The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy

INTRODUCTION by ORSON WELLES

One thing’s sure about science-fiction: there’s too much of it.

A leading editor in the field announces that the boom days are over, but the yearly amount of the stuff that still gets into print is pretty staggering.

My advice to any but the most bug-eyed addict would be to abstain from the novels. “S.F.” is often at its aching worst in “book-length” versions. Good novels (Heinlein’s “Puppet Masters,” for instance) are about as rare as ambergris and a lot harder to identify. My wife, who loathes everything remotely galactic, who alternately yawns and shudders at the prospect of journeying in either time or outer space, and herself travels almost exclusively by train, went shopping with a publisher—a friend of ours who claims to be an “S.F.” expert—and presented me on Christmas with an eight-foot shelf of this season’s crop of the novels. Ploughing through the bulk of this brightly-jacketed little library only confirmed a previous opinion: one of the oddest aspects of this whole publishing phenomenon is that there still seems to be more outright claptrap between hard covers than soft, and that the short stories come off much better than the long ones.

Why? Well, I guess these tales are, after all, our modern fables and it’s certain that the fable as a form generally succeeds when not too extended.

If there remains such a thing as a novice reader in this literature, my suggestion would be for him to begin with the magazines until he knows a few authors, and to steer clear of the bookstores. Against this, of course, our theoretical novice might happen on a poorish issue of whatever monthly he sampled first. An anthology is probably best for a beginning, and I don’t think he could do better than with this one.

For the real aficionado— he’ll be relieved to find that he has nothing familiar from other collections to skip—I reckon he’ll find most of his favorite authors, and these at the top of their form. The range is interestingly wide—from that convincing gadgetry dear to many of the fans, to the wildest and freest sort of nonsense. In this last area I join the enthusiasts. It’s by bringing pure fantasy into currency that science-fiction makes its real and very healthy contribution to our popular literature, at least for my money.

I’m going to try to persuade my wife to read this book. There’s a good hope that a first-rate sampler such as this may convert even her. If “S.F.—The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy” doesn’t sell her on our twentieth-century fairy tales, she’ll just have to stick with the Grimm brothers.