Athena, the computer that runs the factory that has started producing the Guineveres. (It was sabotaged by a disgruntled ex-manager whom Athena automated out of a job. The sabotage consisted of programming it to do something that would provoke its destruction, i.e. manufacturing Guineveres.) When he gets back to the motel where he has installed Guinevere, she is horribly aged—it’s planned obsolescence, intended to insure replacement demand, and he can get a nice trade-in on her if he wants. And that’s not all. The story flails out in several other directions as well. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this kind of clear-the-decks satire from Williamson. It’s a mess, but a sharp and vigorous one.
Lan Wright’s “Wishes Three” is an Unknownish rehash of the “be careful what you ask for” theme, trivial but redeemed by lively writing, not always a feature of his work.
After those, it’s downhill as usual. Peter Phillips’ brief “First Man in the Moon” is merely inconsequential, while Julian Frey’s “Head First”—about some alien children enrolled in a school where the headmaster’s name is Wilmar P. Quagmire, which is probably all you need to know—is actively silly. (Frey was a penname for John Hynam, who usually wrote as John Kippax.) A more baroque sort of lameness may be found in John Kippax’s “Fair Weather Friend,” admittedly a merciful improvement over the Dimple the dachshund on Mars stories. Here the characters run a rainmaking operation in the United States—authentic local color is provided by a “sherriff” who says “Well I’ll be hoodooed,” and a farmer named Eb Doorbell. Their materials are being stolen by a time-traveling magician from ancient Egypt who needs to steal the thunder (as it were) of a competing rainmaker back home. The real-time rainmakers oblige him by providing him a new, improved rainmaking agent. His competitor, by the way, is named Noah.
In a similar vein is Dan Morgan’s “Beast of the Field,” in which a miserable man comes to a psychiatrist with the delusion that he is an alien. Of course, he is an alien, and he’s trying to track down another shipwrecked alien, and now he has. The psychiatrist admits that he’s the guy, but he doesn’t want to go home because the crash destroyed his telepathic centers and he’d be a cripple. So the investigator leaves him, saying, “Goodbye and good luck—Doctor Freud.” What next? Adam and Eve?
26. See this cover at http://www.sfcovers.net/mainnav.htm or http://www.philsp.com/mags/sciencefantasy.html.
27. See it at http://www.sfcovers.net/mainnav.htm or http://www.philsp.com/mags/sciencefantasy.html. As usual, Broderick disagrees, finding it quite pleasing.
28. Little, Brown, 1998, chapter XVIII.
29. See it at http://www.sfcovers.net/mainnav.htm or http://www.philsp.com/mags/sciencefantasy.html.
30. Aldiss, “The Glass Forest,” http://www.solaris-books.co.uk/aldiss/html/glass_forest_4.html (visited 10/19/11).
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