The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

Just now, there is no “Ladbroke Grove” here. Some such center somehow always accompanies a “literary quantum jump”—that unpredictable phenomenon that draws in new writers and new readers at the same time, and creates a new level of quality—to meet new critical standards—in its operative area.

We have the writers; we have the markets; we have the readers. But nothing is happening to bring them together. Much of the best work is being done entirely away from the social-professional nexus of “science fiction.” (Witness Donald Barthelme and Harvey Jacobs in this volume . . . Stanley Elkin’s “Perlmutter at the East Pole” in the Saturday Evening Post . . . William Maxwell and Robert Henderson in The New Yorker . . . and how many others that I won’t even hear about till next year or the year after?)

There is no lack of either talent or reader interest. But the combining force is not at work. There are no exchange centers of ideas and criticism. We have had such focal centers in the past; my guess is we will have some new ones soon. Because, for all my description of Ladbroke Grove as the center, it doesn’t work that way. Moorcock’s living-room-office is the place in London now—but the idea sparks are flying between Ladbroke Grove and Oxford; between both of those and the literary magazine Ambit, where George MacBeth and J. G. Ballard publish back-to-back; between MacBeth in London and Redgrove in Leeds, and through them both on BBC-3’s poetry programs, to a whole new audience—while Penguin Books, and, lately, Jonathan Cape have hooked into the process by using good surrealist and nonobjective art for their s-f jackets.

Nor is a central physical meeting place absolutely necessary. John Campbell in 1940 and Anthony Boucher in 1950 each filled the role of host and mixer magnificently. With writers spread out all over the country, they did it primarily by mail—and by providing the most essential meeting place, the pages of a vital, growing magazine.

For about five years, between 1958 and 1962, such a center seemed to be growing again at Ziff-Davis, where Cele Lalli (then Goldsmith) was editing Fantastic and Amazing: David R. Bunch, Thomas Disch, Larry Eisenberg, Phyllis Gotlieb, Keith Laumer, Robert Rohrer, Roger Zelazny, all came out of these pages. (Now Amazing and Fantastic have been sold, and the new policy seems to be primarily reprint.)

The closest thing to it since then has been Fred Pohl’s new-writer-per-issue policy for If—where R. A. Lafferty, Larry Niven, and Norman Kagan first appeared. The policy continues to turn up good prospects: Jonathan Brand, Hayden Howard, Alexei Panshin, and Bruce McAllister might—any or all—develop interestingly. But the “combining force,” whatever it is, is not there—nor at F&SF, although it continues to attract, and select, superior new writers. (Since 1960, F&SF has come up with a number of exciting “Firsts,” among whom Vance Aandahl, Jane Beauclerk, Calvin Demmon, Sonya Dorman, Terry Carr, and Jody Scott come most readily to mind. Astounding/Analog turned up R. C. FitzPatrick, Richard Olin, Rick Raphael, and Norman Spinrad over the same period.)

Possibly the new SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America) will be able to supply the spark—as for some years it was supplied by Theodore Cogswell’s extraordinary pro-fan letter-journal, PITFCS (Proceedings of the Institute of Twenty-First Century Studies). Or perhaps some bright publisher will give Cele Laili a new magazine.

In the meantime, two of the top graduates of Fantastic’s Class of ‘62 have just published their first novels: Zelazny’s This Immortal (Ace) and Disch’s The Genocides (Berkley). (Zelazny also took two of the first SFWA awards for 1965: for the novelette, “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” in F&SF and the novella “He Who Shapes” in Amazing.)

Tom Disch’s second novel (tentatively. White Fang Goes Dingo) will have been published by Ace before this Annual is out; and his short stories will have appeared in everything from Galaxy and Alfred Hitchcock to Mademoiselle, while he himself roams Europe, following the music festivals and writing between programs.