Pavane. Keith Roberts (Doubleday, $4.95). The Age of the Pussyfoot. Frederik Pohl (Trident, $4.95). The Santaroga Barrier (Berkley, 75¢). Transplant. Margaret Jones (Stein and Day, $5.95). Omar.Wilfrid Blunt (Doubleday, $3.95)

Unlike the little girl with the curl, science fiction is usually neither very, very good nor very, very horrid. Moreover, as it has in other fields, the vocabulary of praise has become so overblown that a simple “good” means, more often than not, “don't bother,” while “brilliant – magnificent – unequalled” means only that the book in question won't kill you.

A good book from Doubleday is Pavane by Keith Roberts, about whom a reader ought to know more than is provided on the dust jacket. Keith Roberts is an Englishman and was associate editor with Science Fantasy, but what Doubleday does not mention – and what I do not therefore know – is whether Pavane is Mr. Roberts' first book or not. There are weaknesses and limitations in the book that mean little if the writer is simply inexperienced but a good deal more if he's not; and there is a fine imagination that would be a respectable achievement for an experienced writer, but is a much greater promise for a beginner.

Pavane is an alternate-universe book: in 1588 Queen Elizabeth I was assassinated; therefore Spain conquered England, Protestantism was destroyed in Northern Europe, and Europe and the New World remained under the control of a repressive Church. Mr. Roberts does not make the mistake of confounding the sixteenth century with the twelfth, or of seeing a slowly developing society as static; one of the best ideas in the book is that technological progress, although slowed down, has not disappeared. Twentieth-century England has steam locomotives (eighty horsepower), a middle class, the typewriter (a rare luxury), Zeiss binoculars, primitive radio, and a social system that is not just an excuse for romance, sadism, or adventurous nonsense. The author's feeling for historical period is impressive, perhaps not in every technological detail (internal combustion, yes; nylons, no) but certainly in his unshakable assumption that leather clothes and porridge do not an idiot make, and in the extraordinary, halfexpressed melancholy of a society that became static after the Renaissance. It is a kind of Paradise Lost.