LESTER del REY, Editor – Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Second Annual Edition. E. P. Dutton, hardcover. 1973. Ace, paperback, December 1975.

   #11. PHYLLIS MACLELLAN “Thus Love Betrays Us.” Short story. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, September 1972. Reprinted in The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: 20th Series, edited by Edward L. Ferman (Doubleday, hardcover, 1973).

   I have been remiss. It’s been over a month since I reviewed the previous story in this anthology. At this rate, when I’m done, an event that is still four stories off, neither you not I (and especially I) will have any way to look back and put the book into any kind of overall perspective.

   But I can say this now. I admire Lester del Rey’s willingness to pick stories by authors who were not very well known then and even more so now. Phyllis Maclellan’s SF writing résumé consists of seven short stories and one novel, Turned Loose on Irdra (Doubleday, hardcover, 1970), which seems to escaped the notice of almost everyone.

   But even so, “Thus Love Betrays Us” is a good one, and is well worth being chosen for this Best of the Year anthology. When biologist Alex Barthold is dropped off by an exploratory ship on the planet Deirdre to learn what he can about it as a one man expedition, what he does not know is that the ship will never return. Until superiors realize that something has gone wrong, he will be as alone as he can be.

   This on a planet on which there is no day or night, only an ever present gloom on a place in which the only plant life is various forms of moss. He sends reports out, but replies never come back. He’s all alone on a world that seems to close in on him more and more every day.

   Until, that is, he comes across a strange truly alien being whose life he happens to save. They become friends, he thinks, but aliens are aliens, and friendship may or may not be friendship in the sense that Barthold assumes to be reciprocal. This, in the end, is the point of the story, most literately told. No Planet Stories tale, this.

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Previously from the del Rey anthology: C. N. GLOECKNER “Miscount.”