1984: Pohlstars (Pohl, Frederik)

Some stars shine, others struggle to ignite (4/5)
From January 29, 2011

Pohl has 25 collections of his short stories, novelettes, and novellas published. From all the ones I've read, they're all been excellent. With stories reaching back as far as 1940 and as modern as 2010, Pohl has a huge wealth of select stories to put into each published collection. I would love to say that this selection process is hand-picked and careful, but some of the duds offered up are painful (see The Wizard-Masters of Peng-Shi Angle).

The Sweet, Sad Queen of Grazing Isles (1984) - 5/5 - The roaming behemoth ships of advantageous hydrothermal explorers of the initial investor and his financial conspirator reap the rewards of innovative marine technology but the death of the owner brings Jason (the ex-banker, shareholder and legal guardian of the captain's only daughter) into unfamiliar personal and mortal territory. 75 pages

The High Test (1983) - 3/5 - Galactic driving instructor writes a series of holiday letters back to his mother in Chicago depicting his daily routine with human and alien learners, some with and some without an agenda. 15 pages

Spending a Day at the Lottery Fair (1983) - 3/5 - The fair has come to town and the Baxter family pay to enter to be included in the job lottery and other lotteries for the day but it's the visiting Scot and the Japanese/Scot who just don't understand the American way of appreciating both life AND death. 12 pages

Second Coming (1983) - 2/5 - Starts like a bad joke: so, a spaceship finds Jesus on an alien planet and brings Him back to earth but after watching TV and speaking nothing but Aramaic, Jesus doesn't like what He sees and can't be bribed with having His own channel to preach on. 4 pages

Enjoy, Enjoy (1974) - 4/5 - Hired to live his life to the fullest in terms of `fun' and "excitement," Cowpersmith take on the challenge through extreme activities and depressions in the trough, but if the money is there for his pleasure and pain, he doesn't care who the end buyer is. 18 pages

Growing Up in Edge City (1975) - 4/5 - A boy finds himself outside the walls of a sheltered city but also finds that he is victimized because of it, yet the victim always finds a prey for his own shortcomings. 14 pages

We Purchased People (1974) - 4/5 - Because of Wayne's paranoid disposition and criminal history, he is enslaved as an alien/human surrogate liaison where he does the financial bidding of the trans-light alien signals but occasionally finds himself with free time when he likes to peruse the flesh trade and lust after a fellow alien mind slave. 14 pages

Rem the Rememberer (1977) - 3/5 - A boy ponders the future but current ecological disaster on earth all the while being educated by how bad it COULD have been if his ancestors hadn't implemented their wise eco-friendly ways. 7 pages

The Mother Trip (1975) - 2/5 - After an enlightening `encounter group' where Pohl was `having his sensitivities elevated and his inhibitions soaked away', a multi-partner experience is re-lived through the eyes of alien intelligences who have come to earth to view the passive and aggrieve ways of human nature. 18 pages

A Day in the Life of Able Charlie (1976) - 4/5 - Seemingly Average Joe product tester is put under then pressure of mechanically reviewing numerous product ideas and ultimately composing the perfect solution while the next product testis moments away and leagues away from `his' normal experience. 7 pages

The Way it Was (1977) - 4/5 - A man is paid handsomely to live the high life of exciting travels, adrenaline inducing thrills and the lavish consumption of luxury all the while having it be paid for by a secret organization who sells the experience to an unknown buyer who seeks not only the acme high of human experience, but also the sullen lows of depression. 15 pages

The Wizard-Masters of Peng-Shi Angle (1958/1984) - 0/5 - A mere novelty to Pohl, this re-translated version of the Chinese-translation of The Wizards of Pung's Corner is littered of Romanized Chinese words and over 80 footnotes relating to the translations. Ignore this "wax tadpole" and read the original version (5/5!) in The Man Who Ate the World. 45 pages

1960: Store of Infinity (Sheckley, Robert)

Without all the polyunsaturated puns (5/5)

This is the third Sheckley book I've had the privilege of picking up. I've read another Sheckley collection in Citizen In Space (1955) and his novel Dimension of Miracles (1968)... I haven't been disappointed yet. Sheckley doesn't take the typical 50s-60s approach of science fiction comedy, that special type of juvenile humor which hones in on terrible puns and cheesy, paper-thin plots. The stories in Store of Infinity are rich with character without all the polyunsaturated puns, zero-calorie tropes, or mono-juvenile-glutamate.

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The Prize of Peril (1959) - 4/5 - Jim Raeder has been running for his life for six days. As his seventh day draws to a close with only seven hours left until he is free, Raeder receives minute-by-minute updates on his predicament via his pocket TV.The television show named The Prize of Peril, of which Raeder is the subject, being the most popular show of its kind, the viewers either help his escape or hinder his passage through the city and country. 18 pages

The Humours (1959) - 5/5 - Alistair Crompton lives the stereotypical placid life of a monolithic clerk: "petty, punctilious, cautious, nervous, puritanical, resentful, driven, circumspect and repressed." This is all due to a trisecting of his personality when he was 11 years old. Now aged 34 and able to reintegrate his two missing personalities, Alistairmust travel to Mars to meet the embodiment of a sybaritic, Edgar Loomis. Subsuming Edgar's persona, the two travel to Vensus to track down the locally infamous figure Dan Stock so that Alistair can be a whole man again. 42 pages

Triplication (1959) - 5/5 - [1] The bucolic planet of Oaxe II is visited three times by the criminally infamous Timothy Mont and his lawyer with the charges of burning down an orphanage on three different planets. [2] Edmond Dritche and his wife duplicate themselves 500 times in order to form their own utopia, but the three cases of adultery point to divergent monogamy. [3] Professor Bolton and his robot Akka take a spaceship to Mars, but earth later receives three distress calls from the asteroid-wrecked ship indicating one survivor. 5 pages

The Minimum Man (1958) 4/5 - On an earth that is "crowder, cluttered and confused," the Planetary Exploration & Settlement Board selects extraterrestrial explorers to initially colonize planets by themselves.Once only hiring the most able-bodied men, the Board is now looking for the less-than-average bloke to settle the systems. Enter Anton Perceveral, a hard-working but terribly accident prone 34 year oldman. On the brink of suicide, Anton is serendipitously chosen as the new explorer for the planet Theta. As the Board is ultimately testing for "minimus-survival conditions," Anton's turn of luck is soon anything but that. 30 pages

If the Red Slayer (1958) - 3/5 - An unnamed trench soldier fighting the Reds gets shot in the leg and fatally shot in the chest, resulting in ten hours of death. Upon his revival by the "Brahmin" doctors, the soldier is miffed to realize that this has been the fourth such revival when in fact he wanted to remain dead, as is his right. Regardless, he's sent back into the trench where he's determined to render himself into metaphorical ground beef. 7 pages

The Store of the World (1958) - 5/5 - The temptation of temporary experiencing one's ideal life draws an unnamed man up a gray-rubbled lane where The Shop is located. The steep price of foregoing all of one's assets and the unfortunate drawback of a decade off one's life still draws people in, like this man, who must compare his subjectively dreary reality with the fantasy within his head. 8 pages

The Gun Without a Bang (1958) - 5/5 - Jungle-trekking on an alien planet with canine-like beats stalking hi, Alfred Dixon is field testing the Weapon. The man knows his guns and this Weapon is the hand-held defense unit to end them all, but it's the silence of the Weapon that concerns Alfred most. 9 pages

The Deaths of Ben Baxter (1957) - 4/5 - The World Planning Council of the Federated Districts of Earth choose world lines from parallel earth's which better reflect the ideal earth the council intends. Simply sliding into these world lines is done often enough, but the conundrum of having to personally intervene is finally at hand. The ideal earth must be realized by one of the three solutions to have Ned Brynne NOT kill his business colleague Ben Baxter. 32 pages

1968: Dimension of Miracles (Sheckley, Robert)

Not only silly, but intelligent and thoughtful (4/5)
From March 14, 2011

As can be expected from a silly science fiction book, there aren't laughs from cover to cover. More realistically, the first quarter is pretty good producing a good amount of laughs and head shaking. The half has some giggles but nothing more. At the end, it's an odd smile and an occasional shrug. Needless to say, the steam of hilarity is quickly dissipated in the steep chimney of story telling... but it was still easy enough and stomachable enough to finish off in one morning.

Rear cover synopsis:
"EARTH HUNT. It had to somewhere, Carmody knew that much. It was waiting for him, just as he had left it. But where? He only knew he was in the center of a galaxy in a universe of galaxies. Within them lay endless varieties of the planet Earth. And there was only one way to find his Earth again. He would have to visit each one. And he would have to hurry. Because his search for home had turned into a race with death..."

Like other silly science fiction books (i.e. Norstilia and Arrive at Easterwine - both of which I gagged over), a major crutch the author uses is spontaneity, which sometimes manifests as just ridiculous randomness. Sheckley, however, keeps a close tab on his randomness and the silliness doesn't stray too far into juvenile absurdity. Puns are another unfortunate staple of what some authors consider to be funny novels. Again, Sheckley is self-disciplined only allowing one glaring pun on the words cards and way.

Aside from being a silly novel, it feels like Sheckley put lot of his personal credo in the pages. It's really quite an impressive list, however blatant some of it is: free will/human error, creation/death, conceptions/reality and touches on religious hypocrisy, law of diminishing returns and law of predation. Further, Sheckley has some interesting and thoughtful ideas about the differentiating between sanity and insanity, the boredom an omniscient being would experience and how waste could be a memorial to our needs.

Far from being one of the worst humorous science fiction stories out there (I think the short story E van S by Piers Anthony takes THAT prize), Dimension of Miracles is a thoughtful exposé of an intelligent man's personal philosophy, a comical feature of a witty man's humor and a keen unfolding done by the hand of one man's literary experience. Four stars is a little high for this but I'll round it up from 3.5 stars