DAMON KNIGHT

1973: The Year
in Science Fiction

Nineteen seventy-three was another year of continued growth in science fiction-"boom" would not be too strong a word. This in spite of Publishers Weekly's annual figures, which show a 52 percent drop in s.f. titles compared to 1972. Unfortunately for all who rely on PW's figures, the magazine stopped using its own data partway through 1972 and instead used the Library of Congress MARC II tapes. "In the latter [MARC Il]," PW notes, "some mysteries, Westerns and science fiction books are listed and counted in general fiction."

In terms of money paid to authors, probably there had never been a better year. Ballantine bought the paperback rights to three novels by Arthur C. Clarke, two of them yet to be written (Rendezvous With Rama , The Fountains of Paradise, and Imperial Earth) for an unprecedented $500,000. (The hardcover editions will be published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.) Ballantine, recently acquired by Random House, also issued a large map of Barsoom in connection with its reissue of all the Burroughs Mars books.

The newsmagazine Locus counted 75 s.f. anthologies published during the year (66 percent of all s.f. titles, if PW's figures were correct!), and Lester del Rey said at Toronto that s.f. accounted for 10 percent of all published fiction. This was at the Thirty-first
World Science Fiction Convention, the "Torcon," where Hugos were awarded to Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. Le Guin, Poul Anderson, and R. A. Lafferty for the best s.f. of the year.

Other conventions, too many to list, included the Infinity Con in New York City (Keith Laumer, guest of honor), the Balticon in Baltimore (Poul Anderson), Boskone X, Boston (Robert A. W. Lowndes), the Marcon in Columbus, Ohio (Gordon R. Dickson), the Lunacon in New York City (Harlan Ellison), the Disclave in Washington, D.C. (Gardner R. Dozois), and the Bubonicon in Albuquerque, New Mexico (Robert Silverberg).

The first Scandinavian SF Film Festival was held in Copenhagen, and a week-long s.f. festival in Lille, France, was attended by 1,300. Science fiction was booming also in Germany, where agent Kurt Luif estimated that English-speaking writers are earning about $100,000 yearly in translation rights. In Poland, Stanislaus Lem received the Literary Award First Class of the Ministry of Culture, carrying with it a cash award of 50,000 zlotys. Here at home, Ursula K. Le Guin won the National Book Award for Children's Literature for her novel The Farthest Shore (Atheneum), the final volume of the Earthsea trilogy. The award was accompanied by a cash prize of $1,000.

The John W. Campbell Award, presented by Conde Nast to the best new s.f. writer of the year, went to Jerry Pournelle, with George Alec Effinger as runnerup. The John W. Campbell Memorial Award, juried by Leon Stover, Brian W. Aldiss, Thomas D. Clareson, Harry Harrison, and Willis McNelly, went to Barry Malzberg for his novel Beyond Apollo (Random House). In a letter to Analog, Poul Anderson bitterly protested this choice: "One can readily understand that the judges, dissatisfied with the Hugo and Nebula procedures, felt something else was needed, and established it. That's fine per se. What is not fine is their misappropriation of a great man's name."

The magazines continued to feel the competition not only of hardcover anthology series such as New Dimensions and Nova, but of the still newer commissioned theme anthologies, dominated by Roger Elwood. Elwood, almost unknown in science fiction until a few years ago, has contracted for more than sixty s.f. anthologies and has become s.f. editor for a number of publishers. A notice in the SFWA Bulletin T gives a hint of his other activities: "He just recently signed a three-book contract with Avon-the subjects include: speaking in tongues (Pentecostalism), prison reform and athletics. Also under contract is a book about a reformed prostitute .... Elwood is working on a book about homosexuality, prostitution, gambling, pornography, abortion, and other subjects; he's writing it for Zondervan Publishing House of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Just recently, he signed a contract to edit for Pyramid a series of books about country-and-western music (he's also science fiction editor at that firm); and landed a major book on baseball star Hank Aaron for Chilton Books (where he's science fiction consultant). He is presently putting together a syndicated newspaper series featuring brand-new articles by Dale Evans Rogers, Anita Bryant and Hal Lindsey."

About the commissioned anthologies Sidney Coleman wrote in F&SF:

Nothing can stop a dumb idea whose time has come .. . . Ever since the ill-fated Twayne Triplets, this has been a known method of getting bad stories from good writers; nevertheless, its popularity continues to grow. Maybe it's just that publishers, a race subject to childish superstitions, believe that a book needs a gimmick if it is to sell. Perhaps at this very moment, another theme anthology is being born, in a conversation something like this:

EDITOR: Sam, give me some money. I'll put together a collection of original sf for you.

PUBLISHER: Sf? Oh, you mean sci-fi. What's the gimmick?

EDITOR: You'll love it. Listen to this: Strange Fruits. The ; blurb is "All New Tales of Alien Effeminacy."
PUBLISHER: No good. We bought the same idea from Elwood last month.

EDITOR: That's all right; I've got a million of them. How about Wine of the Dreamers? Four giants of science fiction accept the challenge of writing a story while dead drunk.

In spite of all this new competition, the magazines showed renewed signs of life. Weird Tales was revived by publisher Leo Margulies, under the editorship of Sam Moskowitz. A new slick magazine, Vertex, published in California, was an immediate success. New books and periodicals about science fiction appeared, notably The World 'of Fanzines by Fredric Wertham (Southern Illinois University Press) and Science-Fiction Studies, a semiannual journal edited by R. D. Mullen and Darko Suvin (Department of English, Indiana State University).

Our losses during the year included Professor J. R. R. Tolkien, who died at the age of eighty-one in England, September 2; Bruce Elliott, a former professional magician (New York, March 21); Leonard Tushnet, physician and Jewish scholar (New Jersey, November 28) ; and Walter M. Moudy, an attorney (Kansas City, Missouri, April 13). Other causes for sorrow were the decisions of the Drake, North Dakota, school board to burn copies of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, and of the California Board of Education to require the teaching of Genesis on a parity with the Darwinian theory of evolution.

Some further disappointments: Lancer Books filed for bankruptcy. The Haunt of Horror was suspended after two issues. Harry Harrison shelved his proposed anthology The Year Two Million because of unimaginative submissions. "I . . . will probably cancel the contract in the end,", he said. "Don't blame me."

In internal affairs, there was extended and sometimes acrimonious debate of a proposal for SFWA neckties (for men) and scarves (for the ladies). Nothing came of this, thank goodness, but Brigadier General Theodore R. Cogswell, editor of the SFWA

Forum, was inspired to make the following remarks about required dress for the 1974 Nebula Awards t Banquet in Hollywood:

"Black tie optional" means that shoes will be worn. Black shoes will be worn with black suits, brown shoes will be worn with brown suits. It would be appreciated if those arriving barefoot would check into the SFWA suite one hour in advance of the ceremony. Appropriately colored shoes will be available on a first-come first-served basis. Latecomers will have to make do with shoe blacking or browning as the case may be.

R. A. Lafferty may have summed it all up when he said, in an interview in The Alien Critic, that he is one of his own favorite writers "in spots." He explained: "A spot is really a blot, a stain, a blemish. The spots I like do appear to be those things, and in addition they slow down and break the rhythm of SF. But they are necessary. They are the generative spots, the original bits, and they will be less awkward every time they are borrowed and reworked .... There are clear-as-a-crystal writers of great reputation who will always remain spotless in this sense. There is not an idea or notion to be found in them that is not first found in others; none that would have been lost forever if they had not pinned it down. But some of us are spotted like sick leopards and we repel a little."

NEBULA AWARDS, 1973		x

The awards were presented at the annual Nebula banquet at the Century Plaza Hotel in Hollywood, April 27, 1974. Guests of honor included the Foreign ,, Secretary of the National Academy of Sciences and

Captain Edgar Mitchell, sixth man on the moon.

Voting for the Nebula Awards was as follows:

NOVEL

Winner: RENDEZVOUS WITH RAMA by Arthur C. Clarke

(Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; serialized in Galaxy)
Runners-up: GRAVITY'S RAINBOW by Thomas Pynchon (Viking); THE PEOPLE OF THE WIND by Poul Anderson (Analog); TIME ENOUGH FOR LOVE by Robert A. Heinlein (Putnam); THE MAN WHO FOLDED HIMSELF by David Gerrold (Random House)

NOVELLA

Winner: "The Death of Doctor Island" by Gene Wolfe (Universe 3)

Runners-up: "Chains of the Sea" by Gardner R. Dozois (Chains of the Sea, Nelson); "Junction" by Jack Dann (Fantastic); "Death and Designation Among the Asadi" by Michael Bishop (If); "The White Otters of Childhood" by Michael Bishop (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction)

NOVELETTE

Winner: "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand" by Vonda N. McIntyre (Analog)

Runners-up: "The Deathbird" by Harlan Ellison (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction); "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" by James Tiptree, Jr. (New Dimensions 111); "Case and the Dreamer" by Theodore Sturgeon (Galaxy)

SHORT STORY

Winner: "Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death" by James Tiptree, Jr. (The Alien Condition)

Runners-up: "With Morning Comes Mistfall" by George R. R. Martin (Analog); "How I Lost the Second World War" by Gene Wolfe (Analog); "Wings" by Yonda N. McIntyre (The Alien Condition); "A Thing of Beauty" by Norman Spinrad (Analog); "Shark" by Edward Bryant (Orbit 12)

DRAMATIC PRESENTATION

Winner: SOYLENT GREEN, screenplay by Stanley R. Greenberg (MGM)

Runners-up: Catholics, teleplay by Brian Moore (CBS Playhouse); Westworld, screenplay by Michael Crichton (MGM); Steambath, teleplay by Bruce J. Friedman (Hollywood Television Theatre)