Scifi Films.pdf

The Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series Produced by James Gunn for the Extramural Study Center of the University of Kansas’ Division of Continuing Education

DVD produced by Eric Solstein and Digital Media Zone

Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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Table of Contents

Creating the Literature of Science Fiction Film Series _________________________ 3 Technical Notes on The Films_____________________________________________ 6 Science Fiction Films: A Lecture By Forrest J. Ackerman _____________________ 8 Plot In Science Fiction: A Lecture By Poul Anderson ________________________ 17 The History Of Science Fiction After 1938: A Lecture By Isaac Asimov _________ 28 Science Fiction And The Mainstream: A Lecture By John Brunner _____________ 36 Theme In Science Fiction: A Discussion Between Gordon Dickson & James Gunn _______________________________________________________ 42 New Directions In Science Fiction: A Seminar With Harlan Ellison ____________ 55 The Early History Of Science Fiction: A Lecture By Damon Knight ____________ 64 The Ideas In Science Fiction: A Lecture By Frederik Pohl ____________________ 73 An Interview With Clifford Simak: A Career In Science Fiction________________ 84 The Early Days Of The SF Magazines: An Interview With Jack Williamson ______ 84


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Creating the Literature of Science Fiction Film Series

Creating the Literature of Science Fiction Film Series by James Gunn

The idea of filming the people who had helped shape science fiction originated at the 1969 World Science Fiction Convention in St. Louis. Gordon Dickson was the president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and he was trying to persuade me to run as his successor (I later succumbed). One of the matters we talked about was what we could do to promote science fiction. We came up with ideas for a speakers bureau and a review column and news releases (I was still in charge of the University of Kansas public relations, and full of information about how such things worked). Then I mentioned the possibility of a film series that might be used in public gatherings and college classrooms. The series would never have gotten off the drawing board had it not been for the contributions of many people. Alex Lazzarino was the key figure. He was the director of a division of the University’s Continuing Education program that was called “The Extramural Independent Study Center”; he saw the potential of the series and agreed to fund it. Prof. Peter Dart, a faculty member in the School of Journalism, directed the first few films and Bob Gardner, a cameraman for the University’s Children’s Research Center, did the filming; later directing and camera work was done by personnel at the EISC. Mostly the credit goes to the science-fiction people who agreed to participate. I went to New York in the fall of 1969 for SFWA’s editorpublisher reception and asked people if they would participate. Isaac Asimov said “of course,” and so did Fred Pohl and many others. We made the first films on the West Coast. We took our crew to the Nebula Awards held that year in Oakland, California, and filmed Poul Anderson talking about “Plot,” then went down the coast to Los Angeles to film Forry Ackerman who had turned his home into a science-fiction library/museum. That year I had agreed to help teach a class in science fiction that my son and a friend had organized, and I used the class to film Harlan Ellison, who was on campus to give a lecture. He talked about “New Directions,” now thirty years in the past. In 1971 we took a crew to New York and filmed “Lunch with John Campbell” (and discovered, when the camera we rented in New York didn’t Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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work, the virtues of “cinema verité”) arranged by Harry Harrison. Campbell didn’t want to discuss the recent history of science fiction (he had been too busy editing a magazine, he said) and we filmed Isaac Asimov describing science fiction from 1938 to the “present” (as science-fiction writers, we should have had more sensitivity to the passage of time). We also tried to film Damon Knight on the street across from the United Nations building (guards wouldn’t let us film on the grounds) and later discovered that street noise obscured his voice; we brought Damon to Lawrence to film the “Early History of SF” in Alex Lazzarino’s home. Then we went up to Boston for the World Science Fiction Convention called Noreascon and filmed John Brunner talking about “Science Fiction and the Mainstream” and an interview with the WorldCon guest of honor, Clifford Simak, and got some WorldCon atmosphere. One student in my three-week Intensive English Institute on the Teaching of Science Fiction, Barbara O’Dell, was a film major at San Diego State University, and as her class project organized all the class members to produce an interview with Theodore Sturgeon. Some (Fred Pohl, Jack Williamson, Gordon Dickson) we filmed in a studio in the EISC building. So it went. I made plans to produce 18 or so of the films and use them as part of a course in science fiction that could be offered to high schools and colleges. But Alex got hired by the Menninger Clinic in Topeka to become a fund raiser and project manager, the Extramural Independent Study Center slowly got re-absorbed into Continuing Education and funding disappeared. I had plans to add some films about other key figures—Robert A. Heinlein, for instance, and Ray Bradbury, and a number of others—but we never were able to complete arrangements. The series got shown, in part, at the Los Angeles World Science Fiction Convention of 1972, and at a Science Fiction Research Association meeting or two. I used all of them in my large science-fiction classes. Continuing Education rented out the films (and sold a few) for a decade or so—they were shown in various places around the world, but mostly in the U.S.—and I am pleased to report that Continuing Education eventually earned back the $50,000 or so that it put into the series. Then Continuing Education went out of the film rental business and turned ownership of the series, then mostly available on VHS tapes, over to the Center for the Study of Science Fiction. For a couple of decades the Center has been trying to get a grant to update the films and add some new ones, and that still may happen. Times have changed (I remember asking whether we couldn’t tape the pieces rather than film them and was told it would take a truck full of equipment). Science Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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fiction has changed too since the 1970s: these accounts of those times record the people (too many of them gone) who helped create and shape it. Now the time machine passes to other hands. One of those pairs of hands belongs to Eric Solstein, through whose vision and expertise these glimpses of a storied past are being made available and who is compiling a new and more comprehensive record.

James Gunn


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Technical Notes on the Films


By Eric Solstein

All of the films in this collection were produced by James Gunn in the early 1970’s as a Professor of English at, what is now, the J. Wayne and Elsie M Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction, of the University of Kansas in Lawrence. These works represent the first serious effort to capture Science Fiction writers on film. With few exceptions, these men and women have been very poorly documented. Even the legendary Robert A. Heinlein has been filmed on less than a half dozen occasions, and no recordings do him justice. When Professor Gunn managed to find the funding for this project, VHS was not yet invented, and film production was pretty much limited to the well heeled and stout hearted. But beyond any cost and effort, Jim Gunn’s films are precious. They may not have the sheen of Hollywood productions, but they are very rare primary historical documents of very intelligent people making very strong presentations under the guidance of a supremely knowledgeable and caring peer. If you want the eye-witness account of how Science Fiction’s “founding fathers” perceived the birth and maturation of a Twentieth Century art form, there is nowhere else to go. Once created, these films were circulated (primarily to colleges) as 16 mm. projection prints. Once videotape became available and economical, many old film reels got lost in the shuffle as the entire educational film industry was transformed. By the time VHS versions of these films were finally made, the originals were getting misplaced, project funding had long disappeared and interest was waning. When I began to document Science Fiction writers for my own project, the University of Kansas was one of my principal destinations. Jim Gunn had already made copies of his films for me from the somewhat beaten-up VHS copy he considered the “master,” and what a copy it was. This tape was painful to watch, a copy of a copy of a copy. It exhibited nearly every kind of noise, distortion and artifact that bad video can, a tragedy I was hoping to set right.It turned out that most of the original materials from which the films had been composed, had been tossed in a dumpster and salvaged by a


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concerned student in the nick of time; they were now resident in the basement of Spencer Library. While many of these materials were intact, they were badly faded (from poor storage) and essential components were gone. In order to make the new video versions presented here, we had to take the second best route. With the assistance of the Spencer staff, all existing (and long uncirculated) projection prints were assembled for my inspection. Over a weekend, I carefully went through each of the many prints to find which was in the best condition for each film. A full set of prints was brought to DMZ in New York to be cleaned and transferred to video. The copies varied in quality: all were scratched to different degrees, some had “dirt” printed into them from the original internegatives, some had bad splices that needed to be repaired, most had faded somewhat and some had aged to a perfect pink. Unfortunately, the Forrest Ackerman piece (Science Fiction Films) has some bad splices and is missing bits of the picture and sound at its head. We transferred the worst of them on a Phillips Spirit Dataciné with a Pogle color corrector at The Tape House, and the balance at our own facility. All of the films required additional color correction before cloning them to their final versions on Digital Betacam. They were all transferred in 16:9 aspect ratio, a decision we had to make, and one that served some films better than others. While the end results are far from perfect, please be assured that the versions before you are far superior to all other extant versions, and the best we could do without a significant additional expenditure. To create these DVDs, we carefully tested and finessed our MPEG encodes, to achieve the best possible results for the compression required. These films now have another hundred years or so of life (if the DVD standards are to be believed) and we are proud to have made them available again, if only to a small but knowledgeable audience. We trust you will find them valuable.

Eric Solstein


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Science Fiction Films: A Lecture by Forrest J. Ackerman

Science Fiction Films: A Lecture By Forrest J. Ackerman [The opening seconds of this film were not available to us in any condition that permitted their restoration, so we have excised the text but re-edited most of its’ original footage to provide a natural beginning. The missing text introduces Ackerman as a SF fan who has shared his expertise for many years. “He has had many careers: agent, editor, columnist, collector, but all have been related to his lifelong love, science fiction.”] Forry, as he is known to his friends and correspondents, has had a way of life out of being a fan. He has brought together one of the most complete collections of science fiction magazines and books in the world. And perhaps because of the fact that he has lived all his life near Hollywood, he turned early to an associated medium for science fiction – the film. He originated and edits a magazine about movie monsters; and science fiction might be called The Monster That Ate Forrest J. Ackerman. Eventually, his collection of books and magazines, motion picture posters, and still photographs grew so extensive that it blotted out every window and began devouring kitchen and bedroom. Forry moved into an apartment and turned his Spanish-style stucco house into a museum. There, in the midst of that incredible collection, he describes the history of the science fiction film. My name is Forrest J. Ackerman. As I speak to you from the year 1970, I’m 53 years old. For 46 of those years I’ve been seeing science fiction films. The first I ever saw was in 1926 – The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, his famous novel of a brontosaurus alive today and loose in London. “He meddled with things man was meant to leave alone… He tampered in God’s domain.” These anti-science cliches that have dominated the majority of science fiction films but never dampened the ardor of the mad scientist persecuted by the superstitious mankind. Boris Karloff acted into his 81st year and suffered horrendous fates for daring to probe beyond the bounds of orthodox science. And what were some of these blasphemous experiments? Cryogenics in The Man With Nine Lives, 1940; prolongation of live with an artificial heart in The Man They Could Not Hang, 1939; revivification of an electrocuted man in The Walking Dead, 1936. Have screen playwrights, producers, motion picture companies, really believed the myth of too much science being a bad thing? Not really. Mad science merely means good box office – just as horror headlines sell newspapers. There have been


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a few films about sane scientists: The Story of Louis Pasteur; Sinclair Lewis’ Arrowsmith; Dr. Erlich’s Magic Bullet, the syphilis story. But the general public, in picking pictures, has evidenced a greater interest in scientists who shrink people, or appropriate their brains, or render them invisible than those good Samaritans who seek a cure for cancer or emphysema. Before chronicling the science fiction film history further, I imagine it’s probably desirable to define the genre and name the first science fiction film ever made. To the best of my knowledge, until the end of 1931, no one ever attempted to compile a list of all known science fiction films. That compilation was published on the first page of the first amateur science fiction magazine, The Time Traveller, at the beginning of 1932. I created the list. Today I don’t agree with many of my own selections: for instance, by no stretch of imagination would I now include the outright supernatural Dracula. I think a science fiction film pretty well defines itself. Most of the pictures are about inventions or catastrophes outside the normal, experiments gone disastrously wrong, life on or from other worlds, the multiple extrapolations of the future. Now, accepting the possibility of chemically separating the evil nature of man from the good, then the first science fiction film may very well have been a short Scandinavian version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1897. The Jekyll-Hyde syndrome, with the inevitable son and daughter sequels, seems to hold a record for remakes, with something like 25 versions to date. Rouben Mamoulian’s classic of 1932 garnered an Academy award for its star, Frederick March, in the dual role of man and monster. In 1898, Georges Melies, the cinemagician of France, produced a short lunar fantasy, An Astronomer’s Dream, following it in 1899 with a brief sequence from H. Rider Haggard’s She, showing the rejuvenation of the immortal goddess in a film called Column of Fire. Best known early example of science fiction on film surviving to this day is the French 1902 combination of elements from Verne’s From the Earth To the Moon and Wells’ First Man On the Moon in a short science farce. In 1909 French Pathe’ audiences were taken on A Trip to Jupiter. In the following year, the film company of Thomas Edison itself offered A Trip to Mars, a daring flight repeated eight years later by a Danish film producer with Sky Ship, and again in 1920 by Tower Films. In 1919 England finally filmed The First Men In the Moon by its most famous sf son, H. G. Wells; but it remained for the greatest animator of his time, Ray Harryhausen, to make a definitive version in 1965.


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A Message From Mars, 1921, was a utopian morality play transferred to film, while Radio-Mania, 1923, gave us an amusingly imaginative look at the weird inhabitants of our neighbor planet. The Russians filmed a highly stylized civilization of robotic Martians in Aelita, 1924. And Science & Invention Magazine from 1923 records a highly unusual story of The Stellar Express, the rocketship that flew faster than light with the result that its astronaut, after landing on a distant planet, observed through the telescope his own arrival. Our Heavenly Bodies, German-made in 1926, would appear to be a lost masterpiece - perhaps the most serious, ambitious space film ever made. A few surviving stills show us an “ethership” taking off from a metropolis of the future century and engaging in a more literal sense in the much latter Cinerama production of the same name in a space odyssey. The weightlessness of the crew appears to have been convincingly portrayed. I believe the conclusion of this picture depicted several ways that the world might come to an end: as by fire or freezing; and that portions of these were incorporated in either a film called Evolution, or The Mystery Of Life – they were two separate pictures, one or possibly both of which I saw a single time at the beginning of the ‘30s. Fritz Lang, of course, made Die Frau im Mond, the prophetic Woman In the Moon, Girl In the Moon, By Rocket To the Moon, as it was variously known; and it was shown here and abroad in 1929, the year that he actually on film invented countdown. Lang’s Moon, wrongly, had an atmosphere; rightly, a powdery surface. A trip to mars was taken the following year, 1930, in the farcical music comedy Just Imagine, which will be covered later when I discuss future films. Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers rocketed around the universe in four serials from 1936 through 1940; but of course these chapter plays bear the same relationship to science fiction films in general as comic strips to magazine and book science fiction. The first space film with international impact in the era of talking pictures was George Pal’s Destination Moon in 1949: in color, with the fortuitous and felicitous combination of author Robert A. Heinlein and artist Chesley Bonnestell collaborating closely on the creation of a memorable work, with Willy Lay as the technical advisor. 20 years ahead of the reality of 20 July of 1969, the picture was a praiseworthy effort flawed only slightly by the unnecessary “comic relief”. Space films to follow, such as This Island Earth in 1955 and Forbidden Planet in 1956 were less documentary and more derring-do, culminating in a multimilliondollar, brain-bewildering 2001 of Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. No science fiction film since Metropolis has been received with such religious fervor and Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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fanatic devotion, or else condemned with passionate displeasure. No viewer, pro or con, faulted it for its fabulous special effects; but arguments will probably still rage into the 21st century as to what the significance of its ending was, if indeed it had any. Space, per se, has rarely inspired productions above a lowbrow level in the films, mirroring more the hack work of space operas of old pulp publications such as Planet Stories, which eloquently emphasized the inarguable observation of sf author Theodore Sturgeon some years ago that 90% of everything printed – and by extension, filmed – is of inferior quality. Space pictures from Japan, Italy, and elsewhere other than Russia had been pretty much of a piece: all pyrotechnics and tinker toy models. Leaving space for a look at the future, we turn back the clock to 1926 – Metropolis. It was the best: the technical and technological masterpiece of Austrian auteur Fritz Lang, which is an indelible creation of a unique supercity of 60 million people held in the thrall of incredible malignant machinery, and features Ultima Futura Automaton, the most glamorous robot ever to grace the screen. As I have been known to lecture an hour and a quarter extemporaneously about the merits of this single film, which I have seen perhaps twenty-five times to date, it is obvious that in this limited time I must hastily pass on to other futuristic productions, summarizing Metropolis succinctly as the supreme achievement of filmic future history. Just Imagine, made in 1930, forecast the world of 1980 – the world, as Will McMorrow once put it, of indexed numbers, where Mia Farrow’s mother, Maureen O’Sullivan, was a numeral made LN-18, who sang to her hero J-21, when he was a captive on Mars of the race of bad twin Martians. Incredibly infantile in its plot and humor, no more than five or ten minutes of the entire film were worth watching. But the Gotham of 1980 was probably more breathtaking in its aerially photographed grandeur than the reality that will soon overtake us – indeed, one day, if you’re studying this course beyond 1980, may be in the past. High Treason, the second British talking film released in the USA in 1930, forecast the world and the war of 1940. There was a channel tunnel between London and Paris (which was blown up); photophones to see the person conversed with; one of the federated Atlantic states gas-bombed by enemy zeppelins of the Europeans; while the MGM plea for pacifism in 1933, Men Must Fight, was similar in theme but inferior in effects to High Treason. Other glimpses of the future were seen in F.P.1 Does Not Answer, (1933’s vision of trans-oceanic flights to come), the German Tunnel of 1933 and its British remake of 1935, Transatlantic Tunnel; the German Gold, (transmutation of Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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elements); and Master Of the World, (robots), in the mid-‘30s; up to the fair adaptation in 1956 of George Orwell’s frightening literary warning 1984, but less than inspired adaptation, 1967, of Ray Bradbury’s powerful book-burning extrapolation, Fahrenheit 451. The French Alphaville and Italian 10th Victim, both 1965 releases, were perverse projections of possible futures. H. G. Wells in Things To Come, 1935, created a scientifilm masterpiece for all time. If you have seen Things To Come and rate it less than memorable, you flunk the course. I have seen it in excess of 40 times – a record which I think attests to my estimate of the value of the film. The themes treated in science fiction films have been many. Among those worth noting: Invisibility: H. G. Wells’ Invisible Man, 1933, superior in all respects. Lilliputianism: The adaptation of The Incredible Shrinking Man by the book’s own author, Richard Matheson, with first-rate effects, in 1957. The breathtaking Fantastic Voyage in a miniaturized submarine through the human body in 1966. Other only slightly less effective “shrinking” stories were Dr. Cyclops in 1939 and the film that was based on the Merritt’s famous book Burn, Witch, Burn! called The Devil Doll made in 1936. This is a series of stills demonstrating the shrinking process which the special effects men created for the film. No really superior treatment of a gigantic human has yet been filled. The purchased but un-produced Nth Man might possibly be the answer to this; but giant beasts, things, and creatures have abounded, King Kong of 1933 being the classic hallowed by time. This is the actual model of the pteranodon which was attempting to fly away with Fay Wray in the production of King Kong. This is the sea beast that reared up and overturned the raft: This, the remnants of the brontosaurus that treed one of the many members of Denham’s doomed party. The triceratops;…And this is believed to be the metal skeleton of the tyrannosaurus rex, which had the monumental battle with King Kong and was finally bested by him. This, the creature called the ymir, the plaster of paris prototype of it which was created by Ray Harryhausen for his film about Venus called 20 Million Miles to Earth. Time, smog, simply air itself are unkind to creatures like this hand puppet which in 1955 was the ferocious Beast With a Million Eyes. The new breed of model makers of the ‘70s may be giving some thought to the preservation of their miniature creations, but maestros like Marcel Delgado of yesteryear no more anticipated their models would be collected, respected, dissected, studied, cherished, preserved, than manufacturers of, say, cigar bands.


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Longevity has proven a popular theme in Black Oxen of 1924; The Young Diana of 1922; The Man In Half-Moon Street in 1944, and its subsequent remake, The Man Who Could Cheat Death, 1958. No one ever seems to actually win the war with the grim reaper, however; and inevitably the artificially preserved people age years in seconds in the grim climaxes. From Lost Horizon to The Leech Woman, it ritualistically happens. After dreaming as a young man of the spectacular destruction of the Earth by cometary collision, I could scarcely believe how dull and boring The End Of the World could be when I saw the French version of 1931. At a revival in 1969, the picture had not improved with age. Deluge, to my mind remains the definitive world destruction depiction, when in 1933 on a table top at a cost of $25,000, New York City’s skyscrapers were toppled by earth-wrenching quakes, then the stricken island of Manhattan drowned by tidal waves. The amazing achievement by Ned Mann was reprised in an otherwise weak film known as SOS Tidal Wave. The same cataclysm depicted in 1951 in When Worlds Collide was pale by comparison; although the Balmer/Wilie novel produced in color by George Pal was the superior picture of the two. Two very interesting variations on the theme, however, were The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, and Nevil Shute’s bestseller On The Beach, released in 1959 and 1960, respectively. Alraune, an artificially created soulless woman, has heartlessly caused men to lose their heads no fewer than seven times in a variety of European versions, the last of which, Unnatural, featured Erich Van Stroheim. Barbarella, incarnated by Jane Fonda, was an astronaughty adventuress of many millennia hence, whose gadgetry would’ve made Buck Rogers green with jealousy, as in 1968 she did her thing in Roger Vadim’s incredibly lush, bizarre, exotic, decadent depiction of a phantasmagorical cosmic future from the comic-oriented mind of French artist Jean-Claude Forest. Fared better: The Day the Earth Stood Still, from the Harry Bates novelette anthologized in Adventures in Time and Space, (original story title Farewell to the Master); The Thing From Another World, 1951, by John W. Campbell, to be found in the same collection under its original magazine title of Who Goes There?. [These are the actual claws of the thing from another world, as modeled for us today by James Gunn. Thank you, Mr. Gunn, for the very effective demonstration of the claws]. And 1941, there was The Devil Commands, a Boris Karloff attempt to scientifically establish communication with the astral plane, based on the wellreceived book by William Sloan The Edge of Running Water; and especially effective adaptation of John Wyndham’s book, The Midwich Cuckoos, filmed in 1960s as Village of the Damned. Windham’s watershed work, The Day of the


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Triffids, was not quite the success of its Midwich predecessor when it reached the screen in 1963. Frankenstein, the world’s number one nightmare, conceived in the teenage mind of Mary Shelley in 1816, first reached the screen in 1910 via the film company of Thomas Alva Edison; was filmed a second time as Life Without Soul in 1915; The Monster of Frankenstein (Italian), in 1920; and then definitively in 1931 with Boris Karloff. A German serial in six hour-long installments called Homunculus was released in 1916 and climaxed with its soulless artificial creature meeting death at the hands of nature via lightning bolt, as Wylie’s gladiator would do many years later. In addition to films previously called to your attention as worthwhile or outstanding, serious students of the science fiction cinema can not afford to miss a viewing of any of the following, should the opportunity afford itself: The War of the Worlds, George Pal, out of H. G. Wells, with breathtaking special effects, which in fact won an Oscar in 1953. [This is the actual model of the Martian war machine.] The Island of Lost Souls, 1932, screenplayed from H. G. Wells’ Island of Dr. Moreau, treating insidiously of the accelerated evolution of animals into “manimals”... The Invisible Ray, 1936, the vintage Karloff and Lugosi at their mad-bad scientist best… Dr. X, 1932, a gripping scientific mystery with a chilling climax featuring synthetic flesh… The Mysterious Island, a milestone for its time, 1929, with a sub-sea civilization discovered by Verne’s pioneer submarines, a creation of haunting beauty… It Came From Outer Space, 1953, about 85% pure Ray Bradbury in the third dimension… Them!, best of the giant insect tales in 1954… The Time Machine, 1960, favorite of some George Pal enthusiasts... The Planet of the Apes, 1968, an eminently satisfactory treatment of screen science fiction. Journey To the Far Side of the Sun, 1969, excelled with its realistic models, obviously influenced by the first-rate miniature work of 2001. And what conclusions are to be drawn after 70 years of science fiction on the screen? The estimate of those most knowledgeable in the field – Walter Lee and Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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Carlos Clarens of America, Luis Gasca of Spain, John Baxter of England; Lotte Eisner of France, the Belgian Groupe D‘Etude pour le Cinema Fantastique [pronunciation of which I don’t guarantee - Esperanto is my native language] – these experts estimate that a figure approaching 2500 is the number of films which the sf cineastes would agree on as having been produced during the first seven decades of the 20th century. 2500 films! – but how many classics, how many even based on magazine stories or books? How much richer the past history of sf films could’ve been had producers reached into the pages of Astounding and Galaxy Magazine, the minds of men like Asimov, and Van Vogt, and Frederik Pohl. Quality and box office are not entities alien to each other. Artistic successes can also be financial successes. The time is long past when we should already have seen Brave New World, Looking Backward, R.U.R, The Vicarion, The World Below, Ralph 124C41+, To Walk The Night, Sinister Barrier, Slan, The World of Null-A, The Voyage of the Space Beagle, Odd John, half of Heinlein, a lot of Sturgeon and Weinbaum, and Stapledon and Van Vogt and Campbell and even much more of H. G. Wells. Pioneers of basic ideas of science fiction, like Ray Cummings, Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson, have been shamefully neglected, their works overlooked, when themes they either originated or perfected frequently were scripted by late-comers or nonentities not even associated with the field. Study the best of the pastFritz Lang, for imaginative interpretation of his written material… Jack Pierce, for the ultimate in makeup… Boris Karloff, for integrity of performances… George Pal, for subject matter… James Whale, for direction… Carl Freund, for camera work… Marcel Delgado, for prehistoric life models… Willis O’Brien and Ray Harryhausen, for animation… Kenneth Strickfaden, for electrical laboratories… Max Steiner, for musical scores. There were 13 “golden years” of science fiction films, including fantasy; and these were from 1923 through 1936. Whenever you can, see the fantastic films of this period, including The Phantom of the Opera, Siegfried, Faust, The Magician, and similar motion pictures for there are many of the same Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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elements in them as in science fiction films. The dragon of Siegfried is not so different from the dinosaur of The Lost World; the laboratory of The Magician can serve for The Young Diana. Lastly, a personal note: I’m sure author Theodore Sturgeon would happily be made out a liar for his observed law of mediocrity be violated, reversed, so that 90% of science fiction films became superior, and only 10% were worthless trash. I have seen every science fiction film made possible to me in approximately 50 years - more I believe than anyone else on earth - and I plan to continue to do so until at least 2001. It would be a great reward to me - one shared in by all interested in the subject matter - if there should be a noticeable increase in the quality of science fiction films in the years from here to the 21st century. The message of Metropolis was that “halfway between the hand and the brain must be the heart.” Dr. Ackerman’s diagnosis is that if you have it in your hearts to do so, then use your heads and your hands to improve on the past. Whenever any opportunity presents itself for you to select, project, view, criticize, or create that most challenging of motion picture art forms – science fiction film – do so with one eye on the past and one on the future. In fact, considering the strangeness of the subject matter, it would not be amiss to operate with three I’s, by which I mean intelligence, imagination, and integrity.


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Plot In Science Fiction: A Lecture By Poul Anderson


In 1947 a young Pennsylvanian, then attending the University of Minnesota, studying toward a degree in Physics, sold two novelettes to the magazine Astounding Science Fiction and launched a career as a writer which has supported him ever since, as well as a wife and daughter he acquired along this particular time sequence. Some several hundred stories and more than 50 books later, Poul Anderson lives and works in Orinda, California - when he is not traveling in Europe, building his own Viking ship, or participating the Society for Creative Anachronisms. He has written science books and mysteries, but most of his writing has been science fiction. He is one of its recognized masters. He is, in that glorious tradition, a teller of tales. And in the 30 minutes that follow he is going to answer the layman's perennial question to the science fiction writer, "Where do you get those crazy ideas?" More precisely, where do science fiction stories come from? How do they grow? How are they put together? At a recent meeting of science fiction writers held at a resort hotel in Berkley, California, Poul Anderson discussed plot in science fiction. [James Gunn’s questions are italicized; Poul Anderson’s answers appear in roman text.] It's an honor to be asked for a contribution to this series and a pleasure to oblige. But let me warn you right at the beginning that I have no word to give you from on high - the only thing I can offer is a few suggestions that may or may not be helpful to the audience for this series. Paul, I've asked you to talk about plot for two reasons: first, because plot plays so important a part in science fiction; and second, because your stories are distinguished by their strong plot lines. Clearly, you have thought about the matter of plotting. Let me start out by remarking that I believe whatever I have to say will apply equally well or badly to every sort of fiction. In fact, I don't think any real distinction exists between science fiction and any other kind - science fiction is at most a set of literary techniques. These techniques are helpful in dealing with certain aspects of life. For instance, by sending the hero to a different planet we can convey some sense of the wonder of this universe, of life itself; of by Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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projecting a future society we can examine the possible ways in which men could order their affairs. But in science fiction, as in any kind of other story, it is real here and now experience on which we draw; and our work always refers back to that same reality. Now, one problem in talking about the plot of a story is that is that we don't have a clearly defined subject of discussion. A very well-known novelist once remarked to me, "Plot, characterization and the rest are nothing but words made up by English professors to describe what real writers have been doing all along." I don't think that remark is entirely fair, but it does contain a certain amount of truth: you simply can not separate plot from character, background, philosophy, and everything else that goes into a story. At least you can not if the story is to be anything more than a mechanical piece of hack work. Nevertheless, we need to get on with our discussion. So let's define the plot roughly as “the scheme of events in a story”. Remember, that's only a very crude definition. Maybe what I have to say later on will suggest refinements to you. To start off, I'll offer a couple of examples. The plot of The Iliad is: Achilles, angry with his king, withdraws from battle until his best friend is killed, whereupon he comes forth to get revenge. The plot of Hamlet is much more intricate than that, of course. In fact, Hamlet consists of several interweaving story lines. One of them, by the way, is a skillfully constructed piece of detective fiction. You remember Hamlet doesn't simply take the ghost's word about his uncle's guilt: the ghost could, after all, only be a demon whose lies are intended to trap Hamlet into sin. So the prince has to investigate for himself. In the course of this, he interacts with a whole cast of people, each with his or her own story that is part of the larger whole. Note how much of this complex plot turns on background and character. Take, for instance, the scene where Hamlet finds the king at his prayers, almost stabs him then and there, but refrains. The background is Catholic. In Catholic belief, if the king were killed while praying in sincere repentance he would go to heaven. What kind of vengeance is that? Therefore Hamlet stays his hand. But the king's remorse and Hamlet's cold calculation derive from their inmost personalities. That's what I mean by claiming that plot is not really separable from the other aspects of the story. Still, you do have a narrative line, whatever its driving forces. In a work like James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, this line is mostly interior: we see what goes on in a human mind, and thus we come to know that human and his milieu. On the other hand, in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island the storyline is almost entirely Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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exterior. We meet marvelous people like Long John Silver and Ben Gunn; we get to know them in the course of the action, but this is the operative difference from Joyce. We get to know them in the course of the action. Physical events dominate their story, and the scheme under which these events happen is the plot. Now, I don't subscribe to the fashionable snobbish view that the only purpose of serious literature is the sensitive analysis of character. I think action writers like Homer are every bit as important as psychological writers like Capek it's just a question of which aspect of reality the author wants to emphasize. Usually, the external part - that is, what a hero does, what happens outside of his skin - usually this is what is emphasized in science fiction. And thus we come to the matter of plot. How do we construct a good plausible narrative scheme? Have you found a good method? According to Robert Heinlein in a critical essay of years ago, there are only three basic plots, and everything written is a variation or combination of them. First is boy-meets-girl. Second is The Little Tailor, that is, the character faced with a problem who finds ways to solve it. Third is the Man Who Learned Better, the story of someone whose mistaken belief or attitude is changed by experience. Of course each of these can be turned around. Boy can lose girl, or in some modern fiction we might have boy-meets-boy. The Little Tailor can fail, in which case the story might become tragic. The Man Who is Supposed to Learn Better may likewise fail to do so, or the lesson he learns may turn out to be inappropriate, thus making the story ironic. And as I remarked, usually elements of all three types enter into a story. For example, we might have a man and woman stranded on an alien planet. Their problem is to get help. Somehow they solve it - that's The Little Tailor. The solution turns on their discovering some fact they hadn't known, or making some invention hitherto unheard of - that's the Man Who Learned Better. And obviously their personal relationship meanwhile comes under boy-meets-girl. Don't knock it: this is the structure of a lot of highly successful stories, like any number of Heinlein's excellent novels for younger readers. And I might immodestly mention my own The Man Who Counts, known in its paperback version as War of the Wing- Men. I used the same combination in The Ancient Gods, paperback titled World Without Stars. In that case the girl never comes on stage, though the hero is obsessively in


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love with her. It turns out that she died long before the story opens; and the narrator who discovers this thereby becomes the Man Who Learned Better. I do not want to say that Heinlein's interesting theory is necessarily right. Other people claim there is really only one plot. Still others claim there is some different number of basic plots, like maybe six. Still others doubt that any neat classification actually works. To tell the truth, I'm myself inclined to that last school of thought. I don't really believe that plots can be categorized, and in fact I don't care whether they can. I do suggest, though, you think about Heinlein's idea and see if you can apply it to various literary works. The practice will open your eyes to the structure beneath all these stories. What is the function of plot in a story? Plots are structures. They are the sets of definite events and other developments by which stories get from hyar to thar. A story which emphasizes background and/or character may have very little formal plot. Cases in science fiction include Heinlein's novels Beyond This Horizon and Starship Troopers. In contrast, his more recent book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress has a complicated and carefully organized formal plot. I'd like to repeat that one kind of book is not inherently better than another. The amount of plot you need depends entirely on what you aim to do. Probably the prime example of a book in which plot is all-important lies in the oldfashioned puzzle kind of murder mystery. Characters are there of course: they're often eccentric or otherwise larger than life - think of Sherlock Holmes or Nero Wolf. Certainly Holmes at least is as vivid a personality as exists in fiction; and the stories about him are among the best portraits we have of the late Victorian era. Therefore, a strong plot is no barrier to literary value. What I want to say about the classic detective story is just that typically it's events are so laid out that all the clues get presented. The function of the plot is to introduce the clues. For instance, suppose without actually saying so the author gives enough indications for the alert reader to see that the murder must have been done by a left-handed man. Now suppose that later on the detective finds occasion to visit a tavern and have a drink with another character, who picks up his glass with the left hand. That scene in the tavern may have many purposes; there may be character exposition or social commentary or whatever. But the storyline has brought the detective there for the principal purpose of introducing the reader to that south paw.


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Much science fiction is structurally similar to the classic mystery. Take Isaac Asimov's robot stories. In these, the robots are constrained by three laws of behavior built into them. The first law is that no robot may ever harm a human being or by inaction allow a human being to suffer harm. The second law is that the robot must obey any order given by a human being, provided this does not conflict with the first law. The third law is that the robot must protect itself against damage and destruction provided this does not conflict with the first or second law. From this background Asimov derived many story plots. Typically a robot would be behaving in some irrational fashion. It would turn out that the cause was a conflict between the three imperatives. Thus, one robot untangled itself in a more and more complicated web of lies. Finally the humans discovered that the robot was striving to avoid revealing a truth which it knew would hurt a particular person to hear. This illustrates again how plot can be a stepping stone toward other literary values, instead of just a rigid framework. In Asimov's story the anguish of both the robot and the human are touchingly shown. The tragedy is a logical outcome of a thoroughly logical plot. Obviously this is far from being the only kind of storyline in science fiction. Toward the opposite extreme you'll find, let's say, Harlan Ellison's I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. This story deals entirely with the sufferings of the characters, who are being tormented by a giant nearly omnipotent computer and the machines it controls. About the only hint of formal plot occurs at the end, when the hero finds a way to liberate another victim by killing her. Yet the story is certainly effective. What are the requirements of a good plot, and how do you get one in the first place? Or as the science fiction writer is always being asked, "Where do you get those crazy ideas?" The answer is, you get them any place - from direct experience, reason, reflection, conversation, reading, television, or Lord knows what. Virtually anything will suggest a story, if you have that kind of mind. What counts is what you afterward do with that idea. Let me offer you a couple of personal examples, not so much from egotism as because I can't presume to speak for any other writer. Years ago when the theory and practice of automation was still in their infancy, I read Norbert Wiener's book Cybernetics. In passing, the author worried about what he called the second industrial revolution. The first industrial revolution brought in powered machinery Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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and put most unskilled manual laborers out of a job. The second industrial revolution, Wiener foresaw, the automation revolution, would displace the whitecollar routineer, the bookkeeper, the clerk, everybody whose work could be done better and faster by a computer. "A-ha!" I said, and promptly wrote a story about the cruel situation of such people in the future, people intelligent enough to recognize that they have nothing to offer which the world wants any longer. Since then everyone has become aware of this disturbing possibility; but I was writing about it more than 20 years ago. I don't claim any great foresight: Norbert Wiener had that. I merely saw his warning in terms of a story. About that same time I spent some months batting around Europe on a bicycle. It was a lot of fun; but as an American, I gradually got fed up with having to fill out a form everywhere I stayed, a bit of paper for the police demanding name, occupation, passport number, where I was last night, and so forth. Nowadays, I'm sorry to say, we are getting more and more of that kind of a thing in this country; but I'm speaking of a relatively innocent era. Since nobody ever checked up, I finally took to signing false names just as a gesture of scorn. Among them was Sam Hall. You may remember that there is a very coarse and profane and generally grand old English ballad about a character named Sam Hall. To this day probably moldering away in assorted European police archives is the statement that a Sam Hall slept here. When I came back to the States, I found myself right in the middle of the era when Joe McCarthy was running rampant. Now, this wasn't actually as bad as academic folklore would have you believe. Some people were looking for communist spies under every bed, true; but others were resisting such hysteria, mocking it, and generally giving the witch hunters a bad time. I was among these resisters, and nobody punished me for it; rather, my blows for the cause of liberty earned me a fair amount of money. You see, I could imagine a dictatorial government in the future America. I could imagine that it would us advance technology to keep day-by-day track of everyone of its citizens. Lately it's become commonplace to worry about the evils of a computerized national databank; but at that time there were comparatively few big computers or memory units, and they were comparatively primitive. It didn't take much imagination, however, to see the possibility of a dictatorship which kept a continuously updated electronic dossier on each of us. This thought fused with my mildly annoying experience in Europe, and the plot came forth. A single key employee of the databank could cause all kinds of trouble. Why would he do so? Well, for one thing, he had slowly become more and more disgusted with the government. Hence I saw him as a middle-aged man Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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and a thoughtful man who had read history and knew that freedom had once existed in America. So the developing plot suggested characterization. It suggested background too: just what would daily life be like in a totalitarian America? These were points to think about and work out in detail. My quiet middle-aged hero would not rebel suddenly and dramatically; but a particularly nasty incident might get his back up. Having access to the citizen data machine, he could take out his resentment on it. Oh, he wouldn't sabotage; that would be too dangerous. But suppose he slipped in a file on a fictitious character, a violent criminal at large named - you guessed it - Sam Hall. Bit by bit, over the months, he would add to the dossier of this nonexistent person. So far, so good. However, I wanted my hero to do something really decisive. What would motivate him to do that? I confess that at this point I used an old gimmick. Still it's based on something that's happened too many millions of times in places like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. I gave my protagonist a favorite relative who fell under suspicion of being associated with the revolutionary underground. The secret police took this young man away, and he didn't come back. In a sorrow and frustrated anger my hero had to do something. Another political policeman had lately been murdered by persons unknown. On impulse my man slipped into the electronic files and made up account of evidence which indicated that Sam Hall might have been the hero. With electronic scanning and cross-correlation the authorities were soon alerted and started to search for the suspect. You can take the story from there for yourself. My hero keeps feeding in more and more about Sam Hall; the underground hears of this violent anti-governmental figure; though no one has ever seen him, Sam Hall becomes a legend among them, a symbol and rallying point. Meanwhile, back in the computer center, my hero plants indications that various higher-ups in the government itself may have had something to do with Sam Hall. The syndrome of guilt by association spreads ever more chaos. This finally makes the government vulnerable enough that it falls before a democratic insurrection. The hero is lionized and uses his prestige to make sure that the computer and its databank are destroyed. I've gone into this example in so much detail because it's typical of one way that plots develop. At least this is one way that plots develop for me. I think your method is typical, at least of some kind of stories. How do you develop an idea into a full-fledged story?


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First I decide in a general way what story line I want. Is it to be about a man coping with a future world he never made, or coping with the hazards of another planet, or what? The specific concept usually makes my story line decision for me. For instance, frequently I start by designing a strange world in considerable detail. The story then becomes in part a Cook’s tour of that world. Or I might want to make some particular point, like "freedom is groovy," or "the Persians were more important to world history than the Greeks," or "a conqueror can get in trouble by acquiring too much real estate," or whatever else I have to say that looks as if it would make an entertaining story. In all these cases I build my plot outward from the core idea. Events are so designed that the characters will be exposed to the different facets of the idea. To give a specific example, let's imagine that we want to say a good word for freedom. We might do this by having a time traveler from the slave era visit a libertarian milieu - or vice versa, of course. In either case we'd want a narrative line which would expose him to as many aspects of the period he is visiting as possible. The plot should also give us a chance to show something of his own background. This we can most readily accomplish by having him do whatever he does in close contact with someone who belongs to the other society. If he is from culture A for instance, the heroine might be from culture B. Their conversations and conflicts will dramatize as well as exemplify their origins. Things are still pretty vague, though, at this stage. What I usually do next is flesh out the characters and background. The people and the situation have to be such that the events can logically happen. Let me make this clear by a reductio ad absurdum: the events of The Iliad could not have happened if the main character had been St. Francis of Assisi rather than Achilles. And if the main character, who got offended with Agamemnon, had been, let's say, Odysseus, events would at least have taken a somewhat different course, even if the ending was more or less what we now have. Elements of character and background do more than justify a plotline. Frequently they suggest parts of it. For instance, I may have a nicely designed planet and the intention of using the story to show you how oddly the laws of nature operate under special conditions. But obviously it makes quite a difference whether the human exposed to these conditions is fat, greedy, boisterous old Nicholas Van Rijn or suave and existentialist Dominic Flandry, to name a couple of serious characters. Likewise, the milieu you pick is important. Van Rijn lives in a raw pioneering era; Flandry in the twilight of an empire. So quite aside from their personal characteristics, the possibilities open to them are different.


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That answers the second question, where do you get those crazy ideas. But what about the first question: what are the requirements of a good plot? What are the standards to meet? Well, again I have no simple answer. If you are a great enough writer, you can get away with anything, like Mark Twain, whose Connecticut Yankee just happened to arrive shortly before a solar eclipse and just happened to remember that it was due. But we can't all be that great. Besides, no matter how fine a writer is, it does him no harm to get his logic straight. So I'll talk a little about the requirements for a sound workmanlike plot. When the rules need breaking, by all means break them however, I would say these rules are not arbitrary; they're extracted from many centuries of experience, and therefore they should not be broken unless you absolutely must. The basic requirements of plot as I see them are first, logic; and second, surprise. Let's take them up in order and afterward together. By “logic” I mean merely playing fair with the reader. What happens next in your story should be reasonable in view of what is already happened. For instance, if the hero has been a timid mouse all his life, he may eventually become a raging Genghis Khan type, but this won't take place overnight. In fact, in a case like this the gradual transformation of his personality is the very core of the plot. This idea of playing fair is what underlies the general disapproval of coincidences which get the hero out of a tight spot. Let's say he is an American astronaut trapped on Mars, running out of oxygen, desperately trying to improvise some means of staying alive - and a Russian expedition that he's never heard about just happens by and saves him, end of story. Wouldn't you as a reader feel cheated? On the other hand, suppose he knows there's a Russian ship somewhere on Mars, and his problem is to find a way to give it a distress call. Or suppose we have him marooned, and the Russians chancing by and picking him up - only this isn't the end of the story, it's the beginning. The real story then becomes the relationship of this American taken aboard under these peculiar circumstances to the Russians. Perhaps the story will in addition be about the relationship of all these people to Mars, and thus symbolically will be about man's relationship to the universe as a whole. Is there any place in a story for coincidence?


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The reader will accept coincidences when they work to the disadvantage of a hero. In such cases, the coincidence is not a magical solution. Rather it is an extra element thrown into the problem that the central character has to solve. He may solve it in various ways: he may be a brawny swordsman who simply hacks his way out of a dilemma, like Conan the Conqueror. This is legitimate, since we have been repeatedly told and shown that Conan has the strength of ten ordinary men. Or he may solve it by sheer doggedness, like Frodo in The Lord of the Rings. Or he may use any of several other possible approaches, or combinations of them. But as a rule, science fiction being somewhat cerebrally oriented, the science fiction reader is most happy when the solution comes out of ingenuity on the hero's part. As said before, when the hero fails to solve his problem, you have a tragedy - or maybe a farce, if you're writing like Wodehouse - or the hero may solve one problem but fail on another, giving you a bittersweet ending. The principle is always the same, though, that whatever happens ought to make sense. The second requirement for a good plot is surprise. If the reader knows exactly what's sure to happen next, why should he bother reading? He might, of course, be re-reading a known and beloved story. But isn't one important reason for his love the fact that first time around the story gave him the delicious thrill of astonishment or the almost religious thrill of a new deep insight? Surprise is not identical with suspense. We know, for example, that Horatio Hornblower is not going to be killed in a given story; but we're interested to learn what will happen to him and his fellow characters. With a top-notch writer like C. S. Forester, we know that we won't be able to predict events much better than we can predict them in that disorderly jumble known as real life. Something unexpected will always come along to shock or delight us, just as something unexpected always comes along in our everyday experience. At the same time the novelty won't be a mere rabbit out of the hat, it will be a logical consequence of the story premises. The reader should ideally say to himself, "My god, what a surprise, but how natural: why didn't I see it coming?" This is the ideal to strive for. I think it applies to every kind of writing, technical, cookbooks, poetry, essays, fiction, you name it. What we as readers want are the simultaneous senses of newness and of rightness. We want the author to take the building blocks he has laid out before our eyes and make them into something we would never have imagined for ourselves. The world is full of stone and glass; but Salisbury Cathedral stands on its flat plain as a stunning and eternal surprise. A Tolstoy presents his characters and lets us see aspects of them we would not have


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expected, but which ring perfectly true. In its more humble fashion the formal plot does the same kind of job, perhaps most especially these days in science fiction. Poul Anderson has told us about plot in science fiction. This is one of a series of films by the people who have helped make science fiction what it is.


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The History Of Science Fiction After 1938: A Lecture By Isaac Asimov

The History Of Science Fiction After 1938: A Lecture By Isaac Asimov Isaac Asimov is one of the major authors of science fiction: in spite of the fact that he's written virtually no science fiction in the past dozen years, his works are landmarks and building stones. He still writes - he writes for a living. He is a compulsive writer, writing eight, nine, ten hours a day; and the volume of his production is staggering. In 1970 his 100th book was published. His first story, Marooned off Vesta, was published in Amazing Stories in 1939, when he was a 19-year-old student at Columbia University. He soon was turning out fiction for the late John Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction while he pursued his academic career. He was one of the four writers introduced in 1939, any one of whom would've made that year significant in science fiction history. The others were Heinlein, Sturgeon, and Van Vogt. In 1949, Asimov earned his Ph. D. in biochemistry and joined the faculty at the Boston University School of Medicine, but he continued to write science fiction and fact articles. In 1958 he turned to full-time writing of articles and books about science. He has been acclaimed as one of the finest science popularizers of all time. His success may be due to the fact that he writes his articles and books as if they were fiction. It is Asimov the science fiction writer and observer we meet today. His contribution to science fiction was not only skillfully told stories, but original concepts: concepts like the three laws of robotics in his Robot Stories; concepts like the robot detective which blend the detective stories and science fiction in The Caves Of Steel and The Naked Sun; and concepts like a future history for mankind in which man spreads his empire through the galaxy, an empire which falls and then is brought back again to civilization in The Foundation trilogy. Asimov fans will be pleased to learn that Asimov is alive and well and once more writing science fiction. Hello. You've caught me typing, but that's no surprise - I'm typing all the time. Now I'm talking, which is only a little less likely. The subject of the lecture is The History of Science Fiction After 1938; and that date is not chosen by mistake. 1938 is a watershed in the history of science fiction, perhaps the most important after 1926, when magazine science fiction first began with Gernsback's Amazing. John W. Campbell, Jr. became editor of Astounding Stories in 1937. It was not, however, until 1938 that the former editor, Mr. F. Orlin Tremaine, left, and the


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inventory that Mr. Tremaine had gathered, was more or less used up. Therefore, it was in 1938 that readers began to discover Campbellesque stories, the kind of stories that John Campbell accepted and published. And this made a great difference. Prior to 1938, those who wrote science fiction were primarily pulp writers in their orientation. This perhaps sounds uncomplimentary, but it isn't meant to be. There were a group of writers who wrote for what were then called the pulp magazines, which published specialty literature of all sorts: westerns, romances, detective stories, jungle stories, adventure stories, sea stories, war stories. And they paid very little: in order to make a decent living, someone who wrote these stories had to write a great many of them; and the only way to write a great many was to write in many categories; and some of them wrote science fiction as well. As a result, science fiction was heavily adventure-flavored. The writers did not necessarily know much science outside of that which they read in the Sunday supplements or in each other's stories. They probably had never met real scientists. And therefore, when science entered, it was with a certain amount of inaccuracy, certain amount of what shall I say, well, certain amount of categorical stereotypical characters - mainly the mad scientist. He was great in these early science fiction stories; almost every story had a mad scientist till you wondered if it was possible to be a scientist without being mad. But the only saving grace they had was that they all had beautiful daughters; and the hero, a sturdy, large-viewed, blonde American, who knew no science but was great in a fight, always fell in love with the scientist's daughter, who was pretty much helpless except for screaming. At any rate, Campbell changed all that. Campbell himself had gone to MIT and Duke University, had majored in physics, and had the engineering attitude. And what he wanted were people who would write stories in which the science was realistic - not realistic in the sense that they couldn't go out into the blue yonder; not realistic in the sense that they couldn't extrapolate wildly; but realistic in the sense that people who worked with science resembled people who actually worked with science; that scientists acted the way scientists do; that engineers acted the way engineers do; and in short that the scientific culture be represented accurately. As a result, he tended to choose stories by people who were either scientists themselves, who had studied science, or who were at least sufficiently well-aware of the scientific culture to be able to speak plausibly in its terms. Consequently, we began to find a new group of authors in science fiction, quite different from the old. They were not primarily pulp writers; they were engineeroriented. And this was met with great enthusiasm on the part of the readers: almost any change, almost any radical change is bound to generate enthusiasm,


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because a certain group of readers who were jaded by what went before would greet the new with cries of joy. Furthermore, those among the readers who could not or would not write stories of the types that had previously been prominent were very likely to try to write once they read stories that they particularly liked; or else they might have been writing all along, but where as earlier editors did not like their orientation, a new editor like Campbell might. As a result, a flood of new writers came in beginning in 1938 and through the early '40s. Of these by all odds the most important and the one who most nearly gave his personal flavor to the times was Robert A. Heinlein. His first story was published in the August 1939 issue of Astounding Stories; it was called Lifeline. And instantly, instantly he became a favorite with the readers. And from then through 1942 he dominated Astounding, and Astounding dominated the field as few single authors and single magazines have ever been able to dominate the magazine field. Heinlein is still an important writer, still a major talent. Heinlein and those like him were indeed engineer-oriented: Heinlein himself had gone to Annapolis and was an engineer. Van Vogt was another author - A. E. Van Vogt - who gave great flavor to what we might call the Campbell era. Now, he was not a scientist; and this shows how easily one can make categories that are not really accurate. It is not possible to say that in 1938 all the earlier romantic adventure pulp - and I stress that I'm not using the word "pulp" in a derogatory sense - vanished and that in its place came along only Heinlein-type engineeroriented stories. For one thing there, Heinlein couldn't write enough, and other writers weren't as good as he was; and you couldn't fill a magazine with that alone. And if you wanted to, it wouldn't work anyway, because nothing is so good that will please all by itself. And as a matter of fact, even after 1938 you had the colorful adventure story of the previous era continuing. E. E. Smith, who was a leading light of the first period with his Skylark stories, continued in very much the same way and even a larger scale with Galactic Patrol, which appeared in 1938, and with succeeding stories based on the Galactic Patrol universe. A. E. Van Vogt, whom I just mentioned, also had incredibly exciting adventure stories in which the science was sometimes not quite comprehensible. There were other writers as well who came in then, or who having come in earlier now changed more or less gladly to meet the Campbell style: those were Sprague De Camp, and Theodore Sturgeon, and Alfred Bester who was a good example of one who didn't write in John Campbell's magazine but who was also writing in the new style and who eventually became a major talent. If Heinlein and Van Vogt were par excellence, the writers of what we now call, lots of us, the golden age of science fiction, I must mention that a third writer, who Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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from hindsight would seem to go along with those two, was none other that myself, Isaac Asimov. I've never been afflicted with false modesty, or true modesty either for that matter; and so I might as well say that during the 1940s I wrote Robot Stories as an example of engineer-oriented science fiction, and The Foundation stories which were rather in the older tradition of the wide-spanning galactic romance. Both were more successful in later time than they were at the moment that's why I say in hindsight, looking back now it seems to me that I was a major entry in the race then, although at the time I must admit I was never aware of being anything but a minor writer. In any case, what Campbell had done was to create a science fictional world that was very largely a consensus: not everybody wrote in the Campbell background; those who didn't, didn't always write. But the most remarkable stories of the period did create a world of computers, of trips to outer space, of missiles, of a science-important culture. As a matter of fact, the science fictional world of the 1940s was very like in many respects the real world of the 1960s, to the point where to those of us who remember the golden age, we are now living in a science fictional world, in one which Campbell's science fiction did significantly succeed in creating. In other words, no one is going to say that science fiction readers brought a man to the moon all by themselves, but we can say that the kind of science fiction that was published in 1940 helped prepare the public for the acceptance of programs to take a man to the moon. Many of the people involved in it undoubtedly did read science fiction; many of the people involved in it were influenced one way or another by science fiction, even if they hadn't read it. And so we in a real sense, we science fiction writers and readers helped create the present world. In a sense we also helped destroy our own, at least the type of science fiction that appeared in the 1940s. As time went on, there was a reaction - and perhaps we can date it from the invention of the atomic bomb, or its first use in 1945. As a matter of fact, we had predicted it: the atom bomb was a very easy thing to predict. Cleve Cartmill in 1944 wrote a story called Deadline, which was sufficiently accurate in its description of the atom bomb and its consequences to get himself and John Campbell investigated by military intelligence. Naturally, they found nothing out of the way, but it does show just exactly how accurate the discipline a science fictional imagination can be. Heinlein himself wrote Blowups Happen in 1941, which realistically describes what an atomic energy plant might be like, even though the reality is different in some ways. He wrote Solution Unsatisfactory under a pen name Anson MacDonald, in which he accurately predicted the nuclear stalemate that followed the invention of the atomic bomb, and did that even before the invention of the atomic bomb. Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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Nevertheless, although some science fiction enthusiasts, including myself, thought that the atomic bomb would bring about a vast increase in science fictional audience, it brought about only a small increase really. And as time went on and more and more of the science fictional predictions came to reality, its effect on increasing the sales of science fiction magazines proved increasingly minimal. Well, now that sounds decreasingly minimal. It did less and less good. There were several reasons for this: in the first place, science fiction did increase and intensify, but not in the magazine direction. In the late '40s and early '50s the hardcover publishers began to put out science fiction novels. Science fiction began to appear with increasing frequency in softcovers, the paperbacks. And there were new magazines: one, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, originally just The Magazine of Fantasy, appeared in 1949; and another, Galaxy, appeared in 1950. The former was under the editorship of J. Francis McComas and Anthony Boucher; the second was under the editorship of Horace Gold. Both represented reactions to Campbell's Astounding. In both cases there was a greater tendency to dismiss the engineering aspect of science fiction. The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction emphasized literary quality, style - the mere fact that they had the word "fantasy" in the title showed that they were less interested strict science fiction. Horace Gold was interested in more in the reaction to scientific advance than to the scientific advance itself, which made in some cases for more sophisticated stories. For instance, Wyman Guin wrote a story called Beyond Bedlam, which described a world in which schizophrenia was handled by allowing everybody to have more than one personality alternately in their bodies; Alfred Bester wrote The Demolished Man, an extraordinarily interesting novel and an unusual one which detailed the kind of society that would follow if telepathy were commonplace; Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth published their novel Gravy Planet, which was eventually, which eventually appeared in book form as Space Merchants, in which a detailed picture of an overcrowded society in which advertising was dominant, was pictured. These were not Campbell-type stories. Once again, the center of interest had moved away from scientists themselves towards society. It wasn't back to the adventurous hero; it was towards society. Science fiction became even more socially significant. And Campbell's Astounding, while continuing to be the most successful single magazine in the field, was no longer unchallenged. Now and to the present day there are three important magazines in the field, which maintaining the position it started with: Astounding Science Fiction has changed its name to Analog. Galaxy has had a number of editors, as has had The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but in both cases the original orientation is essentially still there. Galaxy is still more interested in what we might call social satire, the Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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pictures of societies under radically different conditions than our own; Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is still interested in emphasizing style and is perhaps a little more experimental than the other two magazines, a little more apt to publish the stories which one can with only difficulty recognize as science fiction. And all three serve the public well. Nevertheless, all three are also only marginally successful from a financial standpoint: science fiction remains today, magazine science fiction remains today where it was in 1938 - that magazine is fortunate if it can be slightly in the black. And yet, science fiction on the whole has managed to spread out both extensively and intensively. We live now in a world which takes science fiction for granted, a world which science fiction helped create. An indication of the manner in which the science fiction world of the 1940s became the real world of the 1960s can be taken from a personal example. I could have written an article on colonization of the Moon in the 1940s, and I could also have written the very same article in the 1960s. The difference is this: in the 1940s I would have been able to publish the article only in Astounding Science Fiction; in the 1960s I could and did publish the article in The New York Times - same article, but what had been only a science fictional idea only smiled at by "sensible" people, was now thoroughly accepted in even the most respectable of the publications. In addition, another indication of the broadening scope of science fiction acceptance is the fact that hardcover and softcover publications of science fiction increased steadily through the 1960s. What's more, the visual media also were represented: as early as 1947, I believe, Destination Moon appeared as a movie. Robert Heinlein had been involved in it writing the story. Chesley Bonestell, the great science fiction realist illustrator - in other words, he illustrated otherplanetary scenes with science fiction interest but in a thoroughly scientific manner -was also involved. The number of science fictional movies that appeared after Destination Moon were for the large part rather primitive; but increasingly, one would find major productions of value: War of the Worlds, for instance. And then in 1967 perhaps there appeared Fantastic Voyage, and later still what is until now the real climax of the science fictional movie, 2001, on which Arthur Clarke worked. In television too there have been increasing examples of science fiction, of which the best obviously - I say obviously because to me it's obvious - was Star Trek, which for three seasons gathered an enormous following; not enough to keep it on indefinitely (nothing can stay on television indefinitely) but certainly much larger than the magazines ever had. Indeed, the magazines themselves were directly competed with in a new way: increasingly there are collections of original stories appearing in anthology form in Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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softcovers or even in hard covers, and more and more of these are appearing periodically. For instance, Damon Knight edits Orbit, which is a collection of original science fiction stories. Robert Silverberg is now going to put out an annual collection of original science fiction stories published by Doubleday. This is important because one needs to have what we might call room for education of science fiction writers. The science fiction magazines not only served as a source of science fiction, but also as a proving ground for science fiction writers. A magazine that comes out every month and has to have four or five short stories in every issue offers an unexampled opportunity for the writing amateur to practice on and eventually make his mark. If the magazines failed, if people were expected to write only novels, it would be more difficult than it sounds: a novel is a large investment of time and effort and represents a huge jump for the amateur. The anthology of originals will supplement the magazines in that respect and even eventually perhaps, though I hope not because I myself may have a sentimental attachment to the magazines, eventually perhaps replace them. There is a drain on science fiction writers these days: that is, there is a greater tendency for the magazine science fiction writer to switch to the movies or to television. There is a tendency to switch to science writing: the American public is more interested in science than it used to be, and it reads more nonfiction on science. On the other hand, there is also an influx of a new kind of writer now; a writer who is not primarily interested in science even - maybe even anti-science - but who recognizes in science fiction an unexampled market for novel ideas, for experimentation. We have what we now call the new wave, composed of stories that represent experimentation, which are daring not only in their ideas but in their forms and in their treatments. And we have writers, such as Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, Roger Zelazny, J. G. Ballard, and others whose stories might not have sold at all in the 1940s and 1950s but are now doing very well. This is not to say that there aren't authors today who aren't writing stories in the strict Campbell tradition: Ben Bova for instance; Larry Niven - in fact, Larry Niven's recent Dream World might easily have been written by Hal Clement in the early 1940s. To me, however, the real climax of science fiction is the fact that on July 20th Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon. I was watching on television; and the appearance of Neil Armstrong in his spacesuit, the spaceship from which he descended, the quality of the terrain - everything about it was precisely what I had been reading about in the 1940s, precisely what I have seen in science fiction illustrations, precisely what I saw in Destination Moon. The world of the 1940s that I had been Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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so immersed in had come to actual life exactly in 1969. That, to me, was my climax in science fiction.


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Science Fiction And The Mainstream: A Lecture By John Brunner

Science Fiction And The Mainstream: A Lecture By John Brunner John Brunner collected his first rejection slip at 13 and sold his first paperback novel while he was still in school. Today, only some 40 years old, he has written more than 60 books, creating such novels as The Jagged Orbit; Stand on Zanzibar, which won a Hugo Award in 1969; and The Sheep Look Up. In England, where Brunner lives, science fiction never has been so rigorously segregated as in the United States; and he is unusually well-equipped to discuss science fiction and the mainstream. Let me get one thing clear straight away: for me the label “science fiction” is primarily a book seller’s convenience - it tells the guy who runs the store on which particular shelf he should put this particular book. I’m not a science fiction writer, (quotes on and off); I’m a writer, punt. I have done practically everything that one can do in the writing field short of technical manuals and advertising copy; and I suppose if you count jacket blurbs as ad copy, I’ve even done that. Let me, in fact, read you a science fiction poem to illustrate this point that there is no discontinuity in my own mind between the different things that I do. It’s called What We Have Here, because I found scrawled up in a hallway of a slum apartment building in New York in 1968 “What we have here is a failure to communicate.” “When those creatures who have men for ancestors set off in the amber glow of the dying galaxy in search of fellow mourners for its funeral, they came very shortly to Arcturus and there found bones in heaps around machines which had been listening to the sky a million years; and likewise found at Regulus and Rigel and Deneb and Polaris and Denebola and Canopus and Capella and Achernar and 60 systems in the Magellanic clouds, bones, piled up bones; and electronic ears, listening and listening while no one spoke.” I know some people find it strange that a science fiction writer should also be a poet of some small standing. But to me it is not in the least puzzling, because for example I admire above all contemporary British writers Anthony Burgess, whose most outstanding quality is his versatility. It is not that he can be relied on every time to produce a unique masterpiece; it’s far more that everything he does, from his historical novel about Shakespeare to his fine one-volume guide to Joyce’s work, in everything he does he displays an unfailing level of competence and craftsmanship. And when it comes to what Dale Mullen has so graphically called the science fiction ghetto, one has to recognize that it’s of relatively recent creation. People


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who read Anthony Burgess’s work take it for granted that since he is a talented novelist living in a world that’s been changed out of recognition by the impact of science and technology, he should now and then hit on a science fiction theme, as he did in for example A Clockwork Orange. And this I think is the way it ought to be. In earlier times I don’t honestly believe there was any discontinuity between the audience that Doyle’s books reached – whether he was writing the Sherlock Holmes cannon or his historical novels – I honestly don’t believe that The Lost World, which is an out-and-out science fiction novel, startled or displeased his readers. Granted, there may have been some difference in the audience between H. G. Wells’s socially conscious novels of the present day and his scientific romances; but I’m certain equally there was a very considerable overlap. It seems sensible from this to assume that there is always an audience for fantastic and marvelous tales. And in fact, if one looks back at the historical record, it makes far better sense to try and trace a continuity of an audience of this kind than it does to try and trace some kind of literary genealogy in which a writer of one generation specializing in or dabbling in marvel tales influenced directly a writer of the following generation. I would say, in short, that The Voyages of Sir John Mandeville, which were the equivalent of the bestseller back in the Middle Ages, would be far closer to the linear tradition that gave rise to science fiction than would, for example, Bishop Godwin’s book about Domingo Gonsales’ voyage to the moon. In each generation there is a greater or lesser interest in fantastic and marvelous events. Some expansive cultures are excited about strange far-off places and future times. Others, perhaps more introverted, perhaps more frightened, tend to shy away from the strange. But the continuity of the audience for fantastic literature has come down through the ages, right the way back to Lucian of Somasata and on through, oh one might mention Gulliver’s Travels; one might mention Rider Haggard’s She. Essentially, the impulse seems to be the same, although the nature in which it does manifest varies according to the culture. It is, I think, absolutely no coincidence that regular readers of science fiction also enjoy historical novels, such as Mary Reno’s novels about Theseus, The Bull From the Sea. I think it is also no coincidence that the only definitive biographical novel about Roger Bacon, Doctor Mirabilis, has been written by a man who got his grounding in science fiction – by James Blish. I myself have a tremendous interest in periods of history which I was not taught much when I was at school because they were out of fashion and didn’t seem to relate directly to our present-day culture. But the inclination towards science Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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fiction tends to imply also an inclination towards the fantastic, the marvelous, the extraordinary; and the barriers between science fiction, so-called, and the mainstream not only of literature but of entertainment in general, are being very steadily eroded, thanks particularly I would say to the use of what we would formerly have called science fiction imagery in television series like The Avengers or in movies like the Bond thrillers. What would a few years ago have been dismissed as hopelessly fantastic is done so realistically that one is convinced these gadgets could exist in present time. Still, more important in the erosion of the barriers between science fiction and the rest of fiction is a rapprochement of styles, which is and has been for some years very conspicuous. On the one hand, one might sight people from outside the field, like Kurt Vonnegut and Anthony Burgess who have used science fiction themes. Equally, on the other side, one might sight people inside science fiction who have used techniques drawn from elsewhere: Jimmy Ballard in England, for example, has drawn quite heavily on stylistic effects, some of which can be traced back to Jorge Luis Borges, and many of which are reflected in contemporary poetry. Brian Aldiss has made a deliberate adaptation of Joyce’s most extreme styles in the book of his called Barefoot In the Head. And for me, this is an excellent thing. While it is true that the standard chronological narrative form has served writers whose shoestrings I am not worthy to unlatch, it is equally true that the matter and the manner must be matched in whatever kind of writing. For many years science fiction has been stylistically rather conservative. In the hands of Wells, who was not writing category sf, it was not. I think it is an extremely healthy trend that the stylistic techniques evolved in the so-called mainstream are now being applied to science fiction, just as I feel it is very healthy that writers in the mainstream are falling upon science fiction themes, and instead of treating them with the disdain which was typical perhaps as recently at 20 years ago, are according them as much intensity, as much application, and as much imagination as the more contemporary subjects, the more conventional subjects, I would say, to which they have also applied their craft. There is one quite serious problem, of course, which develops when one attempts to apply experimental or so-called “way out” techniques to science fiction. Many people in science fiction are excellent on science and not so good on the literary side. I’d like to see us go back to the original meaning of the word “masterpiece” – it was the piece of work which an apprentice had to produce at the end of his time in order to prove to his teachers that he was a complete master of the techniques of his specialty and was fit to go out and teach them to other people. After that he was free to do and do his own thing. And in connection with what’s been so often termed the New Wave in science fiction, I’d like to underline one Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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extremely important point: before one breaks the rules in a field where giants have walked, one must know why those rules were created in the first place. The example which I usually adduce is to say that if it were not for the fact that Picasso was one of the half-dozen great portrait painters of his generation, he could never have become the seminal influence which he is on modern art. I myself have tried to adopt this particular posture in my own work. I find, as I said at the beginning, no discontinuity in my own mind between the various types of things that I do. I’ve written novels like Stand On Zanzibar and The Jagged Orbit which involve some quite unconventional narrative techniques; and yet I would not claim that these are particularly new - they are adaptations. I would further say that I have shown in some sense I can do the standard narrative bit standing on my head. In fact, I go to these more exotic narrative techniques primarily in order to make points which simply can not be made in any other way in my estimation. A book like Double, Double, which is an updated horror story; a book like Timescoop, which is an, I suppose, a kind of science fiction black comedy, belongs to me in the same continuum of my work as do the more literarily ambitious and pyrotechnically novels such as Stand On Zanzibar. I find, therefore, that the term New Wave is basically an optical illusion. The style one adapts presumably is the one which is best adapted to the material one is working with. But I stress, before breaking rules one must, absolutely must understand why those rules were made in the first place; otherwise, there is a tremendous risk of confusing and even losing the reader. Let me again refer to my own experience vis a vis the audience for science fiction. There was a time when, if I went to a party and with a stranger, I got into the usual “what do you do/what do you do” routine. And I said, “I write;” and she said – it could be a he, but it was usually due to trying to chat up an attractive bird – she said, “Really, what kind of thing do you write?” I’d say, “Mostly science fiction.” There would be one of two responses: either she’d say, “Oh groovy, I read a lot of science fiction; I never met anybody who wrote it before,” which would be fine; or else there would be a dead pause, and she’d say, “Oh, I don’t read much science fiction, I’m afraid.” But that I think has changed, because now the response is far more likely to be, “Oh groovy, I saw 2001,” or possibly The Andromeda Strain or something of that kind. And I must say that this is very much of a conversation stopper, because on this basis the person in question almost invariably thinks that he or she knows all there is to be known about science fiction; and this is a terribly false impression. In fact, science fiction is infinitely wider than most people’s preconception of it; and it’s an integral part of the spectrum of fiction. As I’ve already said, it makes


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far better sense to view the continuity of the audience for tales of wonder, marvel tales, whatever you call them, than it does to try and trace a direct literary genealogy for the writers of the present day. Similarly, living as we do in a world which is likely to change out of recognition while our backs are turned, we should not be surprised to find that visitors from another star system feature prominently in Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut; we should not be at all surprised to find that what were known as cyborgs a few years ago in the pulp science fiction magazines turn up in novels like John Hearse’s The Child Buyer. And equally, we should not in the least be astonished to discover that somebody like Philip K. Dick in The Man In the High Castle has taken the full range of contemporary formal narrative structure and applied it to a world in which history turned out totally different from what it did in real life. If you are not familiar with The Man In the High Castle, I should indicate that it is set in the world where the Axis powers conquered the United States. Well, these rather brief indications I think could be summed up by saying that so long as there is an overlap for the audience of various types of fiction, one can not possibly hope to create a definition of science fiction, pure and simple, which is any more exclusive than the traditional rain storm. For me, this is a very good thing indeed. I come to science fiction conventions; I travel to many countries; meet science fiction readers who speak diverse languages, who’ve read my books in Italian or Portuguese or German or Swedish; and one factor remains constant: I get feedback. I would far rather have feedback from people whose horizons are not limited by reading nothing but science fiction. It impresses me a great deal more if the person who has just said, “I like such and such a book” of mine, then proceeds to discuss poetry or the novel in general or the question of history or the question of politics, than if the person then proceeds to discuss nothing else but the work of my fellow science fiction writers. I’m a great believer in broadening horizons to the maximum possible. And I have learned the hard way that it is literally out of the question for a science fiction writer to imagine anything more extraordinary than what is bound to appear in tomorrow morning’s paper. I hope very much that under the impact of the growing interchange between category science fiction and mainstream fiction the walls of what Dale Mullen called the science fiction ghetto will finally be eroded away for good and all, because I like to go wherever my imagination takes me. We do, let’s face it, live in a world which to our grandparents, even to our parents, would be impossibly fantastic; and yet, our present and our past coexist to a degree which has never been possible before in history. Oh for goodness’ sake, what would Geoffrey Chaucer have thought if he’d known that his Canterbury Tales


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were going to become a long-running musical play? Our present and our past overlap, and so too does our future. And it’s been very rightly said, “It behooves us all to be interested in the future, because that is where we’re going to spend the rest of our lives.


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Theme In Science Fiction: A Discussion Between Gordon Dickson & James Gunn

Theme In Science Fiction: A Discussion Between Gordon Dickson & James Gunn Gordon Dickson is a hardy, hard-working, hard-living 50-year-old Minnesotan, born in Canada of Scots ancestry. He studied creative writing at the University of Minnesota, and has been a full-time writer since 1950. He has written more than 200 short stories and some 30 novels, one of which, Soldier, Ask Not, won a Hugo Award in 1964. He was my predecessor as President of the Science Fiction Writers of America; and like me, he is greatly concerned about the role of theme in science fiction. [James Gunn’s questions are italicized; Gordon Dickson’s answers appear in roman text] What are the distinguishing characteristics that really distinguish mainstream fiction from science fiction, or science fiction from mainstream fiction? Well, by and large, it’s actually the concern of science fiction versus the concern of mainstream fiction. The hallmark of science fiction has actually always been its theme. The theme of science fiction has always been a far-out matter – of hardcore science fiction; and it’s is far-outedness that attracts the solid science fiction reader and repels the occasional or the mainstream reader. The casual science fiction reader finds the concepts unsettling or disturbing. Well, generally, the job of the science fiction reader is to put faces on daydreams and nightmares, both. The science fiction writer? The science fiction writer – this is essentially what he does. And a lot of people are shy of having faces put on their daydreams, self-conscious about it; or, and scared of having faces put on their nightmares; in other words, having them rendered realistic. Do you think it has something to do with the fact that the casual reader finds in science fiction that the basis for what he believes are fixed and sound have been cut out from under him?


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By and large, this is it, yes. The whole thematic approach of science fiction is to take something so far out of context that there is no familiar ground to stand on. Now, this is an advantage for, as I say, the core reader; and it’s an advantage for the writer himself, because he gets it so far out of context that its everyday connotations don’t mess the picture up. But as I say, it’s bothersome – or rather you said – it’s bothersome to the occasional reader because he finds no place where he can stand. What were some of the themes of science fiction which traditionally have, science fiction has dealt with, uniquely? Well, there’s quite a list of them. To begin with, there’s the theme of far traveling: the wonders of the Earth and the universe. Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. This has always been with us; and this is one of the main and early themes of science fiction. In this kind of story, the reader finds himself in a place where customs are different, where change is what he must accommodate himself to. That’s right, where things wonderful and terrible are happening. And of course he takes this voyage from the security of his own reading chair. But if it’s too real, if it’s too different, if it implies a reality that may come to pass, again it frightens him. Or it is capable of frightening him. Time travel, for example, is a case – it’s all very well to think about traveling in time; it sounds rather exciting. How about going back and seeing the pyramids being built; how about going forward and seeing the wonders of the future. But you start to entertain the thought of what if somebody went back and killed your grandfather, and you never, as a result, were never born. And the concept becomes uncomfortable. And then there’s the time travel into the future, as in The Time Machine; and this can be just as unsettling, don’t you think? Well, yes the whole idea, it’s… Usually when these ideas first come out, it’s, when they come on stage completely without warning, they have a tendency to frighten and attract. Usually the people who write them and read them in their original forms are people who are looking for mind stretching possibilities. But the average person tends to come back from that. For example, one of the strong themes is the wonders of science, the wonderful inventions. Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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Here again, Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the submarine, so on, so forth. At first gasp they seem interesting. But then the question is, you know, what would happen if: what if the Nautilus should pop up out of nowhere… And sink our ship. [G laughs] That’s right [D laughs], ram it and sink it. And as a matter of fact, of course, Nautilus-like ships made most of the difference in the World War I and World War II Atlantic sea traffic, when they did become real monsters, the submarines. The mad scientist is the special case of the wonderful invention. Yes. In fact, well, he’s almost a theme in himself, simply because of the very strong things that have been done, the very early things that have been done: The Island of Dr. Moreau, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man – all these were, well, classics in their own right. And they all centered around the, well, around the line that crops up in the movie The Invisible Man: “He meddled with things that man was not meant to know.” Beyond that, one goes into the kind of terror man has, I think, of the not just the scientist himself but the product of his science, the technology, and technology out of control. Yes, the galloping technology - technology is a monster in itself. This is something of course that has began to worry the hardcore science fiction writers and their readers as themes, as I say, in the early ‘50s. It began to hit home to the more general public, well, in the mid-‘60s and even recently. But the concept of what might come out of Pandora’s box. Oh yes. The old question of perhaps it would be safer if we didn’t have scientists around – they might uncover things that are too dangerous. Pandora’s box, of course is an old fable, but it’s still with us and very much still with us. As I remember, the last thing out of Pandora’s box was hope. That’s right.


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There still, you know, is in science fiction this theme of hope, is it not, in the terms of progress? Yes. Generally speaking, people who are close to science, or people who are close to the science element in science fiction, maintain their hope and maintain their faith in science. The… you find them going around and explaining that while there are bad effects, most of the good effects are yet to come. H. G. Wells, I suppose, really was the great prophet of progress who has made progress one of his great concerns in some of his early works, such as The Time Machine. That’s right, he was… Well, of course he was not the hard-science science fiction writer that Verne was, and admitted he wasn’t. Both men pointed out this difference in their work. And he was a utopianist: for example, in his Men Like Gods, in which a number of people of his day are sort of trapped forward into time and find a sort of superhuman race living that has gone beyond ordinary times, troubles, worries, so on and so forth. Now, of course, this has been matched, this utopian attitude of Wells has gone on to be matched by a dystopian or anti-utopian attitude by, during the last 20 or 30 years, by a lot of our writers. Incidentally, it is interesting to notice that the, essentially in the field, there are more centrists among the writers – Pohl as in contrast to Vonnegut, for example. While they wrote dystopian, while Pohl wrote dystopian, anti-utopian novels, they are much less humanly bitter than what has been written by a lot of people who are outside the mainstream of science fiction itself, like Huxley. It’s almost as if the mainstream writers were saying man inevitably is doomed by his circumstances, whereas the science fiction writers say, “Things will be difficult, but by god, man will blunder through.” Yeah. [D laughs] It’s awfully hard, of course, for a science fiction writer that sees an infinite possibility of, well, an infinity of possibilities of worlds for men from the alternate universes, to an unlimited future in any one of countless directions, to see men as being doomed. It’s almost as if he, the statistics against it were too heavy. One of the things that came out of Pandora’s box, as I recall, was war, was it not?


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That’s right. Let’s see, this has been one of the major themes of science fiction, the Armageddon, in particular: the picture of a last war, of final war that will sort of clear the stage beyond which possibly there may be a new and better human race emerging. We can go back to H. G. Wells for that as well, can we not, for The War In the Air and Things to Come… That’s right. …and I think even When the Sleeper Wakes. Yes, they’re all very good examples. And of course Things to Come is almost a definitive example there was at the time – not only as a book but as a movie. And as you know this obsessed people when World War II came along. Even before World War II, we got Final Blackout by L. Ron Hubbard. And after World War II, the number of cataclysmic stories, stories in which the world is wiped out by war as well as by other means – we’ll get to that in a moment… Classic story by Ted Sturgeon called Thunder and Roses… Oh yes, that’s right. …I recall, about the final – it was in 1946 or ’47, I believe, the launching of an atomic war and the decision by the characters in this particular story to withhold the retaliation so that all mankind will not be wiped out. That’s right. I believe, in fact, he did a song along that... Yes, there is within it I think a song, Thunder and Roses. Yes, that’s right. He said that that’d been done on record. I tried to get him to sing it himself one time up at Milford, and he wouldn’t do it. Beyond war, beyond Armageddon which science fiction as a whole tends to regard as being part of man’s future in some sense; beyond that in a way we have cataclysm, total destruction, which itself is a theme of science fiction. Yes, perhaps the biggest in a way. When Worlds Collide, for example, by Balmer and Wilie; and, oh let me see… No Blade of Grass, of course. Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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By John Christopher. By John Christopher. In which the destruction of… All living things. …all living, all growing things. All growing things, that’s right, yes, which means the world will starve to death. But the idea of the total destruction of the world is not – here, again, this is interesting how time changes things – this isn’t anywhere near as shocking to us now as it was when these books were first written. One of the persistent themes in science fiction have been the unusual powers that man might develop, the super powers – they might even be considered to go back to the original myths of, fairy tales of mankind. Yes. Well, The Invisible Man that we talked about earlier is a good example of one. The cloak of invisibility. Yes. This is the, one of the ancient dreams, you know: “If I could somehow be there but nobody could see me” type of thing. All, almost all the wish fulfillment stories… The kind of seven-league boots might be on… That’s right, teleportation, oh, such as in Harry Harrison’s Matter Transmitter novel recently… Oh, what are some of the others… There’s… The mental control over people, for instance, or things or events. My own book, The Reluctant Witch, and… The Reluctant Witch is a very good example.


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And The World of Null-A, in which we have superpowers transmission, teleportation and telekinesis as well. This concept of strange talents, the development of one aspect of superior ability in an individual or in a group of individuals merges in a sense into another theme: the concept of the superior man, the superman, who is superior in all ways. The superman is a bundle of strange talent, or a bundle of higher talents. Usually the difficulty in dealing with a superman – well, the basic difficulty is the one that’s been stated a number of times; and that is that just as an ape can’t imagine a man, it’s impossible for a man to really imagine a superman. What you usually do is hunt for a different dimension, a different added dimension to him. In Dorsai, the first book of the Dorsai cycle, I have an effective superman in the hero Donald Graham. What he is, he’s an intuitional superman: in other words, he doesn’t have to follow through the chain of logic, a to b to c and so on to z; he can jump directly from a to z. In other words, z is implied by a. Beyond the superman, we have another theme: the theme of the alien, the person who is completely – or the creature who is completely unlike man. The alien has been a fascinating thematic field for science fiction writers for some time. It opened two doors: well the beginning actually, back with War of the Worlds… H. G. Wells’s... H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds… …one of the early novels. Yes. And the contemporary example of that might be Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters. Yes, The Puppet Masters. Again, we have the invasion of an inimical alien force that is intending to take us over one way or another. H. G. Wells’s Martians were simply out to conquer Earth; Heinlein’s puppet masters were out to dominate and


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parasitize, become parasites on individual human beings. And as a spine-chilling exercise, it was very excellent. On the other hand, simply because the Martians in H. G. Wells’ story came earlier, I think they had more shock value, since they came on a readership that was really essentially unprepared for this That, I think, was the first novel of alien, of aliens at all… I think so. Certainly of alien invasion. We have strange creatures, but we don’t have extraterrestrials, which is what these were. We have… Well, of course, the alien invasion, the alien attack, the alien as an inimical being, is only half of the alien contact question. Another question, one that is very interesting, is the matter of the aliens from which we learn, or the aliens who instruct us, or simply the aliens who are equal to us but whom we don’t understand, or who misunderstand us. Or whom we can interrelate with in some useful fashion, if we can just learn to live with them. That’s right. Stories like Murray Leinster’s First Contact. And I think you wrote a story Dolphin’s Way. Oh, Dolphin’s Way, yes. This is one in which the more intelligent aliens, the more advanced aliens from the stars finally land on Earth to give a helping hand, but they walk right past the human being and extend the helping hand to the dolphins… Who may be, and is in their estimation, more intelligent and more promising than human beings. More civilized. More civilized, right.


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And then of course there’s this matter of alien environment, which is totally fascinating. It just occurs to me, we didn’t discuss this earlier, but what’s this recent novel by Joanna Russ? And Chaos… And Chaos Died. And Chaos Died. This is essentially an alien environment novel. There is a story I think by Clifford Simak, the concept of the lopers – a kind of creature, a wolf-like creature of super ability on Jupiter. That’s right, able to withstand the gravity and the pressure and everything like that. And the cold and so forth. And two, a human being and a dog who get transplanted in sense – their mental states – into these creatures to explore the surface of Jupiter; and then they find the experience so, so thrilling, so rewarding that they don’t want to go back. Yes. That story by the way is a fine example of Cliff’s particular talent for handling the situation, because he describes the surface of Jupiter as if it was, as it’s seen through human eyes – and it’s totally forbidding. And then he describes it as seen through the eyes of these… Lopers. …lopers – and it’s completely enthralling. And very few writers could do that off the cuff. One of the basic novels of an alien in an alien environment is Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity, in which the basic problem is an adaptation to a different environment. Yes. Of course the thing about Mission of Gravity, like all of Hal Clement’s books, is that it was so thoroughly researched and so thoroughly worked out: the physical science in it is unimpeccable… not unimpeccable – it’s impeccable. [D


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laughs] Very few writers will go to the trouble to work things out in this tremendous detail. As you know, the heroes were something like little 6” to 9” woolly caterpillars, but about as strong as, they say, a full-grown polar bear would be on this world, simply because they operate under this tremendously crushing gravity. At the same time they were very vulnerable in their home territory: if they reared up half their length, they risked a fatal fall. Because the gravity was several hundred times that we’re familiar with. Yes, that’s right. And the story itself, as I recall it, deals with the trip to the equator where the rapid spinning of this world neutralized much of the effect of gravity, and it was only, what, 2 or 3 times that on Earth. That’s right. And these little woolly caterpillar fellows from near the pole had to overcome all sorts of old habits, because they were like men on the Moon – they discovered they could jump amazing heights and fall amazing distances without being hurt. And this was against instinct, you know: they weren’t used to, as I say, lifting their head more than a fraction of an inch off the ground. The value of this for the science fiction reader, I think, was that he begins to wonder what kinds of prejudices, preconceptions he has which are equally conditioned by the kind of environment which he finds himself. That’s exactly it. You start to consider how it must be like under that kind of gravitation, and you almost have to find yourself considering what it’s like under your own gravitation, and realizing that, how it has conditioned not merely man but all the animal and vegetable life here on earth. This is why the themes of this sort is so valuable – we’ll get into that later. One of the persistent themes that has been common in science fiction ever since R.U.R., I think, the Karel Capek play, man and the machine has run throughout. Man and the machine – man of course… Machine followed the same pattern that men and science ran: at first it looked marvelous; then there was worry whether the


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machine would run away with men, which as a matter of fact several hundred years ago it threatened during the Industrial Revolution, when… Then there came another honeymoon in which the machine looked like it would solve all of man’s problems, or at least a great many of them. And R.U.R.., the play from which the word, in which the word “robots” first appeared, opened up a whole new galaxy of science fictional possibilities, actually. From this has come oh, a number of stories: Isaac Asimov’s stories on robotics… I, Robot and The Rest Of the Robots. That’s right. And more important is his own thinking on the robotic question from which came the three laws of robotics, which has been incorporated in the thinking of most people who were seriously working with robotics nowadays. Beyond man and the machine, I think the concern of science fiction in large is to consider man’s total environment: the kind of thing that he constructs around him or in which he finds himself, in which he must become a part of in some way. This is something that of course is – our present environment has begun to become a concern generally. Science fiction attacked this from two angles, got concerned with it as a theme from two angles: one was man and his environment on Earth here – would he dominate it, would it dominate him; and also, how would man shape up or face up to alien environments, environments on other worlds – would he dominate them or would they dominate him. I had two short stories now in which we see human children essentially being captured by the alien environment. And there’s been some novels on it… A novel like Frank Herbert’s Dune, for instance. Dune is an excellent example of man and environment. Here is a case where man dominates the alien environment by living under almost inhuman stresses. We have a completely desert planet where life is only possible by conserving literally every drop of water and using and reusing and reusing it. Right. In part, the environment gets down to the man-made environment that we find in a story such as Fritz Leiber’s Coming Attraction, and even a book like Pohl and Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants.


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That’s right. The whole pattern of man’s own environment becoming either an enemy or a friend is something that began to concern writers in the early 1950s. And it was given quite a work-out at that time, as a matter of fact. Well, with, it trended into a concern I think for man and his society, which is another theme which springs out of man and environment – perhaps a special case, beginning with a work we’ve already mentioned, Aldus Huxley’s Brave New World; George Orwell’s 1984; but perhaps even more a book like Robert Heinlein’s Stranger In a Strange Land. Yes. In fact, this is very interesting: this is the human being in an alien environment given a twist, where the human being is essentially the alien: the human that’s been brought up on Mars, and the alien environment is Earth as we know it. And it is a concern for society in which the individual is having an impact upon this society, is actually altering the society, instead of, as in The Space Merchants, being a victim of the society. Yes. We see, we see the individual with society as his antagonist. And in Stranger In a Strange Land, we see him win. One consistent theme, a final consistent theme that man, that science fiction writers have used, is the theme of man in the future, almost as if they were writing a future history of mankind. This is the, in a way one of the largest and one of the most recurrent themes in science fiction. There’s a great, there’s almost infinite possibilities in looking into the future for story material and for story ideas and for locales in which stories can be put. It’s possible to step forward and to clear your idea or your theme of your idea or story from any present-day connotations: isolate it completely, put it in a new context, and examine it with completely fresh eyes. How does science fiction use these themes that we’ve discussed in reacting against the fictional content that the stories contain? Well, this is a fascinating part of it. Science fiction – this is a fascinating part about science fiction as a genre: it offers an opportunity to the writer that he finds in no other literary area to take a very hot present-day question and put it essentially in a cool and separate chamber where he can make a statement about it Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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or examine it or offer alternatives to it in such a form that his readers, who are already conditioned to react one way or another to it, won’t be put off by the first word they hear. In other words, they will be forced to look at it. And this possibly is one of the greatest services that science fiction as a literature can offer – is this opportunity to the author, to the reader, and as a matter of fact to literature itself. One aspect I think of what we’ve been talking about is the kind of viewpoint on man that science fiction is able to take, the kind of view from space… Yes. …the kind of view from an alien viewpoint, the kind of view from the future, all of which enable science fiction to look upon mankind in a way in which he has never been looked upon before. That’s right. The dispassionate angle of observation. These things have always been theoretically possible in contemporary novels; but the trouble is, your reader is so conditioned to the connotations of… of problem expressing present-day terms, that he can hardly be brought to look at it dispassionately. He can from the science fictional point of view; and as a matter of fact, most hardcore science fiction readers read it precisely because they can get this long view. And this is the essence of science fiction. I would say so, yes. It’s the essence of the theme in science fiction: the theme, as I say, is the backbone of the genre.


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New Directions In Science Fiction: A Seminar With Harlan Ellison

New Directions In Science Fiction: A Seminar With Harlan Ellison Harlan Ellison is a phenomenon. There is no other way to describe him. In fact, to describe him - 5’5”, 135 pounds, 36 years old, brown hair, blue eyes, nonsleeping, contemporary, an actor playing the role of Harlan Ellison – is to falsify him. Like a volcano, he must be experienced. Harlan happened, and science fiction should be grateful. It did not always seem so: not when Harlan was an aggressive teenage fan; nor when he was a bantam novice pro. And there are writers and editors in the field today who do not feel grateful. Harlan has said that science fiction saved him from becoming quite different. They would say, “But who will save science fiction from Harlan?” Not everyone appreciates volcanoes, even little ones. Harlan’s fiction is like himself: liberated and energetic. He is a salesman for what he believes in and what he likes. He is against war in Vietnam, injustice, discrimination, and ignorance. He believes frequently in marriage, technique, and the New Wave in science fiction. If he has held half the jobs and gone through half the experiences he claims, he has lived the lives of two men already. He has written not only science fiction and fantasy but true confessions; westerns; mysteries; street gang, juvenile delinquency, and men’s magazine stories; interviews; reviews; television scripts, and motion picture screenplays. And he is an editor: A few years ago he told writers he was going to publish an anthology of original science fiction, and he wanted to see stories that were too bold, too frank, too far out for other publications. The result: the explosive, critically acclaimed, best-selling Dangerous Visions. I asked Harlan to talk about new directions in science fiction. Where is science fiction today and why? Where is it heading? [James Gunn’s and the students’ questions are italicized; Harlan Ellison’s answers appear in roman text.] We seem to find ourselves in the midst of a revolution. It’s a revolution of thought that’s as important and is up-ending as the Industrial revolution was, sociologically speaking. We’re coming into a time now when all the old -isms and philosophies are dying: they don’t seem to work anymore. All the things that mommy and daddy told you and told me were true, were only true in the house. The minute you get out in the street, they aren’t true anymore. The kids in the ghetto have known that all their lives; but now the great white middle class is learning it, and it’s coming a little difficult to the older folks, which is always the way it is. Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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We’re no longer just Kansas or Los Angeles or New York – it’s the whole planet now. They’ve got smog in the Aleutian Islands, man; they’ve got smog in Anchorage, Alaska; they’ve got smog at the polar ice caps – can you believe it, smog at the polar ice caps. There’s no place you can go to hide anymore. So the days of thinking that the Thames or the English Channel or the Rocky Mountains was going to keep you safe from some ding-dong on the other side doesn’t go anymore. A nitwit in Hanoi can blow us all just as dead as a nitwit in Washington. And so we’re beginning to think of ourselves not as just an ethnic animal or a national animal or a local or family kind of animal – we are now a planetary animal. It’s all the dreams of early science fiction coming true: I mean, slowly and with great pain the world is beginning to think of itself as Earth men; and it’s kind of startling to see it happening, because it’s coming out of pain and blood and fire. But I guess that’s where all important revolutions come from. What it is, is that we’re beginning to realize and recognize ourselves as part, literally, of the universe – not just of ourselves and number one, but our responsibility to the entire universe. We throw a cigarette butt down on the grass, or we throw our picnic lunch in a lake – that’s not just us getting rid of our garbage so we don’t have to be burdened with it: man, we are screwing up the ecology; and that’s all the ecology, that’s the whole planet. And that means that we’re thinking in larger terms. So incidentally, the emphasis on ecology now I think is another manifestation of that, even as the manifestation of revolution in so many countries in so many different forms speaks to that. So for this time of unrest, this time of turmoil, with revolution and dawning awareness of ourselves as one with the cosmos, we need a new literature that speaks to this kind of feeling and to these needs. Science fiction, speculative fiction, is speaking to all kinds of people. And I think that’s because now it’s becoming a fiction of the people: in essence, street fiction, which is a very old and a very common term for a fiction of the people, even as the stories that Dickens wrote were written for the penny newspapers, were fiction of the people. Like, I see the trouble in colleges invariably boils down to: the voice of the people is being heard, and people with authority here are saying, “No, we’ve made our decision, we don’t care what the people in the streets say.” And that can no longer work, that can just no longer work. Speculative fiction is emerging because it seems to manage to convey the feeling of the strangeness of the times, the blurring of reality and fantasy in our world. Now, if you don’t think that we’re living in a fantasy time, just say to yourself, the delegate to the United Nations is Shirley Temple, you know, and your head has to Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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go somewhere else. You give people evidence of a slaughter at My Lai, and it’s more horrifying than any work of fiction could be. I mean, how do men who are supposed to be the lineal descendants of Jack Armstrong come to pull the trigger on women and children? How do they do that? You know, you look at the pictures, and you see the mothers trying to throw their babies away, because if they have to die it’s alright, but they don’t want the kids to die; and the babies blown apart in their arms. Is this reality? It can’t be anymore. I mean, we’ve come to another place in our development as human beings. And mainstream fiction, with all of its fusty traditions, can wind up in the cul de sac of Portnoy’s Complaint, which is literally masturbation; or it can go someplace else. And one of the places that it seems to be going is into speculative fiction, where dreams prevail. And the dreams seem more real than the reality these days. And that is what I think is the important gift that science fiction and speculative fiction have for our times. People just instinctively need an order to their universe. You can see it in, from the most primitive tribes to the present. We like a natural order; we like to know the answers, whether it’s in Christianity, or astrology, or Zoroastrianism, or whatever it may be. You know, the Druids, I’m sure, had the right answer too. The answers that we’re getting from the natural orders of the universe today are the wrong answers: they keep telling us that one and one is six. And we go out and try and apply it, and it doesn’t work; and we wind up in more trouble than before. And so people are looking around for new answers, which is why almost every chick in Los Angeles is into astrology, you know what I mean. Science fiction writers, fantasists, are special kinds of dreamers. Their minds come from someplace else; their thoughts are someplace else; they deal with this oneness with the cosmos every day, in every story. And I think that if any fiction can offer us answers, can move us to action, it may well be speculative fiction; maybe not in the same way that Uncle Tom’s Cabin, you know, helped move the Civil War, or Frank Norris’s books moved to social reform in the ‘30s; but perhaps in helping this revolution of thought, of literally opening people’s minds, of unclogging the channels of the detritus, however you pronounce it. I know you already mentioned the fact that science fiction hasn’t taken the stabs quite that Frank Norris took in moving, in trying to move society; and I know you said science fiction is a mirror and a sounding board for society. But I wonder if you think it will ever, or should, take some kind of a path that’s aggressive in trying to move society.


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Well, should, could, and will are three different things. Yeah, I think it should. I think it’s the responsibility of any true artist with the talent to speak to people to help try and change things for the better. I think it’s his duty, it’s his obligation to speak to his times. Whether it will do any good, whether anyone will pay any attention, I don’t know. God knows science fiction has been talking about ecological imbalance and the eco-crash, for god’s sake, for… goes all the way back to Wells. And there’s nothing more terrifying than John Christopher’s No Blade of Grass – and that was done in the early ‘50s. Nobody paid any damn attention to that. We’ve been sounding the clarion call for years, and no one seems to pay attention. Can you give us a couple of examples of writers who are dealing with contemporary issues in science fiction terms? Most notable to my mind right at the moment is Norman Spinrad’s book Bug Jack Baron, in which he deals with the effect of McLuhan media message on masses of people; on the effects of power and the uses of power in terms of media message – power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely, all that kind of nonsense which is, you know, old hat. But he does it in the terms of the medium: I mean, the novel is written the same way you would watch a television show. I mean, it’s, the medium of the book is part of the message of the book. And I think it’s a very effective book. Roger Zelazny is dealing with religion today in a very strange kind of realityfantasy way: he is reexamining the various pantheons of gods - Hindu, Egyptian – in his various novels and bringing them up to date and speaking about them in terms of our times and their relevance therefrom, or thereto, whichever one is correct. It’s difficult trying to pin down the writers who I think personally will have powerful voices, because it’s too early to know: we’ve only been doing this kind of thing for five or six years in the whole history of science fiction. I mean, from the beginning in 1926, science fiction writers always dealt with, you know, problems of ecology, and always dealt with problems of the culture, and always dealt with the effects of science on people, but not in this way, not with this kind of strength, not with this almost pamphleteering kind of messianic urge. Is this what you try to do?


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I’m doing it quite a lot. I’m dealing in… Well, for instance with the last two stories I’ve done, have been about the white man’s stealing the black man’s heritage, his birthright; of turning him into kind of a mocha-colored white man. And I’ve done it in fantasy terms. Pennies Off a Dead Man’s Eyes deals with a black girl who is passing for white; whose father, the black man, has died; and at the funeral, when the funeral is over, she removes the silver dollars from his eyes, thereby consigning him to hell – he can’t get across the river Jordan: the dollars had to pay his way with the man. And a guy who is watching this, who was picked up by the father and calls himself a stray cat, goes after the girl to find out why she did it and doesn’t know that it’s his daughter. And when he finds her, finds out that she’s passing, finds out why she hates the father – because the father rejected her. Yet he, the guy, is an alien from another planet who washed up on our shores. And the black man took him in and helped him learn to pass. And I play the counterpoint of an alien passing as an Earth man against a black girl passing as a white girl. It’s, I think, the strangest story I’ve ever written, because I’ve dealt with this theft of a black man’s birthright in completely symbolic terms and completely fantasy terms. What I’m trying to do in my work is to take the burning issues of our times (he said pompously) and entertainment-ize them, make them interesting to read; yet by the same token, when you get done with them, your gut will somehow have been affected. What place does Dangerous Visions have in this scheme of things? I think what it, the place it has in this current movement or in this current flow of the field is that it’s a rallying point. It’s a demonstration: it was the kind of book that they said could not be done, that no one would publish it; that if it was published, it would be ignored. And it wasn’t – it was a book that received tremendous critical attention and seemed to be one of the first books in the vanguard of this new way of thinking. But I think Dangerous Visions solidified a lot of thinking for a lot of people: that they said, “Yes, we can go in other directions; no, we don’t have to hold on to all the old formulas of science fiction. Yes, we can talk about sex; yes, we can talk about religion; yes, we can talk about labor relations and politics and coprophilia, if we feel like it.” So I think Dangerous Visions opened up doors that people didn’t even know existed. And there are other people who’ve opened up doors similarly: Damon Knight with his Orbit series; Chip Delany is now editing the magazine called Warp, paperback magazine which will do more; there’ve been a few other anthologies and a few other – now some of the magazines are starting to do it, you see, because the magazines were the ones that held it back for so long


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because they were the only markets. And as long as they were being sold on the newsstands, and as long as the mommies of the 14-year-old kids who read them were looking through them, they couldn’t run anything very heavyweight. But now they have to compete; now they have to keep up. And so they’re starting to buy really topical and interesting and gut-wrenching stories. Why did they think it couldn’t be done? Well, you see, what most people fail to realize about science fiction is that essentially it is a pulp medium. It started in the pulps; it’s a commercial fiction; and all of the taboos that have hung on for 30 years, 40 years, with pulp magazines of all kinds – love story magazines, western stories, detective stories – all of them were gathered into the science fiction field. These were all barriers that were imposed by the form, by the medium itself. I mean, a guy in a spaceship could take a 45-year journey from here to Proxima Centauri, and he never had to go to the bathroom once. And you know, girls didn’t have breasts in science fiction stories – god forbid, you know, if there was ever a relationship between a man and a woman, it was as antiseptic as making love in an autoclave. And the stories of Doc Smith, the Lensman stories, are classics of that. And for what they are and what they do they’re great, because they have that great galloping sense of space and adventure and what Sam Moskowitz likes to call the sense of wonder in them. But god knows there isn’t one human being from start to finish. I mean, they’re all cardboard. And so that kind of restriction and taboo and order was built into stories all the way up into the ‘50s, when Tony Boucher and Mick McComas began Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction - they said, “No more of that; let’s start dealing with people and let’s start dealing in literary terms. And let’s stop thinking about it as a pulp medium – let’s start demanding of speculative fiction, science fiction, that which is demanded of all good fiction: that it meet the requirements of literature.” And it’s taken the writers 15, 17 years to finally get to the point where, yes, now… The difference between – I mean, if there’s a New Wave and an old wave, the difference between old wave writers and New Wave writers is that New Wave writers think of themselves as artists; and they are not ashamed of the big A; whereas the others thought of themselves as storytellers and, you know, amusing entertainers. And artists can be storytellers too. The one does not negate the other. What was different about Dangerous Visions?


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Well, the stories were written especially for the book; and so by intent the anthology tried to go some places that anthologies had not gone before. As much vehemence as is put into restrictions on writers, as much as they’re told, “Don’t curse, don’t write about unnatural sex, don’t offend the establishment” by most of the commercial media, that was the same vehemence with which I told the writers, “Get it on, you know, really do it. I really want you to write what you’ve never written before: I want you to just put your stomach on paper.” And I was lucky: out of the 32 writers in the book, maybe 10 knew what I was talking about, and 10 were free enough to actually open and do it. And so with that kind of freedom, and knowing they had that kind of freedom in front, they I think opened their heads more than they would for an ordinary story they were doing. What role do you think, again, Dangerous Visions and Last Dangerous Visions will play in this? Dangerous Visions was good because it was the ice breaker. Again Dangerous Visions is going to put people away: it’s going to twist their minds, because it takes up where the heaviest stories in Dangerous Visions left off. It goes about 50 miles further toward real, complete, total literary freedom in the speculative fiction vein than anything in Dangerous Visions did. And the most impressive writing is being done by not the established writers with great reputations but the young Turks - I mean, guys you may never have even heard of: Ken McCullough, and Jim Hemesath, and Jim Sutherland, and Ed Bryant, and the women – the women, their minds are incredible, you can’t believe it! Ursula LeGuin, and Josephine Saxton – women like that are writing science fiction that’s never been written before, because they’re doing it with that special strange, alien thinking that a woman has when she does it. And it’s brilliant stuff. I expect to get some very strong criticism on the second book. There are some really far-out stories; and that’s, I mean, that’s the best phrase I can think of to use for them. They are very explicit sexually; they are very explicit politically; they are very explicit style-wise. There are no soft, easy ways into any of these stories: they all come at you with their fangs bared and dripping. And I can’t think of anybody who’s ever going to walk away from this book the same way he went to it, even as apparently those who went at Dangerous Visions were changed. What had been the reactions to Dangerous Visions? Well, about 99% awe, joy, delight, approbation. People not thinking it could be done, of course… Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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You see, most of the time people don’t write to you when they like something – they only write to you when they’re ticked off about something, they only write when they’re annoyed about something. Yet I got 2,000, nearly 2,000 letters from people saying thank you – you know, I mean, just that much, “Thank you, we…” One guy wrote, “My life was changed,” which is, you know, insanity too. But college students writing and saying, “I’ve been shacked up with Silas Marner for the last eight months, and I didn’t know people were even writing like this;” and writers writing in. And that’s the important thing: other writers writing in and saying, “My god, we can do it!” You know, and now their whole careers are changed, their lives are changed. And even the people who were annoyed, you know, even the ones that I get crummy letters from – the tone of the letters tells me that I am really jamming them, because Clausewitz was right: it doesn’t matter whether you attack or you retreat, as long as you move. Something happens. Let’s see some life. It was intended, the book was intended to shake things up; and I think that’s what it did. In the process it got an awful lot of critical attention, a lot of critical acclaim; and it wound up on the Best Book list of 17 different newspapers in the country: Chicago Book World put it on its Best Paperbacks of the Year. Sold over 50,000 copies in various editions. It’s been translated into 6 languages. It won more awards than any other science fiction book in the last 25 years. And all in all, it’s pretty nice little job. Where do you think things are going from here in terms of science fiction and what it has to say about the contemporary scene? I think science fiction has some strange anomalies, or anachronisms about it actually: it’s beginning to use literary techniques that were outdated in the ‘30s, now it’s beginning to use them; yet at the same time it has an imaginative content that is light years ahead of the mainstream in fiction. And I think that speculative fiction will continue to borrow the literary techniques of the mainstream, and the mainstream will kind of get a leak-off or bleed-off of imagination; and the two will merge in that way, and they will enrich each other. I think science fiction has now become an important, accepted literary medium, one with, one that’s viable and that’s valid. Q. Alexei Panshin has written a criticism of science fiction a few months ago in the Fantasy and Science Fiction, in which he states an attitude he holds towards science fiction as a sort, as being in the condition of the Elizabethan theater in 1590, waiting for Shakespeare. Do you think that’s a valid assumption? Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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Not so much a Shakespeare – I don’t think the field is looking for a Shakespeare as much as it is a… who was Thomas Wolfe’s editor? Maxwell Perkins. Maxwell Perkins, that’s what we need. We need a, yeah, dig it. We’ve already got writers now who are doing things no writer’s ever done before. We have writers who are so brilliant that there’s no place for their work to go. They can’t be published, you know, their best stuff can’t be published. We don’t need another Shakespeare, we don’t need a Shakespeare in our field. What we need now is an editor with literary credentials, so big, so beautiful, so unassailable that he will be able to – you know, a man who will take science fiction writers, the best science fiction writers, and get them their Globe Theater. Then, would you say you are optimistic, I mean, that you think science fiction will help produce a better society? Speculative fiction seems to be emerging as this kind of fiction, which isn’t so peculiar really when you think about it, because speculative fiction is really the only optimistic fiction being written today, because it says there will be a tomorrow: maybe a lousy tomorrow; it may be a messed-over tomorrow, but there will be a tomorrow of some kind. Not everyone would agree with Harlan Ellison about the importance of science fiction in today’s world, or where it is going from here. Some would ask, “Where is the sense of wonder?” Others, “Where is the science? Where is the extrapolation of the present into the future?” But most of them would agree that science fiction is going somewhere. Where it is going in the final analysis is up to you – you who are watching this film today.


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The Early History Of Science Fiction: A Lecture By Damon Knight

The Early History Of Science Fiction: A Lecture By Damon Knight The history of science fiction is difficult to describe because no two critics agree on what science fiction is. As a genre, that is a collective system of expectations in the reader's mind stemming from his past experience with a certain type of writing, science fiction existed, if at all, only hazily before 1926. But stories and novels which clearly contain some of the same elements as science fiction and help contribute to the creation of the genre existed earlier. How much earlier - the second century AD, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, 1854 - is a question to be debated. The answer depends on what element of science fiction the imagination, the intention, the plausibility, the mechanism, the system of belief - one considers more important. The first half of science fiction's history then covers about 2000 years in a way. The second half, which has been described by Isaac Asimov in another film in this series, covers only the period since 1938. Such is the manner in which science fiction, like population and science itself, has exploded in the past quarter century. Damon Knight, who describes the first half, was born in 1922 and educated in Oregon. He came to New York City in 1941 and held a variety of jobs: reader for a literary agent; editor of a pulp magazine; stripper in an off-set printing shop; and freelance writer. He contributed criticism mostly to science fiction fan magazines. He was one of the first science fiction critics, as contrasted to reviewers. He has written and edited more than 30 books; among his novels are Hell's Pavement, A For Anything, and The People Maker. Perhaps more important, he created Orbit, a semi-annual anthology of original science fiction stories which has published some of the best writing in the field. He was cofounder of the Milford Science Fiction Writers' Conference, founder and first president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and the first editor of its annual collection of the best science fiction stories of the year, Nebula Award Stories. He won a Hugo, awarded by the World Science Fiction Convention for science fiction criticism collected in his volume In Search of Wonder. And here is Damon Knight, in search of wonder. Most people who talk to you about the early history of science fiction begin with Lucian of Samosata, a Hellenistic writer who lived in the second century AD. Lucian's true history is a story in which the narrator is caught up in a water spout and carried to the Moon. And I think that's science fiction to just about the extent that the whirlwind that carried Elijah to Heaven is.


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If you're interested in that kind of thing, the literature is full of imaginary voyages to the Moon in which the means of getting there is whimsical or supernatural. In one of Cyrano De Bergerac's voyages, for example, he surrounded himself with little bottles of dew; and when the sun made the dew rise in the morning, it carried him up with it. Some writers harness flocks of birds. But the most popular and reliable method of getting to the moon was just to have an angel come down and get you. Before there could be science fiction, there first had to be science. And that means we begin with a period roughly 150 years, from 1530, when the first treatise Copernicus wrote was circulated in manuscript, to 1687, when Newton's Principia was published. During this short period man's way of looking at the universe was turned on its head: the Copernican system was the first shock; and then a century later came Galileo with his discovery that there are other worlds out there in space. And this was an event so far reaching that you can almost see humanity's collective head turning to look at the heavens with new eyes. Then came Leeuwenhoek with his lenses and his discovery of the world of the invisibly small, and finally Newton with his universal law of gravitation - all this in just over 150 years. This series of discoveries overturned the view of creation that had been essentially stable for 4000 years. Now, science fiction is based on an assumption of a dynamic universe governed by natural law; a dynamic universe as opposed to a static or a cyclical universe of classical times, and gathered by natural law rather than by the whims of the gods. In these two ways science fiction reflects the worldview that didn't begin to come into existence until the 16th century and was not widespread until the 28th. All through this period there were many imaginary voyages to the Moon and the Sun. They were very popular, and people got very excited about the idea of plurality of worlds. Bishops devoted their sermons to it; Swedenborg made it a part of his philosophy. You might think that questions about the souls of inhabitants of other worlds and whether they're fallen or not are modern inventions; but our ancestors hashed all that out in the 17th century. But these imaginary voyages were satires; and the Moon or the Sun was just a convenient place to put an invented society that could be used to mirror the eccentricities of our own. When the satire is good, as it is in Swift's Voyage to Laputa or Voltaire's Micromegas in which an inhabitant of Saturn visits us, then these voyages are lively. When it's poor - and it is usually poor - you might as well forget it. In 1848, here in this cottage, in what is now part of greater New York, a sick discouraged young writer named Edgar Alan Poe wrote Mellonta Tauta, a story about a balloon trip in the year 2848, 1000 years in the future. This story is satire


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of a not particularly subtle kind: it's in the form of a letter dated April 1st. But it is satire laid in a changed future rather than a remote country, and the first such story that I know of. Alan Poe's predictions in this story are magnetic engines and the trans-Atlantic cable, which he imagines being laid on floating platforms. In this little story I think we see the first unequivocal appearance of the idea that the future will be essentially different from the past; the idea of irreversible social changes brought about by changes in technology. In this sense, even though every one of Poe's predictions was wrong, Mellonta Tauta is modern science fiction, and Jules Verne's stories, which are full of amazingly accurate forecasts, are not. Verne laid his stories in the present, and he used only inventions which were actually available at the time he wrote: submarines and airships and other devices that he wrote about all existed; he only imagined bigger submarines and bigger airships. There is a legend that got started god knows how that the periscope couldn't be patented because Jules Verne had already described it in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. In fact, as Ted Thomas has pointed out, the periscope is not mentioned in that novel; the Nautilus didn't have one. And when Verne wanted to send his gun club members to the Moon, he didn't use any exotic or fantastic method - he used a cannon, but he put that cannon in Florida, only on the West Coast instead of the East; and he had the space vehicle circle the Moon and then splash down in the Pacific. The interesting question is, was this prophecy on Verne's part or imitation on ours? What would you call it when we build a supersubmarine and call it a Nautilus and send it on the same route that Verne's Nautilus took under the polar ice? Verne, incidentally, was not the world's greatest stylist, but he was nowhere near as bad as you would think from reading the English translations made by hacks at the turn of the century. The French language expresses itself naturally in a chain of dependent clauses like tinker toy pieces, one stuck onto the end of the next. If you translate that literally, you're going to get an arthritic English sentence; and that was what was done to Verne, in spite of which five or six of his 64 novels have been continuously in print for more than 70 years and have fascinated generations of English and American readers. And still this was not quite what we mean by science fiction because it was too cautious in forecasting technological change and because it did not take into account any social change at all. For that, after Poe, we have to wait a few years for the first scientific romances of H. G. Wells. For all practical purposes, what we now call science fiction was Wells' invention. Between 1894 and 1908 he wrote nine novels and 24 short stories in which he set forth nearly every one of the major themes that have kept science fiction going ever since. The Invisible Man, The


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War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The First Man on the Moon, The Star, The New Accelerator, and so many more. He described tanks in a story called The Land Ironclads published in 1903; he predicted the atomic bomb in 1908 in a novel called The War in the Air; in The Story of the Days to Come and in The Sleeper Wakes he described a megalopolis of the future - something that hasn't quite happened yet, but we can see it coming, and it's horrifying. About the same time Kipling was also writing science fiction of the utmost circumstantiality in Easy as ABC and With the Night Mail. Now, this is science fiction because it introduces imaginative technological changes and social changes: it's based on the idea of the rational universe governed by natural law and the dynamic universe, the universal change. But all through the 19th century, in fact, things that were at least proto-science fiction, trembling on the verge, were being written by the most respected authors. Balzac's Elixir of Life and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and many others like Cooper, Hawthorne, Holmes, Bulwer Lytton, Bellamy, Bierce, Du Maurier, Mark Twain. And where does this sudden flowering of science fiction come from? Not from the imaginary voyages of Lucian and Cyrano - it comes from science. Wells studied biology under Huxley and became an encyclopedic popularizer of science, much like our own Isaac Asimov. Verne had the same enthusiasm: you can see it in every page he wrote; and so did Poe with his Balloon Hoax and his 1,002nd Tale of Scheherezade. Here it all begins to come together. The journey to another planet is one thread out of many that join and become science fiction. A story of the marvelous invention, for example, might begin in the pre-history of science fiction with the story of Talos, the metal giant who patrolled King Minos's island. And then we could trace it through The Arabian Nights, the story of the mechanical winged horse, and so on down through Edward Hale's Brick Moon, Mark Twain's Telelectroscope, and so on. There's the Utopia beginning with Plato's, and then Sir Thomas More's, Samuel Butler's Erewhon, and so on. There's the influence of the gothic novel and historical novel: you see this in a certain tendency for science fiction characters to wear jock straps and long cloaks and carry big swords. There's the influence of Madame Blavatsky - Bulwer Lytton's full of it, and so are the Mars novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs. But by and large, as H. Bruce Franklin has showed us, science fiction or things hard to distinguish from it were published as a matter of course in all the leading American literary magazines down to around 1900. Then they dropped it, and the dime novels took it up. Now, I'm not sure which event was the cause of the other, Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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or even if there was any causal relationship. At any rate, in the 1920s something unprecedented happened, and its name was Hugo Gernsback. Gernsback was born in 1884 in Luxembourg. He came to this country as a boy and became an inventor and the publisher of what we would now call popular science magazines. In one of these, Electrical Experimenter in the '20s, he began to publish short science fiction stories. And the popularity of these was such that in 1926 Gernsback launched the first magazine entirely devoted to this kind of fiction, Amazing Stories. For good or ill, this event shaped the path of science fiction for more than 40 years. Gernsback was a space flight enthusiast at a time when that took a certain amount of courage. He reprinted articles and fiction translated from the German about the problems of space travel. Some of his early magazine covers look now a great deal like NASA drawings. Beyond that, Gernsback was an enthusiast of anything scientific, particularly anything to do with radio and electricity. He reprinted a lot of Verne and Wells and A. Merritt, and also translations of European authors who had never before appeared in English, like S. S. Held, Otto Willi Gail and Otfried Von Hanstein. The German stories were really closest to Gernsback's heart I think; and they were expressions of naive optimism in which technology, represented by great clanking steam machines, became a messianic religion. It has taken us a long time to get away from this, from all those pistons and rivets, back to the mood of pessimistic irony which was the attitude of literary science fiction writers long before Gernsback. Gernsback lost Amazing Stories in one of his several bankruptcies and started two other magazines, Air Wonder and Science Wonder. He combined them into Wonder Stories and lost that. He kept other more lucrative magazines, including Sexology, which is still being published; but he was out of science fiction for good in 1936 except for one brief fling in the '50s. But what he had started kept on going - in 1930 another publisher brought out a science fiction magazine, Astounding Stories, and that made three. The magazines, although they were always in trouble, staggered on somehow from one owner to another. By 1939 there were 11. Now, Gernsback had built up a stable of writers who were essentially enthusiasts like himself and not professional authors; and enthusiasm was the most marked characteristic of their work. But gradually in the late '20s and early '30s we begin to see a few people making what could be described as a career in science fiction writing. Two of the earliest of these were Jack Williamson and Edmond Hamilton, both still with us and both still active. Another was Murray Leinster, whose first


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published science fiction story The Runaway Skyscraper appeared in Argosy in 1919. Meanwhile, entirely apart from this chain of influence, literary science fiction continued to be written by Kipling, Jack London, Saki, Karel Capek, E.M Forrester, Aldous Huxley, and many others. But because the magazines had drawn to themselves all the really enthusiastic readers of this kind of material, and because literary writers despised the magazines for their crudity, a gulf opened between literary and cult writers. The most influential literary writer of this period was probably Olaf Stapledon, whose two long lyrical narratives of the future of intelligence spanning millennia and hundreds of light years are full of ideas that have been of use to other writers. He also wrote the first, and some think the best, superman novel, Odd John. He had some unusual ideas about sex that made him appear freaky then, not so much now. The thing that strikes you about the literary writers is that each one was working more or less by himself, apart from all the others, whereas the commercial writers of this time were building up a set of shared assumptions: widespread use of space travel, the galactic empire; and even a set of shorthand terms, a kind of jargon: hyperdrive, space warp, and so on, which helped them go on with their stories but repelled and irritated the literary writers and readers even more. Cult or commercial science fiction was beginning to take characteristics different from those of literary science fiction to evoke and try to satisfy different expectations. I'm not talking now about the quality of the stuff - most of it was dreadful, but then so was most literary science fiction. In its best writers these characteristics were developing. One was obsessive interest in background, particularly in landscape; and unless you grasp this, you will miss the point of most cult science fiction right down to the present time: the background was the thing - the Martian desert, or the city of the future, or the ships maneuvering in space. Another was the demand for romantic hero and for colorful adventures. You can see where this came from, right out of the pulps - and in fact, by the mid '30s science fiction was being treated by its publishers as just another kind of pulp. You had the steely-jawed hero on the cover, but instead of jodhpurs he had a spacesuit, and instead of a rifle he was holding a raygun. And you had the usual disheveled heroine, but she was in the grip of a robot or a bug-eyed monster rather than in that of a Turk or Berber. It became increasingly clear that for many adult readers science fiction at its best was a form of the epic. Most popular authors were those who wrote novel cycles, like E. E. Smith with his Skylark and Lensman novels, which ranged over dozens of planetary systems and perhaps half a century in time. We see the same thing


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today in the enthusiasm for Tolkien and Frank Herbert's Dune. Scale was terribly important: anything that widened it a great deal or even narrowed or distorted it was well-received. In the '30s there were a good many stories about a descent into the microcosm to visit the inhabitants of an electron, or of less drastic reduction in size so that the protagonist could enter an anthill, for instance. You don't see these anymore, because they began to strain our credulity I suppose; but I think it's rather a shame - I liked them. Another much used theme was that of time travel to remote eras, either to the past or the future. Another was the penetrability of matter, so that with a proper equipment you could walk into a wall or down into the earth, as in Murray Leinster's The Mole Pirate. The people in these stories tended to be rather simple types, absent-minded scientists and their beautiful daughters and handsome young men mostly. The young men wore leather jackets and didn't have much conversation. Nobody cared much about that, because the point of the story was the wonderful gadget or the alien landscape or, better yet, both. Another thing that happened that could not conceivably have happened without Gernsback was that science fiction readers began to grope into contact with each other: they wrote letters to the magazines praising their favorite authors and discussing their work; then using the addresses on these letters they actually began to correspond and even meet. They formed clubs and organized conventions; they published amateur magazines, hectographed or mimeographed in those days, full of amateur fiction and artwork. A complete collection of these magazines from the '20s to the present would probably fill a fair-sized swimming pool. This is something that has never happened with any other kind of category fiction. Western readers do not get together and moon over Zane Grey?, for instance. It's more reminiscent of sports or movie fandom; and yet, not quite like either, because the science fiction fans, although somewhat boy-faced, are intelligent and highly articulate. And this too has had an indelible influence on the field, because out of the ranks of these fans began to come professionals who devoted their working lives to science fiction. Commercial science fiction in the '30s was largely written by professionals of another sort: men who prided themselves on their ability to turn out any kind of a pulp yarn that anybody would pay for. One of these was a man named Arthur J. Burks, who wrote 10,000 words a day for years and sold most of it. Remember that this was a time when there were scores of pulp magazines of every conceivable description. They paid by the word; and if you could turn it out, you could live very well. Burks used to boast that he could write a story about anything you pointed to in his hotel room. Somebody took him up on it once and


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pointed to the keyhole. Burks thought a moment, then sat down at his typewriter, and presently out came the opening pages of a novelette about corpses with mysterious keyhole-shaped bullet holes in them. But among these pulpsters other types were beginning to appear just here and there. They were not near the seats of power just yet, but you could find them on the outskirts organizing, publishing their broadsides. One of these was Donald E. Wollheim, a fan who in the late '30s became a science fiction editor and has been one ever since. Increasingly since about 1950 commercial science fiction has been under the influence and sometimes the direct control of people who came out of fandom and who take science fiction much more seriously than any outsider does. Science fiction fans tend to be idealistic and dramatic types who are repelled by the ugliness of the real world and use science fiction as an escape from it. They rationalize this by saying that they're trying to achieve a better world through the extrapolative thinking that science fiction teaches you - and in fact, there may be a little something to it. There has always been a moralistic flavor in the attitudes of the hardcore fans from the '20s on. In Gernsback's time it took the form of a belief that science fiction existed to teach people science and draw them into scientific careers; and in a number of cases this actually happened. A speculation in a story by David H. Keller, one of Gernsback's writers, that the longevity of queen bees was due to their special diet, led a reader named Thomas S. Gardner to go into that field and discover that in fact Keller was right. To this day, the research institutions in this country are peppered with devoted science fiction readers, people who were drawn there by science fiction. And in the '20s and '30s too we begin to get - forgive me for saying this - the science fiction art story. There was Stanley G. Weinbaum, who had a brilliant career that lasted about two years before he died of throat cancer at 35. He was the most inventive science fiction writer since Wells. He specialized in aliens; and his aliens were fantastic and yet believable - they weren't the standard blobbery menace that we inherited from Wells, they were funny and interesting, and every one was different. But his stories have not survived into the anthologies, with the exception of the first one, A Martian Odyssey, because they're full of the standard 1934 boy-girl talk, which was just another convention then but is unbearable now. Nearly all the best writers of the '30s have aged badly in this way; that's why you don't see their stories anymore. I've often thought that the best ones ought to be rewritten and published as translations from the English; but I've never had the nerve to make the suggestion to the authors' estates.


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These, at any rate, were the circumstances in which we found ourselves at the end of the '30s. Science fiction as a commercial medium was well-established 13 years after Gernsback began it. Over at Street and Smith, a popular young writer named John W. Campbell, Jr. had taken over Astounding Stories and was beginning to make some changes. The end of the pulps was in sight, although we didn't know it. Within the next few years they would begin to fail, and by 1950 they would almost all of them disappear, except the science fiction magazines. But that's another story.


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The Ideas In Science Fiction: A Lecture By Frederik Pohl

The Ideas In Science Fiction: A Lecture By Frederik Pohl Science fiction has been called a literature of ideas. And one of the best idea men in science fiction is Frederik Pohl, a man now in his 50s, who has done almost everything in science fiction except draw the illustrations. As a boy, he was a member of an important fan group in New York City called the Futurians. Before he was 20, he became editor of two science fiction magazines and was writing stories for these and other magazines under pseudonyms on his own and in collaboration with other Futurians. In the early '50s he became a literary agent. In 1952, with Cyril Kornbluth, he wrote one of the most significant science fiction novels of recent times, the first under his own name, The Space Merchants. He edited the first annual anthology of original science fiction, Star Science Fiction; succeeded Horace Gold as editor of Galaxy and its sister magazines; became an editor successively for two paperback publishers, and continued to produce incisive, witty, satirical science fiction stories and books filled with ideas. A few years ago two science fiction fans named Bill Bowers and Bill Mallardi decided to try to find out what science fiction writers think they're doing when they write science fiction. And so they interviewed about 90 or so of the best and most accessible of them and put the responses together in a symposium. One of the questions was, "Why do you write science fiction?" And here are a few of the responses: Theodore Sturgeon said, "It gives me almost complete freedom of speech and absolute freedom of thought." The late Charles Beaumont said, "Originally it was because I liked this sort of thing; later because I realized certain social comments could be made, which otherwise couldn't be made or would come too hard." And Arthur Clark said succinctly, "Because most other literature isn't concerned with reality." Responses like this take out a pretty ambitious sort of claim for science fiction, and for some people they might seem rather overblown. To anybody whose experience of science fiction is limited to something like, say, The Andromeda Strain or The Beast From 2000 Fathoms, this sort of claim might seem preposterous. And beyond question, there's a good deal of material which is published or produced under the brand name of science fiction which is not concerned with reality or with social comment, which requires no freedom of thought and probably has not too much requirement of thought at all.


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But although this is true, when you've said it, all you really said is what is equally true of any specialized kind of creative endeavor, whether it's literary or music or artistic or whatever: namely, that most of what is done in any field is pretty plodding stuff. The glory of science fiction is that in among the tons of schlock and the space opera, the stuff that amuses or excites or titillates and does nothing else, there's a sizable fraction of stories and books that lead to quite another activity, that activity of the forebrain which distinguishes man from the other animals which is called thought. I'm always reluctant to say things like this about science fiction, because far from boasting about it, I'm tempted to try to conceal it. It's pretty clear that from the commercial point of view, the one organ of the human body that there is no money in exploiting is the brain. I don't mean to say that the average buyer of books and magazines is opposed to thought, but I think he prefers to have it done for him by experts, like any other spectator sport. And science fiction, at least at its best, is not like that. Let me try to make clear exactly what it is I'm trying to say here: it isn't so much that science fiction makes it possible to express ideas that can not be said in any form, as that the need to express such ideas is probably what led a few writers a long time ago to invent the kind of literature that we now call science fiction. I don't want to go into the history of science fiction in any detail, but to illustrate what I mean by this, I'd like to look back briefly a couple of hundred years to what most people might not consider a science fiction novel at all, Jonathan Swift's book Gulliver's Travels. Is Gulliver's Travels science fiction? I would say certainly: it has all of the diagnostic features of science fiction. It has a superscientific gadget in this case the magnetic core that makes it possible for the island of Laputa to float around in the air; it has the exploration of far-off fantastic worlds - they're not in space, to be sure, but in 1726 an unknown island in the South Seas was quite as remote and mysterious as Mars and Mercury is to us today. And above all, Gulliver's Travels contains the quality of ideation, of examining our own world from an extra-human and objective point of view, which is what the best science fiction is all about. George Orwell, who himself wrote excellent science fiction like 1984 and discussed it intelligently from time to time, and managed to do all this without ever once using the term "science fiction" - in fact, perhaps, without ever having heard it - describes just what this sort of examination of Swift's world shows. In his essay Politics Vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels he talks about Swift's brilliant and effective use of the novel for political purposes. He says, "Swift's greatest contribution to political thought is its attack, particularly in Part


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III, on what now would be called totalitarianism. He has an extraordinarily clear prevision of the spy-haunted police state with its endless heresy hunts and treason trials. And one must remember that Swift is here inferring the whole from a very small part, because the feeble governments of his own day did not give him the illustrations ready made." To be sure, Swift was a polemicist of great prowess, and he didn't really need science fiction to make a political point. His celebrated essay on relieving the famine and population problem in Ireland by eating the surplus babies, his political pamphlets, and his essays, were couched in mundane terms, and they lost nothing in effectiveness. But the great triumph of Gulliver's Travels was its universality: it has survived and is read where nearly all the rest of his prodigious output is forgotten because its fanciful setting, its science fiction quality, if you will, gave it relevance far beyond the time and place of its composition. And of course it bred a host of imitations: one of the nearest and most direct was the romance written by Swift's near-contemporary and somewhat disciple Voltaire, which is called Micromegas, and was in a sense the first of the space operas since it roamed the solar system in much the same way and to the same ends as Gulliver's Travels roamed the seas of Earth. Now, the quality in Gulliver's Travels that caused George Orwell to marvel was the uncanny accuracy of its predictions, not of inventions or discoveries but of social conditions. And science fiction has long laid claim to excellence in this area. There's a lot of justice in this claim: it's true that science fiction stories dealt casually with such phenomena as space travel and television, atomic bombs, radar, submarines, air travel, and a host of other modern wonders long before they had any reality in the real world. But it's not the claim that I would like to make for science fiction, at least not just now, for two reasons. The first is that the accuracy of these predictions is pretty much a matter of luck: there's an old French saying, "Even a broken clock is right twice a day." And so much science fiction has been written describing so many tens of thousands of machines and inventions and gadgets and gimmicks that it would be pretty remarkable if none of them had ever come true. As far as I know, nobody has ever compiled a batting average of science fiction predictions; I don't even know if the record should be called good or bad, but what I do know for certain is that there are many tens of thousands of science fiction predictions which have never some true and never will. But the more important reason is that a prediction in itself is neither particularly useful nor even particularly interesting. This sort of statement seems unlikely at first hearing because it seems to go against conventional wisdom. You tend to think that, "Oh boy, if only we could know what the future holds, we could clean


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up somehow or other." And it's easy to imagine ways in which this would be so. But the ability to change the future to our best advantage implies that the future isn't fixed; and that in turn implies that it can't be predicted. And that in turn leads to the discovery that the only kind of prediction of the future that is of any real use is either one which was incomplete so that we have an unpredicted area in which to operate, or one which is unreliable so that some act of ours can change it. If we visit a tea leaf reader store and learn from her that as we walk out the door we're going to be hit by a trick and killed instantly, we really haven't gained very much. It's only if we learned that such a danger exists but is not inevitable, that we can be warned of the danger in time to prevent it. So one can not attach too much weight to the character of the predictions in Gulliver's Travels, because it's pretty clear that Swift really was not intending to predict anything but simply to use the device of political satire to discuss his own 18th-century England. Let's turn to some other examples to give ourselves a more secure footing. We can leap ahead to Orwell's own 1984 in which he carries the totalitarian collectivist society to its final steady-state hell. We can stop off at Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, meant to satirize and deplore the assembly-line world of the '20s, in which Henry Ford becomes a sort of god, and people are born through identical mass-production artificial births. Or we can do even better and look at science fiction where it really is, in the science fiction magazines like Galaxy and Analog and Amazing Stories, and the books which are not ashamed to identify themselves as science fiction on their jackets. What Orwell and Huxley were up to was a device of examining trends in contemporary society, isolating a few of them, playing them through to their logical ultimate concluding, and through this reductia ad absurdum showing their disastrous potentials. And almost half a century ago in magazines like Amazing Stories and Wonder Stories writers like David H. Keller and Stanton A. Coblentz were doing pretty much the same thing. One must concede that in those times the satire was a little heavy-handed, and the thought might have been a little superficial; but there's much to be said for Keller and Coblentz and the others. A novel like Coblentz's After 12,000 Years with its dour picture of a world in which insect-like humans conduct wars between city-states that are like enormous insect hives and use droves of specially bred and trained insects as weapons, as clear morality and as thoughtful a warning as Huxley's sermon on the same subject. Keller's Revolt of the Pedestrians was as anti-Ford as Huxley; but what Keller warned against was not the effect of the automobile age on the mind or character, but its effect on the body. His short story The Revolt of the Pedestrians shows a


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world in which men have lost the habit of walking so long that their legs have atrophied to tiny vestigial stumps. More recently Fritz Leiber turned on, touched on the same anti-car theme from still a different direction: in stories like Coming Attraction and X Marks the Pedwalk, he looks at the automobile as a weapon, and on driving as a sort of a duel. The difficulty in constructing this sort of a story, the cut by which Orwell and Huxley could survive pretty well while Keller and Coblentz perhaps have not, is in fleshing out one's vision of disaster with enough insightful surround to make the disaster plausible. It's not a matter of accuracy of prediction - The Revolt of the Pedestrians will never come true, but neither will Brave New World, and neither is meant to. They're cautionary rather than predictive; they're like your dentists say, "You're going to loose that tooth if I don't fill it," only the "if" in the story is unspoken. It's, in the words of Poobah and the Mikado, a matter of adding corroborative detail to land artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bold and unconvincing narrative. In other words, you must imagine in depth if you want your imaginings to carry conviction. In the novel The Space Merchants, which Cyril Kornbluth and I originally wrote for Galaxy around 1950, and which since has been published pretty widely around the world, the concern in our minds was with the effects of the advertising industry on society. The thesis of the book was that by the time of its setting, which is perhaps around the end of this century, essentially everything people do in their private lives, in their social affairs, in their government activities and everything else, will be the result of behavior patterns instilled in them by advertising pressure - nearly all instead of the 90% or so that's true today. Now, at a date which is perhaps 20% of the time from the time when we wrote it to the time when it's supposed to take place, I must confess that I can not really say that the advertising industry has progressed particularly toward that point. But some other things have, at least to some extent, come true; and this is a bit surprising even to me - I had not fully realized it until I began to prepare this discussion. In The Space Merchants there's a good deal of discussion of air pollution. People in it wear filters to keep out the pollutants when they walk in the city streets. And I've seen such filters being worn in Tokyo last year and in London last month and any day of the week in Los Angeles or New York. In The Space Merchants overpopulation is discussed as an urgent danger; and surely, that's what it has become. The destruction of fresh-water resources is described as a fact; and in places like Lake Eerie and most of the eastern rivers at least that's come true. So what has come true in The Space Merchants is not its central warning but some of the surround or the corroborative detail in which the central warning is imbedded.


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It's pretty hard for a writer to look at his work objectively, but I think that one reason why The Space Merchants has survived rather well lies in these two observations: its central warning, which is against the deadening overall effects of advertising on society, has not actually come to pass but remains relevant as a danger to be guarded against, while its subsidiary themes have at least in part shown themselves to be well-based by the developments of history. In exactly the same way I think the survival value of Gulliver's Travels lies not so much in the parts that have come true but in the parts which have not. The fulfillment of Swift's nightmare of the totalitarian state helps us to accept the urgency of his warnings against treachery and hypocrisy and cant. Now, all of these stories that I've mentioned belong to a certain sub-class of science fiction, largely political satire which Kingsley Amis calls the anti-utopia. We haven't touched at all on the utopia itself, although to be sure it exists in the field of science fiction with some celebrated examples. Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward was perhaps the most famous a century ago, but it was only one among hundreds and perhaps not the best. To my mind, the most rewarding of the utopians was H. G. Wells. Wells was no jolly optimist: he had some hope for the perfectibility of man, but he didn't see any of his utopias as either inevitable or easy. The splendid society of his novel A World Set Free was to come about only after a totally destructive war, much like the war and consequent earthy paradise of his film Things to Come. More frequently in his work it seems that even at his most hopeful he could see no way to get from here to there, so he located his ideal societies in another dimension entirely or after some such miraculous intervention as the character reforming gas that remakes the human race in his novel In the Days of the Comet. Because Wells was a major writer, perhaps the most moving and innovative ever to have functioned in the field of science fiction, his utopias carry a certain conviction. They were meant to - they were meant to move people in the direction of remaking the world to its betterment by showing what a better world could be like. He's most effective where, as in The Days of the Comet, he juxtaposes earthly hell and future heaven in the life of a single narrator: his protagonist there is a man who is dwarfed by the poverty and deprivation of early 20th-century England and driven into a life of petty jealousies and mean hatreds and then reborn into a sort of a demi-god of temperance and wisdom and compassion by the gases in the tail of a comet that enter the Earth's atmosphere overnight. There is not much in any of this that is either scientific or predictive: the comet is a purely literary invention. There was then and is now no such chemical that will make us sinners into saints; and if there was, there's no reason to believe we'd find


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it in a comet's tail. But there is much in the novel that is both exact and descriptive. Wells' picture of the life of the poor educated Englishman at that time and place is minute and moving and sympathetic and shocked - he looks at his own life from afar, with some revulsion. His demonstration that all it would take to convert that grubby inferno into something closely approximating paradise on earth would be a change of man's behavior to man is wholly convincing - at least it is while you're reading the novel. But most utopias, even Wells' own, have a certain sterility: they seem to suggest, probably against the will of their creators, that even heaven becomes tiresome if it's perfect and unchanging. And if Wells is rewarding as a utopian, he is even more so as an anti-utopian. When The Sleeper Wakes, which is a sort of a vision of our own world from the point of view of the turn of the century, our own world of today, is wholly wrong in every one of its details but very nearly wholly right in its overall impression: it's a world in which people inhabit huge cities, in which they are regimented but lawless, driven but bored. In The Time Machine, while he envisions a nearly idyllic world of the far future in which gentle, pretty little people play at love and pleasure in the sunlight, he also sees beneath the surface of that same world a cavernous underworld where apelike creatures who produce the food and clothing for the beautiful people of the surface live and at night come out to catch and kill and eat them. This is Wells' crypto-Marxism speaking: the gentle Eloi of the surface are the descendants of today's capitalists, and the bent and murderous Morlocks of the caverns are the children of the workers; and what Wells is saying is that if the class system persists, this mutually destructive society is what it will bring about, and what he means us to understand from what he is saying is not that this is inevitable but that it is a danger we must work to avert. If one looks at the work of almost any single science fiction writer of some ability, it's easy to see that prediction is not what we're about, because each of us makes hundreds of statements about the future, and the majority of them are mutually contradictory. Now and again someone like Robert A. Heinlein or Larry Niven will attempt to organize his work into a sort of a future history, which is how Heinlein described most of his early stories; but even in Heinlein's work the frame outlived out its usefulness. His four major recent novels, Stranger in a Strange Land, and Farnham's Freehold, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and I Will Fear No Evil, have in common only the fact that they have nothing in common: if any one of them came true, the other three could not. What science fiction writers individually and science fiction as a kind of normative forecasting of the future in general offers us then is not predictions about the future so much as a sort of a mail order catalog of possible alternate futures. And from this we can compile a shopping list of the sorts of futures we would like to see, and Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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then proceed to bring them about. The science fiction writers are not the only players in this particular game: it's what the people at the think tanks, like the Rand Corporation and the Hudson Institute and the Institute for the Future in Connecticut are doing; but science fiction is able to do it in a way which is not only pleasantly flavored and agreeable by virtue of such literary skill as its authors possess, but a way which makes it possible to show the side effects, what you might call the second- and third-order derivatives, of existing trends. One might invent a hypothetical example to show the difference: suppose at the time of the sermon on the mount there were in the audience a man from the RAND Corporation and a science fiction writer. Speculating on what might come of Christ's gospel, each might draw up a future scenario. And the RAND man, if he was lucky, might be able to foresee things like the St. Peter's basilica and the massacre of Christians in the arena, maybe even the crusades. But it would only be the science fiction writer who would be able to foresee the Spanish inquisition or Thursday night bingo at your neighborhood church. So a science fiction writer has, at least now and then, been able to cast illuminating lights on our own society, both by showing where some aspect of it may lead if not checked, which is the cautionary story, or simply by showing us how we might look to some Martian or a visitor from another star. Even in the science fiction stories which are primarily blood-and-thunder action-adventure, or even in the socalled heavy science stories which are devoted largely to exploring the possibilities of alien and future technologies and physical environments, these elements are usually present - it's simply too good an opportunity to miss, because it allows a writer to score points off some person or institution who has earned his displeasure. For example, Edgar Rice Burroughs was not above it in stories like The Mastermind of Mars. One would not normally expect a good deal of sophisticated social comment from the creator of Tarzan, but in the Mars novels he had much to say about the cheapness and vulgarity of Earthly life. And in his novel The Mastermind of Mars, he devoted a whole section to a thinly disguised attack on the church in which terrified worshippers mourn meaningless liturgies like "Tur is Tur" - sometimes they say it backwards, "Tur is Tur," while a fake idol scowls and rolls its eyes at them in a staged miracle. For that matter, even Tarzan is depicted as a sort of a Jean-Jacques Rousseau noble savage, and used to score points off the English aristocracy, of whom at that time Burroughs knew so little and disliked so much. To propagandize in this way, encoding one's opinions in the form of science fiction rather than stating them clear, is not only often more effective, but it is sometimes Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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a good deal safer. When I quoted Ted Sturgeon's remark earlier about why he wrote science fiction - because it gave him almost complete freedom of speech and total freedom of thought - I was thinking of comments which I've heard from many men who were in responsible positions in politics or business or the church in the early 1950s to the effect that they treasured science fiction particularly at that time because in those Joe McCarthy years it was one of the few remaining areas in the American periodical press where freedom of speech was still clearly visible. As far as science fiction is concerned, the repressive '50s and the permissive '70s are pretty much the same: there may be some difference in permitted vocabulary, but there was then, as there is now, simply no limit to what can be talked about in science fiction. I would not have you think, however, that the ideas in science fiction are all either technological, scientific, or propagandistic. There's another kind of science fiction speculation which is neither of these things, and in fact is something which I have never observed in any fully developed form in any other human activity. C. S. Lewis, the author of Perelandra and The Screwtape Letters, gave it a name: he called it “eschatological fiction”, and he defined it as a subspecies of science fiction concerned with speculations about the ultimate destiny of our species. Because Lewis himself was deeply religious, his own science fiction stories are essentially religious propaganda - brilliantly done and surrounded by exciting interesting detail. It's perhaps natural that he should usually, that he should think in such terms as this, which is usually taken to mean subjects like the day of judgment and god's intentions for the world. But the stories that he was talking about were not at least conventionally religious. He meant stories like Arthur C. Clark's Childhood's End and W. Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men. Stories like these are no longer about the future of mankind, or at least should not be called so unless one at the same time is prepared to call something like The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire a sort of an account of the future of pithecanthropus erectus, because they're about our evolutionary descendants - not future men, but those beings which will replace man as man has replaced his predecessors. I'm not sure that Lewis ever saw any of his work, but to my mind one of the most interesting writers of this “eschatological fiction” was the late Paul Linebarger, a professor of political science, an occasional roving diplomat for the US State Department, godson of Sun-Yat-Sen, and under his pen-name of Cordwainer Smith, one of the most original science fiction writers of the past 20 years or so. Cordwainer Smith's entire science fiction catalog comprises only a couple of novels and a dozen or two short stories and novelettes written almost entirely in the decade from the late 1950s to his death in the mid-1960s. The Cordwainer Smith stories, novelettes like The Ballad of Lost C’Mell and On Alpha-Ralpha Boulevard Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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and The Dead Lady of Clown Town had to do with the remote future many thousands of years from now. The people are no longer human. Some are human by biological ancestry, but they're so changed through drugs and surgery and prolongation of life that they seem god-like to our eyes. Some are robots, robots of many shapes and sizes. And some are both - they are machines which had been imprinted with the mind and personality of a human being. And some, and some of the most interesting ones, are animals like lost C’Mell herself, who is a humanlike creature created from a cat. In the Cordwainer Smith stories all of these strange creations meet and live and interact with each other in worlds scattered all over the universe, disposing of energies capable of shaking suns, on errands that seem stranger than the characters themselves. There are many works of this sort of “eschatological fiction” in science fiction. I've even dealt in it a little myself in the collaboration with C. M. Kornbluth called Wolfbane or in a short story called Day Million more recently. Day Million is a day 2,000 years or so from now, and the story is a love story that happens on that millionth day of the Christian era. When people ask me what Day Million is about, I sometimes say that it's a story about a boy who falls in love with a girl who's 8 feet tall and smells of peanut butter - because it is - but it's also about other things, like most of the complex “eschatological” science fiction stories I know. It's not very easy to describe it briefly, because these stories need to be read in full to mean anything at all. But they do mean something: they give us a chance to stretch our minds; they give us a chance to think for ourselves, having seen what one writer thinks may happen at a certain time under certain conditions, what we think may happen. They carry with them a sort of a glorious aftertaste of thought, they open new vistas. And the best part of them is often not in what we read while we have the book or the magazine in our hands but in what we think after we put them down. We, human beings, are after all mammalian, biped, vertebrate, warm-blooded animals. We live on a planet that has a certain chemical composition; we breathe a certain particular kind of a mixture of gases; we're used to certain ranges of temperatures; we feel a specific acceleration of gravity every day of our lives. But every indication we now have is that we're not alone in the universe: some scientists have guessed that in our own galaxy alone there may be some 63 million other planets that are capable of harboring life, and experiments that have been conducted with tanks of gas like the primitive atmosphere of earth radiated with the kind of radiation that then reached us from the sun seemed to show that where life is possible, it will develop automatically and inevitably. And what we know of genetics and evolution seems to show that if life once begins, it will proceed towards something in an advanced state which may include intelligence. Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series

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So as a gambling bet, it seems a pretty good probability that somewhere or other there are races like ours in at least that they display what we call intelligence and have developed what we call science and live in what we call civilizations. But they may not be in a physical or chemical sense like us at all. Science fiction is our principal mode of discussing these possible aliens, and science fiction stories often use them to show us some aspect of the truth about ourselves which we might not otherwise suspect. How much of our religion and our social laws and our habits, for example, derive from the fact that we're liveborn and need protection for the first years of our lives? What would these customs be like if we were, as some extraterrestrial creatures somewhere may be, something like the sea urchin whose mother casts 100 million eggs at random into the sea, and whose father fertilizes them by chance as he passes by, and who never sees either of them except by the most unlikely chance at any time in his life? What sort of a god would an intelligent sea urchin worship? What sort of a government would he obey? And what do these thoughts tell us about the nature of our own religions and societies? Brian W. Aldiss wrote a provocative story in this area some years ago which was called The Dark Light Years. He didn't go quite as far as a sea urchin; he only invented an alien race which had much the same physiology and chemistry as ourselves but one major scientific, psychological difference: we attach enormous social and religious importance to some biological functions like eating and reproduction; we make eating a sacrament or a ritual or a social occasion, like the love feast or the editorial lunch; and we make reproduction a sacrament in the form of a wedding ceremony, as well as a major concern of our morality and a basic consideration in our laws of citizenship and inheritance and so on. Now, Aldiss' aliens were like us to a degree; the difference was that the physical function to which they attached psychological and religious significance was neither eating or reproduction - it was excretion. I think I will tell you no more about that particular story just now. When I originally published it in one of my magazines a few years ago, it caused us a good deal of trouble one way or another. I have no uncontrollable desire to repeat it now. But it's easy to see that a story which brings together a race which has our attitudes toward food and sex with one which has similar attitudes toward excrement is bound to produce complications. The point is not what the complications are, or even that they are ludicrous and arbitrary - the point is that the attitudes are ludicrous and arbitrary, both the aliens' and our own. And this ability to look at the human race from afar, what Harlow Shapley in a different context once called the view from a distant star, is one of the greatest triumphs of


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science fiction. For me at least, if there were nothing else that could be said in defense of science fiction, that would be enough to justify its existence. There are many definitions of science fiction, and I have no particular fondness for any of them, because the best of them seem too rigid - they try to describe a field which has as its principal virtue the characteristic of growing and changing. When I was editing Galaxy Magazine, I had a definition of science fiction which went, "A science fiction story is that story which I can publish in Galaxy without causing readers to cancel their subscriptions", but clearly that's a definition which would change in time. But one can say of at least some kinds of science fiction that they promote conceptual thinking as distinct from the crude calculation that's enough to get most of us through daily lives. And they help us to prepare for the violent cultural shocks that the accelerating rate of change of modern society is throwing at us every day, not so much by warning us of what will happen as by leading us to think in terms of consequences and future developments. So science fiction, you see, is not only about trips to Mars or giant man-eating cockroaches rising from the sea; it is about man himself, not only man as he is but as he might be and as he can become. Man is the thinking animal, and the toolusing animal, and the time-binding animal; and these are the things that science fiction is about.


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An Interview With Clifford Simak: A Career In Science Fiction

An Interview With Clifford Simak: A Career In Science Fiction Clifford Simak is a Minneapolis newspaperman born in 1904, who has spent much of his life writing about events that never happened. He began writing science fiction in the '30s and had his first big success in 1939 with a series of stories and novels for Astounding. His best-known novel, City, won him a reputation as a philosophical writer with a gentle heart. He writes about solitary capable people alone on farms, in woods, at one with nature and themselves, who face unexpected challenges from life or the stars. He has won many awards, such as the Hugos for The Big Backyard and his novel Way Station. And he was guest of honor at the 1971 World Science Fiction Convention in Boston, where I spoke with him about his career. [James Gunn’s questions are italicized; Clifford Simak’s answers appear in roman text] What was your first story? My first story was Cubes of Ganymede; and it was sent off to Amazing, and Sloane... was it O'Conor Sloane? T. O'Conor Sloane. T. O'Conor Sloane had it for a year or so. And I heard nothing from him. And then one of the fan magazines said that it was scheduled for publication. And I waited - in the meantime I wrote another story and did sell it, and it was published; but I waited for the Cubes of Ganymede to be published. And after four years Sloane sent it back and said that he found it unacceptable for publication because it was a little outdated. I have tried to find that story since. Sam Moskowitz has urged me time after time to try to find this story, because he said he'd find some means to get it published. And I have, it's probably among my papers somewhere. But I haven't been able to find it. And the first published story was World of the Red Sun - that was in the Wonder Stories; that was sold to Gernsback.


That was after Gernsback had lost Amazing Stories and... Well, no, this was... Gernsback was still publishing Amazing Stories I think at the time that The World of the Red Sun was published. I see. What date was this? I can't tell you. I think it was in '29 or '30. I'm sorry, I would've looked it up if I thought you'd ask me the question. What, why did you decide to write the Ganymede story and The World of the Red Sun? Well, I think all writers feel within themselves a compulsion for expression. And of course as a newspaper man, you do have some means of expression, but it's not quite, not quite the thing that you wanted to do. And I had wanted to write something; and I had become considerably intrigued with science fiction: I had read Poe and H. G. Wells and Rider Haggard when I was in high school. And then, oh, in '27 or '28 I picked up the first of the Amazings, one of the first of the Amazings. I was extremely thrilled to think that there was such a magazine as this. And so I think it was a matter of a rather slow coming to realization that probably this is what I should be writing in. And I was lucky perhaps in choosing this field, because I came in at a relatively early time when there wasn't too much competition; and if a man could write anywhere near competently, you could sell, you could establish yourself, you could gain some confidence. And today it's much harder for a young writer to break in. So I was lucky in many ways: I got in sort on... not ground floor, but probably the second or third floor. You're, you wrote how many stories before 1935, roughly? I would think four or five, six maybe - not too many. This was just in your spare time while you were working as a reporter? This was just in my spare time. And editor?


That's right. You moved around a little bit. I moved around. I started my newspaper career at Arm River, Michigan; and I moved from there to Spencer, Iowa; from there up to Dickinson, North Dakota, and to Brainerd, Minnesota. And I guess that moving around the country for about ten years in my newspaper time, and then I, in 1939, July... June the 15th, 1939 - I remember the day exactly - I came to the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, and I've been there ever since. Did you find that you had more time to write when you went to Minneapolis? Yes, I did. On the smaller newspapers, I was working the schedule that all newspaper men worked - there was no such a thing as an eight-hour day or a fortyhour week. But when I went to Minneapolis, here we did have a forty-hour week; and that did give me more time to write. I had started writing a little bit before that, when John Campbell first was named editor of Astounding. I had not been writing at that time. And I said, "John Campbell is the kind of a man I can write for; is the kind of an editor that I want to write for." So I did start. And I think it was, I was working in 1938 and 1939 before I went to Minneapolis. But after that there was considerably more room. Why did you feel that John Campbell was the kind of an editor you could write for? Oh, I had, I had been reading what John Campbell had written, not what John Campbell'd written but what Don Stuart had been writing: The Twilight and some of the other stories that he'd written in this rather mystical, philosophical vein. And I thought that was just the kind of literature that we should be writing. So, it was moving away from the power story that John had advocated and had written so well. And it seemed to point in a new direction. And I thought that if the man could write this kind of story, he was the kind of a man to follow. Did you get much reaction to your early, earlier stories? I got practically no reaction. The reaction didn't come until after many years. Forrie Ackerman wrote to me - I think he was the first man who wrote, asked for my autograph. I was more thrilled by Forrie writing to me than, I am sure, than he


was in getting my autograph. And then a few years later Isaac Asimov wrote to me - Isaac was, I think he was still in high school at that time. He was trying to write. And we corresponded back and forth. I never, I'll never forget the exuberance of the letter in which Isaac told me he'd made his first sale: I think it was something On Vesta to Amazing, yeah. In the early fiction that you did, what did you feel that you were trying to write then? Well, first of course I was simply trying to write stories. I had not arrived at a point where I was giving too much stock to what I'd write: it was simply a matter of telling a story well enough that it could be sold and published. Was it mainly about hard sciences, physics and astronomy, or just adventure? No, I... it was more of as adventure. There might be some physics and chemistry in it, but not too much, because after all, at that time I knew even less about it than I do now; and now I don't know as much, anywhere near as much as I should. You think it's necessary for a science fiction writer to be really well-informed? I think that a science fiction writer... Let's put this another way: a man who is well-informed and well-based may be at a disadvantage because he knows so well the restrictions of the sciences that he's writing about that it may inhibit the work that he's doing. Puts chains on his imagination. It does, I think it does. Then there was I think a change in your attitude towards your work, and in the work you did in 1938 and '39. What happened, aside from the fact that you were writing for John Campbell principally? I was writing for John Campbell - I wrote those stories for John Campbell, John Campbell in mind. I thought that writing for John, I'd have some freedom, and that I didn't need to stick to the mad scientist syndrome anymore. Of course there were a lot of things not mad scientist, but that was the context of the thing.


And I tried to write more naturalistically. The first story that I sold to John was a story about a football game between Mars and Earth; and the second one I sold to him was about Iowa farmers homesteading Venus. And this was a departure. I, there may've been other people who were doing the same thing, but I was one of the first to do this, to take ordinary characters and put them into strange situations and see what happened. How did John react? John reacted, was delighted with it. And the thing was that John thought that he found a new author - he'd forgotten that I had been writing and announced me as a new author. Did the fans, other people react as well? I don't think that, I don't think that the reaction was so, was as good as it might be. I think it caught them by surprise: it took three or four years before they began to see what myself and some of the other people were trying to do at that time. Then it seems to me there was another change in your, the way you began to work, about the time you wrote Time Query, wasn't it? Yes, I think perhaps it was. Well, you see, writing the way I was and with the comparative freedom of the magazines that were, that was developing at that time, I was getting an awful lot of confidence. And I was then beginning to ask myself now, instead of just writing, should I begin to try to say something worthwhile? And then of course you have to go through the agony of thinking exactly what should I say, what is worthwhile saying. And I think probably Time Query was the first story in which I really tried to do that. There may have been some earlier ones, but... The theme of Time Query, as I remember it, was the fact that all living creatures are brothers, isn't that? That's right. It was the brotherhood idea. After all, life is in the minority in the universe; and the universe is antagonistic toward it. You have to, a life does have to cooperate: it's something rather unique. And it's just unique enough that the mere fact that life exists is enough to make for a brotherhood.


Then it seems to me perhaps, do you think your writing has changed since then, since Time Query and Here Gather the Stars? Oh, I think, I think, Jim, that every writer evolves. I don't think this is unique with myself. You're not the same man you were a year ago or five years ago; there is a continual intellectual ferment going on - I think there is, I hope there is. When it ceases, why, the person is no longer a writer. And you change; you grow; and you evolve; and your thinking changes. It's a continual process. For example, I couldn't possibly write City now - I was able to write City when I did write it. I wouldn't have a ghost of a chance for writing that kind of a story now. I probably am writing better than I wrote then. But there was an exuberance then that was present then that I probably haven't got now. What were you trying to say in City? I was, oh... I was trying, it was at the time of World War II; and I was terribly disillusioned with what the human race was doing to itself. I was extremely upset at the idea that we could continue to use war as a matter of national policy. I was upset by man's inhumanity to man: we were hearing about Dachau and some of the other camps. And so I tried to, I tried to create a world that would be the kind of a world I'd want to live in; and I've always often said, without really meaning it I think, that I made a world of dogs because you couldn't make that kind of a world and fill it with human beings. It was a plea for some intellectual honesty and for some kindness and for some brotherhood. In more recent times, in, say, middle '60s you've been writing more along a fantasy vein. Is this for a particular purpose? I'm not too sure it is. You can't reach inside yourself and find out exactly why you're doing a thing. But I have found, I experiment with this, experimented with it a little bit and found that it worked, this business of time fantasy and science fiction concepts together. And I was a little bit horrified at myself when I started to do it, because I thought, "Well, if this is not science fiction, it's not really fantasy - it's a hybrid." And the more I did it, the more I thought about it, I thought, well, why not? Because they do relate to one another; and they can be used very effectively I think. And I'm not the only man who's doing it - a lot of people are doing this.


Do you think there is still something you want to say that you haven't yet said? I know that I want to continue writing. I still feel the old compulsion to write. I think there are some things I want to say, I hope so. You've just finished a new book, I think. Yes, I did. Is this different than what you've said before? I think this is... I've said a good deal more of a lot of things that I wanted to say. And it was an experimental novel, not necessarily because I wanted to write an experimental novel, but because I had to write a non-structure novel to get at the problems I wanted to present. And thank goodness, I found a publisher that is going to publish it. Were you conscious when you were writing of what other people were trying to say? I think I was conscious of it. I knew that a great many people were thinking different things, trying to express the philosophies and new thoughts. It might have influenced me - I don't think I had too great an influence. After all, when you're writing in that way, you have to be honest; you have to be honest to yourself and to your public; you can't ape somebody else. Could you, would you say that the fact that they were trying to say something encouraged you to say something yourself? Oh certainly. I'd, it'd be pretty lonesome situation to be the only man in the field who's trying to say something. It was a great comfort to me to find out that other people were trying to do some of the same things I was trying to do. Do you feel science fiction has changed significantly during this 40-year span? As far as the structure of the field is concerned, it has changed. And the change has come in a broadening-out and in a more and greater flexibility. You've got more ground you can cover; there is more, there are more themes you can talk about; there are more ways in which you can write. I think it's changed for the


better all the time, not, probably not year by year but period by period, going through different periods of writing. Do you feel there's anybody in particular you've learned from? I... No, I don't think that I can name one single name. I think I've learned from a lot of people: I've learned from Isaac Asimov, and Heinlein, and Sturgeon, and Fritz Lieber, and Poul Anderson - a great many, great many people. Do you feel that the new diversity in science fiction that you were speaking about has made it possible to do things that you couldn't have done before? Oh yes, I very definitely feel that. But there was no restriction ever for a man to go out as far into left field as he wanted to; but seeing other people do it, it gives you an encouragement of sort; it gives you a license to go out and to match what they're doing, or even to go beyond where they've gone. Is that true of this new novel? I think that... I don't think that I could've written this new novel five years ago. But seeing what people like Zelazny, Delany, and perhaps even Heinlein have done gave me the courage to go ahead and do this. And I don't mean to say that this is an outstanding or ice-breaking novel or anything - it certainly is different from anything I have written. And I hope that people like it. It's ice-breaking for you. It's ice-breaking for me. But not for the field. What's the title of the book? A Choice of Gods. Are you working on another one? I'm working on another one. It is not an experimental novel - it's what I have been doing before. Not the same theme?


Not the same theme, no, no. There's always something new. There's always something new. You don't... Occasionally you, one book follows another in pretty much the same pattern; but after all, there are other things to do. You move away. I don't think it's a conscious thing: unconsciously you say this book is going to be a little bit different. Isn't that perhaps what science fiction is all about? I think so. I think so, entirely. I don't, we don't have too many people in science fiction who get stuck in a rut: they change, they evolve. Like I told, like I said before, there's evolution within the writers and within the field.

The Early Days Of The SF Magazines: An Interview With Jack Williamson

The Early Days Of The SF Magazines: An Interview With Jack Williamson Born and raised on an arid New Mexico farm, Jack Williamson used science fiction as a doorway into another world created with the publication of the first science fiction magazine in 1926, Amazing Stories. In his 50s he earned a Ph.D. in English and took up a career as a university teacher in his home town of Portales, New Mexico. He still writes, mostly in collaboration with Fred Pohl, but he can not forget the wonderful early days of the magazines. [James Gunn’s questions are italicized; Jack Williamson’s replies appear in roman text] Jack, your career in science fiction is almost identical with magazine science fiction itself. What brought you into the field? I grew up on a sort of semi-desert farm in South-Eastern New Mexico. The weather was dry; farm prices were low. I wanted to be a scientist with no opportunity to get the training, to get into it. When I came across my first copies of the old Amazing Stories, this was a fantastic new world - it was something I could get into. It was better than real science because it had all sorts of implications for the future as well as today, the experiments worked. And that was exciting. Do you think this attitude was typical or at least symbolic of most science fiction writers and readers? It seems to me that it was. It seems to me that the young reader, the new reader, the typical reader, is excited about science fiction as revealing something that could happen - it's a sort of window into tomorrow. It has this sense of possible achievement, as distinct from fantasy that is about what couldn't happen. And people are excited with the idea that science and reason can make a better society, a new world; it can give us sorts of experience that we can't have in the world today. What about this feeling of isolation that you mentioned, and this feeling of dissatisfaction with reality? Do you think this was typical of the science fiction writers and readers?


I think so. It's - most popular literature is probably escape literature; and science fiction, as much as any of it, is written and read primarily for entertainment and escape, and only incidentally for depth, for literary values or themes or whatever. I think somebody however has suggested - perhaps it was Isaac Asimov or Arthur Clarke - that it is, I think it was Isaac who said it was escape into reality. Do you agree with that? Well, in a sense. That is, the mainstream fiction is about the world as it is, or it was; and it ignores the fact that it's changing. And it seems to me the basic truth, reality about our world today, is that it's changing very rapidly, primarily because of technology, technological change. And it seems to me that this is the first fact of reality; and accepting this change makes science fiction real, realistic in a way that the mainstream fiction is not. Your first story was published in 1928. Did you sense that this time, that feeling of change that you referred to? I think so. About the same time that I wrote the story, I wrote an editorial called Scientifiction, Searchlight of Science in which the basic idea was that science fiction looks ahead of science; it explores the possibilities; it shows what the machines can do. And the idea in the editorial at least was that scientists could follow, they could - science could build the hardware that science fiction had imagined. How long was it before you came into contact with editors and other writers of science fiction? It was pretty slow at first, but within a few years I went to New York and began meeting other writers and editors briefly. I met Ed Hamilton, who was a pioneer science fiction writer for Weird Tales, and drifted down the Mississippi with him. What editors did you meet at the time? Well, I met Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales first of all, who was one of the great editors, and... You met Hugo Gernsback? Only briefly.


What kind of a person was he? Well, he was a very aggressive, successful businessman. He was interested in gadgets. He published radio electronics magazines, how to do it; gadget magazines; and as an editor he was, he liked science fiction. He in a sense deserves all his credit for being the father of American science fiction, but I feel myself that his greatest achievement was probably rediscovering H. G. Wells and popularizing him. I was just checking my files, and I see that for the first 29 issues of Amazing Stories there was a Wells story inside, and Wells' name in big letters on the cover. That's amazing, really amazing. [Gunn laughs] What about Jules Verne? Did he also use a lot of Jules Verne? He used a lot of Jules Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. Merrit. As an editor, he had good taste in that he liked good science fiction. His weakness as an editor, it seems to me, is that he left the editorial management to subordinates, and that he was reluctant to pay for science fiction, for new science fiction; that he didn't really encourage new writers. I think it was Horace Gold who said that in the early days of science fiction one got paid at a fraction of a cent a word, and only upon lawsuit. In my case it was half a cent or less. And I got a lawyer at the fiction guild to collect for me finally. [Gunn laughs] It was in the early '30s that the Clayton Magazines founded Astounding. And you sold some stories to that magazine too. Yes. Harry Bates was the first editor. The original title of the magazines was Astounding Stories of Superscience. And they, Harry Bates was a good editor in that he paid well - he paid 2 cents a word; he had a definite formula; he encouraged writers. The word "formula" has a bad ring, but I don't think it's altogether bad: that is, Clayton had a chain of pulp magazines, and Astounding had to fit the pattern of the chain. And this meant... well, plotted stories, shaped stories with a beginning, a middle, and an end, but the action had to be motivated - it had to get somewhere. There was a reason for things. And I think this was, writing for Astounding was good and encouraged a writer to achieve a sense of form and direction, even though the pulp formula itself was narrow, limited.


Did writers at that time talk a lot about formulas, about how to find the perfect formula? I think so. I was trying to write pulp fiction; and I think the pulp fiction writer had a formula in somewhat the same way that the epic poet did in the oral tradition: that is, pulp writers traditionally wrote fast; they pounded the stuff out first-draft and sold it. And this involves a sort of limited and narrowed approach. And the pulp formula I think was good in some ways: it required a form for the story, a beginning, a middle, and an end, motivation for the action, a sense of direction that was good for a writer to learn, though it was sort of limiting. Is this what you and Ed Hamilton talked about briefly? Well, all sorts of things. Ed had, I think, a too-narrow formula: that is, when you consider his background, his reading, his knowledge of the field, his sensibilities, he could've written more diversified stuff than he did, but he tended to do the same basic story over and over again for Weird Tales. But it was a wonderful story: it was a sort of myth of the future in which his interstellar patrol many thousand years in the future was saving a future society from all sorts of dangers. And this I think was the beginning or an early part of the myth of the future that has been developed by Stapledon, by Isaac Asimov, and by a lot of other people and to... something that is a sort of a central myth in science fiction, as the Trojan War was the central myth for the Greeks. Is this a conscious or an unconscious process, do you think? Well, unconscious. It made a background for the stories. It was part of, well, the sense of wonder, the motivation, the reason for being. But I don't think anybody deliberately planned it out. But when the idea occurred, it was wonderful. Sort of a trial-and-error process of the best idea survive? I suppose so. Ed Hamilton got a nickname out of his writing, didn't he? What was he called? Worldsaver, Worldwrecker Hamilton. Yes, that was it, I believe.


Which wasn't, not quite fair. He wrote better stories at the time that nobody would buy them, and better stories later that people did buy, such as What's It Like Out There. To get back to some of the earlier editors, some names that I recall, people like T. O'Conor Sloane in the early days of Amazing Stories, and F. Orlin Tremaine. Did you know anything of them? Well, Sloane was I think, the son-in-law of Thomas Alva Edison. I didn't actually meet him, though he was there. But I feel that he was a pretty passive, inactive editor. Tremaine I met, knew; I feel that he was an excellent editor in that he was interesting, he was dynamic, he had a goal for the magazine, he planned things for it and carried them through. And he was exciting to work with in the same way that Wright was and that John Campbell was later and that Horace Gold always was for the people who worked for him. His successor in 1937 was John W. Campbell, Jr. What were your relationships with Campbell? Did he write to you? Did you write to him? Well, I was already writing for the magazine. And I met Campbell about the time he came in, if not earlier, and... It was 1937. Yes. And I continued sending him stories. Campbell liked the most of them; and later he suggested ideas. He was a creative mind with a sense of direction, and he was a man who inspired and led writers and who made the magazine what he wanted. And it was something different. Tremaine had not been a scientist in the sense that Campbell was - he didn't have the same sense of science and direction. And so that Campbell, with a special, let's say dream or the role of science and the shape of the future and so forth, energized or inspired a new group of writers, such as Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, L. Ron Hubbard, A. E. Van Vogt, Ted Sturgeon. You mentioned that John Campbell suggested ideas to his writers. What kind of ideas did he suggest to you? For example, I had written a novelette called With Folded Hands, and he suggested a sequel. And With Folded Hands, they are the humanoids, little robots created to serve and obey and guide man from harm that do this too well so that they


suffocate individuality, initiative, freedom; they smother the human race. He suggested that I use Ryan's work in parapsychology at Duke and as a force that man might develop when they're denied their ability to use their hands - as he saw it, a force to use against the robots. But with my own sense of the story, I felt that the robots would control this force too, and...that is, they're created by definition to be perfect; and the statement of the story is that the perfect machine is perfectly destructive. So logically the humanoids had to mechanize this and become more destructive than ever. What other story ideas did Campbell have a part in for you? During the war, when his writers were being drafted, he felt that he wanted new names. And this was the time when I was having problems in - it was a writer's block; and he suggested a new name, a new personality, new stories: somewhat the same sort of thing he'd done when he became Don A. Stuart with a new style, a new sort of story instead of the space operas that Campbell had been writing. And what I had for a story idea was a story about the planetary engineers who terraform asteroids, make them inhabitable. And Campbell suggested that some of these asteroids should be anti-matter. And working with these, this framework, I came up with eventually a couple of novels about what we call "CT," for contra-terrine matter. Another thing that Campbell didn't actually do, but he suggested a story about the mechanical ants who would be somewhat like my own humanoids in that they would be machines that would be too much for us. And this I never was able to do for Campbell, probably because I'd used up my own motivation and so forth and The Humanoids. But it worked into a novel I've just finished called The Moon Children. Which will appear... It's supposed to be published in Galaxy, and to be published by Berkley and possibly Putnam. This will represent six decades in which you have had science fiction published. Which makes me seem pretty antique. [Williamson laughs] Right. Although there is a science fiction writer even more, who goes back farther than that: Will Jenkins.


Murray Leinster. Murray Leinster, whose first story was published in 1919 but still in the '60s I think was considered a contemporary science fiction writer. Did you ever meet him? Only briefly, during the war, about Campbell's office. Quiet, reserved, humorous man; pleasant, likable. I don't know him well. There were, I believe, at least two other major creative editors in the field, although perhaps you never sold to either one of them: Horace Gold and Tony Boucher. I never did. I knew them both socially; I admired them, and I appreciate what they for the field. Horace Gold I think brought an element of ironic or satiric or the anti-utopian into the science fiction magazine field out of the stream of literature that's represented by Huxley's Brave New World, by Orwell's 1984, and so forth. And Boucher with McComas brought into the field a literary quality that it didn't have anywhere else. Back, going back to the '30s, I asked Isaac Asimov the question about the time when he was first involved in science fiction. I'd like to ask you, what did you, you and the other writers, have the sense that you were doing? I was tremendously excited about science fiction as a real way of looking ahead of exploring the possible future, of envisioning what might happen. And I was also excited about it in a way that I can't easily define - it's something to be created: that is, this was something I was deeply concerned about, something I could do. It was the form, the possibilities, the genre, the medium with a challenge. It was just an avenue for creation. We've said that there was not much money in it. Why did you do it if it wasn't for money? Just for love, for excitement, for this special kind of creation, of freedom to do something the way I wanted it as nearly as I could. You thought that you were involved in the, in creating something, in the beginning of something.


I definitely did. That science fiction was to me - I think to most of us - something new. The society around us in depression times and so forth was pretty, pretty discouraging; and this was a way out personally and socially to something new, something different, something better, something wonderful. Did you get any feedback in terms of reaction from readers and other writers? Especially in letter columns in the magazines. They used to print a dozen pages of letters, and many of these readers were as excited about the whole thing as I was. You could've been a physicist or a bank clerk. In fact, you opted to be a kind of outsider, a writer until the last 10 or 15 years when you sort of rejoined the establishment, I think you've said. Do you have any regrets about this period? None at all. It was a lonely life, and in some ways pretty bitter, but in another way it was tremendously thrilling and rewarding because science fiction is a kind of community or culture that I think is unified by this, I say, myth of the future, of science fiction, of something that can extrapolate, predict what is going to happen and perhaps influence what's going to happen - at least that's the way we kid ourselves: that we might somehow make the world better than it would otherwise be. At least I think that's part of the dream. And I think that certainly I'm glad to belong to something, and this I think is something worth belonging to. And the sense of belonging I think is good for the individual. You belong to the science fiction community. A small community, but it's there. [Williamson laughs]

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