Good science fiction is good fiction.

This assertion is one which must be made again, and over again, until the general reader and the “serious” critic cease to associate science fiction solely with girls in brass brassieres being rescued from the advances of bug-eyed monsters by zap-gun-toting heroes in space armor. There is as much of a spectrum of excellence in science fiction as there is in any other field. Mickey Spillane is not Dorothy Sayers or Ngaio Marsh. Hopalong Cassidy is not Shane or True Grit. And the best of science fiction is quite as good as the best of any literature.

It happens also to be the most explosively popular genre on the current scene. American and English science fiction is widely read in France, Italy, and Scandinavia, increasingly in Spain, Portugal, and Latin America, and is attaining new peaks in Germany and the Netherlands. New writers are appearing in Europe, especially in France and Italy, and the translations are beginning to flow the other way into the English-speaking world. And the rise in printed science fiction is reflected in the increasing number of cinema and television productions in the field.

There are several reasons—and a great many more hypotheses—for this upsurge, but they are not within the purview of these remarks and can be left to the dozens of postgraduate theses being written on the subject and to the teachers of high-school and college courses in science fiction (of which there are, at this writing, over 1,500 in the U.S.A. alone). Suffice it to say that there has never been a field of literature so limitless, so flexible, so able to evoke astonishment and wonder, so free of the boundaries of time and space and that arbitrary fantasy we call reality, as science fiction. Not since the invention of poetry.