SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Third Annual Volume edited by Judith Merril

[james_davis_nicoll]

Thrill to the best SF of 1957!

SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: Third Annual Volume edited by Judith Merril

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

"A short but unpleasant tale. One person with a genetically transmitted psychic talent to inhabit many bodies at once becomes the world (or at least its entire population)."

A bit more than half the entire population, right? The Americas are inhabited by a different person with the same talent.

[ba_munronoe]

I was quite unaware that "The Fly" was originally a short story. Does the fly with a human head make an appearance?

"If he had been much older, I would have summed up this story as The Old Man and the Sea and the Alien Spacecraft. I don’t know why so few Hemingway stories had aliens."

Somewhere out there in the multiverse, there's a timeline where Hemingway was a major contributor to Astounding.

[(Anonymous)]

I compared Merril's anthology with the Asimov and Greenberg
anthology that covered 1957, but was published in 1989. The
stories that the two anthologies have in common:

"You Know Willie" by Cogswell
"Let's Be Frank" by Aldiss
"Game Preserve" by Phillips

The Asimov and Greenberg anthology contains two Asimov stories:
"Strikebreaker" and "A Loint of Paw", but not "Let's Get Together".
I guess Asimov didn't think much of it either.

Here are some of the stories Merril could have picked, but didn't:

"Omnilingual" by H. Beam Piper
"The Mile-Long Spaceship" by Kate Wilhelm
"Call Me Joe" by Poul Anderson
"The Cage" by A. Bertram Chandler

Joe

[(Anonymous)]

Here are a couple of excerpts from Asimov's
introduction to "Game preserve":

"One of the games of science fiction, which Horace
L. Gold (founding editor of GALAXY) used to emphasize
in his day, was that of turning things upside down.
He would say, 'We get used to looking at things in one
particular way, but what happens if we try to build a
society in precisely the opposite way.' "

latter in the introduction

"Well, then, as long as humanity has been dealing
with animals we have carefully tried to select them so
that there is 'an improvement of the breed' at least
in our terms and for our benefit, so that we breed
cows that are all milk, hens that are all eggs, sheep
that are all wool, and horses that are all work.

Suppose we stand that on its head. Just suppose ..."

Joe

[philrm]

Ever read Kingsley Amis's short story "Hemingway in Space"? It's exactly what it says on the tin, and is completely hilarious. (I say that as someone who admires a great deal of Hemingway's fiction.)