7th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F

The Year's Best S-F (Merril) #7

by Judith Merril (editor)

contents

Oneiromachia · Conrad Aiken ·
A Passage from the Stars · Kaatje Hurlbut
Among the Dangs [excerpt] · George P. Elliott
Immediately Yours · Robert Beverly Hale
Parky · David Rome
The Fastest Gun Dead [Hiram Pertwee] · Julian F. Grow
All the Tea in China · Reginald Bretnor
The Portobello Road · Muriel Spark
Ottmar Balleau X 2 · George Bamber
The Dandelion Girl · Robert F. Young
Nightmare in Time · Fredric Brown
Looking Backward · Jules Feiffer
Three Prologues and an Epilogue · John Dos Passos
It Becomes Necessary · Ward Moore
My Trial as a War Criminal · Leo Szilard
A Prize for Edie · J. F. Bone
Freedom · Mack Reynolds
High Barbary · Lawrence Durrell
The Quaker Cannon · Frederik Pohl & C. M. Kornbluth
Quake, Quake, Quake [excerpt] · Paul Dehn
Quake, Quake, Quake [excerpt] · Edward Gorey
Judas Bomb · Kit Reed
A Small Miracle of Fishhooks and Straight Pins · David R. Bunch
The Tunnel Ahead · Alice Glaser
Extraterrestrial Trilogue on Terran Self-Destruction · Sheri Eberhart
The Countdown · John Haase
The Beat Cluster · Fritz Leiber
In Tomorrow’s Little Black Bag · James Blish
The Ship Who Sang [Helva] · Anne McCaffrey
A Planet Named Shayol · Cordwainer Smith
The Asteroids, 2194 [Troons] · John Wyndham
The Long Night · Ray Russell
To an Astronaut Dying Young · Maxine W. Kumin

Genres: Short Stories

400 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

Josephine Juliet Grossman

aka Cyril Judd (with C.M. Kornbluth)

Judith Josephine Grossman (Boston, Massachusetts, January 21, 1923 - Toronto, Ontario, September 12, 1997), who took the pen-name Judith Merril about 1945, was an American and then Canadian science fiction writer, editor and political activist.

Although Judith Merril's first paid writing was in other genres, in her first few years of writing published science fiction she wrote her three novels (all but the first in collaboration with C.M. Kornbluth) and some stories. Her roughly four decades in that genre also included writing 26 published short stories, and editing a similar number of anthologies.

Reviews

[Brendan]

George Bamber's "Ottmar Balleau x 2" alone is worth the price of admission. Classic.

Fritz Leiber's "The Beat Cluster," though not his best work, is a fantastic example of what Merril's SF collections are all about. Dirty hippies dancing just beyond the insidious reach of The Man, in outer space. What's not to love?

[Francisco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Covering some of the best short fiction of the year 1961, with Merril's usual and refreshing wide definition of science fiction and fantasy, we get another crop of overall good stories, with some duds and a couple of true masterpieces. 

It's really interesting to get these books and see some "young promising authors" like Anne McCaffrey and Sheri S. Tepper, and you can already tell that these are going to be stars, which they eventually become. Anne McCaffrey's story about "The Ship Who Sang" is a touching, innovative tale in the context of early 60s sci-fi, and it's no surprise that she went on to become such a successful author. 

In fact the two big highlights for me here are McCaffrey's story as well as Cordwainer Smith's "A Planet Named Shayol" which is a truly weird and fascinating story, part of his Instrumentality of Mankind series. Another huge highlight is Muriel Spark's ghost story "The Portobello Road" and Robert F. Young's most famous story: "The Dandelion Girl". Worth a read and there's always gems to unearth in any of Merril's collections.

[Tony Ellis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This series fascinated me in my late teens, as did others of its ilk. Emerging in the early 1960s when SF had shrugged off its pulp trappings and was edging surreptitiously toward the table where the modern literature kids hung out, the stories were collated not just from magazines like Galaxy, but from Cosmopolitan and The New Yorker - and it showed. Sometimes barely qualifying in the fantasy sub-category of Speculative Fiction, many were set in a sort of Ray Bradbury-ish America where everyone seemed to live either in a stifling Manhattan apartment or a small rural town; a world now just barely visible in the earlier seasons of Mad Men.

Sadly, either my memory is rosy or this just isn't a great entry in the series. The best stories (Muriel Spark's The Portobello Road and Cordwainer Smith's A Planet Named Shayol) I'd read long ago in other anthologies, and the rest tended toward the whimsical and too slight. (Totally worth it for those two, though, if you haven't yet had the pleasure.)

[Ogden Jones · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is a time capsule that shows the state of fiction and science fiction in 1961. Several stories about beatniks. The Dandylion Girl was good. A Planet Named Shayol was memorable.