The Best of Science Fiction 12

Take a word, any word. Multiply and prefix it: inter-, multi-, even trans-. They all work: they're with-it because with is with-it. (Like: a molecular biopsychologist in a linguistics seminar is interdisciplinary; a cinemaphotographer projecting abstract paintings on live dancer/actors moving between sculpture/structures to electronic music — that's multimedia.) The last two SF Annuals went international, inter-enclave, and inter-(inner/outer)-space. With no facilities, as yet, to wire-in a light show or even bind-in a Blow-up Pop-out balloon, this time it's inter-ennial. Dropping 'The Year's Best' from the title, I no longer have to wait for someone else to reprint first (as with Jarry and Borges in the 11th) to include the material freshly surfacing from avant-garde and enclave obscurity. (I missed 'Gogol's Wife' in its first English-language publication — Encounter, 1960 — and in the 1963 New Directions collection, and found it just last year — thanks to Playboy's A. C. Spectorsky, and J. G. Ballard. I do not know when it was first published in Italy.) The road to and from Rome/ London/ Los Angeles/ New York grows shorter by the day, and that vital word, multimedia, is at its popping-oppest in the free-form Anymarn's Land where 'underground' films meet 'plastic' sculpture. As the author of the closest thing to a movie novelisation ('Snow White', not quite based on the Disney film) ever published in The New Yorker (an insular periodical which regards Rome as an exurb of New York, and Hollywood as its shopping centre), Donald Barthelme is a fully credited connoisseur of Art/Show/Biz.