6. In that case, we might find some other way of leaving this universe. We could then travel through hyperspace in “jumps” that will carry us enormous distances in zero time. objection: So far hyperspace exists only within the imagination of science fiction writers.
7. Well, then, we can submit to the speed-of-light limit, but freeze the crew and passengers, and arrange to have them restored to conscious life after thousands of years have passed and the destination has been reached. objection: No one really knows how human bodies can be frozen without being killed; or whether such frozen bodies, even if retaining a spark of life, can retain it over a period of thousands of years.
8. In that case, there seems nothing left to do but to coast-to travel at ordinary speeds, considerably less than that of light, with all people aboard thoroughly conscious. This means it will take many thousands of years to reach even the nearer stars, so that many generations will have to spend their lifetimes aboard the starship. That may be bearable if the starship is large enough. objection: None, really, if people want to do it.
So much for hardheaded realism. In science fiction, we tend to have faith that problems that seem insuperable now will be solved-perhaps in ways that are utterly unexpected.
Therefore we are offering you a baker’s dozen of stories, all involving starships. In these are explored the various strategies I have described above for covering long distances, and perhaps one or two that are too far-out for me to have even mentioned.
What’s more, the stories explore the effect of the long voyages on the people on board the starship, and the kind of events that might take place on them.
Since it is not likely that such voyages will be undertaken in our lifetime (and certainly not completed, if the generations-long coasting starship should indeed prove to be the only practical alternative), these exciting science-fictional speculations are the only way we can experience, if only vicariously, the long voyages that are the quintessential dreams of the far-flung imagination.
Inventing A Universe
Why have I gone to the trouble of inventing a universe for other writers to exploit?
No, it isn’t the money or the fame. Most of the royalties and all of the fame will go, as they should, to the authors who actually write the stories in this book and (it is to be hoped) in later companion pieces. My own return is, as it should be, miniscule.
But there are other reasons and I would like to explain them at some length, for among other things, they involve my feelings of guilt. Now guilt (for those of you who have never experienced the emotion) is a dreadful annoyance, souring one’s life and making one unable to enjoy properly any renown or riches that come one’s way. One is bowed down by its weight and is rendered fearful of the (usually imaginary) accusing eye of public disapproval.
In my case, it came about this way. I hadn’t been writing for more than ten or fifteen years when I began to have the uneasy suspicion that I was becoming rather well known as a science fiction writer. In fact, I was even getting mentioned as one of the “Big Three,” the other two being Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur c. Clarke.
It only got worse as the decades continued to fly by. We were not only cursed with prolificity, but with longevity, so that the same old Big Three remained Big for nearly half a century. Heinlein died in 1988 at the age of 80, but Clarke is still going strong as I write this and, obviously, so am I.
The result is that, at present, when there are a great many writers attempting to scale the mountainside of science fiction, it must be rather annoying for them to see the peak occupied by elderly has-beens who cling to it with their arthritic paws and simply won’t get off. Even death, it seems, won’t stop us, since Heinlein has already published a posthumous book and reissues of his old novels are in the works.
Thanks to the limited space on the shelves of bookstores (themselves of sharply limited number), large numbers of new books of science fiction and fantasy are placed on them for only brief intervals before being swept off by new arrivals. Few books seem to manage to exist in public view for longer than a month before being replaced. Always excepting (as some writers add, with a faint snarl) the “megastars.”
“So what?” I can hear you say in your warm and loving way. “So you’re a mega star and your books are perennial sellers and the economic futures of yourself and your eventual survivors are set. Is that bad?”
No, it isn’t bad, exactly, but that’s where the guilt comes in. I worry about crowding out newcomers with my old perennials, about smothering them with the weight of my name.
I’ve tried to justify the situation to myself. (Anything to make it possible for me to walk about science fiction conventions without having to skulk and hide in doorways when other writers pass.)
In the first place, we started in the early days of science fiction-not only the Big Three, but others of importance such as Lester del Rey, Poul Anderson, Fred Pohl, Clifford Simak, Ray Bradbury, and even some who died young: Stanley Weinbaum, Henry Kuttner, and Cyril Kornbluth, for instance. In those early days, the magazines paid only one cent a word or less, and there were only magazines. There were no hardcover science fiction publishers, no paperbacks, no Hollywood to speak of.
For years and decades we stuck it out under starvation conditions, and it was our efforts that slowly increased the popularity of science fiction to the point where today’s beginners can get more for one novel than any of us got in ten years of endless plugging. So, if some of us are doing unusually well now, it is possible to argue that we earned it.
Secondly, from the more personal standpoint, back in 1958 I decided I had done enough science fiction. I had been successful in writing nonfiction of various types and it seemed to me I could make a living if I concentrated on nonfiction (and, to tell you the truth, I preferred nonfiction). In that way I could leave science fiction to the talented new writers who were making their way into the field.
So from 1958 to 1981, a period of nearly a quarter of a century, I wrote virtually no science fiction. There was one novel and a handful of short stories, but that’s all. And meanwhile, along came the “New Wave. “ Writing styles changed drastically, and I felt increasingly that I was a back-number and should remain out of science fiction.
The trouble was that all this didn’t help. The science fiction books that I published in the 1950s refused to go out of print and continued to sell steadily through the 1960s and 1970s. And because I wrote a series of nonfiction essays for Fantasy and Science Fiction. I remained in the consciousness of the science fiction public. I was therefore still one of the Big Three.
Then, in 1981, my publisher insisted (with a big INSIST) that I write another novel and I did and, to my horror, it hit the bestseller lists and I’ve had to write a new novel every year since then, in consequence.
That would have made me feel guiltier than ever, but I’ve done various things to pull the fangs of that guilt. For instance, I have, quite deliberately, decided that since my name has developed a kind of weight and significance, I would use it, as much as possible, for the benefit of the field rather than of my self.
With my dear and able friends, Martin Harry Greenberg and Charles Waugh (and occasionally others), I have helped edit many anthologies. More than a hundred of these have now been published with my name often in the title. What these serve to do is to rescue from the shadows numbers of stories that are well worth exposing to new generations of science fiction readers. Quite apart from the fact that the readers enjoy it, it means a little money to some veteran authors, as well as a shot in the arm to encourage continued production. The thought that the presence of my name might make such anthologies do better and be more efficacious in this respect than otherwise makes me feel fine.