American Science Fiction
AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION
FOUR CLASSIC NOVELS 1960–1966
The High Crusade • Poul Anderson
Way Station • Clifford D. Simak
Flowers for Algernon • Daniel Keyes
. . . And Call Me Conrad [This Immortal] • Roger Zelazny
Gary K. Wolfe, editor
LIBRARY OF AMERICA E-BOOK CLASSICS
AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION
FOUR CLASSIC NOVELS 1960–1966
Volume compilation, introduction, notes, and chronology
copyright © 2019 by Literary Classics of the United States, Inc.,
New York, N.Y. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without
the permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Published in the United States by Library of America.
Visit our website at www.loa.org.
The High Crusade copyright © 1960 by Street and Smith Publications,
Inc., renewed 1986 by Poul Anderson. Reprinted by arrangement with
The Trigonier Trust. Way Station copyright © 1963 by Clifford D.
Simak. Reprinted by arrangement with Open Road Integrated Media,
Inc. Flowers for Algernon copyright © 1966, 1959 by Daniel Keyes,
renewed 1994, 1987 by Daniel Keyes. Reprinted by arrangement with
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. This Immortal,
published here as . . . And Call Me Conrad, copyright © 1966 by Roger
Zelazny. Reprinted by arrangement with J. Boylston & Company.
Distributed to the trade in the United States
by Penguin Random House Inc.
and in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Ltd.
eISBN 978–1–59853–636–2
Contents
Introduction by Gary K. Wolfe
THE HIGH CRUSADE
by Poul Anderson
WAY STATION
by Clifford D. Simak
FLOWERS FOR ALGERNON
by Daniel Keyes
. . . AND CALL ME CONRAD [THIS IMMORTAL]
by Roger Zelazny
Biographical Notes
Note on the Texts
Notes
Introduction
BY GARY K. WOLFE
The emergence of the American science fiction novel at midcentury as a sophisticated, culturally significant, and ultimately enduring genre is amply demonstrated in the two-volume predecessor of the present collection, American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s. The rise of the paperback book, together with the almost paradoxical convergence of postwar technological optimism with the dual fears of nuclear doom and totalitarianism, provided science fiction writers with a new and wider stage than the magazines of the pulp era had offered, new themes, and a new kind of market as well. Novels conceived as novels, not as “fix-ups” assembled from magazine stories, were suddenly welcomed by mainstream publishers, after having long been viewed as the province of specialist fan imprints, as oddball offshoots of mystery or thriller fiction, or as suitable mainly for young adult readers. Even by the early 1950s, reviewers in The New York Times were speculating that science fiction might soon rival mysteries, Westerns, historical novels, and romances in popularity—a benchmark the newly prominent genre never quite achieved. Over the course of the 1950s, however, writers like Alfred Bester, Leigh Brackett, Robert A. Heinlein, Fritz Leiber, and James Blish left a body of work that continues to find new audiences and to influence American literature.
From a specifically literary viewpoint, the 1960s proved to be even more significant than what had come before. The beginning of the decade can be characterized as a moment when writers who had started their careers in the 1930s or 1940s produced some of their finest mature work, such as Theodore Sturgeon with Venus Plus X (1960), Poul Anderson with The High Crusade (1960), Heinlein with Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), and Clifford D. Simak with Way Station (1963). But distinctive new voices also gained prominence. The Hugo Award for best novel in 1961 went to Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s somber and ambitious postnuclear fable A Canticle for Leibowitz, while the 1963 award went to Philip K. Dick’s complex alternate history The Man in the High Castle. In England, the more cerebral and experimental fictions of the so-called New Wave found inspiration in sources as diverse as the French nouveau roman, the work of William S. Burroughs, and even the French protosurrealist Alfred Jarry. In America, editors such as Frederik Pohl, Cele Goldsmith, and Judith Merril also promoted more stylistically adventurous, genre-bending fiction. Goldsmith’s editorship in the early 1960s of the traditionally pulpish magazines Amazing and Fantastic helped introduce U.S. readers not only to New Wave authors from across the Atlantic, but to early work by Ursula K. Le Guin, Roger Zelazny, Piers Anthony, David R. Bunch, and many others. Merril sought to extend the literary range of science fiction in a series of popular “year’s best” anthologies from 1956 to 1968, and her 1968 New Wave anthology rather unfortunately titled England Swings SF included such American authors as Pamela Zoline and Thomas M. Disch. Pohl, editing the magazines Galaxy and If, promoted brilliantly idiosyncratic writers like R. A. Lafferty and Cordwainer Smith (the latter eventually revealed as a pseudonym of political scientist Paul Linebarger), and encouraged more experimental work from prolific younger writers such as Robert Silverberg and Harlan Ellison, whose dystopian parable “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman”—published by Pohl in 1965—was widely recognized as one of the seminal stories defining the American version of the New Wave. (Ellison himself edited two highly influential anthologies of the “new” science fiction, Dangerous Visions in 1967 and Again, Dangerous Visions in 1972.)
Book editors as well were seeking new voices that could reflect an increasingly sophisticated aesthetic for the genre. Terry Carr’s “Science Fiction Specials,” an influential paperback series edited for Ace Books beginning in 1968, included Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, Lafferty’s Past Master, Joanna Russ’s Picnic on Paradise, Alexei Panshin’s Rite of Passage, Zelazny’s Isle of the Dead, and John Sladek’s Mechasm. In 1965, Chilton, a publisher known mostly for automotive repair manuals, branched into fiction with a novel already rejected by most major publishers, Frank Herbert’s Dune, which became a popular classic and the source of one of science fiction’s more enduring franchises. A year later the traditionally literary publisher Harcourt, Brace & World issued Daniel Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon, which provided the basis for the 1968 film Charly, the first science fiction film to receive an Academy Award for Best Actor (for Cliff Robertson). By the end of the decade, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., who had begun his career in the 1950s with science fiction novels Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan, earned his most substantial literary accolades to date with the bestseller Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade (1969).
Thus, if the 1960s began with science fiction that looked largely like the mature-stage growth of the 1940s and 1950s, the decade ended with a dramatically more diverse and more mainstream genre. Star Trek debuted on TV in 1966, featuring a few well-known science fiction figures among its scriptwriters, and, though lasting only three seasons, gave birth to a multimedia franchise still going strong a half-century later. Science fiction film, largely the domain of low-budget monster movies, drew the attention of the great director Stanley Kubrick, first with his doomsday comedy Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), and later with the visionary but meticulous 2001: A Space Odys
sey (1968), one of a handful of science fiction films to engage seriously with major genre themes such as commercial space travel, artificial intelligence, evolution, and alien contact. And, of course, the Apollo 11 moon landing on July 20, 1969, gave science fiction writers a public platform and media prominence not seen since the advent of the atomic bomb back in 1945.
In approaching the selection of novels to represent this varied decade in the two-volume American Science Fiction: Eight Classic Novels of the 1960s, length was a necessary consideration. During much of the 1950s and the early 1960s, science fiction novels tended to be relatively short, sometimes due to constraints as mundane as the ways paperback books were manufactured and distributed. This began to change dramatically in the 1960s, with lengthy and ambitious epics such as Herbert’s Dune or Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (either of which might have precluded two or three other novels from being printed here). Heinlein, almost certainly the most influential science fiction writer of the middle decades of the century, is represented in American Science Fiction: Nine Classic Novels of the 1950s, and no authors from that collection are included in the present one. Nor does this collection include novels available in their authors’ own Library of America editions, such as Dick, Vonnegut, Le Guin, and Madeleine L’Engle. Finally, an effort was made to balance the halves of the decade, though it would certainly be possible to fill two volumes with excellent work from the final two years of the decade alone. One of science fiction’s occasional banner years, 1968 saw the publication of Samuel R. Delany’s Nova, Russ’s Picnic on Paradise, and Lafferty’s Past Master (all included here), as well as Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Disch’s Camp Concentration, Panshin’s Rite of Passage, Simak’s Goblin Reservation, and Silverberg’s Hawksbill Station and The Masks of Time.
Of the authors included here, three can be said to represent that mature-stage growth of earlier traditions: Anderson and Jack Vance, whose first stories appeared in the 1940s, and Simak, who began publishing as early as 1931 but attained his greatest significance in the 1940s and 1950s. (Lafferty, who was actually older than Vance or Anderson, did not begin publishing science fiction until he was in his forties, in 1960, and thus is regarded among the “new” writers of the 1960s.) Zelazny and Delany, along with Le Guin and Disch, were part of science fiction’s remarkable “class of 1962,” each publishing their first genre work in that year. Both Russ and Keyes had published some short fiction in the 1950s, but emerged as major figures in the new decade, Keyes almost entirely on the strength of his classic 1959 short story “Flowers for Algernon” and the 1966 novel developed from it. Russ gained recognition not only as one of SF’s most trenchant and groundbreaking feminist voices, but as a critic and reviewer in scholarly journals and popular science fiction magazines. Delany also emerged as a major critic and theorist of the field by the end of the decade.
As might be expected from such a transitional period, science fiction of the 1960s was characterized by a broad range of styles and themes, and representing that variety was another consideration in assembling this collection. The earliest novel, Anderson’s The High Crusade, reflects the genre’s long-standing fascination with historical fiction, dating back at least to L. Sprague de Camp’s 1939 Lest Darkness Fall and arguably even to Mark Twain’s 1889 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. But while such novels usually dealt with time travel, and efforts to introduce modern technologies to an earlier era, Anderson’s ingenious inversion has an alien spaceship landing in fourteenth-century England, with results that make up in comic invention what they may lack in credibility. Anderson’s fascination with history was evident in his 1953 fantasy novella “Three Hearts and Three Lions” (expanded into a novel in 1961) and in short stories of the Time Patrol, charged with visiting different eras to preserve the historical timeline from renegade time travelers. The High Crusade also permitted Anderson to celebrate another of science fiction’s most popular traditions, the large-scale space opera, with its multiple alien societies and fearsome galactic empires. The novel proved to be one of his most popular, providing the basis of a 1983 role-playing game and a much altered 1994 film, and earning admiration from leading science fiction writers Silverberg, Greg Bear, Eric Flint, and Jo Walton.
Simak’s Way Station reflects a gentler, more pastoral tradition that Simak himself pioneered, although it is also evident in the work of Ray Bradbury, Sturgeon, Zenna Henderson, and Brackett. Set in the same remote southwestern Wisconsin farm country where Simak was born, the novel’s central character is a Civil War veteran who mysteriously never ages. Yet his isolated homestead proves a nexus for the sort of vast galactic civilization that Simak celebrated in his own earlier space opera tales. The implicit anti-urban theme of the novel, not uncommon in midwestern fiction, was even more explicit in Simak’s 1940s stories, which were eventually collected in 1952, with connective material, as City. The title is ironic, since the stories depict the abandonment of cities because of improved transportation, leading to a more distributed and bucolic economy, and eventually to a dispersal of humanity, leaving much of the earth to intelligent dogs and evolved ants. Way Station, a more unified novel, celebrates the classic American values of small communities and isolated individuals who may unassumingly hold a key to humanity’s future.
Vance, who also began publishing in the 1940s and whose career extended to within a few years of his death in 2013, was a transitional figure of another sort. Like Simak, his early work reflected the space operas and planetary romances of the pulp era, but the tales that would eventually be collected in several volumes beginning with The Dying Earth (1952) made him one of the most influential writers of the modern genre, with authors as diverse as Gene Wolfe, Neil Gaiman, and George R. R. Martin acknowledging their debts to him. The reasons for Vance’s continuing influence are twofold. Unlike many pulp-era authors, Vance cultivated an evocative and poetic style; his world-building has a sustained lyrical precision rare in the earlier genre. His settings also influenced a tradition of extreme far-future “dying Earth” tales in which the imagery and language of magical fantasy merge with those of science fiction in a manner sometimes referred to as “science-fantasy”—a blurring of genre boundaries arguably more relevant today than when Vance first began inventing such worlds. Emphyrio is perhaps the strongest of Vance’s “stand-alone” novels not connected to a series, and it reflects not only his mature style but his interest, then comparatively uncommon in science fiction, in problems of art and culture.
Keyes’s Flowers for Algernon, after selling millions of copies in dozens of languages, becoming a widely used text in college, secondary, and even middle school classes, and inspiring films, TV shows, and stage plays, is certainly the most widely familiar novel here. That very familiarity, however, is part of what qualifies it as another transitional work of the 1960s. Few of its readers are aware of Keyes’s origins in the science fiction community, and some are surprised to learn that the novel is science fiction at all, despite its central conceit of artificially increased intelligence. Keyes focuses not on the medical procedure, but on the character and narrative voice of Charly Gordon, whose tonal and stylistic shifts reflect the narrative arc as clearly as Charly’s own pattern of alienation and self-discovery. In other words, the science fictional core of the story is subordinated to its literary ambition, presaging a tradition of humanistic, character-driven science fiction that remains vital today. Yet Keyes began his career editing pulp magazines and comic books; his early mentors included the influential science fiction writers Lester del Rey and Philip Klass (whose satirical science fiction appeared under the name William Tenn); and the original short story “Flowers for Algernon” was workshopped at the well-known Milford Writers Conference by such science fiction luminaries as Merril, Damon Knight, Kate Wilhelm, Avram Davidson, and Blish. It later won the Hugo Award for best short story; a few years after that, the novel earned a Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America. Despite the stor
y’s clear links to its genre origins, it became one of the first science fiction tales to be celebrated almost entirely for its characters and literary technique rather than its speculative inventions.
With Zelazny, Russ, Delany, and Lafferty, however, the sense is less one of transition than of revolution. Zelazny seemed to burst upon the science fiction scene fully formed in 1962, with a series of pyrotechnic stories that appeared determined to redefine the genre both stylistically and thematically. The most well received of these early stories, “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” (1963), concerned a poet and linguist who, studying the dying ancient Martian civilization, finds parallels between their doom-laden fatalism and the book of Ecclesiastes. While the story echoes the “dying Earth” theme as transplanted to another civilization, it also is notable for its exploration of religious impulses and its focus on a troubled and eventually disillusioned protagonist, a sharp contrast with the heroic space adventurers of an earlier era. In these and other stories, Zelazny sought connections between science fiction and the roots of storytelling in ancient myths and legends. His first novel, This Immortal—printed here under the title Zelazny preferred, . . . And Call Me Conrad—opens with pointed allusions to the classical past. The narrator’s girlfriend, significantly named Cassandra, describes him as a kallikanzaros, from the destructive underground goblins of Greek legend. Other classical and literary influences appear throughout the novel—Zelazny held a master’s degree from Columbia in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama—and Conrad himself can be viewed as a kind of Promethean figure. While the novel retains several recognizable elements from the science fiction of the 1950s and earlier—an Earth population diminished by nuclear war, ruined cities, outer space colonies on Mars and Titan, alien overlords, a central figure of ambiguous origins but potentially godlike power—it becomes clear that Zelazny is using such materials to explore ancient myths and rituals of identity, rather than for technological speculation or simple adventure. Some reviewers at the time worried that this newfound literariness was too inward looking and constituted a regressive turn away from the concerns that had made science fiction great in the first place. Nevertheless, on the basis of its abridged initial appearance in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, the novel went on to tie with Herbert’s more traditional science fiction epic Dune for the 1966 Hugo Award. In both . . . And Call Me Conrad [This Immortal] and such later novels as Lord of Light (1967), Zelazny took pains to construct narratives that could support being read as either science fiction or fantasy—a distinct step beyond the “science-fantasy” of Vance’s “dying Earth” tradition and one that further blurred traditional notions of genre. Zelazny’s fascination with myth and ritual eventually led to his most commercially successful novels, the long-running Amber series, which began with Nine Princes in Amber in 1970, continued over the following two decades, and is now viewed as among the first multivolume fantasy series of the sort that became almost ubiquitous in the following decades.