Eros In Orbit: A Collection of All New Science Fiction Stories About Sex. Ed. Joseph Elder (Trident Press, $6.95). Strange Bedfellows: Sex and Science Fiction. Ed. Thomas N. Scortia (Random House, $5.95). The Iron Dream. Norman Spinrad (Avon, $.95). The Listeners. James Gunn (Scribners, $6.95). Dying Inside. Robert Silverberg (Scribners, $6.95)

The topic of sex seems to bring out the worst in a lot of us: embarrassment, 1930s obviousness, and the assumption that just mentioning love-making is somehow funny. Joseph Elder's introduction to Eros In Orbit contains such phrases as “the pleasures of the flesh,” “carnal love,” “the age-old itch,” and the question “Where will it all end?” which only occurs to nervous Americans when they don't know where a lot of other societies have already been. Thomas Scortia is also seized with editorial coyness; he perpetrates “hypermammiferous females” and “raunchy writers … like naughty schoolboys.” These are symptoms of embarrassment, i.e. the assimilation of novelty.

Both anthologies range from the fine to the awful. (By the way, it's good to see publishing houses like Trident, Random House, and Scribners getting into science fiction.) Anthologies “about” this or that theme are bound to be uneven, especially in science fiction where the “topic” is only ostensible – e.g. Philip Jose Farmer's “The Lovers” is really a story of alien mimicry like Avram Davidson's “Or All the Seas with Oysters,” and Theodore Sturgeon's “The World Well Lost” (which is reprinted in Strange Bedfellows) is not about homosexuality per se, but about the effects of enforced secrecy on the human soul. If the anthologies are uneven I suspect the topic is at fault; sex is both endlessly interesting and very hard to write about. Either writers succumb to social taboos and write hartyhars or they break the taboos and are so dazzled by the mere fact of having done so that they manage to express only the most obvious science fiction ideas. Most of the stories in both books don't get beyond the idea of mechanical substitutes for sex – gadgets or android partners or recordings. There is practically no group sex, no promiscuity rendered genuinely and from the inside, and (except for the Sturgeon reprint) no homosexuality.