Clans of the Alphane Moon
By Philip K. Dick
Even if you didn’t know anything about Philip K. Dick’s rocky marital history you’d probably guess that there was some biographical basis for Chuck and Mary Rittersdorf’s near-fatal squabbling in this book. Domestic turbulence can be an inspiration for some artists, but it can also lead to a low kind of score-settling.
I think that’s part of where Clans of the Alphane Moon goes wrong. The novel takes an idea Dick had worked up in a story called “Shell Game” a decade earlier and makes it a whole lot less interesting by superimposing a chaotic spy story over the germ of a tale of psychological misfits who have formed their own little Pitcairn on Alpha III M2. As Chuck struggles to understand the logic of what’s happening on the Alphane moon, and concludes that there is none, it’s hard not to feel that this is a story that just got away from Dick. It probably reflects on the chaos of his own life at the time, which is something that, in this case, really didn’t help.
This book is a follow-up to 
With a title like that, complete with exclamation mark, you’d be forgiven for expecting nothing subtle in this terrific anthology of 25 SF stories written by women between 1928 and 1969. But this period – and most of the stories here come from the “Atomic age” of the 1950s and ‘60s – was just before the more explicit and political feminism of that movement’s second wave, and subtlety was still the order of the day. As Leigh Brackett remarked of what was happening at the time, “you can get away with practically anything [in SF] as long as it’s well and subtly done.”
Wormhole is a solid example of what has proven to be one of the most durable genre hybrids: the SF-detective story.
Judging the SF of the past on what they managed to get “right,” as though its main function was prediction, is a mug’s game. All the more remarkable then to have this look back by Aldous Huxley himself on 
You’d be forgiven for thinking that expanding the boundaries of science fiction away from a predominantly “white, male and American” point of view is all about going woke, for good or ill. But an alertness to prejudice and calls for social justice are not primarily what editor Lavie Tidhar is about in this second of his Best of World SF volumes.
Brave New World is often contrasted with 1984 as an example of a “soft” dystopia. Indeed, Huxley himself was one of the first to do this in his retrospective essay Brave New World Revisited. And one can see the point being made: things seem so much happier in the World State than in Oceania. People aren’t compelled to give up their freedoms by jackbooted police but instead willingly choose their state of infantilized slavery.
In recent years, perhaps feeling that established literary genres aren’t already vague enough, some people have adopted the term “speculative fiction” as an alternative to “science fiction.” Whatever the new label’s merits, it’s fair to say that some SF is more geared toward an imaginative sort of forecasting of what the future might actually have in store, which is the direction taken by the stories collected in the series of anthologies put out by MIT Press that started out as Twelve Tomorrows and of which Tomorrow’s Parties is the latest instalment.
Mallory Viridian isn’t the kind of person you want to get too close to. She’s the carrier of a weird kind of “murder virus,” which means that wherever she goes someone nearby ends up being killed.
Alex on SF 