Judith Merril: The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy

One thing’s sure about science-fiction: there’s too much of it.

A leading editor in the field announces that the boom days are over, but the yearly amount of the stuff that still gets into print is pretty staggering.

My advice to any but the most bug-eyed addict would be to abstain from the novels. “S.F.” is often at its aching worst in “book-length” versions. Good novels (Heinlein’s “Puppet Masters,” for instance) are about as rare as ambergris and a lot harder to identify. My wife, who loathes everything remotely galactic, who alternately yawns and shudders at the prospect of journeying in either time or outer space, and herself travels almost exclusively by train, went shopping with a publisher—a friend of ours who claims to be an “S.F.” expert—and presented me on Christmas with an eight-foot shelf of this season’s crop of the novels. Ploughing through the bulk of this brightly-jacketed little library only confirmed a previous opinion: one of the oddest aspects of this whole publishing phenomenon is that there still seems to be more outright claptrap between hard covers than soft, and that the short stories come off much better than the long ones.

Why? Well, I guess these tales are, after all, our modern fables and it’s certain that the fable as a form generally succeeds when not too extended.

If there remains such a thing as a novice reader in this literature, my suggestion would be for him to begin with the magazines until he knows a few authors, and to steer clear of the bookstores. Against this, of course, our theoretical novice might happen on a poorish issue of whatever monthly he sampled first. An anthology is probably best for a beginning, and I don’t think he could do better than with this one.

For the real aficionado— he’ll be relieved to find that he has nothing familiar from other collections to skip—I reckon he’ll find most of his favorite authors, and these at the top of their form. The range is interestingly wide—from that convincing gadgetry dear to many of the fans, to the wildest and freest sort of nonsense. In this last area I join the enthusiasts. It’s by bringing pure fantasy into currency that science-fiction makes its real and very healthy contribution to our popular literature, at least for my money.

I’m going to try to persuade my wife to read this book. There’s a good hope that a first-rate sampler such as this may convert even her. If “S.F.—The Year’s Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy” doesn’t sell her on our twentieth-century fairy tales, she’ll just have to stick with the Grimm brothers.

The stories in this book, says Mr. Orson Welles, are fables of our time. I think this is a good way to describe them since, like older fables, science-fantasy makes use of the imaginative background and unusual circumstance to add emotional urgency and dramatic power to what are basically problems in philosophy and morality.

Unlike Aesop, the writers of these stories seldom conclude with a clear-cut moral. In a century whose most impressive accomplishments (atom bombs, orlon, rockets, radar, cancer cures, what-have-you-?) are built upon “scientific” concepts with such names as relativity and the uncertainty principle, the inquiring artist does well merely to formulate a coherent question.

The questions you will find most often put in here might be compressed in one composite query:—

How can we learn to live at peace with ourselves and with each other in the complexities of the world we are rebuilding with our new machines?

Fortunately, the stories are not so compressed. A good story must inevitably be unique and individual as the man or woman who wrote it. Unfortunately, if it’s answers that you want, you will not find them here—except occasionally, prefaced with what if?, I wonder , or supposing that . . .

The serious-minded reader will also have to forgive our authors if they resort to the frivolities of space-ships and flying bath-mats, robots and talking rats, to make their points. Even in s-f, a writer is only secondarily a philosopher; his first big job is entertainment.. . and that hasn’t changed since Aesop’s time at all.

-J.M.

Right now, today, we can—and do—build machines that can think logically better and faster than we can. Others in our growing arsenal of tools can hear better, see farther, hit harder, last longer, remember more accurately. We have not yet built anything to live livelier, feel more strongly, or dream at all. We have not learned how to make a soul—yet.

“The Stutterer”—a first story, by the way, written by a Los Angeles physician—presents the problems (and tough ones they are) of an android, an artificial man, built to be as much as possible exactly like a human being—with just two very important differences. He is not fertile; he is indestructible.

Out of the twenty only one managed to escape the planet. And he did it very simply, merely by walking up to the crowded ticket window at one of the rocket ports and buying passage to Earth. His Army identification papers passed the harassed inspection of the agent, and he gratefully and silently pocketed the small plastic stub that was handed him in exchange for his money.

He picked his way with infinite care through the hordes of ex-soldiers clamoring for passage back to the multitudinous planets from which they had come. Then he slowly climbed the heavy ramp into the waiting rocket.

He saw with relief that the seats were strongly constructed, built to survive the pressure of many gravities, and he chose one as far removed as possible from the other passengers.

He was still very apprehensive, and, as he waited for the rocket to take off, he tried hard to remember the principles of the pulse drive that powered the ship, and whether his additional weight would upset its efficiency enough to awaken suspicion.

The seats filled quickly with excited hurrying passengers. Soon he heard the great door clang shut, and saw the red light flicker on, warning of the take-off. He felt a slow surge of pressure as the ship arose from the ground, and his chair creaked ominously with the extra weight. He became fearful that it might collapse, and he strained forward trying to shift some of the pressure through his feet to the floor. He sat that way, tense and immobile, for what seemed a long time until abruptly the strain was relieved and he heard the rising and falling whine of the rockets that told him the ship was in pulse drive, flickering back and forth across the speed of light.

He realized that the pilots had not discovered his extra weight, and that the initial hazards were over. The important thing was to look like a passenger, a returning soldier like the others, so that no one would notice him and remember his presence.

His fellow travelers were by this time chatting with one another, some playing cards, and others watching the tele-depth screens. These were the adventurers who had flocked from all corners of the galaxy to fight in the first national war in centuries. They were the uncivilized few who had read about battle and armed struggle in their history books and found the old stories exciting.

They paid no attention to their silent companion who sat quietly looking through the quartz windows at the diamond-bright stars, tacked against the blackness of infinity.

The fugitive scarcely moved the entire time of the passage. Finally when Earth hung out in the sky like a blue balloon, the ship cut its pulsations and swung around for a tail landing.