I mention these titles in particular because they are neither whimsical fantasies, space-cowboy adventures, sex-and-sci-fi spoofs, nor sprightly satires, but serious speculative fiction of a kind that actually had no market here a few years ago (bar he infrequent F&SF acceptance).
It is part of the same happy blurring of edges that Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon was issued recently by Harcourt with neither labels nor disclaimers on the jacket—and that Gold Medal’s Beaumont selection. The Magic Man, did specify “science fantasy” out front, when the earlier collections from which it was culled had avoided the tag like the plague-carrier it was known to be for a serious and talented young writer.
It almost seems that the trend is to using the label when it seems helpful, and omitting it when it does not. One hesitates to make any assumption of such widespread sanity, but the magazine situation almost requires it. Some readers, and most writers, will already have noticed that this Annual contains no Honorable Mentions listing. For the last two or three years, the attempt to compile such a list has been increasingly frustrating. The diffusion is too great: Even if it were within my powers to be certain I have seen everything entitled to consideration in a given year, I no longer know where to draw the line.
I use poetry, and sometimes cartoons, and frequently newspaper pieces among the selections: Ought they to be covered in the Mentions too? What about British publications, and English-language books published in other countries? How about things like the Christian Science Monitor’s “Martian papers,” describing the amusement along’ the Canal at UFO-nuts who claim to have seen six-foot-lall metallic-dothed extraterrestrials? Or the deadpan stuff the Realist has begun to use (since they broke the s-f ice with Harvey Bilker’s “Genetic Faux Pas”)? How in the world do you decide on a listing for (almost anything from) Roger Price’s inflammatory Grump? What about Fernando Krahn’s cartoons in the Reporter? How about poetry? Or critical writing?
The answer, of course, was to mention all these other things in the Summation, which began to make the addition of the HM list not only burdensome to me and unfair to authors whose work I would not discover till two months, or two years, later, but foolish as well, since much of the highest-quality work was mentioned only off-list. The new answer is to omit any pretense at publication of a comprehensive listing. Most of the items of special merit I noticed during the year have already been mentioned in the story notes) there are a few others I feel should not be entirely passed by— most importantly, some new names from the 1965 magazines:
From Amazing and Fantastic—Stanley E. Aspiltle, Jr., John Douglas, Alfred Grossman, Judith E. Schrier.
From If—John McCallum, D. M. Melton, Laurence S. Todd.
From Analog—Michael Karageorge, Laurence A. Perkins.
From F&SF—John Thomas Richards.
There were also some stories of special interest by established authors, which did not, one way or another, get mentioned inside: Miriam Allen de Ford’s “The Expendables,” Chad Oliver’s “End of the Line,” Edgar Pangborn’s “Wogglebeast,” all from F&SF; William F. Temple’s “The Legend of Ernie Deacon” and James H. Schmitz’s “The Pork Chop Tree,” from Analog; Lloyd Biggie, Jr.’s “Pariah Planet” and Theodore L. Thomas’ “Manfire,” from Worlds of Tomorrow, Gerald Pearce’s “Security Syndrome,” from If, and Richard Wilson’s “Harry Protagonist, Brain-Drainer,” from Galax/; “Don’t Touch Me, I’m Sensitive,” by James Stamers, in Gamma; “The Casting Couch,” by Lewis Kovner, in Rogue; Florence Engel Randall’s “The Watchers,” in Harper’s; and stories from all over by Frank Herbert: “Committee of the Whole” (Galaxy), “The GM Effect” (Analog), “Greenslaves” (Amazing).
And there was Boris Vian’s “The Dead Fish,” outstanding among a collection of good stories in the anthology edited and translated by Damon Knight, 13 French Science Fiction Stories (Bantam).
Nor have I mentioned Cordwainer Smith’s Space Lords collection, memorable not only for the stories, but for the author’s instructive and revealing prologue, in which he explains, in part, just what it is that is different about Smith stories. Required reading for would-be s-f writers (and for many who already are)—as is Brian Aldiss’ long, thoughtful analysis of three British writers in SF Horizons No. 2.
And there are some other British writers, not all new-in-1965, but names still unfamiliar here, which I suspect will not be so for long: William Barclay, John Baxter, Daphne Castell, Robert Cheetham, Jael Cracken, John Hamilton, David Harvey, R. W. Mackleworth, Dikk Richardson, David Newton, Bob Parkinson, E. C. Williams.
* * * *
One way and another, I keep coming back to it. The important things happening in American s-f are not happening in it at all. We have writers comparable to Ballard in stature, for instance—but not in current achievement, and certainly not in influence within the field. Cordwainer Smith and Theodore Sturgeon have each published two new stories in the last eighteen months or so—and none of them close to the authors’ best work. Leiber has been productive: a Tarzan novelization, and thousands of words of magazine stories, some of them very good reading, all rather closer in period to Tarzan than to Leiber’s own work of a few years back (“Mariana,” “A Deskfui of Girls,” “The Secret Songs,” “The Silver Eggheads,” The Wanderer). Nothing at all from Alfred Bester for three years now, nor from Walter Miller for much, much longer. Kurt Vonnegut continues to do a novel every year or two that almost makes up for the rest of what’s missing—but he is not in the same sense a part of the field here at all; his impact on other American writers is almost more from “outside” than Ballard’s.
The novel generally acclaimed as the best American product last year was Frank Herbert’s Dune—a long, and in part excellent, but completely conventional future-historical, admirable essentially for its complexity rather than for any original or speculative contribution. Certainly there is nothing in it to stimulate or influence the work of others.
As it happens, the stimulus is being provided from outside—and not just from England. It is coming from exciting new work in psychology and the allied sciences; from the avant-gardistes and poets who have begun using the images and contexts of s-f with or without concern for the sources; and from the impact of the belated translation and publication of people like Borges and Jarry.
* * * *
It is interesting to speculate on what the difference in our thinking and writing might have been, if we had had Jarry as part of the s-f tradition, along with Verne and Wells. Jarry himself was reading these men as they wrote: Verne in his childhood. Wells in his prime. He responded to Wells (See “How to Construct a Time Machine” in the Selected Works), but also with Wells, to the scientific discoveries of the turn of the century. In a sense, he is Jules Verne’s left hand, as Wells might be the right.
But if we had had Jarry, would we have read him? From today’s vantage point, a hectic half century of scientific revolutions and upheavals later, Jarry’s responses are rather more in keeping with the direction of physics itself than were Wells’ marvelously sane and rational civilized adductions.
But how long have we been prepared to see this? Did we not have to work our way (with pleasure) through Gernsback and “scientifiction” to Campbell’s then-revolutionary 1938-1942 magazines, and then from E. E. Smith to Heinlein, Leiber, and Asimov—and again, to Boucher’s revolutionary notion that a science-fantasy magazine could be well-written—to Bester, Miller, Budrys, Cordwainer Smith—before we were ready for either Cat’s Cradle or “Terminal Beach?”
* * * *
Or if Borges had been translated as he wrote, if the eight stories in Ficciones (Fictions) had been available in 1941, instead of 1962 . . .
I remember vividly the excitement of discovering The Star Maker and Odd John in the early ‘40s; Stapledon opened tantalizing and terrifying vistas of probability for me. For others, it may have been C. S. Lewis, or M. P. Shiel, or E. R. Eddison; but there is no question that the impact of these powerful imaginative thinkers on
a whole generation of writers was one of the major forces that moved s-f out of the technocratic-primitivism of “scientifiction” to the sociological-sci-fi of the “great days” of Astounding and Unknown, and further, to the psychological/semantic/psychiatric science-fantasy of the early years of Galaxy and Fantasy and Science Fiction.
But that was as far as the impetus of that group of brilliant apologists of dualism could take us. The next step we had to reach—are only now reaching—essentially by bootstrap-climbing. So it seems cruelly ironic now to discover that our newest concepts, painfully evolved over a quarter century of speculative interchange from the combined traditions of magic and mathematics, physics and poetry, were already set down—in essays, stories, poems, allegories, sometimes unabashed plot outlines—before we were fairly started on the process, by one man drawing on the whole range of aesthetic/intellectual traditions that have since filtered through to us, from a dozen different sources.
Would we have arrived any sooner, or any saner, at the crossroads of communication where we now stand—where poet and pragmatist, scientist and surrealist, are equally frequently disconcerted to see themselves mirrored in each other’s eyes—would we have come to this gathering place, the converging of the many roads toward “reality” traveled by twentieth-century thought, any more readily for the guidance of one brilliant mind far ahead?
Or did we have to get this far ourselves before we could make out the meaning of the light? Did Borges’ work, and Jarry’s, simply have to wait for the rest of us to catch up? Perhaps we had to go the Zen route before we could contemplate the statement, “ ‘Pataphysics is the science ...” with equanimity (let alone delight), and wail for our learned Academies to convene Conferences on the nature of time before Borges’ “Tlon Uqbar, Tertius Orbis” became comprehensible?
Perhaps we did. Perhaps each cultural island—whether a nation, genre, discipline, or single man—must grow its own way through the stages of naive rationalism and hardware sophistication, before it can approach the recognition of the inalienable association between the concurrent-and-diverse “realities” of physics and metaphysics, mathematics and mysticism, psyche and soma, science and art.
Judith Merril
Milford, 1966
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* * * *
There is nothing I can say about this story that Mr. Tilley does not say better in it. There is nothing I can say about Tilley that he does not say more engagingly himself, in the note following his story.
* * * *
SOMETHING ELSE
ROBERT J. TILLEY
The equatorial region of the planet that the Cosmos Queen crashed on was liberally decorated with mountains, one of which it missed by a relative hairsbreadth before disintegrating noisily in a wide clearing that separated the forest from its stolid granite foot. The dust and wreckage took some time to settle, and it was several minutes after that that Dr. Sidney Williams, having surmised correctly that he was the sole survivor, emerged from the only section of the ship that had remained in one piece. He gazed forlornly at the alien landscape.
Locally, this consisted of multicolored and highly attractive flora, backed by a picturesquely purple range of hills. Dr. Williams shuddered, hastily turned his back, and rooted feverishly among the bits and pieces until he found the sub-wave transmitter, a tangle of wires and dented casing that even his inexperienced eye told him was out of order. He kicked it, yelped, then limped across to a seat that projected miraculously upright among the debris. Slumped on it, he glowered at the landscape again.
He mistrusted nature in the raw. His first experience of its treachery had included being stung by a wasp, blundering innocently into a bed of nettles and being chased by a cow. The result of this encounter, a supposed treat that had been provided by his parents when he was six years old, had been to instill a deep loathing of all things green and insect-ridden. Concrete, plastic and the metallic hubbub of urban existence formed his natural habitat, and he was unhappy away from it. The travelling necessitated by his lecturing chores was a nuisance, but he simply stuffed himself with tranquillizers and kept his eyes firmly closed most of the time between cities.
His undertaking of a tour of the Alphard system had been occasioned by sheer financial necessity. Unrelenting pressure from his wife for the benefits to be derived from a further step up the professional and social scale, coupled with the recent unearthing in Singapore of a reputedly complete collection of the prolific Fletcher Henderson band’s original 78-rpm recordings for which a mere cr. 5000 was being asked, had coincided with the offer from the Department of Cultural History (Colonial Division). Following reassurances that accidents were nowadays virtually unheard of and that unlimited sedation facilities were available, he signed the agreement with a shaking hand, packed his personal belongings and equipment and left.
The ship hadn’t even got halfway to its destination. Due to some virtually unheard of mechanical mishap, they had been forced back into normal space on the outskirts of a small and obscure planetary system, short of fuel and in dire need of emergency repairs. It had been decided that these could be tackled more effectively on the ground, an unfortunate choice in view of the resultant situation.
Dr. Williams got up and wandered about the wreckage, kicking bits out of the way as he went. He didn’t know whether to cut his throat then or wait until later, but in the meantime he didn’t want to sit looking at the surroundings any longer than he had to. They both depressed and terrified him. He could feel the ominous proximity of greenery and smell its undisguised, unfiltered presence, hear its gentle stirring and rustling at the perimeter of the clearing, see its fragmentary movement from the corner of his eye as he moved, head down, among the forlorn remains of the ship.
What did it conceal? Life? It had to, he supposed. What sort of life? Peaceful? Threatening? A timid, herbivorous creature that was shyly concealing itself, or a prowling, slavering carnivore that watched him leeringly from the green darkness, savoring his obvious defenselessness, waiting only until his fear was sweet enough in its nostrils and then emerging to take him in its claws (tentacles?), preparatory to rending and devouring him . . .
He swallowed, and looked around for something sharp. A mustard-colored, familiar shape caught his eye, protruding from beneath a crumpled section of paneling.
Dr. Williams croaked an ejaculation of relief, partially occasioned by the reorientation gained from finding something familiar and also because it appeared at first glance to be undamaged. He dropped to his knees and eased the paneling to one side, his mouth dry with excitement, crooning softly and trying to keep his hands steady.
The case itself was thick with dust, but intact. The contents, though—He swallowed again. He wasn’t worried overmuch about his clarinet, snugly cushioned on all sides in its special compartment, and it was doubtful that anything had happened to the spools themselves, but their playing apparatus was another matter. Although it was almost completely transistorized it inevitably contained a minimal number of moving parts, and despite their being made to withstand moderately rough handling they had recently been subjected to rather more than they could be reasonably expected to survive.
He unlocked the lid and opened it. Excellent insulation had ensured that the contents had remained firmly in place, but that in itself was no guarantee against havoc having been wreaked at any one of several vital points. He licked his lips, said a brief silent prayer, and eased the machine up and out of the box.
Nothing tinkled. He held his breath, and shook it by his ear, very gently. Still nothing. Dr. Williams placed it on the ground, and stared at it hopefully.
As far as he could tell without actually trying it, it was undamaged. Had he been a man of mechanical aptitude, Dr. Williams would no doubt have carried out at least a cursory inspection as a precautionary measure before switching it on, but he was not. All he knew about its workings was that it was mercifully battery operated and that it carried a two-year guarantee covering mechanical failure.<
br />
He wondered how many million miles away the nearest authorized repair agency was, and laughed, hysterically. If the machine was broken, it at least meant that further procrastination regarding his future would be quite pointless. Operative, it could at least save him from going insane as long as the batteries lasted (the case held several spares); also, it would almost certainly distract any marauding locals, if not exactly deter them. It was also possible, he was reluctantly forced to concede, that it would actually attract them, but that was a chance he would simply have to take. With the solace that he could derive from it, life would be tolerable for at least a brief while; without it, unthinkable.
With a fixed and slightly demented smile on his face, Dr. Williams picked out a spool at random, fitted it, and pressed the on button. There was a click, a faint whisper of irremovable surface wear from the original recording that he had always found an endearingly essential part of the performance, and Duke Ellington’s Ko Ko racketed into the stillness of the alien afternoon.
The Year's Best Science Fiction 11 - [Anthology] Page 35
