Star of Stars

FREDERIK POHL Introduction

In 1953 the first volume of Star Science Fiction Stories ap­peared. It was a curious, hybrid publishing format, not quite a magazine and yet not very like the ordinary vari­eties of book. Its plan was simply to find enough of the best science fiction stories that could be had and to print them; and the one editorial rule established was that they must never have been published before.

It is only rules of that sort—mechanical rules, rules which admit of a simple yes-no answer—that can rigor­ously be applied in the selection of science fiction stories. Every other rule begins with a numerous class of exceptions. Science fiction is not stories about the future. Or about space. Or about technology. It is all of these things, and more than them. Science fiction lies in the eye of the beholder. In fact, said the introduction to that first volume of Star, it is a limitless field, as spacious as space itself. Publisher, critic, and a good many readers have a tendency to think of science fiction as one of the "categories" of publishing, in the specific sense of the term, like detective stories and Westerns. But unless you can think of The Big Sky as a Western or Hamlet as a whodunit, you can hardly class in a tight little group so widely variant an assortment of stories as justly fit under the common label of science fiction.

Was that a fair estimate of the situation? Well, let's look at the record.

Since then there have been eight volumes of one sort or another in the Star series. The aggregate is seventy-five stories, amounting to some half-million words. They have among them carried us to nearly all the planets of the solar system, including our own earth (both surface and in­terior) and its moon; we have circled many foreign stars and wandered in the space between them. In time we have seen both past and future—including a past that never really was (see Bester's "Disappearing Act") and futures that, heaven grant, will never be at all. (See the assorted waspish predictions of Kornbluth, Matheson, and Bloch.) Earth itself was invaded many times, for many reasons; half a dozen times civilization was destroyed. (And half_, a dozen more times it should have been. Surely such surviving cultures as those of Kornbluth and Matheson, for two, are really better off dead.)

But these themes, situations, and events are no more than the pegs on which Star's fifty-six contributors hung their imaginings. Science fiction can be, when it chooses, a literature of ideas. If Star proved anything in seven years, surely it proved that there are ideas which can be explored in no other way.

The stories included in this volume can speak for themselves, but perhaps we can spare a word for some which, for one reason or another, had to be left out. The only volume in the series not represented is Star Short Novels, and that because, though each of its three stories —by Lester del Ray, Jessamyn West and Theodore Sturgeon—was a memorable work, any one of them would by sheer mass have squeezed out three or four others. It seemed a necessary rule that the very longest stories simply could not be made to fit.

The other ground rule observed in constructing the present volume was that, given a choice, the story less frequently reprinted would get the nod. On that sharp edge of decision were lost such ornaments as the Brad­burys, the Asimovs, the Sheckleys, and a dozen others. A few stories simply would not allow themselves to be left out for any reason at all, and so Leiber's tale is here in spite of its having appeared in a previous collection, Clarke's despite its having formed the basis of his full-dress novel of the same name, and so on. But the number is quite few. Of the fourteen stories herein, only four have appeared anywhere in this country except for their first use in Star itself.

It seems at this point more than likely that there will be no future issues of Star. It would not be fitting to see it end without some words of thanks. I acknowledge deep gratitude, then, to the writers who gave it fine stories, to the critics who treated all of its incarnations most kindly and, most of all, to Ian Ballantine, least remote of publishers, who conceived the plan of the series in the first place and, with endless patience, saw its editor through eight ill-kept deadlines.

Red Bank, New Jersey February, 1960