What Was “World Science Fiction”?

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What Was “World Science Fiction”?

On Donald Wollheim’s World’s Best SF Anthology Series, 1965–1990

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The Story So Far

This short piece emerges from my attempt to gather data for a project I’m (slowly) working on about Soviet sf’s circulation in the American sf market: who translated and published what, when, and why; who wrote introductions, what did they say, how did they understand the Soviet writers, the USSR, and Soviet sf; and who reviewed it, where, and how did they respond to Soviet sf?. These are the questions my project is about and which I think are important to helping us understand the American sf community’s response to Soviet writers also producing sf, and which frames larger questions about genre and geopolitics during the Cold War.

In preparing the background for this project, I wanted to a clear and poignant example of how US sf publishing engaged (or didn’t) with the global scope of the genre, and it so happened that Donald A. Wollheim spent 26 years (co-)editing and publishing an anthology that promised the “world’s best sf” between 1965 and 1990. The series was co-edited by Wollheim and Terry Carr between 1965 and 1971 for Ace Books under the title World’s Best Science Fiction, and then by Wollheim and Arthur W. Saha between 1972 and 1990 for DAW Books under the title Annual World’s Best SF. For the purposes of this piece, I call the anthology series World’s Best SF and refer to it largely as the product of Wollheim, largely because this choice represents Wollheim’s sustained influence as the anthology moved from Ace to DAW, since it ended with his death in 1990, and since Wollheim is credited with writing most of the introductions to each volume.

If you’re not familiar with sf publishing in this period (1965–1990), DAW Books stood for Donald A. Wollheim Books (Wollheim was the co-founder and publisher alongside wife Elsie B. Wollheim) and was founded in 1971 as a mass-market paperback publisher of largely original sff novels and the occasional story collection. DAW Books’s output was incredible and featured work by authors who were often progressive, even feminist and leftist (unsurprisingly, Wollheim was a member of the Futurians in the late 1930s), and DAW remained a major independent publisher of sff at the height of publishing’s conglomeration (this is my attempt to get you to read Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction, about the publishing industry’s conglomeration and its affect on literature in this same period); it was only in 2022 that Betsy Wollheim, Donald’s daughter and long-time editor/publisher after him and Elsie, sold the company to Astra Publishing, another indie publisher.

A quick glance at a few volumes convinced me that the 26 volumes published between 1965 and 1990 (exactly the period covered by my Soviet sf project) had presented readers with little diversity beyond the US, UK, and occasionally Canada or Australia, though I did see some interesting names in the early volumes that pointed to engagement with Czech, Dutch, and Russian sf. But I needed actual numbers to understand the full extent (or not) of World’s Best SF‘s engagement with non-American and more importantly non-Anglophone sf. And so to make the point stick, to understand just how stratified (or not) was the global representation of “world sf” in these anthologies, and to see if anything else interesting emerged (such as Soviet authors I was unfamiliar with), I needed to comb through every volume, collect data on every author republished, and look into the original language of publication of each story.

What started as the need to back up a small but important point in a developing project turned into about 10 hours of collecting, double-checking, and organizing data, which ultimately resulted in the somewhat disappointing but very clear-cut table of information below. I say disappointing because I had hoped the data about authors’ nationalities and the languages of their stories’ original publication would prove to be a little more diverse. I expected at least 10% of the stories to have initially been published in languages other than English, and instead found a whopping 1.31% of stories (or 4 out of 305) published in Wollheim’s 26 anthologies first appeared in languages other than English, in either Czech (1), Dutch (2), or Russian (1). This was surprising because the 1970s and 1980s saw the introduction of Polish writer Stanisław Lem and the Russian Soviet writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky to American audiences, and there were a number of short story collections published in the 1960s and 1970s featuring the “best” of Soviet sf, as well as a few anthologies of Japanese and Chinese sf (which one would imagine might have been particularly enticing in the 1980s); not to mention other major writers, like France’ Pierre Boulle, source of Planet of the Apes, were circulating in English during this period. So I was a bit naive and ultimately underwhelmed by my findings; or, to put it another way, I was overwhelmed by the sheer Anglophonicity of World’s Best SF.

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TOTAL UNIQUE AUTHORS	Gender	#/Gender	NAT’LS	#/NAT’LS	STORIES	LANGS	#/LANGS
162	W	26	AUS	2	305	Czech	1
	M	136	BEL	1		Dutch	2
			CA	1		English	301
			CZ	1		Russian	1
			ND	1
			TH	1
			UK	24
			US	130
			USSR	1

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Now that you’ve had a chance to consider this table—and are probably thinking, “wow, you spent 10 hours on that? are you ok, dude?”—I want to explain it, my data collection practices, and the decision making behind them.

Data Collection

The table compiles data on every story that appeared in every World’s Best SF anthology edited by Wollheim and published by Ace then DAW between 1965 and 1990 (the entire lifespan of the series). The data was compiled using the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) and information about authors was cross-referenced against the Science Fiction Encyclopedia (SFE), Wikipedia, and various fan-made sites about lesser-known sf authors.

For transparency’s sake, and in the hopes that someone else might do something with it, the data I collected are available in this spreadsheet, which features the raw data, my breakdowns of that data by yearly and five-yearly increments, my final summary of the data (i.e. Table 1 above), and my key to the nationality abbreviations I use.

For each story that appeared in a World’s Best SF anthology volume, I collected the following data and recorded it in the following ways:

1. the anthology it was published in (i.e. the 1965, 1974, or 1989 anthology)
   • recorded as a year with a hyperlink to the relevant volume on ISFDB
2. the author(s) of the story
   • recorded as a name with a hyperlink to the relevant author on ISFDB
3. the gender(s) of the author(s) of the story
   • recorded as W for woman or M for man
4. the nationality(ies) of the author(s)
   • recorded as a regularized abbreviation for a nation, e.g. BEL for Belgium, CA for Canada, UK for the United Kingdom (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland)
5. the story’s original language
   • recorded as the name of the language, e.g. Czech, Dutch, English

Crucially, though not controversially for my purposes, I saved time by not recording each story’s name (let alone the name as it appeared in the volume in question, which may have different from the original, esp. if translated), since that exact info would not have proved useful to the data analysis I wanted to undertake. One can easily find out any story’s name for a given year by cross-referencing the author’s name with the information available on a given volume’s ISFDB page (of course, in a few cases, an author was published twice in one volume, meaning that some volumes have duplicate rows of info, since each row represents a story not an author; this didn’t affect or confuse any of the points measured in data collection or analysis, especially given that my final measure of author data points was adjusted to measure unique authors, rather than repeating data points for each instance of an author).

My goal from the beginning was to be able to measure how many unique authors published in the World’s Best SF anthologies, what their nationalities were, and what language their stories were initially published in. I added gender as a category of analysis after collecting several volumes’ worth of information because I quickly realized that, given the changing dynamics of gender in sf publishing during this period, measuring women’s representation in these anthologies might prove interesting even if it wasn’t exactly relevant to my main questions: authors’ nationalities and stories’ original languages.

Table 1 therefore measures two kinds of things that give us three different kinds of information about the diversity of the World’s Best SF anthology series: authors (which allows us to measure gender and nationality) and stories (which allows us to measure language of original publication). Interestingly, the data shows that about half of the stories that appeared in the anthologies between 1965 and 1990 were published by an author who had already appeared in the anthology series. That is, 162 unique authors published 305 stories in 26 volumes (10 stories were published by 2 or more authors, and most of those stories were by co-authors who wrote another story, usually as a solo author, that appeared in a different volume; I measured these 10 stories as 10 separate stories, and measured their authors’ data accordingly, making sure to account for when a co-author was also a solo author of another story, so that these authors’ gender and nationality data are not represented more than once).

This table does a thing that is specific to my needs, but the raw data might prove interesting to other scholars of sf during this period. In addition to the raw data and what I call the “totals” (which is exactly what you see in Table 1), I also broke down the data by year (so that you can see how many women or Americans published in a given volume) and by five-year increments (this was a somewhat random choice on my part, but I thought it could be an interesting way to group data in order to potentially see changes over time, i.e. more women in a “period” or more Russian stories in a “period,” though the latter clearly did not pan out…). Analyzing the data this way revealed a few interesting things, namely that women’s representation increased over time (unsurprising) but that it increased precipitously in the 1980s (maybe unsurprising), with some World’s Best SF anthologies achieving near or total parity of genders in the last half of the decade.

I also want to make clear, if it’s not already, that there are some data I did not track, but which might yield interesting results if considered; I explain my thinking about three potential data categories below.

First, in retrospect, I could have tracked the original publication date of each story against its publication in the World’s Best SF anthology, but I’m not sure that would have revealed anything particularly interesting. My familiarity with the data source after hours looking at it, suggests that nearly every story was reprinted the year after it was published, with few exceptions, i.e. the 4 stories that appeared in languages other than English, and even in those cases, they were typically reprinted the year after their English publication appeared. (Vadim Shefner’s story, discussed in more detail below, is an outlier here, since it was first published in Russian in 1963, appeared in English first in 1969, then again in 1973, before finally appearing in the 1974 World’s Best SF volume.) So, while I can’t 100% say, it’s not clear to me that tracking the original publication date of each story would reveal much more than the fact that the anthology editors—with limited time, limited knowledge of languages beyond English, and limited access to all of the sf publications coming out each year across the world—mostly discovered non-Anglophone stories through prior translation in English and publication in Anglophone venues. Perhaps my assumption is wrong and carefully tracked data would have yielded something more interesting; if you’d like to add to the project by crunching that info, let’s talk.

Second, and related to the point I just assumed (hopefully not making an ass out of me), it might also have been worth tracking the original publication venue of each story. This would, for example, have demonstrated if non-American Anglophone authors were being discovered by the World’s Best SF anthology editors because they were appearing in US-based publications; that’s almost certainly the case, given what I gleaned in looking at the data for each volume, but it would need to be proved by careful and explicit tracking of the data. That information, if my assumption holds up, would mostly underline that the editors drew on what was immediate to them: publications easily available in the US and, obviously, in English. However, given that only 4 stories were originally published in a language other than English, there is very little utility to tracking this data for that purpose.

Even so, my thinking about this yielded an interesting example that seems like an exception to my claim about the editors drawing purely on the American sf market: David J. Lake’s story in the 1979 volume, “Creator,” which originally appeared in a 1978 anthology published in Australia and nowhere else. But a careful look at just that data misses the context that Lake was already well-known to Wollheim, since DAW published Lake’s first novel, Walkers on the Sky, in 1976 and three more novels in 1977–1978 before the 1979 World Best SF volume featuring Lake’s story from an Australia-only publication appeared. So, despite the story seemingly existing outside of the American sf field, the author himself was absolutely entangled with US sf publishing (the situation repeated itself with the 1982 volume, where DAW reprinted another Lake story that had only appeared previously in an Australian publication).

My concern about the (f)utility of measuring original publication venue in order to better understand the sources of not-originally-Anglophone stories aside, it would be interesting (not for my project, just generally interesting) to know whether stories in the World’s Best SF anthologies regularly came from the same venues. That data could tell us a lot about the publishing networks in sf of the period, and that data could be fascinating.

Third, I could have tracked whether stories in the World’s Best SF categories were award nominees or winners. I didn’t because it wasn’t relevant to my very immediate concern and would have necessitated a lot more work, but the information would certainly be interesting, would tell us a lot about the pretensions of the series to represent the “best” sf (my concerns, discussed below, about its representation of “world” aside) and again, as with the previous potential data point, would tell us much about American sf’s publishing and, importantly, prestige networks in the 1960s through the 1980s, a period that saw the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and other awards raise in prominence.

Those caveats of what I didn’t measure, and why, now submitted for your review (and maybe you want to take on that work?), I want to acknowledge that compiling data necessitates making tricky and complexity-collapsing decisions about how to put things in boxes in order to measure things more easily. So it’s time for me to explain my choices about how I represented data.

Data Decisions

Names — I represented the best-known version of an author’s name and only clarified if they wrote the story under a pseudonym if that pseudonym was significantly different than the best-known version of the author’s name. For example, I have clarified that Pauline Ashwell published her story as by Paul Ash, but I didn’t clarify that Phyllis MacLennan published her story as by Phyllis MacLennon, since she published most of her worked under “MacLennan” and I felt that the small difference in name wasn’t nearly as crucial to represent as a pseudonym that seems otherwise unconnected to an author’s most commonly used name (or switches the apparent gender of the author; however, I always used James Tiptree, Jr., since Alice Sheldon always published her sf under that name). In short, I tried to use common sense and often followed the common sense decisions made by ISFDB about how to represent the best-known version of an author’s name. It was important to represent each name the same every time, and to avoid using different pseudonyms, in order to record information about unique authors and not accidentally reproduce gender and nationality info.

Gender — This category was, as I mentioned, an afterthought to my original data collection efforts, but quickly became important; given how bleak the rest of the data is, it might now be the most interesting thing about this data set! Because until recently the sf community, and American society at large, didn’t really recognize the diversity of (trans)gender experiences, I chose to only measure gender along a binary axis of women (represented as W) and men (represented as M) based on our best understanding of how an author, at that time, identified and/or how they have retrospectively come to be understood (e.g. Triptree is represented as W, despite not being known as a woman to the entire community until c. 1976). If I was unfamiliar with an author, I cross-referenced information with SFE, Wikipedia, fan sites, and sometimes obituaries. In only two cases was I unable to completely verify the gender of an author with reference to other online info: Jerry Meredith and D. E. Smirl, who co-wrote a story published in the 1987 volume. I recorded them as men, because they have what at the time were considered names for men (Jerry and Dennis); if I am wrong, please correct me.

Nationality — More so than any other category of data, nationality required the most active decision-making. So I want to explain nearly ever instance where I hesitated and why I made the choices I did. I chose nationalities for authors based on the most commonly articulated association of an author with a country, though sometimes deciding on a single nationality to represent an author posed a problem that I ultimately had to make a decision about for the purpose of easy data collection (see below for more about what “easy data collection” in cases like an author’s nationality elides a whole mess of complexities; I was very cognizant of this). If I was unfamiliar with an author, I cross-referenced information with SFE, Wikipedia, fan sites, and sometimes obituaries. Cases that required active decision making:

• Arthur C. Clarke, who I’ve labeled British — he was born in the UK and is considered in every source as a British writer, despite having lived mostly in Sri Lanka from 1956 onward (importantly, Sri Lanka was a British possession until 1948);
• James H. Schmitz, who I’ve labeled American — he was born in the German Empire but moved to the US as a child and wrote in English as an American writer for his entire career;
• Gordon R. Dickson, who I’ve labeled as American — he was born in Canada, moved to the US at 14, and became a published sf writer after two decades living as an adult in the US;
• S.P. Somtow (known as and published under the name Somtow Sucharitkul before the 1990s), who I’ve labeled Thai — he was born in Thailand, raised in England, his first language is English, he moved back to Thailand and learned Thai in late adolescence, and he has published nearly all of his work in English through American publishers, but he retains a strong Thai identity, referring to himself as “Thailand’s Renaissance Man” (to complicate matters, he has dual Thai and US citizenship);
• Michael G. Coney, who I’ve labeled as British — he having spent the first four decades of his life in the UK, and though he lived in Canada (British Columbia) during most of his publishing career, much of his work was first published by UK publishers (and sometimes exclusively in the UK), demonstrating that his key industry connections were British.

These cases should make clear that the choice to ascribe a single nationality as a measurable data point can collapse complexities of personal identity and belonging that easily transgress borders. My national identifiers should not be taken as the singular measure of any author’s identity or how their identity informed their fiction.

Take as further examples the way presentation of national identity as a singular data point collapses other differences that might, at a local level, be highly significant:

• Bob Shaw and James White — Northern Irish writers, so while technically from the UK, they represent complicated positionalities within that state;
• Laurence Yep — a Chinese American man from the US;
• Samuel R. Delany — a Black gay man from the US;
• Craig Strete — a Cherokee man from the US;
• Steven Barnes — a Black man from the US;
• Rand B. Lee — a gay white man from the US;
• Octavia Butler — a Black woman from the US;
• Brenda W. Clough — a Chinese American woman from the US.

While these aspects of identity are absolutely significant and need to be kept in mind, they are not in the scope of my survey. These examples, unsurprisingly, also (including S.P. Somtow but with the exception of Rand B. Lee) represent what I believe is all of the authors of color published in the World’s Best SF anthologies cover a period of 26 years.

By measuring nationality, I was after broad strokes that will allow us to more fully grasp the representation of “world sf”—and just how truly representative of “the world” it was—through these anthologies.

Story’s Original Language — This data category did not take a lot of extra thinking, since it simply measured which language a story was originally published in. Unfortunately, as is now clear, only 4 stories necessitated a data point other than “English” (and even then, two of those stories were published in the same language, meaning there are only 4 data points in this category!) It was relatively easy to check if a story was published in a language other than English, since ISFDB records this information. If more stories had been published in something other than English, I might have had to think more about this category, but alas the data had other ideas.

By laying out the sorts of decisions I had to make based on the kind of data I collected and the sort of information I was interested in analyzing, I hope I can caution anyone against using this data for other purposes without fully considering the data collection strategies I’ve outlined and whether those make sense for your project.

Some Data Conclusions

What started as a single paragraph in another project, and the need to provide some clear and convincing numbers to back up a point about the range of sf beyond the US that American sf audiences could ideally have been familiar with necessitated a larger data collection project just to prove my point. In doing so, the data suggested a larger questionthat was simultaneously central to, and beyond the scope of my project on Soviet sf’s circulation in the American mass cultural genre system during the 1960s–1980s. That question is: what was “world sf” to American sf readers in the Cold War period? How did Soviet sf fit in to this larger, supposedly global or international perception of sf? In other words, what did American readers know about the global shape of the genre beyond the US and especially beyond the Anglophone sphere of influence? 

These questions imagine an ideal reader who read all of these anthologies and tracked them meticulously. But these projects (this immediate piece and my project-in-progress) aren’t really about individual readers and what they might (or might not) have known. Rather, what I’m really after is a sense of the institutional and market history of “world sf” in the US, which means understanding in retrospect what the ideal reader (of all of American sf) had access to. This means paying attention to anthologies, publishing series, the work of editors, publishers, awards (and awardees), reviews (and reviewers and review venues), and so on. In other words, bringing into focus all of the people, institutions, forces, and apparatuses that constitute the field of American sf.

This data collection project and short analysis of that data, of course, don’t accomplish all of that—and only a small part of that is what I am setting out to do in my project on Soviet sf—but the present piece brings into focus a major anthology series that circulated during the Cold War and which attempted to cultivate an idea of “world sf,” at least in name (more below). What should be clear is that I’m not assuming there was any actual, perceivable “world sf” that any one person or institution could have possibly brought into view. World sf was (and is still) a totality of all generic productions that could be labeled sf, taking into account that not everyone agrees about what sf is, when it started, and so on—in short, actually existing world sf is a sort of Schrödinger’s cat that both exists (I just defined it) and doesn’t (I’ve questioned how one could define it). Rather, “world sf” is a proposition by writers, editors, publishers, critics, and scholars about the scope of sf insofar as they make it knowable, as “world sf,” to audiences (which includes other writers, editors, publishers, critics, and scholars).

The minor point I sought to make with this data collection project ended up being a more disappointing point than I even imagined. I truly expected a greater range of nationalities represented among the authors and languages represented among the publications. But all of the data leans heavily toward a conclusion that “world sf,” at least as understood by the American sf community and its institutions insofar as Wollheim’s popular World’s Best SF is representative, was essentially what was already circulating in English and in the American sf publishing field.

To be fair to, the first volume of World’s Best SF was something of a tease, showcasing authors from Australia, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US and stories originally published in Czech, Dutch, and English. Not the greatest diversity, but impressive nonetheless for the first publication of a series that, I assumed, would continue to present at least this much national and linguistic diversity, but which in reality only got more American and British, and more Anglophone, over the years (though it did slowly increase its representation of women authors).

Wollheim’s first volume suggested a vision of sf as a field of literary production that could produce “best of” volumes that were not just the stories nominated for largely Anglophone awards like the Hugo and Nebula, and which articulated sf as a genre and perhaps a political project—of crafting and imagining human futures in the midst of the Cold War—that was global, international, and multilingual in scope. This is clear in his naming of the volume and in the first volume’s, albeit meager, attempt to gather authors from across the world and from across linguistic boundaries. Given Wollheim’s background with the Futurians and his generally progressive leaning, I had good reason to hope.

But after the first volume, it was another 7 years before a World’s Best SF volume included another story first published in a language other than English—a story originally published in Dutch by the Belgian author Eddy C. Bertin, which appeared in the 1972 volume (the first in the series published by DAW). And the first author from outside of the Euro-American West to appear in the World’s Best SF anthologies (after the first volume’s inclusion of Czechoslovakian writer Josef Nesvadba) was Vadim Shefner, a Russian Soviet poet whose story “A Modest Genius” appeared in the tenth volume, published in 1974. It was republished from a translation in an anthology of Russian sf stories published by NYU Press in 1969 and then republished in an anthology of European sf edited by the Austrian Franz Rottensteiner for Seabury Press in 1973. Importantly, Shefner’s story was the last story published in the World’s Best SF anthologies that originally appeared in a language other than English. To make absolutely clear, after 1974—for the remaining 16 years—not a single story appear in any volume that wasn’t originally published in English. Only S.P. Somtow (then known as Somtow Sucharitkul) represented an author (nominally) outside of the Euro-American West for the remainder of the series’s history, and even he was a purely Anglophone author who grew up in the UK and held US citizenship.

Perhaps that first volume in 1965 was Wollheim’s initial vision for an annual World’s Best SF anthology, and perhaps the reality was that as he became increasingly busy at Ace and, within 5 years, founded his own publisher, DAW Books, he was unable to devote as much attention to seeking out the best short-form sf from across the world, relying increasingly on US magazines publishing the occasional non-US author or Anglophone anthologies translating sf from Europe. One wonders, then, what Terry Carr and then Arthur W. Saha were doing as co-editors, though perhaps they too were equally busy with other matters. More and more the anthologies also came to recycle the same names, so that UK, or Australian, or Thai representation meant, really, the same small stable of authors who were already familiar to Wollheim.

Given the national and linguistic makeup of the anthologies after 1974, such that World’s Best SF became just another anthology of the best sf the American field had to offer, a German publisher began translating the anthologies into German starting in 1989 under the title Die besten Stories der amerikanischen Science Fiction or The Best American SF Stories (lit. The Best Stories of American Science Fiction).

It became very clear to me by the time I was gathering data for 1980 that the anthology series had lost all pretensions to representing “world sf” or, in the worst reading, had become too lazy to imagine that anything better existed outside of the Anglophone sf world. Of course, this can’t really be true, since Wollheim was obviously aware of writers like the Strugatskys, Lem, and many others whose novels were appearing in English with Ace, Avon, Macmillan, Bantam, Gollancz, and more—I say obviously, because Wollheim in fact published several Strugatsky novels and, within the first five years of founding DAW Books, he published translated novels by the Strugaskys as well as by French writers Pierre Barbet, Gérard Klein, and C.I. Defontenay; Austrian writer Herbert W. Franke; Belgian writer Paul van Herck; and Swedish author Sam J. Lundwall (and I might have missed others!).

Perhaps the answer is, at least with regard to the short fiction appearing in the World’s Best SF volumes that in the mid-1970s, facing an expanding talent market in the US and with a greater network of authors whose copyright was more easily available in his new capacity as publisher of DAW, Wollheim simply felt it would be better, more financially advantageous, and legally simpler to focus on reprinting excellent, often award-nominated Anglophone sf content. In short, Wollheim’s World’s Best SF anthology became a go-to “best of the year” anthology, and the “world” of the title transformed from a claim to familiarity with the global scope of sf and into a claim to the anthology’s status as offering the best in the world (while also, not coincidentally, being relatively simple and uncomplicated to put together).

I wanted to acknowledge, though, that I’m making some assumptions that my data alone can’t confirm; I make these assumptions based on both the data and my familiarity with the history of sf and sf publishing in this period. A more accurate reading of “what happened” to the World’s Best SF series, what it intended, how that changes over time, and how Wollheim imagined the claim of representing “World sf” in the anthologies, could perhaps be gathered by reading all of his introductions to the 26 volumes in the series. Who knows, maybe he actually tells us, but since this was just a data-gathering mission to make a small point about the rhetoric of “world sf” in the American mass cultural genre system as background data for a different project, I’m OK letting others (or maybe myself in the future) find all those volumes and get to the bottom of this.

In the meantime, I’ll just say I wish Wollheim had done better and stuck to the “world sf” concept; but, in not doing so, he ceded ground to other publishers and editors to do that work, especially with regard to Soviet sf. And to find out more about that, you’ll have to wait until I write my piece on Soviet sf’s circulation in the American sf field.