The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

Sixty-five was a sort of comeback year for robopsychology. There were three other stories that missed inclusion here by the thinnest of margins: Robert L. Fish’s “Sonny” in F&SF, and another of Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker stories, “What T and I Did” from If, and Theodore Sturgeon’s “The Nail and the Oracle” in Playboy. Goulart himself did another which tempted me: “Badinage” in Bill Nolan’s anthology The Pseudo-People—a very funny story, much more typical of Goulart’s usual vein than “Terminal.”

According to the resumé sent on by his agent, Goulart has: . . . written ads and commercials about beer, dog food, margarine, ice cream and peanut butter. He has drawn an advertising strip about cigars, written and directed a radio quiz show heard on two stations in upstate New York and turned out a newspaper which ran on the back of breakfast-food boxes.

Oddly enough—I mean, would you expect it from an ice-cream, dog-food, peanut-butter, and breakfast-food man?—”Terminal” is the only story in this volume that makes any noticeable use of “psychic” drugs.

With the newspapers rampaging on their demi-decade crusade against drug decadence in the colleges and universities, with a special Time-Life report on The Drug Takers, and whole shelves of books devoted to LSD—where, I wonder, are all the stories on psychedelics? There has been a scattering in the magazines, but the only one I recall lingering over was Henry Slesar’s “Melodramine” in Playboy.

Ah well, perhaps next year . . .

Meantime, we are beginning to get a kind of story which might even constitute a renascence of “solid science fiction”—the educated-psychology (or sci-chology?) story, as distinct from the truism that all fiction above the hackest level is “psychological fiction.”