The Sword Swallower. Ron Goulart (Doubleday, $4.50). The Phoenix and the Mirror. Avram Davidson (Doubleday, $4.95). Small Changes. Hal Clement (Doubleday, $4.95). The Best SF Stories from New Worlds #2. Poul Anderson (Berkley, 60¢). 7 Conquests. Poul Anderson (Macmillan, $4.95)

Southern California wackiness consists not only of odd-ball phenomena but also in the attitude you take toward them; more than matter-of-factness or casual acceptance, it's simply the lack of realization that anything odd is going on. Ron Goulart is the only science fiction writer I know about who writes from this point of view – in fact, he hardly seems to write from any other – and The Sword Swallower is a running fire of dead-pan jokes of this peculiarly Forest Lawn kind. (The back jacket says Mr. Goulart spent his first twenty years in Berkeley, so maybe it's just California.) The tone of the novel resembles that of Mr. Goulart's Max Kearny stories and the plot (to speak heavy-handedly of what doesn't, after all, matter much in a comedy like this) sprawls and straggles over a planet-wide cemetery which is complete with ten-story neon wreaths, The Eternal Sleep Coffee Shop, etc. Through this world of mad monologists travels a tired, realistic, decent, unsurprisable government agent who has been hybridized with Plastic Man. It is a world of flower children, leftists, rightists, retired Wing Commanders, geriatric hotelees, incompetent girl spies, protest singers, tomb-robbers and other all-too-credibles. A shorter version of the novel was first published in this magazine in 1967; it was funny then and is funny now, although it spirals out of control once in a while and the constant whimsy tends to dematerialize not only the action (which hardly matters) but also the characters and situations. Like mad Ophelia, the book turns all to favor and to prettiness. Sometimes the essential innocence of the characters is refreshing, but sometimes Mr. Goulart looks like a man who has wandered observantly through Gehenna and decided it would make a great place for a wienie stand. The self-righteous and vicious young, the callous old, middleaged liberals with massive guilt complexes, ineffectual innocents, rigidified right wingers – if this were a serious book, the hero would have killed himself on the last page, only the reader would have anticipated him.