You cannot even trust the world with candy, not to mention sentient bombs that boast about their megaton load. "Luckily there are enough humans that losing a few hundred thousand of them to little nukes now and then had no net effect and apparently about the same social effect as the annual tobacco related death rate" or - on other words - "it doesn't bother the anthill much, no matter how many ants get killed..." You have to agree, it's "a conversation starter" story, even today, 30 years later.
Barrington J. Bayley
"The Cabinet of Oliver Naylor"
© New Worlds # 10, 1976
The Knights of the Limits, 1979
This story is a sudden revelation among the average contents of the New Worlds collection (this was already a book, not a magazine). Barrington Bayley is not only better, he is lethally good. After reading his stories, the joy of reading any other writer's honest effort pales in comparison and does not hook you any more. He will spoil you and show you what really inventive and cool writing is.
In this off-beat (and seriously GRAND) tale we have Victorian design and culture, spaceships traveling with unthinkable speeds and the metaphysical ramifications worthy of the late PKD theories. Witness these words from the "Cheap Truth": "His best work has an eerie sense of dark complexity. To read a work like "The Cabinet of Oliver Naylor" is to be simultaneously enlightened and bewildered, to receive a Zen knock on the head; it is the literary equivalent of psilocybin. It is, in fact, why science fiction was invented."
James Tiptree, Jr.
"Houston, Houston, Do You Read?"
© Aurora: Beyond Equality, ed. by Vonda McIntyre, 1976
Star Songs Of An Old Primate, 1978
--novella : 1977 Hugo Winner (tie)
--novella : 1977 Nebula Winner
--novella : 1977 Locus award /3rd place
--novella : 1977 Jupiter Award Winner
--novella : 1999 Locus All-Time Poll /6th place (tie)
"The Battle of the Sexes" has a predictable winner in this brilliant novella (predictable, because we know that James Tiptree is the male pseudonym of a woman writer). Surprisingly, the science fiction community did not guess the author's true identity even after this tongue-in-cheek feminist tale.
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