The Year's Best Science Fiction 9

The increasing pressures for conformity and homogeneity in today’s culture are unfortunately not limited to suburban housing developments, clothing styles, or automobile shapes; nor even to the more rigid areas of religion, politics, and education. They work on science, art, and philosophy as well.

These pressures are not new. In the past they have operated against rationalism and scientific inquiry, even as today they inveigh against what institutionalized science finds irrational. At the height of the Inquisition, Johannes Kepler could publish his theories only as science fiction in Journeys to the Moon. In our present-day commonsensical philosophic atmosphere, imaginative literature still gives scope to inquiry in those areas of human experience not recognized by any currently sanctified systems of classification. When the vast body of phenomena now stigmatized by association with “magic” and “mysticism” are finally incorporated into a more inclusive view of nature and cosmology, some of the credit, one hopes, will go to the free-wheeling thinkers who are now busily prying the lid off Pandora’s psi box, and to the magazines and editors who are providing the outlet for “crackpot” ideas.

This is perhaps the place to record my deep sense of loss—both personal and literary—at the death of Mark Clifton, in the fall of 1963. The first Clifton story, “What Have I Done?” appeared in Astounding (forerunner of Analog) in May, 1952, and shortly afterward in my anthology, Beyond Human Ken. Our first exchange of business letters turned quickly to a voluminous and stimulating correspondence which continued, with only occasional breaks, until his final illness. His active career in science fiction was short; there were five or six years during which his work appeared regularly; after that, only occasional short stories and one recent novel.

When he started writing, Mark had already retired as a semi-invalid from a long and successful career in personnel work and industrial relations. He was fascinated by people; he knew people; he cared about people. He wrote about them, when he had to slop working directly with them. He was passionately concerned with the necessity for integrating the humanist and scientific viewpoints in our time; tirelessly curious about everything people do, and why and how; often frighteningly dear-eyed in his insights.

I do not know whether it was Mark, or John Campbell, who coined the word psionics, but it had its first currency during “the Clifton period” in Astounding. He broke ground for a dozen new roads of thought that are still being traveled, explored, exploited, by writers today—roads leading to greater comprehension of human behavior, and in particular to those “crackpot” areas of the psi functions.

His work was sometimes too crude in style for my taste, although he could, and occasionally did (as with that first story), write with elegance; he was usually concerned only with speaking clearly and loudly. He knew from the first that even in science fiction there would be a large and unmovable block of readers, editors, and other writers who would shudder fastidiously at his “crackpot” thinking.

I tried to convince him that he could woo many of them with more attention to style. He did not care. He had a lot to say, and he always knew he did not have time enough. He was tired when he started. But he wanted to get everything he had learned, and everything he had learned to wonder about, down on paper for the young minds, the fresh minds, the readers whose thinking had not yet set into molds.

I know he died dissatisfied; it was not in Mark to be satisfied; there was always something more. But as I read the work of the new young writers, I know how much more he accomplished than he would ever have believed.

Two other writers of special interest, to this field died last year, but both were essentially “mainstream” writers, and have received their literary funeral orations elsewhere.

William Lindsay Gresham will be best remembered for his vivid novel of carnival life. Nightmare Alley, but he was also the author of some first-rate science fantasy.

C. S. Lewis was eulogized—among other places—in Edmund Fuller’s regular column in the Sunday Times Book Review, and Mr. Fuller took the occasion to discuss imaginative literature in general: “Good fantasy is not escapist in the pejorative sense of the word. It may offer temporary refuge and relief from the pressure of the immediate world, but at the same time we are given new perceptions of our actual lives. ... Fantasy is an art of equivalents,” and, he concluded, “opens to writers the added dimensions needed to grapple with immense, awesome realities in our potentially apocalyptic age.”

Few mainstream critics approach a work of fantasy or science fiction with this much sympathy. Among the more memorable of last year’s s-f books was A Sense of Reality, a collection of four of Graham Greene’s novelettes, each of which attempted to explore, through the unreal, the nature of “reality.” Two of these I feel were excellent (I should have liked to have included “A Discovery in the Woods” in this volume). Granville Hicks, reviewing the book for the Saturday Review, seemed to like all the stories, but found the main significance in Greene’s love for paradox, which “is the point of the title.” And Kingsley Amis (also in SR) seemed to believe that André Maurois, in “The Earth Dwellers,” was writing a fable designed to convert followers of Fabre away from belief in ant-instinct.

Meantime, the critics and the editors of quality fiction magazines have joyously discovered Slawomir Mrozek, the Polish satirist, whose short sharp fables (and these are fables) generally fall just short of fantasy, but well within the range of speculative or imaginative literature. Perhaps that elusive line between the genres of s-f and mainstream is related to the critics’ enjoyment of the Mrozek fables as specific criticisms of Communism. The fables are barbed and excellent. They are true satires on mankind, with special reference to his political-social organizations. Most of them, with no more than some change in nomenclature and occasionally in minor procedures, could be aimed as pointedly at American customs. But in that case, would Mademoiselle and Playboy enjoy them as much?

I mentioned a story of Graham Greene’s which would have been included here, had it been possible. There are always a few such disappointments in compiling an anthology. It may be due to the growing respectability of the field, or to the increasing number of mainstream entries, or both—but there seem to be more such problems each year. Some of these are due to previous exclusive reprint commitments. Others are budget problems: many anthologies proportion their funds to allow for larger payments to “name” authors) I prefer not to.

These dropouts are, of course, listed in the Honorable Mentions, together with stories that were too long, or for other reasons not quite right for the book. But there are two stories I should like to mention here, if only because both are the work of comparatively new writers of unusual ability. These were Roger Zelazny’s extraordinarily thoughtful and lender “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” and Rick Raphael’s very funny, very human “Sonny.”

There were two other dropouts not listed at all because I do not feel that my coverage of poetry is wide enough for me to name individual items as “The Best.” I use—or try to use—what I happen to see that I like. This time I was unable to secure rights to some poems from John Updike’s new collection. Telephone Poles, and to excerpts from Harry Martinson’s Aniara (both published by Knopf, 1963).