The Fourth Galaxy Reader [antikvár]

> In This CornerJust recently the wife of a U.S. diplomat called, said her husband was to meet with an Iron Curtain oflBcial known to have a fondness for "space" fiction, and what could I suggest as a poHtic gift of books?PohticIPolitical is the word.Like all overlords before them, the Communist chiefs consider everything to be political; the differences between democracy and autocracy are immense, but this is the biggest, the multi-trap-doored labyrinthine arena in which democracy continually finds itself emerging unaware, to be thwacked humiliatingly before the laughing worldsimply for want of knowing that everything is political, or can be made so if that's how one operates, and that this is how autocracy does operate because it must.Brink of war and Olympic games, steel-production figures and Nobel prize winners, U.N. debates and ballet for export, alphabet-bomb bans and world fairs, Arab nationalism and music contests . . .And, of course, science fiction. Why not? It falls into the everything classification.Not long ago, newspapers picked up a Moscow story in which Russian writers of science fiction were ordered, as the headlines something less than accurately stated, to "Think, Danan You!" (We in American science fiction would say extrapolate, which is the process of taking a known fact or theory of today and carrying it just as far as imaginative logic can take it, only we don't have to curse or command om writers into doing so.) When Russian poHtniks make a political statement on something, how else should we regardix