"Aldiss, Brian W - Afterward - This Year in SF 1966" - читать интересную книгу автора (Aldiss Brian W)

and announcer are credible. So are the new religion, and all
the thrusts against our too-fat society. It happens to be fun to
read as well as ringing true. (Belmont)
Robert Silverberg: Needle in a Timestack. A collection of
ten Silverberg stories, Silverberg in a rather thoughtful mood.
There's a lot of contemporary point to such stories as "The
Pain Peddlars"when the latent sadism of those medic sagas
on the idiot box is not so damned latentand a sound moral
trim to the punishment used by a future society in "To See
the Invisible Man." (Ballantine)
E. E. Smith; The Lensman Series: Triplanefary, First Lens-
man, Galactic Patrol, Gray Lensman, Second Stage Lensman,
Children of the Lens. It can be argued that, after the opening
sentence, "Two thousand million or so years ago two galaxies
were colliding," we are in for six volumes of anticlimax, and,
at the same time, to remain fascinated by this workthe
longest of the hard-core SF sagas. Even if it remains cops and
robbers without transcending into Good and Evil, it still stays
fresh in its rather charming wooden way, and the various
aliens remain more human than the human characters. (Pyra-
mid)
The John Wyndham Omnibus. Contains Wyndham's three
best novels, The Day of the Triffids, The Kraken Wakes, The
Chrysalids. Too little has appeared from the once-prolific
Wyndham of late; here's the reason in one unparallelled
volume; he is resting adequately on his laurels. The very
English method of narration suits the theme of the leisurely
magnitude of civilization's fall. (Simon & Schuster)
William F. Temple: Shoot at the Moon. Perhaps an SF
first, with a Spillane-type wise-cracking tough-guy novel all
about rocketships. (Simon & Schuster) While Bill Temple is
too nice a guy to be as foul as this exercise demands, he still
moves the story along at a nice clip -so that it has the
readability of a good mystery. This despite the rough and
tough characters' startling ability to throw quotes at each
other rather than brick bats. "Because I'm in mourning for
my life," the heroine declaims, and the hero instantly recog-
nizes it as Masha's line from The Seagull. There is a lot more
like this, and, surprisingly enough, Pangborn's The Judgment
of Eve is shot full of the same kind of thing. Perhaps we
make too much of a small coincidence, but can it be possible
that these are first signs of intellectual awareness, that science
fiction is part and parcel of literature and not a form of
super-pulp somewhere between the western and the romance?
There is certainly some evidence for this belief. Critical
books about SF appear regularly and stay in print. 1966 was a
bumper year. Pride of place goes to the MIT Index to the
Science Fiction Magazines, 1957-1965. This index, of all the
stories and all the authors in all the magazines during this
period, was published by the university science fiction society