An original collection of 10 stories with an introduction by the editor for each of the tales. I never know when I am going to stumble on a really good collection, but this was good but not great. The orbit anthologies I have read in the past have been generally good. The stories are:

7 • The Doctor • (1967) • shortstory by Ted Thomas
18 • Baby, You Were Great! • (1967) • shortstory by Kate Wilhelm
36 • Fiddler's Green • (1967) • novella by Richard McKenna
110 • Trip, Trap • (1967) • novelette by Gene Wolfe
145 • The Dimple in Draco • (1967) • shortstory by R. S. Richardson as by Philip Latham
164 • I Gave Her Sack and Sherry • Alyx • (1967) • novelette by Joanna Russ
185 • The Adventuress • Alyx • (1967) • novelette by Joanna Russ
211 • The Hole on the Corner • (1967) • shortstory by R. A. Lafferty
227 • The Food Farm • (1967) • shortstory by Kit Reed
240 • Full Sun • (1967) • shortstory by Brian W. Aldiss

The opening story "The Doctor" put me on notice that I might have a good one here. A physician from the present time volunteered for a time travel experiment at Pennsylvania State University which successfully sent him half a million years into the past of early man with no apparent way to return. In the story we see how the doctor tries to use his skills to help a tribe survive. Things do not go well, in fact they go very badly, but he perseveres, because he is a doctor. I liked this one a lot.

Kate Wilhelm's story "Baby, You Were Great" was noted by the editor as different from her usual work. It was and I didn't care for it, just not my cuppa.

The novella "Fiddler's Green" is the most interesting piece, sort of the star of this collection. Damon Knight says in his intro that it was one of a handful of unpublished stories Richard McKenna left behind when he died in 1964. Wikipedia defines Fiddler's Green so: 'Fiddler's Green is a legendary supposed afterlife, where there is perpetual mirth, a fiddle that never stops playing, and dancers who never tire. In 19th-century maritime folklore it was a kind of afterlife for sailors who have served at least 50 years at sea.' McKenna handles this idea of an imaginary place in a story where a ship transporting contraband explosives has sunk and eight men survive in an open boat. The future looks hopeless. McKenna was a US navy sailor (for 22 years) as well as an author and is best known for his famous novel and movie adaptation "The Sand Pebbles." I need to seek out other stories by this man, who died young at 51. As far as I know I have only read one other short story by McKenna in a supernatural/horror anthology several years ago. Orbit is advertised as the best new science fiction of the year, but this story would be better classified as fantasy although there is a mass hallucination of sorts within the story and one man develops a kind of telepathic mind control so I suppose many would think that element was science fiction. But is hypnosis or other forms of control sci/fi? Not to me. It was an intriguing story but I was disappointed with how it finished.

Gene Wolfe's "Trip, Trap" was a long fantasy / science fiction mashup that was pretty good and kept my interest, and told in an interesting fashion. Beware the troll bridge. Phasers on stun.

"The Dimple in Draco" was an interesting astronomy oriented story written by an astronomer.

I wasn't sure at first what to make of Joanna Russ's pair of related stories. In the first one Alyx bonks her abusive husband on the head, and perhaps makes him dead. She runs off, or rather swims off and finds herself on the ship of Blackbeard the pirate. Alyx is by no means an innocent sweet young thing. I found myself interested despite the strangeness of it all. There was probably a science fiction element somewhere I missed. I would call this a historical feminist fantasy as was the followup. Some people would probably love this sort of story - I found it amusing enough to give it an OK. I liked the first one more than the second.

Of the three remaining stories, Lafferty and Reed's stories were zany and a bit whacky and not really to my taste. Brian Aldiss, however, gives us a story of a dark future where machines have increasingly taken over and man has become pacified city dwellers. This tale is of a hunter, a hunter of werewolves which are men who have broken away from the cities. The story was interesting and had a very good and unexpected twist. ( )

In the late 1960s, while a high school student, I read a strange SF novella called "Fiddler's Green."

Around 2001, having for a couple of years tapped into the collective consciousness of current and former Tulsans on TulsaTVMemories.com, the story resurfaced in my mind.

I could not remember the author's name or where I read it. I thought it might have been from one of my dad's Reader's Digest condensed books.

"Fiddler's Green" stuck in my mind particularly because I knew I had not fully understood it (and it is a great story.)

With Google, I found out that the author was Richard McKenna, and that I probably had read the story in the Orbit 2 anthology.

Here are a couple of online mentions of this unique story. If you are reading this, you may have found them, too:

Writer Robert Silverberg (whose juvenile novel, Lost Race of Mars, was probably the first SF I read) is said on AbeBooks.com to have called "Fiddler's Green" "...surely the most moving and profound desert-island fantasy ever written."

The July 2001 issue of Cloud Chamber (an online fanzine by David Langford) described it as a "disturbingly odd tale of escape from death at sea into a flawed consensus reality."

More at: http://tulsatvmemories.com/fiddlersgreen.html ( )