Not Promised Tomorrow

The Year’s Best S‑F: 5^th Annual Edition (The Year’s Best S‑F, volume 5)

Edited by Judith Merril

4 Jul, 2023

**Judith Merril’s The Year’s Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy**

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Support me with a Patreon monthly subscription! — 4 Jul, 2023

**Judith Merril’s The Year’s Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy**

17 comments

1960’s The Year's Best S-F: 5th Annual Edition (also published as The 5th Annual of the Year's Best S-F and as The Best of Sci-Fi 5) is the fifth volume in Judith Merril’s The Year’s Best SF anthology series. This volume draws on science fiction published in 1959 and 1960.

Conspicuous by its absence: “the controversial special non-fiction section.” Why the special non-fiction section was controversial is left unexplained. However, a Campbell editorial is included. Presumably this means the editorial was as non-fictional as Fox News is news.

The contributors include two women (one if Merril’s ancillary essays do not count) and twenty men.

Randall Garrett gets in twice. Merril comments on her unhappiness that selecting Leiber’s “Mariana” meant rejecting his almost as good “Silver Eggheads,” this suggests that she was not aware that “Darrell T. Langart” was a Garrett penname.

Almost every story in this anthology was subsequently reprinted. Aside from Merril’s volume-specific essays, the only works for which I could not find reprints were Dighton’s Sierra Sam, Price’s “An Inquiry Concerning the Curvature of the Earth's Surface and Divers Investigations of a Metaphysical Nature,” and most surprisingly (because for some reason I thought he’d had a comprehensive short works project) Davidson’s “No Fire Burns.”

In contrast to the one-sided gender balance, Merril seems to have done her best to draw from a wide range of sources, which were as follows.

Associated Press: 1

Astounding: 2

Fantastic Science Fiction Stories: 1

Galaxy Magazine: 1

The Gent: 1

If: 1

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction: 7

A Medicine for Melancholy (collection): 1

Monocle Magazine: 1

Rogue: 1

The Saturday Evening Post: 1

Science Fantasy: 1

Science Fiction Stories: 1

Star Science Fiction: 1

Playboy: 1

Merril heaps praise on John W. Campbell, but her table of contents makes it clear that her tastes were far better aligned with those of Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction editor Robert P. Mills. Even more evident: her loathing of Kingsley Amis, described by Merril as the author of “a recent volume of considerable arrogance, ill-considered opinion, and unconsidering slovenliness of research.” Merril spends more time snarling at Amis than she does lavishing unearned praise on Campbell.

While there are some duds in here, this volume rewards reading. This collection may best be remembered for including Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon, but there are other works in here that may not be as well known, but are as good or close to being so.

In more detail:

Introduction (The 5th Annual of the Year's Best S-F) • (1960) • essay by Judith Merril

A thumbnail description of human progress leads Merril to her definition of science fiction: “trained wonderment.”

“The Handler” • (1960) • short story by Damon Knight

The star enjoys popularity. The man behind the man is quite obscure.

Note to self: do a Tor piece on SF stories in which reality is stage-managed.

“The Other Wife” • (1960) • short story by Jack Finney

A man trapped in a boring marriage finds relief in alternate histories.

If he is walking from world to world (as opposed to occasionally rewriting history), presumably his alternates are also world-walking. Do his various wives enjoy their respite from him as much as he enjoys his respite from them?

A essay re “five classic sf stories arguing for no-fault divorce” would also be easy to do.

“No Fire Burns” • (1959) • short story by Avram Davidson

To what purpose, precisely, is Mr. Melchior putting Doctor Colles’ psychopath test?

I will admit, the twist surprised me.

“No, No, Not Rogov!” • [The Instrumentality of Mankind] • (1959) • short story by Cordwainer Smith

Soviet psionics research ends very badly indeed.

“The Shoreline at Sunset” • (1959) • short story by Ray Bradbury

Two lay-about lotharios have an encounter with wonder.

“The Dreamsman” • (1959) • short story by Gordon R. Dickson

The world is exactly as it should be and thanks to the hard-working Mr. Wilier, it will remain that way.

“Multum in Parvo” • (1959) • short story by Jack Sharkey

A series of terrible puns and dad jokes.

Flowers for Algernon • (1959) • novelette by Daniel Keyes

Amplified intelligence delivers terrible consequences for a kind-hearted simpleton transformed into an alienated, doomed, genius.

“What Do You Mean … Human?" • [Editorial (Astounding)] • (1959) • essay by John W. Campbell, Jr.

Exploration of the limits of the idea of personhood.

Sierra Sam • (1960) • essay by Ralph Dighton

A foray into the exciting world of high-tech test dummies.

A Death in the House • (1959) • novelette by Clifford D. Simak

A recluse does his best for a badly injured, inarticulate alien.

This was an extremely Simak-esque story.

“Mariana” • (1960) • short story by Fritz Leiber

Unhappy Mariana learns the unbearable truth about the world in which she lives.

“An Inquiry Concerning the Curvature of the Earth's Surface and Divers Investigations of a Metaphysical Nature” • (1958) • short story by Roger Price

A zany exploration of flat-earthism.

“Day at the Beach” • (1959) • short story by Carol Emshwiller

Nuclear war may have reduced the world to a bandit-ridden radiation-soaked nightmare, but a husband, wife, and their odd child can still enjoy a day at the beach.

Hot Argument • [Poor Willie] • (1960) • poem by Randall Garrett

A mercifully brief poem/lame pun.

What the Left Hand Was Doing • (1960) • novelette by Randall Garrett [as by Darrell T. Langart]

A psionic agent must rescue a genius from the Red Chinese without the genius figuring out the means by which he was rescued.

I could swear I reread this recently, but none of the places it was reprinted look familiar. Readers looking for examples of crap written to appeal to Campbell’s hobby horses need look no further.

The Sound Sweep • (1960) • novelette by J. G. Ballard

A speechless man assists a diva to get vengeance on a world whose technological progress consigned her to the ash heap.

I found this Singing in the Rain meets Sunset Boulevard tale overlong, but its themes have aged well. I suppose someone is always being put out of work by progress.

“Plenitude” • (1959) • short story by Will Mohler [as by Will Worthington]

To best explain to his son why the family lives in rustic poverty, a father takes his son on his first and only trip to the big city. The boy will see at first hand the terrors of modern life.

This isn’t a million miles from “and people spend all their time looking at smart phones.”

“The Man Who Lost the Sea” • (1959) • short story by Theodore Sturgeon

Reflections on his life lead a man to come to terms with his current circumstances, which are, to be frank, not ideal.

“Make a Prison” • (1959) • short story by Lawrence Block

The prison is without flaw. The world view of those who built it, on the other hand….

What Now, Little Man? • (1959) • novelette by Mark Clifton

Docile and tasty alien goonies provide human colonists with slaves, food, and much needed social inferiors. What secret explains their placid docility?

This was far too long, but not without points of interest, such as the question of whether tests designed for humans would be able to recognize alien intelligence.

I wondered at first why this was published in F&SF rather than Astounding. I suspect it’s the conclusion that goonies are better than humans, and the thinly veiled commentary on American racism, particularly this passage:

“No matter how low down a man is, he’s got to have something he thinks is still lower before he can be happy. The more inferior he is, the more he needs it. Take it away from him and you’ve started something.”

The main element of the plot involves a mob trying to lynch a goonie for being too visibly intelligent.

“Me” • (1959) • poem by Hilbert Schenck [as by Hilbert Schenck, Jr.]

AI may simulate intelligence but it will never produce a person.

Each one of these volumes has a surprise. Volume Five’s is that Schenk’s career was much longer than I expected. He is another example of an author who debuted in the 1950s only to take a several decades-long hiatus before resuming his career.

The Year's S-F, Summary and Honorable Mentions • (1960) • essay by Judith Merril

A glimpse into the alarming but hopeful state of SF publishing in 1959. Will the mass market paperback eclipse magazines?

Spoiler: yes.

Comments

Tim

I knew nothing of Kingsley Amis. What was the "recent volume"?

James NicollTim

She never names it but my guess would be New Maps of Hell.

PhilRMJames Nicoll

Undoubtedly - New Maps of Hell was published in 1960.

It's an interesting book. Amis is certainly opinionated, and occasionally scathing, but it's also written by someone who was very much a fan of SF. Mostly he chides it for not doing better.

In the present context, it's of note that he quite obviously despised Campbell.

McannonPhilRM

Amis was indeed a fan of SF; the “Spectrum” series of anthologies that he co-edited with Robert Conquest (another writer much better known outside SF) drew heavily from the American magazines. I read several volumes in my early teens recall being rather surprised when I later learned of Amis’ heavy mainstream literature credentials.

Over time, Amis moved from being one of 1950s literature’s “Angry Young Men” to being a crotchety old political and social reactionary - not the first writer to do so and probably not the last. In that respect, he may not have been that far from Campbell after all.

From memory, Amis was responsible for the memorable rhyme - “SF’s no good” They bellow til we’re deaf “This looks good” “Well then it can’t be SF”.

(Apologies if I’m paraphrasing, and if I have the attribution wrong)

Mark PontinMcannon

As regards Merril's dislike of Amis and his NEW MAPS OF HELL, one can't help wondering if that might have been because its most notably heterodox feature from the viewpoints of American and Canadian readers (Budrys commented on this in one of his reviews of the 1960s-70s) was the emphasis Amis placed on Frederik Pohl as one of the primary — maybe the primary American SF writer — of the 1950s.

Pohl had been Merril's husband from 1948 to 1952. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsley_Amis

“…He (Amis) had been avidly reading science fiction since a boy and developed that interest in the Christian Gauss Lectures of 1958, while visiting Princeton University. These were published that year as New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction, giving a serious yet light-handed treatment of what the genre had to say about man and society. Amis was especially keen on the dystopian works of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, and in New Maps of Hell coined the term “comic inferno” ….”

JVjrMcannon

"Sf's no good," they bellow till we're deaf. "But this looks good." – "Well then, it's not sf."

In Spectrum II: A Second Science Fiction Anthology (1962), and actually by Conquest.

Amis got c/Conservative rather soon – I recall the somewhat surprising venom which the hero of I Want It Now (1968) heaps on all modern nonsense, from television programming to these young hippies. But then, he was already 32 and married with children when he became famous.

JVjrJames Nicoll

Well, it is named at the copyright page: "Quotations appearing on pages 14, 30, 123 and 313 are from New Maps of Hell by Kingsley Amis and are reprinted by permission of Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc. Copyright © 1960 by Kingsley Amis."

Also, in the very next installment we shall see that Merril chose to reprint Amis's "Hemingway in Space" (Punch, December 21, 1960) bur I won't steal your thunder by quoting details of her explaining how "my first fine fury began to die down".

Shem

Is that the same Roger Price who's better known for creating Droodles and co-creating Mad Libs?

James NicollShem

It is.

Robert CarnegieJames Nicoll

Not "The Tomorrow People" Roger Price then, creator of the mostly British TV show, and a few book adaptations, in which the next generation of our evolution is... humane. And hunted for sport. (The viewers'.)

Dan'L Danehy-Oakes

Dancing in the Rain? Surely you mean Singing?

David Goldfarb

I remember reading that Campbell editorial when it was reprinted somewhere — not this volume, I'm sure I've never read it. Campbell's thesis was that people used "human" to mean "having emotions".

For myself, I think Janet Kagan put her finger on it in Hellspark:"Human means 'like me'." This is a superset of Campbell's "having emotions". Kagan didn't expand on this, but I would say that in particular "human" means "deserving of the respect that I would wish if I were in those circumstances". If something is human you have to be (relatively) nice to it; to something non-human, you can be as evil as you wish and it's okay.

David Pulver

James said "In contrast to the one-sided gender balance, Merril seems to have done her best to draw from a wide range of sources"

Which short stories by women writers in 59-60 do you think got overlooked in this volume?

JVjrDavid Pulver

Good question! As mentioned (several times) before, it is rather hard to get a comparative data baseline, but as a first-order approximation, let us look at Merril's Honorary Mentions in this volume.

It contains, if I count right, 101 items (sometimes several by the same author, including one for “Fantastic Science Fiction Stories, Nov. (Complete Issue)" by Fritz Leiber , which contained 5 pieces; I'm not going to complicate this further by correcting to unique persons). That is quite a lot and I doubt it misses any significant short fiction of the year. As far as I could identify, 15 of these were by women (including “Idris Seabright” – was her real identity known already back then?).

I tried to list them all here, but it seems that it triggers the website's spam trap. So, just to summarise: I don't think I ever saw any of them, and they certainly are not of the complete-classic, remembered-today calibre like two or five stories in the anthology are; but about half are quite big names (some even already recognised in 1960), and I bet many of the stories are not worse than the men's duds in the book. And yes, the gender ratio, however low, seems underrepresented in the final selection. (But then the ideal 15 % would mean just three stories instead of two, so on sample this small it doesn't really make sense to infer from a difference of one; Merril has reached that proportion before).

David PulverJVjr

Thank you for checking. I'm mostly familar with Seabright's work as St. Clair, so I'm not sure, but it does seem like she did know of several other choices who might have made it in!

I'd read Amis and Aldiss' works on SF writers before, but I was disappointed that the main biographical SF surveys of the 1960s and 70s (e.g., Charles Platt for the 60s-70s and Sam Moskowitz for the 50s-60s), while very informative in general, badly under-covered even some of the better-known women writers of the period).

JVjr

1) ISFDB considers No Fire Burns "non-genre", but even it lists the reprint in The Playboy Book of Crime and Suspense (1967); Contento also in The Future of Being Human: Psychology and Science Fiction, ed. Jackie Estrada & Dave Estrada, Canfield Press 1977. (Sounds kind of obscure...)

(I would continue, if the site lets me post comments elsewhere than to the moderation limbo suspiciously similar to /dev/null.)

JVjrJVjr

2) I wouldn't presume so fast that Merril was unaware of the Garret pseudonym, what with her being well-connected in the genre, and the penname rather obviously anagrammatical. She does indeed say "Mr. Langart, an author new to science fiction (so far as I have been able to determine from his tight-lipped agents)", but it may have been ironic winking. (Anyway, what was the point of his starting another pseudonym, admittedly for a new series?)

Having a policy "just one story per writer, for greater diversity", whether explicit with the publisher or implicitly expected by readers, would make some sense, so she might have tacitly kept the fiction of the pseudonym – including the dire story as a favour to JWC to get one back? After all the poem, as noted, has meagre 6 lines, so bending the rule is easier here than would be with Leiber where Silver Eggheads is a rather long novelette.