The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

S-F Books: 1960 by Anthony Boucher

As in 1959, science-fiction books were numerous and largely negligible. Not counting reprints, there appeared close to a hundred new titles—equaling last year’s total and surpassing any previous year. Close to half of these came from two second-string publishers, desperately committed to monthly schedules that make tasteful selectivity impossible. Most of the rest were paperback originals; s-f in hard covers has dwindled almost to the vanishing point.

The saddest phenomenon was the lack of distinction between the weary work of hacks published to fill out a schedule and the almost equally weary efforts of some of the biggest Names in s-f. In better times, you would expect the bylines of Brian W. Aldiss, Algis Budrys, Mark Clifton, L. Sprague de Camp, Philip K. Dick, Gordon R. Dickson, Andre Norton, Chad Oliver, Robert Sheckley and Wilson Tucker to mean an all-star imperative-reading list. They all published new novels in 1960; and the novels ranged from just adequately publishable to plain embarrassing. Even the coruscant Theodore Sturgeon produced (in Venus Plus X) an entertainingly controversial essay which failed as a novel. For the first time in 15 years there was no novel, adult or juvenile, from Robert A. Heinlein.

But though a reviewer finds it constantly more difficult to force himself to open a new s-f novel, his conscientious effort is occasionally rewarded. Judith Merril (The Tomorrow People), Frederik Pohl (Drunkards Walk) and Richard Wilson {And Then the Town Took Off) demonstrated that it is still possible to write long s-f with some originality of concept, some intelligence and grace in the treatment; and the year did produce two permanently memorable novels, to stand in the company of the best of the past.

Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade, which describes the conquest of the galaxy by earthmen in 1346 a.d., is as delightful as a good British film—outrageous, yet seductively plausible. Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a major work of modern imaginative fiction: a future history of Roman Catholicism from the 26th to the 38th Centuries which is so deeply sensitive, so emotionally powerful as to have meaning for the most irreligious.

One can complain no longer of the sexlessness of s-f after 1960’s rash of novels which attempted to combine prognostication and pornography, and achieved only boredom—excepting when written by Philip Jose Farmer. Mr. Farmer’s Flesh, in particular, is astonishing: the most pria-pic book I have ever reviewed, in any genre, but quite legitimately so, using its picture of a hypersexed future to explore (and fascinatingly) some of the basic symbols of Jung and Frazer.

Lowest publisher’s trick of the year: the labeling of the third book appearance of a poor van Vogt novella as “first book publication.” I thought there was a law....

The situation was more gratifying to the reader in the field of the s-f short story. There were satisfactory one-author collections by Heinlein, Pohl, Sheckley and Sturgeon, and distinguished ones by Aldiss (Galaxies like Grains of Sand), Anderson (Guardians of Time), Merril (Out of Bounds) and Clifford Simak (The Worlds of Clifford Simak). And again Philip Jose Farmer was astonishing; his Strange Relations goes on the permanent list of important collections—creative and stimulating s-f (in the fullest sense) which suggests that such relation-words as “father” or “sister” have an archetypal meaning quite aside from the accidents of our improbable reproductive system.

The year’s outstanding anthologies were two in which editors surveyed the histories of their publications and came up with admirable and brightly varied stories’. Robert P. Mills’s A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Frederik Pohl’s Star of Stars. Groff Conklin resumed, (huzzah!) steady anthologization with 13 Great Stories of Science Fiction and Six Great Short Science Fiction Novels; and the Council of Four (Denver branch of the Baker Street Irregulars) produced the attractively unique The Science-Fictional Sherlock Holmes.

Highly welcome was the publication in America of the three British Broadcasting Corporation TV-plays by Nigel Kneale (The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit). which demonstrate, in a manner unknown to American TV and films, that mass-appeal s-f can still be literate and intelligently exciting.

Most controversial book of the year: Kingsley Amis’s New Maps of Hell, the first extensive and informed critical survey of s-f by a literary figure quite unconnected with the field. Your editrix devoted much of her commentary in the last of these annuals to violent disagreement with Amis. I submit that the book, arguable in details, presents a knowledgeable, broad picture of s-f calculated to cause the general reader to respect and even to investigate it.

To turn to pure fantasy—F without S—1960 was notable for the first American publication of the imaginative nightmares of Sarban (especially The Sound of His Horn) and for an excellent chiller of witchcraft survivals in the modern world: The Devil’s Own by Peter Curtis (pseudonym of Norah Lofts). Robert Bloch’s Pleasant Dreams is an agreeably grisly assembly of shorts; and volumes of straight mainstream fiction by Roald Dahl (Kiss Kiss) and the increasingly interesting Muriel Spark (The Go-Away Bird) contain a few first-rate fantasies.

Out of the 500-odd books, in assorted fields, that I read professionally during the year, the one that gave me the most intense pleasure was a century and a half old, though new to English. The Saragossa Manuscript by Count Jan Potocki (1761-1815), translated by Elisabeth Abbott, is a one-of-a-kind book, a (literally) marvelous collection of tales-within-tales-within-tales, which blends fantasy, horror, sensuality, romantic adventure, mysticism, Gothic extravagance ... I can never describe it; I can only urge every connoisseur of caviar to leave no single egg untasted.