The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

Anyone who does not know by now that Arthur C. Clarke and Stanley Kubrick are collaborating on a novel and movie to be called 2001: A Space Odyssey (and completed well before that date, one assumes) has not been reading his London Sunday Times Magazine— or his New York Sunday Times Magazine, or Life, or these Annuals— or probably much of anything else. The news has grown from a trickle to a flood over the past year; it is even barely possible that the novel, at least, will be published before this book.

Well, we assume it is worth waiting for: Kubrick-and-Clarke can’t be all bad. In fact, things seem to be picking up in s-f movies, I have not seen The 10th Victim, but if the film compares to Sheckley’s “novelization” (of the movie made from his own story), it is good nervous fun. I have seen a preview of Ed Emshwiller’s Relativity, which has nothing (well, almost nothing) to do with Einstein, and everything to do with S (for society, sex, sanity, science, speculation, surrealism, symbolism) F (for fantasy, fact, feelings, fluidity, and first-rate fotografy).

The situation in television is, perhaps, faintly promising. As I write, the offerings are primarily fantasy: I Dream of Jeannie, Stuart Little. Batman is not exactly fantasy—maybe the good old invidious term, “pseudoscience”? But ABC has announced a show called Time Tunnel, and is considering another. The Invaders, both of which are supposed to be bona-fide science fiction. Meantime from England comes word of a BBC-2 series initiated last fall under Producer Irene Shubik, which has done some acceptable, if not exciting, dramatizations of stories by such people as Asimov, Brunner, Pohl, Tenn, and Wyndham. And the late news is that Rattray Taylor, who has been responsible for some first-rate features and documentaries, will produce The World of J. G. Ballard.

On stage, of course, symbolism is the thing. Albee and Pinter and the New York production of Marat/Sade all veer continually into fantasy—but not often over the (shifting and frequently invisible) line into s-f. Closer to home were Durrenmatt’s The Physicists (now in print here, from Grove Press) and Loring Mandel’s Project Immortality, which saw only a two-week experimental production at Washington’s Arena Theatre in 1965, but will, hopefully, be more widely known by the time this is published.

And then of course there is Ubu Roi, by that spectacular scatologist, surrealist, speculative philosopher, and pataphysical scientist Alfred Jarry. Ubu is in.

Less well known is the “neo-scientific novel” Exploits and Opinions of Doctor Faustroll, ‘Pataphysician, written a full seventy years ago and first published posthumously (in France) in 1911, now in print in English for the first time.

To call Faustroll a novel is rather like referring to a Mariner space probe as a flying machine. The term is applicable, but a great deal less than adequate. Faustroll is a novel, and a rather old-fashioned one, as far as plot is concerned: The learned doctor, dunned for debts, escapes prison by luring the drink-loving bailiff, Panmuphle, into a Marvelous Invention (a copper-mesh skiff—perhaps the first amphibious vessel), in which, with the added company of the doctor’s friend (or familiar), the talking baboon Bosse-de-Nage, a Wonderful Voyage is conducted. After many strange adventures and exotic sights, including a holocaust in which Bosse-de-Nage dies (“provisionally”), the sieve-boat founders, and Panmuphle, the narrator up to this point, disappears (presumably, unprovisionally, dead). Faustroll takes up the (prophetically posthumous?) narrative in the last section (Book VIII, subtitled, Ethernity), from which the first two chapters are reprinted below.

(In the Selected Works, editors Ralph Shattuck and Simon Watson Taylor, supply footnotes and introductory explanations which I shall not include here, beyond commenting that the cosmological, physical, and metaphysical arguments advanced are in specific reply/parody to/of several essays and addresses of Lord Kelvin, then recently published; that the names mentioned are those of scientists of the time, mentioned in Kelvin’s works; and that “the measuring rod, the watch, the tuning fork, the luminiferous ether, the rotating flywheels and linked gyrostats,” as well as the Scottish shoemaker’s wax, the squares, pyramids, screws, and paddles, plus the reference to the sun as a “cool solid,” and the final reference to an optics phenomenon known as “Haidinger’s Brushes” are all lifted straight from Kelvin.)