Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow
Page 35
Jack Williamson
Jack Williamson was born in 1908 in Bisbee, Arizona Territory, to pioneering parents who moved first to Sonora, then to Pecos, Texas, and finally in 1915 by covered wagon to the sandhill homestead in eastern New Mexico where he grew up. The big event of his youth was the discovery of Hugo Gernsback's Amazing Stories, which promised an escape from dust storms and drought into more exciting worlds of the imagination. He entered college the year his first story sold, but dropped out before graduation because the courses had little to do with science fiction. For many years, he was a freelance writer. As an Army Air Forces weather forecaster, he reached the Northern Solomons in 1945. Upon his return to New Mexico, he married and settled in Portales. During the science fiction boomlet of the early 1950s, he created a comic strip, Beyond Mars, which ran for three years in the New York Sunday News.
Returning to college, he received the B.A. and M.A. from Eastern New Mexico University in 1957. A teacher there since 1960, he is now a professor of English. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Colorado in 1964 with a dissertation, which has now become a book, on the early science fiction of H.
G. Wells—H. G. Wells: Critic of Progress. Writing more or less steadily since 1926, he has published two and a half million words of magazine science fiction and nearly thirty books, several in collaboration. His teaching fields include the modern novel, literary criticism, and science fiction. He has recently been speaking and writing to promote science fiction as an academic subject.
The Legion of Space, 1947 (Fantasy)
Darker Than You Think, 1948 (Fantasy)
The Humanoids, 1949 (Simon and Schuster)
The Green Girl, 1950 (Avon)
The Cometeers and One Against the Legion, 1950 (Fantasy)
Seetee Ship, 1951 (Gnome )
Dragon's Island, 1951 (Simon and Schuster)
The Legion of Time and After World's End, 1952 (Fantasy)
Undersea Quest, 1954 (Gnome); with Frederik Pohl Dome Around America, 1955 (Ace)
Star Bridge, 1955 (Gnome); with James Gunn Undersea Fleet, 1955 (Gnome); with Frederik Pohl Undersea City, (Gnome); with Frederik Pohl
The Trial of Terra, 1962 (Ace)
Golden Blood, 1964 (Lancer)
The Reefs of Space, 1964 (Ballantine); with Frederik Pohl Starchild, 1965 (Ballantine); with Frederik Pohl The Reign of Wizardry, 1965 (Lancer)
Bright New Universe, 1967 (Ace)
The Pandora Effect, 1969 (Ace)
Rogue Star, 1969 (Ballantine); with Frederik Pohl People Machines, 1971 (Ace)
The Moon Children, 1972 (Putnam)
H. G Wells: Critic of Progress, 1973 (Mirage)
The Power of Blackness (Putnam—in progress) Doomship, (Ballantine—in progress); with Frederik Pohl
A Critical Sampler
Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1960. By a mainstream novelist, who emphasized elements of satire and contemporary social comment.
Atheling, William, Jr. (James Blish). The Issue at Hand. Chicago: Advent, 1964. Intelligent and outspoken essays by a veteran writer.
Atheling, William, Jr. More Issues at Hand. Chicago: Advent 1972. Recent Blish, still wittily abrasive. Probably the best criticism at hand.
Bailey, J. O. Pilgrims Through Space and Time: Trends and Patterns in Scientific and Utopian Fiction. New York: Argus Books, 1947. Reprinted with new foreword by Thomas D. Clareson, Westport, Conn., Greenwood Press: 1972. Important study of the emergence of science fiction, emphasis on the period 1870-1915.
Bergonzi, Bernard. The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961. The standard study of Wells's early-and great-science fiction.
Bretnor, Reginald (ed.). Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Future. New York: Coward-McCann, 1953. A symposium by leading writers, editors, and critics of its time, this has been a standard reference work.
Briney, Robert, and Edward Wood. Sf Bibliographies: An Annotated Bibliography of Bibliographical Works on Science Fiction and Fantasy Fiction. Chicago: Advent Publishers, 1972. A valuable listing of 107 items.
Clareson, Thomas D. (ed.). SF: The Other Side of Realism: Essays on Modern Fantasy and Science Fiction. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1971. A diversity of essays, mostly recent, sometimes excellent.
Clareson, Thomas D. Science Fiction Criticism: An Annotated Checklist. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1972. Lists some eight hundred items, of widely varied critical value.
Clareson, Thomas D. (ed.). A Spectrum of Worlds. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1972. Fourteen stories, from Ambrose Bierce to Robert Silverberg, introduced and annotated to relate science fiction to the main traditions of modern literature.
Davenport, Basil. Inquiry into Science Fiction. New York: Longmans, Green, 1955. A brief appreciation.
Davenport, Basil (ed.). The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism. Chicago: Advent, 1964. Four lectures on science fiction as social criticism, by Robert A. Heinlein, C. M. Kornbluth, Alfred Bester, and Robert Bloch.
de Camp, L. Sprague. Science-Fiction Handbook: The Writing of Imaginative Fiction. New York: Hermitage House, 1953. An important book of its time, still a useful reference.
Elliott, Robert C. The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. The idea of Utopia traced from golden myth to nightmare.
Eshbach, Lloyd Arthur. Of Worlds Beyond: The Science of Science Fiction Writing. Chicago:
Advent, 1964. Reprint of a 1947 symposium.
Franklin, H. Bruce. Future Perfect: American Science Fiction of the Nineteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. An anthology of early American science fiction with comment by a Marxist scholar.
Green, Roger Lancelyn. Into Other Worlds: Space Flight in Fiction from Lucian to Lewis. New York: Abelard-Schuman, 1958. A scholarly but readable survey of space flight in literature, with summaries of rare early novels.
Hillegas, Mark R. The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967. Emphasizes the influence of the early Wells on Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell, and more recent science fiction.
Hillegas, Mark R. (ed.). Shadows of Imagination: The Fantasies of C. S. Lewis, J. ft. ft. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969. Essays on three creators of modern fantasy.
Knight, Damon. In Search of Wonder. Chicago: Advent, 1956. Enlarged second edition, 1967.
Collected essays by a science fiction veteran. Intelligent, sometimes devastating.
Lundwall, Sam J. Science Fiction: What It's All About. New York: Ace Books, 1971. A Swedish fan's view of the genre.
Lupoff, Richard A. Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure. New York: Canaveral Press, 1965. Revised and enlarged edition, New York: Ace Books, 1968. An entertaining-and scholarly-study of the most popular science fiction writer of all.
Manuel, Frank E. (ed.). Utopias and Utopian Thought. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. Articles by scholars looking at the idea of Utopia from a dozen varied points of view.
Moskowitz, Sam. Explorers of the Infinite: Shapers of Science Fiction. New York: World, 1963. Useful information on early writers, marred by critical myopia and too many errors of fact.
Moskowitz, Sam. Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Modern Science Fiction. New York: World,
1966. About more recent writers.
Nicolson, Marjorie Hope. Voyages to the Moon. New York: Macmillan, 1960. Reprint of a 1948 survey of the moon voyage as a literary theme before the nineteenth century.
Panshin, Alexei, Heinlein in Dimension. Chicago: Advent, 1968. A readable and useful but maybe not-quite-adequate study of the foremost American science fiction writer.
Philmus, Robert M. Into the Unknown: The Evolution of Science Fiction from Francis Goodwin to H. G. Wells. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970. Highbrow scholarshi
p, sound but sometimes dull.
Silverberg, Robert, (ed.) The Mirror of Infinity: A Critics' Anthology of Science Fiction. New York: Harper & Row, 1970. With a dozen fine stories, each introduced by a different critic, this book surveys science fiction from Wells to Ellison.
Suvin, Darko. Other Worlds, Other Seas: Science Fiction Stories from Socialist Countries. New York: Random House, 1970. Suvin, a Marxist critic now at McGill University, introduces and edits selected science fiction from five socialist nations.
Wollheim, Donald A. The Universe Makers: Science Fiction Today. New York: Harper & Row, 1971. A valuable "inside" view of science fiction by a veteran editor and publisher who has helped form the genre.
Footnotes
[1] Wonder Story Annual, 1952-1953.
[2] W. W. Norton and Company, 1956.
[3] In Search Of Wonder, Advent Publishers: Chicago, 1956.
[4] Philip Gibbs, Little Novels of Nowadays. New York, 1924.
[5] In his wise and challenging work The American University, How It Runs, Where It Is Going (Harper & Row: New York, 1968), Jacques Barzun very pertinently says:
Reconsider research, and benefits to the university will include: less general anxiety, less preoccupation with money, fewer arrangements- to interrupt teaching and go away, to get research assistance, to get printed, etc.; and further: smaller subsidies to university presses for useless books serving only the author's claim to more salary; libraries and journals relieved from the pressure of having to cope with what comes out of the foundry under forced draft: we are perishing from publishing and must keep down that which is premature and that which is artificial.
“But if a man doesn't produce, how do we know he's a scholar?" Answer: "How do you know now from reading titles?" In the end, you take the fact on faith from close observers who know the man. They could just as easily tell you even if he never published a line. Teachers in college and university should be scholars. But scholarship and publication are not identical. Of the two, higher education should prefer scholarship. It is not as visible as jaundice, but it is often far more visible in one man's lecture than in another man's book. The teaching scholar should be able to say what Loup de Ferrieres wrote to Charles the Bald: "I desire to teach what I have learned and am daily learning."
[6] In a curious and interesting book, The Mind Game, Witchdoctors and Psychiatrists (New York, 1972), E. Fuller Torrey of
the National Institute of Mental Health, on pp. 108-9, has this to say of:
... therapists in our culture who are thought to employ techniques based on modern science.
The truth is not even close; it is a quantum jump away. The techniques used by Western psychiatrists are, with few exceptions, on exactly the same scientific plane as the techniques used by witchdoctors. If one is magic then so is the other. If one is prescientific, then so is the other. The only exceptions to this are some of the physical therapies, in particular some drugs and shock therapy, which have been shown in controlled studies to be effective in producing psychiatric change. None of the psychosocial therapies has been so shown. In fact efforts to show this- so called "outcome studies"-have been notoriously negative... Psychiatry is just as scientific-or prescientific-in rural Nigeria or the mountains of Mexico as it is in New York or San Francisco.
To do Dr. Torrey justice, he is not saying this in criticism of his profession, but as part of his argument
that "indigenous therapists"-shamans, witchdoctors, curanderos, and the like-should be accredited and admitted to psychiatric practice, at least within their own cultures and subcultures.
[7] An anecdote from my own experience illustrates this very nicely. In the early '50s, I sold a story to the quarterly of a large and very rich Texan university. It wasn't too bad a story; at least it made Martha Foley's "Distinguished" list. I was paid the princely sum of twenty dollars-half a cent a word. A
year or so later, I requested what I thought would be a routine reversion of reprint rights, and was informed that, if I would tell them who was publishing the anthology, and who was editing it, and give them some idea of its contents, they would if they saw fit release the necessary rights because-I quote verbatim and the italics are my own-they considered themselves trustees for the author!
[8] Historical Evaluation and Research Organization, "Historical Trends Related to Weapon Lethality," 1964.
[9] E. Fuller Torrey, The Mind Game, Witchdoctors and Psychiatrists, p. 108. 178
[10] The Many Worlds of Leo Rosten, New York: Harper & Row, 1964, pp. 328
[11] The Kenyon Review, Autumn, 1962, p.733.
[12] Drafted by Karen Anderson
[13] Indeed, in the January 1973 Analog, a reader berates the editor for abandoning Mr. Campbell's sexual morality standards, and cites "Hero" by Joe Haldeman as being pornographic and "Collision Course" by S. Kye Boult as containing sexually suggestive comments which could have been removed. He does not want his teen-age son corrupted.
[14] Paradoxically, some very fine sf stories have been published in Playboy.
[15] I.e., the editor suggested, recommended, or insisted on the change.
[16] I remember a heated argument with one young fan in 1965. He categorically refused to believe that Andre Norton could be a woman. He may still not believe me.
[17] When I joined the Science Fiction Writers of America in 1965, there were 30 women members of the total 275. By 1970, in a total membership of 425, there were 52.
[18] One notable exception occurred in H. Beam Piper's "Omnilingual"-Dr. Martha Dane.
[19] This story predates the James Bond movie use of a power-pack Buck Rogersian one-man flight unit although, as I recall the cover illustration, the two had striking similarities.
[20] In fact, because of the immense possibility that Norman Spinrad's story might come true, the Milford SF Writers' Conference at which it was first read debated long over whether it should be published at all.
[21] Examples to the point: Conan the Warrior, Doc Savage, Tarzan, Buck Rogers, John Carter, Captain Nemo, Orcott-Morey-Wade-Fuller (of the early John Campbell novels); Richard Seton, "Skylark," Grey Mouser, Retief, Nicolas van Rhyn, to name a few of the best known.
[22] What could be more descriptive of science fiction and fantasy?
[23] As a corollary to this, read Mr. Knight's "The Great Cow Pat Hoax," fortunately well anthologized. And commemorated by the Faithful with a plasticized cow pat, complete with fly, which reposed on the organ in the Knights' home.
[24] My second son has worn out five sets of the trilogy.
[25] There is actually another novelist, Georgette Heyer, who exerts a tremendous fascination for her readers. But as the Regency period existed and Miss Heyer is authentically recalling that era, it is not a true exception.