A: Fortunately, the Heaven’s Gate people hurt nobody but themselves, but there are a lot of people who believe in strange religions and enforce them on others. And there are a lot of people who are so convinced by the reality of such things as the six aliens who were said to be found by the Air Force in Roswell, New Mexico, that I am surprised that more of them don’t take out their guns and say, “This is true and if you don’t believe it I will kill you.”
Q: I could make a prediction that has almost happened a few times. Kate Wilhelm wrote a novel, Let the Fire Fall, which comes pretty close to it. Someone today, a standard Uri Geller type stage magician, could start a religion, not claiming to receive messages from aliens, but claiming to be the alien himself. He would announce himself to be an extraterrestrial messiah and draw all his imagery from science fiction, and he would do slight-of-hand tricks to provide miracles, and it would work.
A: I have no doubt that that’s possible, and I am a little surprised that some major cult figure has not chosen to call himself a person from the planet Clarion or something like that. But that’s the sort of thing that I don’t want to have on my conscience. I don’t want to endorse beliefs that I think are harmful.
Q: But at the same time there is something inherent in written science fiction—certainly not in science fiction movies—that discourages this kind of credulity. I think you will find in fandom—if we define fandom as the people who actually read science fiction, as opposed to those who show up at conventions in costumes derived from movies—the skeptical quotient is higher than among the general public. Flying saucer enthusiasts who come to science fiction conventions looking for converts never get very far. My guess is that it’s because we’re in the business of making stuff up, and therefore can recognize a second-rate job.
A: I think your argument is correct. I think that probably the percentage of science fiction fans who believe in flying saucers is lower than that of the human race in general. Even when John Campbell was pushing things like the Dean Drive and the Hieronymous Machine and all that other stuff that he was claiming was the wave of the future, he never believed in flying saucers. They were just too ridiculous.
It wasn’t that they were so marvellous. They weren’t marvellous enough. The stories were so simplistic and primitive. I think John might have been willing to believe in creatures from another planet coming to the Earth if they had some purpose for doing so. But to have them come and abduct somebody and mess around with their genitals for a while really wasn’t plausible even for John.
Q: It’s always seemed to me that UFOlogy gives a science-fiction writer an experience like that of an automobile engineer going through a junkyard. You see shabby and rusted pieces of things you’re already familiar with.
A: I think that’s true. A lot of science fiction tropes have turned up in the flying saucer bibles. But they were better in the original science fiction.
Q: Have you ever found anything recognizable from something you’re written filtering into crankology texts?
A: No, and I hope I never will. Actually, I haven’t given much thought to UFOlogy in the past few years. I did spend some time with it years ago. I had been challenged to say whether I disbelieved in UFOs because of anything I’d investigated for myself, or if I was just taking the word of notorious skeptics like Lester del Rey and Donald Menzel and Willy Ley and people like that. So that made my conscience bother me, and accordingly I did do a lot of digging. I went to visit some of the most famous sites of sightings at the time. I talked to abductees and others. I attended their meetings. I read their literature. And there simply is nothing there. There is not one report that stands up as being supported by any kind of evidence. There is no physical evidence at all, and most of what is said to be fact is based on anecdotes by people who may be telling the truth or may think they are telling the truth, but are also equally likely are just making it up.
Q: Are you going to write a book about your researches?
A: No. For one thing, there have been good books on the subject of debunking flying saucers already, and I really have nothing to add. For another, nobody buys them. Nobody cares to have it proven to them that flying saucers don’t exist. That’s no fun. They’ll buy books about flying saucers, but not debunking books.
Q: What is the special characteristic of science fiction that makes it more fun than flying saucers?
A: Science fiction deals with aliens in more depth. It tries to show that maybe there are these creatures, and you may be able to fly around with them in space, but that they have lives and personalities and societies which are quite unlike our own. That’s interesting as speculation. It also gives you what Harlow Shapley once referred to as “the view from a distant star,” the ability to look at our own world from the outside, and see it objectively. It allows you to get insights into our own society that you can’t have if you don’t think of any others. How much of what you and I are is due to the accident of the way we evolved from the primordial slime? Do we think of a father god because we have two sexes? Do we believe in any of our beliefs because our personal heredity and evolution led us to it? Would a different race of creatures have entirely different beliefs? That’s a thing to speculate on and it allows us to think of the things we do believe in as being pretty much accidental.
Q: But somehow you avoid the sense of cosmic futility that H.P. Lovecraft fixated on.
A: Maybe that’s why I was never really fond of H.P. Lovecraft. I don’t think existence is futile. I don’t know if there is a purpose for life, human or any other kind. Someone once said that the purpose of life is to find out what the purpose of life is. But I think that the purpose of life, as I see it, is to learn something about the universe we live in. And the more we learn, the better off we are, whether it serves any fundamental practical purpose or not.
Q: Does science fiction teach the methods of reason, or at least encourage them?
A: I think that science fiction does teach a certain amount of rational thought. I’d be hard-put to prove that even to my own satisfaction, but I think that if you read science fiction, it does lead you to see a causality in human events, which may lead you to think of ways of changing the future to encourage the things you like and discourage the things you don’t.
I think that, above all, science fiction teaches us that the world we live in is subject to change. Science fiction is the literature of change; it talks about the ways in which things can be different. I think it is useful to be reminded, through science fiction or any other way, that nothing is permanent in the universe, and that everything we think of as permanent, the world around us, the sun that shines on us, our political institutions, our political habits, our religions, are all subject to change.
Q: Tom Disch has written a book, Such Dreams Our Stuff is Made of, in which he propounds that science fiction has become so much part of the general, mass culture that much of what passes for science fiction now, particularly on television or in media-related books, is antithetical to what we used to regard as the basic science-fiction virtues. That is, it exists, not to startle you into some new point of view, but to reassure you by being more of the same. What do you think of the impact on science fiction of this level of acceptance?
A: My wife makes a distinction between science fiction and sci fi. Sci fi is all over the TV networks and the movie theaters. But those places don’t have much in the way of true science fiction as I understand it, because what they are doing is basically the pornography of science fiction. They’re showing the excitement of it without showing the rationale behind the excitement. There’s nothing in any science fiction film series or television which excites the reasoning powers. It doesn’t stimulate you to do any constructive thinking on the subject. But science-fiction stories can in fact activate the forebrain, as well as the basic ganglia which go back to the days of the fishes.
Q: I heard a scary figure recently. Apparently for this past year (1998), 51 percent all books published in the science fiction ca
tegory were media tie-ins, which presumably preclude any essential science fiction elements. So I wonder if science fiction is becoming a minority within the science fiction field.
A: Absolutely, There’s an awful lot of sci fi around. All of the media tie-ins are sci fi. They’re exploiting the superficial and colorful stuff that science fiction makes possible, but they’re not contributing anything to thought about what make these things actually happen.
Q: Do you then that this may be a dark age for science fiction? Will this perhaps be the era people look back on and say, “That’s when science fiction went into a little hole somewhere and sci fi took over”?
A: No. There is still a lot of real science fiction being written and published. There are, what? 1200 titles being published a year that are called science fiction—some grotesque number like that. If only one-twentieth of them are real science fiction, that’s still more than was being published most of the time in the last sixty years. So there is a good deal of of good science fiction being written and published. True, there is also all this media crap. But I don’t write it and I don’t have to read it.
Q: But you may one day have a publisher who says, “TV tie-ins sell ten times better than a Fred Pohl book, so let’s just publish an extra TV tie-in instead.”
A: And I will say, “Go screw yourself, publisher.”
Q: Are you still optimistic for the future of science fiction?
A: I’m very optimistic for the future of science fiction. I just don’t have any idea what direction that future will take.
The thing is, science fiction isn’t a monolithic object, like a bowling ball, and it doesn’t have a fixed trajectory, like a cannon shot. Science Fiction is constantly moving, but it moves in several directions at once, like an amoeba. When it breaks new ground it isn’t because some central authority has ordered it to move on, it’s because some individual writer woke up one morning with a notion that hadn’t been explored before and once he showed the way, others began to explore it. And at the same time, some other writer has found a new direction of his own to explore.
Q: So what direction are you going in right now?
A: At the moment I’m going in the direction of some non-fiction and some fiction that isn’t SF. That doesn’t mean I’m abandoning Science Fiction. It just means that there are a couple of books I want to write for the fun of it?
Q: Can you describe them?
A: Well, I can describe one of them. That’s a non-fiction book called Chasing Science, which is a sort of travelogue, about the pleasures of science as a spectator sport—how to have fun visiting observatories, laboratories, places where science is happening. I can talk about that one because it’s basically finished and pretty nearly delivered. The others, the non-SF fiction, I’d rather not talk about for reasons of superstition. I don’t like to talk about any book until it’s far enough along that I can see how it’s going to wind up, and I haven’t reached that stage with these.
There is one science-fiction book that’s in the works, though. That’s another volume in the Heechee series, that began with Gateway twenty years ago. I had no intention of writing any more about them, but then along came Bob Silverberg, coaxing me for a novelet for an anthology he was preparing. Bob is a very persuasive man. I agreed to do it. But then, when I was writing the story, it developed a will of its own and finished up too long for Bob’s book. So I wrote a different one for him; it’s called “The Boy Who Would Live Forever” and it’s in his anthology. But then I realized that, with the two stories, I had a big chunk of an entire new book on hand, and once I get some of the other things out of the way, I propose to finish it up for publication sometime in the early 21st Century.
And beyond that ... well, we’ll just have to wait and see.
Q: Thanks, Fred.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
S. J. BYRNE (1913-2011) was an American science fiction author whose first published story, “The Music of the Spheres,” appeared in Amazing Stories in 1935. He also wrote as John Bloodstone.
SIR ARTHUR CHARLES CLARKE, CBE, FRAS, Sri Lankabhimanya, (1917–2008) was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World. For many years, Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Clarke were known as the “Big Three” of science fiction.
MARK CLIFTON (1906–1963) was an American science fiction writer. About half of his work falls into two series: the “Bossy” series, about a computer with artificial intelligence, was written either alone or in collaboration with Alex Apostolides or Frank Riley; and the “Ralph Kennedy” series, which is more comical, and was written mostly solo, including the novel When They Come From Space. Clifton gained his greatest success with his novel They’d Rather Be Right (a.k.a. The Forever Machine), co-written with Riley, which was awarded the Hugo Award.
BRENDA W. CLOUGH (who also writes as B.W. Clough) is an American science fiction and fantasy writer. Her Novella “May Be Some Time” was nominated for a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award in 2002. She currently teaches writing workshops at the Writers Center in Bethesda, MD.
LESTER DEL REY was the fantasy editor for Del Rey Books (which was actually named for his wife, Judy-Lynn del Rey). Although probably most remembered as a science fiction writer for adults, he may have had the greatest influence as a Young Adult writer of such classics as The Runaway Robot, Marooned on Mars, Step to the Stars, Tunnel Through Time, and many more.
ALLEN GLASSER (1908-1971) was an American author and fan most active in the 1930s.
CARL JACOBI (1908- 1997) was an American author. He wrote short stories in the horror, fantasy, science fiction, and crime genres for the pulp magazine market. Most of his science fiction is space opera, but he delved into more thoughtful realms, as with his story in The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack.
JANET KAGAN (born Janet Megson, 1946-2008) was an author of two science fiction novels and one science fiction collection, plus numerous science fiction and fantasy short stories that appeared in publications such as Analog Science Fiction and Fact and Asimov’s Science Fiction. Her story “The Nutcracker Coup” was nominated for both the Hugo Award for Best Novelette and the Nebula Award for Best Novelette, winning the Hugo.
JAY LAKE was a quarterly first place winner in the Writers of the Future contest. In 2004 he won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in Science Fiction. His writings have appeared in numerous publications, including Postscripts, Realms of Fantasy, Interzone, Strange Horizons, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Nemonymous, and the Mammoth Book of Best New Horror.
RAY FARADAY NELSON became captivated with science fiction at the age of eight at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. “I was just there one day, but that was the most important day of my life because before that I was not a science fiction fan and after that day I was.” After that, he began reading science fiction and fantasy novels voraciously, and became a science fiction fan and cartoonist.
In the 1950s, he moved to Paris, where he met Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs among others of the Beat Generation, as well as existentialists Jean Paul Sartre, Boris Vian, and Simone de Beauvoir. He subsequently co-edited Miscellaneous Man, the first “Beatnik” little literary review. In Paris, he worked with Michael Moorcock smuggling Henry Miller books out of France. It was also in France where he met and married Kirsten Enge, a Norwegian girl, and where his son Walter was born.
After returning to the US with his new family in the early ’60s, he published his first work of fiction, the short story “Turn Off the Sky.” In 1967, he published his first novel, The Ganymede Takeover, in collaboration with Philip K. Dick. Numerous books and short stories have followed. His book Blake’s Progress, in which the poet William Blake and his wife are travelers in space and time, has been his greatest critical success. His short story “8 o’Clock in the Morning,” was turned into the comic book story Nada, and John Carpent
er made Nada into the paranoid cult classic film They Live in 1988.
Wildside Press is working to reissue all of Ray’s novels and will be including more of his great short stories in future Megapacks.
KEVIN O’DONNELL, JR. (1950-2012) was an American science fiction writer. O’Donnell graduated from Yale University in 1972. His 70+ short works appeared in a broad range of periodicals ranging from Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine to Omni. He published ten books in America, and has been reprinted in the United Kingdom, France, Israel, the Netherlands, Spain, and Germany. In February 1987, the French translation of his 1984 novel ORA:CLE received the 1987 Prix Litteraire Mannesmann Tally.
FREDERIK POHL (1919-2013) was an American science fiction writer, editor and fan, with a career spanning more than seventy-five years—from his first published work, the 1937 poem “Elegy to a Dead Satellite: Luna”, to the 2011 novel All the Lives He Led and articles and essays published in 2012.
DEAN WESLEY SMITH is a science fiction author, known primarily for his Star Trek novels, film novelizations, and other novels of licensed properties such as Smallville, Spider-Man, X-Men, Aliens, Roswell, Men in Black, and Quantum Leap. He is also known for a number of his original novels, such as The Tenth Planet series, on which he collaborated with his wife, author Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
EVELYN E. SMITH (1922-2000) was an American writer and crossword puzzle compiler. During the 1950s, she regularly published—under her real name—short stories and novelettes in magazines like Galaxy Science Fiction and Fantastic Universe.
CYNTHIA WARD was born in Oklahoma and lived in Maine, Spain, Germany, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, and Tucson before moving to the Los Angeles area. A 1992 graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop, she has sold stories to Asimov’s Science Fiction, and other anthologies and magazines. Cynthia’s reviews appear regularly on Amazon.com and SciFiWire.com and irregularly in other websites and publications. She is working on her first novel, a futuristic mystery tentatively titled Stone Rain.
The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack Page 100