Black Gate

In his Foreword to his Fourth Annual Collection of Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, which gathered stories published in 1974, Lester del Rey makes the case for Sense of Wonder as the core literary virtue of science fiction.

There is another element that must be present in every good science fiction story. It should excite a feeling of wonder, of something beyond the ordinary. It is the expectation of finding such wonders that makes the reader turn to science fiction rather than to more conventional tales of adventure.

There was a time, forty or fifty years ago, when what was then called “scientifiction” had little more than this sense of wonder to recommend it. Most of the writing was dreadful, the characters were little more than stick figures, and the plots were creakingly devoted to nothing but gadgetry. Yet, bad as they were, these stories opened the imagination to wonderful vistas of the future, of the triumph of mankind beyond normal limits, and to all things strange and alien.

Today, the situation has changed. The newer writers — and the older ones who have survived in the field — have learned their craft well. The writing is incredibly better. Gone are the horible cliches of the worst of pulp fiction: the trite mad scientists, and the banal heroines who are mere props for the hero to save from a fate worse than death. Gone are the spate of pseudo-science words and the plethora of meaningless adjectives.

Happily, in the best of science fiction the sense of wonder is still with us.

We need that feeling of wonder today, perhaps more than ever, when mainstream literature and our daily newspapers keep telling us that — in the words of Wordsworth — “The world is too much with us; late and soon;/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers…” We need to be reminded that the future is still unexplored territory and that we can read to the end of the sonnet and “Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;/Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn.”

I don’t often get to mix Wordsworth with my science fiction; allow me to celebrate a little when it happens organically.

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I’ve heard it said many a time that online shopping will never replace a good bookstore, because you can’t make those delicious unexpected discoveries online.

Well, that certainly hasn’t been my experience. My most recent example? Damon Knight’s 1974 fantasy reprint anthology The Golden Road: Great Tales of Fantasy and the Supernatural, which I found on eBay while bidding on a small collection of British fantasy paperbacks from the same seller.

Now, I’ve never even heard of The Golden Road, and I most definitely stumbled on it while I wasn’t looking for it, so it certainly counts as a delicious and unexpected discovery. Plus, I won it for a measly five bucks plus shipping, so it’s sort of like making a delicious and unexpected discovery at a neighborhood garage sale, when your neighbor has no idea how to haggle.

Why’d I bid on a book I’d never heard of? Partly because of Damon Knight’s sterling rep, which he earned with numerous highly regarded anthologies, including 21 volumes of the legendary Orbit. But also because, wow, I really had never heard of this thing, and just look at it. It’s 44 years old and it looks brand new. Plus, it’s 447 pages long, and I bet it could keep me entertained for an entire weeklong cruise to Ecuador.

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