The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

“Are you a moralist?”

In the same Show magazine interview quoted earlier (and well worth reading in its entirety if you can get hold of a back issue), Ray Bradbury answered this question with:

“I think I am, above everything, for the question of morality arises again and again with each machine that we create. . . . While machines are amoral, sometimes the very manner of their construction, and the power locked into their frame, inspires man to lunacy, idiocy, or evil. Some of the greatest liberals of our time are illiberal and demonic in a car. Some of the greatest conservatives become radical destructionists when they step on the starter and rampage off after murder. I once asked a class in design at the Art Center in Los Angeles to design a car that would cause men not to prove their masculinity every time they slung themselves into the bucket seat. ...”

I thought—indeed, I knew—no one could write another freeway satire I would want to read, let alone reread, or reprint. One of the differences may be that the author had not read any of the others: or so at least, his brief biographical note suggests. A professional musician, James Houston has been writing for eight years, publishing stories and poems in literary magazines and men’s magazines in this country and in England. An essay on California appeared in a recent issue of Holiday; his first book, The Sport of Hawaiian Kings, a history of surf-riding in the Pacific, was published this year by Tuttle.