Judith
Merril
Among all the beckoning byways of the mind, the previously untraveled roads of inquiry which it is the special privilege of science fantasy to open and explore, the most fascinating by far, to me, are the many avenues of speculation about other possible forms of life. This anthology was undertaken in an effort to collect as many different, and differing, concepts of "other life" as could be found. What difficulty was encountered in the selection of stories was almost entirely one of elimination; there just wasn't room to cover the whole field.
I decided to print only those stories that had never before been anthologized, and to include at the end of the volume a list of the many more that might have been included. Altogether, the stories reprinted and listed include almost every concept of life as we don't know it that I have come across in my reading of the field—all, that is, except the standard-brand, English-speaking, tentacle-waving monster from Mars, the BEM, or Bug-Eyed Monster. He (or it) is, I hope, fading away forever, along with the yellowing pages of the magazines whose covers he once adorned.
There are a goodly number of extraterrestrial critters included here, all selected for their plausibility, as well as for originality of concept, and skill of storytelling. Some of them are described in their native habitats, others in the more familiar role of visitors to earth. You will find, in addition, a fairly wide variety of men, monsters, and machines going boomp i' the nicht: werewolves, robots, mutants, angels, educated animals, intelligent energies, thinking machines, and even a flirtatious whirlwind; stories of life on other planets and unsuspected life on our own, of nonprotoplasmie life and given nonmaterial life, of the friendship, the enmity, and the pure indifference such beings might display toward man.
In the preface to his own excellent anthology, World of Wonder Fletcher Pratt pointed out: "Fantasy-science fiction also extends the writer's range, not only by adding new areas of experience and idea, but also by allowing intensifications of emotional and intellectual events that in the normal way of life occur only on an insignificant scale."
The stories in this volume are all, in that sense, a study of psychology under a magnifying lens. They deal, in every case, with the enlargement of some one of man's interpersonal or cultural problems: the group fear of the stranger (invader from space), and the stranger's fear of the group ( trip to another planet); the desire for domination, and the desire for privacy; the problems of mastery and servitude, of class and caste; the fear of change, and the little understood, yet demonstrable, drive toward progress.
The problems that are here turned over with a tentative and questing finger are the very problems of human development that are now being taken in hand by the more forward-looking of social scientists. And the trend toward this line of speculation is increasingly observable in the science-fantasy fiction now appearing in magazines—both the specialty publications and the more general national magazines. The stories included in this collection were written and published over a period of some fifteen years; I think they are the forerunners of the speculative fiction of tomorrow.
There were many people who assisted in the selection of stories for this collection. I should like to express my thanks to all of them, and in particular to the Hydra Club of New York for the use of its library, and to many of its members for suggestions and criticisms; to Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas, for advice and assistance in helping me to obtain manuscripts; to my mother, Ethel Grossman, for her fortitude in reading and criticizing my favorite stories from a non-science-fantasy reader's point of view; and above all, to Fletcher Pratt, for his sustained enthusiasm, his many kindnesses, and his extraordinary patience.