The competition for space in the science fiction magazines is therefore keener, so that better natural talents reach their pages-and set higher standards for other novices to shoot at.
I doubt, for instance, that I could possibly have broken into science fiction in 1979 with nothing more than the talent I had when I broke into the field in 1939. (Nor need this discourage new writers-they are learning in a better school in 1979 than I did in 1939.) There is also greater knowledge of science today.
The writers of my own golden age knew very little science that they didn’t pick up from the lurid newspaper stories of the day (equivalent to learning about sex in the gutter).
Nowadays, on the other hand, even those science fiction writers who are not particularly educated in science and who don’t particularly use science in their stories nevertheless know much more about science and use it far more skillfully (when they do) than did the creaky old giants of the past. The new writers can’t help it. We now live in a society in which science saturates every medium of communication and the very air we breathe-and the growing ranks of capable science writers see to it that the communications are of high quality.
What do we face then?
We will have stories by better writers, dealing with more exciting and more subtle themes in a more intelligently scientific manner.
Need we worry that it will all come to an end, that science is outpacing science fiction and putting us all out of a job?
No! What the scientists are doing is exactly the reverse. They are providing us with fresh, new gimmicks daily: new ideas, new possibilities.
In just the last few days, I have read about the discovery of gases in Venus’s atmosphere which seem to show that Venus could not have been formed in the same way Earth was. I have read about the possibility of setting up a modulated beam of neutrinos that could allow communication through the Earth instead of around it. I have read that the Sun may have a steadily ticking internal clock with the irregularities of the sunspots a superficial modification-but what the clock is and why the modification, we do not know.
Each of these items can serve as the starting point for a story that might not have been possible to write last year, let alone thirty years ago. And they will be written with the skill and expertise of today.
These are exciting times for society, for science, for science fiction, for science fiction writers, for science fiction readers. George, Joel, and I are having more fun putting this magazine together all the time; and, we hope, you are having more fun reading it all the time.
Why not? There’s a Golden Age ahead!
The All-Human Galaxy
In I928, “The Skylark Of Space” by Edward E. Smith appeared in Amazing Stories, and was instantly recognized as an important milestone in science fiction.
Until then, stories involving space travel dealt almost exclusively with the solar system. Trips to the Moon and to Mars were the staples. Visitors from other stellar systems may have been mentioned (as in the case of the visitor from Sirius in Voltaire’s “ Micromegas“) but these were trivial instances.
Smith, however, introduced interstellar travel as a commonplace thing and placed his heroes and villains within a space-frame that included the entire galaxy. It was the first time this had happened and the readers devoured it and demanded more. The “superscience story” became the hit of the decade. Smith held the lead in this respect for twenty years, although during the first half of his career, John w. Campbell was a close second.
Smith and Campbell viewed the galaxy as including many, many intelligent species. Almost every planet possessed them and Smith, in particular, was most inventive in dreaming up unearthly shapes and characteristics for his alien beings.
This “many-intelligence galaxy” is not as prominent in science fiction as it once was, but you may find it in contemporary television. In Star Trek and its lesser imitations, it sometimes seemed as though a spaceship could not travel in any direction at random, for a week, without coming across an intelligent species (usually inimical in one way or another.) The visual media are hampered in their ability to represent these aliens imaginatively, for somehow an actor usually exists under the makeup or plastic. The extraterrestrial creatures, therefore, if not human, were nevertheless clearly primate.
In this connection, though, the science fiction writer, Hal Clement raised an interesting question, which I think of as “Clement’s Paradox.”
The universe has existed for perhaps fifteen billion years, and if there are many civilizations that have risen here and there among its stars, these must have appeared at any time in the past twelve billion years (allowing three billion for the first to arise).
It should follow, therefore, that human explorers, when locating an extraterrestrial civilization, would be quite apt to find them anywhere from one to twelve billion years old in the vast majority of cases (assuming them to be very long-lived). If they were not very long-lived, but only endured, say, a million years or less before coming to a natural or a violent end, then almost all planets bearing such civilizations would show signs of the ruins of a long-dead one, or possibly a series of two or more sets of ruins.
To a lesser extent, in relatively young planetary systems, the civilization might not be ready to arise for anywhere from a million to a billion years.
The chance of encountering a civilization, then, that is at some level near our own would have to be very small.
And yet (and this is Clement’s Paradox), science fiction writers consistently show alien civilizations to be fairly close in technological level to Earth’s. They might be a little more primitive or a little more advanced, but considering the rate at which technology advances on Earth these days, it would seem that the aliens are not more than a few thousand years behind us at most, or a few hundred years ahead of us at best.
How enormous the odds are against that!
As far as I know, however, science fiction writers didn’t worry about this. Certainly, I didn’t. Since I began publishing in 1939, when Edward E. Smith was at the very height of his success (though John Campbell had just retired to the job of editing Astounding), I naturally tried my hand at the “many-intelligence” galaxy myself.
For instance, there was my eighth published story, “Homo Sol,” which appeared in the September, 1940 Astounding. It dealt with a galactic empire consisting of the civilized beings from many, many planetary systems-each planetary system containing a different type of intelligent being. Each bore the name of the native star in the species name, so that there would be “Homo Arcturus,” “Homo Canopus “ and so on. The plot dealt with Earth’s coming of technological age and the possible entry of Earthmen (“Homo Sol,” you see) into the empire.
And now there came a struggle between John Campbell and myself. John could not help but feel that people of northwest European descent (like himself) were in the forefront of human civilization and that all other people lagged behind. Expanding this view to a galactic scale, he viewed Earthmen as the “northwest Europeans” of the galaxy. He did not like to see Earthmen lose out to aliens, or to have
Earthmen pictured as in any way inferior. Even if Earthmen were behind technologically, they should win anyway because they invariably were smarter, or braver, or had a superior sense of humor, or something.
I, however, was not of northwest European stock, and, as a matter of fact (this was 1940, remember, and the Nazis were in the process of wiping out the European Jews), I was no great admirer of them. I felt that Earthmen, if they symbolized these northwest Europeans according to the Campbellian outlook, might well prove inferior in many vital ways to other civilized races; that Earthmen might lose out to the aliens; that they might even deserve to lose out.
However, John Campbell won out. He was a charismatic and overwhelming person, and I was barely twenty years old, very much in awe of him, and very anxious to sell stories to him. So I gave in, adjusted the story to suit his prejudices and have been ashamed of that ever since.
Nevertheless, I didn’t plan to have that happen again, ever. I wrote a sequel to “Homo Sol,” which I called “The Imaginary,” in which I evaded the issue by having Earthmen not appear (and Campbell rejected it). I wrote another story in which Earthmen fought villainous extraterrestrial overlords, and felt that would be all right, for the overlords were transparent symbols of the Nazis (and, as it happened, Campbell rejected that, too).
I continued to want to write “superscience stories” my way, however, and continued to probe for strategies that would allow me to do so without encountering Campbellian resistance.
I arrived at the answer when I first thought of my story “Foundation.” For it, I needed a galactic empire, as in “Homo Sol,” and I wanted a free hand to have it develop as I wished. The answer, when it came to me, was so simple, I can only wonder why it took me so long to reach it. Instead of having an empire with no human beings as in “The Imaginary,” I would have an empire with nothing but human beings. I would not even have robots in it. Thus was born the “all-human galaxy.”
It worked remarkably well for me. Campbell never raised any objections; never suggested that I ought to insert a few alien races; never asked why they were missing. He threw himself into the spirit of the stories and accepted my galactic empire on my terms, and I never had to take up the problem of racial superiority/inferiority.
Nor did I spend time worrying about the rationale behind the all-human galaxy myself. I had what
I wanted, and I was satisfied.
I did not ask myself, for instance, why it was that human beings were the only intelligent species in the galaxy. As it happens, it is possible that though planets are extremely numerous, relatively few are habitable; or that though many planets may be habitable, few may develop life; or that though many planets may be lifebearing, few indeed may develop intelligent life or civilizations. Nevertheless, I made no effort whatsoever to state any of this explicitly as explanation for what I was describing. It is only with my new novel Foundation’s Edge, written forty years after the series had begun, that I have started to explore the rationale behind it.