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

It was John Campbell’s magazine to which the title of the SEP’s “Unbelievable but True” piece applied, and the article seemed to have been stimulated primarily by Campbell’s crusading articles and editorials for investigation of the Dean Drive.

The “Dean Drive” is an invention of a Washington, D. C., mortgage expert named Norman Dean: a device to convert rotary motion into unidirectional motion, extremely suitable for a space drive (among thousands of other applications) because it somehow appears to get around Newton’s law about action and reaction. All the energy goes into the push—none into push-back.

Mr. Dean had patented his device privately, after failing for several years to interest the U. S. Government in an engine which obviously could not work—because Newton said so. Mr. Campbell publicized the invention to the point where his last editorial on the matter ironically stated, “... Dean’s device is now being thoroughly and adequately investigated by competent scientists and engineers.... We cannot continue to follow the work; much of it is going to duck rapidly behind closed doors; some of it definitely has already____” He goes on to point out once more, emphatically, that his crusade was not for attention to the particular device, but for a new kind of approach to invention and research—for, essentially, the application of the open speculative mind to all of science and engineering.

The “Dean Drive crusade” will, I believe, rebound even more to Campbell’s honor as time goes on. But if the drive itself should fail to prove out, his basic fight for attention to new and different ideas on the part of established science will have been more than worthwhile by itself.

One other item not mentioned in either of the Honorable Mention lists to follow is the continuing emergence of verse in s-f. In addition to the irrepressible Hilbert Schenck, there were notable contributions last year by Randall Garrett, Joseph Hansen, Alan Lindsey, and Rosser Reeves.

With more and more science fantasy appearing in full-length novels rather than magazine short stories, I have felt for the last two years that this book should offer a more complete and authoritative report on the new books than I could hope to do myself. Starting with this volume, that report will be handled by Anthony Boucher. But outside the realm of s-f itself there are a few new books I think may be of special interest to readers in this field. These include—

Doubleday’s new series of Tutor Books: a completely new approach to self-teaching textbooks. “The Arithmetic of Computers” taught me the fundamentals of the octal and binary systems in about four fascinated hours. (Others are on algebra, trigonometry, electronics, and bridge.)

“The World Is My Country” (Putnam, 1961), is World Citizen Garry Davis’s autobiographical account of ten years of living out his own private political science-fiction farce-satire-adventure.

Finally, I should like to express my considerable gratitude to those who assisted in compiling this volume—most notably James Blish and Merril Zissman, who revised and copied the music for the songs; Ann Pohl, who did most of the cataloging; and Barbara Norville, Oriole Kingston, Mae Sugrue, and Bob Bone, for a marvellous assortment of miscellany.

As in 1959, science-fiction books were numerous and largely negligible. Not counting reprints, there appeared close to a hundred new titles—equaling last year’s total and surpassing any previous year. Close to half of these came from two second-string publishers, desperately committed to monthly schedules that make tasteful selectivity impossible. Most of the rest were paperback originals; s-f in hard covers has dwindled almost to the vanishing point.

The saddest phenomenon was the lack of distinction between the weary work of hacks published to fill out a schedule and the almost equally weary efforts of some of the biggest Names in s-f. In better times, you would expect the bylines of Brian W. Aldiss, Algis Budrys, Mark Clifton, L. Sprague de Camp, Philip K. Dick, Gordon R. Dickson, Andre Norton, Chad Oliver, Robert Sheckley and Wilson Tucker to mean an all-star imperative-reading list. They all published new novels in 1960; and the novels ranged from just adequately publishable to plain embarrassing. Even the coruscant Theodore Sturgeon produced (in Venus Plus X ) an entertainingly controversial essay which failed as a novel. For the first time in 15 years there was no novel, adult or juvenile, from Robert A. Heinlein.

But though a reviewer finds it constantly more difficult to force himself to open a new s-f novel, his conscientious effort is occasionally rewarded. Judith Merril ( The Tomorrow People), Frederik Pohl ( Drunkards Walk) and Richard Wilson {And Then the Town Took Off) demonstrated that it is still possible to write long s-f with some originality of concept, some intelligence and grace in the treatment; and the year did produce two permanently memorable novels, to stand in the company of the best of the past.

Poul Anderson’s The High Crusade, which describes the conquest of the galaxy by earthmen in 1346 a.d., is as delightful as a good British film—outrageous, yet seductively plausible. Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s, A Canticle for Leibowitz is a major work of modern imaginative fiction: a future history of Roman Catholicism from the 26th to the 38th Centuries which is so deeply sensitive, so emotionally powerful as to have meaning for the most irreligious.

One can complain no longer of the sexlessness of s-f after 1960’s rash of novels which attempted to combine prognostication and pornography, and achieved only boredom—excepting when written by Philip Jose Farmer. Mr. Farmer’s Flesh, in particular, is astonishing: the most pria-pic book I have ever reviewed, in any genre, but quite legitimately so, using its picture of a hypersexed future to explore (and fascinatingly) some of the basic symbols of Jung and Frazer.

Lowest publisher’s trick of the year: the labeling of the third book appearance of a poor van Vogt novella as “first book publication.” I thought there was a law....

The situation was more gratifying to the reader in the field of the s-f short story. There were satisfactory one-author collections by Heinlein, Pohl, Sheckley and Sturgeon, and distinguished ones by Aldiss ( Galaxies like Grains of Sand), Anderson (Guardians of Time), Merril (Out of Bounds) and Clifford Simak (The Worlds of Clifford Simak). And again Philip Jose Farmer was astonishing; his Strange Relations goes on the permanent list of important collections—creative and stimulating s-f (in the fullest sense) which suggests that such relation-words as “father” or “sister” have an archetypal meaning quite aside from the accidents of our improbable reproductive system.

The year’s outstanding anthologies were two in which editors surveyed the histories of their publications and came up with admirable and brightly varied stories’. Robert P. Mills’s A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Frederik Pohl’s Star of Stars. Groff Conklin resumed, (huzzah!) steady anthologization with 13 Great Stories of Science Fiction and Six Great Short Science Fiction Novels; and the Council of Four (Denver branch of the Baker Street Irregulars) produced the attractively unique The Science-Fictional Sherlock Holmes.

Highly welcome was the publication in America of the three British Broadcasting Corporation TV-plays by Nigel Kneale (The Quatermass Experiment, Quatermass II and Quatermass and the Pit) . which demonstrate, in a manner unknown to American TV and films, that mass-appeal s-f can still be literate and intelligently exciting.