The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

Communication—its importance, its modes, its failures, its variety of meanings—has been a major theme throughout this volume. Except for a literal handful of stories, every selection here is vitally concerned either with a problem resulting from inadequate communication—a puzzle involving some means of communication—the result of an experiment with communication—or the uses and usages of those areas of modern living which we call “Communications.”

The last two selections have focused on the potentialities of man for immediate, direct contact with (and influence over) the physical environment. “The Red Egg” reverses the field, and examines the capacity for perception and (in a slightly different sense) communication by the (biological, this time) environment.

José Maria Gironella is a Spanish author best known for his trilogy about the Spanish Civil War, The Cypresses Believe in God. This story is from a collection of short works, subtitled Journeys to the Improbable, in which the author recorded a period of what he called “psychic experience”—hallucinations, weird images and insights, obsessive imaginings, which haunted him for two years.