by Brian Aldiss
PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS
A SCIENCE FICTION OMNIBUS
BRIAN ALDISS has been publishing since the 1950s. In the sixties, he originated the three science-fiction anthologies which combined to form The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus (1973). In one form or another, these volumes were reprinted over thirty-five years. He is known for many non-SF novels, the latest being HARM and Walcot (2007), and stories, as well as science fiction, together with articles and poems. He is also an artist.
Aldiss was awarded an OBE in 2005 for services to literature. He lives in Oxford.
A Science Fiction Omnibus
Edited by Brian Aldiss
PENGUIN BOOK
PENGUIN CLASSICS
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
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First published separately as Penguin Science Fiction 1961
More Penguin Sciene Fiction 1963
Yet More Penguin Science Fiction 1964
Published in one volume as The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus 1973
This revised and expanded edition first published in Penguin Modern Classics 2007
1
Editorial matter copyright © Brian Aldiss, 2007
All rights reserved
The moral right of the authors has been asserted
The Acknowledgements on pages 576–8 constitute an extension of this copyright page
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
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Contents
Introduction
Eric Frank Russell Sole Solution
Ward Moore Lot
Clifford Simak Skirmish
James Tiptree, Jr. And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side
Brian Aldiss Poor Little Warrior!
James H. Schmitz Grandpa
Isaac Asimov Nightfall
Katherine MacLean The Snowball Effect
Bruce Sterling Swarm
Greg Bear Blood Music
Fredric Brown Answer
William Tenn The Liberation of Earth
Harry Harrison An Alien Agony
J. G. Ballard Track 12
Kim Stanley Robinson Sexual Dimorphism
Frederik Pohl The Tunnel Under the World
Eliza Blair Friends in Need
Robert Sheckley The Store of the Worlds
Isaac Asimov Jokester
John Steinbeck The Short-Short Story of Mankind
James Inglis Night Watch
Ted Chiang Story of Your Life
H. B. Fyfe Protected Species
Arthur Porges The Rescuer
Walter M. Miller, Jr. I Made You
Damon Knight The Country of the Kind
Bertram Chandler The Cage
A. E. van Vogt Fulfilment
James Blish Common Time
Garry Kilworth Alien Embassy
John Crowley Great Work of Time
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Science fiction stories are the fables of a technological age.
A tadpole in a pool bears little resemblance to the frog on land. Yet both are the same creature. A similar transformation can be seen in the history of science fiction. It is not only a literature in its own right; it now hops about everywhere on screens of various sizes.
To say this is not to denigrate the written SF (let’s use the family name for short); indeed, SF novels are more polished, embracing more cunningly their devised scenarios, than ever before. But there are fewer outlets – except for electronic ones – fewer magazines, for the short story than once there were.
My decision was to work on my earlier Penguin anthology, and to renovate it, preserving the best stories from it. In part, this has been done because I wished to see reprinted in Britain John Crowley’s magnificent ‘Great Work of Time’, which I had come across in one of my wise friend David Hartwell’s anthologies. It is admirable. It is not a story which could have been written or published, I think, in the 1960s.
Subject matter is much changed. The technocratic emphasis of the fictions prevailing in the forties and fifties – hardly surprisingly in wartime – has become diluted. Lowering the technocratic threshold appears to account for SF’s wider readership among women nowadays, together with a weakening in faith in technological progress.
In an October 2006 issue of the Times Literary Supplement, the reviewer, Michael Saler, devoted a whole page to an examination of the fiction and life of James Tiptree, Jr. Tiptree’s fiction appeared in SF magazines in the late 1960s and was immediately recognized as speaking with a powerful new voice, discoursing sometimes obliquely on dark sexual subjects. It was not until 1976 that readers discovered that Tiptree was in fact a woman, a sixty year old by the name of Alice Bradley Sheldon.
One of Tiptree’s stories is included in this omnibus. It speaks for itself, and in its contained melancholy we perceive the troubles often besetting the human spirit. Those troubles bring us closer to less specialized fiction than was previously the case.
Turning to the anthology as a whole, I quote the sentence with which Saler concludes his piece. Alice Sheldon writes to a friend that ‘those eight years in SF were the first time I could be really real’.
These words contain what drives a writer to SF, as well as what drives SF on. For whatever reasons, we are discontented with the world-as-is. The stories selected here indicate our dissatisfaction with our station in life, our presidents, the assumptions our parents made for us, the nigh-insane quest for ‘happiness’ which may yet ruin our civilization, or indeed a thousand other aspects of life. We are the Steppenwolves of our culture.
We live in that culture, in general as law-abiding citizens, but we occasionally speak – as Tiptree spoke – of different worlds. ‘So it goes’, said Kurt Vonnegut in an early novel. And many readers miss something by not training themselves to the mode we have found the need to adopt, and the distances from the mundane we desire to preserve.
William Tenn’s story, ‘The Liberation of Earth’, was published in an obscure magazine in 1953. Of course it is funny, in Tenn’s best ironic manner. But if we think of ‘liberation’ as ‘regime change’, we perceive its topicality and its adroit use of distancing metaphor.
The shortest short story here is ‘Answer’. When I was first collecting these stories, back in the sixties, my friend and competitor,
Edmund Crispin, was also compiling SF anthologies. Crispin got to this story first. When attending a New Scientist party at about that time, I heard one young scientist telling another the story of ‘Answer’. It was clear he had not read the story; someone had told it to him. He was passing it on. It had achieved escape velocity from the printed page.
I began by claiming that SF stories are the fables of our time. This was one story in particular I was thinking about: the birth of a new god!
*
Of course, things are not always as serious as this makes them sound. The use of irony often comes to our aid. When my history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree, was first published (1973), I used an image on its yellow jacket showing planes roaring over New York, blasting skyscrapers and setting them on fire. That picture also formed part of the cover of a magazine entitled Stories of Super Science, which bore the enticing tag-line: ‘Read It Today! – Live It Tomorrow!’
As indeed we did on 9/11.
SF has become more domestic than formerly. This is in part because young writers have grown older and have settled down. Our Western world has an immense variety of adventures, improvements, miseries and speculations from which we can take our choice. Yes, we can take in the dark side of our culture, but it helps if we know the dark side of Central Asia as well.
As an old hand at this game, I find myself missing the great range of stories set on other planets and in outer space which were once the backbone of SF. Distance and dislocation were always pleasurable to encounter.
Isaac Asimov, a clever and engaging writer, was heard to remark, after Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, ‘This justifies all the SF written since 1940’ – or words to that effect. The comment is invalid in more than one respect (for instance, the misunderstanding that SF is a united entity, rather than diverse in content and treatment); behind it lies the assumption that SF was an instrument of prediction. This was – again – the technocratic emphasis of SF. Ever since Apollo 11 and the landing on the moon, the emphasis, the very understanding, of SF has changed and the weather-vane points more in the direction of metaphor.
Mary Shelley would not have written Frankenstein with the puissance it still retains had she not been orphaned at birth. Her creature resembles her in having only one parent – a male one. Writing my first SF novel, Non-Stop, about people imprisoned in circumstances beyond their control, I was conscious of reconstructing on one level my own confining circumstances.
Such is the power of metaphor that my novel became extremely popular in the Poland of that time, where it was read as a veiled criticism of the Communist regime within which that society was imprisoned. It may be this metaphorical quality of the discourse that permits science fiction to travel round the globe – a freedom hardly attainable for a novel set in, let’s say, Croydon.
A considerable distance from Croydon is James Inglis’s story of grand despair and infinite space, ‘Night Watch’. As far as we can discover, this is the one and only story Inglis ever wrote. Possibly he felt a Tiptree-like urge to escape from himself, to live in a universe free of humanity. We can only speculate on whether the story proved in some way to be curative for him. Anyhow, it is a pure Steppenwolf story.
SF used to have a small sister, a sweet little thing with pearls in her hair and stars in her eyes. She grew up to be a big brawny lass, threatening her parents and staying out late at night. Her name is Fantasy. Sometimes Fantasy and SF blend – as one might expect. I still think there is an important distinction to be made between the twain. A fantasy story – J. R. R. Tolkien provides an example always to hand – tends to end happily with an evil defeated and the world going back to the way it used to be. A conservative ending.
In a really good SF story – we might have Greg Bear’s ‘Blood Music’ in mind – the world is changed. Evil may be repulsed, but there is a recognition that the world can never return to its previous state. Here again we think of 9/11. A revolutionary ending.
Change is the great subject for SF – power and change. The story by Eliza Blair, ‘Friends in Need’, written when Blair was a student at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, is an excellent example of this. Even the language has morphed itself, resembling more the style of emails or text messages.
It was in a SF magazine I first encountered the word ‘ecology’. For many years I have admired James Schmitz’s story ‘Grandpa’. Here’s ecology with a vengeance! Ah, those cold Zlanti Deeps – how long they haunted me!
Harry Harrison’s story, too, is set on another planet. An alien planet is surely an extreme version of escape. As T. S. Eliot admitted, we cannot bear too much reality.
Never can a SF story be too extreme, or too foreign, for me. ‘Swarm’, by Bruce Sterling, is another guaranteed extreme.
I listen to stories read on BBC 4, the star radio channel. Never do they select a story from the wealth of science fiction’s treasury. Their stories frequently concern tales of unhappy Irish childhoods or of two people meeting in Bedford, with bitter-sweet but conventional results. I would trade them all for one dip in the Zlanti Deep! How one longs for a more impassioned approach, with the imagination kicked about a little! It is imagination which has created the West – imagination and its cousin, ingenuity. We should offer it more respect.
However, the universal ignorance and the ignoring of SF are of long standing. I have four histories of French literature on my shelves: they are rather past their sell-by date, admittedly, but none of them gives a single mention of Jules Verne. Poor Jules, whom the Pope blessed for his writing…
Can a withholding of enthusiasm be because it is ‘only about imaginary things’? Imagination is a vital quality; children swim in it most of the time, as when they talk to their teddy bears. An attempt to describe how imagination functions is made by the Oxford philosopher Mary Warnock in her book Imagination (1976). Warnock believes strongly that the cultivation of imagination should be the chief aim of education. Later, she says, there is
a power in the human mind which is at work in our everyday perception of the world, and is also at work in our thoughts about what is absent; which enables us to see the world, whether present or absent, as significant, and also to present this vision to others, for them to share or reject. And this power… is not only intellectual. Its impetus comes from the emotions as much as from the reason, from the heart as much as from the head.
In other words, we may regard as preposterous the statement in Fredric Brown’s ‘Answer’ that there are 96 billion civilized planets in the universe: that does not detract from the power of the story, which depends not so much on science as on our fear of being dominated by omnipotence.
Indeed, if we wish to know how many civilized planets there are in the universe, we can read George Basalla’s Civilized Life in the Universe (2006), and we shall be chastised and enlightened by his learned answer to the question.
So long neglected when confined mainly to the printing press, that vital invention of an earlier age, SF awaited newer media to attain a wider popularity. The setting – the very environment which is often the most vital ‘character’ of a SF story – demanded the birth of the electronic age, which created both wide- and small-screen viewing. SF movies are now so popular that they no longer bother to announce themselves as ‘SF’, or as the slummy nickname ‘sci-fi’. This trend may have been prompted by a modern masterpiece of the screen and of the genre, The Truman Show.
Sometimes such movies are occasioned by a new technological development and can be otherwise idea free (Terminator 2 is an example). Sometimes movies are based on such ideas as you find in a volume like this.
Some older facets of SF remain – and we hope always will: the ingenuity of Eric Frank Russell’s ‘Sole Solution’, the penetrating moral of Bertram Chandler’s ‘The Cage’, the terror of Walter Miller’s take on Frankenstein, entitled ‘I Made You’, and of course the cosmic awe of James Inglis’s ‘Night Watch’.
Such fables as these are certainly worth preserving.
> Although SF short stories are far too often ignored, there are by way of contradiction resounding successes still for writers such as Iain Banks, Terry Pratchett with his Discworld series, Philip Pullman with his Dark Materials, and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Not to mention an earlier – and by now tiresome – success The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
We talk of success, but success is not everything. The rest of us can take encouragement from a work which contains an admission that ‘the mind is indeed restless’, the great Sanscrit poem, Bhagavad Gita:
Set thy heart upon thy work, but never on its reward.
Work not for reward; but never cease to do thy work.
Brian Aldiss
Sole Solution
ERIC FRANK RUSSELL
He brooded in darkness and there was no one else. Not a voice, not a whisper. Not the touch of a hand. Not the warmth of another heart.
Darkness.
Solitude.
Eternal confinement where all was black and silent and nothing stirred. Imprisonment without prior condemnation. Punishment without sin. The unbearable that had to be borne unless some mode of escape could be devised.
No hope of rescue from elsewhere. No sorrow or sympathy or pity in another soul, another mind. No doors to be opened, no locks to be turned, no bars to be sawn apart. Only the thick, deep sable night in which to fumble and find nothing.
Circle a hand to the right and there is nought. Sweep an arm to the left and discover emptiness utter and complete. Walk forward through the darkness like a blind man lost in a vast, forgotten hall and there is no floor, no echo of footsteps, nothing to bar one’s path.
He could touch and sense one thing only. And that was self.
Therefore the only available resources with which to overcome his predicament were those secreted within himself. He must be the instrument of his own salvation.
How?
No problem is beyond solution. By that thesis science lives. Without it, science dies. He was the ultimate scientist. As such, he could not refuse this challenge to his capabilities.