THEY CALL IT THE NEW THING.

The people who call it that mostly don't like it, and the only general agreements they seem to have are that Ballard is its Demon and I am its prophetess—and that it is what is wrong with Tom Disch, and with British s-f in general.

There is a certain uneasiness in finding oneself the publicly appointed Defender of an undefined Faith. But the more I read of (what must be by simple subtraction) The Old Thing, the more inclined I am to take on the championship of TNT—especially as the very lack of definition provided by the innovators of the term leaves me in the happy position of being able to describe my own parameters. What sort of game is it that fits so agreeable a name?

I assume it is my enthusiasm for Ballard's work, and for much of what is being done by the group of new "New Worlds writers" in England (commonly, and erroneously, thought of as Ballard disciples by OT supporters here), that has identified me with TNT. I am now, as it happens, preparing an anthology of British s-f for Doubleday, which should make much clearer by example than I can possibly do by precept, some of the specifically British directions of TNT. But any sub-classification of new s-f writing which begins by including such basically dissimilar—and versatile—writers as Ballard and Disch can hardly be limited to the area cultivated by New Worlds and the late lamented Impulse. The American counterpart is less cohesive as a "school" or "movement": it has had no single publication in which to concentrate its development, and was, in fact, till recently, all but excluded from the regular s-f magazines. But for the same reasons, it is more diffuse and perhaps more widespread. Without reference to such names as Barth and Barthelme, whose s-f qualifications would, I am sure, be hotly debated by TOT supporters, there is a clear vein of native NT running at least from Philip Dick to the American aspect of the split-Disch, and including among its more notable practitioners Kurt Vonnegut, David Bunch, Kit Reed, and above all, the late Cordwainer Smith.

Add the less well-known (inside s-f) work of Carol Emshwiller, Vance Aandahl, Harvey Jacobs, and a score of others barely known in the s-f magazines. Remember that the antecedents of TNT begin (at least) with Kuttner, show up prominently in the best work of Sturgeon and Leiber, some of Kornbluth, most of McKenna, and a good part of Budrys—not to mention memorable excursions into the area by Knight, Blish, Laumer, and Asimov, for instance. Finally, consider the nature of most of the recent work of such current OT favorites as Roger Zelazny, R. A. Lafferty, Samuel Delany, and Harlan Ellison.

The Thing isn't so New: it is nothing more than the application of contemporary and sometimes (though mostly not very) experimental literary techniques to the kind of contemporary/experimental speculation which is the essence of science fiction.

I have in front of me samples of the most recent work of at least half of the best currently active writers (British and American) of American science fiction: novels by Dick, Disch, and Delany, and two anthologies, one of which calls itself WORLD'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION l967,* (* WORLD'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION 1967, Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr, eds., Ace, 75¢) while the other —ORBIT 2 (ORBIT 2, Damon Knight, ed., Putnam's, $4.95) —spreads a big black catchline over its title, proclaiming, "The Best All New Science Fiction Stories of the Year."

The first of these collections is edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr. Carr generally expresses a more open attitude toward TNT than most American editors; Wollheim is probably as solid an OT man as you'll find in the business. Quite possibly it is just this combination of editorial attitudes which has maintained the generally high level of this series—and predictably, the stories in this year's grouping tend to level out to a fairly even balance between old- and new-style selections. Predictability by name or source falls down almost entirely otherwise. Although there are four selections (out of the book's total of twelve) from New Worlds, and three selections which might fairly (though by no means emphatically) be described as examples of TNT, there is only one of those three which originally appeared in NW: Brian Aldiss' excellent "Amen and Out," a funny and tender (among other things) treatment of religion, robotics, and immortality (among other things). On the other hand, "Behold the Man"—also about religion, also from NW, and written by the editor of that magazine and chief spokesman for TNT, British style, Michael Moorcock—is a highly effective, completely conventional (in s-f) treatment of a Freudian-conventional view of the hero of that other NT, Jesus Christ.

Just to even things out, the farthest-out story in the book, and the only one to which the NT label can be unequivocally attached, was written by one of the most emphatic and influential opponents of (British, at least) TNT: Fred Pohl, editor of Galaxy. And the third NT item, R. A. Lafferty's "Nine Hundred Grandmothers," was published in Galaxy. (At the risk of further confusing the issues, I must add that I found both of these below-par both for the collection as a whole, and for their respective authors.)

The two Zelazny inclusions, again, criss-cross my line of definition: "For a Breath I Tarry" is written in a breathless quasi-poetic style usually associated with TNT, but there is not a breath of fresh idea in its crossbreeding of two of the hoariest plots in s-f; "The Keys to December" is exciting, complex, absolutely TNT speculation on education and religion (among other things) structured and styled in such a way as not to seem out of place in a collection of, say, the best from Analog. (Both stories appeared in New Worlds.)

Best-of-the-book, I'd say, are the Aldiss and Moorcock and Bob Shaw's (conventional, even sentimental, but vividly evocative and inventively consistent) "Light of Other Days," from Analog. The rest of the line-up consists of three good-ish stories by Philip K. Dick, Avram Davidson, and Paul Ash, and two undistinguished entries by new authors, A. A. Walde and Dannie Plachta.

It is worth mentioning that in their brief preface the editors speak of the "relative scarcity of genuinely new ideas" in science fiction today. I think they are right—for traditional (which is to say, OT) science fiction: the new ideas of today cannot be adequately written in the style of the gadget-and-gimmick ideas of the golden age of the American science fiction magazines. Just how true this is is made unhappily clear, I think, in Damon Knight's ORBIT 2.

This is the second of the Putnam-Berkley series of anthologies of original s-f. The jacket and flap-copy specify "science fiction," but I note that Knight has omitted a generalizing preface this time, and I expect he was motivated at least in part by the impossibility of reconciling the contents with his own frequently-stated concept of science fiction. Of the ten selections here, only Kate Wilhelm's "Baby, You Were Great" and (just barely) Aldiss' "Full Sun" would satisfy any reasonable traditional definition of science-fiction-proper.

Once again, there are three stories that might be described as TNT, but only one that is unarguably so—and this time I am pleased to say I also found it distinctively the best piece in the book: Kit Reed's story of adolescence, pop music, alienation, and dieting (among other things), "The Food Farm." McKenna's "Fiddler's Green" was probably unpublished previously 'precisely because of the way it straddles traditional fantasy and TNT: trimmed of its overlong simplistic fantasy introduction, this might have been an exceptionally powerful symbolic exploration. Lafferty's "The Hole on the Corner" also seems to me a bit less economical in the writing than his best work, and somewhat looser-woven conceptually as well.

In addition the book contains a straight mainstream story of no great merit by Philip Latham, a transplanted mainstream (medical missionary) story by Ted Thomas, an anti-heroic-fantasy by Gene Wolfe, and two delightfully literate but otherwise routine sword-and-sorcery stories by Joanna Russ.

The outstanding quality of the collection, in fact, is its literary merit. The book is eminently readable—but when you have finished, the sad note struck in the Wollheim-Carr introduction is even more strongly in evidence. Only in the Wilhelm, McKenna, and Reed selections is there any content worth chewing on; for the rest, ingenuity replaces idea, and technical excellence conceals conceptual emptiness.

And there's the crux of it: the people who find TNT uncomfortable now are the same readers and writers who turned away from The Old Thing of mainstream fiction twenty, thirty, or forty years ago for the explosive exploratory delights of The New Things science fiction was then offering—and who seem not to have noticed that speculation about space travel and the Marvellous Machine has become as routinely OT today as summer movie reruns on TV. There is a highly selective sort of blindness that afflicts the members of Establishments (call it the Let 'em Eat Cake! syndrome), and it does not discriminate between powerful governments, entrenched academicians, and loyal science fictionists. It is what makes some people see all bearded men as Beatniks (or, thirty years ago, as Russians), and what made space science fiction look like romantic/escapist junk to parents, educators, and librarians right up till 1957. Presumably it is the same myopia that made the phrase Black Power seem no more than a political slogan to Congress—and allows the solid Science Fictioneers and onetime Futurians to look, for instance, on the Mothers of Invention (or the Pugs, or even Beatles) as well as op art, student protest, the new sexual revolution, psychedelics, and a multiplex of other manifestations of the silly-sounding phrase, Flower Power, as collegiate antics comparable to goldfish-swallowing and phone-booth cramming.

The Brave New World of the Flower People is not always comprehensible to me—but neither was nuclear physics when Heinlein and del Rey and Cartmill turned me on to atom power a quarter century ago. TNT is what Campbell gave us then, what Gold and Boucher gave us a dozen years later, and what looks as weird to some of our Establishments today as Weird looked to the readers of Ballyhoo.

But don't get me wrong: Ballyhoo had its good points, and so does some of the OT. (I mean, I even dig Jane Austen.) And Weird was pretty bad most of the time; so is a lot of The New Thing. But when it is bad, it is usually because the author's technique was not adequate to handle his concepts—rather than because his basic ideas were too old, too stale, or too flat to matter.

Philip K. Dick is admired, if anything, even more by Old Thing adherents than by TNT people. Yet he is virtually the only established American s-f writer who demonstrates a consistent awareness of the facts of life in this country today.

Perhaps because his work is so colorful—and sometimes so garbled—Dick does not seem to be as highly regarded for the acuteness of his political/sociological observations and projections as he deserves: this in spite of the fact that THE MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE is generally considered (on both sides of the Thing fence) to be his best book, and it is certainly the one with the least pyrotechnics and the most fully-developed socio-economic extrapolation. Since then, his work has been, in general, more flamboyant but also more complex in concepts; more ambitious in scope, but seldom as fully realized.

The three recent novels under discussion here—THE CRACK IN SPACE, (THE CRACK IN SPACE, Philip K. Dick, Ace, 40¢) THE ZAP GUN (THE ZAP GUN, Philip K. Dick, Pyramid, 50¢) and COUNTER-CLOCK WORLD (COUNTER-CLOCK WORLD, Philip K. Dick, Berkley, 60¢)—are all somewhat more restrained and less infuriatingly disconnected than most of the interim work (notably last year's NOW WAIT FOR NEXT YEAR—and the elusive quality of something-extra, a note quite graspable plus, which pervaded NEXT YEAR and PALMER ELDRITCH, is (if also somewhat modified) beginning to be more comprehensible.

That is to say, I think I have at last discovered what it is that at once delights and annoys me in the particular kind of brightness characteristic of Dick's work of the last five years or so—and it has to do with his appropriation of a very specialized and very contemporary aspect of pop art: an approach probably excellently well suited to his content—and incidentally, but irrelevantly, extremely irritating to me.

Pause for story identification : ZAP GUN is the Romeo-and-Juliet story of Lars Powderdry, weapons fashion designer for Wesbloc, and Lilo Topchev, his opposite number in Peep East, set against a fascinatingly postulated near-future of intensely controlled economy, in which the two great powers maintain stability by the conduct of a false war, fought in mock-up on tabletops, while the "concomodies" on the UN-W Natsec Board think up ways to adapt the weapon designs to practical civilian use.

COUNTER-CLOCK WORLD contains one of the very few future-projections of the present Black Power movement in which there is any genuine comprehension of the issues, motivations, and directions of today's "insurrection," along with further comments on our anticulture, and some cogent asides on the character of contemporary matrimony—all thrown into a really unbelievably banal plot set in an amusing, sometimes-satiric, lightly-scatological reverse-time fantasy, whose burlesque-and-bathos effects almost neutralize the political concepts completely. CRACK IN SPACE uses abortions and human deep-freezing, a pleasure-satellite run by a two-headed mutant, and lots of fast action to veil a meaty account of economic and race issues in an election campaign.

In all three books, Dick makes use of every available color-and-motion effect—as well as his innate magnificent sense of timing—to create a spell-binding effect which carries the reader easily through the' countless nonsequiturs and logic-gaps of his plots. In every case, it takes aliens or supermen to get things resolved. The characters, going through a series of disconnected but (each time) briefly convincing motions and emotions, seem to be painted entirely in primary colors—

And it was with that thought that the flash of insight came to me. Phil Dick is not writing novels, but comic-strip continuity—and when you chew on that thought a bit (even if, like me, you have trouble swallowing it) you may recognize that it is not a Bad Thing, after all. Dick is writing what the British critics like to call a "novel of ideas" rather than a "novel of manners." It doesn't matter what sort of nonsense he makes use of, to carry his concepts —as long as he can hold the reader, and as long as the idea-cargo itself comes through intact. He may offend my sense of fitness—but I learned to read out of Victorian novels. My children learned mostly out of comic books, and the public school adaptation of comics known to the Ed Biz as Visual Aids.

It may be pushing things a bit, but this view of Dick made me take a new look at Disch, who is represented here by two of his less New-Thing-y efforts: ECHO ROUND HIS BONES, (ECHO ROUND HIS BONES, Thomas M. Disch, Berkley, 60¢) and MANKIND UNDER THE LEASH (MANKIND UNDER THE LEASH, Thomas M. Disch, Ace double, 50¢) (an expansion of the magazine story, "White Fang Goes Dingo").

It is time, I think, for me to make an admission: when I wrote my wildly enthusiastic review of Disch's first novel, THE GENOCIDES, I had just finished reading the book. I still stand by what I said—but had I waited a week to set it down on paper, I should have said it much more mildly. Disch has a spell-binding trick of his own, and it resembles Dick's only in being intensely visual. The difference is, on one level, the reverse of the point about novels of manners and of ideas: Disch is concerned primarily with character interactions, and he uses his idea content, ordinarily, to construct a showcase for the behavior of his characters. But he focuses on only two or three individuals—and 'focus' is the key word here. These are not comic-strip types, but movie characters: the caricature element is gone, and in its place is the illusion of depth which the motion picture added to the still photograph. The fore ground figures are in full focus, and for the most part fully realized; the others at any point are "extras" whose illusion of reality need not be sustained an instant longer than it takes them to cross the screen (unlike the comic book, where the reader can always turn back).

Once again, what sounds like an indictment is meant as an observation of interest. In spite of what I think—or rather, how I react—I not only do not think there is anything wrong in these techniques, but suspect that they are excellently well adapted to the authors' purposes as well as the readers' tastes.

Certainly, all five of these books qualify as plain ordinary good reading. (And some day I will take you backstage in pulpwriter country—where the familiar techniques of most American commercial writing were developed.)

Samuel Delany's new novel, THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION, (THE EINSTEIN INTERSECTION, Samuel R. Delany, Ace, 40¢) left me as divided in response after first reading as the Disch and Dick novels—but for very different reasons. I read the book at a gulp, delighted page by page, and disappointed at the end, without quite knowing why. When I went back to skim through and refresh myself before writing about it, I found myself re-reading instead: and found out it was the gulping that gave me that faint indigestion the first time.

Do not let the easy story surface and lyrical language mislead you: this is a dense mixture, heavily concentrated, double-distilled. If you cannot read slowly, with careful attention to each (believe me!) carefully-wrought sentence—if the pace carries you along too swiftly—then go with it, but go back afterwards, and discover what you missed (or some of it; I suspect I will find more next time, and perhaps more again after that). The epigraphs and excerpts from the author's travel diary that precede each chapter are not there for any of the usual reasons (decoration, counterpoint, vanity)—or at least not for those reasons alone; they are integral to the tight-woven complexity of Delany's multi-level fabric of statement.

If the book has a serious flaw, it is in the over-tight weaving, the too-careful pruning and packing of meaning into deceptively simple and rhythmic language: that is, that it is in large part closer to poetry than prose, without any of the typographical, linguistic, or structural formalities which usually serve as clues to the reader to proceed more attentively than he expects to do with an adventure novel (let alone an adventure novel in cheap paperback format with a lurid red demon-thing on the cover).

Then again, I expect I'd have had that uneasiness at the end even if I had paid proper attention all the way through the first time. I had the same kind of thing when I finished Richard McKenna's SAND PEBBLES. ("Endings to be useful must be inconclusive," says one of the quotes from Delany's journal.)

That is to say: this is a charming book, a gay book, a story of true love and roving adventure, full of strange music, a song of changelings and dragons and a Dove and a devil; where Orpheus battles Billy the Kid, and is saved from the Minotaur by a compassionate computer; but it is also and absolutely a story about where it's at, right here, right now.

I cannot imagine a book about the world I live in that could leave me feeling satisfied at the end: which is one of the more important basics of The New Thing.

Another basic is that no two really good examples will be the same. This is TNT by Delany. Buy it, read it, and then go back and read it again. Just to give you a headstart, here's how it starts:

There is a hollow, holey cylinder running from hilt to point in my machete. When I blow across the mouthpiece in the handle, I make music with my blade. When all the holes are covered, the sound is sad, as rough as rough can be and be called smooth. When all the holes are open, the sound pipes about, bringing to the eye flakes of sun on water, crushed metal. There are twenty holes. And since I have been playing music I've been called all different kinds of fool—more times, than Lobey, which is my name.

What I look like?

Ugly and grinning most of the time. That's a whole lot of big nose and gray eyes and wide mouth crammed on a small brown face proper for a fox. That, all scratched around with spun brass for hair. I hack most of it off every two months or so with my machete. Grows back fast. Which is odd, because I'm twenty-three and no beard yet. I have a figure like a bowling pin, thighs, calves, and feet of a man (gorilla?) twice my size (which is about five-nine) and hips to match. There was a rash of hermaphrodites the year I was born, which doctors thought I might be. Somehow I doubt it. . . .

–JUDITH MERRIL

BOOKS RECEIVED

FICTION

NEBULA AWARD STORIES TWO, Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison, eds., Doubleday 1967, 252 pp., $4.95.

THE TECHNICOLOR TIME MACHINE, Harry Harrison, Doubleday 1967, 190 pp., $3.95.

LOGAN'S RUN, George Clayton Johnson and William Nolan, Dial 1967, 133 pp., $3.50.

THE TENTH GALAXY READER, Frederik Pohl, ed., Doubleday 1967, 232 pp., $4.50.

VOYAGES IN TIME, Robert Silverberg, ed., Meredith 1967, 244 pp., $4.95.

LORD OF LIGHT, Roger Zelazny, Doubleday 1967, 257 pp., $4.95.

GENERAL

UNNATURAL HISTORY, An Illustrated Bestiary, Colin Clair, Abelard-Schuman 1967, 256 pp., $5.95.