Katherine MacLean (1925–2019)

This is a good collection from the Golden Age of SF. The period from the 1940s to the early 1960s produced the best of the pioneers of SF. We all know about Asimov, Clarke, and Heinlein but we often miss out on the dozens of other great contributors to the genre. Kathrine MacLean was one of the better writers. she authored at least 5 novel/novellas and multiple short stories. She received a Nebula for Best Novella in 1972 for the "The Missing Man". There are more a dozen anthologies containing one of her stories.

This is one of her short story collections
The Diploids (good)
Defense Mechanism (fair)
The Pyramid in the Desert (very good)
The Snowball Effect (very good)
Incommunicado (fair)
Feedback (interesting spin on old theme)
Games (fair)
Pictures Don't Lie (best of the book)… (altro)

In a not-too-distant future (or maybe an alternate reality?), practicing medicine has been outlawed and being 'sick' is seen as a personal failure. Travis is a young man who aspired to be a space traveler but when he doesn't make it aboard the ship he needs to figure out something else to do with his life. He comes across an abandoned ambulance with some medical texts, and a hermit in the woods who teaches him a little more about healing. He also befriends a young man from another planet who is being targeted by some bad guys and tries to help him get home.
The world-building in this one is really great and I would have liked more in this world. The two plots with Travis and his friend didn't fit together as seamlessly as I expected them to by the end of the book. Seems also like the ending left room for a sequel or two.… (altro)

I put this on my SF Mistressworks list several years ago based on its reputation, and the fact it won a Nebula, although that was for the original novella, not the novel (although the novel too was nominated four years later). MacLean’s name popped up a number of times in Judith Merril’s (auto)biography (see here) – she was part of the same Futurians group, with Merril and Pohl, banging out stories for the sf mags, which garnered praise from the likes of Damon Knight and Brian Aldiss. So it came as something of a surprise to discover that Missing Man was actually sort of rubbish. George is an idiot savant – an uneducated orphan, physically strong but good-natured, with an unnaturally strong empathic ability. He meets up with a friend from childhood, who is in the Rescue Squad, and is hired as a consultant because he can use his ability to find missing people. Meanwhile, there’s a blackmail plot by a gang of teenagers, who have kidnapped a city engineer (the missing man of the title) and learnt of a design flaw in the city’s systems. As proof of this, they cause the collapse of two undersea cities, killing thousands. MacLean clearly just made shit up as she went along. It’s bad enough that Missing Man, a mid-1970s novel, reads more like a mid-1960s one, but then you come across a line like “The distilled water, being pure and without salts, carried no radiation back from the ‘hot’ place it circulated through”, and it’s clear the author’s grasp of science is feeble at best… But then, from what Merril wrote in her autobiography, they were really quite cynical about writing for money, and would bang out any old crap, knowing that Pohl, as editor, would buy it (although he pocketed half of the fee). I had expected much more of Missing Man, given the author’s reputation. Disappointing.… (altro)

This collection contains eight science fiction stories from the 1950s through the early 1960s. They’re pure pulp stories, meaning that the writing is serviceable, and that they sometimes suffer from cringey science (e.g. engineers fearing that a terrorist might let Pluto fall into earth; silly Sapir-Whorf nonsense). But they all share a clear focus on how individuals and societies respond to changes in technology, and I thought that aspect was very well developed. I’d say this collection is about as introspective as pulp sf gets.

On the whole, though, I quite liked these stories, dated though they might be: the scientific kernels they revolve around are things like genetic manipulation, bio-engineering self-repairing bodies, staging a global take-over through mathematical models of sociology, and raising children with ESP. MacLean tries to coat the science part of her stories with at least one or two layers of semi-plausible-sounding technobabble. And most of these stories here are, if not passable, then at least likeable: while some Golden-Era tropes are annoying, there is an unmistakable drive for interesting ideas to wrap stories around, and that can never be a bad thing.

MacLean’s writings reminded me of the stories of Walter M. Miller Jr., which I liked for similar reasons.… (altro)