A collection of wild rides, often having quirky visions of alien creatures as the central plot idea. If I hadn’t known that James Tiptree actually was a retired lady writing SF in the late 60’s and early 70’s, I would have guessed that a SF version of Hunter S. Thompson was writing this fueled by drugs. Creativity abounds more than once bordering on the surreal and absurd.

If I were to give an average rating, it would probably be two stars as I wasn’t taken by the majority of the stories. The highlight of the collection is the novella ‚The Girl Who Was Plugged In‘. A fun social commentary on the overflowing importance of advertising and at the same time an early cyberpunk story before cyberpunk existed. It even could be seen as a presage of influencers omnipresent nowadays.

I also liked ‚Fault‘ due to its original premise. Alien justice in a novel form, punishing a human perpetrator by removing his perception from the fabric of time. ‚The Milk of Paradise‘ and ‚The Last Flight of Doctor Ain‘ also have nice ideas although the plots aren’t that great.

The rest of the stories were forgettable. I’m especially astonished how the repellent ‚Love is the Plan the Plan is Death‘ was awarded with the Nebula award in 1973. Get this collection for ‚The Girl Who Was Plugged In‘ and skip the rest.

One more note: the German translation I read isn’t good and has aged terribly, using a lot of out-of-date pseudo-hip vocabulary not used anymore since the 80’s.

What nonsense! Science Fiction is about ideas but the ideas here are far-fetched and underdeveloped. None of the events is explained in any believable fashion. The effort of giving depth to the main character is laughable. Nothing interesting is going on. A pure waste of time I only read because it is part of an SF collection I own and work my way through.

A solid mix of fantasy and SF. Could have been an episode of Star Trek with humanity monitoring backward settlements on remote planets without intruding. It’s not that those settlements have evolved independently from humanity. In fact, Carrig has been settled by a human spaceship crashed there. Since, this fact has been forgotten and only remains recognizable in legends.

Now, outlaws from a rogue planet disturb the balance on medieval Carrig by intervening with superior weapons to exploit the rich resources on this planet. Scouts of the Federation try to alleviate this, allying with selected locals without revealing their identity.

There are enough interesting ideas and the world building is sufficiently original to provide entertainment without any major plot holes or implausibilities. If you like Star Trek, you’ll like this one.

The S in SF stands at least as much for social as for science when it comes to this book. There’s a science part in that a scientist discovers an eternity serum. But more importantly, The Great Secret is about the social implications of such an eternity serum. Obviously, it hinges upon the issue of overpopulation which eternity would cause and its consequences of humanity ultimately fighting for survival in a world where too many humans fight for not enough resources.

The twist here is that the scientist discovers this early enough and approaches the world leaders of the time (it is set from the 1950’s to the 1970’s) who surprisingly act long-sighted enough to take action and either isolate or eliminate everybody who took this serum. Because eternity is infectious. A very interesting twist in times of Corona when I read this. The first half of the book is a slow burn. You basically know what has been discovered but Barjavel doesn’t tell us explicitly and you are slogging through many many pages, hoping that finally you are getting told what’s going on and come to the interesting part. Once this happens, the social utopia starts. How could an isolated world look like where nobody dies and nothing degenerates. Quickly, the utopia falls apart and we are rather talking about a dystopia.

This setup is original and I like that Barjavel’s social science fiction that resulted. It has a 70’s vibe of liberalism and free love as well as a macho male slant which might turn off modern readers. This and the slow start hinder it from being an exceptional experience but still one of the more interesting SF stories worth a read.

The premise of genetically mutated humans is interesting and disturbing at the same time. Also, the setup with a human dictator ruling the Earth is critical, being written in 1940. Then, there’s hilarious technology and plot. It’s a wild rollercoaster ride without any thought to plausibility. Some strands of the plot lead nowhere or are simply superfluous. The character development simply isn’t there. If a character changes, it’s without any discernible steps. The world is black and white with no intermediate steps. One sole Slan single-handedly develops and produces the most outstanding new machines and technologies. I can’t believe this ever stood out. Nonetheless, 2* only because of the inventiveness.

Doesn’t stand the test of time. It’s repetitive, disrespectful and unimaginative science fiction from the not so golden age of SF.

As mentioned in other reviews, the conception resembles a series of Star Trek episodes. Each episode, a mixed crew is send to another planet to explore the habitat.

Things start going south with Russell’s definition of a mixed crew. Whites because they are good at technology. Blacks because they don’t get space nausea. Martians (!) because they use very little air, are fairly immune to cosmic ray-burn and with their tentacles are formidable fighters. No women. I could live with this as a representation of the time the book was written.

But this definition is a foreshadowing of Russell’s narrow-minded imagination. Each planet visitation follows the same structure of exploration, making first contact, getting attacked, finding ways to fight back and finally abscond back to Earth. A banal plot repeated four times and the author’s ideas for the different alien lifeforms can’t rescue this wreck of a spaceship.

One note: I read the German translation which probably is an abridged version of the book.

I often read science fiction and came across many authors but I wasn’t aware at all of David Gerrold before reading this book as part of a collection. A pity since he stands out among his peers in the way he’s approaching writing science fiction. While science fiction usually is about plot and world-building, Gerrold is giving us ideas.

Harlie is one of the early cognizant AI’s. 2001’s HAL was already around but Harlie can stand on his own. In fact, I would wager that Douglas Adams read this book before creating Deep Thought. Harlie designed the computer that follows him a decade before Adams‘ Deep Thought. But Harlie isn’t about humour. Harlie conducts long winding conversations with his project lead David Auberson, a psychologist. They revolve around love and religion as essential human traits separating man from machine.

By focusing on philosophical issues, Gerrold avoids the trap of obsolescence which so many SF stories from the past fall into. It shows that he put a lot of thoughts he was turning over in his head into this book. Some of them are out of place like his thoughts on his own homosexuality which are a long stretch in the context of the interaction between man and machine but for the early 70’s these thoughts are extraordinary nonetheless. SF certainly gave more freedom than other forms of writing. Delany’s Dhalgren comes to mind.

Where Gerrold fails the same way as is common in SF is in developing his characters. The interactions lack cohesiveness and the crucial relationship between the main human protagonist and his love interest is described weakly. Nonetheless, When Harlie was One is a recommended read for anybody who likes SF because of ideas and not of plot. Speaking of ideas, this novel is probably the first book in history that mentioned computer viruses.