INTRODUCTION

Here are seven stories. There is something special about each one of them, or they wouldn’t be here.

They were all of them nominated for the Nebula Award, a thing presented at the annual Science Fiction Writers of America awards banquet, a thing which represents our collective opinion as to what is the very best work our area of literature produced in the year in question.

Three of these stories won that award. Some of the others came close.

What is a Nebula?

Physically, it is a 9“‘X.4V4”X4V4” piece of Incite with a black base, containing a chunk of quartz and a stylized representation of the spiral nebula. It is an expensive and, as such things occasionally are, a lovely thing to behold. It is our Academy Award/Emmy/Edgar/What Have You. It is the thing we give to the people we respect, for what they have written. A full list of winners, for this and previous years, occurs at the end of this book.

Now, let the Nebula, with its aims reaching out, turning, represent the human imagination, seeking new things. Okay.

Because of this, no two of our anthologies (or stories) will ever be alike. Know this, because you need to know it before you start reading these or any other works of science fiction.

The imagination is a funny thing. By nature, it reaches out; and this nature is a pleasure-pain thing. As Robert Conquest has said, nobody reads science fiction out of a sense of duty.

Since it has not yet been academized, you read it, if you read it at all, for pleasure, impure and unsimple.

And that is what this award represents: recognition of the highest fruits of the imagination, impure and unsimple.

An individual story of this sort may hold the fascination of ‘

a spider or a butterfly. When I say that they give pleasure, I do not mean that you are holding a collection of fairy tales with happy endings. I mean only that these are stories people will read because they want to, not because they have to, I mean that they are alive, with heartbeats, metabolisms, EEO readings. I mean that they can be sad, happy or neither of these. The pleasure I mentioned comes from contemplating the many aspects of the human condition in whatever variant environments it may be cast, the same as in any other form of literature.

Two things please bear in mind: like opera, nobody kicks because people sing instead of talk, or if median res means Medieval Germany or Italy; likewise, we live now in an age when the really big philosophical ideas are borne of Science (cap. “S,” yes), rather than debate over the horse’s teeth.

So…

This is, as a mass-media magazine once observed, and correctly, the folk-literature of the machine ‘age. Without ‘the industrial revolution, you might be reading rewrites of the Faerie Queene. But this is not the case. No. Those antipodal themes, Pygmalion and Frankenstein, are with us still. Our creations may kill or love. In this sense, the archetypes are still valid, and probably always will be. Otherwise, though, these writers were doing electric things long before Marshall M came along. They project, expand, guess upon and just plain fool around with themes as current as the headlines.

and as timeless as Auden’s four terms of nonbeing: Darkness, Silence, Nothing, Death.

In short, they’re all of them good, hard-working stories, calculated to play the Life-Death-Love-Hate game the same as any others, but on their own terms: the expansions of science and human awareness.

If you depart them at this point, you will be none the, richer. Embrace them, and a world or three may be opened before you.

Roger Zelazny

AFTERWORD

Roger Zeiazny

tfatike many aficionados, I do not read every science fiction story published. Ergo, I’ve probably missed some good things, as well as some real dogs. Because of this. I’m in no position to comment on the year 1967 in. science fiction, as I do not know everything that happened in it. Therefore, let me talk of other matters.

It is a Good Thing, as I see it, that Chip Delany has within the past two yearsreceived the Papal blessing. He deserves recognition, and now he’s got plenty of it.

Good Thing #2: I am pleased to have the opportunity to publish, here something of Gary Wright’s. He is a newcomer who I think will do many a goodly thing as time wears on. I eagerly await his first novel. I tip my hat to him on the eve of what I think will be a grand career.

Last year, the editors of Nebula 2 spoke of the problems that were or were not getting into science fiction. Vietnam seems to be ever with us. And all the big problems of all the big cities. And progressive bureaucratization, computerization of life as we know it. And the outflow of gold. Race relations. I could use a full page just listing them. They are still with us and we don’t have any handy answers. We can only guess at possible outcomes.

Science fiction, as I see it, though, isn’t here to provide handy answers. We may comment upon or extrapolate a particular thing, but it doesn’t provide a solution, it simply points a finger. This is what I believe Theodore Sturgeon meant when he referred to a class of stories as being of the “If this goes on” type.

So maybe it’s a Good Thing that most people do not pay much attention to their Friday-before-Monday-morning quarterbacks. We are not that much different from the medicine men predicting fire, famine, plague and war. They’re always safe bets.

As for the year in science fiction, God knows, there’s more of it with us as a result thereof. Some of it is good and some isn’t. That which is good shall prevail.

So what am I to say, here and now? I am going to tell you that our special form of literature is an invitation, an indication, a pastime. Sometimes we push the right buttons and sometimes we don’t. You’re looking at literature, not social commentary. If some of the latter gets mixed inwell, good.

It was probably not intentional, though. Some future historian will chuckle at all our mistakes. Like the man who crashes the party, we just want to be on the scene.

So here are our words, impure and unsimple. We enjoyed putting them together in the order in which they exist. Should they give you pleasure, emotional or intellectual, that’s all we can really ask. Thanks for coming along for the ride.

This year, as I see it, was a good one.

There were more of us around.