The Best of the Best. Ed. Judith Merril (Delacorte, $6.50). Ashes, Ashes. René Barjavel, trans. Damon Knight (Doubleday, $3.95). A Torrent of Faces. James Blish and Norman L. Knight (Doubleday, $4.95)

The Best of the Best is a collection of stories chosen by the editor from her previous anthologies, The Year's Best S-F, from 1955 to 1960. At about the fifth story, the Merrilian bent of these twenty-nine tales becomes clear – they are human, “poignant,” chosen for feeling and not for gimmickry or detachable ideas. The hard sciences are conspicuously absent. So is philosophy, despite the editor's introduction. At best this leads to stories like J. G. Ballard's “Prima Belladonna,” the first of his Vermilion Sands stories I ever read. Is it the first ever published? When it appeared in the second annual Best anthology this story seemed cryptic, but it vindicates Miss Merril's judgment retrospectively. It's not only full-bodied and perfectly clear; it's probably one of the earliest future-society-taken-forgranted- instead-of-explained stories and it still manages to look futuristic and fresh. Human feeling and literary finish were also good guides in selecting the star of the collection, Gummitch the superkitten (!), who returns in “Space-Time for Springers” by Fritz Leiber. The less I say about this story the less I will slobber over the page and make a nut of myself. There are also two by Carol Emshwiller, Avram Davidson's “Golem,” and an early (?) Cordwainer Smith (“No, No. Not Rogov!”) which is only half mad, and Damon Knight's “Stranger Station.” These are all first-rate stories and so are many of the others. But.

The editor's taste for “the human factor” – or a retrospective interest in New Thing writers like Ballard and Emshwiller – or perhaps a reaction against too much hardware in the field (both now and back then) – has made The Best of the Best a surprisingly monotonous book. The stories are good, but the tone is somehow the same all through. In her introduction the editor notes that science fiction is “a field which degenerates … readily into mere adventure story.” In avoiding “mere adventure story,” Miss Merril sometimes chooses stories that degenerate into mere somethingelse. Walter Miller's “Hoofer,” for example, need not have been done as s-f at all.