I read Marty’s headnotes with avidity for they always tell me more about the writer than I know, but not more than I want to know, of course.
One thing that I’ve noticed, with some curiosity, is that science fiction writers tend to have a ten-year lifespan, or, if anything, less.
That is, they will write science fiction, sometimes copiously, for ten years or less, and then they will dwindle off and fade to a halt. Sometimes, they don’t even dwindle, they simply stop dead. It leaves me wondering why.
One explanation, of course, is that they find other and more lucrative markets. John D. MacDonald wrote science fiction in his early years and then made the big time in mystery thrillers. John Jakes wrote science fiction in his early years and then made the big time in historical fiction.
Another explanation is that they die-even science fiction writers die. Back in the 1950s, Cyril Kornbluth and Henry Kuttner died while each was at the peak of his career, and more recently the same was true for Philip K. Dick and Frank Herbert.
But there are those who simply stop and end what seems a fruitful career without switching to other fields and while remaining vigorously alive. I can even think of names of fresh young writers who graced the pages of this magazine in its early issues whom we (or anyone else) don’t hear from much anymore.
Why is that? Do they run out of ideas? Do they simply get tired of writing? Does science fiction change into new channels with which they are out of sympathy?
I simply don’t know.
Perhaps this is something that is true of all forms of writing and not of science fiction alone. Perhaps it is true of all forms of creative endeavor. Perhaps “burnout” is a common phenomenon which ought to be studied more than it is-by psychologists, not by me.
But if burnout is common, then what about those cases in which burnout does not occur? It may be just as useful to study those who are burnout-immune, and who have been writing high-quality science fiction steadily, prolifically, and successfully for, say, forty years and more, and who show no signs of breaking under the strain.
Lately, I have noticed that such people are termed “dinosaurs” by some observers in the field. I suspect that the term is used pejoratively; that is, it is not used as a compliment. From the things they have to say about the writers they call dinosaurs, I gather that, like the real dinosaurs, these writers are considered to be ancient, clumsy, and outmoded.
The term, however, is particularly inappropriate because the characteristic that we most associate with the real dinosaurs is that they are extinct, while the characteristic most noticeable about the writing dinosaurs is that they are not extinct. As a matter of fact, I gather from the nature of the comments made about these dinosaurs that those who use the term are rather aggrieved at them for not being extinct and for hogging too much of the spotlight for far too much time.
Well, that’s their problem. For myself, I prefer to use the term “survivors,” which is neither pejorative nor complimentary, but merely factual.
What are the characteristics that would qualify a science fiction writer to be a survivor?
To begin with, since I talked about a successful and steady and prolific writing life of at least forty years, a survivor would have to be at least sixty years old, and alive, and working. Naturally, he would have had to have started at quite a young age and been swatting away at it steadily since then.
I can think, offhand, of nine writers who fulfill these qualifications, and here they are:
1) Jack Williamson. His first story was published in 1928, when he was twenty years old. He has been writing steadily for fifty-nine years, and he is now eighty years old. To me, he is the undoubted and wellbeloved dean of science fiction. His “The Legion of Space, “ which bounced me off the wall when I was a teenager, appeared fifty-three years ago.
2) Clifford D. Simak. His first story was published in 1931, when he was twenty-seven years old. He has been writing steadily for fifty-six years and he is now eighty-two years old. His “City” appeared forty-three years ago, and “Cosmic Engineers” forty-eight years ago.
3) L. Sprague de Camp. His first story was published in 1937, when he was thirty years old. He has been writing steadily for forty-nine years and is now seventy-nine years old. His “Lest Darkness Fall” which I read in preference to studying for an all-important test in physical chemistry (without ever regretting it) appeared forty-eight years ago.
4) Isaac Asimov. (You didn’t think I’d leave myself out through some perverted notion of modesty, did you?) My first story was published in March, 1939, when I was nineteen. I have been writing steadily for forty-eight years, and I am now sixty-seven years old. My story “Nightfall” appeared forty-six years ago.
5) Robert Heinlein. His first story was published in August, 1939, when he was thirty-two. He has been writing steadily for forty-eight years and he is now eighty years old. His “Blowups Happen “ appeared forty-seven years ago.
6) Fritz Leiber. His first story was published in August, 1939, when he was twenty-nine. He has been writing steadily for forty-eight years and he is now seventy-six years old. His “Conjure Wife” appeared forty-four years ago.
7) Frederik Pohl. It’s hard to say because so much of his early stuff appeared under pseudonyms of one sort or another, but an undoubted story of his appeared in 1941 when he was twenty-one. He has been writing steadily for forty-six years, and he is now sixty-seven years old. His “Gravy Planet” (“Space Merchants”) appeared thirty-five years ago.
8) Arthur C. Clarke. His first story appeared in 1946, when he was twenty-nine. He has been writing steadily for forty-one years, and he is now seventy years old. His “Rescue Party” appeared forty-one years ago.
9) Poul Anderson. His first story appeared in 1947, when he was twenty-one. He has been writing steadily for forty years, and is now sixty-one years old. His “The Helping Hand” appeared thirty-seven years ago.
I don’t pretend that this list is necessarily definitive. Offhand, I can think of three other possible survivors. Lester del Rey’s first story was published in 1938, while A. E. Van Vogt and Alfred Bester were each first published in 1939. In recent decades, however, they have not published much, so I can’t honestly deny burnout in their cases.
If we look at the list, we can come to some conclusions, I think. In the first place the survivors were all science fiction fans from a very early age, and gained a life-long fascination with the field. That must be so.
Secondly, each must be a nonsuffering writer. Lots of good writers, even great writes, don’t necessarily like to write, and must force themselves to do so. This doesn’t prevent them from writing well, you understand, but it does prevent them from writing a lot, and my qualification for being a survivor is that one writes steadily and prolifically.
Thirdly, each resists the notion of abandoning science fiction. It is not likely that survivors can write only SF and nothing else. To my knowledge, Simak, Pohl, and Anderson have written good nonfiction; Clarke and de Camp have written quite a bit of good nonfiction; and I have written a thundering lot of it. In addition, Pohl has written mainstream fiction (he has a new novel entitled Chernobyl that’s coming out-very unusual and not science fiction). De Camp has written excellent historical novels. As for me, I have written a great deal of mystery fiction. In every case, however, no matter how they stray, these survivors always return to science fiction.
There you are. “Dinosaurs”? I think not. I think the survivors (even I) are the great pillars of science fiction. I wonder how many more of them will appear in the future.
Nowhere!
In 1516, the english scholar Thomas More (1478-1535) published a book (in Latin), with a long title-as was the fashion in those days-that was also in Latin. When it finally appeared in its first English edition in 1551, the title was given as “ A fruteful and pleasant Worke of the beste State of a publyque
Weale, and of the newe yle, called Utopia.” We refer to the book simply as Utopia.
In the book, More described the workings of what he considered an ideal human society, as found on the island nation of Utopia, one that was governed entirely by the dictates of reason. His description of such a society is so noble and rational that it would seem enviable even today.
More was under no illusions as to the real world, however. The word “utopia” is from the Greek “ou” (“not”) and “topos” (“place”) so that it means “nowhere.” More realized, in other words, that his ideal existed nowhere on Earth (and still doesn’t). In fact, his book, in describing his ideal society, served also by clear contrast to excoriate the actual governments of his day, particularly that of his native England which, of course, he knew the best.
An easy mistake was made, however. Since Utopia, as described, was such a wonderful place, it could easily be imagined that the first syllable was from the Greek prefix “eu-” meaning “good” so that Utopia became not “nowhere” but the “good place.”
The word “utopia “ entered the English language, and the other European languages as well, as meaning an ideal society. The adjective “utopian “ refers to any scheme that has what seems a good end in view, but that is not practical, and cannot be carried through in any realistic sense.
We might speak of utopian literature-written accounts in which ideal societies are described, with More’s as the classic, but not the earliest, example. Plato’s Republic was a description, nineteen centuries earlier than Utopia, of an ideal state dependent upon reason. Earlier still, were accounts of ideal states in mythological or religious literature, in the form of past golden ages or of future messianic ones. The Garden of Eden is a well-known example of the former, and the eleventh chapter of Isaiah of the latter.
The production of utopian accounts has not fallen off since the time of More, either. The most influential recent examples have been Looking Backward, published in 1888 by Edward Bellamy (1850-1898), which described the United States of 2000 under an ideal Socialist government, and Walden Two, published in 1948 by B. F. Skinner (1904-), which described an ideal society based on Skinner’s own theories of social engineering.