Ejler JakobssonCritiques

If anything was needed to show how science fiction has developed as literature in forty years, this issue of 'Worlds of If' fills that niche perfectly. The one good thing in this issue is the original novella that Greg Benford wrote under the title of 'In the ocean of night' and that he later developed into a full-blown novel, the beginning of a sequence dealing with intelligent alien AI probes. The other contents of this issue are not so distinguished. Joseph Green's "The Dwarfs of Zwergwelt" is an alien anthropology story with a mystic twist and some unpleasant vigilantes amongst the humans, spoilt for me, as a German reader, by the total giveaway of having a title that translates as "The Dwarfs of Dwarf-world". Then there was a piece of faux-Dune alien world scene-painting which looks as though someone had written a desert story and just changed some of the names for alien ones; and another alien-world exploration story which was well-written but reflected attitudes which were not at the cutting edge of societal development even in 1972. Finally, there was the final instalment of a Colin Kapp novel which read like Doc Smith, updated for the 1970s. (I met Colin Kapp once; an unassuming little chap who no-one at the convention recognised, which given that he was Guest of Honour was a bit embarrassing.)

Still, such explorations of sf's past are necessary if only to appreciate what we have now (and to sort the clowns from the competent); and the Benford is still quite important.