And there was Boris Vian’s “The Dead Fish,” outstanding among a collection of good stories in the anthology edited and translated by Damon Knight, 13 French Science Fiction Stories (Bantam).
Nor have I mentioned Cordwainer Smith’s Space Lords collection, memorable not only for the stories, but for the author’s instructive and revealing prologue, in which he explains, in part, just what it is that is different about Smith stories. Required reading for would-be s-f writers (and for many who already are)—as is Brian Aldiss’ long, thoughtful analysis of three British writers in SF Horizons No. 2.
And there are some other British writers, not all new-in-1965, but names still unfamiliar here, which I suspect will not be so for long: William Barclay, John Baxter, Daphne Castell, Robert Cheetham, Jael Cracken, John Hamilton, David Harvey, R. W. Mackleworth, Dikk Richardson, David Newton, Bob Parkinson, E. C. Williams.
One way and another, I keep coming back to it. The important things happening in American s-f are not happening in it at all. We have writers comparable to Ballard in stature, for instance—but not in current achievement, and certainly not in influence within the field. Cordwainer Smith and Theodore Sturgeon have each published two new stories in the last eighteen months or so—and none of them close to the authors’ best work. Leiber has been productive: a Tarzan novelization, and thousands of words of magazine stories, some of them very good reading, all rather closer in period to Tarzan than to Leiber’s own work of a few years back (“Mariana,” “A Deskfui of Girls,” “The Secret Songs,” “The Silver Eggheads,” The Wanderer). Nothing at all from Alfred Bester for three years now, nor from Walter Miller for much, much longer. Kurt Vonnegut continues to do a novel every year or two that almost makes up for the rest of what’s missing—but he is not in the same sense a part of the field here at all; his impact on other American writers is almost more from “outside” than Ballard’s.
The novel generally acclaimed as the best American product last year was Frank Herbert’s Dune—a long, and in part excellent, but completely conventional future-historical, admirable essentially for its complexity rather than for any original or speculative contribution. Certainly there is nothing in it to stimulate or influence the work of others.
As it happens, the stimulus is being provided from outside—and not just from England. It is coming from exciting new work in psychology and the allied sciences; from the avant-gardistes and poets who have begun using the images and contexts of s-f with or without concern for the sources; and from the impact of the belated translation and publication of people like Borges and Jarry.
It is interesting to speculate on what the difference in our thinking and writing might have been, if we had had Jarry as part of the s-f tradition, along with Verne and Wells. Jarry himself was reading these men as they wrote: Verne in his childhood. Wells in his prime. He responded to Wells (See “How to Construct a Time Machine” in the Selected Works), but also with Wells, to the scientific discoveries of the turn of the century. In a sense, he is Jules Verne’s left hand, as Wells might be the right.
But if we had had Jarry, would we have read him? From today’s vantage point, a hectic half century of scientific revolutions and upheavals later, Jarry’s responses are rather more in keeping with the direction of physics itself than were Wells’ marvelously sane and rational civilized adductions.
But how long have we been prepared to see this? Did we not have to work our way (with pleasure) through Gernsback and “scientifiction” to Campbell’s then-revolutionary 1938-1942 magazines, and then from E. E. Smith to Heinlein, Leiber, and Asimov—and again, to Boucher’s revolutionary notion that a science-fantasy magazine could be well-written—to Bester, Miller, Budrys, Cordwainer Smith—before we were ready for either Cat’s Cradle or “Terminal Beach?”
Or if Borges had been translated as he wrote, if the eight stories in Ficciones (Fictions) had been available in 1941, instead of 1962 . . .
I remember vividly the excitement of discovering The Star Maker and Odd John in the early ‘40s; Stapledon opened tantalizing and terrifying vistas of probability for me. For others, it may have been C. S. Lewis, or M. P. Shiel, or E. R. Eddison; but there is no question that the impact of these powerful imaginative thinkers on a whole generation of writers was one of the major forces that moved s-f out of the technocratic-primitivism of “scientifiction” to the sociological-sci-fi of the “great days” of Astounding and Unknown, and further, to the psychological/semantic/psychiatric science-fantasy of the early years of Galaxy and Fantasy and Science Fiction.
But that was as far as the impetus of that group of brilliant apologists of dualism could take us. The next step we had to reach—are only now reaching—essentially by bootstrap-climbing. So it seems cruelly ironic now to discover that our newest concepts, painfully evolved over a quarter century of speculative interchange from the combined traditions of magic and mathematics, physics and poetry, were already set down—in essays, stories, poems, allegories, sometimes unabashed plot outlines—before we were fairly started on the process, by one man drawing on the whole range of aesthetic/intellectual traditions that have since filtered through to us, from a dozen different sources.
Would we have arrived any sooner, or any saner, at the crossroads of communication where we now stand—where poet and pragmatist, scientist and surrealist, are equally frequently disconcerted to see themselves mirrored in each other’s eyes—would we have come to this gathering place, the converging of the many roads toward “reality” traveled by twentieth-century thought, any more readily for the guidance of one brilliant mind far ahead?
Or did we have to get this far ourselves before we could make out the meaning of the light? Did Borges’ work, and Jarry’s, simply have to wait for the rest of us to catch up? Perhaps we had to go the Zen route before we could contemplate the statement, “ ‘Pataphysics is the science ...” with equanimity (let alone delight), and wail for our learned Academies to convene Conferences on the nature of time before Borges’ “Tlon Uqbar, Tertius Orbis” became comprehensible?
Perhaps we did. Perhaps each cultural island—whether a nation, genre, discipline, or single man—must grow its own way through the stages of naive rationalism and hardware sophistication, before it can approach the recognition of the inalienable association between the concurrent-and-diverse “realities” of physics and metaphysics, mathematics and mysticism, psyche and soma, science and art.
Judith Merril
Milford, 1966