The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

It seems time to ask again: what are the gradations, the lines of definition, between “delusion” and “reality”? Between madness and dreaming, between dream and creativity, between the act of creation and divinity? Between divinity and madness?

In which of these overlapping lands lies the residence of Reality?

The latest scientific stance suggests that the act of dreaming is a prerequisite for sanity. But sanity (in court at least) is the ability to distinguish reality from illusion. Are our dreams, then, real? (Sub-real? Surreal?)

Harvey Jacobs, who is just about half as old as Jorge Luis Borges, but who broke into (English-language, fiction-category) print only two years later than Borges—and who is also appearing for the first time in any sort of s-f collection—has a not even remotely similar story, which also happens to be about dreams, gods, and the act of creation.