The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

Neither Stephen Becker nor John D. MacDonald need any introduction to the general bookbuyer. So far as I know, the Encyclopaedia entries here are Becker’s only venture into SF. Mac-Donald is an old hand in the field: some of his short stories from the SF magazines of ten or more years ago are still vivid in my memory. (One of the best, “A Child Is Crying,” has recently been re-reprinted in Damon Knight’s Paperback Library anthology, The Shape of Things. Also, if you missed it when it came out, Gold Medal has just reissued the 1962 science-fantasy-sex-suspense novel, The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything.)

As it happens, “Joe Lee” is a departure for MacDonald. It is not science fiction—unless you use the label in the Bradbury sense:

“Q. Are you attracted to science fiction because in a sense you are setting up your own standards, your own world, peopled by creatures of your imagination?

“A. . . . Science has raped as well as lovingly seeded our land. We are the natural children of that seeding and that ungentle rape. This is a science-fictional time. ... I am attracted, therefore, to my time, not to science fiction per se, but rather to the fantastic mechanistic elements that explode, implode, and drive the machineries of our existence. Science fiction in these circumstances is simple exhalation after decades of breathing in.”—from an interview in Show, Dec., 1964.