The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

The surprise best seller of 1965 was Eric Berne’s Games People Play. Of course, “game-playing” as a psychological model is anything but new. “Role-playing” has been a basic psychiatric concept for many years, and Stephen Potter has played “Gamesmanship” into an enviable income for what seems almost as long.

What is comparatively new is the application of the mathematical Theory of Games to interpersonal behavior, in an effort to achieve a greater rigor and clarity in analysis and description. Last year’s Annual quoted some applications of the idea from an article by Timothy Leary in the book, LSD (Putnam, 1964), which were rather more sophisticated and far-reaching than anything offered by Dr. Berne. What Berne does provide Is a series of plot outlines of some of the most common and destructive behavior games, with catchy, colloquial titles (Kick Me, Let’s You and Him Fight, Rapo, etc.) to make them easier to think about and identify—and enable readers to enjoy the always popular mirror game. Who Am I?

I said “plot outlines” because, of course, game playing has been an underlying assumption of the writer, from bardic times. In s-f, the game—or, I should say. The Game—has had additional significance: Indeed, the puzzle-story is one of the most basic forms of the genre, and almost any “hard-core” science-fiction story is essentially a variant of a chess problem, in which specific pieces (characters) with clearly defined powers are located within an arbitrarily determined—but thereafter unchangeable—board (environment), with White (John Doe) to mate in so many moves (pages).

(John Brunner may well have brought this form to its ultimate formulation with his multilevel chess-plus novel last year—The Squares of the City, from Ballantine.)

In the last two stories, both Mrs. Saxton and Mr. Moudy made use of a variant of the popular “arena game” s-f story. I am intrigued not so much by the departures from the standard form they both effected, but by the marked similarity of structure in two stories on such dissimilar themes, from entirely dissimilar authors.

And yet the same—almost identical—arena was ideally suited to both stories. Now Fritz Leiber—a familiar name at last—makes use of a rather more complex arena, or labyrinth, to tell a more complex story of love-and-war.