The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

And then there was the issue of the Sunday Times containing two separate pieces headlined, “Life on Mars?”

Sullivan’s article on the science page reported on recommendations made to the National Academy of Sciences by a meeting of distinguished scientists who declared, “We believe it entirely reasonable that Mars is inhabited with living organisms” and urged a program to land “an automated biological laboratory” on Mars in 1971 or 1973.

The piece on the editorial page said stiffly: “The biological exploration of Mars will not be cheap, and available funds for scientific research and development are limited.”

If I had any lingering doubts, they are gone. It is actually happening: the cosmonaut space-acrobatics and the Gemini launching programs are not simply part of a global drama of prestige and influence conflicts. We are actually on our way. In another year or two, someone will set foot (or spaceboot) on the moon’s surface for the first time. I know it is so now, because the Times is seriously disturbed about the cost of exploring for life on Mars.

Science has caught up with science fiction. We have gone too far with the hardware and techniques of space travel to leave much of a field for inventive imagination to work in. We have not yet gone far enough into space itself to acquire the new knowledge that will generate a whole new phase of speculative science and fiction.

Meantime, science fiction is leaping ahead of science, on today’s frontiers. The exciting new work is not in rocketry but in biochemistry, in behavioral psychology, in parapsychology, in anthropology and information theory and communications. And in a backwards way, this is bringing back the space story, but a different kind of space story.