The Year's Best Science Fiction 9

And it will not get more settled before it is more upset.

Imaginative literature today is preoccupied—necessarily—with the same stirrings, the same conflicts, visions of greatness and of doom that are acting on the imaginations of philosophers, scientists, teachers, industrial and political leaders, throughout the world.

On the brink of more dramatic physical explorations and discoveries than ever before, we find ourselves facing, first and most urgently, a different kind of great unknown: the nature of cultural man; the odds (no less than life and death) on his ability to coexist with cultures other than his own; or the likelihood that natural man can or will learn to adapt to his own technological culture.

In a forum published last year in Playboy, “1984 and Beyond,” dozen top writers of science fantasy argued the probable future of man. William Tenn concluded a discussion on future social trends by saying:

“Thoreau wrote over a hundred years ago that ‘the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.’ Well, the world has changed fantastically since then, but the mass of men still do. History always repeats itself, but on another step of the spiral. We are a wildly imaginative, inordinately idealistic, incredibly persistent, hopelessly naive, incurably corrupt species, and no matter what we do we always seem to wind up somehow or other in the same position on the tree, except that occasionally it’s a different tree. Tomorrow we’ll be looking for the mechanical bananas in a nickel-plated jungle.”