The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 2

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“You mean you get paid for reading that stuff?” goes the refrain.

I do. And every time I start a new collection, the idea that reading all those stories could be called work seems absurd and wonderful, even to me. It isn’t till somewhere along in the seventieth magazine, maybe halfway through the full year’s s-f crop, that I even begin to feel I’m earning my pay. But don’t get me wrong. I love anthologizing. . . .

Maybe it’s just that it feels so great when you find a good one—and of course this is even more true when the story is by a new and unknown author.

I was suspicious when I finished Lions, though. Too smooth for a beginner, I thought, and—last time this happened, it turned out to be a pen-name for Algis Budrys. So I wrote cautiously inquiring to the editor of Infinity, who answered, “John Bernard Daley is not John Bernard Daley at all; he is Bernard John Daley, and this is not his first story; it is his second. . . .”

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