Bad Moon Rising. Ed. Thomas Disch (Harper & Row, $6.95). Paradox Lost. Frederic Brown (Random House, $5.95). The Star Road. Gordon Dickson (Doubleday, $5.95). Complex Man. Marie Farca (Doubleday, $5.95)

In the 1950s somebody defined urban renewal as “replacing Negroes with trees,” and I'm beginning to think that in the same way too many typical science fiction horror stories are not the universal dystopias they pretend to be, but rather the unhappy wails of privilege-coming-to-an-end. Take, for example, the usual Overpopulation Story, in which Americans have to live without private ranch houses, or the typical Pollution Story in which far too often the real gripe is that “we” must subsist on soybeans and vegetable starch (as if the vast majority of the human race since the Bronze Age hadn't been doing just that) or the Violence Story which deplores the fact (as someone recently pointed out) that violence is becoming democratized.

As Thomas Disch, editor of Bad Moon Rising, says in his Introduction, science fiction is “a partisan literature” inevitably involved with the didactic because it presents not what exists (about which one can at least pretend to be objective) but what might exist. Like a liberal late Roman Mr. Disch prefaces his collection with the statement that “almost everything is going from bad to worse,” but the collection doesn't think so; it is really on the side of the early Christian radicals and so am I. Keep this in mind as I tell you that I judge Bad Moon to be a splendid book. It is (by the way) not labeled “science fiction,” but a recent article of Samuel Delany's has convinced me that we're fighting a losing battle, not in trying to get public recognition of s.f. (which is possible) but in trying to get the distributors to let us out of our ghetto.