(Scanner's note: Since many of the editorial comments in this anthology apply to both the story preoceeding and the story following the comment, they are presented here as published. Where you see Story: Author Source would be where the story was placed in the anthology.)

1963 was the year of the first rocket probe to Venus and the year in which Medgar Evers and John F. Kennedy were shot to death in the streets of American cities. A complex new electronic brain began translating Chinese, and the proud new atomic submarine, Thresher, sank with more than two hundred men on board.

By the time you read this, the record on 1964 will be almost or altogether complete—and we may confidently expect even more contradictions and internal frictions: not in any one country, or in any one field of endeavor, or on any particular economic or social level, religious or political grouping, but within almost all such groups, and between many of them.

There has probably never been so much disagreement among respectable people about morals; among educators about schooling and parents about child rearing; among scientists about basic theories or engineers about specific applications, or doctors about the causes, treatment, or diagnosis of anything from the common cold to terminal cancer.

And it will not get more settled before it is more upset.

Imaginative literature today is preoccupied—necessarily—with the same stirrings, the same conflicts, visions of greatness and of doom that are acting on the imaginations of philosophers, scientists, teachers, industrial and political leaders, throughout the world.

On the brink of more dramatic physical explorations and discoveries than ever before, we find ourselves facing, first and most urgently, a different kind of great unknown: the nature of cultural man; the odds (no less than life and death) on his ability to coexist with cultures other than his own; or the likelihood that natural man can or will learn to adapt to his own technological culture.

In a forum published last year in Playboy, "1984 and Beyond," dozen top writers of science fantasy argued the probable future o, man. William Tenn concluded a discussion on future social trends by saying:

"Thoreau wrote over a hundred years ago that 'the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.' Well, the world has changed fantastically since then, but the mass of men still do. History always repeats itself, but on another step of the spiral. We are a wildly imaginative, inordinately idealistic, incredibly persistent, hopelessly naive, incurably corrupt species, and no matter what we do we always seem to wind up somehow or other in the same position on the tree, except that occasionally it's a different tree. Tomorrow we'll be looking for the mechanical bananas in a nickel-plated jungle."

Story: BERNIE THE FAUST by William Tenn from Playboy

Story: FORTRESS SHIP by Fred Saberhagen from If

"What do you consider the raison d'être, the chief value, of science fiction?" The question was asked in a survey of s-f writers and editors in the fan magazine Double Bill last year.

Fred Saberhagen's reply: "Ideally, science fiction gives a chance to impose different coordinate systems upon the human condition, and k try to see what will change and what will remain the same."

"Coordinate system" is engineerese for "background" or "measurement" or occasionally "viewpoint." The different coordinate system, iv, a science-fiction story, may be an alien planet, an alien body, an alien culture (past, future, or sidewise-in-time).

In this case, the set of coordinate systems is a set of coordinate systems—which is neither a Steinism, nor a typographical error, but a description of a checker game.

Story: MR. WATERMAN by Peter Redgrove from The Paris Review, No 29

Alien ...

What does alien mean to you? Alien corn ... alien concept … alien national ... alien life form?

Bug eyed monsters, giant squid, robots, supermen, fallout mutations? Snakes, cannibals, Communists, sexual deviants? What shape or posture triggers your recoil from stranger-danger?

Alien: alien . . . adj. 1) Belonging or pertaining to another; strange; foreign; esp. not belonging or owing allegiance to the same country; belonging to the citizens of a foreign state. 2) Wholly different in nature; incongruous; ... n. 1) A person of another family, race or nation. 2) A foreign-born resident of a country in which he does not possess the privileges of a citizen. 3) One excluded from certain privileges; one estranged, as from royal favor. . . .

(Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary)

There were three kinds of aliens in "Fortress Ship": the Berserker, the offstage extraterrestrials, and the dog-ape Newton. The next selection contains still another kind of alienism—and an alienist.

Part of an editor's job, ordinarily, is to find things that go together.

But it is unusual to find two stories (especially from such widely separate sources) that "go together" (in several senses) quite the way "Mr. Waterman" and "Mrs. Pigafetta" do.

"Mr. Waterman" was called to my attention by Carol Emshwiller (whose work has appeared in earlier annuals); otherwise I should hardly have thought to look for material in the Paris Review. "Mrs. Pigafetta" appeared in Fantasy and Science Fiction—my most frequent source for many volumes.

Peter Redgrove is a British scientist and poet, living in Leeds; Mr. Bretnor is a California litteroteur (critic, essayist, fictionist, translator, humorist) and Orientalist (consultant on occasion to the U. S. Government). They have this much in common: both writers' literary interests are divided primarily between the "quality" publications and s-f. In Mr. Redgrove's words: "Science fiction is one of the modes of poetry in our age, and vice versa too, if either has any guts."

Story: MRS. PIGAFETTA SWIMS WELL by R. Bretnor from Fantasy and Science Fiction

Alien: Adj. extraneous, strange, foreign, outlandish, exotic, excluded. Alienated: disaffected, irreconcilable. Alienable: negotiable, transferable, reversional. N. heathen, gentile, Nazarene; unbeliever, infidel. Alienism: extraneousness, exteriority; mania, paranoia, aberration. V. alienate: transfer, convey.

(Roget's Thesaurus)

In science fiction, the word has come to be almost synonymous with extraterrestrial. In fantasy, most alien beings are terrestrial in origin—very much so. (Demons and leprechauns, trolls, gnomes, and fairies, naiads and dryads: the whole hierarchy of magical descent. The animate plant-being; the possessed animal; the halfway life—were-things, vampires, zombies, et al.) Almost the only non-earthy parts in the supernatural or gothic casts are angels—who, after all, still belong to the cosmology that centers around Earth.

Yet the science-fictional alien is rarely as fearsome, and more often "human" in nature than the fantastic one. The difference, I suspect, is that the e-t alien is ordinarily a symbol of the real stranger, the geographical or cultural outsider; while the archetypes of fantasy are, rather, externalized symbols of the dark shapes of the subconscious mind.

The "survivor story" which has an honored history in science fiction (Wells, Benêt, Stewart, Wylie, and Golding, among others), seldom contains either one of these alien types. It deals instead with the alienated: with "normal" people in a world suddenly turned alien.

Story: THEY DON'T MAKE LIFE LIKE THEY USED TO by Alfred Bester from Fantasy and Science Fiction

It is not only the creatures of the Earth that can turn suddenly from what is known and natural to what is fearful and alien. In some ways, we know less about the ball of rock beneath our feet than about space itself; certainly far less than we should consider safe or reasonable for a house, a car, or spaceship. And for all our terrible armament, for all our incipient Doomsdays, we have not yet created any weapon as potentially destructive as Earth itself.

Gravity alone is the greatest killer we know. Usually, it works its damage slowly and all but unnoticed. But from time to time—just as the unremitting stress eventually fells the man, brings him to Earth—the slow accumulation of its internal stresses causes the surface of Earth itself to buckle and break.

Mr. Danzig's detailed "future history" of an Earth spasm is his first published story. The author is an English teacher at City College in New York City.

Story: THE GREAT NEBRASKA SEA by Allan Danzig from Galaxy

The Great Disaster may be natural or man-made; the new environment to which men must adjust may be created by the still untamed forces of gravity, of flood, fire, ice age, sunspots, or meteorites. It may be the by-product of thoughtless technology, or it may be a planned holocaust, the ultimate atomic war, bringing with it such chemical changes in atmosphere, soil, or genes as will change the face (and bowels) of the Earth itself.

But there might also be a new kind of disaster, a trouble truly alien in origin. . . .

Story: THE FACES OUTSIDE by Bruce McAllister from If

Ten years or more ago, John W. Campbell opened an editorial in (what was then) Astounding Science Fiction by stating that the first immortal man had probably already been born. His thesis was that medical science and biochemical research were advancing at a sufficient rate of acceleration so that death, at least by decay or disease, might be averted indefinitely.

Last year, in Worlds of Tomorrow, Frederik Pohl published an article by R. C. W. Ettinger, which began flatly: "Most of us now living have a chance for personal physical immortality," and went on to argue the immediate feasibility of deep-freezing, at the instant of death, for revivification and treatment as soon as medical arts make it possible. To me, the idea is no less staggering than, and in its way not too different from, the complete-opposite concept of Doomsday destruction. Everything in our psychology stems, I am convinced, from the essential drive of mortal man to survive the disintegration of his body: in the spirit (religion); in name (fame and power); in artifacts and products (art, science, the bulk of "civilization"); in a continuation of the flesh (children, family, clan, nation).

I was impressed by the exposition of this philosophy in "The Faces Outside." I was more impressed when I found out it was the author's first published story; and more again when he wrote me about himself.

The first part is a deceptively typical writer's history: Has lived in Florida, Virginia, Italy. Now in California. Interested in "international relations, languages, all sciences, art, and writing." Participated in recent sleep-deprivation experiments. Currently doing a study of "symbolism from the writer's point of view, rather than the critic's." (Among seventy-odd authors: Aldiss, Budrys, Ellison, Golding, Heinlein, Leiber, McCarthy, Merril, Sturgeon.) One summer in Italy spent studying art at the Belle Arti Institute in Florence. Now supports himself in part, at Claremont Men's College, by "doing 'crazy' drawings and paintings that scare enough people into buying."

It is his first year at college. He is now seventeen. (The story was written two years ago.)

I do not know whether Mr. McAllister has decided, yet, to want to live forever. But I think I do know in Dr. Biggle's case. (No. Not medicine. Musicology.)

Story: A SLIGHT CASE OF LIMBO by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. from Analog

Story: 237 TALKING STATUES, ETC. by Fritz Leiber from Fantasy and Science Fiction

Mr. Ettinger's article on immortality was completely serious opinion based on available facts; and "Limbo" was at least perfectly rational within its own premises.

The next story is totally improbable...but it deals with a kind of immortality that I understand—personally, subjectively.

Just about here, the words all start to turn inside out: this next story deals with alienation from reality—or deals with realistic alienation between son and father—or really deals out an alien—or perhaps it is just that the son really resolves things with a deal involving alienation. . . .

Some aliens are born. Some are made. Some attain alienness. Some are neither alien in form, nor place of origin, nor status of reality. They are the estranged and excluded; the exotic and unbeliever; the outcast of culture or creed or society.

Story: THE JAZZ MACHINE by Richard Matheson from Fantasy and Science Fiction

Fritz Leiber, Richard Matheson, and Charles Beaumont—who follows here —form a sort of magic triangle of masters of the macabre moderne. All three live, currently, in the Los Angeles area: two are movie scriptwriters, the third, the son of a well-known actor. When the classic Leiber witch novel, Conjure Wife, was filmed in Britain a few years ago (under the even more classic Merritt title, Burn, Witch, Burnt) Matheson was one of the scenarists. Beaumont and Matheson have both worked on the recent gaggle of neo-Poe movies. Leiber and Beaumont are, separately, authors of two of the finest and most fearfully "rear' fantasies of modern city life I have ever read ("The Vanishing American" and "Smoke Ghost").

Each of the three has written across the whole range of science fantasy, and well out of it; in fiction, essay, and dramatic form; from vignette to book length. (Notable novels: Matheson's I Am Legend; Beaumont's The Intruder; Leiber's The Wanderer.) All three were included in the first issue of Gamma, a new magazine of imaginative fiction, edited by William Nolan (author of "One of Those Days," in the 8th Annual).

Story: MOURNING SONG by Charles Beaumont from Gamma

It works both ways, of course. Even as the word "alien" evokes the start of fear, so our deepest fears and darkest torments have evolved into symbols of alienness. The symbols must keep pace with culture, it is true. For most of us, a horned-tailed-and-hoofed devil is no longer an apparition of terror; we are more likely to be struck with real fear by the familiar yellow radiation symbol, or by the image of a hairy-legged multi-magnified germ-laden fly.

But the Devil was Lord of the Flies long before the microbe hunters traded in their bells and candles for microscopes and agar cultures. Mermaids sang in wondrous strange seductive tongues hundreds of years before zoologists began to puzzle out the language of mammalian porpoises. And the archetypal duality of love-hate, good-bad, hope-guilt, took the form (centuries before anyone coined words like "schizoid" and "alienist") of the shape-changer—the werewolf.

… and as far back as the dove meant peace, the crow and raven were croaking portents of doom .. .

Story: THE JEWBIRD by Bernard Malamud from The Reporter

Xenophobia: An hysterical symptom characterized by a morbid dread of strangers ... the course of these apprehensions is not in the stranger but in the xenophobic, whose defensiveness is directed actually against his own latent malevolence.... Xenophobia usually inspires elaborate and ingenious doctrine about the motivations, intentions, character and habits of strangers. (The Domesday Dictionary, by Donald M. Kaplan and Armand Schwerner, 1963)

Planaria are worms. Worm-runners are people who run worms through mazes. The Worm Runners' Digest is the journal of the Planaria Research Group of the University of Michigan's Mental Health Research Institute. Worm-runners throughout the country—amateur and professional—use the WRD as an information and idea exchange, discussing via lab reports, speech reprints, research papers, semipersonal letters, art, verse, parody, fable, and farce the latest news about worms, themselves, and the human condition, with special reference to the provocative and productive research initiated by the PRG on the biochemistry of learning and memory.

I was fascinated by WRD. And I not only learned about worms; thought had found out something about the UI Kworn too. Who would be more likely to think of worms than a veterinarian?

So I wrote to Dr. Bone. He answered, "The UI Kworn was built up from terrestrial precursors, but he was made to the requirements of the gadgetry. The gadget is real. NASA had it walking around the banks of the Potomac, shooting out sticky threads and reeling them in for several months before I got the idea for a story. I modified the gadget by making it sessile, but the rest of the machine is about the way it really is. Since NASA intends to shoot it at Mars in the not-too-distant future, I had the planet.

"So all that was left was to build a believable character that could be elemental enough to be trapped by the machine, yet advanced enough to elicit sympathy from the reader. The hunger motivation was inherent in the machine. . . .

"Physically, the UT is a composite of a snail, a starfish and an amoeba, with the protective mantle being my own creation and dictated by Mars' temperature variations. His reproductive pattern was pirated almost verbatim from the coelenterates, in this case Hydra, which reproduces sexually and asexually.

"A far worse problem was to arrange some sort of social order that would make the NASA gadget a problem. By using the hunger motivation and a scanty food supply, I hit upon the idea of territorial strips. After that the formulation of social rules was easy."

Easy, that is, for a man whose profession has accustomed him to thinking and feeling nonhuman thoughts and emotions. We do not all possess this faculty in the same degree; too many of us are completely untrained in its use--or more accurately, perhaps, have had it trained out of us. Call it imagination, intuition, empathy: it is something other than logic; something more than the simple sum of observations and deductions. Children have it, far more than adults—as they have other capacities for learning that most of us can hardly perceive.

Story: POPPA NEEDS SHORTS by Walt and Leigh Richmond from Analog

The distinctions of chemistry, gravity, atmosphere, temperature, nourishment, technology, and overall biological organization between the UI Kworn, for example, and an Earth man are obvious; either one would find it nearly impossible to visualize the other's existence as anything other than a fantasy.

The difficulty of seeing through the eyes of childhood, for adults, is slightly less than the problem a child must have trying to see a world he has never known (a world of much smaller dimensions, less sharp smells, duller colors, less sunshine and more artificial light, different food and clothes and technology) as adults might see it.

Now here is one more alien's-eye view, from the core of the culture-image itself.

Story: DOUBLE STANDARD by Fredric Brown from Playboy

You could call it "canned soul." Or maybe "electropsyche"? Sheerest fantasy when it assumes cognition (ego? sentience? essence?) springing full-blown from the picture tube—but very solid probability when you reverse the sequence, and feed the emotions into the box.

Story: INTERVIEW by Frank A. Javor from Analog

Meanwhile, back in the living room .. .

Story: EIGHT O'CLOCK IN THE MORNING by Ray Nelson from Fantasy and Science Fiction

Three years ago, the sixth annual SF reprinted Ray Bradbury's Life article, "A Serious Search for Weird Worlds," about the origins and objectives of the felicitously named Project Ozma.

Mr. Bradbury pointed out with detailed care that this sort of undertaking would have to be measured in generations rather than years: that it would take twenty-two years, for instance, simply to exchange. Hello's with the nearest possible neighbors.

By this time, we are all well accustomed to the concept of the limiting speed of light: astronomical information cannot travel faster than 186,000 miles per second. But we have also become accustomed to faulty space-breaking timetables. Everything always happens sooner than they said it would.

And here it is four years since Ozma started. So…

Story: WHERE IS EVERYBODY? By Ben Bova from Amazing

... or they may not even watch. Could be, the star charts show Sol III as "unmapped; uninhabited; nonarable; overrun with poison ego, infectious entropy-accelerator."

Or we might be succulent pickings for any number of star-market buyers. Does the peach tree know about canning and slicing? Do you have yourself announced by an aphid butler if you spend an hour watching an anthill?

On the other hand, will you really worry about whether the ants know that you are watching? Or what interpretation they may put on it, if they do?

In what he himself calls "a satire of hasty conclusions," Andre Maurois here sets forth a first lesson in alien-watching. If there is some small confusion in identifying the true alien, bear in mind that it is a parable, not a primer. As for who watches the watchers—it is an old question, and adds a certain spice to the game.

Story: THE EARTH DWELLERS by Andre Maurois from The Weigher of Souls & The Earth Dwellers (Macmillan, 1963)

Story: THE NOBEL PRIZE WINNERS by W. J. J. Gordon from The Atlantic Monthly

In his introduction to The Earth Dwellers, M. Maurois mentions a book which delighted and exasperated me when f read it: Jean Henri Eabre's essays on the "social insects."

"He described some extraordinary feats performed by insects, and kept on warning the reader: 'Do not believe there is any intelligence in all that. It's just instinct. Bees have no patriotism with regard to the beehive nor ants toward the anthill.' " And in an epilogue, Jacques Choron adds a quotation from Bertrand Russell: "...animals behave in a manner showing the rightness of the views of the man who observes them."

Which brings us back to the more advanced sport of watcher-watching. "The Nobel Prize Winners" is a long hard look at some engineers and scientists, by a scientist and engineer. W. J. J. Gordon, besides being the author of occasional brilliant farcical fiction in the Atlantic, is a lecturer in the Engineering Department of Applied Physics at Harvard, and also President of Synedics, Inc., a "consulting firm concerned with augmenting the creative output of industrial research organizations."

In 1954, the late honored Albert Einstein astonished more laymen than fellow-scientists when he said that if he were about to choose a career, "I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber 6r peddler...."

Norbert Wiener had written, earlier: "The degradation of the position of the scientist as an independent worker and thinker to that of a morally irresponsible stooge in a science-factory has proceeded even more rapidly and devastatingly than I had expected...."

And earlier still, J. Robert Oppenheimer watched the explosion of the first atom bomb at Alamogordo, and could think of nothing but the line from the Bhagavad-Gita: "I am become death—the shatterer of worlds."

The quotations are all from Lewis S. Feuer's The Scientific Intellectual (Basic Books, 1963), and his conclusions seem inescapable. The Laugh-O-Rama of Big Business Research is no happenstance; the decline of creative scientific thought is a natural consequence of the compromise—and compromising—of scientists.

Science: A broad inquiry, by means of numerous subsidiary disciplines, into the true nature of the universe. Its chief exponents liken it to humanity in general, whose perpetuation requires the intermittent observation of its own errors.

Scientism: The promotion of goods, services, values or decisions in the name of scientific method. Hence science as practiced. One who practices science is called a scientist. The practice allows for a large variety of human inclinations. Scientists are variously idealistic, ambitious, ordinary, academic, practical, foolish, careless, trustworthy, decent, and indecent; some are comic, some tragic, some vulgar, and some ate in the grand tradition. (The Domesday Dictionary)

Story: HOT PLANET by Hal Clement from Galaxy

If the several examinations here of the species Scientist (his habits, habitat, habiliments) seem less than conclusive, it may be due to a sort of "atmosphere problem."

The astronomer, evaluating star spectrograms, must make allowance for the known composition of the intervening atmosphere. The thicker the atmosphere, or the more unknown elements in it, the less accurate will be the analysis; observatories are built on high ground, away from city smog and smoke. In addition, the less similar the subject of study, the more alien it is to the native atmosphere, the more accurate will the analysis be.

The atmosphere in which we observe each other is murky, to say the least. In an article in the Saturday Review lost year, Robert Graves delivered himself of much unhappiness, after spending two weeks as a guest on the M.I.T. campus. "It is politely assumed here that scientists have souls as well as minds," says Mr. Graves, expressing his disapproval of the new chapel. "But what modern scientist has ever learned the technique of meditation?" Meanwhile, the distinguished editor of the Worm Runner's Digest, and chief of the Planaria Research Group, Professor James V. McConnell, in a speech to the American Psychological Association, attacked the "humanistic value system" in the teaching of psychology with at least as much enthusiasm as Robert Graves generated against his image of the scientist. "Our reaction to the word humanism is a powerful, non-logical, gut reaction. Did Pavlov's dogs stop to ask why the dinner bell had such a pleasant sound? No, the dogs merely salivated each time the bell was rung, much as humans unthinkingly 'light up with an inner glow' whenever someone extolls the merits of the humanistic approach." But, he adds, "if humanism is nothing but an arbitrary set of values we accept chiefly because we've been trained to do so, what about science? Is it something different, something better? The truth is of course, that science, too, is a way of life, a set of mores and values that our society in general tends to venerate (at least in principle) much as it Venerates humanism."

Having made the admission, Dr. McConnell unfortunately proceeded to ignore its implications in the remainder of his address. But all this meant was that it was true, and the significant truth had been stated long before:

No man is an island. When we look at each other—white and Negro, male and female, child and adult, Communist and Bircher, scientist and humanist—no matter what labels we pin on ourselves, we look to some extent into a mirror. Creators and creations both, each of us is part of the total culture and environment in which we meet and observe each other. Whether we will someday meet an intelligence alien enough to be accurately observed, remains to be seen. For now, perhaps we had best just accept the existence of the scientist, the engineer, and even the TV technician, as inalienable parts of our society. We may then, instead of trying to isolate components, begin upon the useful study of (take your choice; take both) scientific humanity and human science.

Cliff Owsley is a representative of another subspecies unique to contemporary society: the PR people. As chief of press and writing for the U. S. Forest Service in Washington, he occupies a position commanding a superior view for observation.

Story: THE MING VASE by E. C. Tubb from Analog

Extrasensory Perception: Also ESP. An inadmissible mode of cognition in which an external event presents itself to none of the five known senses. Telepathy and clairvoyance are two common modes of ESP; the former is the extrasensory perception of the mental activities of another person; the latter is the extrasensory perception of events that have already happened, or that are happening, or that are about to happen. Though investigations of purported ESP phenomena manage to discredit most of them, they do not discredit all of them; moreover, there is a small body of experimental data strongly suggesting paranormal cognition in certain subjects. However, at this point ESP is more an embarrassment than a legitimate concern of science (q.v.). Like soup spilled at a banquet, it is seen but ignored

(The Domesday Dictionary)

In the introduction to a story called "The Last Day of Summer," in the first annual SF, I referred to the author, E. C. Tubb, as "almost unknown in this country, but probably Britain's most popular writer of s-f ..." The next annual included the first published story of a young writer named J. G. Ballard: "Prima Belladonna." In the third, Brian W. Aldiss, then already becoming known in England, made his American debut with "Let's Be Frank."

All of these stories, and many that appeared in later volumes, were from the British Nova publications, Science Fantasy and New Worlds, both of which were, at that time, as little-known here as the authors.

I am happy to say that this is no longer true either of the magazines or of the substantial group of authors (John Brunner, John Rackham, James White, among others) who developed in their pages under the editorial guidance of E. J. Cornell.

In the past year Mr. Carnet, who has been publicist, critic, business manager, and (probably at times) mailboy as well, since the beginning of the publishing venture, went on to a new_, position at Corgi Books. The magazines were to cease publication, but happily passed into new hands instead. Some of the best and brightest new ideas in science fiction in the last decade have come from this source.

Nova has not, however, been the sole source of good British s-f. Arthur C. Clarke, John Wyndham, A. B. Chandler, John Christopher, to name a few, were writing for the American magazines all along, as were several others whose reputations were primarily "mainstream."

Whether Gerald Kersh, now residing in New York State, can still be called a British writer, I do not know. That he is one of the finest and most consistently entertaining writers of imaginative literature, I am sure.

Story: A BARGAIN WITH CASHEL by Gerald Kersh from The Saturday Evening Post

Throughout these notes, I have placed much emphasis on matters of definition. Time, as a coordinate of space, has been defined with some degree of precision, mathematically; but time, as we ordinarily use the word, a subjective measurement of awareness, is even more difficult to pin down than, for instance, subjective or awareness.

In the Playboy symposium, William Tenn mentioned "intelligence of some sort" as a prerequisite for civilization, and added that the factor we were most likely to share with an alien civilization would be "imagination, the essential ingredient of our culture."

All right. But what is imagination? What is the relationship between intelligence and imagination? What is intelligence?

And these are all "easy" words; we can usually understand each other when we use them in ordinary conversation, even without clear definitions. But what about intuition, neurotic, creative, secure, art?

Or how about curiosity, wonder, humor, communication? Writers and philosophers have repeatedly pointed to one or another of these qualities as setting mankind apart from other Earth animals. But what—exactly—do we mean when we say them?

The search for practical, working definitions is going on in many fields of sociological and psychological study today. A new kind of science is being born in the process.

When we understand, in the way that we now understand the word atmosphere (composition, behavior, etc.), what we mean by subjectivity, we will be able to make the same allowance for it, in our study of "humanics," that the spectrographer now can make for the content of Earth's atmosphere.

We may then come to a further understanding of the true and complete potential of the (subjective) human mind.

Story: DRUNKBOAT by Cordwainer Smith from Amazing