The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

I know very little about Roger Zelazny, because he claims to get amnesia when asked to write about himself. Among the few things I do know are that he can fill a page with fine, funny copy describing a writer having amnesia when asked, etc.; that he fairly recently acquired a Master’s degree at Columbia in some particularly esoteric field of literature; and that he is an (or perhaps the) outstanding example of the influx of literate young writers into the SF field during the last three or four years.

Perhaps it would be even more valid to say that Zelazny— and Ballard, who follows here—are the kind of writers working in and out of SF, who are making the idea of a separate “field” disappear.

Writers outside SF have begun to discover the uses of extrapolative and speculative writing. Inside SF the best people—like Zelazny, like Ballard—are reaching toward poetry, metaphysics, religion, psychiatry, symbolism, and myth as systems through which to explore the nature of man; and reaching, too, for the new techniques of expression being explored in the experimental and avant-garde fringes of the “mainstream.”

James Ballard has, I think, been more successful in this effort than anyone else writing “inside SF” today—comparable perhaps to Jorge Luis Borges on the “outside.” Ballard says of this story:

“ “Terminal Beach’ represents the most extreme expression to date of what I have called ‘ inner space’—that area where the outer world of reality and the inner world of the psyche meet and fuse. Only in this area can one find the true subject matter for a mature science fiction.”