The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

Art Buchwald writes from Washington, these days. But back in 1948, Buchwald, an ex-Marine, was in Paris, working for the Herald-Tribune. Another young American, an ex-bomber pilot, was camping out on the steps of the Palais de Chaillot in the middle of Paris, but technically not in France at all, because the building had just been declared international territory, the domain of the new United Nations. Garry Davis had proclaimed himself a World Citizen and was demanding citizenship papers of the UN.

To many of us, in those apocalyptic days, Garry Davis was a symbol of—literally—life or death. To most of the American press he was just one more loose nut. As I recall, Buchwald was one of the few newsmen published here who seemed to comprehend the wonderful and terrible myth Davis was acting out.

We did not win our One World. Not with Davis’ intuitive dramas not with the scientists’ naive sanity. Today we seem farther than ever from the name—yet the game (between Crises) appears virtually in our hands. The world shrinks daily. Global communications and transportation pull us together in shared language, handicrafts, entertainment, cuisine, and personal contact—while the growing pressure of our awed awareness of the immensity of the universe pushes at us from outside, turning us toward each other.

Looking for biographical material on Brian Aldiss, I found instead my first letter from him, in February, 1959:

So Oxford fascinates you? What effect do you think “Pike County” has on me? Oxford these days is a beautiful and exciting city—very lively, one facet of it resembling exactly a dour, congested. Midland town, with big cinemas and traffic jams and Morris Motors, making the university side look like its Latin quarter. But the other side of it, the side that contains thirty-one colleges and a wedge of beautiful living and buildings, is even more exciting. And you can see both sides at once. 80,000 people live here....

Morris Motors? Factories? Cinemas? 80,000 people? This had nothing to do with the Oxford I knew, from three centuries of English literature. Not that it mattered: I could keep my pretty picture. I would never see the reality.

Last year I saw Oxford. I went to England, for a World Science Fiction Convention. (Brian Aldiss was guest of honor.)

The convention took me there, but London kept me: I went for two weeks; and stayed two months—and of course went up to Oxford (as in all those British novels) for a weekend. It is everything Brian said, and everything those English novels promised, too. (Nothing had prepared me for the House of 12th-century Wood-Carvings and Stuffed Birds, home of Bonfiglioli and Impulse.)

Six months later, Aldiss’ publishers brought him here to receive in person one of the first annual SFWA awards. The Aldisses came out to Pike County for a weekend, and I took them for my favorite long drive through the Pocono foothills and back along the Delaware River, on the Hawks’ Nest Drive, into Port Jervis—where the Silver Grill, has an all-jazz, and ail-good, jukebox. (Margaret Aldiss had never played a jukebox.)

The other day I had a letter from Brian:

. . . We know how you feel about England; we feel that way about the States—well, the 0.0001% of it we saw. We’ll be back. And we do thank you for the time we spent with you, and the lick of American myth we saw through your eyes. . . .

The globe is getting smaller, as the universe gets bigger.

(Who Can Replace a Man? Best SF Stories of Brian Aldiss should be just out from Harcourt, Brace, and World.)