The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

Rick Raphael is another newsman: like Baker, working in Washington; like Reed, a comparative newcomer to SF; like Wilson, clinging to his label, although he is now a senatorial press secretary.

Like Wilson again—or Simak—Raphael is the true-hybrid breed of news-SF man, deriving his fiction largely from the other side(s) of his double (or triple) life. (Covered AEC and rocket tests at Los Alamos and White Sands for seven years; the Nuclear Reactor Testing Station in Idaho for five; member of the National Association of Science Writers; now handles science-oriented legislative projects for his senator.) “The Thirst Quenchers,” title story of his first book (Gollancz, 1965), was the bastard brother of a documentary film on water problems which won a National Radio and Television News Directors’ Award for Boise Station KBOI and writer-director Raphael; both pieces came out of “six years of riding snow cats, and plodding ungracefully on skis and snowshoes in the company of the Columbia Basin Snow Survey supervisor, learning and reporting the vital mechanics and sciences of his art.” His first novel, Code Three, about the highways of the future, will be published this spring by Simon and Schuster.

“Sonny” (which has also been reprinted in Analog III) is a different kind of story—I think. It is true, however, that Raphael put in eleven years as an Army career man (coast artillery private to armored division infantry officer, via the paratroops, cryptography, a bit of interpreting, and World War II). I have no reliable information about his background in ESP.