The Year's Best Science Fiction 11

Ciardi was talking about soldiers, far from home. But what he says is at least as true for the sudden letter from a stranger that discovers a part of one’s own private landscape in another’s mind.

I spoke earlier of the letters that are the Anthologist’s Reward. Sometimes, they build up to a virtual chain reaction.

It was Carol Emshwiller (herself represented in the 4th and 5th Annuals) who called Peter Redgrave’s prose-poem, “Mr. Waterman,” to my attention, two years ago. Her post card referred me to the Paris Review, and almost timidly assured me that she knew it was not quite what I usually used, but she thought it was awfully good.

She was right on both counts. It was very good, and it was not what I usually used: Not what I usually found. I find more of it these days: there is more, and I’m beginning to know where to look. And writers write to tell me about the good new things I often have not seen myself. Like Carol Emshwiller, like Ballard, like Disch. Or like Redgrove. Some excerpts from a much folded, carried, opened, and reread letter:

My complaint about much s-f has been that the writers seem to have kept to a pulp magazine lingua franca in the interests, perhaps, of getting their insights published and known, and have neglected what you could call the known means of expression.

He goes on to discuss several writers, and one in particular: . . . some of whose stories have invented ,parts of my own mind, but whose mode of expression I believe is often conventional in the extreme. I admire his invention so much . . . but when I think back to his stories and listen to them I can usually say, “That’s like so-and-so, or he’s using such and such as a vehicle, to get that wonderful thing across, instead of coming, in his own person.”

And by way of pointing up his meaning, comes at last to: . . . Jorge Luis Borges, who tells the most appalling mathematical jokes with sad humility ... In my opinion he’s the greatest link between s-f and so-called humane studies, in, for instance, his magnificent “library of Babel” about the people who wander in an infinite library of books containing, not sense necessarily, but all the possible permutations of letters (like the monkeys who, given long enough, would randomly strike out Shakespeare on typewriters).

He went on to quote, stopping sometimes to repeat and relish some treasured phrase—a paragraph from the “Library,” another from “Funes the Memorious” (who could remember everything).

Others had told me about Borges. He was “on my list.” It’s a long list, and its priorities are always in upheaval. After Redgrove’s letter, I went out and found the book. From which—