The Ship Who Sang. Anne McCaffrey (Walker, $4.95). Satan's World. Poul Anderson (Doubleday, $4.95). Report on Probability A. Brian W. Aldiss (Doubleday, $4.50). I Sing the Body Electric. Ray Bradbury (Knopf, $6.95)

Professionally speaking, Anne McCaffrey is just a pup, as those who wish to read The Ship Who Sang can verify for themselves. As late as 19661 Miss McCaffrey was indulging in plenty of slipper-worryings, barkings-atnothing, and enthusiastic fallings-over-own feet. For me one of the pleasures of reading Ship is watching it progress from some rather awful gaucheries through the middling treatment of middling ideas to the two final sections in which the author at last begins to dramatize scenes with ease and some polish. But readers are not critics and may not find the eager awkwardness of the beginning as appealing as I do. It tickled me, for example, to hear a character remark gravely, “Such an A Caruso would have given the rest of his notes to sing,” or to find that the heroine's first mission (she is a cyborg built into a spaceship) is to rush a vaccine to “a distant system plagued with a virulent spore disease,” while her second leads to a tangle with “a minor but vicious narcotic ring in the Lesser Magellanics.” Miss McCaffrey is infested with gremlins. My favorite in the whole book is the statement (on page 56) that “A second enormous stride forward in propagating the race of man occurred when a male sperm was scientifically united with female ova,” a pronouncement that blends the impossible with the ineffable. It's true that these whoppers do not occur in the last third of the novel, but all the same, somebody (God, the author, Walker, the author's children) should have rewritten the first three episodes so that all the parts might be equally readable – and equally sensible.

For example, we are told that Helva, the heroine, is born deformed but that she spends her first three months enjoying “the usual routine of the infant.” Anyone not internally deformed would be better off with prosthetics than with Helva's all-enveloping metal “shell”; moreover, Miss McCaffrey later insists that shell-people do not sleep, which is impossible, and that her heroine has “no pain reflexes” – by itself a better reason for shell-life than lack of limbs.