For a while in the middle 1960s, I was unfaithful to SF. I was reading crime fiction almost exclusively when I wasn't reading the zillions of books required in my grad school classes. I was sharing an office with three other grad students, all women, and the boyfriend of one of them was an SF reader. He left a copy of this book in the office one day, and I picked it up. I immediately recognized every name of the cover, so I opened it up and checked out the table of contents, which I've put down below. I recognized even more names, but a few of them were unfamiliar. The boy friend wasn't around, and neither was anyone else at the moment. So I took the book home with me and started reading the stories. It didn't take me long to realize that I'd been missing some entertaining stuff, so when I took the book back, I asked the guy if he had any others in the series. He had two, the 1965 and 1967 volumes, which he brought to the office for me. I found some more unfamiliar names, and by this time I was hitting the used bookstores picking up novels by both the familiar and unfamiliar folks. Since then, while I've read mostly crime fiction, I've never turned my back on SF again.
The biggest surprise in the book was the Ellison story. I started reading his work with the appearance of his first story in, I believe, Infinity, and I really liked it. This one, however, wasn't like anything of his I'd read before. Something had changed, and it wasn't just Ellison, though I didn't know that until later.
I picked up all the rest of the Year's Best in this series as they appeared, and others, as well. I'm sure that no anthology manages to be filled with only the best, and there are a couple of clunkers in this one, but I owe it a big debt since it got me back into SF in a big way.
ToC:
"Introduction" (Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr)
"Sunjammer" (Arthur C. Clarke)
"Calling Dr. Clockwork" (Ron Goulart)
"Becalmed in Hell" (Larry Niven)
"Apartness" (Vernor Vinge)
"Over the River and Through the Woods" (Clifford D. Simak)
"Planet of Forgetting" (James H. Schmitz)
"'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" (Harlan Ellison)
"The Decision Makers" (Joseph L. Green)
"Traveler's Rest" (David I. Masson)
"Uncollected Works" (Lin Carter)
"Vanishing Point" (Jonathan Brand)
"In Our Block" (R. A. Lafferty)
"Masque of the Red Shift" (Fred Saberhagen)
"The Captive Djinn" (Christopher Anvil)
"The Good New Days" (Fritz Leiber)
