4/5/22

Published first as The World's Best Science Fiction 1968

This book has had the good fortune to have several lives under different names, some of which were the same as other books' names, leading to much bibliographic confusion. Hence I'll specify that this review is of the World's Best SF 1 edited by Donald Wollheim and Terry Carr, containing stories first published in 1967. It begins with 'See Me Not' by Richard Wilson, and ends with 'It's Smart to Have an English Address' by D.G. Compton.

It's a disappointing collection of science fiction short stories, all of them published in genre magazines in 1967. Co-editor Donald Wollheim was among the earliest fans of the science fiction magazines in the 1920s and '30s, and one of the original fans-turned-pro, largely as an editor. This selection seems largely to reflect the old-fashioned tastes of an old-fashioned fan, and seems like poor fare to a 21st century reader. It is tempting to imagine that the handful of not-dull stories were chosen by the younger editor, Terry Carr.

The editors' introduction invokes the Old Wave vs New Wave controversy that troubled much of the science fiction world at the time. To this reader it seems strange to regard anything in the collection as 'new wave', unless 'new wave' is code for 'competently written'.

This collection contains the great 'I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream' by Harlan Ellison and 'The Man Who Loved the Fiaoli' by Roger Zelazny; and 'Hawksbill Station' by Robert Silverberg, later expanded to novel length, though the original is good enough that it's hard to see how more could be better. There's the pretty good 'Coranda' by Keith Roberts, and 'Driftglass' by Samuel Delany. Lafferty's 'Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne' has an oddball charm, and may even make sense. Well, maybe not. Aldiss's 'Full Sun' is so-so, but at least has the distinction of being one of the few really weird stories in the volume.

There are a lot of what I think of as 'Analog stories'. Analog is a science fiction magazine which is very much based in the notion that the term 'science fiction' means something, and that science fiction should have something to do with science. This seems as absurd to me as that romance novels should have romans in them. What is 'science' anyway? Surely everything is in its domain -- but those who want science fiction to have something to do with 'science' invariably have some very narrow sense of science as an academic discipline. What is the sense of wanting a genre of fiction that concerns in some way a narrow range of topics discussed in a particular department of the university? That would lead to stories like Asimov's 'Billiard Ball', perversely regarded by at least one of the editors as one of the best sf stories published in 1967: surely one of his dullest works, but it's about science so in it goes.

The other aspect of this narrow view of 'science fiction' is of course the 'social effects of advances in technology' story, because technology sort of has something to do with science. Compton's 'It's Smart to Have an English Address' is one of these. The main driver of the story is the suspense generated by the question 'What is the sf premise of this seemingly mundane story supposed to be and oh god when will it finally be revealed?', and the revelation late in the story does not justify anything the reader has endured till then. The story, and I suppose many others in this sf subgenre, can be summarised thus: protagonist mopes around for quite a lot of pages, like someone in a mundane story that even mundane readers wouldn't be interested in; finally the sf premise of the story is revealed: a technological innovation!; the protagonist dislikes this innovation a lot.

I haven't read anything else by Compton, but his novel 'The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe' sounds like something I'd like to read. (It's yet another reality-TV-story-published-before-reality-TV). I'm hoping this story was unrepresentative.

'The Sword Swallower' by Ron Goulart, another writer I haven't read before but who seemed interesting, is a barely-publishable superhero comic of a story, in which a super-powered hero uses his super power to get out of various sci-fi thriller situations. It feels like 'With one bound Jack was free', over and over. Offutt's 'Population Implosion' takes a silly premise very seriously and works out its implications like a serious science fiction story of the Analog variety might, but the premise isn't quite silly enough for it to be very amusing. It's the kind of story that might have been published in Unknown in the 1940s.

All told, this collection makes 1967 look like it was a pretty bleak year in the world of magazine science fiction. Admittedly, a quick scan of the contents pages of the principal magazines does not reveal many 'how could they have missed that!' titles, so this may not be entirely down to the selection in this book. This book was never going to include Ballard's 'The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race', though 'The Cloud Sculptors of Coral D' doesn't seem to be out of the question. Perhaps by 1967 the energies of the great sf writers had already been redirected from the short story to the novel. ( )