By the advent of the 9th Annual Edition: The Year’s Best S-F, things had proceeded artlessly: Similar to the cover of World’s Best Science Fiction 1968 (edited by Donald Wollheim and Terry Carr), rather than a painting, the cover illustration was a makeshift collage of ill-defined stuck-together objects photographed close-up. I suppose the idea was to create a sense of weirdness and mystery, but the whole thing simply comes off looking odd: There’s a tiny little person (made of clay?) hanging out at the bottom of the cover; to his (hers?) left, some bent paper clips, chunky cobwebs, or clear plastic. And that’s about it. Oh well.
Having read this volume, like the others in Merril’s series, a couple of years ago, the stories still outstanding in my memory are Alfred Bester’s “They Don’t Make Life Like They Used to”, Bernard Malamud’s “The Jewbird”, and Cordwainer Smith’s “Drunkboat”. Unsurprisingly, prior to this volume I’d read all three stories in other collections. Though technically well written, typical of Bester’s oeuvre, his story begins on an optimistic “last man and last women in the world” note, and ends rather disappointingly, and nihilistically, perhaps because having been written in the early 60s, he wanted to run counter to the sense of triumphant optimism previously associated with the genre. Smith’s Drunkboat, is, like all (I mean all) of Smith’s body of work, an excellent choice. (Then again, I’ve long thought that Smith (real name Paul M. Linebarger) is among the top ten (top five?!) science fiction writers of the twentieth century. Ah, but what about Malamud’s “The Jewbird”? Having previously read this tale (in a collection of that author’s stories published in the early 70s), I wondered (and wonder) why it was even chosen for inclusion in S-F. It’s emphatically not science fiction by any stretch of interpretation. (Really.) Even to consider it a fantasy requires mental somersaults far beyond the ability of ordinary editors. (Truly.) I’d deem it a thinly veiled form of social allegory, or, social criticism, about internalized antisemitism. Regardless of its merits as “a story”, its presence here indicates the way the content of this series veered away from science fiction to include a hodge-podge of items peripherally related to the genre.
I don’t plan to re-read this collection, but it was an interesting diversion.
And inside?
“Bernie the Faust”, by William Tenn,
from Playboy, November, 1963
“Fortress Ship” (Berserker series), by Fred Saberhagen,
from If, January, 1963
“Mr. Waterman”, by Peter Redgrove,
from book The Nature of Cold Weather & Other Poems, 1961
“Mrs. Pigafetta Swims Well”, by Reginald Bretnor,
from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, May, 1963
“Tree Trunks” (cartoon), by John Gallagher,
specifically for this volume
“They Don’t Make Life Like They Used to”, by Alfred Bester,
from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, October, 1963
“The Great Nebraska Sea”, by Allan Danzig,
from Galaxy Magazine, August, 1963
“The Faces Outside”, by Bruce McAallister,
from If, July, 1963
“A Slight Case of Limbo”, by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.,
from Analog Science Fact -> Science Fiction, April 1963
“237 Talking Statues, Etc.”, by Fritz Leiber,
from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, September, 1963
“The Jazz Machine”, by Richard Matheson,
from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, February, 1963
“Mourning Song”, by Charles Beaumont,
from Gamma 1, July, 1963
“Dog Eat Dog” (cartoon), by Jules Feiffer,
specifically for this volume
“The Jewbird”, by Bernard Malamud,
specifically for this volume
“On the Fourth Planet”, by J.F. Bone,
from Galaxy Magazine, April, 1963
“Poppa Needs Shorts”, by Leigh Richmond and Walt Richmond,
specifically for this volume
“Double Standard”, by Fredric Brown,
from book The Bedside Playboy, 1963
“Interview”, by Frank A. Javor,
from Analog Science Fact -> Science Fiction, November, 1963
“Eight O’Clock in the Morning”, by Ray Nelson,
from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November, 1963
“Where Is Everybody?”, Essay by Ben Bova,
from Amazing Stories, May, 1963
“The Earth Dwellers” (variant of Book Fragments d’une histoire universelle / Fragments of Universal History, 1928),
from the book The Weigher of Souls & the Earth Dwellers, 1963
“The Nobel Prize Winners”, by W.J.J. Gordon,
from The Atlantic Monthly, November, 1963
“Hot Planet”, by Hal Clement,
from Galaxy Magazine, August, 1963
“IBM” (cartoon), by Mort Gerberg,
specifically for this volume
“Confessions of the First Number”, by Cliff Owsley,
specifically for this volume
“The Ming Vase”, by E.C. Tubb,
from Analog Science Fact -> Science Fiction, May 1963
“A Bargain with Cashel”, by Gerald Kersh,
from The Saturday Evening Post, April 27, 1963
“Drunkboat” (The Instrumentality of Mankind series), by Cordwainer Smith,
from Amazing Stories, October, 1963
Summation: SF, 1963, essay by Judith Merril, 1964
Books (The 9th Annual of the Year’s Best SF), essay by Anthony Boucher, 1964
Honorable Mentions (The 9th Annual of the Year’s Best SF), essay by Judith Merril, 1964
Still Life With Pixels
Internet Speculative Fiction Database
Published Variants of This Book (Just two!)