Gordon Van Gelder
My nickname for this book is “F&SF’s Greatest Hits, Volume 2,” which has prompted several of the contributors to suggest getting Ed Ferman, Kris Rusch, and me to put on sweaters, sit by a fireplace, and read poorly scripted infomercial copy about how we love curling up with old favorites. Then the book’s table of contents scrolls up the screen over moody clips of writers reading their own work while David Bowie’s “Golden Years” plays. (Is there a rendition of that song on the theremin?)
But let us banish all thoughts of infomercials to the nether plane where they belong. What we have here is proof that The Very Best of F&SF, the anthology I assembled five years ago, barely lives up to its title. When you’ve got more than six decades’ worth of material from which to choose, you’re never going to fit all the finest works in one volume. (Or two, for that matter.)
But here in the second volume, I’ve tried to assemble a good representation of the magazine’s whole history, from the “Eureka Years” when Tony, Mick, Phyllis, and Annette established the magazine’s standards, on through the second decade of the twenty-first century, when I’ve done my best to maintain them.
The last five years have not been an era of big changes. We’ve switched from a monthly publishing schedule to bi-monthly and electronic publishing is a bigger part of our endeavor, but by and large, F&SF continues to do what it has done since 1949: publish the best works of speculative fiction that it can. And every once in a while, we collect the best of the best into a book.
Here’s hoping you enjoy the nightmares, speculations, and flights of fancy assembled here.
—Gordon Van Gelder