（外文电子版资料）Afterward- This Year in SF 1966.docVIP

AFTERWORD THE YEAR IN SF (1966) I believe that SF attracts the more imaginative, inquiring child, the type who can make a success in the scientific field. God knows we need that type. Dr. JULES T. SIMON, U. S. Atomic Energy Commission It was definitely the year of the book in 1966. One speciality book dealer, the F. and S.F. Book Co., informed us that he had to work overtime to fill his orders and that he looked forward to an even better year ahead. There were approximately 319 science fiction books published during this twelve-month period; of this number, seventy-three were hardbound and 241 were paperback books. Doubleday and Company led the hardbound publishers with twenty-six books, and Ace Books topped the other paperback houses with seventy-two titles. These figures are not entirely accurate; as soon as you look at them closely they begin to shimmer and change. Though the publishers were co-operation itself, it proved immensely difficult to track down all of the publishers. Many of the titles, once discovered, proved to be in that shadowy borderland of but is it science fiction? Should we include the Doc Savage books from Bantameven though the editors of Bantam themselves do not consider the bronze mans heroic exploits to be SF? And what about that mysterious paperback firm of Corinth who published 48 titles in 1966 that they dredged up from the old pulps, names to bring a tear to the middle-aged eye: Phantom Detective, Operator No. 5, Dusty Ayres? Are they SF? In the light of this, we present the above figures as being about asscience-fictional as the works under discqssion and, in essence, a partly personal conclusion. So much for quantitywhat about quality? Here we are on firmer ground and, in two mens opinions, the books seemed far superior to the short stories, an observation which we shall examine in some detail in a moment. Perhaps one reason for the superiority of the novel is the remarkable vitality of well-liked works of SF. Some of these bo