The Clewiston Test. Kate Wilhelm (Farrar Straus Giroux, $8.95). Millennium. Ben Bova (Random House, $7.95). Star Mother. Sydney J. Van Scyoc (Berkley Putnam, $6.95). Comet. Jane White (Harper, $7.95). Cloned Lives. Pamela Sargent (Fawcett Gold Medal, $1.50). Star Trek: The New Voyages. Eds. Sondra Marshak and Myrna Culbreath (Bantam, $1.75)

In the course of her writing career Kate Wilhelm has progressed from being a “story teller ” (her own phrase at a writer's conference once attended) to a “manager of words” – T. S. Eliot's phrase – through sheer intelligence and dogged hard work. Verbal lyricism remains either outside her repertoire or not to her taste; what she has done in The Clewiston Test as part of her continuing progress is to develop her “telling” into dramatic crosslighting. There are no less than sixty-four changes of point-of-view in the book (I may have missed some) and the crucial questions on which the book turns are questions organic to the crosslighting method: who is sane, who is honest, and whose perceptions are to be trusted. Test is a bare book, puzzling perhaps at first reading (it puzzled me) because of the solidity, simplicity and unusualness of the method, but eventually clear and often very powerful.

There is an eerie idea current in much popular criticism that a critic ought to judge only the “technique” of a novel and not its “content;” yet beyond the point of minimal competence technique is content. To judge science fiction by “technique” only is like judging buildings only by whether they remain standing or not; in these terms, I. M. Pei's NCAR building at Boulder and McDonald's golden arches are equally valuable. Literature is not only beautiful, like music and architecture; it is also referential, which means that literary criticism inevitably becomes referential also, and hence moral. As George Bernard Shaw once said of plays, mechanical rabbits are fun because they are ingenious, cheap, or resemble real rabbits; but real rabbits appeal to entirely different concerns and provoke entirely different questions. You don't, for example, praise a live rabbit for ingeniously looking like a live rabbit; you expect it to; after all, it is a live rabbit. In Shaw's metaphor the artificially constructed commercial work is the wind-up toy, the organic work of art the live animal. Science fiction, like all literature, is overrun by artificial rabbits…