Farewell to Yesterday's Tomorrow

by Alexei Panshin

  It is a new year now. In 1974 the two possibilities that have ruled our lives for so long have become wild unlikelihoods. American and Russian generals may still thumb-wrestle for hypothetical advantage, but there will not be an atomic war. Neither will there be a New American Empire imposing democracy and California on the world. The planet is aswarm with independent forces that do not accept the superiority of America and who will not have control imposed on them by anybody. Some of these forces are older and wiser than we yet recognize.

  In this new year it is clear that we are entering a new era. What its shape will be, we cannot yet tell. But the old era is over.

  The old era ruled our lives and our thinking for thirty years. All its factors were established by the end of World War II:

  Computers. Plastics. Rocket ships. Atomic weapons and atomic power plants. The United Nations. Russian-American antagonism. The arms race. Technological superfluity.

  All of us whose years of awareness have come since 1945 have grown up in a world dominated by these factors. It was as though we had been handed a particular situation and it was our fate to play its permutations out to their conclusion—atomic disaster or American triumph. We had no choice other than these. Like it or lump it. Love it or else.

  The protest of the 1960’s was an objection to the American Dream Machine, but it was doomed to fail. When an era has crystallized, alternatives are unimaginable. Hate their two choices as they might, the protesters of the sixties could not imagine any others. They still believed that their most likely futures were nuclear hell or America squatting on the face of the world.

  The imagined universe of science fiction during these same years was a reflection of the hopes and fears of the new era. The great fear was Atomic Armageddon. The great hope was that the men of Earth might stride forth to conquer the stars.

  These hopes were first expressed in the pages of the Golden Age Astounding—in exactly the same period of time in which our modern world crystallized itself. They were the basic assumptions of the superman stories of A.E. van Vogt, of the Future History stories of Robert Heinlein, and of the Foundation stories of Isaac Asimov. If no sf writers during the past thirty years have matched these three in importance, it is because Asimov, Heinlein, and van Vogt have held the patents within which a generation of science-fiction writers have labored.

  The writers of the Campbell Astounding set forth the outline of our future. We would establish colonies among the stars. We would dominate alien races. We would found galactic empires. And we would explode through the entire universe. The heroes of this world to come were technocrats, secret agents, and team players—the analogs of all the bright young Americans who expected to rule the postwar world.

  By the end of the 1950’s this sf scenario of the future had become gray, trivial, and unpromising. Heroes revealed fatal fallibility. The virtues of human rule of the universe seemed questionable.

  In the 1960’s, just as there was reaction to the assumptions of American life, so was there reaction to its science-fictional image. Writers sought color. They wrote of lost colonies and of the dropouts of Galactic Empire. They wrote, too, of the exotic landscapes that might survive the nuclear firestorm, of holocaust as the wellspring of magic. But like the political and cultural protest movements of the time, the science fiction of the 1960’s was an evasion rather than a true alternative to the mainline future that had been set out in the Golden Age Astounding.

  When an era has crystallized, there are no alternatives. This can be seen in the stories that J. G. Ballard wrote during the 1960’s. His inert inner landscapes of the imagination are an expression of Ballard’s hatred of the postwar universe of sterile plastic. But his stories offer no alternative to the Future History of Heinlein and the others. They offer only exaggeration of sterility, ennui, and death.

  All the abortive revolutions of the 1960’s failed at the end of the decade. Rock music heroes discredited themselves or died squalidly. Weathermen went underground. Dissenters were prosecuted in public show trials. The counterculture went into seclusion. The American Monster won a final victory in the election of Richard Nixon, who is the living symbol of the postwar era and all its assumptions.

  Since 1969 the typical science fiction story has been able to envision little besides disaster. The common story of the period is an account of final extinction in the near future resulting from a willful abuse of technology.

  The most successful writer of the past few years in science fiction has been Barry Malzberg. Malzberg has been overheard to say, in the spirit of these years, “Paranoia is science fiction.” And in his stories of insane astronauts, such as his novel Beyond Apollo, Cape Canaveral and Future History meet in some ultimate disaster of the spirit.

  But science fiction is not inevitably paranoid. Not all writers have succumbed to the fear and loathing that result from being trapped by a choice between the unsurvivable and the unendurable. There have been some few stories in these past years that see a new and wholly different world lying just before us.

  Examples of these new stories are R. A. Lafferty’s “When All the Lands Pour Out Again” and Fred Pohl’s “The Gold at the Starbow’s End”; Jack Dann’s “Junction” and our own “When the Vertical World Becomes Horizontal.” Listen to the titles of these stories. They are portents. They bid farewell to yesterday’s tomorrow.

  They speak of the new time that we have now entered. For here it is 1974 and suddenly all our long-held assumptions no longer obtain. It is a new springtime season.

  The old crystallization that held us in thrall has been shattered. We have entered a new era. Change is upon us once again.

  For who could have dreamed that the American economy of abundance would now be plagued by scarcity? Who would ever have suspected that a crisis in the supply of energy would already be transforming the great American machine? Who would have thought only a few years ago that the political trials of the Nixon Era would all fail, every one, and that Richard Nixon would himself be on trial? All the discredited young men of the Nixon Administration—technocrats, secret agents, team players—are our former heroes in discard.

  All is fluid now. The old situation, the old era, is no more. The new era has not yet become fully apparent.

  In a period of fluidity there are opportunities for all those who can perceive them. For those who strive to cling to the hopes and fears of yesterday, the times will be profoundly disturbing. But for those who can grow, these will be times of unparalleled adventure.

  Revolutions are now under way throughout the sciences—in astronomy and physics, geology, anthropology, archaeology, and psychology. The details are unclear, but it is already certain that when the revolutions are complete, we will have completely revised our ideas about the nature and history of the universe, about the emergence and evolution of life on this earth, about the origins of man and the length of his existence, about the intellectual abilities and achievements of prehistoric man, and about the nature and capacity of the human mind.

  We are likewise entering a period of radical international readjustments. The bases of world finance and of world trade will be redefined. The arms race will be abandoned as an expensive anachronism. World controls on population growth will be established. It will be demonstrated that the United Nations is no longer an instrument of American foreign policy. The UN will grow in effectiveness and change in function.

  Within fifteen years we will all be living in ways that are presently unimaginable to us. All the priorities of American life will be altered. There will be new goals in education, new styles of life. We will become masters of the American machine rather than cogs within it.

  This new season of change might be likened to the 1860’s, the decade that saw the rise of corporate capitalism and of European imperialism, the decade that set the crystal that was the early twentieth century. It is also like the 1930’s, the period of the Depression and the New Deal, the time in which American values were last rearranged.

 
Science fiction, the ideal reflection of the world around us, will also change. All our former assumptions, the assumptions of the 1940 Astounding, will be abandoned. We can no longer write seriously of Nuclear Cataclysm or of Terran Empire.

  We might take note of the fact that we are living now in the days that were imagined as the beginning of Future History. That future is now, this very moment. But when we look about us, we do not see Heinlein’s rolling roads. We do not see van Vogt’s Slans. We do not see Asimov’s positronic robots. The future of 1940 is now, but this now is not the world that was dreamed in 1940.

  The last period in science fiction that was like the one we are now entering came during the 1930’s. Hugo Gernsback had founded Amazing Stories in 1926, in the last days of the crystallization of the 1860’s. Amazing reflected that world. It was a sister magazine to popular science magazines. The future it expected was populated by young Tom Edisons. Its heaven was a utopia of backyard inventions. Its hell was devolution—the collapse of civilization and return to skin-clad barbarism. The other planets of our solar system were envisioned as being likewise utopic or barbaric. Their populations were either just like us, or they were monsters with a taste for human flesh. This sf world was laid down by Jules Verne and given its classic expression by H.G. Wells.

  After 1930, however, all was different. There were new magazines. With the appearance of Astounding in 1930, sf took on the racier style and size of the pulp magazines. It no longer seriously pretended to be popular science. During the 1930’s the number of science fiction magazines grew. As late as 1937 there were only three. By 1940 there were seventeen.

  There were new editors—in particular, F. Orlin Tremaine and John W. Campbell. With their encouragement new writers entered the field. The assumptions and matter of sf changed radically. Before 1930 there was “scientifiction.” After 1930 there was “science fiction.”

  Such writers as E.E. Smith, John W. Campbell, Jack Williamson, and Stanley Weinbaum began producing stories with strange premises and stranger conclusions. They provided the basis from which Heinlein, van Vogt, and Asimov eventually elaborated a new conception of the future. With Smith and Campbell we traveled to the stars and beyond the bounds of our own galaxy. With Williamson we penetrated new dimensions. The planets of our solar system were colonized. With Weinbaum we discovered that aliens need not be either humanlike or monstrous.

  With all this exciting possibility there was no point to writing the familiar old-fashioned style of story about wearing a sweater and bow tie and living in a utopia of chuff-chuffing inventions. It was more creative and exciting to imagine being an explorer of alien realms, or an asteroid miner, or an outlaw of the spaceways.

  Just so, as of this springtime of the mid-seventies that we are entering, will sf once again be made wholly new. Just as E.E. Smith’s Skylark once went forth to discover the universe, so we need to send new starships of the imagination forth to take account of a new world. These ships will not find an empty universe to be strip-mined and subjugated. Instead they will find a universe filled to the brim with the new, rare, and different. It will contain standards by which to measure ourselves—alien races with different abilities, some less advanced than we, some more advanced. This universe will be the ideal reflection of the new multiplex Earth we are now awakening to.

  The key words of this new time are synergy and ecology and evolution. The era will be a time of liberation, unfolding, maturation, creativity, and growth.

  What the actualities that wait locked in these words may be we do not yet know. We must discover these things for ourselves, and it is an exciting prospect.

  The new sf will help us to understand and direct our new lives in the years immediately ahead. It will be more popular in appeal than it has ever been. There will be new magazines and new forms of magazines. There will be new editors and new writers. Sf will excite you as it has never excited you in all your years within the Great American Machine. It will amaze, astound, and delight you as you never dreamed possible. It will scratch forgotten itches and satisfy unrecognized thirsts. It will aid in the remaking of your minds and your lives.

  It is time to say good-bye to yesterday’s tomorrow and put it out of mind.

  Good-bye. Good-bye.

  The good-byes are now all said.

  A new tomorrow is waiting.

  ALEXEI PANSHIN lives with his wife and collaborator, Cory Panshin, on a farm in Pennsylvania. They are co-authors of a definitive critical history and analysis of science fiction and fantasy writing, The World Beyond the Hill.