The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 4

THE YEAR’S SF A Summary

If you do manage to lift yourself by your own bootstraps, do the boots come along? It seems to me they would! it’s a “closed system,” isn’t it?

In which case, perhaps the analogy of a multiple-stage rocket would be more suitable to describe the present paradoxically successful plight of science fiction. . . .

“The trouble is, the whole world seems to have gone ‘science-fictional’ “ Isaac Asimov wrote me, while preparing his article on “The Thunder-Thieves.” “All sorts of mad ideas (or so they would have seemed a few years ago) are under serious investigation by scientists and—wonder of wonders—are reported in the press without either jokes or sneers.”

What’s more, the press (still somewhat ill-at-ease with the far-out notions “sober scientists” turn out to have) frequently refers to s-f to bridge the gap between the common-sense facts of a few years ago and the startling new scientific achievements—achievements “that only yesterday were science fiction.”

It’s not just the newspapers, either. The general magazines are printing more (and better) s-f all the time. Public libraries have special displays of new s-f. Several new s-f programs were announced for television at the start of the ‘58-’59 season.

And while all this was going on, the number of specialty s-f magazines on the newsstands plummeted from twenty-one, at the start of 1958, to ten at year’s end.

These trends are not so contradictory as they may at first appear. Science fantasy is simply hoisting itself out of its own bootstraps—or leaving its booster tanks behind, as it levels into a new trajectory.

In a review of last year’s SF, Anthony Boucher commented on the new non-fiction section, saying, “Much of the disciplined imagination we used to associate with science fiction now appears without fictional coating.” And Asimov, in the same letter quoted before, said, “No matter how fast science progresses, it does not and cannot encroach upon science fiction—though between you and me it can encroach on s-f readers, by saturating them with science-advance, and depriving them of the need for s-f magazines.”

I think Dr. Asimov is very right. It is worth noting in this connection that two of the magazines that suspended publication last year were replaced by “space” titles; and that John W. Campbell, Jr., who has edited the field’s leading magazine, Astounding, for more than twenty years, called upon his readers last summer to subscribe to membership in a new “Society of Gentleman Amateurs”; the Society is to have its own journal, devoted exclusively to speculative science and engineering. (The rules would bar any working scientist from writing in his own field.)

Or consider these bits from a piece published last year on the possible future uses of parapsychology.

“The real idea ... is to employ the waves or impulses for long-range transmission of messages, and even for the near-fantastic purpose of moving or influencing inanimate objects at great distances. . . . One group . . . has advanced the idea that the brain wave amplification concept offers a possible means of communication between space ships.. ..” And the theory is proposed “that the measurable electrical impulses given off by the human brain are products of a body chemical reaction much in the same way that noise is a product of a combustion engine, and that the true brain waves making possible extra-sensory perception are something else again and not yet understood. . . .”

The article also claims that many “scientists of the highest repute” have come to believe “that there definitely is a special group of humans having the power or gift of transferring thought from mind to mind, and influencing consistently the dice in a game of chance.”

Now there would be nothing of special note in all this, except that the scientists referred to are not the hand-picked group of known “crackpots” who would have been quoted in an article of the same sort in a science-fantasy magazine ten, five, or just two years ago. They are working engineers and research men at Westinghouse’s laboratory in Friendship, Md., at the famous Rand Development Corporation in Cleveland, and at the Army’s Redstone, Alabama, missile development center.

The article, which appeared in the Sunday N. Y. Herald Tribune on July 13, 1958, was written by that paper’s military and aviation editor, Ansel E. Talbert. It starts out: “An amazing series of projects ... are receiving serious study in the research branches of the United States armed forces.” It closes with a paragraph quoting Col. William Bowers, director of biological sciences in the Air Force Office of Scientific Research, as being “tremendously interested” in finding out “whether messages and even energy emanating from the human brain can be transmitted over thousands of miles. . . .”

“Science-advance” and “disciplined imagination” are no longer the esoteric intellectual entertainment of a specialized cult; it is to be expected that the literature of logical speculation will not for long retain its discrete identity. And if any further evidence were needed, it could be found in the ranks of s-f authors: both in the fast-growing roster of new names attracted to science fantasy, and in the attitudes expressed by older writers in the field.

For the past three years, an annual Science-Fiction Writers’ Conference has been held at Milford, Pa. Discussions at these meetings cover every facet of the writer’s craft, with special reference to science fantasy: markets, agents, editors, critics, research sources, and the basic subjective problems of writing itself. During the 1958 sessions, one point of view emerged repeatedly: the writers who had been in s-f for any length of time, almost to a man wanted to get out—but to take it with them as they went. Some wanted the greater literary freedom of the book form; some wanted to get away from “gimmicks”; others wanted editors without established s-f conventions.

“I want to say the same kind of thing, but I’m tired of saying it to the same people,” some of them summed it up. But one way or another, almost all wanted to write “a sort of s-f” or “something in between s-f and mainline fiction,” for a wider market.

S-f (the category) is, if not dead, moribund; then long live s-f (the literature, and way of thinking)!

In a year of disquieting news all round in the s-f marketplace, the saddest single item—after the untimely deaths of Henry Kuttner and C. M. Kornbluth—was the retirement of Anthony Boucher from the editorial chair of Fantasy and Science Fiction. From its first issue in 1949, through five years of co-editorship by Boucher and J. Francis McComas, and five more of Mr. Boucher’s solo guidance, F&SF reflected his distinctive editorial personality, and exercised a potent influence on science fantasy as a whole, by supplying a sorely needed critical standard to a field which had grown up with pulp traditions and which was often marked by careless prose and stock characterizations.

Wide erudition and keen intelligence are professional requirements for the science-fiction editor, but Tony Boucher was the first to add a discerning sensitivity to good writing. ,

Consoling notes: One of the reasons Boucher gave for leaving the magazine was the hope of finding more time for his own writing. And the selection of Robert P. Mills, who edited F&SF’s (more brother, by its personality, than) sister magazine, Venture, to fill the slot on the older magazine, gives hope that the new F&SF will take on some of the invigorating freshness he injected into the short-lived Venture.

Also worthy of special mention is the changeover in Satellite, formerly a digest-size bimonthly, now a large-size, smooth-paper monthly magazine. The experiment with a “slick” format was last tried some years ago by Hugo Gernsback; from what I’ve seen so far of the new Satellite, I think its chances are a good bit better than Science Fiction Plus ever had. In any case, it’s an effort everyone in the field will be watching with interest, and one I personally hope will succeed.

Special mention for merit, outside the realm of the Honorable Mention listings that follow, go this year to:

Karen Anderson for “In Memoriam: Henry Kuttner,” as heartfelt and apropos a eulogy as ever I have read or heard.

Vladimir Nabokov’s Nabokov’s Dozen (Doubleday), which contains some wonderful fantasy, reprints of previously printed stories.

Ron Smith, Dave Foley, and Bob Leman for their sidesplitting parody of F&SF in Inside Science Fiction.

Peter Ustinov, whose publishers wouldn’t permit us to include his charming Atlantic story, “The Man in the Moon” in this volume.

—J. M.