"1971 This Year In Science Fiction By Damon Knight" - читать интересную книгу автора (Knight Damon)

DAMON KNIGHT

1971: The Year in Science Fiction

Nineteen seventy-one was a year of changes. Interest in science
fiction was plainly on the increase: Publishers Weekly reported a total
of 304 sf books in 1971 as against 269 in 1970." Courses on science
fiction proliferated in high schools and colleges. Time, in its March
29 issue, ran a long and favorable report on modern sf. The Tolkien
boom continued: Lord of the Rings was read aloud over WRVR-FM in
New York, a bit every weekday at midnight The first tower of the
World Trade Center in New York City reached its full height, and the
sf newsmagazine Locus announced a contest with a free lifetime
subscription to the first gorilla to climb it.

John W. Campbell, who had dominated the sf magazine field for more
than thirty years, died July 11 of a heart ailment. He was sixty-one.
Campbell, who began writing science fiction when he was a student at
MIT in the twenties, became editor of Analog (then Astounding
Stories) in 1937, and in the next few years introduced the work of
Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, L. Ron
Hubbard, Lester del Rey and others. His abrasive and controversial
editorials became a feature of the magazine in

'PW's figures are widely thought to be low; Joanne Burger, who publishes an
annual checklist, reported
784 sf books published in 1971.
the late forties and continued to his death. In October Ben Bova was
appointed his successor.

Campbell's death altered the balance of the field noticeably, and so did
some other editorial changes. In April Terry Carr left Ace Books,
"with mutual acrimony"; later Ace announced it would drop the Ace
Specials line which Carr had originated and edited. Carr also severed his
connection with the annual World's Best Science Fiction, which he had
edited in collaboration with Donald A. Wollheim, but announced that
he would edit another year'sbest series for Ballantine Books. Later in
the year, Wollheim resigned as editor-in-chief of Ace to form his own
publishing company, Daw Books, which will publish science fiction
paperbacks exclusively. His place was taken by Frederik Pohl,
formerly editor of Galaxy.

In the November issue of English Journal, Sheila Schwartz wrote:
"Before World War II, science fiction writing speculated about the
world of the future. Today, all a writer need do to qualify as a science
fiction writer is to record the present with such details as napalm, self-
cleaning ovens, pep pills, pollution, birth control pills, thought
control, dream research, or tranquillizers. Science fiction reflects our
world as accurately, spiritually and factually, as the work of Charles
Dickens reflected the Victorian world, or the work of Alexander Pope