The Best of Science Fiction 12

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We do not know who discovered water — [a small folder. Picture: orange fish against streaks of green and blue.] — but it was almost certainly not a fish. [And inside:] Anybody's total surround, or environment, creates a condition of nonperception.

It might have been intended as the essential statement on the motives, mode, and modus operandi of science fiction. Actually, it was an advertisement for a firm of industrial consultants, quoting Marshall McLuhan.

... sudden relevance to contemporary thinking. He orbits in the same system as R. D. Laing and McLuhan ...

That one was from a 'mainstream' London review of The Disaster Area, a collection of stories originally published in the s-f magazines of the fifties, and early sixties.

Well, one has one's little snobberies: best-seller philosophy, pop technology, two-culture professors — obviously, McLuhan. But I had just discovered Laing. And Edward Hall, Eduardo Paolozzi, Sagan and Shklovskii, John Barth. And, suddenly, Sgt. Pepper!

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