The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

During 1964 the young rebels of America found themselves a spokesman.- a skinny, tangle-haired, booted and suede-jacketed, whiney-voiced, snarling young troubador named Bob Dylan.

For those less than totally familiar with the diction of the “country and Western” singers, Dylan’s records are close to incomprehensible at first hearing. They are well worth a second. Dylan has not just something, but a great deal to say; and he says it vigorously, poetically, effectively, colloquially. He is alternately angry, sad, threatening, angry, cajoling, nostalgic, and angry. His anger is diffused: the youths who gathered their forces for the mass protests of early 1965 (the inanity of Berkeley—the dignity of Selma—the controversy of the Vietnam picketing in Washington) are people who dig Dylan—as do I.

There’s one song, “Talking World War Three Blues,” that starts (as near as I can make out) “One time ago crazy dream came t’me— I dreamed I was walkin’ in World War Three.” He walks up and down the lonesome town—lights a cigarette on a parking meter, tries to break into a shelter, steals a Cadillac, and sees one other man—who runs away. “Thought I was a communist.”

He tells his dream to a psychiatrist who, it seems, has had the same dream—except that he was the only one left in his version. And then it turns out, “everybody’s havin’ these dreams,” says Dylan. “I’ll let you be in my dream, if you’ll let me be in yours.”