SF: The Year's Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume edited by Judith Merril

[james_davis_nicoll]

Thrill to the best SFF 1958 had to offer!

SF: The Year's Greatest Science Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume edited by Judith Merril

Comments

[jhetley]

I'm pretty sure I owned that book.

[(Anonymous)]

I compared Merril's anthology with the Asimov and Greenberg
anthology that covered 1958, but was published in 1990. The
stories that the two anthologies have in common:

"The Prize of Peril" by Sheckley
"Or All the Seas with Oysters" by Davidson
"The Yellow Pill" by Phillips

There is an Aldiss story, but it is "Poor Little Warrior!"
instead of "Ten-Story Jigsaw".

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

"The Last of the Deliverers" by Poul Anderson
"The Feeling of Power" by Isaac Asimov
"Two Dooms" by C. M. Kornbluth
"The Big Front Yard" by Clifford D. Simak

Joe

[(Anonymous)]

Formatting note: the review appears to be missing a cut. When I look at https://jamesdavisnicoll.com/reviews, I see the entire text there, instead of just the first couple paragraphs of the review.

[sturgeonslawyer]

What, above all else, fascinates me is that Daniel Lang is the first person listed on the cover.

Who?

Apparently some guy who worked for The New Yorker. Merrill did generally cast her net fairly wide in these anthos.

[beamjockey]

That majestically silly rocket on the cover has Thunderbirds Are Go Zero X levels of fins, stages, and engine nacelles, if you know what I mean.

[ba_munronoe]

When the automobiles already look like rocketships, the actual rockets have to up their game.

[kgbooklog]

Have you seen the cover for "Clive Cussler's Dark Vector"?

[beamjockey]

Why, no.

[HIGGINS image-googles]

Great Flaming Ekranoplanes!!

[(Anonymous)]

😵

-Awesome Aud

[scott_sanford]

If fire starts coming out everywhere you are having a bad problem and you will not go to Ukraine today.

[dormouse1953]

The BBC did a TV dramatisation of The Yellow Pill in their series Out of the Unknown back in 1969. I remember seeing it. It was set in a British police station. The psychiatrist was played by Francis Matthews, who was the voice of Captain Scarlet in the Gerry Anderson series. I recall that there was a British journalist at that time called Rog Phillips and at least one reviewer thought it had been written by him.