What Happened to Emily Goode After the Great Exhibition. Raylyn Moore (Donning [Scarblaze] (Norfolk, Va., 1978, $4.95). Rime Isle. Fritz Leiber (Whispers Press, Chapel Hill, N.C., 1977, $10.00). The Year's Finest Fantasy. Ed. Terry Carr (Berkley Putnam, New York, 1978). Lord Foul's Bane. Stephen Donaldson (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1977, Ballantine, 1978, paper, $2.50). The Grey Mane of Morning. Joy Chant (George Allen & Unwin, London, 1977)

Emily Goode is an archetypal female fantasy – Victorian lady in twentiethcentury America – whose appeal (I suspect) is the chance it offers for moral cheating; one can have the thrill of being daringly improper (in nineteenth-century terms) while remaining extremely ladylike and staid (in twentiethcentury ones). To send her heroine across the modern United States, Moore resorts to what Damon Knight once called an idiot plot (i.e. one that works only because everyone involved in it is an idiot). Emily, supposedly so respectable that she can't mention sex to a suitor, even by euphemism (and she's a widow of thirty, not a maiden of twenty), nonetheless runs from authority, not to it, the moment she finds herself in trouble, a piece of plotting that not only detracts from her reality as a character but also insures that the novel will be an adventure story, and (therefore) that there will be no real confrontation between the values of the two eras – the only possible point in a story with a time-displaced protagonist. Either the nineteenth century can win and the heroine reject our time, or we can win and she can accept the modern world, or (the most interesting possibility, dramatically) she can outdo the twentieth century. Moore chooses the first and dullest alternative; near the end of the book the heroine denounces modern life, and the psychiatrist she's seeing is impressed and agrees with her. That is, the era of child labor, Jim Crow, robber barons, rampant prostitution, and virtual female slavery in marriage feebly condemns the nineteen-seventies for smog, inflation, tasteless food, television pictures of the moon, unisex clothing, and “wars fought without reason and without honor.”