The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

Well, I warned you.

The next story is also a war story, but a very different war, in a radically different time—and Time is the key word, not just for “Traveller’s Rest,” but for a good deal of the s-f you will be reading in the next few years. I am not talking about time-travel, or time-paradox, or parallel-universes-in-time,- these are tried and true devices of s-f, used to establish a sufficiently remote, yet credible, cultural context. The stories I am talking about are not manipulating time in order to look at some other aspect of human experience— they are trying to look at the nature of Time itself, or at least at the nature of the human experience of the phenomenon we call “Time.”

The trend was beginning to be strongly evident in the British magazines in 1965: Collyn’s “Singular Quest of Martin Borg,” Moorcock’s “Escape from Evening,” Harness’s “Time Trap,” in New Worlds/ Aldiss’ “Man in his Time,” Ernest Hill’s “Joik,” in Science Fantasy. (And here again, one sees the pervasive influence of Ballard, all of whose early work was obsessed with Time. And not just the early work: Time, encapsulated, is the topic of The Crystal World.) Also from England—although I do not know whether to consider George Langelaan a British, French, or American author—a collection. Out of Time, was published by Four Square.

In this country, the stories are just beginning to emerge. The only really notable examples in 1965 were Harlan Ellison’s prize-winning “ ‘Repent, Harlequin,’ Said the Ticklockman” (from Galaxy, and reprinted in both the SFWA anthology and World’s Best Science Fiction: 1966); and the second short story in the November 13, 1965, installment of William Maxwell’s “Further Tales About Men and Women” in the New Yorker. (You would have thought that he would sooner or later have realized that the time he was spending so freely was next month’s, and that if he had already lived through the days of this month before it was well begun he was living beyond his means.)

Nor is it only in fiction that Time is the big upcoming topic. The same themes are burgeoning in a slightly different area. A four-day Interdisciplinary Conference on Perspectives of Time, conducted by the New York Academy of Sciences, included panels on “Concepts of Time”; “The Fabric of Biological Time”; “Man, the Timed, and Man, the Timer”} “Experiential Aspects of Time.” An impressive anthology of discussions called Voices of Time was published about the same time by Braziller. And in an article in the winter, 1965, Daedalus, “The Future as the Basis for Establishing a Shared Culture,” by Margaret Mead absorbed the underlying concept, of time-as-tool and time-as-phenomenon, into a philosophy of social change.

As does David Masson, who has supplied only this much information about himself: In my view the finished story is important or of public interest, but not the man. The symbolic overtones are also important but it is better if the reader discover these for himself. I will however say that my age is between forty-five and fifty, that I have a university post, and that I am married with a family.

“Traveller’s Rest” is his first story, although he has published a number of literary-linguistic articles in learned journals in Britain, Europe and the United States.