The Best of Science Fiction 12

There is no cohesive or directional 'movement' in American s-f comparable to the British happening. The 'category' field is bigger, more lucrative, and more prestigious than anyone could have imagined a decade ago, but the bolder young writers are little drawn to it; and there is a growing Inner Establishment which clearly feels, 'What was new enough for Daddy is new enough for you.'

Some fine work has appeared in American magazines and 'category' s-f books recently under unfamiliar by-lines: but the best of it is usually from practiced hands drifting in from other fields (Harvey Jacobs,Gilbert Thomas, Virginia Kidd, etc.) or from the new British names (not represented here: David Redd, Keith Roberts, Josephine Saxton). And even this work tends to be strongly traditional in flavor, and conventional in subject matter and technique.

It is too easy to lay the blame at the door of editorial stodginess, or mass-market commercialism. Harlan Ellison, self-appointed prophet of the 'New Thing' in American s-f, spent two years energetically soliciting material for a much-publicised 'no-taboo' anthology of original stories (Dangerous Visions, Daubleday, 1967), and wound up with 33 fair-to-first-rate selections — of which half a dozen might have had some difficulty selling to the American s-f magazines.

The last notable influx of radical new talent, between 1960 and 1963, included Norman Spinrad, Roger Zelazny, Piers Anthony, Jonathan Brand and David Bunch, as well as Lafferty, Delany, Dorman, and Disch. I think it is significant, and probably a Good Thing, that very few of these new people (or the even newer ones, like John Sladek, Joanna Russ, James Sallis) limit themselves, as an earlier generation largely did, to one area of expression: they are painters, sculptors, musicians, dancers, actors, poets, playwrights, critics, scenarists, as well as fiction writers — mirroring the painters, poets, musicians, etc., on the 'outside' who are adopting so much of the idiom of science fiction.

Both Sonya Dorman and Tom Disch, as it happens, started out with an interest in the dance, then turned to poetry, and then to s-f. Mrs. Dorman is still better known for her poetry than for her rare (and I use the word with care) fiction. Disch's poetry has just begun to be noticed by his first novel, The Genocides (1965), stirred up a storm of controversy, and his next (Camp Concentration, serialised in New Worlds and forthcoming from Doubleday) is likely to renew it, violently, (Doubleday is also publishing a 'black humour' novel by Disch and Sladek: Black Alice.)