Outpaced by Space

THE 7TH ANNUAL OF THE YEAR'S BEST S-F (399 pp.)--Edited by Judith Merril --Simon & Schuster ($4.50).

Alas for science fiction! Science has caught up with it, or it has caught up with science. Except for low-grade space opera, there is not much of the good old stuff around. To fill her seventh annual S-F anthology. Judith Merril scraped the bottom of the barrel, and, by her own admission, few of the 32 short stories, poems, cartoons and other oddments that she assembled are science fiction. James Blish, a drug industry public relations man, writes In Tomorrow's Little Black Bag, which is praise for wonder drugs to come. In High Barbary, Lawrence Durrell satirizes the British Foreign Office, whose delicate young men cannot get a tolerable haircut outside one special shop in London. Freedom, by Mack Reynolds, is a blameless political sermon predicting that the Russians will overthrow Communism because they value intellectual liberty above a high standard of living. Only about half a dozen items show the sciencebased imagination that is the accepted mark of true science fiction. George P. Elliott's Among the Bangs is a humorous and reasonable extrapolation of field anthropology. A Planet Named Shayol, by Cordwainer Smith, is good space opera.

Kids still slaughter each other with ray guns; teen-agers still dream about blasting off. What, then, has happened to science fiction? Miss Merril suggests that it has been absorbed into the main body of literature. "Thus, much of the best science fiction published today is under wrappers and headings that either angrily disclaim the 'science-fiction' label, or ignore it completely."

Perhaps. But more likely, science fiction is suffering from exhaustion of the accessible pay dirt. Its classics, such as Conan Doyle's Lost World, H. G. Wells's Time Machine, were skillful storytelling based on knowledge of the science of their time. In those days, almost any educated man could follow the advances of science.

Today few writers can follow the scientists into their increasingly complicated jungles, and what they find does not support good storytelling. Science fiction will have to take a breather until neutrinos, wave mechanics and information theory grow familiar enough to be clothed in human terms.

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