Kelly Freas (1922–2005)

_Star Well_ by Alexei Panshin is an entertaining comedy of manners in the SF mode with a hint of the demimonde thrown in for flavour. Our protagonist is Anthony Villiers, Viscount Charteris, an aristocrat and fop whose life seems to be a perpetual Grand Tour of the Nashuite Empire, chasing the stipend afforded him by his father from port to port and resorting to what might, in impolite circles, be considered illicit means to gain funds when he is unable to catch up with it. He is no career criminal or grifter, though, and is content rather to live a life of comfort and fashion without sullying his hands with anything so low as labour or outright criminality. He is, in a word, a gentleman.

His travelling companion is the enigmatic Torve the Trog, a giant befurred frog who seems equal parts Yoda and Chewbacca. Torve is generally a rather stoic companion, at least in this volume, and is content merely to evade customs officials anxious to restrict Trog travel, sit cross-legged in the Palatine Suite composing indecipherable poetry seemingly based upon the single word “Thurb”, and utter gnomic phrases repudiating causality to Anthony whenever confronted by the latter’s concerns or problems: “No, you have very strange mind. I do not understand. But is no mattering: favourable line of occurrence and friendship travel together. I like you – means nothing to me.” He is rather a charming fellow.

Star Well is a space port tunnelled into an asteroid which resides in the Flammarion Drift, an empty reach of space “where the stars don’t grow” and which is known primarily for some gambling, a little shopping, and an otherwise complete lack of interest. It is thus generally used as little more than a stopover by travellers on their way to somewhere else. This suits its owners and operators fine, since it is, of course, also the home of illegal smuggling and other illicit activities. We follow Anthony as he becomes embroiled in these activities, quite by accident of course, and meets such varied characters as Godwin the deadly enforcer of low birth and aristoractic yearnings (a man who, if it can be believed, has an even more accomplished toilet than that of Villiers…though of course it is somewhat vulgar in its ostentation); Godwin’s boss the cow-towing Hisan Bashir Shirabi who might make a formidable criminal if only he could overcome his awe of his betters; a corpulent and red robed priest of Mithras who may be more than he appears; and the charming and capable Louisa Parini, a fifteen year old girl of shadowy parentage en route to a finishing school for girls which she would most heartily like to avoid.

There is another character even more prevalent in the tale, the narrator, whose asides and commentary make up most of the ‘mannerism’ of the tale. I generally don’t mind an intrusive narrator like this (in fact I quite love it when done with panache, as in Dumas), and usually such a tale demands one, but I think Panshin needed a slightly lighter touch with him than was on display here. Some of the bon mots were a little too strained and it would have been nice to see a few more in the mouth of Villiers himself, though he does get a few of his own.

All in all this was an enjoyable tale and if you like the comedy of manners mode and light sci-fi then you will likely enjoy this. Despite its slight beginnings the story ends in a satisfactory manner and leaves open some room for the development of Villiers and his adventures to something more substantial. Two volumes follow (a fourth, concluding volume, was never produced due to disputes between Panshin and his publishers).
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Robert Silverberg fixates a lot on the idea of "fun" in his introduction to this anthology, but I sense that he perhaps had more fun writing for Super-Science Fiction when it was published 1955-59 than I am having reading what got written. After all, who wouldn't like being able to sell three stories a month to a magazine that paid the best in the business? Not Silverberg (and not Harlan EllisonTM, none of whose stories are in this volume, unfortunately).

But with fourteen stories, this book has enough room to be good and be bad, and thankfully the good makes the bad worth it. James Gunn turns in an almost prescient critique of a consumer economy gone mad (and how fortunate that I read this book at Christmastime, even if the story was set in the summer) in "Every Day is Christmas," with a suitably dark ending. I also enjoyed "Song of the Axe" by Don Berry: I didn't always get what had happened or why, but the details were intriguing enough that I didn't care; it's definitely the best fleshing out of an alien culture in this collection (where aliens are often just foils for Our Brave White Spacemen).

Robert Moore Williams's "I Want to Go Home" was maybe my favorite story in the collection: short and creepy, but seemingly universal. A great idea I wouldn't want to spoil one jot by explaining it. Alan E. Nourse's "The Gift of Numbers," about a criminal who transfers his mathematical abilities to someone else, was also a delightful and clever idea. And big kudos to Tom Godwin for writing "A Place Beyond the Stars" and Silverberg for including the story: a very cool idea from a guy who deserves to be remembered for something other than "The Cold Equations."

Jack Vance's "World of Origin" was one of the worst ideas for a murder mystery I ever read-- it basically tromps all over Asimov's rules for sf mysteries, and not to good effect. A guy tries to solve a crime based on what planets the suspects come from, applying what he knows of the planets' cultures (a Space Father Brown, maybe?), but it turns out that this is very easy because in the future, every planet will have one easily-defined characteristic that tells you exactly how its citizens murder people. (On Planet Sprocket, you can only murder a man when riding a bicycle. On Planet Academia, you can only murder someone if you publish a monograph on it. On Planet Cricket, you can only murder someone with a cricket bat used to win the Ashes. These aren't real examples... but they could be.)

"The Tool of Creation" by J. F. Bone is boring because it sets up a nonsensical sf problem (why are all the planets formed like this?) and then answers it via coincidence. I don't care about the problem or the solution. And can we call for a retroactive moratorium on all sf stories that involve "twist" endings? Except for the good ones, of course.

I found Silverberg's own two contributions ("Catch 'Em All Alive" and "The Loathsome Beasts") dull and flat, typical sf tropes played out uninterestingly, but his introduction is great, and he even provides individual introductions to each story/writer, an anthology practice that I always enjoy, and am disappointed we don't see more often. This is a well-planned packaging of some forgotten sf, and while the stories might not be a fun to read as they were to write, they're fun enough to pick up and look through at the least.… (more)