This was the opening of the Spectator’s report on the World Science Fiction Convention in London last August. The London Sunday Times Magazine, shortly afterward, came out with a special s-f section: an article on the Clarke-Kubrick movie, one on the BBC’s (then) forthcoming s-f drama series, and a thoughtful profile of John W. Campbell, editor of Analog, which summed up:
. . . Life to Campbell is a gigantic experiment in form, and earth the forcing-house—an impeccable vision, but one not warmed (in his theories, that is) by a feeling for the pain or personal potential of the individuals in the experiment. That kind of gentleness in expression seemed to disappear with Don A. Stuart.
So that, ironically, as s-f becomes increasingly respectable, John Campbell, its acknowledged father-figure, can’t really claim his throne. He provides the continuity, he shaped much of the thought, he made many reputations. S-f narrowed from the vastness of space to the greater complexity of “sociological” s-f with him presiding. But now it is narrowing towards the highly focused, upside-down detail of “innerspace.” The tone is personal and subjective, the quality of expression important. . . . There is even a literary magazine: SF Horizons. None of this is Campbell’s style.
You may disagree with the views of either or both reporters (Bill Butler in the Spectator, Pal Williams in the Times Magazine). What is significant is that they had views, and expressed them intelligently; that neither one approached the job in the role of literary slummer, or even intrepid anthropologist among the fantasists, but simply and seriously as observers reporting on a field they knew and understood, and believed to be of interest to other readers.
I was about to say, it couldn’t happen here—but I suspect the difference in attitude is not so much spatial as temporal. What has already happened there is just beginning to happen here.
Which is to say: the big news in s-f this year is mostly not in s-f—not this side of the ocean. (Exceptions: the establishment of the SFWA; and Doubleday’s expanded publishing schedule, under the supervision of Lawrence P. Ashmead, who looks to be the best thing that has happened to s-f book publishing here in a long time.)
In a sense, the biggest news of the year is that it is harder than ever to locate on the literary map any reliable boundary line between s-f and anything else. The other side of the coin, whose tail is the lack of focus and esprit in the specialty field here, is, I suppose, the diminishment of spirited opposition or snobbism directed at the field. To some extent, this is a self-reproducing cycle; to a greater degree, the changing faces on both sides are being shaped by pressures initiating entirely outside the local literary scene, particularly such adjacent areas as education, advertising, psychology, and the Think Factory phenomenon. The s-f label becomes ludicrous, not to say invisible, when advertisements like the star-sprinkled page with the cute little capsule through whose wide-vision window a cheery astronaut and his mouth organ illustrate the pitch: “Three billion people will look up to you ... on Dec. 16, 1965, the Hohner Harmonica became the first musical instrument to be played in outer space,” appear in the same sort of magazines which now publish such stories as “Game,” “Somewhere Not far from Here,” “The Girl Who Drew the Gods,” “The Drowned Giant” (and Stanley Elkin’s “Perlmutter at the East Pole” in the Post), with neither apologies, explanations, nor exclamation points.
I mention these titles in particular because they are neither whimsical fantasies, space-cowboy adventures, sex-and-sci-fi spoofs, nor sprightly satires, but serious speculative fiction of a kind that actually had no market here a few years ago (bar he infrequent F&SF acceptance).
It is part of the same happy blurring of edges that Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon was issued recently by Harcourt with neither labels nor disclaimers on the jacket—and that Gold Medal’s Beaumont selection. The Magic Man, did specify “science fantasy” out front, when the earlier collections from which it was culled had avoided the tag like the plague-carrier it was known to be for a serious and talented young writer.
It almost seems that the trend is to using the label when it seems helpful, and omitting it when it does not. One hesitates to make any assumption of such widespread sanity, but the magazine situation almost requires it. Some readers, and most writers, will already have noticed that this Annual contains no Honorable Mentions listing. For the last two or three years, the attempt to compile such a list has been increasingly frustrating. The diffusion is too great: Even if it were within my powers to be certain I have seen everything entitled to consideration in a given year, I no longer know where to draw the line.
I use poetry, and sometimes cartoons, and frequently newspaper pieces among the selections: Ought they to be covered in the Mentions too? What about British publications, and English-language books published in other countries? How about things like the Christian Science Monitor’s “Martian papers,” describing the amusement along’ the Canal at UFO-nuts who claim to have seen six-foot-lall metallic-dothed extraterrestrials? Or the deadpan stuff the Realist has begun to use (since they broke the s-f ice with Harvey Bilker’s “Genetic Faux Pas”)? How in the world do you decide on a listing for (almost anything from) Roger Price’s inflammatory Grump? What about Fernando Krahn’s cartoons in the Reporter? How about poetry? Or critical writing?
The answer, of course, was to mention all these other things in the Summation, which began to make the addition of the HM list not only burdensome to me and unfair to authors whose work I would not discover till two months, or two years, later, but foolish as well, since much of the highest-quality work was mentioned only off-list. The new answer is to omit any pretense at publication of a comprehensive listing. Most of the items of special merit I noticed during the year have already been mentioned in the story notes) there are a few others I feel should not be entirely passed by— most importantly, some new names from the 1965 magazines:
From Amazing and Fantastic—Stanley E. Aspiltle, Jr., John Douglas, Alfred Grossman, Judith E. Schrier.
From If—John McCallum, D. M. Melton, Laurence S. Todd.
From Analog—Michael Karageorge, Laurence A. Perkins.
From F&SF—John Thomas Richards.
There were also some stories of special interest by established authors, which did not, one way or another, get mentioned inside: Miriam Allen de Ford’s “The Expendables,” Chad Oliver’s “End of the Line,” Edgar Pangborn’s “Wogglebeast,” all from F&SF; William F. Temple’s “The Legend of Ernie Deacon” and James H. Schmitz’s “The Pork Chop Tree,” from Analog; Lloyd Biggie, Jr.’s “Pariah Planet” and Theodore L. Thomas’ “Manfire,” from Worlds of Tomorrow, Gerald Pearce’s “Security Syndrome,” from If, and Richard Wilson’s “Harry Protagonist, Brain-Drainer,” from Galax/; “Don’t Touch Me, I’m Sensitive,” by James Stamers, in Gamma; “The Casting Couch,” by Lewis Kovner, in Rogue; Florence Engel Randall’s “The Watchers,” in Harper’s; and stories from all over by Frank Herbert: “Committee of the Whole” (Galaxy), “The GM Effect” (Analog), “Greenslaves” (Amazing).