I don't read introductions myself: not ahead of time. Anything the author, or his friend or admirer has to say about it may interest me after I have read the book. Occasionally, I go back to a preface part way through the book, hoping for some sort of background to place unfamiliar or difficult material in context; but, that's rare, and there really ought to be a different label for that kind of introduction.
The stories in this anthology are not difficult; some of them were surely unfamiliar in tone or subject when they were first published, in the remote Sputnik and pre-Sputnik days, but there is nothing in here that needs footnoting for the ordinary space-age citizen of the sixties. Nevertheless, custom (and my contract with the publishers) requires that a collection of this sort have a preface.
I understand that the basic function of the introduction is advertising. I am supposed to tell you how good the book is and make you want to read (buy) it. Quickly, then—this is a very good book. If you are just deciding whether or not to read (buy) it, I suggest you turn immediately to the first page of the first story (or any other story); any one of them will be more convincing, and much more entertaining, than I am likely to be.
Presumably, I could stop here: perhaps wisely so. But it occurs to me that some of you may, after reading the stories, be interested in the background from which they came. Perspective and context I can talk about—at length. The problem becomes one of where to start and how to stop. Suddenly I still don't want to write an introduction: I want to write a book.
"Science fiction isn't a livelihood for you, it's a way of life," a typist told me once. True.
Science fiction—by which I mean for the moment the science-fiction field—has been my life, in large degree, for the last twenty years or so. I have made my living from it, and derived most of my entertainment and education through the reading and writing of it. My closest friends and most uncomfortable enemies were made among the writers and editors and publishers of SF. My children were raised on its ideas. Books and correspondence files overrun my living quarters. What traveling I have done has been inspired by science-fiction happenings or people, and often made possible by professional connections.
In short, I am prepared to talk at length about what it (SF, s-f, science fiction, science fantasy, speculative fiction—it) is and where it fits and who does it and why, and whether it's worth it. I will try to limit myself only to what applies to this particular book.
Science fiction as a descriptive label has long since lost whatever validity it might once have had. By now it means so many things to so many people that—even though there are more and more people to whom it means something—I prefer not to use it at all, when I am talking about stories. SF (or generically, s-f) allows you to think science fiction if you like, while I think science fable or scientific fantasy or speculative fiction, or (once in a rare while, because there's little enough of it being written, by any rigorous definition) science fiction.
(I am not going to trap myself into attempting a definition of what I mean by science fiction; enough to say that of the stories in this book, those by Thomas, Reynolds, Byrom, Budrys, and Asimov, and Carol Emshwiller's "Day at the Beach" are all valid examples.)
So I say SF—but I still think science fiction: like it or not, the label sticks. It has a ring to it that suits our times: an implicit dialectical synthesis equally expressive of our acclimatization to the evermore-fantastic facts of daily life, and the growing popularity of fact-filled fantasy and fiction. ("True stories" have taken over the pop-magazine field; sex becomes so graphic it ceases to be suggestive; the Timeless West is vanishing before a flood of dates and names; the Private Eye has become a form-filling-out police detective, and the psychiatric crime-suspense novel has given way to the gadget-and-gimmickful spy story.)
In fact, one of the main difficulties with science fiction as a label for a particular kind of story, or category of publishing, is a popular reversal of meaning most often applied by editorial writers for Time-Life, political speechmakers, and a certain breed of science writer teacher: phrases like "a science-fictional adventure" or "an accomplishment positively science-fictional" or "beyond science-fiction" mean, as we all immediately understand, not a fantasy based on science or scientific reasoning, but a truly astonishing fact.
Aside from the inversion-process, there is a sideways slippage. To the moviegoer, "science fiction" has come to mean "horror." A "science-fiction movie" means The Blob from Time, not Dr. Strangelove. To the comic-book addict, it means Superman and his many friends. To the TV viewer, it is beginning to mean "space story" instead of "chiller," as Star Trek takes over from the Twilight Zone.
And of course, in book publishing, "science fiction" means either a book written by an author whose name is familiar to s-f book-buyers, or any poor-to-mediocre book with fantastic or futuristic elements written by an unknown. (So Vonnegut's Player Piano was "science fiction" in 1952, and "caustic social comment" when it was reissued in 1966; anything by Sturgeon is science fiction; anything by John Barth or John Hersey is not.)
People read for two reasons: to get away from reality, and to get closer to it; the ideal story form, I suppose, is the fable, which does both. In his introduction to the first SF Annual, Orson Welles suggested that s-f stories are "our modern fables." More recently there has been much talk (from me among others) about SF as modern myth. It may seem pretentious to speak of a field which degenerates so readily into mere adventure story as the replacement for classical philosophy in our time—and yet this is to some extent the role s-f has been playing. Science-fiction is not fiction about science, but fiction which endeavors to find the meaning in science and in the scientific-technological society we are constructing.
This book, then, contains 29 s-f stories, by which I mean a special sort of contemporary writing which makes use of fantastic or inventive elements to comment on, or speculate about, society, humanity, life, the cosmos, reality, and any other topic under the general heading of philosophy. They are, generally speaking, the stories that looked best to me on rereading, out of all those included in the first five SF Annuals. That means, among other things, that they were all published between 1955-1960, a significant half-decade with special import for speculative fiction.
I started work on the 1st Annual in the fall of 1955. Two of the stories in this book were first published in January, 1955, and three more in March—which means one or more was probably written at least as early as 1953.
1953 was the year Dwight Eisenhower became President of the United States, and the Korean war ended, and McCarthy became Chairman of the Senate Committee on Government Operations. Stalin died. The peptide molecule was synthesized for the first time. Dr. Oppenheimer, the "father of the H-bomb," was dismissed from government employ as a bad security risk. John F. Kennedy, the junior Senator from Massachusetts married society girl, Jacqueline Bouvier. Dylan Thomas died; James Baldwin published his first novel; William Burroughs wrote Junkie. The Old Man and the Sea won a Pulitzer for Hemingway.
1954 was the Supreme Court ruling on integration, and Dien Bien Phu, and the formation of SEATO. Winston Churchill retired as Prime Minister; McCarthy was censured by the Senate. The USSR exploded an H-bomb; the first peace-use atomic power plant was opened in Shippingport, Pa. Aldous Huxley published a book of his experiences with mescalin, The Doors of Perception.
In '55, the Salk vaccine for polio was put into use; the CIO and AFL merged; there were Freedom Riders in the South; the DNA and RNA molecules were synthesized; Cat on a Hot Tin Roof won the Pulitzer drama prize; nobody paid much attention to the early publicity releases coming from Washington about the satellites to be orbited during the International Geophysical Year. The anti-proton was produced in a laboratory.
'56: Sen. Kennedy (D., Mass.) failed to gain the vice-presidential nomination. Fidel Castro landed in Oriente Province and started fighting his way to Havana. The U.S. conducted an aerial H-bomb test over Bikini atoll. Premier Diem refused to allow a Vietnam election. A Walk on the Wild Side and Giovanni's Room came out, and Around the World in 80 Days brought wide-screen vision to the world. The Rebel won a Nobel Prize for Camus.
'57 was Kerouac's On the Road and Kennedy's Profiles in Courage; the first Little Rock ruckus; the Principle of Conservation of Parity, and the Sabin sugarcubes; O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. Ghana achieved independence. And in October—Sputnik 1.
In '58, the first atomic submarine was launched; Alaska was admitted to the Union; the Diner's Club began; the Space Race got underway. '59 was the Castro victory in Cuba, college students in phone booths, Lolita banned and Lady Chatterley sold, the first Soviet moon rockets, and the Able-Baker rockets in the U.S.
When the last of the Annuals represented here was published, in 1960, more than 20 satellites had gone up, the lunch-counter sit-ins were starting, The Catcher in the Rye had become a Big Thing on Campus, Hawaii was the 50th State. Elizabeth Taylor had found happiness at last with Eddie Fisher, and John F. Kennedy was campaigning against Richard Nixon for the Presidency.
No one—well, hardly anyone—had yet heard of the Beatles or Bob Dylan or pick Gregory. Malcolm X was barely known outside Harlem. McCarthy was dead, but not McCarthyism, which seemed to have taken root in the American soul. There was much concern about science education, and classics were being dropped from school curricula. Khrushchev had not been to Disneyland, and people were starting to worry about China instead of Russia.
This was the time, so close and somehow so remote, during which these stories were written and published. It was a time of adjustments, culmination, transitions, announcements, rather than new achievements. (The basic satellite designs were on the drawing boards in 1952; the polio research was completed in 1953; Castro was already gathering his forces in 1954; and so forth.) This was even more true inside science fiction.
The best s-f of the forties had been (often brilliantly) predictive; the overall tone up through the early fifties was instructive, indeed evangelist; science fictionists were triumphant prophets of atomic power and space flight, direful forewarners of atomic war and brainwashing and overpopulation.
In the early fifties, the bright new ideas and urgent messages were fewer. Between 1948 and 1952, new writers had poured into the field, and new ideas as well as new techniques emerged in every issue of the proliferating magazines. Between 1955 and 1960, I think more writers left the field than came into it; the number of magazine titles fell off sharply; the new-concepts writing began to be found in RAND reports and NASA releases, more than in s-f. The beginning of the industrial, political, and technological space age meant the beginning of a new period of exploration in "the human factor," as opposed to the "hardware," for both science and science fiction. The interesting new work tended to emphasize literary qualities rather than philosophic ones. And by 1955, the field had achieved just enough literary respectability to be able to serve a vital function: during the entire period covered by this anthology, it was the science-fiction magazines that provided the only widely read medium for protest and dissent in a witch-haunted country.
It was a curious combination of pressures and circumstances which resulted in the best American short fiction of that period being published in magazines most "literary" people (still) were not willing to have seen on their coffee tables. And it is interesting to note that the sophistication of science fiction through those years was, to some extent at least, a conscious process.
In 1956, the first Milford Science Fiction Writer's Conference took place under the joint direction of Damon Knight, James Blish, and myself. Thirty-odd writers attended, and discussed things like symbolism in fiction and techniques of criticism, as well as problems of marketing and plotting. The impact of the week of talks on those who attended was enormous, and the Conference has continued to function as an arena for serious professional discourse.
An indirect result of the Conference was a publication edited for several years by Theodore Cogswell, called Proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-first Century Studies. PITFCS published articles, limericks, nonsense stuff, poetry, and letters—most of all, letters. It provided a running round-robin for everyone professionally involved with s-f—and its full role in the development of the field, and of some individual writers, is hard to overestimate.
This anthology, as I said earlier, is made up of the stories in the first five Annuals that seemed best to me in retrospect—in a general way.
For instance, Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon" is not here, because it has since been published as a novel even better than the original novelette version. Eugene Ionesco's "Flying High" is missing because I could not secure permission to reprint. And half a dozen more I'd have liked to include, there was simply not enough space for.
Beyond that, there are stories missing here that should by all means be in any volume called The Best of the Best—but they were not in the Annuals to begin with. Some of these were permission problems, some were editorial restrictions imposed by the publishers, some again, lack of space. The considerations that go into the makeup of each year's Annual, are complex: Charles Beaumont's "The Vanishing American," for instance, was published in Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1955; there were too many stories from that magazine, and too many conformity/alienation stories that year, so it dropped out; in another volume, it would have been a sure selection.
Some other authors whose work was significant and popular during the period involved are not here and were not in the original Annuals because they were not writing short fiction at the time, or because a great deal of good fiction from one author does not always add up to individually excellent stories.
But while there are, to my knowledge, at least as many other stories published between 1955-60 that are just as good as these —these still (and I know I said it before) are very good indeed.
I have read each of them many times now, and I know.