here the fourth annual set of Nebula Award winners and as

literary form, it seems time to offer some history and com-

So widely are the assumptions and conventions of that

form disseminated these days, that nobody feels surprised or

puzzled when they are used by someone as respectable as,

more and more adopting techniques which, if not yet abso-

lutely contemporary (being associated with such names as

Joyce, Kafka, Capek, DOS Passes), are light-years in advance

of cut-and-dried pulp narration.

Most science fiction has also preserved its own traditional

virtues. It still tells stories, wherein things happen. It remains

more interested in the glamour and mystery of existence, the

in the neuroses of some sniveling fagot. And pace Will

it. The impressive terminology always did include plenty of

gobbledygook. If anything, we get more genuine science and

technology now, from writers like Hal Clement, Joseph

Martino, and Larry Niven, than ever before.

This combination of new skills and old values has com-

pletely revitalized a field which, a decade or so back, had

decayed to a frighteningly low proportion of stories not flat,

they're responsible for a lot. Quite a few old-timers suddenly

earning us a wider, more discriminating audience. The

rewards go well beyond such benefits for the writer 'as decent

We still have a long way to fare, but it looks like an excit-

ing journey ahead.

Among reasons for optimism is our organization. Science

Fiction Writers of America. Let's be blunt, the typical writers'

groupand I include some of the most prominentis a

farce. The vitality of science fiction is reflected in the virility

of SFWA. It has won, or created, genuine benefits for its

membership, such as improvements in the contracts of several

publishers and the increasingly prestigious Nebula awards.

The year 1968 was almost as stressful for SFWA as it was

for mankind in general. Not only did we suffer a Year of the

Jackpotsee the obituary sectionbut for a while, political

disagreements threatened to tear us apart. Two opposing

groups were collecting signatures and contributions for two

opposing statements on the Vietnam War, to be published as

advertisements in some of the magazines.

I happened to spearhead one of these, which involved me

in a blizzard of correspondence with SFWA members as well

as officers. Practically without exception, every letter I got

from any sidemore than two sides exist, you knowwas

both patriotic in tone and humane in spirit. The statements

appeared simultaneously, and I haven't heard of any friend-

ships that they broke. The experience gives me a bit of hope

for our poor flayed world. Science fiction people obviously

can't save it by themselves. But are they perhaps representa-

tive of a larger community of people who'd rather think than

scream?

Let's turn from the writers to what they write, a subject

doubtless more interesting to readers. I don't agree with every-

thing that Will McNelly has to say about the year in novels;

neither, probably, will you; and it is obvious that a substantial

plurality of SFWA's professional writers won't, since their

votes bestowed the Nebula on a book that leaves him cool but

that they (and 1) think is a credit to the award. And so

what's wrong with a little controversy? Professor McNelly's

remarks are well worth your attention, both for their own

sake and as a strong assault on those Berlin Walls of categori-

Analog offered the mixture as before: stories running

sometimes deliberately infuriatingeditorials. Or was it

really quite .the old blend? John Campbell has never stopped

pioneering. He has, however, recognized that even a science

fiction audience is basically conservative and newness must be

sneaked in. For example, you don't see much about "psi" any

more; it's simply there, as Anne McCaffrey's yarn bears wit-

The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction continued in

its own tradition, quite a different one except for Isaac

Asimov's column. It was especially noteworthy how many

twentieth-century world. Editor Edward Ferman also en-

new writers as Bruce McAllister, K. M. O'Donnell, and

Amazing and Fantastic had their problems, including a

midstream change of editors, but nonetheless published a

good deal of fresh and worthwhile material. Under Harry

Leiber and James Blish; the anthropologist Leon Stover began

and besides old hands, we got extremely promising recruits

like Robert Taylor and James Tiptree, Jr. When Barry

to experimental writing: which is not the same thing as

But Frederik Pohl was unquestionably the innovator of the

Galaxywhich regularly includes articles by Willy Leyand

//which has thrice in a row taken the annual Hugo Award

for best magazine, bestowed through vote of fans rather than

writers. He also launched two new, at present irregular,

publications. One is called Worlds of Fantasy and is devoted

to precisely what the title implies. If you don't like space-

ships but do like Tolkien or Lovecraft, this is probably for

stories from places as remote as Japan and the Soviet Union.

When he ran the two head-on Vietnam declarations, Fred

PoM and his publisher did not go out and spend the five

that it would be paid out in prizes for the best ideas they

received on what the United States might actually do about

the situation. Response was large and imaginative. After win-

nowing, it was turned over to a professional study group

science fictioneers can bail out the human race. But it does

aware of and concerned about reality.

In addition, Galaxy Publishing Corporation instituted its

own awards, cash, for the best stories it has printed within

a year. These are determined by a poll of subscribers, em-

ploying standard statistical methods of sampling and valida-

tion. It is interesting that none of the winners (first was

Clifford Simak's novel Goblin Reservation) made the final

Nebula ballot. I suspect this indicates not so much a failure

of either system as it does the diversity of science fiction.

In fact, the range is so very healthily wide that what's

going on in Britain today is often too much for me, even

though I consider myself to have catholic tastes. Rather than

scold what I seldom understand, I asked one of that country's

most distinguished writers in our field to comment on it.

Ladies and gentlemen, Brian Aldiss:

"New Worlds: totters from strength to strength. The appear-

ance of every issue is a triumph of hope over economics; the

persistence of the editor, Michael Moorcock, who is now

also publisher, is perhaps a triumph over himself.

"New Worlds is no longer a magazine but a cause: thrown

away the magazine, kept the courage. The November 1968

issue contained only stories by new authorsthey were being

given a chance to speak before the magazine sank forever.

In December, the magazine bobbed up again, with stories by

such Nebula winners as.Delany, Moorcock, and Aldiss. Disch

and Bill Butler were also present, and there was an article on Andy Warhol. So the vessel still floats, despite severe trouble

with distributors during the year, when Spinrad's Bug Jack

Barron was running. Of course, a hefty Arts Council grant

(now extended into 1969) helps buoyancy.

"Subject matter in the stories is sometimes thin, inexpertise

but what matters most is the attitude of questioning: the good

"English science fiction has never been too greatly sub-

New Worlds merely uses its liberty to the full; it's for writers

and not for publishers (under either system, readers, as

policy by writing freelyand sometimes for free, if necessary.

legend, begins to look like a Gerald Scarfe portrait of the

"Many of Moorcock's contributors are AmericanZeiazny,

Disch, Sladek, Spinrad, Leiber, Zoline, Jacobs, et al. The typical New Worlds story is pretty cool, has connections with

mon with the American New Wave, which is characterized

by heavier breathing. It is against nothing but mediocrity:

which is why it has aroused so much anger here and there."

I take special pleasure in having Brian's remarks because

one of my great regrets in editing this book was that there

turned out to be no way of including his novelette Total

Environment. Look for it elsewhere, together with the other

fine runners-up. If 1968 had more than its share of catastro-

phes, it also had some very special gloriesamong them the

return of the Pueblo crew, Apollo 8's Christmas journey

around the moon . . . and, not altogether bathos in the

present context, a great deal of first-class science fiction.

The Science Fiction Novel in 1968

by Willis E. McNelly

Professor of English, California State College, Fullerton

The Wandering Jew is alive and an activist in Berkeley.

Seven billion human beings are trying to stand on Zanzibar;

there is conflict in Utopia; puberty rites in space end with the

death of a planet; the Apocalypse will come either with Black

Magic or with the approaching Millennium. Electric sheep

graze, unmolested by fallout, and all is not well on Paradise.

These visions of the futuresome might term them night-

mareswith their extensions, extrapolations, and involve-

ments are the subject matter of the best science fiction novels

published during 1968. Seven of them were the Nebula

vo t i ng.2 Together they continue a trend begun some years

ago, demonstrating again the growth of the novel as the most

representative, if not the most distinctive, form for the

presentation of science fiction.

Thirty-five novels were listed on the preliminary ballot used

by the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America

to nominate candidates for 1968 Nebula Award. They were

a diverse lot, including a few fantasies, dozens of spanner and

grommet stories, some high jinks in time, and several serious

explorations of certain new views of the hell man continually

shapes for himself. It was, in general, a good year for the

i James Blish, Black Easter, Doubleday; John Brunner, Stand on

Zanzibar, Doubleday; Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of

Electric Sheep, Doubleday; R. A. Lafferty, Past Master, Ace;

Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage, Ace; Joanna Russ, Picnic on

Paradise, Ace; Robert Silverberg, The Masks of Time, Ballantine.

are not really worth considering seriously. They are mostly

good adventure stories, told, as usual, with a maximum of

action and dialogue, a minimum of characterization, and a

general banality of style: "Starwolf, whispered the void . . ."

among the stars.

The serious works, like the Nebula finalists, sometimes

Review or The New York Review of Books had read some

of the Nebula nominee novels published during 1968, they

stream fiction and first-rate science fiction is narrowing. In

fact, there are times when the difference disappears com-

pletely, so completely that even the case-hardened iconoclasts

to detect the gap at all. For example, John Earth's Giles Goat

Boy is science fiction, but no reviewer bothered to mention

the fact. Earth's McLuhanesque Lost in the Fun House was

also science fictiona non-novel, perhaps, or even an antinovel, or a non-book, a piece of mclunacy, but science fiction

make conventional, representational mainstream sense out of

Good as the Nebula nominees were, they did not produce

a science fiction novel in a class with Frank Herbert's Dune,

Alfred Hester's The Demolished Man, Robert A. Heinlein's

Stranger in a Strange Land, or Walter Miller's A Canticle for

Leibowitz. Yet the general quality of the better novels is

certainly above that of any year within recent memory. To

be sure, even among the finalists there were certain failures,

but the failures were often failures of excess and were not

due to lack of imagination, paucity of conception, or lapses

The outstanding feature of the finalists was how much

best novels, such as James Blish's Black Easter, Robert Silver-

oi John Boyd's The Last Starship from Earth, were written

for what might be called a "maximum" audience. The authors

all seem to have realized that creative writing requires cre-

ative reading. Thus they are no longer content to spoonfeed

up to their readers, not down to them. Consequently, the

passive reader is forced, by every device in the writer's

arsenal, to become involved, to read between the lines, behind

the lines, and under the lines. The stories are often told by

indirection, suggestion, allusion. The characters begin to

assume a life as independent human beings, rather than card-

board stereotypes. Readers unwilling or unable to provide

what the artists demand remain blissfully unaware of some

genuinely superior work. And that is their loss, not that of

the writers. What is most important, any reader who ap-

proaches the principal novels of the year with a quickened

ear, a sensitive eye, and an awakened imagination will realize

that in a few instances at least, the writer deserves the appella-

tion "artist."

The 1968 Nebula nominees demonstrated a wide variety of

styles, types, techniques, and modes. They ranged from the

wildly experimental Stand on Zanzibar to the controlled disci-

pline and form of Panshin's Rite of Passage, the Nebula

winner. Certainly Panshin's first novel had been widely

anticipated; he had, after all, demonstrated both his commit-

ment to science fiction and his undeniable talent in numerous

short stories and his full-length critical analysis, Heinlein in

Dimension. What kind of novel could be expected from this

man, reputed to be a member of the New Wave, who was

at the same time a merciless dissector of Heinlein? The result:

a smooth, competent, professional reworking of tired, wom-

out science fiction characters and devices. One is tempted to

say that Rite of Passage is a mini-splendored thing.

Yet withal, it was the Nebula winner, voted the best science

fiction novel of the year by the members of SFWA. Their

choice was both difficult and easy to understand. Rite of

Passage is, on one hand, banal, at least to this reader. On the

other hand, it is well constructed, smooth, slick, thoroughly

professional. Unquestionably the writers who named Rite of Passage were responding to the professionalism everywhere

evident in the novel, the tight plotting, the crisp transitions,

theless intriguing. In the last analysis, the votes for Rite of Passage were a tribute to the writer from whom Panshin had

learned so much and to whom he owed so much, Robert A.

Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, the Nebula third-place win-

antinovel, it may be the ultimate "New Worlds" novel, the

hardly be indifferent to it. Indeed, Stand on Zanzibar may be the most important science fiction novel of the last decade.

Zanzibar requires a patience of eye and ear that many fans

to appreciate any of the other Nebula nominees, and none of

However, those who pay it the attention it deserves, who are

situations, typographical eccentricities, and triple or quadruple

levels of writing will find here both a richness of conception

and depth of execution rarely matched in contemporary fic-

tion. Stand on Zanzibar is no sterile, naturalistic-representa-

tional novel about people whose miseries are merely aching

groins and whose griefs, to quote William Faulkner, grieve

on no universal bones, who write not of the heart but of the

glands.

For all of his dazzling pyrotechniques, Brunner is neither

deliberately obscure nor obtusely difficult. To create his

twenty-first-century world where seven billion humans con-

sume mass-marketed psychedelics and otherwise sweat,

struggle, and die, Brunner writes a careful multidimensional

prose. The major clue to understanding the book is, curiously

enough, the seven-page table of contents. Here Brunner

leaves his clues: utilizing styles he calls "context," "the hap-

pening world," "track with closeups," and "continuity," he builds a multilayered contrapuntal novel. These four fugal

styles interweave continually while each still maintains its

complete artistic integrity. The McLuhanesque quality of the

novel is everywhere evident. The four parts cannot simply

be considered as linear, independent developments, each

telling a simple beginning, middle, and end story. Instead, the artistic construct becomes a single entity, an art object-as-form, a medium whose message is its totality, Brunner demands sensory involvement on all levels, from the thematic

to the stylistic, as he searches for "retribalization" in the

midst of sterile linearity. All in all, Stand on Zanzibar is a

dexterous performance, at once as facile as a Bach motet

and as gripping as one of the German master's chorales.

interesting, trends in many of the science fiction novels

are anthropology, sociology, psychology, semantics, and re-

in such works as Raymond F. Jones's Renaissance, religion

has recently become primary source material, used sympa-thetically and provocatively by many different sf authors.

Recall, for a moment, A Canticle for Leibowitz, considered

by many critics to be one of the two or three best science

fiction novels ever written. Miller's novel untilizes the struc-

ture, mystique, language, and theology of Roman Catholicism.

Remove the Roman Catholic Church from its pages, and

Canticle is nothing, mere vapidity unredeemable even by

Miller's flashing word magic. Also religiously oriented are

James Blish's A Case of Conscience, Roger Zeiazny's Lord of

Light, Herbert's Dune, and Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange

Land, to cite only a few. It matters little whether the religious

constructs and background be Catholicism, Hinduism, Islam,

or pantheism. What is important is that these writers, all

skilled craftsmen, felt impelled to utilize religious themes as

artistic material and to utilize them so profoundly that their

novels would not otherwise be complete. Moreover, each of

these writers has handled the religious symbols as if they

were standard science fiction devices.

Yet the nature of the material has seemingly forced the

writers to consider some genuine problems, problems as real

as violence in Chicago or dangling bodies in Iraq. Suppose,

asks Herbert, we have a genuine avatar, a messiah, a true

manifestation of the Deity who is forced by the incredible

horror of living conditions to choose violence, not love or

charity, as his method of redeeming Arrakis and the Fremen.

So Paul Atreides' internal sufferings, the clash of love with

violence, become a crucial ethical problem that would be

essentially trivial without the religious background against

which the ethics can be weighed.

No author has explored these theological implications as

consistently, or as profoundly, as James Blish. Beginning with

the Hugo-winning A Case of Conscience and continuing with Doctor Mirabilis, the second book in the trilogy, which has

been published only in England, Blish has pursued the rami-

fications of evil as has no writer since the late Charles

another Nebula finalist, is perhaps the most frightening novel

Faust undertakes to let all of the major demons out of hell

and no restrictions except that they must return to hell at

his actions bring Armageddon and the resultant destruction

of the world. What all of the diabolists had not realized, they

conquer. End of novel.

Here Blish again asks ancient questions: What is the role

the position of suffering? In addition Blish raises the great

are its implications for our contemporary society, because

if evil is creative, perhaps diabolists such as Huysmans' des

Essientes or the Marquis de Sade were right after all to

worship Lucifer. Perhaps Rosemary's baby is real, alive and

Black Easter.

Some readers may cavil with Blish, maintaining that his

artistic viewpoint is essentially one of fi "tasy rather than

science fiction. That may very well be, but at best it is a

Blish's arguments. Like Ivan, in The Brothers Karamazov,

Blish seems to imply that if God did not exist, everything

is permitted and the doing of evil becomes .virtually a man-

dated "good."

This kind of probing into the depths of man's consciousness

is impossible within the traditional science fiction novel.

Involvement with scientific gimmickry has too often robbed

science fiction of its humanity. It may be that the inclusion of theologyand the other "soft" sciencesas viable subject

matter is one step toward the restoration of its human element.

it becomes simply a mechanical recitation of fantasized fact,

a trap that too much science fiction has fallen into. Theology

First novels have many characteristics. Sometimes they are

so bad that about all that can be said for them is that the

punctuation and spelling display a startling originality. Too

know almost nothing about the form. George Orwell's 1984

or Aldous Huxley's Brave New World seem to them the

fiction ended with Carl Claudy's pastiches of H. G. Wells in

the old American Boy magazine. They had fading memories

of the Buck Rogers radio program or the superior draftsman-

be laughable if they weren't so pitiable. Don't fail to miss

Often enough a first science fiction novel is written by

someone like Panshin who has obviously learned his trade

Pohl, or Ed Ferman. Of course, writing a short story with its

characterization, and qualified range is not the same as writ-

ing a novel. Essentially, the problem of the novelist is to

create an entire world, populate it with believable people, and

construct a problem that requires careful, detailed elabora-

tion. Further, he must accomplish this in prose that moves

the story toward its denouement while remaining unobtrusive.

"There are those writers, like Ray Bradbury, whose talents

seem to lead them to the short story as a natural medium.

It is not that Bradbury lacks the artistic vision for the novel;

it is rather that his concepts seize him, shake him, and emerge

explosively after two or three hours of writing into a short

story. Other writers think galactically or epically; no micro-

cosm for them. Their dreams encompass entire worlds, their

characters emerge from ink into reality, and their prose can

be lean, supple, poetic, highly charged with cosmic tensions.

Critics often maintain, with some justification, that it is

more difficult to write a good short story than an average

novel. Perhaps. But when any author masters his trade so well

that his novel is a richly panoplied accomplishment, he

deserves recognition and praise from those who should appre-

ciate the extent of his achievement.

caused Heinlein to break his strongest resolution:, never to

comment in public on anything a colleague has written. He

on trends in our present culture that I have seen since 1984

appeared . . . it belongs up at the top, along with Brave New

World."

Yet despite Heinlein's praise, Boyd's novel had a very

mixed reception. It received a few votes for the Nebula

the science fiction magazines. Why was it ignored? No one

both science fiction writers and fans might have accounted

had clannishness forced upon them by those who think that

science fiction is easy to write or simply Buck Rogers updated.

Thus, uncertainty about Boyd's identity or background might

have caused a certain reluctance to vote for his book. All

anyone knew was that The Last Starship from Earth was a

first novel, that it had been picked up by the Doubleday

Science Fiction Book Club as the June-July selection.

All of these suppositions did not alter the fact that The

Last Spaceship was a superior first achievement, better than

most authors' tenth. It is, on the surface, a parallel universe

storythe Pope is a computer, the City of God is on Mt.

Whitney, Lincoln has given "The Johannesburg Address,"

Byron is an eighteenth-century poet, laser science has pro-

duced theological cybernetics, and Hell is a pariah planet.

Beyond the surface, the novel is a virtuoso-performance com-

thinly veiled references to "reality," and unobtrusive, pene-

description. Only the theologically ingenious innovation at the

Canticle must be the standard for comparison. The Last

Starship from Earth did not win any awards, but it will be

His new novel, The Pollinators of Eden, due from Weybright

& Talley in mid-1969, is sure to get a much wider readership.

If it is anywhere nearly as good as The Last Starship from

If 1968 was the year science fiction explored certain devices

and techiques derived from McLuhan, psychology, and the

conscious, and too sycophantic. It has usually lacked the

the warts and the freckles, and then break into raucous

laughter at the sight. Perhaps the somberness of reality was

reflected in the somberness of the writing, but science fiction could have used some outrageous spoofs, more rollicking

comedy, or even some gentle self-satire.

Arthur C. Clarke's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, based on

Stanley Kubrick's epic motion picture of the same name,

solved some of the many questions raised by the film itself.

Not eligible for a Nebula nomination, 2001 was in many

ways a better book than the picture really deserved. Flashy,

expensive, and magnificently photographed, Kubrick's movie

had everythingexcept characters who lived, a plot which

made sense, dialogue which sounded human, and action of

any kind. It did have, of course, the mysterious Formica

tabletop upon which everyone grooved, a drag computer for

a hero, the loudest and most distracting sound track of any

film ever made, and unrelieved boredom. After the press

preview before Kubrick eliminated an hour of non-action, several perceptive critics booed.

There was no booing of Clarke's novel, however. Not only

was it assured of vast sales because of its connection with the

movie, 2001 was snatched up by eager film viewers who

looked for answers to questions raised by the motion picture.

Clarke provided those answers literately, intelligently, and

provocatively. Readers familiar with his earlier Childhood's

End might have expected as much. Fortunately for science

fiction, the tens of thousands of readers attracted to the novel

by the film were treated to serious probing of some profound

questions: What is the nature of man in space? What are

some of the implications of genuine interstellar contact? What

is the mutation beyond man?

These questions are part of the common coinage of science

fiction, to be sure, but Clarke's handling of them insured

many sympathetic readers for science fiction, particularly

among people who would not otherwise know an Apollo cap-

valuable novel of the year.

Persistent rumors during the last year or two have told of

a coming sequel to Frank Herbert's Nebula-winning novel,

Dune. Herbert finally confirmed the rumors when he finished

the actual writing in mid-1968. While the continuation of the

tion and evaluation, Herbert's 1968 novel, The Santaroga

Barrier, was not one of the Nebula finalists. "The critics may

have subconsciously compared the limited scope of The

Santaroga Barrier with the epic vision of Dune, but The

been praised by many college students who are overly aware

alienation, anomy, despair.

One of the principal charges laid against many science

fiction novels is that they are exasperating. Too often they combine startling ingenuity with shabby characterization, or

complexities of plotting with inanities of style. Some 1968

is the realization that they are, on the whole, so good that

there is no reason for their not being superior. What is even

more disappointing, the novels sometimes demonstrate an

unrealized potential. Editors groan when they get a manu-

script embodying an original concept, very badly handled.

his trade and that his execution be at least half as good as his

imagination, before they will print a single mediocre word.

For that matter, even the very best novels of the past dozen

years too often betray symptoms of this same unrealized

potential, or are marred in one way or another. Stranger in a

Strange Land breaks apart in the middle, Dune has stylistic

lapses, and even A Canticle for Leibowiti, lacks centricity, to

cite only three examples. Mainstream novels, of course, do

not lack flaws, as they too often concentrate on representa-

tional confessionalism, replete with sexual aberrations or

psychological hang-ups.

However, the fact that a science fiction novelor any

other for that matteris flawed should not detract from the

writer's forte may be dialogue, another's style, a third's char-

Someday a writer may combine all these elements and the

to define "great." Many writers now active have the ability.

Lafferty, Moorcock, Sturgeon, Zeiazny . . . the list could

include a dozen more . . . all are capable of writing a dis-

tinguished work. To that list perhaps should be added Joanna

Russ, whose Picnic on Paradise is an agonizingly good but

flawed novel. Miss Russ's major accomplishment here is that she may have created one of the first memorable women in a

A typical woman perhaps? Yes, but Alyx breathes the way

Miss Russ may learn more as her talent matureslearn

enchantingly exasperating. For example, she may learn more

about techniques of plotting, or learn not to depend on too

she learns she will still have her talent, a vibrant verbal

dexterity. Her words chime with a ring of genuine silver, not

the clunk of the ersatz sandwich coinage spewed out by so

that, for all its flaws, Picnic on Paradise, her first novel, was

a Nebula nominee. How good her second or sixth will be

Robert Silverberg's The Masks of Time was the Nebula

runner-up. It looks to the past and projects that vision to the

future. How will people in the mass behave as they approach

the end of the millennium thirty years from now? he asks.

Much the same as they behaved a thousand years ago, with

fears of the coming of the Antichrist or hopes for the Second

Coming; with riots, depredations, religious intolerance, vast

excesses of lust, rage, and power. Silverberg might have

prefaced his novel, which is both realistic and terrifying, with

Yeats's words, "And what rough beast, its hour come round

first century thus may be the age of the rough beast, the era

of enlightenment, the beginning of the new dark 'ages. The

conditions are here now, Silverberg posits: the superstition,

the ignorance, the susceptibility to vast stimulation through

the Cyclopean eye of the TV monster, the potential for mass

hysteria. Combine these elements and transform "the rough

beast" into a charismatic figure, and you have the makings of a very provocative novel indeed. The entire book is seen

through the eyes of a dispassionate University of California

at Irvine physics professor, and told in his words. He be-

comes involved with the antihero, Vornan-19, as a jealous

sexual rival, and through the professor's narrow vision, life at

the end of our century lurches to its whimpering conclusion.

Wisely, Silverberg never reveals whether his visitor out of

time is a demonic demiurge, a homo superior from the future

with incredible charm, or simply the personalized extension of

the bastard in all of us. Even though the novel may appear

to be limited by the narrowness of the first-person point of

view which Silverberg adopts, close examination reveals that

he has created a universal micro-world. And as Scott Fitz-

gerald once put it, "Life is much more successfully looked at

from a single window, after all." So with The Masks of Time.

The role of sex in contemporary science fiction has been a

limited one, at best. Formerly magazine editors would not

even suggest that a spaceman ever had to urinate, to say

nothing of wanting to fornicate now and then. Today when

D. H. Lawrence has emancipated all novelists, few science

fiction writers treat sex as anything excep' a biological curi-

osity. Silverberg is a notable exception, tod The Masks of

Time is his best example. To be sure, any treatment of sex

character, or action. But by personalizing Vornan-19 as an

berg makes the sexual conflict an important part of the book.

action or characters. In the end, Silverberg's utilization of

hitherto proscribed materials may be as important to the

ences as subject matter.

The last two finalists, Lafferty's Past Master and Dick's

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep are two more examples

of books being written for a maximum audience. Both require

to the breaking point past a willing suspension of disbelief.

book Sir Thomas More is alive in his Utopia, but faced with

original vision? And Dick asks the reader some elemental

questions: When is a human being? Are machines more real

than man if they are worshiped by man, if they are immune

to fallout, and if humans can program their daily moods with

a few simple flicks of a dial?

All of these extrapolations derive from conditions actually

existing in our present society. This ability to indicate the

logical conclusions of what we now do when projected into a

future scene is, of course, at the very heart of science fiction.

Throughout the past thirty years the imagination of science

fiction writers has often, surpassed their ability to incarnate

that imagination into form. Now talent is beginning to catch

of the readers means that writers will produce competent,

do nothing to make science fiction into literature. When writers utilize their imaginations and talents in concert with