The Best of Science Fiction 12

'Frenchy Steiner' was Hilary Bailey's first U.S. publication (reprinted in The Saint, 1966, from The Best of New Worlds); her most recent was 'Dr. Gelabius' in England Swings SF. In private life, Miss Bailey is Mrs. Michael Moorcock, wife of the editor of New Worlds — but life for the Moorcocks is seldom private, with Britain's controversial new 'magazine of speculative fiction' doing most of its growing in the middle of their living-room floor.

Bob Shaw is not-quite-British: a North Irish journalist — columnist and science correspondent for The Belfast Telegraph — and author of perhaps a dozen short stories and one novel, Night Walk (Banner, 1966). Although his first fiction sale in 1953 was to the New York Post, he was almost unknown in the U.S. until 'Light of Other Days' appeared in Analog, and was promptly selected for inclusion in both The World's Best Science Fiction: 1967 (Ace) and Nebula Award Stories Two (Doubleday) — as well as being a (very close) runner-up for both the Hugo and Nebula awards in 1966.

One extraordinary thing about the story is that it is actually science fiction. Time-travel, long a favourite device (with or without magical or scientifabulous vehicles) for both classical and contemporary fabulators, philosophers, and science fiction writers, has lately gone the way of the Bug-eyed Monster: out of print onto the screen. But the topic of Time itself — its phenomenology, properties, effects, metaphysics — is as hot in the laboratories and academies as it is pervasive in new speculative fiction. (Especially in Britain: Fred Hoyle's October the First Is Too Late; Aldiss' 'Man in His Time' and Cryptozoic; almost anything by Ballard or Langdon Jones. In America, one thinks primarily of Dick, Leiber, and Delany.) 'Light of Other Days' incorporates a plausible, intriguing, and new idea about the physics of light in relation to Time.