The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

SUMMATION The Year in S-F by Judith Merril

When I determined to include in this collection the excerpts from Harry Stine’s as yet (at this writing) unpublished article, I was motivated by several things.

First, and most evident, was the paucity of good science fiction. There was an abundance of high-quality speculative and imaginative fiction of various kinds, published in every conceivable medium, during 1960; there was very little “real science fiction” anywhere—in or out of the specialty publications—and of that little, most was mediocre to poor.

At the same time, I did not, and do not, believe that the genre is disappearing. It is, certainly, diffusing—spreading out from a limited-circulation group of fiction magazines and a select grouping of hardcover book titles, to the mass markets: paperback novels, radio and TV, comic books, newspapers, and large-circulation general magazines.

In another sense, too, it is diffusing. Until a few years ago, “pure science fiction” confined itself, with rare exceptions, to speculation about space, the atom, and possible inventions or discoveries in the physical sciences.

The very technological advances that have swallowed up the old subjects almost entirely have, meantime, opened up whole new frontiers. And in the same way, the new media of communication now open to science fiction provide it with a new function as well.

Science fiction did not invent speculative thinking; it was quite the other way round. For whatever reasons of historical happenstance, the special kind of thinking that lies between outright fantasy and scientific hypothesis was focussed for a while largely in the s-f magazines. Now, some of the best story plots are going into reports by research and development men for the government, the armed services, the big corporations, and such novelties in our scheme of things as the Rand Corporation. What part of this thinking is not channeled into governmental or industrial secrecy is as likely to appear in essay form in a serious journal as in adventure trappings in the magazines.

Mr. Stine has pointed out several areas not currently being examined in this way by industry or government, and has provided a tool for the job. Meantime, there is another job for s-f to do—and one it is doing effectively.

The switch to initials just above was intentional. I am talking now about the whole field of science-fantasy, of speculative literature. And the job I refer to is roughly equivalent to that performed by the Encyclopedists before the French revolution: PR, essentially, public relations.

I have stressed throughout the book the underlying theme of communication. Perhaps writers in the field are so concerned with the one subject just now because the motivation of the writers themselves has shifted somewhat from extrapolation to explanation?

The modern scientist cannot possibly even attempt to keep up with progress in specialties outside his own; publications come too fast and frequently. But the modern citizen must keep up with at least the broadest outlines of new developments—and must be prepared, continually, for the most radical of new departures. The best of academic educations have not prepared even the most willing laymen to think in terms of tomorrow’s strange new world; and few citizens have either the studiousness or the background to keep up with the accelerating rate of change.

TV has proved, or re-proved (the advertising agencies did it first) the relative impact of pictures and words; there is the same distinction to be made between word-pictures and word-studies. To the specialist, the study is more informative; to almost all others, the word-picture is more so —not only because it informs more quickly, but because it does it more graphically.

Newspaper columnists, among others, have seized on this “pictorial” use of s-f recently. Of the future-story columns I’ve noticed, two in particular struck me as most effective: William A. Caldwell’s “Locked Alone in the World,” (under the by-line: “Simeon Stylites”) and William V. Shannon’s “1961.”

For non-fictional, straight-article presentations of speculative material throughout the year, both The Saturday Evening Post and the Saturday Review made impressive publishing records—addressing similar information to different readers in very different styles.

A surprising amount of material was also published during 1960, in general and literary magazines, about science fiction, science fantasy, and the “s-f way of thinking.” Some of the special attention was, of course, stimulated by the Amis book (Nation’s “Lucky Jim and the Martians,” for instance). More of it was the product of the dilemma of education and communication in general: Norbert Wiener’s “The Grand Privilege”; John Lear’s “When Space Travel Was Witchcraft”; N. R. Hanson’s “Science Is a Way of Seeing” (all in SR); Thomas N. Scortia’s “The Captive Eggheads” and Robert Bloch’s “The Clown at Midnight” (in Rogue); and the extraordinary article, “Unbelievable but True,” in The Saturday Evening Post.

Within the specialty field, also, fact articles—and critical essays—have been more numerous and more interesting. The previously established series by Willy Ley (Galaxy), Isaac Asimov (Fantasy and Science Fiction), and Kenneth Johns (combined pseudonym for Kenneth Bulmer and John Newman in New Worlds), continue as brisk and intriguing as before. John Rackham contributed a thoughtful piece on “The Science Fiction Ethic” to the 100th issue of NW. Sam Moskowitz’s scholarly series of researches on fantasy authors (Fantastic) is coming up to contemporary writers. Ted Sturgeon’s initial column in If promises a bright future—though Fred Pohl’s reviews will be missed. In the same way, while mourning Damon Knight’s absence from s-f reviewing, I have found Alfred Bester’s fresh approach to s-f criticism (F&SF) provocative and stimulating. A whole new publication devoted to “science-fiction-non-fiction” has emerged: The Journal of the Interplanetary Exploration Society. But the most dramatic of the excursions into speculative essay took place in Analog.

It was John Campbell’s magazine to which the title of the SEP’s “Unbelievable but True” piece applied, and the article seemed to have been stimulated primarily by Campbell’s crusading articles and editorials for investigation of the Dean Drive.

The “Dean Drive” is an invention of a Washington, D. C., mortgage expert named Norman Dean: a device to convert rotary motion into unidirectional motion, extremely suitable for a space drive (among thousands of other applications) because it somehow appears to get around Newton’s law about action and reaction. All the energy goes into the push—none into push-back.

Mr. Dean had patented his device privately, after failing for several years to interest the U. S. Government in an engine which obviously could not work—because Newton said so. Mr. Campbell publicized the invention to the point where his last editorial on the matter ironically stated, “... Dean’s device is now being thoroughly and adequately investigated by competent scientists and engineers.... We cannot continue to follow the work; much of it is going to duck rapidly behind closed doors; some of it definitely has already____” He goes on to point out once more, emphatically, that his crusade was not for attention to the particular device, but for a new kind of approach to invention and research—for, essentially, the application of the open speculative mind to all of science and engineering.

The “Dean Drive crusade” will, I believe, rebound even more to Campbell’s honor as time goes on. But if the drive itself should fail to prove out, his basic fight for attention to new and different ideas on the part of established science will have been more than worthwhile by itself.

One other item not mentioned in either of the Honorable Mention lists to follow is the continuing emergence of verse in s-f. In addition to the irrepressible Hilbert Schenck, there were notable contributions last year by Randall Garrett, Joseph Hansen, Alan Lindsey, and Rosser Reeves.

With more and more science fantasy appearing in full-length novels rather than magazine short stories, I have felt for the last two years that this book should offer a more complete and authoritative report on the new books than I could hope to do myself. Starting with this volume, that report will be handled by Anthony Boucher. But outside the realm of s-f itself there are a few new books I think may be of special interest to readers in this field. These include—

Doubleday’s new series of Tutor Books: a completely new approach to self-teaching textbooks. “The Arithmetic of Computers” taught me the fundamentals of the octal and binary systems in about four fascinated hours. (Others are on algebra, trigonometry, electronics, and bridge.)

“The World Is My Country” (Putnam, 1961), is World Citizen Garry Davis’s autobiographical account of ten years of living out his own private political science-fiction farce-satire-adventure.

Finally, I should like to express my considerable gratitude to those who assisted in compiling this volume—most notably James Blish and Merril Zissman, who revised and copied the music for the songs; Ann Pohl, who did most of the cataloging; and Barbara Norville, Oriole Kingston, Mae Sugrue, and Bob Bone, for a marvellous assortment of miscellany.