The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

Harvey Jacobs was born in New York City In 1930, attended the New York public schools, and went on to Syracuse University, in New York State—where he returned a few years later as an instructor in the university’s Writers’ Workshop. He is now manager of public relations for Worldvision, ABC’s (soon to be satellite-relayed) network of TV stations in twenty-five countries. Between flying business trips to odd corners of the world, he lives, with his wife and baby son, Adam, in the executive-suite-near-West-Side section of Greenwich Village.

J. G. Ballard was born in Shanghai in 1930, the son of a Scottish doctor resident in an American section of Shanghai. He was interned in a Japanese prison camp during World War II, and repatriated to England in 1946, where he spent a brief period at a proper boys’ public school, before going on to read medicine at Cambridge. He has traveled extensively in the Mediterranean countries and spent a tour of duty with the RAF in Canada. A widower, he now lives in a row-house middle-middle-class London suburb with his three children, James Jr., Faye, and Beatrice.

Jacobs sold his first story to Tomorrow magazine in 1950, while still in college. Shortly afterwards, he went to work in public relations for the United Jewish Appeal and then the Weizmann Institute of Science; then a spell with the Village Voice, in its first year of publication, after which he set up shop (briefly) as editor/publisher of his own newspaper (East, in what was not yet known as the East Village). In 1958, he settled down in a job with ABC-TV. Meantime, he had sold his second story, to Esquire, in 1954, and was beginning to appear in other national magazines.

Ballard won the annual short-story contest at Cambridge in 1951. Shortly afterwards, he went to work as an advertising copywriter; then a spell in the RAF, after which he returned to London and became a script-writer for scientific films. In 1956 he made his first sale as a professional fiction writer to Science Fantasy (“Prima Belladonna,” reprinted in the 2nd Annual), and began appearing regularly in the British s-f magazines. Gollancz published his first novel, and then a short-story collection.

In 1962, Jacobs wrote and produced the first satellite-relayed TV show linking European and American broadcasting systems, and beamed to Japan The International World of Sports. He also had a prize-winning story in Playboy. His fiction has since appeared in a wide range of publications, including Midstream, Status, Nugget, Family Circle, and Ladies’ Home Journal.

In 1962, Ballard’s work began to appear in the American magazines (Amazing and Fantastic originally), and Berkley Books did his first novel and two short story collections in paperback. Since then, three more novels have been published (in both countries) and five more collections. Both fiction and, recently, critical writings have appeared in literary and popular publications outside the specially fields his work has been widely anthologized, translated, and reprinted.

In the spring of 1965, Jacobs’ story about the death of gods appeared in Mademoiselle, and Ballard’s story about the drowned giant in Playboy. As I write this, Ballard is discussing a TV show with the BBC, and Jacobs is discussing the possibility of publication of some of his work in the British s-f magazines.

These two men come—literally and literarily—from opposite ends of the earth. Their voices—symbols, images, diction, speech rhythms, narrative techniques—are as different as their backgrounds. But there are no longer any places on earth as remote as Shanghai and New York were thirty-five years ago.

Because each of them is a serious and skillful writer, each man tells his story in a form uniquely his own, in the personal language of his own inner world. Because each of them is a serious and perceptive writer, the stories they tell are vitally related, in the outside, “real” world.

Or (to paraphrase Ciardi): For a writer to be able to talk in his own language (which he is forever inventing) is almost the next thing to a reality.