the only story I've felt that explores its idea fully and creates interesting characters and story to go along with it. The quest for humanity, in this case by Asimovian robot Andrew Martin, is a classic plot and Asimov explores it in one of the best stories of his career.

Finally, at this point in my reading, is "The Cabinet of Oliver Naylor", by Barrington J. Bayley. I want the time I spent reading this story back. This story would earn my first 0.5 if it were standing on its own. The editor says "[...] there are more original ideas tossed in this one novelette than [...] in entire issues of some sf magazines." That's at least part of the problem; the story tosses the concepts of an Earth that has rejected international trade, people traveling over an area of interstellar space I believe the story describes as "googols" of light years wide (all apparently English, the winner of the non-trade war) despite the chance of never being able to find their way home and a machine capable of making up any story. Each of these is at least on the surface implausible and worthy of in-depth exploration; instead, we get slapped in the face with them and the story moves out without explanation. The infodump of the philosophy of identity--without even the pretense that anything had been studied on the subject since the 19th century--and abusive sexualized cruelty add to the pain this story brought to me.

So, so far a mix of the good, the mediocre and the truly ghastly. ( )

Originally published as The 1977 Annual World's Best SF