The Game of If

The contributors to Anthony Boucher’s anthology (The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, 7th Series, Doubleday, $3.75) tend to stray from the spaceship and the weird extra-terrestrial — although these delightful attributes of Science Fiction are by no means absent. Indeed many of these stories take no root in formal science, although there may be vague assumptions of marvelous future inventions.

Perhaps only Arthur C. Clarke’s excellent “Venture to the Moon” sounds the note of sober science, the science just around the corner. Other stories, such as Young’s flawed but thrilling “Goddess in Granite,” must be assigned to the realm of fantasy and symbol. And yet this most modem of writing forms has found a basic relation between “science” and “fantasy,” so that however widely various examples may seem to differ, they still belong in a recognizable way to the same lively family, a family which includes Wells, Kafka, Huxley, “Alice”—and Kornbluth (C. M. Kornbluth, happy inventor of the title: “MS Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie”).

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C. Robert Morse

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The contributors to Anthony Boucher’s anthology (The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, 7th Series, Doubleday, $3.75) tend to stray from the spaceship and the weird extra-terrestrial — although these delightful attributes of Science Fiction are by no means absent. Indeed many of these stories take no root in formal science, although there may be vague assumptions of marvelous future inventions.

Perhaps only Arthur C. Clarke’s excellent “Venture to the Moon” sounds the note of sober science, the science just around the corner. Other stories, such as Young’s flawed but thrilling “Goddess in Granite,” must be assigned to the realm of fantasy and symbol. And yet this most modem of writing forms has found a basic relation between “science” and “fantasy,” so that however widely various examples may seem to differ, they still belong in a recognizable way to the same lively family, a family which includes Wells, Kafka, Huxley, “Alice”—and Kornbluth (C. M. Kornbluth, happy inventor of the title: “MS Found in a Chinese Fortune Cookie”).