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The Mammoth Book of The Science Fiction Century 1
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Constable & Robinson Ltd
3 The Lanchesters
162 Fulham Palace Road
London W6 9ER
www.constablerobinson.com
First published in the USA as part of The Science Fiction Century by Tor Books, 1997
This edition first published in the UK by Robinson, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd, 2004
Copyright © David G. Hartwell 1997, 2004
The right of David G. Hartwell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication data is available from the British Library
ISBN 1-84119-514-6
eISBN 978-1-78033-418-9
Printed and bound in the EU
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Copyright Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
Introduction
JAMES BLISH A Work of Art
MICHAEL SHAARA 2066: Election Day
CHARLES HARNESS The Rose
DINO BUZZATI The Time Machine
PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER Mother
JAMES MORROW Veritas
A. E. VAN VOGT Enchanted Village
WOLFGANG JESCHKE The King and the Dollmaker
CORDWAINER SMITH Drunkboat
J. H. ROSNY AÎNÉ Another World
GORDON EKLUND and GREGORY BENFORD If the Stars Are Gods
GEORGE TURNER I Still Call Australia Home
ALEXANDER KUPRIN Liquid Sunshine
FRANK HERBERT Greenslaves
ROGER ZELAZNY He Who Shapes
NANCY KRESS Beggars in Spain
JACK VANCE Rumfuddle
Copyright Acknowledgments
“A Work of Art” copyright © 1956 by James Blish, renewed © 1984 J. C. Blish, D. E. Blish. Used by permission.
“2066: Election Day” copyright © 1956 by Jeffrey M. Shaara and Lila E. Shaara. Used by permission.
“The Rose” copyright © 1953, 1981 by Charles Harness. First appeared in Authentic Science Fiction: reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, Linn Prentis.
“The Time Machine” copyright © 1954 by Arnoldo Mondadori Editore. Used by permission.
“Mother” copyright © 1977 by Philip José Farmer. Used by permission of the author.
“Veritas” copyright © 1987 by James Morrow. Used by permission of the author.
“Enchanted Village” copyright © 1952 by A. E. van Vogt. First printed in Destination Universe, Pellgerini & Cudahy, 1952. Used by permission of the author.
“The King and the Dollmaker” copyright © 1970 by Wolfgang Jeschke. Used by permission of the author.
“Drunkboat” copyright © 1963 by Cordwainer Smith. Used by permission of the author’s agent, Scott Meredith.
“Another World”. First published in 1895. Translation copyright © 1962 by Damon Knight. Used by permission of the translator, Damon Knight.
“If the Stars Are Gods” copyright © 1976 by Gregory Benford and Gordon Eklund. Used by permission of the authors.
“I Still Call Australia Home” copyright © 1990 by George Turner. Used by permission of the author’s agent, Cherry Weiner.
“Liquid Sunshine” translation copyright © 1982 by Leland Fetzer. Used by permission of the translator, Leland Fetzer.
“Greenslaves” copyright © 1965 by Frank Herbert. Used by permission of the author’s Estate.
“He Who Shapes” copyright © 1967 by Roger Zelazny. Used by permission of the author’s agent, The Pimlico Agency.
“Beggars in Spain” copyright © 1991 by Nancy Kress. First published by Axolotl Press. Used by permission of the author.
“Rumfuddle” copyright © 1973 by Jack Vance. Used by permission of the author.
Acknowledgments
To Maron Waxman, Susan Ann Protter, Les Pockell, and
Kathryn Cramer, without whom this book would never
have been completed.
I would like to acknowledge the significant presence of John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and Arthur G. Clarke, and all the other science fiction writers who are not reprinted in this book. I used their work to support my argument for the consideration of science fiction as a worthwhile literature in The World Treasury of Science Fiction. I used many of them again to illuminate and uphold the value of the hard SF tradition in The Ascent of Wonder. In this book, I chose the work of other major writers, some of them less familiar, some of them equally famous, so as not to allow my argument to get lost in the particular aesthetic of SF that is so dominant in their work. But their presence is here anyway, anyhow, even in the absence of representative examples of their work.
Rooted as they are in the facts of contemporary life, the phantasies of even a second-rate writer of modern Science Fiction are incomparably richer, bolder, and stranger than
the Utopian or Millennial imaginings of the past.
– ALDOUS HUXLEY
Science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts. Most frequently, the scientific dressing clothes fantasy. As fantasies are as meaningful as science, the phantasms of technology now fittingly embody our hopes and anxieties.
– BRIAN W. ALDISS
Introduction
The twentieth century was the science fiction century. We are now living in the world of the future described by the genre science fiction of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s – a world of technologies we love and fear, sciences so increasingly complex and steeped in specialized diction and jargon that fewer and fewer of us understand science on what used to be called a “high school level”. These are the days, as Paul Simon sings, of miracles and wonder.
Science fiction is a literature for people who value knowledge and who desire to understand how things work in the world and in the universe. In science fiction, knowledge is power and power is technology, and technology is useful in improving the human condition. It is, by extension, a literature of empowerment. The lesson of the genre megatext – that body of genre literature that in aggregate embodies the standard plots, tropes, images, specialized diction and clichés – is that one can solve problems through the application of knowledge of science and technology. By further extension, the SF megatext is an allegory of faith in science. Everyone knows there are science fiction addicts – I am one – and this is why: it expresses, represents, and confirms faith in science and reason.
Life is never so neat that abstract patterns, such as centuries, are more than arbitrary dividers. In the case of science fiction, the twentieth century really began about 1895, with the first stories of H.G. Wells, the greatest writer in a vigorous literary tradition now superseded, called the Scientific Romance. Wells had many contemporaries writing Scientific Romances, such as George Griffith and M.P. Shiel; predecessors include Jules Verne and Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton. But the tradition did end in Wells’s lifetime, although Brian Stableford, in Scientific Romance in Britain, 1890–1950 (1985), revives the term, which fell out of usage by World War II, to emphasize the differences between the evolution of American and British science fiction. Olaf Stapledon, S. Fowler Wright, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, for instance, might properly be considered as having written late examples of Scientific Romance.
But Wells, especially in his works between 1895 and 1911, was the primary model for a variety of other writers, in many languages, to explore the explosion of ideas and technologies that the advent of the new century promised. Not the only model, I hasten to add. I have included a fine story by J.H. Rosny aîné, from the French, in this anthology. And as the genre of science fiction began to coalesce in the teens and twenties of the new century, it became evident that a number of earlier writers, first of all Jules Berne but also many others from Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe to Fitz-James O’Brien and Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton might provide variant models for science fiction. Wells, however, was that spark that ignited the genre.
The fires of science fiction did not blaze in the United States until April 1926, when editor and publisher Hugo Gernsback launched Amazing Stories – the first magazine devoted to the new genre and which provided, as it were, a fireplace. To give examples of the new literature he proposed to support and publish, Gernsback filled parts of his issues with “classic reprints” of Wells and many of the others named above. And in his oft-quoted first editorial, in which he defined scientifiction (the term science fiction was not coined until 1929), he said it was in the manner of Poe, Verne and Wells: “charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision”.
In addition to this relative confusion, Gernsback, an eccentric immigrant and technological visionary, was tone-deaf to the English language, printing barely literate stories, often by enthusiastic teenagers, about new inventions and the promise of a wondrous technological future cheek by jowl with fiction by Wells, Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and a growing number of professional pulp writers who simply wanted to break into the new market. Gernsback was the man who first saw science fiction as the ordinary pleasure reading of the new technological world. But his standards were not the standards of a literary man or a modernist. They were the standards of a publisher of popular entertainment in pulp magazines – low-class, low-paying, low-priced popular entertainment serving the mass market.
So genre science fiction became anti-modernist. It rapidly developed a loyal readership, literary conventions, and a body of specialized writers who, converted by the evangelical pitch of Gernsback and the other early editors – chief among them John W. Campbell, Jr, who took over the helm of Astounding in the late 1930s and set higher stylistic standards for the genre (his was for decades the highest-paying market) – set about improving themselves.
Of all the pulp magazine genres, science fiction was the most socially unacceptable for decades, so it attracted the alienated of all stripes, some of them extremely talented writers. By the early 1940s the SF field had come into being. And it decided to rule the world. “Science fiction is the central literature of our time. It is not part of the mainstream. It is the mainstream”, says Ray Bradbury, and such grandiose claims are part of the essence of the SF field. Bradbury was a teenager who published a fanzine in the late 1930s and became a writer in the 1940s under the tutelage of such established SF professionals as Leigh Brackett (who co-authored the script for The Big Sleep with William Faulkner, and later wrote the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back). Science fiction did not aspire to take over literature, but reality.
The field (an aggregation of people) as opposed to the genre (a body of texts) was originally a closely-knit international group of passionate readers and writers of science fiction in the 1930s and 1940s, people who knew each other for the most part only through correspondence and rarely met. They published fanzines and sent them to one another. They developed and evolved their own practical literary criticism and their own literary standards. Most of them were teenagers at the start – including the writers. Practically speaking, none of them had the benefit of a literary or humanist education. They read a lot. Some of them had technical training, some a scientific education – like Wells. But they were organized, and when the economy and publishing opportunities expanded after World War II, the SF field was ready to expand.
In its own view, science fiction had already grown up; in Campbell’s Astounding, the 1940s were the Golden Age of SF. But by any sensible calculation the SF field really began to grow up after the war and blossomed with the first publications of genre science fiction in hardback books; the founding of major new magazines, such as Galaxy and Fantasy & Science Fiction in 1949; and the growth of the mass market paperback publishing industry in the early 1950s, which discovered science fiction right away. Most of the stories in this book are post-World War II mainly because that was the time at which the idea of revision took hold in the SF writing community, with a concomitant improvement in the fiction; it was a time when the money improved, although not enough for any but five or six of the highest paid writers to make a living without a “day job”; and most of all it was a time of optimism in the West after the terrible war.
The international SF Field Crew with the sudden influx of American science fiction, and a dialogue began among literatures that grew and continues to grow today. In Russia in the 1940s, one of the key texts was a story written in response to a Murray Leinster story in Astounding. In France, Boris Vian translated A.E. van Vogt’s uneven English (The World of Null–A) into literate French and launched van Vogt as the most important SF writer of the period in France. American science fiction, in translation or in the original, dominated the discourse worldwide. It still does; even though there have been major writers in other languages who have made major contributions. American science fiction is still the dominant partner in all dialogues. I have attempted, in this anthology, to provide some translations that give evidence of t
he growth of other traditions, but the overwhelming evidence is that American science fiction and the American market place drive the SF world.
It is a source of both amusement and frustration to SF people, writers and readers that public consciousness of science fiction has almost never penetrated beyond the first decade of the field’s development. Sure, Star Wars is wonderful, but in precisely the same way and at the same level of consciousness and sophistication that science fiction from the late twenties and early thirties was: fast, almost plotless stories of zipping through the ether in spaceships, meeting aliens, using futuristic devices and fighting the bad guys (and winning). SF people generally call this sci-fi (affectionately) “skiffy”, to distinguish it from the real, grown-up pure quill.
Science fiction is read throughout the English language-reading world, and in many other languages for pleasure and entertainment. But it is not read with much comprehension or pleasure by the dominant literary culture, the writers and academics who, on the whole, define literary fashions and instruct us in the values and virtues of fashionable literatures. This is understandable given the literary history of the genre, which has now outlasted all the other counterculture or outsider literary movements of the twentieth century. I wrote an entire book, Age of Wonders (1984, 1996), devoted to elucidating the nature of the field and the problems of understanding it and the literature associated with it, for outsiders, but one particular point needs to be repeated each time the subject arises. Science fiction is read properly, as an experienced reader can, only if the givens of the story are granted as literal, so that if the story is set on Mars in the future, that is the literal time and place. It might secondarily be interpretable as “only” a metaphor for the human condition, or for some abnormal psychological state of the character or characters, but with rare exceptions in science fiction, the literal truth of the time and place and ideas is a necessary precondition to making sense of the story. This is because only through this literality (the real world is pared away and reduced to an imaginable invented world, in which we can focus on things happening that could not happen in the mainstream world of everyday reality) can the emotional significance of totally imaginary times and places and events be felt.
The Mammoth Book of 20th Century SF II Page 1