Gold

by Isaac Asimov

  Golden Age Ahead

  It seems to be an almost unvarying habit among human beings to find golden ages in the past, both in their own personal lives and in their societies.

  That’s only natural. In the first place, there’s something to it—at least in our personal lives. To those of us who are elderly (or even in their late youth, as I am) there is no question but that there are memories of a time when we were younger and stronger and thinner and more vigorous and less creaky and could perform more frequently and grow tired less frequently and so on. And if that isn’t golden, what is?

  In general, this is naturally extrapolated to the point where whatever society was like in our teenage years is our view of what society ought to be like. Every change since then is viewed as a deterioration, a degeneration, an abomination.

  Then, too, there are the falsities of memory, which cast a delicious haze over the past, eliminating the annoyances and frustrations and magnifying the joys. Add to that the falsities of history which inevitably produce a greater emphasis on heroism, on dogged determination, on civic virtue, while overlooking squalor, corruption, and injustice.

  And in the sub-universe of science fiction, isn’t this also true? Doesn’t every reader who has been reading for a decade or two remember a “golden age”? Doesn’t he complain that science fiction stories aren’t as good as they used to be? Doesn’t he dream of the classics of the past?

  Of course. We all do that. I do it, too.

  There is one “Golden Age of Science Fiction” that has actually been institutionalized and frozen in place, and that is the period between 1938 and 1950, with its peak years from 1939 to 1942.

  John W. Campbell, Jr. became editor of Astounding Stories in 1938, changed its name to Astounding Science Fiction, changed its style, and found new writers or encouraged older writers to expand their horizons. He helped develop me, L. Sprague de Camp, Lester del Rey, Theodore Sturgeon, Eric Frank Russell, Hal Clement, Arthur C. Clarke, and many others; and all produced stories that are among the great all-time classics of the genre. In particular, in 1939 Robert A. Heinlein and A. E. Van Vogt both burst on the scene with crackerjack stories.

  Let’s, however, take a closer and unimpassioned look at the Golden Age.

  To begin with, how was it viewed in its own time? Did all the readers sit around, saying, “Golly, gee, wow, I’m living through a Golden Age!”?

  You’d better not believe it. Sure, the young readers who had just come into the field were fascinated, but the older readers who had been reading since the late 1920s were not. Instead, they frequently talked of the “good old days” and longed for their golden age of the Tremaine Astounding, which ran from 1933 to 1938.

  I was one of the old fossils, as a matter of fact. Much as I liked the stories of the Campbell era and much as I enjoyed contributing to them myself, it was of the earlier 1930s that I dreamed. It wasn’t Heinlein that was the epitome to me of science fiction (though I recognized his worth)—it was Jack Williamson’s “The Legion of Space”; it was E. E. Smith’s “Galactic Patrol”; it was Nat Schachner’s “Past, Present, and Future”; it was Charles R. Tanner’s “Tumithak of the Corridors.”

  Even at this very day there is an organization called “First Fandom” (to which I belong), and only those can belong to it who were science fiction fans before 1938.

  And if there were golden ages before the Golden Age, there were also golden ages to still-younger readers after the Golden Age. Indeed, Terry Carr has just published an excellent anthology of stories from 1939 through 1942 entitled Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age.

  How many more have there been? I should guess that there has been one for every three-year interval since the first—to one group of readers or another.

  Think again? Were the stories of your golden age really golden? Have you reread them lately?

  I have reread the stories of my own golden age and found the results spotty indeed. Some of the stories I slavered over as a teenager turned out to be impenetrable and embarrassing when I tackled them again. A few (“Tumithak of the Corridors” for one) held up very well, in my opinion.

  It was clear to me, though, that the general average of writing forty years ago was much lower than the general average later. That, in fact, seems to me to have been a general rule. Magazine science fiction over the last half-century has steadily risen above and away from its pulpish origins.

  That means me, too. I imagine that many people who drooled over “Nightfall,” The Foundation Trilogy, and I, Robot in their teens find some of the gloss gone when they reread them in their thirties. (Fortunately for myself, a substantial number do not—and there are always new teenagers entering the field and ready to be dazzled.)

  Why has the quality of writing gone up?

  For one thing, the competition to science fiction has gone. The pulp magazines are gone. The slick magazines scarcely publish fiction. Whereas, some decades back, science fiction magazines—with their small circulation and even smaller financial rewards—could not compete in the marketplace and could gain only raw enthusiasts, there is now comparatively little else for a beginning writer to do, few other places for him to go.

  The competition for space in the science fiction magazines is therefore keener, so that better natural talents reach their pages—and set higher standards for other novices to shoot at.

  I doubt, for instance, that I could possibly have broken into science fiction in 1979 with nothing more than the talent I had when I broke into the field in 1939. (Nor need this discourage new writers—they are learning in a better school in 1979 than I did in 1939.)

  There is also greater knowledge of science today.

  The writers of my own golden age knew very little science that they didn’t pick up from the lurid newspaper stories of the day (equivalent to learning about sex in the gutter).

  Nowadays, on the other hand, even those science fiction writers who are not particularly educated in science and who don’t particularly use science in their stories nevertheless know much more about science and use it far more skillfully (when they do) than did the creaky old giants of the past. The new writers can’t help it. We now live in a society in which science saturates every medium of communication and the very air we breathe—and the growing ranks of capable science writers see to it that the communications are of high quality.

  What do we face then?

  We will have stories by better writers, dealing with more exciting and more subtle themes in a more intelligently scientific manner.

  Need we worry that it will all come to an end, that science is outpacing science fiction and putting us all out of a job?

  No! What the scientists are doing is exactly the reverse. They are providing us with fresh, new gimmicks daily: new ideas, new possibilities.

  In just the last few days, I have read about the discovery of gases in Venus’s atmosphere which seem to show that Venus could not have been formed in the same way Earth was. I have read about the possibility of setting up a modulated beam of neutrinos that could allow communication through the Earth instead of around it. I have read that the Sun may have a steadily ticking internal clock with the irregularities of the sunspots a superficial modification—but what the clock is and why the modification, we do not know.

  Each of these items can serve as the starting point for a story that might not have been possible to write last year, let alone thirty years ago. And they will be written with the skill and expertise of today.

  These are exciting times for society, for science, for science fiction, for science fiction writers, for science fiction readers. George, Joel, and I are having more fun putting this magazine together all the time; and, we hope, you are having more fun reading it all the time.

  Why not? There’s a Golden Age ahead!

  The All-Human Galaxy

  In 1928, “The Skylark of Space” by Edward E. Smith appeared in Amazing Stories, and was instantly recognized as an important milestone in science fict
ion.

  Until then, stories involving space travel dealt almost exclusively with the solar system. Trips to the Moon and to Mars were the staples. Visitors from other stellar systems may have been mentioned (as in the case of the visitor from Sirius in Voltaire’s “Micromegas”) but these were trivial instances.

  Smith, however, introduced interstellar travel as a commonplace thing and placed his heroes and villains within a space-frame that included the entire galaxy. It was the first time this had happened and the readers devoured it and demanded more. The “superscience story” became the hit of the decade. Smith held the lead in this respect for twenty years, although during the first half of his career, John W. Campbell was a close second.

  Smith and Campbell viewed the galaxy as including many, many intelligent species. Almost every planet possessed them and Smith, in particular, was most inventive in dreaming up unearthly shapes and characteristics for his alien beings.

  This “many-intelligence galaxy” is not as prominent in science fiction as it once was, but you may find it in contemporary television. In Star Trek and its lesser imitations, it sometimes seemed as though a spaceship could not travel in any direction at random, for a week, without coming across an intelligent species (usually inimical in one way or another). The visual media are hampered in their ability to represent these aliens imaginatively, for somehow an actor usually exists under the makeup or plastic. The extraterrestrial creatures, therefore, if not human, were nevertheless clearly primate.

  In this connection, though, the science fiction writer, Hal Clement raised an interesting question, which I think of as “Clement’s Paradox.”

  The universe has existed for perhaps fifteen billion years, and if there are many civilizations that have risen here and there among its stars, these must have appeared at any time in the past twelve billion years (allowing three billion for the first to arise).

  It should follow, therefore, that human explorers, when locating an extraterrestrial civilization, would be quite apt to find them anywhere from one to twelve billion years old in the vast majority of cases (assuming them to be very long-lived). If they were not very long-lived, but only endured, say, a million years or less before coming to a natural or a violent end, then almost all planets bearing such civilizations would show signs of the ruins of a long-dead one, or possibly a series of two or more sets of ruins.

  To a lesser extent, in relatively young planetary systems, the civilization might not be ready to arise for anywhere from a million to a billion years.

  The chance of encountering a civilization, then, that is at some level near our own would have to be very small.

  And yet (and this is Clement’s Paradox), science fiction writers consistently show alien civilizations to be fairly close in technological level to Earth’s. They might be a little more primitive or a little more advanced, but considering the rate at which technology advances on Earth these days, it would seem that the aliens are not more than a few thousand years behind us at most, or a few hundred years ahead of us at best.

  How enormous the odds are against that!

  As far as I know, however, science fiction writers didn’t worry about this. Certainly, I didn’t.

  Since I began publishing in 1939, when Edward E. Smith was at the very height of his success (though John Campbell had just retired to the job of editing Astounding), I naturally tried my hand at the “many-intelligence” galaxy myself.

  For instance, there was my eighth published story, “Homo Sol,” which appeared in the September 1940 Astounding. It dealt with a galactic empire consisting of the civilized beings from many, many planetary systems—each planetary system containing a different type of intelligent being. Each bore the name of the native star in the species name, so that there would be “Homo Arcturus,” “Homo Canopus” and so on. The plot dealt with Earth’s coming of technological age and the possible entry of Earthmen (“Homo Sol,” you see) into the empire.

  And now there came a struggle between John Campbell and myself. John could not help but feel that people of northwest European descent (like himself) were in the fore-front of human civilization and that all other people lagged behind. Expanding this view to a galactic scale, he viewed Earthmen as the “northwest Europeans” of the galaxy. He did not like to see Earthmen lose out to aliens, or to have Earthmen pictured as in any way inferior. Even if Earthmen were behind technologically, they should win anyway because they invariably were smarter, or braver, or had a superior sense of humor, or something.

  I, however, was not of northwest European stock, and, as a matter of fact (this was 1940, remember, and the Nazis were in the process of wiping out the European Jews), I was no great admirer of them. I felt that Earthmen, if they symbolized these northwest Europeans according to the Campbellian outlook, might well prove inferior in many vital ways to other civilized races; that Earthmen might lose out to the aliens; that they might even deserve to lose out.

  However, John Campbell won out. He was a charismatic and overwhelming person, and I was barely twenty years old, very much in awe of him, and very anxious to sell stories to him. So I gave in, adjusted the story to suit his prejudices and have been ashamed of that ever since.

  Nevertheless, I didn’t plan to have that happen again, ever. I wrote a sequel to “Homo Sol,” which I called “The Imaginary,” in which I evaded the issue by having Earthmen not appear (and Campbell rejected it). I wrote another story in which Earthmen fought villainous extraterrestrial overlords, and felt that would be all right, for the overlords were transparent symbols of the Nazis (and, as it happened, Campbell rejected that, too).

  I continued to want to write “superscience stories” my way, however, and continued to probe for strategies that would allow me to do so without encountering Campbellian resistance.

  I arrived at the answer when I first thought of my story “Foundation.” For it, I needed a galactic empire, as in “Homo Sol,” and I wanted a free hand to have it develop as I wished. The answer, when it came to me, was so simple, I can only wonder why it took me so long to reach it. Instead of having an empire with no human beings as in “The Imaginary,” I would have an empire with nothing but human beings. I would not even have robots in it.

  Thus was born the “all-human galaxy.”

  It worked remarkably well for me. Campbell never raised any objections; never suggested that I ought to insert a few alien races; never asked why they were missing. He threw himself into the spirit of the stories and accepted my galactic empire on my terms, and I never had to take up the problem of racial superiority/inferiority.

  Nor did I spend time worrying about the rationale behind the all-human galaxy myself. I had what I wanted, and I was satisfied.

  I did not ask myself, for instance, why it was that human beings were the only intelligent species in the galaxy. As it happens, it is possible that though planets are extremely numerous, relatively few are habitable; or that though many planets may be habitable, few may develop life; or that though many planets may be life-bearing, few indeed may develop intelligent life or civilizations. Nevertheless, I made no effort whatsoever to state any of this explicitly as explanation for what I was describing. It is only with my new novel Foundation’s Edge, written forty years after the series had begun, that I have started to explore the rationale behind it.

  Nor did I ask myself, at the start, if the idea were a novel one. Years later, I began to think that no one before myself had ever postulated an all-human galaxy. It seems to have been my invention (though I stand ready to be corrected in this by some SF-historian more knowledgeable than myself).

  If I did indeed invent the concept, it is a useful one, quite apart from the role it played in the duel between Campbell and myself (a duel which Campbell never knew existed). By removing the alien element, the play and interplay of human beings can be followed on an enormous canvas. Writers can deal with human interactions (only) on different worlds and within different societies and it gives rise to interesting opport
unities of all sorts.

  And, what is more, the all-human galaxy offers a way of getting around Clement’s Paradox—perhaps the only way of doing so.

  Psychohistory

  Psychohistory” is one of three words (that I know of) that I get early-use credit for in The Oxford English Dictionary. The other two, for the record, are “positronic” and “robotics.”

  This is not at all unusual. Every science fiction writer makes up words and sometimes they actually penetrate the language (but then English is notoriously hospitable to neologisms—which is one of its strengths, in my opinion).

  The more unimaginative and inevitable a word is, the more likely it is to be adopted, and I am not prone to making up words wildly. Thus, once the positron was discovered and named in 1935, and once “robot” became accepted as a term for a humaniform automaton in the 1920s, it was simply a matter of time before the words “positronic” and “robotics” appeared in print. That I seem to have been the first in each case is purely accidental.

  In fact, when I first used the word “positronic” in print (in my story “Reason,” which appeared in the April 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction) as a natural analogue of “electronic,” I thought the word already existed. The same was true when I first used the word “robotics,” in my story “Runaround,” which appeared in the March 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.