The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

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Science, they keep telling us. Is “catching up” with science fiction. This is happily (at long last) true—precisely as it must be true that on any new frontier (space, surface, political, or academic) surveyors will replace the early scouts, and settlers may tread heavily on the surveyors’ heels.

This succession is, indeed, the only sure way to determine the validity of the new frontier. And the more swift and certain the waves of succession, the better it speaks for the work of the scouts—and for the alertness and adventurous spirit of man’s society. The rhythm of progress has a fixed pattern, but its tempo is variable in the extreme. Not all frontiers are still new when they are explored.

It was almost 2,000 years from the speculations of Aristarchus of Santos to the mathematically verifiable hypotheses of Johannes Kepler; three hundred more before Goddard and Tsiolkovsky (half the world round from each other) began to apply the principles of physical reaction (first observed in China in Aristarchus’s time, and mathematically formulated by Newton in the century after Kepler) to that men could and would, a scant half century later, build vessels to carry them into space to test, with physical exploration, the “proven” theories of Kepler.

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