Judith Merril: The Year's Greatest Science Fiction & Fantasy 4

Experimenters at the Rockefeller Institute have taken nucleic acids out of cells and replaced them with synthetic polymers. Proteins continued being manufactured. Man, in a sense, was then using new and artificial “blueprints” for protein manufacture.

Is the interior of our Earth a mysterious domain, suitable only for science-fiction writers? So far, our only knowledge about it is indirect, derived from such things as earthquake shock-waves. These tell us, for instance, that the Earth’s crust (which we can see and study) ends some miles under our feet and something else, called the “mantle” begins. The mantle is quite different from the crust, chemically and physically, but it cannot be studied by us, in the sense that we can lay our hands upon it.

Or can it? The rather sharp dividing line between crust and mantle is called the Mohorovicic discontinuity (named after its discoverer). Its distance below Earth’s surface varies; from thirty-five miles underneath the mountain belts to twenty miles under land surface generally to barely eight miles under the ocean basins.

And where the oceans are concerned, the first five or six miles down are water, which offers no resistance to a drill. There would thus only be two or three miles of actual rock to penetrate. There are preparations being made, now, for an attempt to drill through that relatively thin rock barrier so that samples of mantle can be brought up to the open light of day.

Among other science-fictional engineering feats being soberly considered by sober scientists is that of damming the Mediterranean at Gibraltar. The waters of the warm Mediterranean evaporate more quickly than they can be replaced by river flow and must therefore be fed by a continuous flow of Atlantic Ocean water through Gibraltar. Blocking this flow will cause a lowering of the Mediterranean sea-level and would allow the building of the greatest hydroelectric power station Earth has ever seen. (Great as would be the engineering problems, here, however, the political problems would be even greater. Sea-coasts would change, sea-ports go out of business. New land—belonging to which powers?—would come into existence, etc.)

But if all its thunder is being stolen, what is left to science fiction?

The answer is— everything!

Let us not forget the function of science fiction. It is not to predict particular scientific advances. It is not to tie itself insolubly to some particular type of plot—such as space-exploration.

Science fiction is, first and foremost, a branch of literature. It deals, first and foremost, with people. Its specialized character is the consideration of people in connection with scientific advance (or retreat). How do people respond to changes in their ways of life brought about by science; to the new hopes; to the new fears?

The point of my story “Trends” lay not in the spaceship itself, which I didn’t even describe, or the flight to the Moon, which I dismissed in one paragraph—but in the reaction of public opinion to a flight to the Moon. The story could be written again now, or in any year of the future. Changing the flight to the Moon to a trip to another galaxy or to a burrowing underground, or to the creation of the first artificial man, or to the development of a telepathy machine, is but the change of a trifling detail.

Heinlein in “Blowups Happen” wasn’t interested primarily in the technology of a fission power-plant, but in the strains on the human technicians who ran it. The essentials of the story would not be changed if the fission plant were changed to a fusion plant or an anti-matter plant.

Whatever the rate of scientific advance, or its actual position at the moment, the capacity for further advance (whether for good or evil) is infinite.

The complexities of the human mind and the variety of ways in which it can react and interact is also infinite.

So, while science fiction deals with the effect of science on man, and man on science, the potentialities of science fiction are, and will remain, doubly infinite.

EDITOR’S NOTE: “Robots, tremble!” says Asimov—but he didn’t tell the half of it. A few days after I received this article, I opened my newspaper to find a front-page article on a “machine language” developed by a young scientist at M.I.T. A vocabulary of 107 words (so far) now makes it possible for one machine to act as “foreman” for another— performing the programing that up till now has had to be done by a man. You tell the top machine what you want; it tells the slavey machine how to do it.

Another young man, this time at Cornell, is at work right now building a skimpy first working model of what he says will be the first really intelligent robot. “Dr. Rosenblatt . . . believes his ‘perceptron’ concept developed for the Navy, can provide electronic machines duplicating all functions of the human brain, including consciousness,” says the UPI report. Which brings it very close to home for Dr. Asimov’s famous science-fictional “positronic” robots.

—J. M.

If you do manage to lift yourself by your own bootstraps, do the boots come along? It seems to me they would! it’s a “closed system,” isn’t it?

In which case, perhaps the analogy of a multiple-stage rocket would be more suitable to describe the present paradoxically successful plight of science fiction. . . .

“The trouble is, the whole world seems to have gone ‘science-fictional’ “ Isaac Asimov wrote me, while preparing his article on “The Thunder-Thieves.” “All sorts of mad ideas (or so they would have seemed a few years ago) are under serious investigation by scientists and—wonder of wonders—are reported in the press without either jokes or sneers.”

What’s more, the press (still somewhat ill-at-ease with the far-out notions “sober scientists” turn out to have) frequently refers to s-f to bridge the gap between the common-sense facts of a few years ago and the startling new scientific achievements—achievements “that only yesterday were science fiction.”

It’s not just the newspapers, either. The general magazines are printing more (and better) s-f all the time. Public libraries have special displays of new s-f. Several new s-f programs were announced for television at the start of the ‘58-’59 season.

And while all this was going on, the number of specialty s-f magazines on the newsstands plummeted from twenty-one, at the start of 1958, to ten at year’s end.

These trends are not so contradictory as they may at first appear. Science fantasy is simply hoisting itself out of its own bootstraps—or leaving its booster tanks behind, as it levels into a new trajectory.

In a review of last year’s SF, Anthony Boucher commented on the new non-fiction section, saying, “Much of the disciplined imagination we used to associate with science fiction now appears without fictional coating.” And Asimov, in the same letter quoted before, said, “No matter how fast science progresses, it does not and cannot encroach upon science fiction—though between you and me it can encroach on s-f readers, by saturating them with science-advance, and depriving them of the need for s-f magazines.”

I think Dr. Asimov is very right. It is worth noting in this connection that two of the magazines that suspended publication last year were replaced by “space” titles; and that John W. Campbell, Jr., who has edited the field’s leading magazine, Astounding, for more than twenty years, called upon his readers last summer to subscribe to membership in a new “Society of Gentleman Amateurs”; the Society is to have its own journal, devoted exclusively to speculative science and engineering. (The rules would bar any working scientist from writing in his own field.)