Reviews

Universe 6 by Terry Carr

sjstuart's review

3.0

As sci fi anthologies go, this one is not particularly good. Maybe that can be blamed on the time period, as much as the stories themselves. Many of these stories were award candidates, but they date from the mid-1970s, and are as dated as everything else from that decade. It's hard to take seriously any futuristic prognostications taking place among dial telephones and characters who call police "the pigs". I can't help but picture them wearing bell bottoms and Tom Selleck mustaches. Apparently progress in the future comes not so much from technology as from mystical topics such as dream interpretation and frequencies of vibration that control our behavior. Sexual trends are also extrapolated forward, so there's lots of casual, open sex. Even crystals are capable of sex in the future. Many of the stories go a bit overboard in their experimental structure, as well. There are sadistic ravings of an insane disembodied brain, a completely impenetrable record of an apparent schizophrenic's perceptions of mind control, and an inexplicable alternate history (told via dry history books) of a Civil War in which not only had motorized flight been invented 60 years early, but Plains Indians were flying the planes.