The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

INTRODUCTION

Science, they keep telling us. Is “catching up” with science fiction. This is happily (at long last) true—precisely as it must be true that on any new frontier (space, surface, political, or academic) surveyors will replace the early scouts, and settlers may tread heavily on the surveyors’ heels.

This succession is, indeed, the only sure way to determine the validity of the new frontier. And the more swift and certain the waves of succession, the better it speaks for the work of the scouts—and for the alertness and adventurous spirit of man’s society. The rhythm of progress has a fixed pattern, but its tempo is variable in the extreme. Not all frontiers are still new when they are explored.

It was almost 2,000 years from the speculations of Aristarchus of Santos to the mathematically verifiable hypotheses of Johannes Kepler; three hundred more before Goddard and Tsiolkovsky (half the world round from each other) began to apply the principles of physical reaction (first observed in China in Aristarchus’s time, and mathematically formulated by Newton in the century after Kepler) to that men could and would, a scant half century later, build vessels to carry them into space to test, with physical exploration, the “proven” theories of Kepler.

In any field of new knowledge, on all frontiers, concrete or physical, the fools must first rush out to see what the accepted angels of the day do not credit even enough to fear. The quixotic ass may be a “Somnium” or a glider at Kitty Hawk, a “Rights of Man,” a burning bush, a dream of passage to India, a Unified Field of Theory, or a story of space. Whatever its form, it must take shape first in the imagination of some, somehow, less fettered mind, and pass, through the speculations of philosophers, onto the lathe of logic; if it turns true (however slowly or swiftly), it has become Accepted Theory.

With Theory, the cycle begins anew: someone must “dream up” (literally, just about) a completely new way to lest a new theory. Belter disciplined, less dreaming, men must refine the techniques; mathematical symbols must be found to describe in precise language the verified experiment. And—

With a new technique In hand, a new idea in the mind’s storehouse, some new dreamer will first imagine the next step, and (barring final warfare) so on, and on, and—

J. M.

Milford, March, 1961