Star of Stars

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In 1953 the first volume of Star Science Fiction Stories ap­peared. It was a curious, hybrid publishing format, not quite a magazine and yet not very like the ordinary vari­eties of book. Its plan was simply to find enough of the best science fiction stories that could be had and to print them; and the one editorial rule established was that they must never have been published before.

It is only rules of that sort—mechanical rules, rules which admit of a simple yes-no answer—that can rigor­ously be applied in the selection of science fiction stories. Every other rule begins with a numerous class of exceptions. Science fiction is not stories about the future. Or about space. Or about technology. It is all of these things, and more than them. Science fiction lies in the eye of the beholder. In fact, said the introduction to that first volume of Star, it is a limitless field, as spacious as space itself. Publisher, critic, and a good many readers have a tendency to think of science fiction as one of the "categories" of publishing, in the specific sense of the term, like detective stories and Westerns. But unless you can think of The Big Sky as a Western or Hamlet as a whodunit, you can hardly class in a tight little group so widely variant an assortment of stories as justly fit under the common label of science fiction.

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