Second paragraph of third story (“And isles where good men lie…”):
Still spitting noisily, Fortune pushed himself up and walked heavily to the window. Half a million miles beyond the orbit of the Moon the ship made a minute course correction….
I never met Bob Shaw, who died aged 64 in 1996, but I am aware of him as Northern Ireland’s leading science fiction writer of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, along with James White, and he apparently had a great line in humorous convention speeches (for which he won the Hugo Award for Best Fan Writer in 1979 and 1980). I have fond memories of his A Wreath of Stars, but rather bounced off both Orbitsville and The Ragged Astronauts when I tried them a few years ago.
Tomorrow Lies in Ambush is a collection of some of his short stories originally published between 1966 and 1971. The most republished of these is “The Happiest Day of Your Life”, a very short piece about a future where children receive all of their education in a single day. That could have been really poor if played for laughs, but it actually comes out very powerfully, reflecting wistfully on the importance of childhood as a part of the human experience.
Most of the stories are solid engineering sf of the type you would expect from Shaw, who was an aeronautical engineer by profession. A couple feature one of his other trademark tropes, a poisonously bad marriage between the leading characters, presumably based on a situation he had closely observed in person. It’s not ground-breaking, but it’s not bad either.
The reason I got the book, however, was to read “The Cosmic Cocktail Party”, a 1970 story involving the personalities of people who have died being preserved in a computer storage called a matrix, in which one particularly strong individual has created a colonial hunting fantasy which the other minds in the matrix are compelled to acknowledge and participate in; part of the technobabble around this involves artrons.
Doctor Who fans will immediately recognise elements of the bedrock of one of the greatest Who stories, The Deadly Assassin. To put icing on the cake, the concealed villain of the longest of the stories in the book, “The Pilot Plant”, appears to be an AI called Xoanon (though it turns out to be humanoid rather than robotic). This is also the name of the mad computer in The Face of Evil, the story after The Deadly Assassin. Going back to “The Cosmic Cocktail Party”, it also features a very minor character called Uvarov, which is not a million miles from Uvanov, the captain in The Robots of Death (the story after The Face of Evil).
Credit for pointing this out belongs entirely to Shakespeare scholar Martin Wiggins, who included it in the information in the Season 14 Blu-Ray commentary and kindly answered my questions. He has not published the link between Bob Shaw and Doctor Who anywhere else, so let the acknowledgement of his discovery now begin.
You can get Tomorrow Lies in Ambush here.
