The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 7

BOOKS by Anthony Boucher

I have been trying for some time to understand why I, as a reviewer, am so much more resentful of uninspired routine books in science fiction than I am of similar publications in the mystery-suspense field. And I think I am beginning to see the reason.

To be sure, the current publishing standards are even lower for s-f-in-book-form than they are for mysteries. The very crudest sex-and-sadism private-eye paperbacks have a certain professional competence in keeping a story moving that is rare at any level of today’s s-f; and the suspense field is certain to provide at least one intelligent, literate, original, creative novel in a week’s reviewing load, while the s-f reviewer is lucky if he finds one over a span of months.

But why do I simply shrug and stop reading if a whodunit turns out to be weary and derivative, while I feel acutely embittered when I find the same qualities in s-f?

I see now that it is because s-f is a form which, more than almost any other, by its very nature demands creative originality. The detective story and even the more modern psychological crime novel are — like the western, the love story, the historical romance — fixed forms, in which the creative challenge lies largely in seeing what the author can do within established boundaries. S-f is — or perhaps better, should and must be a literature of stimulus and fresh horizons.

Put it this way: You are not going to complain if a large number of sonnets sound, superficially, a good deal alike; you are fascinated by what each poet manages to do within the sonnet. But if all the free verse you read, from countless divers hands, sounds pretty much the same, you are justified in thinking that poetry is in a hell of a state.

A conventional, competent, uninspired murder novel or western is a perfectly reasonable commercial commodity. Conventional, competent, uninspired s-f has no reason for existing.

This is putting the case politely. As a matter of honest fact, most of 1961’s s-f novels were conventional, uninspired… and incompetent. There were more novels in the field than in any previous year save one (1959); over half of them came from two publishers whose sole criterion of a novel seems to be a length of 50,000 words or less.

Among these many novels were at least a half dozen examples of what might be called the un-novel, composed of, say, two short stories, a novelette and a novella assembled from various magazines and presented as a novel. The practice is more advantageous to authors than to readers, though at its best it can result in, if not a novel, at least a memorable collection of stories, like Zenna Henderson’s Pilgrimage, which presents at last in permanent form the chronicle of those interstellar castaways, the People.

The year 1961 was not totally devoid of good s-f novels. At least two were genuine Golden Age stuff — stimulating thought fleshed in good fiction. A Fall of Moondust showed that Arthur C. Clarke, now writing mostly non-fiction, is still uniquely the master of immediate day-after-tomorrow realism; and Daniel F. Galouye’s Dark Universe brought off a virtuoso technical trick in writing plausibly of a culture which knew nothing of the sense of sight. Poul Anderson’s Three Hearts and Three Lions, skillfully expanded from its 1953 magazine version, was a splendidly enjoyable fantasy-romance, in the tradition of Tolkien or T. H. White, with a gimmick or two that might possibly justify its publication as science fiction. Fritz Leiber’s The Big Time, Andre Norton’s Star Hunter, Brian Aldiss’ The Primal Urge and especially John Wyndham’s Trouble with Lichen had their welcome distinctions.

Philip José Farmer’s The Lovers, sensationally controversial when it appeared in Startling a decade ago, proved somewhat disappointing in its long-awaited book form, largely because Farmer has, in the interval, done even better jobs of handling such provocative xeno-sexual-symbolic material. But the year’s major disappointment was Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, in which Heinlein regrettably abandoned storytelling for sermonizing.

Particularly notable among books of short stories were Poul Anderson’s Strangers from Earth, for the high quality of these hitherto unreprinted stories from Anderson’s early days; Fredric Brown’s Nightmares and Geezenstacks, for the technical brilliance of its under-1,000-words vignettes; and Mildred Clingerman’s A Cupful of Space, the first book by s-f’s glowing prophetess of warmth and love. But these— like other good collections by Fritz Leiber, Richard Mathe-son and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. — were composed chiefly of stories published in magazines a number of years ago; the year’s anthologies of brand-new short material reflected s-f’s contemporary state of weariness.

A major event in non-scientific fantasy was the rediscovery, for the English-speaking, of Nikolai Leskov (1831–1895), whose Selected Tales, newly translated by David Magarshack, include the novel The Enchanted Wanderer, as rich in inventive incident, at once as intensely Russian and as broadly human as a mob scene by Mussorgsky.

Fantasy anthologies notable for their intelligent patterning include Things with Claws, by Whit and Hallie Burnett, on the intimate and perilous relation of man and beast; Tales of Love and Horror, by Don Congdon, on the even more intimate and perilous relation of man and woman; and The Unexpected, by Leo Margulies, an interesting archeological dig in the era between the death of Unknown Worlds and the birth of F & S F, when Weird Tales was the only magazine market for fantasy.