Judith Merril - The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

Locking herself into thought disciplines, Dandi began to dissolve. Man had needed machines to help him to do it, to fit into the Involutes. She was a lesser animal: she could unbutton herself into the humbler shape of a musicolumn. It was just a matter of rearranging— and without pain she formed into a pattern that was not a shaggy megatherium body ... but an indigo column, hardly visible. . . .

Lass for a long while cropped thistle and cacti. Then she ambled forward to seek the hairy creature she fondly—and a little condescendingly—regarded as her equal. But of the sloth there was no sign.

Almost the only landmark was a faint violet-blue dye in the air. As the baluchitherium mare approached, a sweet old music grew in volume from the dye. It was a music almost as old as the landscape itself and certainly as much travelled, a tune once known to men as The Old Hundredth. And there were voices singing: ‘All creatures that on Earth do dwell. . . .’

Whether or not s-f did (before Punch-parodies) lack humor, it is certainly true that its best boffs have seldom seen print. (Or I should have said, type,) Fan magazines are usually mimeographed, and only the official programs of the annual fan conventions are ordinarily transcribed.

These Labor Day weekends are virtually Impossible to describe (without, at least, technicolor). But for spontaneous humor, song, skit, verse, quick-trigger emceeing, and sufficiency of the bon (mot or vivant), they would be hard to equal. In their songs, particularly—whether at national, international, or purely neighborly gatherings—s-f-ers in general antedated the recent return to roll-your-own, home-made music. Oddly, the music-story did not appear until recently, but s-f music (both in parody and in original) has been on-scene (behind the scenes) for years.

Herewith, a distinctive part of the tradition of the special world inside Science Fiction....

Words by Theodore R. Cogswell—Music: “John Henry” variation

Words and music by Theodore R. Cogswell

by Gordon R. Dickson—Music by Gordon R. Dickson

In August, 1957, I doubt there were a hundred men and women alive who rationally expected to see a man land on the Moon in their own lifetimes. There were, I should say, a couple of thousand, out of Earth’s billions, who honestly believed such a development to be technologically possible, or historically plausible. By January of 1958, the swiftest intellectual revolution in history had occurred. But even then, our best hopes were slower than our best performance.

Dr. I. M. Levitt, director of the famous Fels Planetarium, was one of the few men already accustomed to thinking in terms of the challenge of space. Shortly after Sputnik, in an article in The New York Times, he predicted a manned rocket into space by 1968; a station in space by 1980; and a manned trip to the Moon about the year 2000.

Look magazine, in a “Space Timetable” at the start of 1958, did not anticipate the first manned satellite till between 1970 and 1980 (on the basis of pooled scientific opinions); but lowered Dr. Levitt’s estimate for the Moon trip, placing it “in the last decade of this century.”

G. Harry Stine, a rocket engineer who had been working at While Sands until S (for Sputnik)-Day, when he voiced his opinion of the U.S. space program (“Fat, dumb, and happy,” was part of it), was rather more optimistic. He said 1967 for a man in orbit, 1970 for a manned space station.

Two years later—January, 1960—Look magazine printed a new timetable, agreeing with Stine’s old guess on the space station, but making him look like a stodgy conservative otherwise: men in orbit by the end of 1961, they said, and the first man to the Moon between 1967 and 1969. But they also said 1963 for the Echo satellite which was launched eight months after the article appeared; and they figured the Soviet Venus probe (January, 1961) for early 1962. Once again these estimates were derived from a composite of best-informed sources.