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

Seven billion human beings are trying to stand on Zanzibar;
there is conflict in Utopia; puberty rites in space end with the
death of a planet; the Apocalypse will come either with Black
Magic or with the approaching Millennium. Electric sheep
graze, unmolested by fallout, and all is not well on Paradise.
These visions of the futuresome might term them night-
mareswith their extensions, extrapolations, and involve-
ments are the subject matter of the best science fiction novels
published during 1968. Seven of them were the Nebula
finalistsl the eighth was a superior work overlooked in the
voting.2 Together they continue a trend begun some years
ago, demonstrating again the growth of the novel as the most
representative, if not the most distinctive, form for the
presentation of science fiction.
Thirty-five novels were listed on the preliminary ballot used
by the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America
to nominate candidates for 1968 Nebula Award. They were
a diverse lot, including a few fantasies, dozens of spanner and
grommet stories, some high jinks in time, and several serious
explorations of certain new views of the hell man continually
shapes for himself. It was, in general, a good year for the
i James Blish, Black Easter, Doubleday; John Brunner, Stand on
Zanzibar, Doubleday; Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of
Electric Sheep, Doubleday; R. A. Lafferty, Past Master, Ace;
Alexei Panshin, Rite of Passage, Ace; Joanna Russ, Picnic on
Paradise, Ace; Robert Silverberg, The Masks of Time, Ballantine.
2 John Boyd, The Last Starship from Earth, Weybright & Talley.
science fiction novel, although space operas, by and large,
are not really worth considering seriously. They are mostly
good adventure stories, told, as usual, with a maximum of
action and dialogue, a minimum of characterization, and a
general banality of style: "Starwolf, whispered the void . . ."
They end up as half of an Ace double, thud and blunder
among the stars.
The serious works, like the Nebula finalists, sometimes
show great originality. Indeed, if the editors of the Saturday
Review or The New York Review of Books had read some
of the Nebula nominee novels published during 1968, they
might have discovered that the gap between so-called main-
stream fiction and first-rate science fiction is narrowing. In
fact, there are times when the difference disappears com-
pletely, so completely that even the case-hardened iconoclasts
who occupy the pages of The New Yorker might be unable
to detect the gap at all. For example, John Earth's Giles Goat
Boy is science fiction, but no reviewer bothered to mention
the fact. Earth's McLuhanesque Lost in the Fun House was
also science fictiona non-novel, perhaps, or even an anti-
novel, or a non-book, a piece of mclunacy, but science fiction
nonethelessa fact ignored by every reviewer who tried to
make conventional, representational mainstream sense out of