AFTERWORD
Writers talking about writing are about as bad as parents boasting about their children. I have not done much of it; the few times that I have been guilty, I did not instigate the project, and in almost all cases (all, I think) my arm was twisted.
I promise to avoid it in the future.
The item above, however, I consider worthy of publication (even though my arm was twisted) because there really are many librarians who earnestly wish to buy good science fiction . . . but don't know how to do it. In this short article I tried very hard to define clearly and simply how to avoid the perils of Sturgeon's Law in buying science fiction.
Part way through you will notice the origin of the last name of the Stranger in a Strange Land.
"It is far, far better to have a bastard
in the family than an unemployed
son-in-law."
—Jubal Harshaw
THE THIRD
MILLENNIUM OPENS
FOREWORD
Superficially this looks like the same sort of article as "Pandora's Box"; it is not, it is fiction—written by request to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Amazing Stories. In "Pandora's Box" I was trying hard to extrapolate rationally to most probable answers 50 years in the future (and in November 1979 I gave myself a score of 66%—anybody want to buy a used crystal ball with a crack in it?).
But in this short-short I wrote as if I were alive in 2001 and writing a retrospective of the 20th century. Of course everyone knows what happened in 2001; they found a big black monolith on Luna—but in 1956 I didn't know that. So I wrote as far out as I thought I could get away with (to be entertaining) while trying to make the items sound plausible and possible if not likely.
Figures in parentheses refer to notes at the end.
"Has it everoccured to you
that God might be a committee?"
—Jubal Harshaw
Now, at the beginning of the year 2001, it is time to see where we have been and guess at where we are going. A thousand years ago Otto III ruled the Holy Roman Empire, William the Conqueror was not yet born, and the Discovery of America was almost five hundred years in the future. The condition of mankind had not changed in most important respects since the dawn of history. Aside from language and local custom a peasant of 1000 B.C. would have been right at home in a village of 1001 A.D.
He would not be so today!
The major changes took place in the last two centuries, but the most significant change of all occurred in the last fifty years, during the lifetimes of many of us. In 1950 six out of ten persons could neither read nor write; today an illiterate person is a freak.(1)
More people have learned to read and write in the past fifty years than in all the thousands of years preceding 1950.
This one change is more worldshaking than the establishment this last year of the laboratory outpost on Pluto. We think of this century just closed as the one in which mankind conquered space; it would be more appropriate to think of it as the century in which the human race finally learned to read and write.
(Let's give the Devil his due; the contagious insanities of the past century—communism, xenophobia, aggressive nationalism, the explosions of the formerly colonial peoples—have done more to spread literacy than the efforts of all the do-gooders in history. The Three R's suddenly became indispensable weapons in mankind's bloodiest struggles—learn to read, or die. Out of bad has come good; a man who can read and write is nine-tenths free even in chains.)
But something else has happened as important as the ABC's. The big-muscled accomplishments of the past fifty years—like sea-farming, the fantastic multiplication of horsepower, and spaceships, pantographic factories, the Sahara Sea, reflexive automation, tapping the Sun—overshadow the most radical advance, i.e., the first fumbling steps in founding a science of the human mind.
Fifty years ago hypnotism was a parlor trick, clairvoyance was superstition, telepathy was almost unknown, and parapsychology was on a par with phrenology and not as respectable as the most popular nonsense called astrology.
Do we have a "science of the mind" today? Far from it. But we do have—
A Certainty of Survival after Death, proved with scientific rigor more complete than that which we apply to heat engines. It is hard to believe that it was only in 1952 that Morey Bernstein, using hypnotic regression, established the personal survival of Bridget Murphy—and thereby turned the western world to a research that Asia and Africa had always taken for granted.(2)
Telepathy and Clairvoyance for Military Purposes. The obvious effect was the changing of war from a "closed" game to an "open" game in the mathematical sense, with the consequence that assassination is now more important than mass weapons. It may well be that no fusion bomb or plague weapon will ever again be used—it would take a foolhardy dictator even to consider such when he knows that his thoughts are being monitored . . . and that assassination is so much harder to stop than a rocket bomb. He is bound to remember that Tchaka the Ruthless was killed by one of his own bodyguard.
But the less obvious effect has been to take "secrecy" wraps off scientific research. It is hard to recall that there was once a time when scientific facts could not be freely published, just as it is hard to believe that our grandfathers used to wear things called "swimming suits"—secrecy in science and swimming with clothes on are almost equally preposterous to the modern mind. Yet clothing never hampered a swimmer as much as "classification" hampered science. Most happily, controlled telepathy made secrecy first futile, then obsolete.(3)
But possibly the most important discovery we have made about ourselves is that Man is a Wild Animal. He cannot be tamed and remain Man; his genius is bound up in the very qualities which make him wild. With this self-knowledge, bleak, stern, and proud, goes the last hope of permanent peace on Earth; it makes world government unlikely and certainly unstable. Despite the fact that we are (as always) in a condition of marginal starvation, this fact makes all measures of population control futile—other than the ancient, grisly Four Horsemen, and even they are not effective; we finished World War III with a hundred million more people than when we started.
Not even the H-bomb could change our inner nature. We have learned most bloodily that the H-bomb does nothing that the stone axe did not do—and neither weapon could tame us. Man can be chained but he cannot be domesticated, and eventually he always breaks his chains.
Nor can we be "improved" by genetic breeding; it is not in our nature to accept it. Someday we may be conquered by superbeings from elsewhere, then bred according to their notions—and become dogs, rather than wolves. (I'm betting that we will put up a fight!) But, left to our own resources, improvements in our breed must come the hard way, through survival . . . and we will still remain wild animals.(4)
But we have barely begun to study ourselves. Now that mankind has finally learned to read and write what can we expect him to accomplish?
We have no idea today of how self-awareness is linked to protoplasm. Now that we know that the ego survives the body we should make progress on this mystery.
Personal survival necessitates Cosmic Purpose as a "least hypothesis" for the universe. Scientists are tending to take teleology away from theologians and philosophers and give it a shaking. But concrete results this century seem unlikely. As of now, we still don't know why we are here or what we are supposed to do—but for the first time in history it is scientifically probable that the final answers are not null answers. It will be interesting indeed if one of the religious faiths turns out to be correct to nine decimals.
Since ESP talents seem to be independent of space-time it is theoretically possible that we may achieve a mental form of time travel. This is allowable under the mathematics being developed to describe mind phenomena. If so, we may eventually establish history, and even prophecy, as exact sciences.
On the physical side we can be certain that the speed-of-light barrier will be cracked this century. This makes it statistically likely t
hat we will soon encounter races equal or superior to ourselves. This should be the most significant happening to mankind since the discovery of fire. It may degrade or destroy us, it may improve us; it cannot leave us unchanged.
On the mundane side we can expect a population of five billion by the middle of this century. Emigration to other planets will not affect the total here.
Scientific facts will continue to be discovered much faster than they can be classified and cross-referenced, but we cannot expect any accompanying increase in human intelligence. No doubt the few remaining illiterates will continue to be employed in the subscription departments of periodicals; the same bigmouths who now complain about rocket service to Luna (but who can't thread a needle themselves) will in 2050 be complaining about service to the stars (and they still won't be able to thread a needle).
Unquestionably the Twentieth Century will be referred to as the "Good Old Days," we will continue to view with alarm the antics of the younger generation, and we probably will still be after a cure for the common cold.
* * *
Notes: 1980
1. He's still a freak but he's all too common. There is a special circle in Hell for the "Educators" who decided that the Three R's really weren't all that important. Concerning our public schools today: Never have so many been paid so much for so little. I thank whatever gods there be that I went to school so many years ago that I had no choice but to be tightly disciplined in classes in which the teachers did not hesitate to fail and to punish.
My first-grade class had 63 kids in it, one teacher, no assistant. Before the end of the second semester all 63 could read.
2. Many people seem to feel that the "Bridey Murphy" case has been invalidated. Maybe so, maybe not—the investigative reporter who went to Ireland had no special qualifications and the "disproof" came from Time magazine. Time magazine probably publishes many facts . . . but since its founding in the early 1920's I have been on the spot eight or nine times when something that wound up as a news story in Time happened. Not once—not once—did the Time magazine story match what I saw and heard.
I have the "Bridey Murphy" recording and Bernstein's book about it. I am not an expert witness . . . but I found the recording highly interesting. To me it sounded like what it purported to be: regression under hypnosis to memory of a former existence. Some years later I learned from an ethical hypnotherapist (i.e., he accepted patients only by referrals from M.D.'s, his own doctorate being in psychology) that regression to what seemed to be former lives was a commonplace among patients of hypnotherapists—they discussed it among themselves but never published because they were bound by much the same rule as physicians and priests taking confession.
I have no data to offer of my own. I decided many years back that I was too busy with this life to fret about what happens afterwards. Long before 2001 I will know . . . or I will know nothing whatever because my universe has ceased to exist.
3. Anyone today who simply brushes off ESP phenomena as being ridiculous is either pigheaded or ignorant. But I do not expect controlled telepathy by 2001; that is sheer fiction, intended to permit me to get in that bit about Tchaka, et al.
4. I lifted this "Man is a wild animal" thesis bodily from Charles Gallon Darwin (grandson of the author of The Origin of Species) in his book The Next Million Years, Doubleday, 1953. I am simply giving credit; I shan't elaborate here. But The Next Million Years is a follow-on to The Origin of Species and is, in my opinion, one of most important works of this century. It has not been a popular book—but I seem to recall that his grandfather's seminal work wasn't too popular, either.
WHO ARE THE HEIRS OF PATRICK HENRY?
STAND UP AND BE COUNTED!
FOREWORD
This polemic was first published on Saturday 12 April 1958. Thereafter it was printed many other places and reprints of it were widely circulated inside and outside the science fiction community, inside and outside this country.
It brought down on me the strongest and most emotional adverse criticism I have ever experienced—not to my surprise.
After more than twenty years my "misdeed" seems to have been largely forgotten, or perhaps forgiven. But I do not ask to be forgiven and I do not want it to be forgotten. So I now republish it in permanent form. I have not consulted my editor or my publisher; each is free to denounce my opinions here expressed—but is not free to refuse this item while accepting the rest of this book.
A few specific details below are outdated by new technology—e.g., earthquakes can now be distinguished with certainty (we hope) from nuclear explosions, while other aspects of detection and inspection grow more complex. Technical details change; basic principles do not.
"Supreme excellence in war is to subdue the enemy without fighting."
—Sun Tzu, ca. 350 B.C.
The Soviet Union is highly skilled at this—and so are the Chinese leaders. During the last twenty-odd years we have been outmaneuvered endlessly. Today it's the Backfire bomber (a B-1 with a Russian accent); tomorrow it is an international (U.N.) treaty to socialize all aspects of space and thereby kill such enterprise as the L-5 Society, Sabre, Otrag (already killed), Robert Truax's Do-It-Yourself projects. The treaty will permit a KGB agent ("A rose by any other name—") to inspect in detail anything of ours, private or public, on the ground or in the sky, if it is in any way connected with space—or the KGB man claims to suspect that it might be.
(But if you think that gives us a free ticket into every building, every room, at the Byakonur space complex, you don't know how the USSR does business.)
The President has already announced that he will sign it. 10 to 1 he will, 7 to 2 the Senate will pass it—and 100 to 1 we will regret it.
This declaration is more timely than ever; I am proud to reprint it—and deeply sorry that it was ever needed.
Any rational person may well disagree with me on details of this broadside. But on the moral principles expressed here, a free man says: "Give me liberty, or give me death!" No quibbling, no stopping to "think it over." He means it.
Fools and poltroons do not.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take, but as for me, give me liberty, or give me death!!"
—Patrick Henry
Last Saturday in this city appeared a full-page ad intended to scare us into demanding that the President stop our testing of nuclear weapons. This manifesto was a curious mixture of truth, half-truth, distortion, exaggeration, untruth, and Communist-line goals concealed in idealistic-sounding nonsense.
The instigators were seventy-odd local people and sixty-odd national names styling themselves "The National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy." It may well be that none of the persons whose names are used as the "National" committee are Communists and we have no reason to suppose that any of the local people are Communists—possibly all of them are loyal and merely misguided. But this manifesto is the rankest sort of Communist propaganda.
A tree is known by its fruit. The purpose of their manifesto is to entice or frighten you into signing a letter to President Eisenhower, one which demands that he take three actions. The first demand is the old, old Communist-line gimmick that nuclear weapons and their vehicles should be "considered apart" in disarmament talks. It has had a slight restyling for the post-Sputnik era and now reads: "That nuclear test explosions, missiles, and outer-space satellites be considered apart from other disarmament problems."
This proposal sounds reasonable but is booby-trapped with outright surrender of the free world to the Communist dictators. Mr. Truman knew it, Mr. Eisenhower knows it; both have refused it repeatedly. The gimmick is this: if nuclear weapons and their vehicles are outlawed while conventional weapons (tanks and planes and bayonets and rifles) are not, then—but you figure it out. 170,000,000 of us against 900,000,000 of them. Who wins?
Even if you count our allies (on the assumption that every last one of the
m will stick by us no matter how bone-headed our behavior), the ratio is still two-to-one against us when it comes to slugging it out with infantry divisions, Yalu River style.
Oh yes! Khrushchev would like very much to have nuclear weapons "considered apart" from infantry divisions. And he is delighted when soft-headed Americans agree with him.
"The Mice Voted to Bell the Cat." —Aesop
Their second proposal has been part of the Communist line for twelve long years. It reads: "That all nuclear test explosions be stopped immediately and that the U.N. then proceed with the mechanics necessary for monitoring this cessation." This is the straight Communist gospel direct from the Kremlin. This was and is today their phony counter-proposal to the Baruch Proposals of 1946—banning first, policing the ban if, when, and maybe . . . and subject to the veto of the U.S.S.R. It would leave us at the "mercy" of the butchers of Budapest, our lives staked on the "honor" of men to whom honesty is a bourgeois weakness, our freedom resting on the promises of a gangster government that has broken every promise it ever made.
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