"Intoduction and Foreword by Poul Anderson" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Awards)

INTRODUCTION

This book is more than a collection of science fiction stories.
Of course, it is mainly that, and rightly so. After all, we have
here the fourth annual set of Nebula Award winners and as
many runners-up on the final ballot as could be fitted in. But
in view of the growing acceptance of science fiction as a valid
literary form, it seems time to offer some history and com-
mentary besides.
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,
say, John Hersey. At the same time, their regular users are
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
survival and triumph and tragedy of heroes and thinkers, than
in the neuroses of some sniveling fagot. And pace Will
McNelly, I don't believe "hard" science is on the way out of
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,
imitative, or idiotic. I don't know what brought on the change.
It wasn't just the many talented new writers, though obviously
they're responsible for a lot. Quite a few old-timers suddenly
caught fire again. Whatever the cause, heightened quality is
earning us a wider, more discriminating audience. The
rewards go well beyond such benefits for the writer 'as decent
income and expenses-paid trips to symposia in Brazil. Mainly,
he's getting across.
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