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The Cutting Edge

Everyone plays with ten-best lists; science fictioneers are no exception,32 but here is a modest proposal: the ten best science fiction stories of all time. Whether it is possible to define a ten (or even a hundred) "best" is arguable; the qualifications and criteria of the compiler are pressed every step of the way but that the job should be done for the short story too is non disputandum.

Science fiction, at the cutting edge, has always flourished in the short story. Perhaps the genre by definition will sustain its best work in that form; here a speculative premise and a protagonist upon whose life that premise is brought to bear can be dramatically fused with intensity. Novels tend to be episodic or bloated; even novellas tend to say too much or too little, but the short story—traditionally defined as a work of prose fiction of less than fifteen thousand words—has from the outset comprised as a body most of the best work in this field. While science fiction in its modern inception has produced possibly ten novels that might be called masterpieces, it has given no less than several hundred short stories that would justify that difficult and presumptuous label. Henry James defined the short story as in its purest state being about one person and one thing and it is within that compass that science fiction achieves rigor and its proper form. (It should be noted that almost all of the disputed masterpieces that would appear on most of the ten-best-novel lists were expanded or assembled from short stories . . . Budrys's Rogue Moon, Miller's Canticle for Leibowitz, Sturgeon's More Than Human, for instance. Although one is dangerously surmising author intention, it would be a fair guess that these were originally conceived as short stories and only worked obiter dicta into novels, lending further justification to the view of science fiction as a short story form.)

Too, it is in America in the twentieth century that the short story has reached its apotheosis; our one great contribution to world culture might be the American short story, which has become a wondrous and sophisticated medium. The confluence of the American short story and that uniquely American form modern science fiction would result in a ten-best list with which anyone would reckon.

Herewith this list with the usual qualifications and cautions: The stories themselves are not ranked in order of descending merit (it is foolish enough to find a top ten without going on to arrange them); the judgment is based upon literary excellence (seminal stories such as Stanley Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey" as influences upon the genre have had far greater effect than most of the stories on this list, but the work is being judged sui generis) and, of course, as a single informed opinion it is liable to provoke challenge and dispute, not least of all from the list-maker himself, who a year or two from now might want to change three quarters of it . . . or ten years from now might agree that work yet to be written has displaced several of these stories. Whether or not our best work is ahead of us, a lot of good work is still ahead:

1) "Vintage Season," by C. L. Moore (Astounding Science Fiction, 1946). Published as by "Lawrence O'Donnell," the second most important (after "Lewis Padgett") of the Kuttners' pseudonyms, this story is now known to have been one of the very few of their eighteen-year marriage and collaboration to have been written by Catherine Moore alone. The vision of future cultural decadence imposed (through time-traveling researchers who specialize in attending plagues, torment, and disasters of history) upon an earlier (undefined) period that in its own decadence foreshadows this version of the future, its languorous pace, concealed but artful, and manipulated erotic subtext and stylistic control probably distinguish it as the single best short story to emerge from the decade. It has been rewritten endlessly and has directly influenced hundreds of short stories and at least two dozen novels, but none of its descendants have improved upon the basic text. Its only flaw—as Damon Knight pointed out twenty years ago—is a denouement that carries on too long between the revelation and the flat, deadly last line; it is bathetic and overextended and for the sake of good form should have been severely cut. It is not a serious flaw because it enables the reader only to marvel at the spareness of this eighteen-thousand-word story to that point; it has the density and emotional impact of a novel.

2) "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever," by James Tiptree, Jr. (Alice Sheldon) (Final Stage, 1974). The judge must plead his own problem at the outset and throw himself on the mercy of a higher court: I commissioned this story for an original anthology co-edited with Edward L. Ferman and published it first. Final Stage was a written-to-order anthology in which various writers were asked to write a story on one of the great themes of science fiction, Tiptree (Sheldon) was asked for an End of the World story and delivered one of the very few masterpieces that did not originate with the writer. (Editorial involvement or the assignment of theme often results in good stories and sometimes improves good stories to better-than-good, but masterpieces almost necessarily have to self-generate and will themselves through.)

This postapocalypse story in which the end of the world becomes a metaphor for the shocks and injuries of existence which prefigure and replicate death (and make the state of death their eternal reenactment) is almost unknown today; it appears only in the out-of-print Final Stage in hardcover and paperback and an out-of-print Tiptree collection, Star Songs of an Old Primate. It will reward the most careful study, and Tiptree's afterword to the story—also commissioned, as were all of the afterwords in the collection—is a brief but beautifully written essay on the real meaning of science fiction on whose ideas I have based the title essay of this book.

3) "Particle Theory," by Edward Bryant (Analog, 1977). The protagonist, a physicist, is dying of cancer, his emotional life is in decay and the astronomical phenomena which he observes clearly foreshadow the end of the world . . . all three levels of destruction here fuse, echo one another, are bound together in a story of astonishing excellence which fully meets the criteria of a great science fiction story: its science and scientific premise are locked into the text and grant the emotional force; without the scientific element the story would collapse, yet it is this speculation's shift into individual pain and consequence which clarify it scientifically. The seventies were science fiction's richest decade in the short story; although more good stories were published in the fifties, the top 1 or 2 percent of the latter decade's output far exceeded the equivalent top percent of the fifties, and in this decade Bryant's story might have been the best.

4) "The Terminal Beach," by J. G. Ballard (New Worlds, 1965). Rejected by every American market of its time as eventless, internalized, and depressing, this mysterious and beautiful work was the key story of its decade, the pivot for science fiction; its importance lay not only in its depiction of "inner space," the complex and tormented vistas of the human spirit in the post-technological age, but in its use of science fiction technique to convert its ambiguous landscape, and by implication our century, to "science fiction."

5) "Private Eye," by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (Astounding Science Fiction, 1949). A puzzle story, a futuristic mystery (how can the protagonist make a premeditated murder look accidental when the forensic pathologists and the prosecution have time-scanning devices that can follow him from birth and put him on stage all the time?) that in its horrid denouement indicates exactly where the Kuttners thought the paraphernalia and technological wonders of the future would take us and why; cleanly written, paced to within an inch of its life, and although still anthologized, it is nonetheless always underrated as the masterpiece that it is.

6) "Sundance," by Robert Silverberg (Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1969). A complex, multiply voiced, shifting point of view (employing among other technical devices, second-person narration for a time), the story would have been self-conscious, a display of virtuosity for its own sake, were it not for the pain of the American Indian protagonist attached to a genocidal mission and the clarity of its plot development, which not only justify but incorporate all of the stylistic trickeries and make them implicit in the theme. It is the most brilliant of many Silverberg excellences in the short story form between 1968 and 1975, and in its subtle fashion is one of the most powerful anti-Vietnam, antiwar stories of the period.

7) "Anachron," by Damon Knight (Worlds of If, 1954). A story which, because it did not sell the top magazines of the period, fell into obscurity, although it does appear in the recent The Best of Damon Knight. A time-paradox story of the most elegant construction, it sets up and explodes its desperate conclusion with a remorselessness and rigor characteristic of the very best of the Galaxy school of science fiction, of which Knight in turn was the best and most rigorous example. Naturally Horace Gold rejected it, but "Anachron" was only one of many distinguished stories published by James Quinn in Worlds of If. Quinn was an editor who—by the standards of science fiction perhaps rather foolishly—asked first that a story be literate and readable and only second that it be suited for the nebulous "science fiction audience."

8) "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," by Alfred Bester (Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1954). Bester is best known for his two fifties novels which appeared first in Galaxy, The Demolished Man (1952) and The Stars My Destination (1956), but in that period he published no more than a dozen stories in Fantasy and Science Fiction which are generally thought to be the finest and most consistently brilliant body of shorter work by any writer in the history of the form; here is Bester using the device of the time paradox to destroy the time paradox and some of the shibboleths of science fiction itself ("you are your past . . . each of us lives alone and returns alone"); the many-voiced, restless, surgically probing style is beyond the level of the best "literary" writers of Bester's time. (It was the late nineteen-sixties before the so-called mainstream in the persons of Robert Coover, a latter-day Norman Mailer, Donald Barthelme, Robert Stone caught up to Bester by finally evolving a style which crystallized the fragmented, tormented, transected voices of the age.)

9) "Fondly Fahrenheit," by Alfred Bester (Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1954). Silverberg has called this perhaps the single finest short story ever to come from science fiction; it may be. It certainly is, with due respect to "Sundance" (which was written a full decade and a half later!), the most technically brilliant: an alternating first and third person, a maddened protagonist and the crazed robot who has become his alter ego and doppelganger, perfect demented control and a trapdoor ending. There has been nothing like this story in modern American literature; that it was published over a quarter of a century ago and is still unknown outside of science fiction is an indictment of the academic-literary nexus, which in the very long run, if there is any future for scholarship at all, will pay heavily.

10) "E for Effort," by T. L. Sherred (Astounding Science Fiction, 1947). A. J. Budrys writes that Campbell published Sherred's first story on its astonishing merit, spent the next ten years thinking about it and decided that he didn't like what it really meant at all. A viewer which enables its possessor to see anyone at any time in history, once seized (as it would inevitably be) by the government, will be so obviously dangerous to all other governments that war will be started as soon as the word gets out; technology in its purest form will always be appropriated for the purposes of destruction. Sherred has published only a scattering of short stories and a forgotten novel (Alien Island, 1968) over succeeding decades; his reputation on the basis of this story remains as secure as that of any writer in the history of the genre.

The second ten, all close runners up to be sure, are listed again in no order and with the understanding that any or all could be traded in for any or all of the top ten:

"Baby Is Three," by Theodore Sturgeon (Galaxy, 1952); "Live at Berchtesgarden," by George Alec Effinger (Orbit, 1970); "They Don't Make Life Like They Used To," by Alfred Bester (Fantasy and Science Fiction, 1961); "The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs," by Carter Scholz (Universe, 1977); "The Eve of the Last Apollo," by Carter Scholz (Orbit, 1977); "The Psychologist Who Wouldn't Do Awful Things to Rats," by James Tiptree, Jr. (New Dimensions, 1976); "The Children's Hour," by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore (Astounding, 1944); "Timetipping," by Jack M. Dann (Epoch, 1975); "The Big Flash," by Norman Spinrad (Orbit, 1969); and "Party of the Two Parts," by William Tenn (Philip Klass) (Galaxy, 1955).

 

—1980: New Jersey

 

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