The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus [antikvár]

Introduction Many impressive scenes and confrontations swim before our eyes on reading these thu:ty-six stories. Perhaps the most frightening, the most telling, and the most typical comes in the story by Walter Miller, in which one Captain John Sawyer is trapped in a cavern on the moon's surface by a computerized super-tank trying to . destroy him. 'I made you!' Sawyer cries - to absolutely no avail. But he knows that the last thing he can expect is mercy; he programmed the super-tank himself. I say that such a confrontation is typical because the most powerful and compelling theme in science fiction is the fate which overcomes man when he attempts to outdo nature, when he is faced with menaces of his own making. Throughout the genre since its beginning, nemesis has clobbered hubris. The relevance of such a theme to our times - where progress and pollution, medical advance and over-population, technological developments and missile escalation, improved communications and terrorism, seem inescapably linked - hardly needs stating. It is a theme which lends strength to the sheer ingenuity of sf, sinews to mere fancy. Of course, the theme of fate overtaking brave heroes, and of those heroes fighting back and either conquering or being conquered, is one of the age-old staples of story. The specific form it takes in sf, of man being confronted by and either conquering or being conquered by his own creations, has therefore a two-fold power: its antiquity and its modernity. Much of sf's tremendous