The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy

PREFACE

The stories in this book, says Mr. Orson Welles, are fables of our time. I think this is a good way to describe them since, like older fables, science-fantasy makes use of the imaginative background and unusual circumstance to add emotional urgency and dramatic power to what are basically problems in philosophy and morality.

Unlike Aesop, the writers of these stories seldom conclude with a clear-cut moral. In a century whose most impressive accomplishments (atom bombs, orlon, rockets, radar, cancer cures, what-have-you-?) are built upon “scientific” concepts with such names as relativity and the uncertainty principle, the inquiring artist does well merely to formulate a coherent question.

The questions you will find most often put in here might be compressed in one composite query:—

How can we learn to live at peace with ourselves and with each other in the complexities of the world we are rebuilding with our new machines?

Fortunately, the stories are not so compressed. A good story must inevitably be unique and individual as the man or woman who wrote it. Unfortunately, if it’s answers that you want, you will not find them here—except occasionally, prefaced with what if?, I wonder, or supposing that . . .

The serious-minded reader will also have to forgive our authors if they resort to the frivolities of space-ships and flying bath-mats, robots and talking rats, to make their points. Even in s-f, a writer is only secondarily a philosopher; his first big job is entertainment.. . and that hasn’t changed since Aesop’s time at all.

-J.M.