The Best of Science Fiction 12

The astonishing prospect (as I write — half an election year before publication, remember) is that the worst might not happen. The flashes of light on several (new and old) horizons are just frequent enough to give an illusion, at leasts of predawn.

One streak of illumination was a collaboration between two astronomers making an excellent case for the existence of Intelligent Life in the Universe (Holden Day, 1966) — or at least on Earth. The book is knowledgeable, imaginative, literate, entertaining, instructive and also (doubly) opinionated. In the preface, Carl Sagan, of Harvard and the Smithsonian, says of his colleague I. S. Shklovskii, of the Sternberg Institute and Soviet Academy:

... Since he does not travel out of the Soviet Union and I have never traveled to the Soviet Union, we have been unable to discuss the present edition in person. "The probability of our meeting is unlikely to be smaller than the probability of a visit to the Earth by an Extra-terrestrial cosmonaut," he once wrote ... As the reader might expect ... there are occasional differences. I have not tried to avoid these problems ... I do not think the reader will be distressed by the occasional appearance of a dialogue.

What with Alliluyeva and Glassboro, too, the Soviet-American dialogue gets steadily more sociable, if not more sensible. Even the Orange (Yellow/Red) Menace looms less lurid in the light of popular dissatisfaction, dissent, and spasmodic riot and rebellion, in the provinces of China as in the cities of America. And then there was The Report from Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace (Dial, 1967).

1967 was a big year all around for reports and most of those not concerned with Vietnam or the Kennedy assassination seemed to concentrate on the year 2000 (perhaps the influence of RAND's 'Delphi' predictions; or the — again — imminent release of the Clarke-Kubrick film 2001?), including the extraordinary (February 1967) '2001+' issue of Architectural Design. Along with broad forecasts and detailed technical prospectuses, it reprinted a speech on 'The Year 2006' by Buckminster Fuller:

... In ten years from now we will have changed so completely that no one will say you have to demonstrate your right to live, that you have to earn a living ... It will be normal for a man to be successful ... Politics will become obsolete. ...

There will be a rediscovery of what Einstein described in 1930, in an article on the 'cosmic religious sense' ... We are going to have an increasing number of human beings as scientists and philosophers thinking about the total significance of human experience and ... of man's development. An era of extraordinary integrity might ensue.

The 'cosmic religious sense' and the integrity potential of man are the dominant themes of the most readably provocative theological s-f since A Canticle for Leibowitz — R. A. Lafferty's first novel, The Past Master (Ace, 1968). Here he offers a report on scientists and philosophers and the PTA and things.