Unfamiliar Territory
Robert Silverberg
204 pages
published in 1973

Last August, I spent the month with Sandra and at the end of my holidays my family came over to visit us for a weekend. Not having been to Plymouth yet, we sort of gave them the touristic highlights: a trip down the river, a visit to the Aquarium, etc. And since the weather was nice, on Sunday we went to the beach, which was fun. It was there, in an beachpub where I was buying some icecream, that I spotted this book. Let me tell you, this is not a bad book at all for something that only cost me 40p.

Which is a bit of an understatement because this is in fact an excellent collection, filled to the brim with classic stories. There are simply no bad stories in Unfamiliar Territory, only good to excellent ones. I knew Robert Silverberg is an excellent writer when he puts his mind to it and this collection confirmed it. The stories were all written between 1971-1973 and manage to fuse New Wave sensibilities with a solid core of "old-fashioned" idea science fiction.

Take the first story for example. "Caught in the Organ Draft" has as main premise a straightforward extrapolation of the then existing draft, into a future where you could be drafted as an organ donor. Instead of your life, you could lose a kidney. The story itself is about what one guy goes through when he gets his draft notice, how he reacts, rebels at first but ultimately pragmatically accepts the system. The parallels with the Vietnam era draft are of course obvious, but the story is good enough to not be dated by them. Which also goes for the other stories here: all clearly a product of the times they were written, but not dated.

Quite a lot of the stories are about time travel: "(Now+n), (Now-n)" is about a man in telepathic contact with his past and future selfs. "What We Learned from This Morning's Newspaper" is what happens when one street gets the newspaper being delivered a week early. "When We Went to See the End of the World" has timetravel cruises to the end of the world, with every cruise featuring a different ending, one being very Wellsian. "In Entropy's Jaws" the protagonist gets unstuck in time, randomly experiencing flashbacks or flashforwards. "Many Mansions" is the best of the timetravel stories, as it puts a new twist on that perennial favourite of traveling back in time to kill your grandfather. "Caliban" finally is about what happens if you freeze yourself and awake in the future.

Of the other seven stories, "Some Notes on the Pre-Dynastic Epoch" and "The Wind and the Rain" are less real stories then impressions. The former is about future (alien?) archeologists studying twentieth century America, the latter about the cleaning of a dead and incredibly polluted Earth. "Mutant Season" too is more about conecpt then plot. Which leaves "In the Group", "Good News from the Vatican" and "Push No More". The first of which is my least favourite story in this collection, as the main character is a whiner. Still a decent story though. "Good News from the Vatican" shows what a good sf writer can do in 8 pages and "Push No More" is a well done story of adolescent angst manifesting in ESP.

Highly recommended. Best forty pence I've ever spent.