Judith Merril: The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 6

Science-fiction, where it has considered future trends and future cultures, has been both unimaginative and conservative. In relation to reality, that is. The predictions of s-f are an order of magnitude better than those of professional scientists, but are still several orders of magnitude below reality. Things are going to happen much faster than we think, and they are going to have much wilder implications than we have considered. We need only look at the last twenty-five years. And we need to realize that we will see just as much change in the next ten years.

If we have the courage to admit this to ourselves, it means that it is time to think, time to argue, time to speculate, and time to philosophize. If the trend curves can tell us that all this—and more—is going to happen, we should try to do a little engineering and planning in advance so that they don’t happen willy-nilly, so that we can have some control over making them happen the way we want them to. We can and must plan for the future world in the same manner that a successful business plans for the inevitable retirement of a bond issue on a certain future date.

Science-fiction is the obvious and logical medium in which to do this. S-f is truly speculative fiction. It has been fairly successful in the past, but its true Golden Age is yet to come if it again realizes that the future is starting to happen right now. There is plenty left to speculate about because the well hasn’t gone dry.

Ed. Note: The latest set of Stine predictions will be available by the time you read this, in his new book. Man and the Space Frontier (Knopf. 1961).

When I determined to include in this collection the excerpts from Harry Stine’s as yet (at this writing) unpublished article, I was motivated by several things.

First, and most evident, was the paucity of good science fiction. There was an abundance of high-quality speculative and imaginative fiction of various kinds, published in every conceivable medium, during 1960; there was very little “real science fiction” anywhere—in or out of the specialty publications—and of that little, most was mediocre to poor.

At the same time, I did not, and do not, believe that the genre is disappearing. It is, certainly, diffusing—spreading out from a limited-circulation group of fiction magazines and a select grouping of hardcover book titles, to the mass markets: paperback novels, radio and TV, comic books, newspapers, and large-circulation general magazines.

In another sense, too, it is diffusing. Until a few years ago, “pure science fiction” confined itself, with rare exceptions, to speculation about space, the atom, and possible inventions or discoveries in the physical sciences.

The very technological advances that have swallowed up the old subjects almost entirely have, meantime, opened up whole new frontiers. And in the same way, the new media of communication now open to science fiction provide it with a new function as well.

Science fiction did not invent speculative thinking; it was quite the other way round. For whatever reasons of historical happenstance, the special kind of thinking that lies between outright fantasy and scientific hypothesis was focussed for a while largely in the s-f magazines. Now, some of the best story plots are going into reports by research and development men for the government, the armed services, the big corporations, and such novelties in our scheme of things as the Rand Corporation. What part of this thinking is not channeled into governmental or industrial secrecy is as likely to appear in essay form in a serious journal as in adventure trappings in the magazines.

Mr. Stine has pointed out several areas not currently being examined in this way by industry or government, and has provided a tool for the job. Meantime, there is another job for s-f to do—and one it is doing effectively.

The switch to initials just above was intentional. I am talking now about the whole field of science-fantasy, of speculative literature. And the job I refer to is roughly equivalent to that performed by the Encyclopedists before the French revolution: PR, essentially, public relations.

I have stressed throughout the book the underlying theme of communication. Perhaps writers in the field are so concerned with the one subject just now because the motivation of the writers themselves has shifted somewhat from extrapolation to explanation?

The modern scientist cannot possibly even attempt to keep up with progress in specialties outside his own; publications come too fast and frequently. But the modern citizen must keep up with at least the broadest outlines of new developments—and must be prepared, continually, for the most radical of new departures. The best of academic educations have not prepared even the most willing laymen to think in terms of tomorrow’s strange new world; and few citizens have either the studiousness or the background to keep up with the accelerating rate of change.

TV has proved, or re-proved (the advertising agencies did it first) the relative impact of pictures and words; there is the same distinction to be made between word-pictures and word-studies. To the specialist, the study is more informative; to almost all others, the word-picture is more so —not only because it informs more quickly, but because it does it more graphically.

Newspaper columnists, among others, have seized on this “pictorial” use of s-f recently. Of the future-story columns I’ve noticed, two in particular struck me as most effective: William A. Caldwell’s “Locked Alone in the World,” (under the by-line: “Simeon Stylites”) and William V. Shannon’s “1961.”

For non-fictional, straight-article presentations of speculative material throughout the year, both The Saturday Evening Post and the Saturday Review made impressive publishing records—addressing similar information to different readers in very different styles.

A surprising amount of material was also published during 1960, in general and literary magazines, about science fiction, science fantasy, and the “s-f way of thinking.” Some of the special attention was, of course, stimulated by the Amis book ( Nation’s “Lucky Jim and the Martians,” for instance). More of it was the product of the dilemma of education and communication in general: Norbert Wiener’s “The Grand Privilege”; John Lear’s “When Space Travel Was Witchcraft”; N. R. Hanson’s “Science Is a Way of Seeing” (all in SR); Thomas N. Scortia’s “The Captive Eggheads” and Robert Bloch’s “The Clown at Midnight” (in Rogue ); and the extraordinary article, “Unbelievable but True,” in The Saturday Evening Post.

Within the specialty field, also, fact articles—and critical essays—have been more numerous and more interesting. The previously established series by Willy Ley (Galaxy), Isaac Asimov ( Fantasy and Science Fiction ), and Kenneth Johns (combined pseudonym for Kenneth Bulmer and John Newman in New Worlds) , continue as brisk and intriguing as before. John Rackham contributed a thoughtful piece on “The Science Fiction Ethic” to the 100th issue of NW. Sam Moskowitz’s scholarly series of researches on fantasy authors ( Fantastic) is coming up to contemporary writers. Ted Sturgeon’s initial column in If promises a bright future—though Fred Pohl’s reviews will be missed. In the same way, while mourning Damon Knight’s absence from s-f reviewing, I have found Alfred Bester’s fresh approach to s-f criticism (F&SF) provocative and stimulating. A whole new publication devoted to “science-fiction-non-fiction” has emerged: The Journal of the Interplanetary Exploration Society. But the most dramatic of the excursions into speculative essay took place in Analog.