The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

Fritz Leiber is the original S-F man. By which I mean any number of things, beginning with his beginning in the field a good thirty years ago (which would make him Senior Writer for the volume if it were not for Alfred Jarry antedating everybody.) Nor is it simply seniority, but also scope. Leiber began as a Lovecraft disciple, went from fantasy for Unknown, to s-f for Astounding, and then to popular-science writing and editing. In Leiber’s case, S is not just for Science, or Satire, or Speculation, though they are all there, but for Snakes as well as Spiders (the Time-Change stories), and for Shakespeare (“Four Ghosts in Hamlet” in last year’s FSSF), and Sword-and-Sorcery. (F, of course, is for Fafhrd and the Mouser.) And this year he has expanded his range a bit more, by writing the first authorized post-Burroughs Tarzan book (Tarzan and the Valley of Gold, Ballantine, 1966).

What started me on all this, really, was snakes. Looking through the odds and ends set aside for these notes, I found an undated news item which I had clipped and never mailed, headlined: SNAKES, TOOLS OF WAR, STILL IN DEMAND DESPITE YEMEN TRUCE. Seems you can always tell when fighting will break out down there by following the dips and rises in snake stocks. The snakes are neither weapons nor “native superstition.” They are kept as pets by desert fighters because they are the most reliable and effective eye-wipers in a sandstorm: A guerilla with sand in his eye grabs his pet serpent firmly and inserts its twitching tail into the corner of his eye to remove the source of irritation.

They tried goggles, but the goggles cracked and clouded in the desert storms. Snakes die in captivity—but they are plentiful. Snakes are available in the desert—and apparently the Arabs do not share our (Western) “instinctive” prejudice against snakes.

Which brings us to the twin questions posed in the next “arena” variant: How many of our instincts are cultural products? How many of our limitations are cultural prejudices? Or, if you take everything away from a man except the faculties contained inside his skin, what has he got going for him that is still available?

I warn you beforehand, this is not the kind of story I usually publish—not the kind anyone usually publishes, it would seem. The author says he collected 113 rejection slips, over thirteen years, before it sold—not, as one might have expected, to an adventure magazine, but to The Colorado Quarterly.

That was where Larry Ashmead, Doubleday’s new s-f editor, saw it. Ashmead sent me a copy. Both of us wrote to Malec, asking what else he had done.

It seems this was his first published story, but he had lots more that hadn’t sold. And I know why: Malec does everything wrong— only it comes out right.

There is a Jack London kind of Tightness to his wrongness.

You probably won’t like it—right away. (And then you find it doesn’t go away.)

Anyhow, here is the first one; Doubleday will publish a collection, Extrapolus, in the spring.