INTRODUCTION

 

From the inception of science fiction in the pages of Amazing Stories in 1926, until the advent of the International Fantasy Award in 1951—a quarter century later—there were no awards offered for sf writing (or writers). But the IFA sputtered out quickly, to be replaced in 1953 by the Hugo Award (named for Amazing’s founder Hugo Gernsback, and awarded yearly by members of the World Science Fiction Convention). Then in 1966, after much contentious discussion, the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America began awarding its professional accolade, the Nebula Award. And the rush was on.

Today that first singular 1951 science fiction award has grown at an almost exponential rate until over the years, according to the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, more than 50 different awards for excellence in science fiction have been created and given—although, like the International Fantasy Awards, several have come and gone over the years and the total of active awards is somewhat lower. Among the most distinguished still being presented today are:

 

The Nebula Award

The British Fantasy Award

The Ray Bradbury Award for Outstanding Dramatic Presentation

The British Science Fiction Award

The John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer

The Ditmar Award for Best Australian Science Fiction

The Jack Gaughan Award for Best Emerging Artist

The Locus Poll Award

The Nommo Award for Best African Speculative Fiction

The Andre Norton Award for Best Young Adult Science Fiction and Fantasy

The Sidewise Award for Alternate History

The Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire

The Bram Stoker Award for Best Horror

The Sunburst Award for Excellence in Canadian Science Fiction

The World Fantasy Award

 

And these awards are important. Having a publisher blazon a science fiction book or author bio with its status as winner or nominee of a “Best of” award brings increased sales and boosts the writer’s career, and the sales of their work. Richard Curtis, one of New York’s savviest literary agents, has written that having “Nebula Award” on the cover, even as a nominee, is a “powerful inducement” to science fiction fans to buy a book, and “demonstrably” increased sales for a novel. Spider Robinson, himself a multi-award winning science fiction writer, has publicly stated that publishers “pay careful attention” to who wins a Nebula Award.

The stories in this anthology, all award nominees or winners, demonstrate just how outstanding a story has to be to qualify for consideration for a major science fiction award.

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says all Rog Phillips’ other stories are “eclipsed by his psychological thriller, the lesser known but equally brilliant ‘Rat in the Skull’, which received a well-deserved Hugo Award nomination.”

Almost every science fiction author worth their salt has, at one time or another, written about extra-sensory perception and H. L. Gold does it too in “Inside Man”, but unlike his colleagues, he dreams up brand-new wrinkles on ESP no one else, including you, has ever thought of. The special quality of this work was endorsed by his colleagues when “Inside Man” was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Short Story.

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction praises Leigh Brackett’s early space operas, of which “The Stellar Legion” is one, for “their colour, their narrative speed, the brooding forthrightness of their protagonists” and the “economy and vigour” of her style, so it is hardly surprising that one of them (so far) earned a Retro Hugo Award nomination.

“Scanners Live in Vain” first brought Cordwainer Smith to the attention of science fiction readers, and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction terms it “one of the finest of his tales” filled with “foreboding intensity,” plunging “in medias res into the Instrumentality of Man Universe, generating a sense that much remains untold beyond the dark edges of the tale”. It, too, earned a Retro Hugo nomination.

Evelyn Martin’s Reluctant Eve, winner of the Jules Verne Prize for Most Outstanding Achievement in the Science Fiction Field for 1956, was the first science fiction romance, published at least three decades before the genre became popular, and is still an enthralling read today.

Another landmark “first of” science fiction tale, Don Wilcox's “The Voyage that Lasted 600 Years” (1940) was the first generation starship story, and the first to incorporate the breakthrough notion of Earth developing faster-than-light ships that beat the generation ship to its destination—a worthy recipient of its Retro Hugo nomination.

Here are six of science fiction’s best, but often overlooked, short novels and novelettes, each voted as one of the top stories of its year. And, we believe, a top story of any year. Wherever you are on the spectrum of science fiction knowledge or fandom, you’ll find hours of enthralling reading (and re-reading): forgotten favorites for long-time science fiction fans, and an introductory grand tour for those new to the genre.

 

RAT IN THE SKULL

Rog Phillips

(Hugo Nominee 1959)

 

 

 

I.

 

DR. JOSEPH MacNare was not the sort of person one would expect him to be in the light of what happened. Indeed, it is safe to say that until the summer of 1955 he was more "normal," better adjusted, than the average college professor. And we have every reason to believe that he remained so, in spite of having stepped out of his chosen field.

At the age of thirty-four, he had to his credit a college textbook on advanced calculus, an introductory physics, and seventy-two papers that had appeared in various journals, copies of which were in neat order in a special section of the bookcase in his office at the university, and duplicate copies of which were in equally neat order in his office at home. None of these were in the field of psychology, the field in which he was shortly to become famous – or infamous. But anyone who studies the published writings of Dr. MacNare must inevitably conclude that he was a competent, responsible scientist, and a firm believer in institutional research, research by teams, rather than in private research and go-it-alone secrecy, the course he eventually followed.

In fact, there is every reason to believe he followed this course with the greatest of reluctance, aware of its pitfalls, and that he took every precaution that was humanly possible.

Certainly, on that day in late August, 1955, at the little cabin on the Russian River, a hundred miles upstate from the university, when Dr. MacNare completed his paper on An Experimental Approach to the Psychological Phenomena of Verification, he had no slightest thought of "going it alone."

It was mid-afternoon. His wife, Alice, was dozing on the small dock that stretched out into the water, her slim figure tanned a smooth brown that was just a shade lighter than her hair. Their eight-year-old son, Paul, was fifty yards upstream playing with some other boys, their shouts the only sound except for the whisper of rushing water and the sound of wind in the trees.

Dr. MacNare, in swim trunks, his lean muscular body hardly tanned at all, emerged from the cabin and came out on the dock.

"Wake up, Alice," he said, nudging her with his foot. "You have a husband again."

"Well, it's about time" Alice said, turning over on her back and looking up at him, smiling in answer to his happy grin.

He stepped over her and went out on the diving board, leaping up and down on it, higher and higher each time, in smooth coordination, then went into a one and a half gainer, his body cutting into the water with a minimum of splash.

His head broke the surface. He looked up at his wife, and laughed in the sheer pleasure of being alive. A few swift strokes brought him to the foot of the ladder. He climbed, dripping water, to the dock, then sat down by his wife.

"Yep, it's done," he said. "How many days of our vacation left? Two? That's time enough for me to get a little tan. Might as well make the most of it. I'm going to be working harder this winter than I ever did in my life."

"But I thought you said your paper was done!"

"It is. But that's only the beginning. Instead of sending it in for publication, I'm going to submit it to the directors, with a request for facilities and personnel to conduct a line of research based on pages twenty-seven to thirty-two of the paper."

"And you think they'll grant your request?"

"There's no question about it," Dr. MacNare said, smiling confidently. "It's the most important line of research ever opened up to experimental psychology. They'll be forced to grant my request. It will put the university on the map!"

Alice laughed, and sat up and kissed him.

"Maybe they won't agree with you," she said. "Is it all right for me to read the paper?"

"I wish you would," he said. "Where's that son of mine? Upstream?" He leaped to his feet and went to the diving board again.

"Better walk along the bank, Joe. The stream is too swift."

"Nonsense!" Dr. MacNare said.

He made a long shallow dive, then began swimming in a powerful crawl that took him upstream slowly. Alice stood on the dock watching him until he was lost to sight around the bend, then went into the cabin. The completed paper lay beside the typewriter.

 

 

 

II.

 

Alice had her doubts. "I'm not so sure the board will approve of this," she said. Dr. MacNare, somewhat exasperated, said, "What makes you think that? Pavlov experimented with his dog, physiological experiments with rats, rabbits, and other animals go on all the time. There's nothing cruel about it."

"Just the same," Alice said. So Dr. MacNare cautiously resisted the impulse to talk about his paper with his fellow professors and his most intelligent students. Instead, he merely turned his paper in to the board at the earliest opportunity and kept silent, waiting for their decision.

He hadn't long to wait. On the last Friday of September he received a note requesting his presence in the boardroom at three o'clock on Monday. He rushed home after his last class and told Alice about it.

"Let's hope their decision is favorable," she said.

"It has to be," Dr. MacNare answered with conviction.

He spent the weekend making plans. "They'll probably assign me a machinist and a couple of electronics experts from the hill," he told Alice. "I can use graduate students for work with the animals. I hope they give me Dr. Munitz; from Psych as a consultant, because I like him much better than Veerhof. By early spring we should have things rolling."

Monday at three o'clock on the dot, Dr. MacNare knocked on the door of the boardroom, and entered. He was not unfamiliar with it, nor with the faces around the massive walnut conference table. Always before he had known what to expect—a brief commendation for the revisions in his textbook on calculus for its fifth printing, a nice speech from the president about his good work as a prelude to a salary raise—quiet, expected things. Nothing unanticipated had ever happened here.

Now, as he entered, he sensed a difference. All eyes were fixed on him, but not with admiration or friendliness. They were fixed more in the manner of a restaurateur watching the approach of a cockroach along the surface of the counter.

Suddenly the room seemed hot and stuffy. The confidence in Dr. MacNare's expression evaporated. He glanced back toward the door as though wishing to escape.

"So it's you!" the president said, setting the tone of what followed.

"This is yours?" the president added, picking up the neatly typed manuscript, glancing at it, and dropping it back on the table as though it were something unclean.

Dr. MacNare nodded, and cleared his throat nervously to say yes, but didn't get the chance.

"We—all of us—are amazed and shocked," the president said. "Of course, we understand that psychology is not your field, and you probably were thinking only from the mathematical viewpoint. We are agreed on that. What you propose, though..." He shook his head slowly. "It's not only out of the question, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to request that you forget the whole thing—put this paper where no one can see it, preferably destroy it. I'm sorry, Dr. MacNare, but the university simply cannot afford to be associated with such a thing even remotely. I'll put it bluntly because I feel strongly about it, as do the other members of the Board. If this paper is published or in any way comes to light, we will be forced to request your resignation from the faculty."

"But why?" Dr. MacNare asked in complete bewilderment.

"Why?" another board member exploded, slapping the table. "It's the most inhuman thing I ever heard of, strapping a newborn animal onto some kind of frame and tying its legs to control levers, with the intention of never letting it free. The most fiendish and inhuman torture imaginable! If you didn't have such an outstanding record I would be for demanding your resignation at once."

"But that's not true!" Dr. MacNare said. "It's not torture! Not in any way! Didn't you read the paper? Didn't you understand that—"

"I read it," the man said. "We all read it. Every word."

"Then you should have understood—" Dr. MacNare said.

"We read it," the man repeated, "and we discussed some aspects of it with Dr. Veerhof without bringing your paper into it, nor your name."

"Oh," Dr. MacNare said. "Veerhof..."

"He says experiments, very careful experiments, have already been conducted along the lines of getting an animal to understand a symbol system and it can't be done. The nerve paths aren't there. Your line of research, besides being inhumanly cruel, would accomplish nothing."

"Oh," Dr. MacNare said, his eyes flashing. "So you know all about the results of an experiment in an untried field without performing the experiments!"

"According to Dr. Veerhof that field is not untried but rather well explored," the board member said. "Giving an animal the means to make vocal sounds would not enable it to form a symbol system."

"I disagree," Dr. MacNare said, seething. "My studies indicate clearly—"

"I think," the president said with a firmness that demanded the floor, "your position has been made very clear, Dr. MacNare., The matter is now closed. Permanently. I hope you will have the good sense, if I may use such a strong term, to forget the whole thing. For the good of your career and your very nice wife and son. That is all." He held the manuscript toward Dr. MacNare.