Introduction to PELT by Carol Emshwiller
Does your science-fiction magazine look different lately?
If it does, there's a fair chance (one in six, by my count) that Carol Emshwiller is a good part of the reason why.
The reason for that is that Mrs. Emshwiller—who is now a housewife, mother of three pre-schoolers, married to a rising young professional man, in the world's most suburb, Levittown, Long Island—once went to Italy on a Fulbright fellowship to study art.
No, she does not illustrate her own stories. Her husband, the young professional man who was also in Italy on a Fulbright, usually does; Carol just poses. (Frequently, I mean. You'll find "Emsh" on the cover of just about every third s-f magazine these days; on just about half of those you'll find a girl who is—usually recognizably—Mrs. "Emsh.")
Carol Emshwiller is typical of a number of new authors in the field in that she has been writing for about five years, on a part-time basis. She is completely atypical (of anything or anybody) in the individuality of her style, the uniqueness of her perceptions, and the seemingly effortless clarity with which she conveys them.
"Pelt" is the story of a dog and a man on a hunting trip on a far distant planet in a future perhaps not too remote.
Introduction to TRIGGERMAN by J. F. Bone
The ideal of the brotherhood of man is hardly new. But the purely practical, businesslike necessity for immediate and enduring Peace on Earth—on Earth equipped with space missiles and atomic weapons—is original with this generation.
The development of modern warfare, of rockets, radioactives, and robot controls, has been taken for granted in science fiction for some time—and with it the recognition that international rock-tossing is just too extravagant an entertainment for modern man.
Stemming perhaps from this basic "One World or None" philosophy, and/or from the conflicts of science vs. security (and space goals vs. defense needs), a certain tradition of military-mind-mocking has grown up in s-f. Though here too history is overtaking us. Or at least General Douglas MacArthur has caught up with Planet Stories and the bug-eyed monsters. "Because of the recent development of science, the countries of the world must unite," True Space Secrets quotes him as saying. "They must make a common front against attack by people from other planets!" (My itals.—J.M.)
It is slightly less startling, but still of interest, to note that in a book full of animal-heroes (a dog, a cat, a mouse, a bear), it's the story about the General that was written by a professor of veterinary medicine.
Introduction to THE PRIZE OF PERIL by Robert Sheckley
This may come as a bit of a letdown, after Emshwiller and Bone, but Robert Sheckley is neither a cover boy nor a professor of extraterrestrial medicine. He is a writer of science fantasy, and has applied himself with exceptional competence to that profession for the past ten years or so.
"The Prize of Peril" is a story that needed the professional touch. Satires about television have cluttered the pages of too many magazines for several years, and the topic has by now been handled with more unoriginal thinking, pedestrian prose, and all-round mismanagement than any other theme I know. But this one is neither second-rate nor secondhand; this is hot-off-the-griddle, emphatically first-rate Sheckley, and is, incidentally, the favorite story in this year's volume of the gentleman who edits Dell First Editions.
Introduction to HICKORY, DICKORY, KEROUAC by Richard Gehman
The most frequent focus of speculation in s-f these days is on the cultural potential of humanity. One story may explore uncharted territory deep in the darkest interior of man; another may try to trace the tangled relationships between men and the world around them; a third might be a sort of aerial-photo view of the environment itself.
Richard Gehman is one of America's most prolific magazine writers, and is an inquisitive and earnest student of our mores, including our fads in jazz and literature.
This story was first published under the by-line, Martin Scott. The name was new to me. I queried editor Ray Russell at Playboy, who wrote to tell me the author's identity, and also said, "It certainly is an extremely clever piece, but I must admit I don't see how the satire fits into your book."
This shook me, because Russell is a type that digs s-f, mostly, and if this is not science fiction, it is what I mean by s-f, and—like, man, I mean, it is the greatest. ...
Introduction to THE YELLOW PILL by Rog Phillips
"The best laid schemes o' mice and men," that Scotsman said, "gang aft a-gley." Which, in American, means: man or mouse, one can be just as crazy mixed-up as the other.
The late Robert Lindner, in his fascinating The Fifty-Minute Hour, wrote about a patient whose fantasy-world took the form of a space-travel story so credibly constructed that the psychiatrist himself kept drifting into near-acceptance of the reality of the alien planet. Now Mr. Phillips asks: How does the doctor know—for sure—who's crazy?
Introduction to RIVER OF RICHES by Gerald Kersh
For some reason, s-f has enjoyed a rather more reputable name in Great Britain than it has here—or at least a good many more "literary" British authors have written it. (Kipling, Wells, Dunsany, Doyle, Chesterton, Priestley, Collier, Coppard, to name a few.)
In this country, fantasy, beginning with Hawthorne, has a long record of respectability; but even the best science fiction (with the notable exception of a few offbeat efforts by "major" writers, such as Stephen Vincent Benet's "By the Waters of Babylon") could be found ordinarily only in pulp magazines.
All this, of course, was B.B.—Before the Bomb. Then when s-f did achieve a measure of popular approval here, one of the first science-fiction stories printed in a top national magazine was by a British author. (Not the first. Heinlein beat Kersh to The Saturday Evening Post by about two months, early in 1947.)
Though Mr. Kersh lives in this country now, and is one of the more colorful lights in the New York literary firmament, much of his work retains the flavor of the traditionally English adventure story. This one is a tale told in a barroom, by that classic adventurer, the "younger son of a younger son,"
Introduction to SATELLITE PASSAGE by Theodore L. Thomas
Back to Cain and Abel, and ever since that time, there have been restless men, dissatisfied ones, the rovers, explorers, and adventurers. They are the men who traveled to India, discovered China, stumbled across America, pushed through the jungles of the Congo and the Amazon, charted the oceans, crested the mountains, and dog-sledded to the poles. To the stay-at-homes, these wanderers are sometimes heroes, sometimes worthless bums, depending as often as not on whether they do bring home nuggets of real gold (or silks, spices, slaves, oil leases). Now, very soon—as matters look, within our own lifetimes—the rovers will be going out to space. They will man our satellites and space stations, mine our moon, and colonize the other planets; eventually, it is they who will represent us to whatever alien life may have spawned from other stars.
Ted Thomas has a faculty for imagining life in space with such sharp realism that you can almost see and feel and taste it as you read. Here he tells the story of an embattled, proud and lonely man, a wanderer and a fighter, who must make a split-second decision for or against the community of mankind.
Introduction to CASEY AGONISTES by R. M. McKenna
Ted Thomas's hero was a sailor turned spacer; Richard McKenna is a sailor turned writer. "Casey Agonistes" was his first published story, and beyond question the brightest new entry in the s-f field last year.
Born in Idaho in 1913, Mr. McKenna reports a "desert and cowboy-type youth. To Navy, 1931. China Station, 1932.
"Meant to retire and die out there. . . . Double-crossed by history...." He spent the war years in the Naval Transport Service "…all oceans. No decorations", then found himself in 1949 in a Navy Public Information Office in Chicago.
"... Liked the journalistic word-carpentry. Decided to write some day. S-f, of course, voracious reader thereof from early age ..."
In '53, after a cruise to Korea, he was mustered out Chief Machinist's Mate: ". . . That's steam engines, refrigerators, lathes, etc. Felt lack of formal education keenly. In U. of North Carolina, summer, 1953." He took a variety of science courses, majored in psychology, and got his B.A. in English Literature in February, 1956. "Married next day. Time out for one year. First dribbles of writing, spring, 1957. Casey first thing sold and published. Age 44 then....
"Hope to live to 100 and write something every day of it. ..."
Introduction to SPACE-TIME FOR SPRINGERS by Fritz Leiber
Some people will tell you that Fritz Leiber was born backstage, in the traditional trunk, during the witches' scene in Macbeth. This is not true. But he did grow up in an atmosphere of greasepaint and iambic monologue; and he did put in at least one season of Shakespearean barnstorming himself. He also studied for the ministry, acted in Hollywood, taught at a college, worked in a factory, and edited a science magazine. But all that time he was writing, too.
Very few authors are equally successful with fantasy and science fiction. Leiber already had a reputation in Weird Tales when, in 1943, two novels of his appeared almost simultaneously in Astounding and Unknown Worlds. "Gather Darkness" is still generally regarded as one of the best American science-fiction novels; "Conjure Wife" is a modern fantasy with the unique distinction of being the only story that has ever frightened me the third time through.
Two years ago, after a silence of five years, Leiber began writing fiction again. (HE'S BACK!, one magazine cover shouted.) Last year, a two-part serial of his in Galaxy took the "Hugo" award for best novel of the year at the World Science-Fiction Convention. Most hopeful news we've had this year is that Leiber at last is writing full-time. (Well, almost—just a bit of tournament chess on the side.)
Introduction to OR ALL THE SEAS WITH OYSTERS by Avram Davidson
Kersh, McKenna, Leiber, and (I think) Thomas too, set forth the premise that there exists in man a soul, spirit, psyche—call it what you will—separate and independent from his consciousness. Each one of them portrayed the fleeting image of the soul against a different aspect of experience: man-and-nature, man-and-death, man-and-beast.
Now Avram Davidson probes the relationship between man and the products of his own creation. Can a soul (or a consciousness) inhabit a machine?
Since his appearance in the first annual SF, as a new fiction writer of remarkable talent, Mr. Davidson has carved himself a solid niche in both the mystery and s-f fields. Two years ago, he took first prize in the Ellery Queen Mystery Contest. Last year, he won the "Hugo" award for the best shod science-fantasy story of the year. This is it... .
Introduction to TEN-STORY JIGSAW by Brian W. Aldiss
The wider range and subtler definition of subject matter in modern s-f makes, I think, for better reading—but much more complex anthologizing.
Time was when the editor of a collection such as this could sit down and sort out the stories into tidy piles under such subheadings as Space Travel, Time Travel, Planetary Adventure, Marvelous Invention, Alien Visitors, Mutation, Atom Doom, and the like.
Presumably this could still be done. The space ships, inventions, and mutations are still there—but that's not what the stories are about. The end result would be only to multiply confusion. If I used subheadings here, the two main ones would have to be: Whither Civilization? and Inside Man.
One of the old labels would still fit, though—Atom Doom —and the next three stories could be grouped under it. The first of them is the work of a young British author who has only recently begun to appear in print in this country.
The time: After World War III.
The place: Sydney, Australia.
The hero: A junkman.
Introduction to FRESH - GUY by E. C. Tubb
Another Britisher presents what you might call a double-doom story—set in a graveyard, around the tombstone that marks the underground retreat of the war-torn remnants of humanity. Mankind dug under long ago; but the scent of fresh-turned dirt is present still—appetizingly, for some.
Introduction to THE BEAUTIFUL THINGS by Arthur Zirul
A story about bears—but no Goldilocks.
Like Mrs. Emshwiller, Professor Bone, and Patent Attorney Thomas, Arthur Zirul has been writing and publishing s-f, on a part-time basis, for the last five years or so. As with them, s-f was favorite reading for him long before he tried writing it. "Science fiction to me," he says, "is the last, and likely the only, refuge for genuine satire ... the biting kind only fantasy can provide."
Mr. Zirul's more usual, workaday refuge is an out-of-the-way back building in Greenwich Village which he describes as "1,500 square feet of a former night club, filled with fine dust, a dozen assorted machines, shelves full of very odd odds and ends, and me (I'm the one that's moving)."
Sorry. No Things or Shottlebops or genii-jars. He calls it Diorama Studios, and builds industrial models there.
Introduction to THE COMEDIAN'S CHILDREN by Theodore Sturgeon
There is very little remaining to be said by any editor or anthologist about Theodore Sturgeon, whose stories have been so thoroughly collected and so assiduously introduced that every scrap of biographical information has been worked thin.
And I have found, in the course of introducing my own share of Sturgeoniana, that his stories are seldom susceptible to summing-up or finger-pointing. You can't say, "Here's what it's about." It's about too many things...
Introduction to THE SHORT-SHORT STORY OF MANKIND by John Steinbeck
Maybe you go for Hemingway. Faulkner? Thomas Wolfe? (With me it's Dos Passos.) But no matter whom you pick for first place, Steinbeck is probably high up on your list; and for many people he is indisputably the realistic modern novelist.
What's he doing here?
I may as well say right off that this piece is not science fiction—or science fantasy, or "fantasy-fable" either, I'm afraid (though "fable" and "allegory" are what Playboy called it when they printed it).
But it stops just short of "future history" which would make it legit s-f. And it's pretty realistic, too.... You could call it historically fantastic realism ... Or really historical fantasy ...
Or fantastically realistic history ...
Anyhow, it's speculative; also it's satire. And it's Steinbeck in an unexpected and delightful vein. So here it sits, behind the fiction, and before the fact....
Introduction to MAN IN SPACE by Daniel Lang
In the welter of wordage published during 1958 about the prospects of manned space flight, very little was at once comprehending, comprehensive, and comprehensible. Mr. Lang's article combines these virtues with the authoritative documentation and stylistic excellence for which his reportage and the pages of The New Yorker are both known—and a certain skepticism of viewpoint is, I expect, a healthy thing.
Introduction to THE THUNDER-THIEVES by Isaac Asimov
S-f writers are restless types, generally. They seem to come from—and be forever going off to—bizarre employments and unlikely places. Even inside the field there are few "name writers" who have not at some time switched teams, and tried their hands at editing or criticism.
Dr. Asimov lives quietly in Boston, and his career as a Professor of Biochemistry is just what one might expect (but seldom find) in a science-fiction writer. He has never edited a magazine or conducted a review column? Apparently he is content with two fictional personalities (the other is juvenile author Paul French). Co-author of five (at last count) biochemistry textbooks, Isaac Asimov has a growing reputation for non-fiction science writing. As a notorious composer of hoax and spoof articles, he is among the leaders of the slim ranks of s-f humorists. He is the author of many, many short stories, and a versifier and parodist of note.
The verse reprinted here, which goes to the tune of "The Flowers that Bloom in the Spring," was first published in Future Science Fiction. The article following was written especially for this book.