Sensible "SF"?

GREAT STORIES OF SCIENCE FICTION (321 pp.) -- Edited by Murray Leinster--Random House ($2.95).

An old hand at writing science fiction once described the formula: first get your characters into a mess, then grab a handful of electrons and get them out of it. In the opinion of Murray Leinster (real name: Will F. Jenkins), dean of U.S. science fictioneers, the formula has been badly overworked. He is tired of galactic worlds, space ships, bug-eyed monsters and the few thousand rabid fans who cry for them. Along with most book publishers, he would like to see "SF" go respectable, or at least sensible, keep one foot and preferably two on the ground--and even try for a slightly more polished prose.

The yarns in Dean Leinster's anthology, Great Stories of Science Fiction, do not meet all his specifications, but they do illustrate a trend. The first story is simply for laughs, almost a parody of previous space operas: Otho, first ambassador from Philistia, reaches Washington in a rocket ship easily enough, then gets into trouble with the girls because of his X-ray eyes. In Blind Alley, rich and nostalgic Mr. Feathersmith hires the devil to restore the home town of his boyhood, but soon realizes that life in good old Cliffordsville was really a tedious bore. In Hiding, selected as the most popular story in Astounding Science Fiction in 1948, is perhaps the real tipoff on the new trend: it is a fairly quiet story of a psychiatrist's effort to keep a fantastically high-I.Q. teen-ager on an even keel.

Most of the twelve Great Stories (Leinster modestly includes only two of his own) still put too heavy a strain on credibility, e.g., in one, a dead dancer carries on, mentally at least, when her brain is transferred to a metal figure. But the best of the stories show signs of serious effort to keep fantasy within hailing distance of reality. SF cultists of the old guard may deplore the trend--on the ground that it threatens, sooner or later, to take all the amazement out of the amazing. But it will be all right with most book publishers. Though the space-opera formula seems to work well at the pulp level, experimenting publishers have generally had to be content with sales of around 5,000 when such yarns are peddled as honest-to-goodness books. Just maybe the new trend will catch more readers.

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