SUMMATION
Judith Merril
“There have been more changes in the past 65 years than in all other centuries put together. No longer do most people believe in the orderly progression of cause and effect; no longer do they believe in the natural goodness of man and the inevitability of progress. Stability is gone. This is an era of quibble, doubt, and qualm. Science, technology, art, architecture, music, literature have all acquired new values, and revolutionary conflicts rage.”
Call that one #1. (Here’s your chance to see if you can tell the writers from the scientists, or the mainstream from SF.)
#2: “I am going to make one big hypothesis—a religious hypothesis —that the emergence of intelligent life is not a meaningless accident. But I am not going to follow orthodox religions by presuming that I know what the meaning is.. . . Let us see how much of the plan we can discover.”
#3: “The next great breakthrough in science—the breakthrough that will have the kind of impact on us all that the Hiroshima bomb had —will be in the area of psychophysiology: mind and brain. And the man who will bring it about walks the earth today.”
(#4, “Today, science stands fair to join Religion, Motherhood, and the Flag as a domain so sacrosanct and so sanctimonious, that leg-pulling isn’t allowed, levity is forbidden, and smiling is scowled at.”
(Three of these nine quotes are by tried-and-true science-fiction writers; three are by scientists; three by serious writers.)
#5: “At any given time recording devices fix the nature of absolute need and dictate the use of total weapons—like this: Take two opposed pressure groups. Record the most violent and threatening statements of group one with regard to group two. Record the answer and take it back to group one—back and forth between opposed pressure groups. This process is known as feed back. You can see it operating in any barroom quarrel—in any quarrel for that matter. Manipulated on a global scale feeds back nuclear war . . .”
#6: “Each of us wants what Ponce de Leon wanted, and unless the road maps are all wrong, we are well on our way to finding it. . . . It is, in fact, a good betting probability that some of us, and perhaps a great many of us, may never have to die at all.”
(Well, perhaps I made it sound a little less complex than it is; at least one of these authors spreads over all three categories, and three of those in the “scientist” and “serious” groups have written some science fiction.)
#7: “I believe it is realistic to say that the manned lunar program will be carried to a successful conclusion in spite of the wafted time and cost; but let’s be clear. This isn’t science. It’s adventure and propaganda.”
(For purposes of the Concept Guessing Game, I am considering Arthur C. Clarke a science-fiction writer, along with Frederik Pohl and Theodore Sturgeon.)
#8: “We need very urgently to know that we are not strangers and aliens in the physical universe. ... We did not arrive like birds on barren branches; we grew out of this world, like leaves and fruit. Our universe “humans” just as a rosebush “flowers.” We are living in a world where men all over the planet are linked by an immense network of communications, and where science has made us theoretically aware of our interdependence with the entire domain of organic and inorganic nature.”
(The three scientists: Philip Abelson, editor of Science; Fred Hoyle, cosmologist; James V. McConnell, comparative psychologist.)
#9: “The most controversial, and widely criticized of all space experiments took place in mid-Pacific on July 8, 1963, when . . . the AEC and the Department of Defense detonated a megaton bomb 200 miles above Johnston Island. (Sociological note: In the press releases, it’s always a “nuclear device.” I say it’s a bomb, but I say the hell with it.)”
(And seriously three more: William S. Burroughs, of Naked Lunch, etc.; John Gunther, Inside author; Alan Watts, Zen philosopher-theologian.)
The answers are here; you’ll get to them. But if you make an honest try at matching them up first for yourself, you may get my point better. SF has become more sophisticated, as well as more literate. We can no longer rely on flashing-panel gadgets or mad scientists, any more than on poor prose or flamboyant illustrations, to set it apart from other literature. Nor can we determine the nature from the source: there are comparatively few specialty magazines, and any publication is likely to carry some SF. Presumably, the distinctive quality is in the concepts; and if the SF writer’s ideas are different from other people’s, it ought to show up In such vigorous statements as those above.
(Burroughs, Hoyle, and McConnell are the three who have written some SF; does that help?)
Throughout this volume, I have been pointing out the meeting places on the literary scene where the once-sequestered science-fictionist now mingles freely with the journalist, the experimentalist, the poet and philosopher, and an occasional visitor from the academic or international world of letters. I have mentioned the journalists, and the newsmen in particular, who have made their way onto the SF scene— as well as the students and avant-gardistes. But there is another change in the author statistics that is more significant.
Most of the people included in this Tenth Annual are mostly-writers: that is, writing is the occupation by which they earn their living, and with which they would have to fill in tax returns and credit applications. Fully half of them this year are full-time free-lancers—and half of the balance have writing jobs.
Ten years ago, when I began editing this series, the number of people writing SF who did not have other jobs was very small (and the number of full-time SF-writers smaller yet, by far). The average contributor was either a spare-time science-fictionist—a scientist, technician, teacher, doctor, what-have-you?—who regarded his writing as a second profession, and probably wrote only SF, or a would-be freelancer who took his writing seriously enough, but still had to have an outside job to eat on.
Nine of the authors in this book have nonwriting jobs (and “non-writing” includes the PR men and English professor).
Let me hasten to make clear that the change has not occurred because science-fiction writing has become a lucrative business. It is quite as miserably underpaid as it used to be. The difference is, simply, and once again, that the distinction between the specialty writer and the writer-in-general has almost vanished. For instance—
The Big Names of SF—the names everybody knows—Sturgeon, Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke—how many of them are actually “SF writers” today? Only Heinlein still writes primarily in the genre.
Conversely, the best new names in the field, this last decade, are almost all either young writers of serious literary intentions, who regard SF as one of their preferred modes of expression (Aandahl, Aldiss, Davidson, Ellison, Sheckley, Wilhelm, to name a few who do not happen to be represented this year); or already established writers just discovering the uses of the speculative and imaginative techniques (George P. Elliott, “Cordwainer Smith,” John Hersey, Charles Einstein, Graham Greene, for instance).
(All right, you can start eliminating. Numbers 1, 2, and 3 are, respectively, John Gunther, in Look magazine’s special “Inside the Twentieth Century” issue, January 12, 1965; Fred Hoyle, in Of Men and Galaxies, University of Washington Press, 1964; Theodore Sturgeon, in IF magazine, March, 1964. Try again on the other six.)
Or look at the new books.
Unfortunately, Anthony Boucher is no longer reviewing SF regularly enough to continue his annual surveys for these anthologies. I did not seek to replace him (as how could one, in any case?) this year, because at the time I received his regrets, I had just started, myself, to do reviews for Fantasy and Science Fiction—the same column Boucher had brightened with his unique style and erudition for the first ten years of the magazine’s history. I cannot speak comprehensively of the 1964 books: I started too late for that. But there are some comments I can make on the basis of the past six months, and one of them is about the books that are sent to a magazine with a name like Fantasy and Science Fiction.