The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

I have been conscious for some years of the gradual merging of SF with the “mainstream.” The trend is dramatically noticeable this year; but my own big discovery in the work on this Annual was the extent to which SF and the avant-garde had already merged, and begun to overlap.

For some time, Reginald Bretnor and David Bunch had been murmuring about the reviews and quarterlies and “little magazines”; they still seemed unlikely sources to me, until Carol Emshwiller called my attention to the Redgrove story in Paris Review last year.

About the same time, James Ballard wrote me the first of several angry letters of praise for William Burroughs. During the year, I had occasion to review Burroughs’ strange, brilliant surreal-science-fantastic Nova Express, and found myself impressed and fascinated by a book whose confusing (and perhaps pretentious) style might otherwise have prevented me from reading it at all. Meanwhile, Short Story International had begun demonstrating, with reprints, that the magazines I had thought of as “anti-story” were not necessarily to be so considered.

There were the letters from Redgrove, and more from Ballard and Bunch. And somewhere in there, I met Seymour Krim, then editor of Nugget (and of the Leets,, an anthology of same), who set about undercutting my preconceptions mercilessly.

My sincere thanks to all these people. The fruits of the explorations I was led to are just beginning to show in this Annual; meanwhile, it is most hopeful to have become aware of the extent to which the experimentalists in style and the explorers in ideas have begun to identify with each other.

Robert Wallace is neither SF-er, avant-garde-ist, foreign-born, student, teacher, nor—exactly—newsman. He is a staff writer for Life magazine, which I feel completes the spectrum almost unbelievably well.