The Best of Science Fiction 12

Take a word, a multiplex word: science-fiction.

In Popland, it's camp comics; for Sontag, horror films; UFO people claim it as kissing kin; news-media editorialists equate it generally with disquieting technological prediction. On TV it's space-geared Western or Tropic Isle adventure — or Spy Thrillers with aliens, robots or a mad scientist as The Enemy. Paperback buyers grab up two books a week of the TV type, and probably half again as much E. R. Burroughs-derived 'sword and sorcery' and 'Heroic fantasy'. Some paperbacks, and a few hardcovers, have made it into the 'underground' (campus and hippie trade), a very mixed bag where the Hobbits and Ubu rub elbows with Witzend, Nova Express, and Stranger in a Strange Land — and with two-dollar soft-covers of Hawthorne, Lovecraft, and Mary Shelley for the Lit Profs who have decided (with the help of H. Bruce Franklin's Future Perfect, Oxford, 1966) that science fiction is really Neo-Victorian-Gothic.

For some faithful 50,000 fans, science fiction is (inclusively and almost exclusively) any thing published in the speciality magazines — where in fact there is rarely more than one story per issue (if that) which meets the requirements of that esoteric modern form, science fiction. For within the wide spread of contemporary 'nonrealstic' prose, there does remain a discrete discipline — 'hard-core science fiction' — with specialised, and rather demanding, parameters. It is no easier to define now than it was in the days of its glory, but it is readily recognisable — and dearly beloved — by those who, like myself, have identified most of their adult intellectual lives with it. Vide: 'Light of Other Days'.

It is not so easy to classify 'Beyond the Weeds'. Like Shaw, Peter Tate is a newspaperman: sub-editor of the Echo in South Wales (also not-quite-British?). Both men are in their thirties. Tate perhaps five years the younger. But where Shaw — in style, content, publishing history — is typical of the best of the first generation of British s-f writers, Tate is almost the prototype of the young New Worlds writer: five of his first seven stories were in NW in 1966-67; but more to the point was his reply to my selection of 'The PostMortem People' (form NW) — this retitled and extensively rewritten version of a story already two years old, and hardly satisfactory, to a growing writer. His first novel, The Thinking Seat, will be published by Doubleday in 1968.