The Best of Science Fiction 12

Poloscki started drinking from my cup again as An and I started laughing all over.

As I walked back that night, black coffee slopped in my belly.

There are certain directions in which you cannot go. Choose one in which you can move as far as you want. Sandy said that? He did. But there was something about Sandy, very much like someone golden. It doesn't matter how, he's going on.

Under a street lamp I stopped and lifted up the ecologarium. The reproductive function, was it primary or adjunctive? If, I thought with the whisky lucidity always suspect at dawn, you consider the whole ecological balance a single organism, it's adjunctive, a vital reparative process along with sleeping and eating, to the primary process which is living, working, growing. I put the chain around my neck.

I was still half soused, and it felt bad. But I howled. Androcles, is drunken laughter appropriate to mourn all my dead children? Perhaps not. But tell me, Ratlit; tell me Alegra: what better way to launch my live ones who are golden into night? I don't know. I know I laughed. Then I put my fists into my overall pouch and crunched homeward along the Edge while on my left the world-wind roared.

Samuel R. Delaney is where it is at: multi-mediumed, trans-cultural, interracial, call it multiplicity

He has never really decided whether he is a mathematician, musician, or writer. On the record, writing has the edge: at twenty-six, he has published seven novels (the latest — The Einstein Intersection, Ace, 1967) and an eighth, Nova, is due out shortly from Doubleday. But he has also worked as a singer, guitarist, actor, producer for a recording studio, and — most recently — organised his own group . The Heavenly Breakfast (4 voices, 3 guitars, an incredible variety of flutes). When 'The Star-Pit' was dramatised on radio station WBAI last winter, he wrote the script, read the narration, helped score the music, and played apprentice audio engineer. He also cooks, and occasionally paints.

He has wandered through most of Europe, has a speaking acquaintance with at least five languages; he is married to his high-school girl friend, the poet and co-editor of City, Marilyn Hacker, and they live anywhere: London, San Francisco, Greece, the East Village — well, mostly New York. He can look natural in a tux, but prefers one earring and a psychedelic red weskit.

He is unique, of course, but not as unique as you may think. You could pose him for a composite portrait of The Artist as a Young Folkrock Graduate, circa 1970. Of course, he had a headstart: dropped out of upper-middle-class Harlem (before teenyboppers were invented) and was given a scholarship to the Breadloaf Writers' Conference at seventeen for his first novel, written while majoring in math at the Bronx High School of Science. So actually, he's just a bit ahead of where it is otherwise at: approximately where the kids you worry about today will be tomorrow.

Tuli Kupferberg is a Fug. If you haven't heard him, you've probably seen him, and if you haven't seen or heard him, you've read his messages on lapel buttons. He is the proprietor of Birth Press (a mimeograph), publishing Yeah!, Birth, and anything else as the spirit moves him; author of One Thousand and One Ways to Beat the Draft (Grove, 1968), and other self-help books; inventor of the erectarine, a 'vertical tambourine'. He is one of the moving spirits behind the East Village Other, and a frequent contributor. In the Fugs, he plays rhythm instruments, writes songs, sings, and does pantomime. 'Kill, Kill, Kill for Peace' is one of his tunes; at forty-three, he claims to be 'the oldest rock 'n' roll star in America', and probably is.

There was once an atom bomb who wanted to be a bullet.

"Why," said his fellow atom bombs, "when you can be a great A-bomb, do you want to be a little bullet ?"

"I miss," said the bomb, sighing, "the personal touch."

The first SF Annual, in 1956, was called The Year's Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy; that title stayed on the paperback (it was a Dell Original) for four years, although the simultaneous hardcover edition published by Gnome Press switched to just SF:1957 with the second volume. In 1960, the book became a hardcover original, published by Simon & Schuster, and the title changed to The Fifth (and etc.) Annual of the Year's Best SF. When Dell inaugurated its own hard-back line, Delacorte Press, the book went back home, so to speak: that was the 10th Annual.

The first ten Annuals all concluded with a Summation of the year in science fiction and — increasingly — speculative writing generally, and with a listing of Honourable Mention stories. The Honourable Mentions were dropped from the 11th Annual, for the same reasons — already extensively explained here — that the title was changed this year to read simply SF 12. It would be as absurd, at this point, to attempt to 'sum up' what has happened in speculative writing since the last volume as it would have been to call this collection either an 'Anthology of Science Fiction' or 'The Year's Best' of — well, what?

It should be clearly understood, then, that what follows does not represent any comprehensive culling of work published in or out of any special category during any particular calendar period. It is simply that there were things I read or saw which I meant to mention in the course of the book, and never did.

For instance, there should have been a spot somewhere to chuckle over Giles Goat-Boy, or to mention John Barth's thoughtful and effective article 'The Literature of Exhaustion', in Atlantic. And I wanted to find space to discuss at least briefly the flood of critical volumes on s-f over the past two years: H. Bruce Franklin's Future Perfect, I . F. Clarke's Voices Prophesying War, and Mark Hillegas' The Future as Nightmare, all from Oxford University Press; Advent's reissue of an expanded version of Damon Knight's In Search of Wonder ; C.S. Lewis' posthumous collection of papers . Of Other Worlds (Harcourt); and a whole range of books of varying merit on Cabell, E. R. Burroughs, E. E. Smith, and others — right down to Sam Moskowitz's Six-Foot Shelf of Plodding Prose in Praise of 1950.

Somehow, I never got around to saying anything about Jean-Claude Forest's contribution to the Space Scene — Barbarella (Grove; and — chuckles — now banned in Paris!); or Gahan Wilson's first hardcover cartoon collection, The Man in the Cannibal Pot (Doubleday). And then there is Witzend, the new Thinking Man's Comic Book, whose only real competition appears in Grump (items like 'Stan Mack's 5th Dimension' and 'The Urban World of Donald Silverstein').

Possibly by the time SF 13 comes out (on a Friday, one trusts) I will be able to do more than just mention artists like Esher, Paolozzi, and Colin Self And there's a whole stack of clippings and jottings on 'psychedelic art', posters and buttons and the 'underground press'. And I never did squeeze in any mention of La Jetée, or the incredible experience of Ed Emshwiller's Relativity, or the sad bust of Fahrenheit 451; but I can at least note here that Ballantine has done a fine paperback from Juliet of the Spirits, with the original script, a transcript of the final scenario, and a fascinating interview with Fellini.

I wanted to make special mention of the quality — and quantity — of speculative/fabulative fiction in Transatlantic Review; and (second place, but way up) in Cavalier. And I should note here, for readers really upset about the changes in this book, that there are now three field-wide science-fiction 'Bests' each year — the Carr-Wollheim World's Best Science Fiction (Ace), SFWA's Nebula (Doubleday), and a new annual coming from Putnam edited by Harry Harrison — in addition to the yearly collections published by each of the magazines.