The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 195

The Bookshelf sfand fantasy Sunday, August 8, 10S2 Philadelphia Inquirer 7 A bright garden of literary roses THE COMPASS ROSE Ursula K. Le Guin Harper Row. $14.95 I SPECIAL DELIVERANCE By Clifford D.Simak BallantineDel Rey. $12.50 A sensible, believable young English professor is delivered into another world, where he struggles with enigmas and falls in love. Prof.

Edward Lansing's adventures begin when a student's explanation for apparent plagiarism in a paper leads Lansing to a slot machine that not only produces term papers but fulfills other wishes. Soon Lansing finds his longing to escape the university suddenly and alarmingly realized. In a mysterious other world, the professor joins a group of equally perplexed time travelers who don't know where they are or what to do. The pilgrims, who include a didactic parson, a dreamy artist, a pensive engineer and a winning robot, face environmental and intellectual chal-; lenges. One by one, the pilgrims succumb to a fatal fascination with the strange phenomena of this new world: A singing tower, a door into an apple-blossom world of endless springtime, a complex machine matrix, a vision of chaos all act as snares to Lansing's companions.

It's up to Lansing and his engineer sweetheart to face the final challenges of this land. The story is full of surreal scenarios held together by the Iik-! able Lansing, whose perseverance wins him a place in a galactic society of the future. Rosemary Herbert' Reviewed by EdnaStumpf From science-fiction anthologies and the Kenyon Review and The New Yorker, or, more accurately, from outer space and the South Pole and the imaginary nation of Orsina, Ursula K. Le Guin gathers this collection. Her stories are aromatic and alive, like real roses.

The craftsmanship, however, is pure Faberge. The best writers reveal their personalities In their works. There are bits and pieces of Le Guin throughout these stories. In "The Pathways of Desire," in which two scientists decode the social mysteries of an alien planet and fall in love in the process, we perceive a strong and bravely unfashionable romanticism combined with a knowledge of how cultures are analyzed (Le Guin's Alfred Kroeber, is a prominent anthropologist). "The New Atlantis" and "The Diary of the Rose," which are about decent people living under indecent totalitarianism, display political liberalism and personal optimism.

"Schro-dinger's Cat" is playful, lampooning the mind that tries to trap reality in a box and the future in an equation. It is not as hilarious as "Intracom," however, which performs the seemingly impossible task of taking off on "Star Trek" and making a nice human statement about pregnancy at the same time. Most consistent are Le Guin's affection and perhaps need for fantasy. Her mind, complicated and academically trained, tends to make a sharp left when confronted with the tiresome fiats of the "reality" producers, those politicians, research assistants and scriptwriters who know all the rules well because they made money writing them. She is uninterested in the surface.

She goes for the depths, the subconscious, and she truly believes that the truth of the subconscious is the truth of the universe. It cannot always be expressed in terms of what goes on in bourgeois living rooms. We must go to outer space, at the very least, to begin to understand ourselves. Le Guin is a serious writer who communicates serious visions. She has a natural drive toward moralism but no desire to overpower, as her humor makes clear.

The clash of conviction and fun occasionally results in her only writer's fault, a tone close to coyness. Still, this is a small price to pay for a body of work that combines intelligence, moral fervor, imagination and the sweetest of literary tempers. Only Le Guin could express her feminism as gently as in "Sur," in which a party of South American matrons is revealed to have preceded Roald Amundsen in discovering the South Pole. They wanted the experienco, but they had no use for the glory: "We left no footprints, even." Edna Stumpf frequently reviews science fiction and fantasy for Books Leisure. COURTSHIP RITE Duuaiu kingsbuiy TimescapeSimon 460 pp.

$3.95 paper Courtship Rite is being comparcJ. This 460-page book has a packed, cross-referenced, vibrating quality marking it as the work of a master world-creator, a midnight-oil burner, a man who has asked and answered and gamed and planned until what he has actually written down is only the first level of what is implied. It may not be literature, but it sure as God made DNA isn't escape fiction. We have the exoticism we expect: temple prostitutes and assassins, festal dances and cosmetic body mutilations, biochemistry and secret rites that leave one breathless. Without being totally satisfying, this work is exhilarating, and in part demonstrates why science fiction readers have traditionally needed to join groups: to talk the stuff over.

Courtship Rite will be discussed by thousands. Edna Stumpf frequently reviews science fiction for The Inquirer. Robert Silverberg THE SCIENCE FICTIONAL DINOSAUR Robert Silverberg Charles G. Waugh and Martin Harry Greenberg, eds. Avon Books.

$2.25 paperback Prehistoric life is used here in wildly varied ways. In one story, Paul Ash has his protagonist confess: "I do not like pterodactyls. No doubt they have their good points. But as a result of personal and unfortunate experience, 1 have taken a dislike to them." This humorous account traces the adventures of a doctor somehow "displaced" into the Cretaceous Age. After saving a baby pterodactyl from starvation, the doctor finds himself saddled with a re-ponsibility he does not desire.

Robert Silverberg's story "Our Lady of the Sauropods" shows a woman stranded on a lonely island inhabited by dinosaurs created from ancient DNA. With its glossary, a classification of reptiles and a further reading list, this volume provides intriguing leisure reading. Rosemary Herbert SCIENCE FICTION A TO A Dictionary of the Great S. F. Themes Isaac Asimov Marvin H.

Greenberg and Charles G. Waugh, ed. Houghton Mifflin. Well, it's big. But it's no dictionary.

It is the most flabbily constructed anthology this side of a Montgomery Ward catalogue. Each story (illustrating xenobio-logy, women, zoos etc.) has a little introduction apparently geared to an orientation class of visiting Martians. "There are individual sports, like jogging, and-team sports, like basketball." Asimov explains with a straight face that "computer" is a good word to include in this dictionary of themes and "cement" is not! Anything to keep the word processor from cooling down. Concept is not content. Cord-, wainer Smith's brilliant idiosyncrasy in "The Game of Rat and Dragon" (included under and Bob Shaw's poignant characterization in "Skirmish on a Summer Morning" (under the heading "time confer value on any collection.

The best stories are already familiar and available, however, and there is a high percentage of that competent, likable, forgettable reading matter that is sfs everyday fare but not its cutting edge. An indispensable book? Only for those who travel heavy. EdnaStumpf Isaac Asimov LAUGHING SPACE Isaac Asimov and O. Jeppson, ed. Houghton Mifflin.

$17.95 This anthology of humor collected by Asimov and his wife proves that science fiction can be a rich medium for laughs. Besides stories, the book contains cartoons, poems and essays. It is ideal for reading on the bus and the subway and in that gap between the late news and bedtime. In "Silcnzia," Alan Nelson tells a tale of a man who is obsessed with a need for silence and who finds his panacea in a "sound wick," which absorbs unwanted noise in the way the familiar household wick soaks up odors. When the protagonist overuses the "sound wick" to turn down the volume on his wife, his boss and the world at large, he finds his access to the device is threatened.

Charles Beaumont and Chad Oliver offer a parody titled Claude," and Russell Baker provides a wry sense of perspective in his subtle essay "Spaced Out." Lighthearted and lively reading. Rosemary Herbert WIRED By Harry Hellerstein St. Martin's Press. $12.95 Welcome to the future. Drugs? Everywhere.

Crime? Rampant. Sex? Easy. It is a time when computers run just about everything and when the person who can run the computers can rule the world. And that is what Rita Spark has in mind, ruling the world with her computers, in this first novel Dy Harry Hellerstein, a federal public defender in San Francisco. As soon as she can compute her way into the presidency of the United States, it will all be over.

Only another computer genius can stop her. and, of course, we have one: Berkowitz and his portable computer. Magic. Berkowitz has dropped out of society and created the Pineapple Club, a computerized pleasure palace. He is content with staying high electronically until events force him, and manipulate him, into action.

On the way to the more-or-less-happy ending we meet a nihilistic rock group, Carcas, and visit newly rich Okan, where the inhabitants make human sacrifices. This is a tale of good versus evil but with a twist. If you are already paranoid about all-powerful computers, this look into the future will not set your mind at ease. Martin L.Perl Life in a world that lives by the 'survival quotient' THE DARK TOWER: ineounsnnger By Stephen King Donald Grant. $20 These five tales, which originally appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, follow the pursuit of the shape-shifting man in black by Roland the Gunslinger, through a world winding down toward collapse.

Present are the grim landscapes, short, sharp episodes of horrific violence, and driven characters we have come to expect in King. New is the disturbing metaphysical speculation thatends the book. Throughout are brilliant illustrations by Michael Whelan. Issued by Donald Grant, one of the most active of the several small publishers producing handsomely designed and illustrated limited hardbound editions of science fiction and fantasy, the stories introduce themes and characters that King, in an afterword, speculates might lead to a series of interrelated works totaling several thousand pages. Richard E.

Nicholls Reviewed by EdnaStumpf The planet Geta. The human race, long divorced from earthly origins, is involved here in a a hard-knock life: a climatically difficult environment, few minerals, no animal protein, the majority of vegetation "profane" or poison-ridden. The humans have responded to hardship with tradition: a harsh religion, the development of pan-geographic clans with specific duties, the rigid designation of kalothi survival quotient. If famine comes, when it comes, the culling begins. First the criminals already stigmatized by missing noses are killed and eaten.

Then the genetic inferiors, those low in kalothi, commit ritual suicide. In the Kaiel clan, babies who do not meet the rigorous "creche testing" are butchered; the Kaiel live well. Human flesh is a staple of diet, consumed with a ceremony commensurate to the status of the donor. All this is pretty interesting (or shocking), and none of it is gratuitous. The folkways of Geta are demanding to inhabitant and reader alike, and highly reminiscent of Frank Herbert's Dune, to which.