by Gordon R. Dickson—Music by Gordon R. Dickson
HOW TO THINK A SCIENCE FICTION STORY
by G. Harry Stine
In August, 1957, I doubt there were a hundred men and women alive who rationally expected to see a man land on the Moon in their own lifetimes. There were, I should say, a couple of thousand, out of Earth’s billions, who honestly believed such a development to be technologically possible, or historically plausible. By January of 1958, the swiftest intellectual revolution in history had occurred. But even then, our best hopes were slower than our best performance.
Dr. I. M. Levitt, director of the famous Fels Planetarium, was one of the few men already accustomed to thinking in terms of the challenge of space. Shortly after Sputnik, in an article in The New York Times, he predicted a manned rocket into space by 1968; a station in space by 1980; and a manned trip to the Moon about the year 2000.
Look magazine, in a “Space Timetable” at the start of 1958, did not anticipate the first manned satellite till between 1970 and 1980 (on the basis of pooled scientific opinions); but lowered Dr. Levitt’s estimate for the Moon trip, placing it “in the last decade of this century.”
G. Harry Stine, a rocket engineer who had been working at While Sands until S (for Sputnik)-Day, when he voiced his opinion of the U.S. space program (“Fat, dumb, and happy,” was part of it), was rather more optimistic. He said 1967 for a man in orbit, 1970 for a manned space station.
Two years later—January, 1960—Look magazine printed a new timetable, agreeing with Stine’s old guess on the space station, but making him look like a stodgy conservative otherwise: men in orbit by the end of 1961, they said, and the first man to the Moon between 1967 and 1969. But they also said 1963 for the Echo satellite which was launched eight months after the article appeared; and they figured the Soviet Venus probe (January, 1961) for early 1962. Once again these estimates were derived from a composite of best-informed sources.
Ex-rocketman Stine is now working for a research and development company in New York City, where he is closely associated with Col. William O. Davis, former chief of the USAF Office of Scientific Research. (Stine’s “Time for Tom Swift,” in Analog, January, 1961, some of Davis’s ideas on space flight, based on the notion that any practical system of transport must be “suitable for an aged grandmother visiting her grandchildren. . . .”) The article that follows is excerpted from a longer essay, “Science Fiction Is Too Conservative.”
My full-time legitimate business involves the promotion of scientific innovation, management of scientific research, and synthesis. I don’t run a laboratory; I sit with a pencil and paper, I read constantly, and I travel to find out what Dr. Knowsall happens to be doing in a remote corner of his lab. In order to find out what is likely to be significant to my company in the future, I must identify a new area of science or technology early ... preferably before it becomes a real new area and before everyone else knows about it, too. If a new area makes sense in a number of ways, and if everybody else thinks that you are stark raving mad to consider it, it is exactly what the doctor ordered. It’s not an easy job; just when you think you have things well under control, the program planned nicely, and the future well in hand, through the door walks someone with something new. And you have to start all over again.
Old training as an s-f writer taught me the value of future trend curves. In order to write a story about the future, one had to have some notion of what the future held in store and in what approximate time period it was likely to take place. This sort of crystal ball gazing is quite useful in research management, particularly when you must sell a screwball concept to management.
Trend curves were probably first considered as a serious aid to research management by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research in 1953. A trend curve is a simple thing to plot. It isn’t hard to construct one. It is difficult to do the necessary research to begin with and to interpret the results when you are finished. For a better understanding of this matter of trend extrapolation, let us consider one of the simplest and most obvious of trend curves: speed.
If we plot the time in years on the abcissa while plotting the speed achieved by manned devices (and/or unmanned devices, too) on the ordinate, we get the simplest and purest sort of trend curve. In 30,000 B.C., a man could make 4 mph walking and about 10 mph running. Plot the point. In about 2000 B.C., he rides a horse at about 30 mph maximum; another point. Get the idea? Then come ships, starting at zero mph for simple rafts in umpteen-hundred B.C. and progressing to about 40 mph in 1800. Then comes the train, starting with the 10 mph of Stevenson’s locomotive in 1830 and rising to the 128 mph achieved by the Pennsylvania Special in 1905.