James Nicoll Reviews

Edgar Pangborn’s A Mirror For Observers is an International-Fantasy-Award-winning stand-alone science fiction novel.

Thirty millennia ago, the Salvayans — or Martians, as humans would call them — emigrated from dying Mars to Earth. Since then, the Martians have kept their existence secret from humanity. The Martians observe. Rarely, they intervene.

Most Martians hope humans will one day be ethically mature. A handful of dissenters, the Abdicators, believe humans are inherently flawed, and the sooner humans wipe themselves out, the better.

Angelo Pontevecchio becomes the focus of Martian struggle.

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Edgar Pangborn’s 1972 Good Neighbors and Other Strangers is a collection of speculative fiction stories¹.

Recently SF fans were thrilled to learn that, after a delay of more than half a century, Harlan Ellison’s The Last Dangerous Visions was finally being published. This news was of particular interest to Edgar Pangborn aficionados. Would Pangborn’s heretofore unpublished ​“The Life and the Clay,” one of many stories that Harlan Ellison had sat on for decades, finally see print?

No.

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This demonstrates a pitfall the preferred length of modern SF generally skirts. I began intended just to reread Edgar Pangborn’s post-holocaust Bildungsroman Davy but because I was also planning to reread Canticle for Leibowitz, which covers centuries to Davy​’s decades I then began to ponder if it would be better to reread all the stories Pangborn wrote in that setting so I would be comparing similar spans of time or at least half a millennium to 1800 years. After all, both The Company of Glory and The Judgment of Eve are short and the collection Still I Persist in Wondering is under 300 pages. Of course, it all added up to something as long as The Past Through Tomorrow or Adventures in Time and Space. I am sure there is a lesson here somewhere and equally sure that I didn’t learn it.

Although he is comparatively obscure now, in the 1950s Pangborn won an International Fantasy Award for his A Mirror for Observers, a Hugo nomination for Davy (which lost to Leiber’s execrable The Wanderer ; what the hell, SF fandom?), and Nebula nominations for ​“A Better Mousehole” and ​“Mount Charity”. A fair fraction of his work was set the Darkening World, in a world where thanks to resource depletion, overpopulation, light nuclear war, and a host of almost certainly engineered plagues, civilization collapsed, leaving in its wake a small and infertile population of people to survive as best they can.

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