Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

That isn’t to say that Jack is softhearted, or softheaded. Indeed, he and I recently attended a conference entitled “The Future of Intelligence in the Cosmos,” jointly sponsored by the NASA Ames Research Center and the SETI Institute. I was too chicken to give a talk of my own—after all, others on the agenda included Marvin Minsky and Frank Drake. But Jack stepped up to the plate (demonstrating the skills he’d honed as a motivational speaker) and gave a stirring, mercifully PowerPoint-free, presentation entitled “Invent a Printing Press and Hang On.” In it, he argued that the way to ensure the long-term survival of our species was to emphasize the development of critical thinking in high schools (Jack keeps this skill honed for himself with frequent games of chess). Yes, Jack wants us all to be goodhearted, to look with awe and wonder at the stars—but also to use our reasoning powers and to take responsibility for our actions.

Indeed, my friend Jack has a little catch phrase. Whenever we part, he always says, “Be good, Rob.”

Be as good a person as he? I try.

Be as good a writer as he? I can only hope.

I can’t give the same advice back to him. Jack is good, in all the ways that adjective can be applied. How good, you’re about to find out; just turn the page.

by Jack McDevitt

More than half a century ago, I sat in the large overstuffed armchair in our living room captivated by Lester Del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy.” I was twelve years old, in grade school, home for lunch, and still in my Lone Ranger phase. I’d discovered science fiction eight years earlier, watching stunned as Flash Gordon piloted his magnificent rocket ship in circles above the sterile landscapes of Mongo. So I was already a lifelong fan, captivated by John Carter and Dejah Thoris, by Conan and the Legion of Space .

But “Helen O’Loy” packed a different kind of punch from anything I’d seen earlier. Not that it was necessarily better. Just different . A man in love with a beautiful robot. (I don’t think the term ‘android’ was in use yet.) Ultimately, we learn that, after a glorious lifetime, the husband dies, as humans inevitably do. And Helen’s note to a friend arrives, of course, at the climax: “He died in my arms just before sunrise....Don’t grieve too much for us, for we have had a happy life together....” She will turn herself off and be buried with him. No one is ever to know the truth. It was the first time I can recall reading a story of any kind with tears running down my cheeks. Certainly nothing we were looking at over in the seventh grade ever had that sort of effect. I can’t imagine I was worth much that afternoon while we talked about geography and who imported what from whom. (We always did our geography in the afternoon, and there was, for reasons I never understood, a great deal of fuss about imports.)

On an early summer evening a few years later, I sat outside in a rocking chair—we lived in a row home in South Philadelphia and everything around me was made out of brick or concrete—caught up in Ray Bradbury’s “Mars Is Heaven.” The rocket from Earth had landed on Martian soil and discovered a small town with picket fences and two-story houses that would not have been out of place in South Jersey. There are hedges and lawns and driveways. And a church.

The crew waits as the captain checks his instruments and finally walks over to the hatch and opens it. Music drifts in.

Somebody is playing a piano .

It’s “Beautiful Dreamer.”

Maybe those early jolts are so unforgettable precisely because they are early. But I think there’s more to it that that.

It’s been impossible to forget the kid created so many years ago by Jerome Bixby in “It’s a Good Life.” I think that was my first encounter --more like a collision-- with irony operating at anything like that level. I can still see that crowd of local residents, local victims , gathered in a living room, with one of their number dead on the floor, and snow coming down out of season to ruin the crops, and they’re going on in nervous, terrified voices about what a good life it is because the little boy who mindlessly wields such lethal power wants them to be happy. Will kill them if they aren’t.

And who could come away from Damon Knight’s aliens, with their manual titled To Serve Man , not marked for life? The manual, of course, is written in their own language. And they’re playing the role of benefactors, friends of the human race. Inviting people to ride their ships, to head off to a better world, until one of the characters learns to read the language. “It’s a cookbook ,” he says.

I went to a school where they thought Edgar Allen Poe was scary.

I ran into my first fictional ethical dilemma in Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations,” when a star pilot confronts a terrible choice: Stand by while a young woman ejects herself through an airlock, or allow her extra weight to destroy them both.

There were other riveting moments: a basketball that gained energy from friction rather than losing it, a subway that got lost beneath the streets of Boston, a poet stranded in space writing about the cool green hills of Earth. And a superdense moon, previously unknown, orbiting Mars three feet off the ground, drilling holes through any elevations in the landscape. “Look out, Harry, here it comes again.”

Murder by black hole. The Jesuit navigator who confronts the painful truth about the star of Bethlehem. And Charlie, who evades retardation just long enough to find out what he is about to lose.

And Asimov’s “Nightfall.”

What a treasure. If anyone would like a story idea, how about having aliens come in after we’re gone, and discover a volume of, say, the fifty best science fiction stories of all time. It’s all they have of us. Except for a few scattered ruins, Bradbury and the others are all that remain. What would they think of us?

Science fiction, ultimately, is about what might happen, in Heinlein’s classic phrase, “if this goes on.” What are the consequences for us if we learn how to reverse the aging process? If we discover how to double our IQ’s? If we can track down a happiness gene and thereby guarantee a pleasant, untroubled existence to our children? Would we want that? Years ago I visited the Page School at the Capitol and we talked about whether unlimited happiness is a good idea. The kids, always ahead of the rest of us, had some doubts. People who can be happy in the face of serious setbacks would probably make pretty good slaves.

And maybe there’s something to be said for being unhappy in the face of loss. Who could really stand being around people who were tirelessly, relentlessly, happy?

The happiness gene shows up in “Tweak.”

Science fiction seems to be most effective in its shorter form. Maybe that’s because it’s generally aimed at making a single point—What if this goes on? Or what if something had happened differently? Or what if we were able to get a breakthrough in, say, transportation? Inevitably, the issue is What if? Rather than commenting on the impositions of society, or the vagaries of human nature, we tinker with technology.

After I came out of the Navy, I spent ten years as an English teacher and theater director. It became obvious very quickly that my original idea about how to conduct a high school class, which was that all I needed to do was to mention Charles Lamb, and maybe do it with a little showbiz, was in error. My students did not scramble, as I was sure they would, to read his comments on life, death, and winning the love of beautiful women. Toward the end of the first year, while I watched eyes roll anytime I mentioned King Lear , I figured out that I had the wrong approach. (I’ve never been a quick study.) I needed something to ignite a fire. It was not my job, despite what I’d understood, to warp my kids’ brains with classics they weren’t, with a few exceptions, ready to read. What I decided would be most useful, what would be most valuable for them, was to demonstrate how much fun books could be. To pass on the passion.