Two Sci-Fi Anthologies: Pohl and Nebula Awards

 

Frederik Pohl. Day Million (1970) In his introduction, Pohl says that these tales have only two things in common: One is they were written by “myself” – I put it like that because I’m not really entirely sure that that 20-year-old who banged out It’s A Young World is much like the 50-year-old who is telling you about it now. The other is that are all “science fiction.” He goes on to puzzle over the label for the genre, noting that much “science fiction” contains no science at all. At the time he wrote, the genre was still widely dissed as adolescent trash. But many of the classics Gulliver's Travels, 1984) are in fact what we label “science fiction”. If we consider any fiction to be an extended answer to “What if?”, then all fiction is “science fiction”.
     Pohl wrote for the pulps, which means he had to write stories that sold, which means that they couldn’t be too different. Readers expect both the familiar and the new, but the new had better be a variation or extension of the familiar. Johnson said that the purpose of art is “to make the new familiar and the familiar new”. “Science fiction” is the art that specialises in that endeavour. Pohl was a master. The story he wrote when he was 20 years old still stretches the reader’s expectations. The world it describes has been set up to enable the immortal leaders of the stellar empire(s) to recover their psychological equilibrium and emotional strength.
      Any of Pohl’s tales is worth reading. *** to ****

James Blish. Nebula Award Stories Number Five (1970) The three award-winning stories, plus three add-ons, and a couple of essays about the state of science fiction in the 1960s, which I didn’t read. The stories are all worth reading. The best I think is Ursula Leguin’s Nine Lives, a meditation on what makes us individuals, via the fancy that a team of ten clones would feel and act as one. When nine of them are killed, the survivor is faced with the a life of appalling loneliness.
   Terror also figures in Silverberg’s Passengers: he posits invasion by entities that “ride” humans by taking over their brains. It’s a literal take on enthusiasm, which originally meant being inhabited by a god (en- “in” thus- “god” -(i)asm “state or condition”). Recall Shakespeare’s “As flies are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport.”
     *** to ****