J’ai dévoré ce roman de SF se passant aux États-Unis après une attaque nucléaire. L’autrice Judith Merril se focalise sur une femme tentant de comprendre l’impact de la catastrophe sur son quotidien et celui de ses deux filles, en l’absence de son mari dont elle n’a plus de nouvelles depuis son départ le matin.

Écrit en 1950, ce roman dénonce les biais d’une société patriarcale où les femmes n’ont leur place qu’au sein du foyer.
#mastobooks #mastolivres #sf #judithmerril #argyll #sfff

Innen-Illustration von Ed Emshwiller für
"Mars Child" von Cyril Judd
aus Galaxy, May 1951.

#scifi #sciencefiction #GalaxyMag #CMKornbluth #JudithMerril #EdEmshwiller

Best of SF annuals are a venerable tradition. The first such collection was, according to my research, Bleiler and T. E. Dikty’s The Best Science Fiction Stories: 1949. That being said, a slightly later Best SF series left a lineage that spans decades.

I refer to Judith Merril’s The Year’s Greatest SF. Between 1956 and 1968, Judith Merril edited twelve [Note 1] annual anthologies of works that Merril considered to be the best speculative fiction stories of the previous year. Merril’s tastes were unusually wide-ranging [Note 2].

When I revisited the series in 2023 and 2024, it was the structure of her anthologies that caught my attention. I’d seen that arrangement before. Or rather, I had seen it before in anthologies that were published later than Merril’s were.

A Merril Year’s Best included, in addition to the stories, ancillary material in form of a discussion of the state of science fiction in the previous year and a list of noteworthy works that hadn’t quite made the cut for inclusions. Lester del Rey’s less noteworthy Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, which he helmed from 1972 to 1976, used a similar approach although minus the long list of recommended works. Gardner Dozois’ The Year’s Best Science Fiction, which ran from 1984 to 2018, resembles Merril’s structure far more closely, albeit at greater length. Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction & Fantasy also adopted a similar arrangement.

It’s no surprise that Dozois’ Best of would resemble del Rey’s. Dozois’ 1984-to-2018 series was the second time he’d helmed a Best SF series. The first time, he replaced del Rey as editor of The Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year. A consistent format under those circumstances is no surprise, but if you check Dozois’ first volume, its structure resembles Merril’s more than it does del Rey’s.

The similarity between Merril, del Rey, and Dozois could just be three editors independently arriving at a similar arrangement. Far stranger coincidences have happened in science fiction. On the other hand, Aldiss, Harrison, Carr, Strahan, Hartwell, Cramer, and other editors used different approaches, so alternatives did exist. Still, Merril’s series was hardly obscure, and her way to contextualize the best SF stories makes a lot of sense.

Were del Rey and Dozois drawing on Merril [Note 3]? Or is there an earlier source from which all three were drawing? I’d love to know one way or another.

Ah, but what about Rich Horton, you ask? Why no laborious dot-connecting and strained reasoning to connect Horton and Merril? Horton is still alive, so I asked him if Merril’s Best SF influenced him [Note 4]. His answer: “Yes, definitely.”

As you can see, the past is never gone in the present and future, particularly in SF and its annual anthologies of best SF, where each successive generation is influenced and inspired by and builds on what has come before, not just in content and context of the stories themselves but also in how those anthologies are presented to us.

Notes

1. Unless you count her three Best of the Best selections from earlier volumes as anthologies in their own right, in which case one could argue for as many as fifteen.

   ⤴️ Return to reference 1

2. As was her definition of “year.” It wasn’t uncommon for her anthologies to span more than one calendar year. In at least one case, it spanned more than one calendar decade. Well, Merril never said which planet’s year she was using.

   ⤴️ Return to reference 2

3. I did check the debut volumes of both the del Rey and Dozois series to see if they mentioned Merril. If they did, I overlooked it.

   ⤴️ Return to reference 3

4. Horton is also influenced by Merril’s wide-ranging, eclectic tastes.

   ⤴️ Return to reference 4

https://seattlein2025.org/2024/12/13/fantastic-fiction-judith-merrils-approach/

#GardnerDozois #JudithMerril #LesterDelRey #RichHorton

Fantastic Fiction: Judith Merril’s Approach: Good ideas can persist in science fiction for generations. Take, for example, Judith Merril’s approach to anthologies of the best science fiction, which has inspired at least one modern descendant, anthologies by Rich Horton, and may have inspired two other anthology series as well, those by Lester del Rey and Gardner Dozo… (#GardnerDozois #JudithMerril #LesterDelRey #RichHorton)

Full post: https://seattlein2025.org/2024/12/13/fantastic-fiction-judith-merrils-approach/

“Your April Selection”

Virgil Finlay art for the April-May 1965 Things To Come for the Science Fiction Book Club, advertising The 9th Annual of the Year’s Best SF edited by Judith Merril. #FinlayFriday

#VirgilFinlay #JudithMerril #Illustration #LivingHisBestLife #SFBC #ScienceFiction #SF #SFF @sciencefiction @scifi

c/o Black Gate https://www.blackgate.com/2022/10/16/the-art-of-things-to-come-part-4-1964-1966/

#ask-doctor-hal #axis-of-awesome #corydoctorow #darusha-wehm #drew-friedman #eating-the-fantastic-podcast #ellijay-makerspace #fediverse #judith-merril #mastodon #podcast #scott-edelman

https://evilgeniuschronicles.org/b/2yo

In this episode, I play a song by the Axis of Awesome;
my random choice of mastodon.lol had consequences; I sympathize with having one Really Bad Day on your project; trans people just want to live their boring lives; I marched with the trans group in Myrtle Beach on MLK weekend; I am now in the orbit of the Ellijay Makerspace; Darusha Wehm and Andrew Roach sent the lifeboat to me; what if I had multiple personas for Mastodon?; I have a shitload of Fediverse accounts; makerspace silk-screening opens up a lot of possibilities; Cory Doctorow and Scott Edelman discussing Judith Merrill made me think about the one spark plug in a scene; I enjoyed Maverix and Lunatix; I missed a window in buying underground comics; I like scrappy Democrats; don’t criticize people by throwing rural people under bus.

Here is the direct MP3 download for the Evil Genius Chronicles podcast, February 17 2023.

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And here are the titans of science fiction in this video: #robertheinlein #isaacasimov #octaviabutler #harlanellison #samueldelany #ursulaleguin #raybradbury #hugogernsback #arthurcclarke #judithmerril #julesverne #annemccaffrey #philipkdick #hgwells #maryshelley https://youtu.be/Z6_CfYtn4pA