The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

SUMMATION

Burroughs would have been lost . . . Edgar Rice Burroughs, that is. Since the days of his novel The Warlord of Mars things have changed in outer space. Yet William Burroughs, he of Naked Lunch and Nova Express fame, would have loved nearly every minute of it.

At ten o’clock on Sunday morning, when the decent folk of London were still in their beds, delegates to the 23rd World Science Fiction Convention in London were discussing “The Robot in the Executive Suite,” speculating on practical optimums for robot construction.

Only one lonely bug-eyed monster appeared at the convention— at the costume ball/ and Penguin Books had great difficulty in persuading a Dalek [Unautomated, man-sized U.K. version of Robbie the Robot— controls, mike, etc., are inside, as is operator.] to appear. Monsters and Martians get harder to find every day. Science fiction, since the good old days when Hugo Gernsback first named the genre “Scientifiction” and printed space operatics in pulp magazines, has come of a respectable age. Unlikely Martians are of less interest than what one British writer, J. G. Ballard, has called “inner space,” a very real world. In the space age Jules Verne can’t shine a candlepower before the reality of Gemini.

This was the opening of the Spectator’s report on the World Science Fiction Convention in London last August. The London Sunday Times Magazine, shortly afterward, came out with a special s-f section: an article on the Clarke-Kubrick movie, one on the BBC’s (then) forthcoming s-f drama series, and a thoughtful profile of John W. Campbell, editor of Analog, which summed up:

. . . Life to Campbell is a gigantic experiment in form, and earth the forcing-house—an impeccable vision, but one not warmed (in his theories, that is) by a feeling for the pain or personal potential of the individuals in the experiment. That kind of gentleness in expression seemed to disappear with Don A. Stuart.

So that, ironically, as s-f becomes increasingly respectable, John Campbell, its acknowledged father-figure, can’t really claim his throne. He provides the continuity, he shaped much of the thought, he made many reputations. S-f narrowed from the vastness of space to the greater complexity of “sociological” s-f with him presiding. But now it is narrowing towards the highly focused, upside-down detail of “innerspace.” The tone is personal and subjective, the quality of expression important. . . . There is even a literary magazine: SF Horizons. None of this is Campbell’s style.

You may disagree with the views of either or both reporters (Bill Butler in the Spectator, Pal Williams in the Times Magazine). What is significant is that they had views, and expressed them intelligently; that neither one approached the job in the role of literary slummer, or even intrepid anthropologist among the fantasists, but simply and seriously as observers reporting on a field they knew and understood, and believed to be of interest to other readers.

I was about to say, it couldn’t happen here—but I suspect the difference in attitude is not so much spatial as temporal. What has already happened there is just beginning to happen here.

Which is to say: the big news in s-f this year is mostly not in s-f—not this side of the ocean. (Exceptions: the establishment of the SFWA; and Doubleday’s expanded publishing schedule, under the supervision of Lawrence P. Ashmead, who looks to be the best thing that has happened to s-f book publishing here in a long time.)

In a sense, the biggest news of the year is that it is harder than ever to locate on the literary map any reliable boundary line between s-f and anything else. The other side of the coin, whose tail is the lack of focus and esprit in the specialty field here, is, I suppose, the diminishment of spirited opposition or snobbism directed at the field. To some extent, this is a self-reproducing cycle; to a greater degree, the changing faces on both sides are being shaped by pressures initiating entirely outside the local literary scene, particularly such adjacent areas as education, advertising, psychology, and the Think Factory phenomenon. The s-f label becomes ludicrous, not to say invisible, when advertisements like the star-sprinkled page with the cute little capsule through whose wide-vision window a cheery astronaut and his mouth organ illustrate the pitch: “Three billion people will look up to you ... on Dec. 16, 1965, the Hohner Harmonica became the first musical instrument to be played in outer space,” appear in the same sort of magazines which now publish such stories as “Game,” “Somewhere Not far from Here,” “The Girl Who Drew the Gods,” “The Drowned Giant” (and Stanley Elkin’s “Perlmutter at the East Pole” in the Post), with neither apologies, explanations, nor exclamation points.

I mention these titles in particular because they are neither whimsical fantasies, space-cowboy adventures, sex-and-sci-fi spoofs, nor sprightly satires, but serious speculative fiction of a kind that actually had no market here a few years ago (bar he infrequent F&SF acceptance).

It is part of the same happy blurring of edges that Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon was issued recently by Harcourt with neither labels nor disclaimers on the jacket—and that Gold Medal’s Beaumont selection. The Magic Man, did specify “science fantasy” out front, when the earlier collections from which it was culled had avoided the tag like the plague-carrier it was known to be for a serious and talented young writer.

It almost seems that the trend is to using the label when it seems helpful, and omitting it when it does not. One hesitates to make any assumption of such widespread sanity, but the magazine situation almost requires it. Some readers, and most writers, will already have noticed that this Annual contains no Honorable Mentions listing. For the last two or three years, the attempt to compile such a list has been increasingly frustrating. The diffusion is too great: Even if it were within my powers to be certain I have seen everything entitled to consideration in a given year, I no longer know where to draw the line.

I use poetry, and sometimes cartoons, and frequently newspaper pieces among the selections: Ought they to be covered in the Mentions too? What about British publications, and English-language books published in other countries? How about things like the Christian Science Monitor’s “Martian papers,” describing the amusement along’ the Canal at UFO-nuts who claim to have seen six-foot-lall metallic-dothed extraterrestrials? Or the deadpan stuff the Realist has begun to use (since they broke the s-f ice with Harvey Bilker’s “Genetic Faux Pas”)? How in the world do you decide on a listing for (almost anything from) Roger Price’s inflammatory Grump? What about Fernando Krahn’s cartoons in the Reporter? How about poetry? Or critical writing?

The answer, of course, was to mention all these other things in the Summation, which began to make the addition of the HM list not only burdensome to me and unfair to authors whose work I would not discover till two months, or two years, later, but foolish as well, since much of the highest-quality work was mentioned only off-list. The new answer is to omit any pretense at publication of a comprehensive listing. Most of the items of special merit I noticed during the year have already been mentioned in the story notes) there are a few others I feel should not be entirely passed by— most importantly, some new names from the 1965 magazines:

From Amazing and Fantastic—Stanley E. Aspiltle, Jr., John Douglas, Alfred Grossman, Judith E. Schrier.

From If—John McCallum, D. M. Melton, Laurence S. Todd.

From Analog—Michael Karageorge, Laurence A. Perkins.

From F&SF—John Thomas Richards.

There were also some stories of special interest by established authors, which did not, one way or another, get mentioned inside: Miriam Allen de Ford’s “The Expendables,” Chad Oliver’s “End of the Line,” Edgar Pangborn’s “Wogglebeast,” all from F&SF; William F. Temple’s “The Legend of Ernie Deacon” and James H. Schmitz’s “The Pork Chop Tree,” from Analog; Lloyd Biggie, Jr.’s “Pariah Planet” and Theodore L. Thomas’ “Manfire,” from Worlds of Tomorrow, Gerald Pearce’s “Security Syndrome,” from If, and Richard Wilson’s “Harry Protagonist, Brain-Drainer,” from Galax/; “Don’t Touch Me, I’m Sensitive,” by James Stamers, in Gamma; “The Casting Couch,” by Lewis Kovner, in Rogue; Florence Engel Randall’s “The Watchers,” in Harper’s; and stories from all over by Frank Herbert: “Committee of the Whole” (Galaxy), “The GM Effect” (Analog), “Greenslaves” (Amazing).

And there was Boris Vian’s “The Dead Fish,” outstanding among a collection of good stories in the anthology edited and translated by Damon Knight, 13 French Science Fiction Stories (Bantam).

Nor have I mentioned Cordwainer Smith’s Space Lords collection, memorable not only for the stories, but for the author’s instructive and revealing prologue, in which he explains, in part, just what it is that is different about Smith stories. Required reading for would-be s-f writers (and for many who already are)—as is Brian Aldiss’ long, thoughtful analysis of three British writers in SF Horizons No. 2.

And there are some other British writers, not all new-in-1965, but names still unfamiliar here, which I suspect will not be so for long: William Barclay, John Baxter, Daphne Castell, Robert Cheetham, Jael Cracken, John Hamilton, David Harvey, R. W. Mackleworth, Dikk Richardson, David Newton, Bob Parkinson, E. C. Williams.

One way and another, I keep coming back to it. The important things happening in American s-f are not happening in it at all. We have writers comparable to Ballard in stature, for instance—but not in current achievement, and certainly not in influence within the field. Cordwainer Smith and Theodore Sturgeon have each published two new stories in the last eighteen months or so—and none of them close to the authors’ best work. Leiber has been productive: a Tarzan novelization, and thousands of words of magazine stories, some of them very good reading, all rather closer in period to Tarzan than to Leiber’s own work of a few years back (“Mariana,” “A Deskfui of Girls,” “The Secret Songs,” “The Silver Eggheads,” The Wanderer). Nothing at all from Alfred Bester for three years now, nor from Walter Miller for much, much longer. Kurt Vonnegut continues to do a novel every year or two that almost makes up for the rest of what’s missing—but he is not in the same sense a part of the field here at all; his impact on other American writers is almost more from “outside” than Ballard’s.

The novel generally acclaimed as the best American product last year was Frank Herbert’s Dune—a long, and in part excellent, but completely conventional future-historical, admirable essentially for its complexity rather than for any original or speculative contribution. Certainly there is nothing in it to stimulate or influence the work of others.

As it happens, the stimulus is being provided from outside—and not just from England. It is coming from exciting new work in psychology and the allied sciences; from the avant-gardistes and poets who have begun using the images and contexts of s-f with or without concern for the sources; and from the impact of the belated translation and publication of people like Borges and Jarry.

It is interesting to speculate on what the difference in our thinking and writing might have been, if we had had Jarry as part of the s-f tradition, along with Verne and Wells. Jarry himself was reading these men as they wrote: Verne in his childhood. Wells in his prime. He responded to Wells (See “How to Construct a Time Machine” in the Selected Works), but also with Wells, to the scientific discoveries of the turn of the century. In a sense, he is Jules Verne’s left hand, as Wells might be the right.

But if we had had Jarry, would we have read him? From today’s vantage point, a hectic half century of scientific revolutions and upheavals later, Jarry’s responses are rather more in keeping with the direction of physics itself than were Wells’ marvelously sane and rational civilized adductions.

But how long have we been prepared to see this? Did we not have to work our way (with pleasure) through Gernsback and “scientifiction” to Campbell’s then-revolutionary 1938-1942 magazines, and then from E. E. Smith to Heinlein, Leiber, and Asimov—and again, to Boucher’s revolutionary notion that a science-fantasy magazine could be well-written—to Bester, Miller, Budrys, Cordwainer Smith—before we were ready for either Cat’s Cradle or “Terminal Beach?”

Or if Borges had been translated as he wrote, if the eight stories in Ficciones (Fictions) had been available in 1941, instead of 1962 . . .

I remember vividly the excitement of discovering The Star Maker and Odd John in the early ‘40s; Stapledon opened tantalizing and terrifying vistas of probability for me. For others, it may have been C. S. Lewis, or M. P. Shiel, or E. R. Eddison; but there is no question that the impact of these powerful imaginative thinkers on a whole generation of writers was one of the major forces that moved s-f out of the technocratic-primitivism of “scientifiction” to the sociological-sci-fi of the “great days” of Astounding and Unknown, and further, to the psychological/semantic/psychiatric science-fantasy of the early years of Galaxy and Fantasy and Science Fiction.

But that was as far as the impetus of that group of brilliant apologists of dualism could take us. The next step we had to reach—are only now reaching—essentially by bootstrap-climbing. So it seems cruelly ironic now to discover that our newest concepts, painfully evolved over a quarter century of speculative interchange from the combined traditions of magic and mathematics, physics and poetry, were already set down—in essays, stories, poems, allegories, sometimes unabashed plot outlines—before we were fairly started on the process, by one man drawing on the whole range of aesthetic/intellectual traditions that have since filtered through to us, from a dozen different sources.

Would we have arrived any sooner, or any saner, at the crossroads of communication where we now stand—where poet and pragmatist, scientist and surrealist, are equally frequently disconcerted to see themselves mirrored in each other’s eyes—would we have come to this gathering place, the converging of the many roads toward “reality” traveled by twentieth-century thought, any more readily for the guidance of one brilliant mind far ahead?

Or did we have to get this far ourselves before we could make out the meaning of the light? Did Borges’ work, and Jarry’s, simply have to wait for the rest of us to catch up? Perhaps we had to go the Zen route before we could contemplate the statement, “ ‘Pataphysics is the science ...” with equanimity (let alone delight), and wail for our learned Academies to convene Conferences on the nature of time before Borges’ “Tlon Uqbar, Tertius Orbis” became comprehensible?

Perhaps we did. Perhaps each cultural island—whether a nation, genre, discipline, or single man—must grow its own way through the stages of naive rationalism and hardware sophistication, before it can approach the recognition of the inalienable association between the concurrent-and-diverse “realities” of physics and metaphysics, mathematics and mysticism, psyche and soma, science and art.

Judith Merril

Milford, 1966