Pandora's Planet. Christopher Anvil (Doubleday, $5.95). The Light That Never Was. Lloyd Biggle (Doubleday, $4.95). Midsummer Century. James Blish (Doubleday, $4.95). Beyond Apollo. Barry Malzberg (Random House, $5.95). What Entropy Means To Me. George Alec Effinger (Doubleday, $4.95)

Outsiders mean bad and stupid things when they say “science fiction,” but sometimes the bad and stupid things are unfortunately accurate. In the 1930s even the most simple-minded tale written for bright, white, male, conventional fourteen-year-olds had some shock and novelty value (because of its context), but the same thing written and published in the 1970s is another kettle of Venusian fishoids. (Some day s.f. writers will stop tacking “oid” onto nouns. We may even stop having our characters drink coffee under other names like Anne McCaffrey's “klah.”)

Pandora's Planet by Christopher Anvil turns on one naive joke: that we are smarter than the aliens who invade us. Human chauvinism seems fairly harmless – after all, how many giant ants have been demonstrating for civil rights lately? – but Pandora does not really include all humans. If “America” is geography and “Amerika” the radical-left nightmare, then Pandora is pure Amurrica – women, children, non-whites, non-Americans, homosexuals, the poor, even the genuinely religious, need not apply. Even the invading aliens (to judge from the book's detail) are white, male, American, middle-class, and middle-aged. A fan writer recently characterized one type of s.f. fan as The Galactic Square. Pandora's Planet is written for The Galactic Square. If we lived in a sensuous, emotional, erotically permissive, egalitarian, heterogeneous, more-or-less matriarchy, Mr. Anvil's novel would be a stunning piece of speculation. I've been kind to routine s.f. in the past, but Pandora doesn't have the energy or luridness that can make s.f. stereotypes minimally interesting. The central joke isn't even new; a fine story written in the 1950s from the viewpoint of a human con-man ends with the aliens being sold the Brooklyn Bridge. And then one has to put up with Pandora 's conviction that intelligence means only technical or military ingenuity, with emphasis on the latter (Einstein would not be at home here), that all humans have IQs of 130 or above, that a deus ex machina is a good way to end a dramatic conflict (the book has two of them), and that Communism and Fascism are silly-simple decals.