The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

INTRODUCTION

I generally skip introductions myself—at least until after I read the book. But I hope you’re reading this one, because you may be disappointed otherwise.

This is not a collection of science-fiction stories.

It does have some science fiction in it—I think. (It gets a little more difficult each year to decide which ones are really science fiction—and frankly I don’t much try any more.)

There are two selections full of good honest hard-science stuff. The biochemical one is a sort of bible story, and the astrophysical one is about an astral pataphysician. And there are a couple of planet-type stories by Leiber and Clarke—two solid science-fiction names if ever there were—about life (or death) on (or in or around) the moon.

I can also offer a galore of space ships, a gaggle of monstrous or otherwise odd alien creatures, and a fair-sized battalion of robots and other kinds of thinking machines, as well as some telepathists and general Wielders of Powers, some disembodied entities, and a mess of mythological and magical beings (one giant, one sorceress, a devil-sticks dancer, and assorted semi- and demigods).

But if you think that makes the book a collection of fantasy and science fiction, I’m afraid I still have to beg off—unless you choose to Include under “fantasy” everything that is not rigidly “realistic” —assuming you know what that means. I don’t.

What this book is, is a collection of imaginative speculative writing reflecting, I believe, clearly and sharply the problems and conflicts of civilized man today, and his hopes and apprehensions for the future.

The stories and poems and essays here have been selected from as wide a range as I could cover of books and periodicals published here and in England last year. About half the entries are from the genre magazines. The rest are from books and from such diverse sources as Mademoiselle and Escapade, The Colorado Quarterly and the Washington Post, Playboy and the Saturday Review (and Ambit and King in England). The youngest author is an eighteen-year-old college freshman; the oldest a ninety-three-year-old (if still alive) Parisian legend.

You will, I think, find the attitudes, treatments, topics, as varied as the sources.

Some of it is even science fiction.

Judith Merril