Gold: The Final Science Fiction Collection

The Longest Voyage

Suppose you want to take a trip across the country from Portland, Maine to Portland, Oregon.

That’s roughly 3,000 miles. A trip around the world along the equator is only a little over eight times that, 25,000 miles.

To go from the Earth to the moon is only about nine times the equatorial jaunt, about 240,000 miles. Beyond that? Well, Venus at its closest is just over a hundred times the distance to the moon; it is about 25,000,000 miles away. And right now, Pluto is just about as near to Earth as it ever gets, but it is over a hundred times the distance to Venus. It is about 2,800,000,000 miles away.

So far we’ve stayed in our solar system, but beyond that are the stars. Even the nearest star is nearly 9,000 times as far away as Pluto is right now. The nearest star is Alpha Centauri and it is 25,000,000,000,000 miles away. And that’s the nearest star.

The distance across the Milky Way galaxy is 23,000 times the distance from Earth to Alpha Centauri. The distance from here to the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest large galaxy to our own, is about twenty-three times the diameter of the Milky Way galaxy. And the distance from here to the farthest quasar is about 4,000 times that from here to the Andromeda.

What about time? It takes a few days to get to the moon; a few months to get to Venus or Mars; a few years to get to the giant planets of the solar system. But that’s about as far as we can go and have it make reasonable sense.

To get to even the nearest star, at the present state of the art, would take hundreds of thousands of years. All that NASA has so far done in sending probes as far as Saturn has been to play games in our backyard. It is interstellar travel, trips to the stars, that represent the longest voyage.

And it is in trips to the stars that science fiction writers and readers are most interested. Our solar system is too well known and too limited. The solar system (outside Earth) is not at all likely to bear life of any kind-certainly not intelligent life. So we’ve got to take the longest voyage and get to the stars, if we’re to find extraterrestrial friends, competitors, and enemies. As long ago as 1928, in The Skylark of Space, E. E. (Doc) Smith took the first science-fictional trip to the stars, and how the readers loved it.

Good old Doc was a little vague on just how his interstellar ships managed to cross those huge spaces, however, and, to tell you the truth, we’re not much better off now. Let’s list the possibilities:

1. We can keep accelerating; going faster and faster and faster until we’re going fast enough to cover vast interstellar and intergalactic distances in a matter of months, or even days. objection: Physicists are strongly of the opinion that the speed of light in a vacuum, 186,000 miles per second, is as fast as anyone can go. At that speed, it will still take years to reach the nearest star, millions of

2. Even if we’re limited to the speed of light, that could be good enough. As one approaches the speed of light, the rate of time passage on the speeding object slows steadily, and at the speed of light itself, the rate of time passage is zero. At light speed, then, the crew of a starship would cover enormous distance practically instantaneously. objection: Interstellar and intergalactic space is littered with occasional hydrogen atoms. At light speed, these atoms would strike the ship with the energy and force of cosmic ray particles and would quickly kill the starship’s crew and passengers. Probably, the ship would have to go no faster than one-tenth light speed, and at that speed the time effects are not great enough to help us much.

3. Suppose we attach a kind of “atom-plow” arrangement in front of the starship. It would scoop up all the atoms in front of it, thus preventing cosmic ray problems and, in addition, gathering material to serve as fuel for its nuclear fusion engines. objection: Such atom-plows would have to be many thousands of miles across to be effective. Building such things would represent enormous and perhaps insuperable problems.

4. We can evade the speed-of-light limit altogether by making use of tachyons, subatomic particles that move much faster than the speed of light and that, as a matter of fact, cannot move slower than the speed of light. objection: Tachyons exist only in theory, and have not actually been detected. Most physicists think they will never be detected. Even if they were detected, no one has even come close to figuring out a way of putting them to use.

5. Perhaps we can evade the speed-of-light limit by going through black holes. They at least are known to exist. objection: Even if black holes exist (and astronomers are not yet unanimous on this), no one is even close to suggesting how any stars hip might approach one without, being destroyed by tidal forces. In addition, there is by no means general agreement that one can negotiate long distances quickly by going through black holes.

6. In that case, we might find some other way of leaving this universe. We could then travel through hyperspace in “jumps” that will carry us enormous distances in zero time. objection: So far hyperspace exists only within the imagination of science fiction writers.

7. Well, then, we can submit to the speed-of-light limit, but freeze the crew and passengers, and arrange to have them restored to conscious life after thousands of years have passed and the destination has been reached. objection: No one really knows how human bodies can be frozen without being killed; or whether such frozen bodies, even if retaining a spark of life, can retain it over a period of thousands of years.

8. In that case, there seems nothing left to do but to coast-to travel at ordinary speeds, considerably less than that of light, with all people aboard thoroughly conscious. This means it will take many thousands of years to reach even the nearer stars, so that many generations will have to spend their lifetimes aboard the starship. That may be bearable if the starship is large enough. objection: None, really, if people want to do it.

So much for hardheaded realism. In science fiction, we tend to have faith that problems that seem insuperable now will be solved-perhaps in ways that are utterly unexpected.

Therefore we are offering you a baker’s dozen of stories, all involving starships. In these are explored the various strategies I have described above for covering long distances, and perhaps one or two that are too far-out for me to have even mentioned.

What’s more, the stories explore the effect of the long voyages on the people on board the starship, and the kind of events that might take place on them.

Since it is not likely that such voyages will be undertaken in our lifetime (and certainly not completed, if the generations-long coasting starship should indeed prove to be the only practical alternative), these exciting science-fictional speculations are the only way we can experience, if only vicariously, the long voyages that are the quintessential dreams of the far-flung imagination.

Inventing A Universe

Why have I gone to the trouble of inventing a universe for other writers to exploit?

No, it isn’t the money or the fame. Most of the royalties and all of the fame will go, as they should, to the authors who actually write the stories in this book and (it is to be hoped) in later companion pieces. My own return is, as it should be, miniscule.

But there are other reasons and I would like to explain them at some length, for among other things, they involve my feelings of guilt. Now guilt (for those of you who have never experienced the emotion) is a dreadful annoyance, souring one’s life and making one unable to enjoy properly any renown or riches that come one’s way. One is bowed down by its weight and is rendered fearful of the (usually imaginary) accusing eye of public disapproval.

In my case, it came about this way. I hadn’t been writing for more than ten or fifteen years when I began to have the uneasy suspicion that I was becoming rather well known as a science fiction writer. In fact, I was even getting mentioned as one of the “Big Three,” the other two being Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur c. Clarke.

It only got worse as the decades continued to fly by. We were not only cursed with prolificity, but with longevity, so that the same old Big Three remained Big for nearly half a century. Heinlein died in 1988 at the age of 80, but Clarke is still going strong as I write this and, obviously, so am I.

The result is that, at present, when there are a great many writers attempting to scale the mountainside of science fiction, it must be rather annoying for them to see the peak occupied by elderly has-beens who cling to it with their arthritic paws and simply won’t get off. Even death, it seems, won’t stop us, since Heinlein has already published a posthumous book and reissues of his old novels are in the works.

Thanks to the limited space on the shelves of bookstores (themselves of sharply limited number), large numbers of new books of science fiction and fantasy are placed on them for only brief intervals before being swept off by new arrivals. Few books seem to manage to exist in public view for longer than a month before being replaced. Always excepting (as some writers add, with a faint snarl) the “megastars.”

“So what?” I can hear you say in your warm and loving way. “So you’re a mega star and your books are perennial sellers and the economic futures of yourself and your eventual survivors are set. Is that bad?”

No, it isn’t bad, exactly, but that’s where the guilt comes in. I worry about crowding out newcomers with my old perennials, about smothering them with the weight of my name.

I’ve tried to justify the situation to myself. (Anything to make it possible for me to walk about science fiction conventions without having to skulk and hide in doorways when other writers pass.)

In the first place, we started in the early days of science fiction-not only the Big Three, but others of importance such as Lester del Rey, Poul Anderson, Fred Pohl, Clifford Simak, Ray Bradbury, and even some who died young: Stanley Weinbaum, Henry Kuttner, and Cyril Kornbluth, for instance. In those early days, the magazines paid only one cent a word or less, and there were only magazines. There were no hardcover science fiction publishers, no paperbacks, no Hollywood to speak of.

For years and decades we stuck it out under starvation conditions, and it was our efforts that slowly increased the popularity of science fiction to the point where today’s beginners can get more for one novel than any of us got in ten years of endless plugging. So, if some of us are doing unusually well now, it is possible to argue that we earned it.

Secondly, from the more personal standpoint, back in 1958 I decided I had done enough science fiction. I had been successful in writing nonfiction of various types and it seemed to me I could make a living if I concentrated on nonfiction (and, to tell you the truth, I preferred nonfiction). In that way I could leave science fiction to the talented new writers who were making their way into the field.

So from 1958 to 1981, a period of nearly a quarter of a century, I wrote virtually no science fiction. There was one novel and a handful of short stories, but that’s all. And meanwhile, along came the “New Wave. “ Writing styles changed drastically, and I felt increasingly that I was a back-number and should remain out of science fiction.

The trouble was that all this didn’t help. The science fiction books that I published in the 1950s refused to go out of print and continued to sell steadily through the 1960s and 1970s. And because I wrote a series of nonfiction essays for Fantasy and Science Fiction. I remained in the consciousness of the science fiction public. I was therefore still one of the Big Three.

Then, in 1981, my publisher insisted (with a big INSIST) that I write another novel and I did and, to my horror, it hit the bestseller lists and I’ve had to write a new novel every year since then, in consequence.

That would have made me feel guiltier than ever, but I’ve done various things to pull the fangs of that guilt. For instance, I have, quite deliberately, decided that since my name has developed a kind of weight and significance, I would use it, as much as possible, for the benefit of the field rather than of my self.

With my dear and able friends, Martin Harry Greenberg and Charles Waugh (and occasionally others), I have helped edit many anthologies. More than a hundred of these have now been published with my name often in the title. What these serve to do is to rescue from the shadows numbers of stories that are well worth exposing to new generations of science fiction readers. Quite apart from the fact that the readers enjoy it, it means a little money to some veteran authors, as well as a shot in the arm to encourage continued production. The thought that the presence of my name might make such anthologies do better and be more efficacious in this respect than otherwise makes me feel fine.

Then, too, a number of novels by young authors have been published under the “Isaac Asimov Presents” label. In this way, the young authors get perhaps a somewhat better sale than they might otherwise have, and even (perhaps) a better break at the bookshelves.

I have even granted the right to make use of some of the themes that I have developed in my own books. There is a series of a dozen books, for instance, that have the generic title “Isaac Asimov’s Robot City.” They are written by young writers who have my express permission to use my Three Laws of Robotics, and for each one I write an introduction on one phase or another of robotics. The books are doing well, actually, and it is clear that the presence of my name doesn’t hurt.

Then another way of using my name came up. Marty Greenberg suggested that, rather than have writers use a “universe” I had already invented and made my own, I invent a brand-new one I had never used and donate it to some publishing house that would be willing to have writers produce stories built about the concepts of the “universe”-and, of course, find the writers who would want to try their hand at it.

I agreed enthusiastically. After all, I had just devised a new background for my 1989 novel, Nemesis, one which had not been used in any piece of fiction I had written before, so I did not foresee any great difficulty in inventing an “Isaac’s Universe” for other writers to use. (The use of the word “Isaac” in the title was Marty’s idea but I snatched at it eagerly. There are well over sixty books that I have writtenby no means all anthologies-with either “ Asimov” or “Isaac Asimov” in the title, but none with “Isaac” alone, until this one.)

In making up a new “Universe” there were some things I couldn’t abandon, of course. We would be working within our own Galaxy in which I postulated the existence of 25,000,000 star systems containing a habitable world, the whole being linked together by devices that made it possible to travel and communicate at faster-than-light speeds. The shorthand for this is “hyperspatial travel and communication.”

I have this in my Foundation universe, and the other novels I have been connecting to the Foundation, but from here on my Universes part company.

In my Foundation series and the novels related thereto, the Galaxy contains only one intelligent species-our own. All the habitable worlds have been colonized by human beings so that we, in effect, have an all-human Galaxy. I may have been the first to write important novels based on such a theme, and the reason I did it was to pare away the complexities that would arise from a multiplicity of intelligences. I wanted to be able to deal with humanity and its problems in a detailed all-human manner, making them even clearer by showing them through a Galaxy-wide magnifying glass. This I have ended up doing-albeit imperfectly, of course, since I am no Shakespeare or Tolstoy.

However, I was well aware that there was the alternative multiple-intelligence Universe. We see that now constantly on such television shows as Star Trek and in many of the older “space opera “ stories.

There we always have the risk of a failure of imagination that leads to the portrayal of other intelligences as differing from ourselves superficially by the possession of green faces, or antennae, or corrugated foreheads, but allowing these changes to leave them, clearly, primates. You can’t really blame Star Trek for this, since they have to have human beings playing the roles of other intelligences, but in science fiction stories in print, having all intelligences primate (or, if villainous, reptilian) seems insufficient.

E. E. Smith’s Galactic Patrol and its sequels had a multi-intelligence Universe that had its intelligences encased in radically different physiologies and this I found satisfying when I read the stories as a young man. I was particularly pleased with the feeling Smith labored to give of a communal mental feeling among individuals who had nothing physically in common.

It was something like this, then, that I wanted for my Universe, but I wanted to make my Universe more specific in its description of the different species and more concerned with the various political, economic, and social problems of the Galaxy. It was to be less space-opera-ish and more quasi-historical, a melding to some extent of Galactic Patrol and Foundation.

I wanted a Universe with millions of planets bearing life, with the indigenous life on every planet unique to itself and with differences limited only by the imagination of the writer. However, there are only six intelligent species-widely different in nature:

1. Earthmen.

2. An aquatic race, vaguely analogous to Earthly porpoises.

3. A fragile, skeletal insectlike species adapted to a low oxygen atmosphere plus neon rather than nitrogen.

4. A sinuous, limbless species, possessing fringed flippers, however, that are snakish in a way.

5. A small, winged species adapted to a thick atmosphere.

6. A strong, slow-moving, blocklike species with no appendages, and adapted to a gravity higher than Earth’s.

The intelligences each control more than their native planets. They can be pictured as going through the Galaxy, colonizing and settling planets suitable to themselves. In general, a world suitable for one is not particularly desirable for any of the others, and with plenty of each variety, there is no push for going to the enormous expense of modifying a planet to suit one’s own kind. The intelligences can therefore live together in the Galaxy without treading on each other’s toes. There is nothing to fight over unless there is an inability to overcome the unreasoning dislike of one species for another because, of course, each appears incredibly ugly to all the others, and each may have social customs and ways of thought that are distasteful to the others.

Yet the various intelligences need to be in contact, since trade among them is useful for all, and since advances in technology by one species may be useful to others as well (and each intelligence has its own specialities in technology, some of which are unpalatable to the others for one reason or another), and since disputes may arise occasionally and there must be some form of political/social machinery to settle them. There are even occasional dangers that might require Galactic cooperation. What’s more, each intelligence may be split up into several mutually hostile subcultures.

So, you see, the Universe I invented (and which I described in considerable detail to the publishers and to the writers who were willing to chance working within it) supplies plenty of problems, some of which would certainly be beyond my imagination to handle well, and has broad enough limits to allow the writer a great deal of personal room for his own visions.

You can see how it works out in the sampling of stories in this volume, which (we very much hope) will be but the first of a series. Good reading-and if you like it, write and say so. It will lower my level of guilt, and I can always use that.

Flying Saucers And Science Fiction

I am helping to edit a book on flying saucers? Isaac Asimov? Surely, I am a leading and vocal skeptic where flying saucers are concerned!

Have I changed my mind now? Do I believe in the existence of flying saucers?

That depends on what you mean by the question. Do I believe that many people have seen something in the sky that they can’t explain?

Absolutely! Of course! You bet! Seeing something one can’t explain is very common. Every time I watch a magician perform his act I see something I can’t explain.

However, when I see something I can’t explain, I assume there is a perfectly normal explanation, one that fits in with the structure of the universe as worked out by modern science. I don’t instantly jump to the idea that there is no explanation short of the supernatural or of some far-out near-zero-probability hypothesis.

For that reason, I have no tendency to explain every appearance of a light in the sky by declaring it to be a spaceship manned by extraterrestrial beings.

Nowadays, in an effort to gain respectability, people who accept the wilder hypotheses about flying saucers call them “unidentified flying objects” and abbreviate it UFO. On numerous occasions, I have been asked if I “believe” in UFOs.

My usual answer is, “I assume that by UFO you mean ‘unidentified flying objects.’ I certainly believe that many people have seen objects in the air or sky that they can’t identify, and those are UFOs.

But then, many people can’t identify the planet Venus, or a mirage. If you are asking me whether I believe that some mysterious object reported is a spaceship manned by extraterrestrial beings, then I must say I am very skeptical. But that, you see, is an identified flying object, and that’s not what you’re asking about, is it?”

Mysterious objects have been reported in Earth’s skies all through history. Usually they are interpreted according to the preoccupations of the day. In ancient and medieval times and in primitive societies, they would be interpreted as angels, demons, spirits, and so on. In technological societies, they would be interpreted as first balloons, then dirigibles, then airplanes, and then spaceships.

Of course, if they’re spaceships now, then they’ve been spaceships all the time, and some people have indeed interpreted Ezekiel’s vision in the Bible, for instance, as the sighting of spaceships manned by extraterrestrials.

The modern surge of flying saucer sightings began on June 24, 1947, when Kenneth Arnold, a salesman, claimed he saw bright disk-shaped objects flying rapidly through the air near Mount Rainier. From the shapes he described, the expression “flying saucers” came into being.

Nothing much might have happened in consequence, for wild reports about all sorts of things reach the news media every day and then fade out. In this case, though, the report attracted the attention of Raymond A. Palmer, who was then the editor of the science fiction magazine Amazing Stories.

Palmer may not himself have been a piece of broken pottery, but he was certainly not averse to building circulation by means of items that appealed to crackpots. He had shown this in his earlier work on something completely wacky that he called “The Great Shaver Mystery.”

Now he took up flying saucers and single-handedly promoted them into an international mania. That is one connection (an important one) between flying saucers and science fiction.

Mind you, I have a soft spot in my heart for Ray Palmer. Way back in 1938, he bought the first science fiction story I ever sold, and sent me the very first check I ever earned as a professional writer.

Nevertheless, candor compels me to state that for years after this noble deed of his I never had occasion to believe a word he said.

At the other extreme of the flying saucer spectrum is professor J. Allen Hynek. He is a respectable and learned scientist who has spent decades examining the evidence and who remains firmly convinced that there is something there. He doesn’t accept the extraterrestrial spacecraft hypothesis, but he thinks that something mysterious underlies the phenomenon, which, if understood, may revolutionize science.

However, in all the years he’s been investigating the phenomenon, he’s come up with-nothing! Far from revolutionizing science, his work has not added one even marginal item to the world of physical science.

Then what am I doing helping edit this anthology?

That brings us to the second connection between flying saucers and science fiction. The whole concept of flying saucers-the whole notion of thousands upon thousands of spaceships hovering about us without ever seeming to do anything or to affect us in any way-has supplied science fiction writers with an endless supply of story material.

All of us have written flying saucer stories. I have myself, and one of them is included in this book.

Generally, we have to deal with a situation in which extraterrestrial spacecraft visit us, but keep out of sight for some reason, or decide not to do anything for some reason, or try to do something and fail for some reason, or fail to manage to convince Earthpeople they are real for some reason.

You see, science fiction writers, being sane and rational, have to find some reason for so many spaceships doing nothing. Usually the results turn out to be funny, satiric or ironic; sometimes tragic. Very often, they prove to be stories that are entertaining and good-so what we have done is to collect a sizable number of them into one book for your delectation.

Come, see for yourself that every cloud has a silver lining, and that even the silliest notions can undergo a sea change into something rich and strange in the hands of skilled science fiction writers.

Invasion

Invasion is undoubtedly as old as humanity. Hunting groups must occasionally have encountered each other, if only by accident. Each side must have felt the other was invading. The obviously weaker side would have had to decamp. If the matter were not obvious, there might have been threats or even a brief struggle to settle the matter.

Once agriculture became a way of life and farmers were pinned in place by their farms and food stores, these same food stores became an overwhelming temptation to surrounding nomads; invasions were more terrible because farmers could not flee but had to stand and fight.

We begin to have records of early civilizations suddenly inundated and taken over by raiders. The Sumerians were taken over by Gutian invaders as early as 2200 B.C. The Egyptians fell under the grip of the Hyksos invaders soon after 1700 B.C. We can go through an endless list of such things.

Considering that those people who were invaded (until quite recent times) had little knowledge of the world outside the boundaries of their own cultures, the invasions must usually have come as unbelievable shocks, as a sudden influx of the unknown from the unknown. This would be especially so when the invaders spoke strange languages, wore strange clothes, had strange ways, and even, perhaps, have looked odd.

As the most recent example of our cultural ancestors being subjected to the horror of an unexpected invasion, we need only go back to 1240, when the Mongols (short, squat, slant-eyed) swept into Europe on their hardy desert mounts. Europe knew nothing about them, had no way of knowing they were on the way (they had been ravaging Asian kingdoms for twenty years). All they knew were that these terrible horsemen, moving with incredible speed and organization, winning every battle, smashed Russia, Poland, Hungary, and were penetrating Germany and reaching for Italy, all in a matter of a single year. And then they left and raced eastward again, smashing Bulgaria en route. (They left because their khan had died back in Mongolia and the army had to be there for the election of a successor. Nothing the Europeans could have done would have stopped them.)

But the Mongols were “the last of the barbarians.” Partly because of the Mongolian empire that was set up, communications between China and Europe became smoother. Such things as printing, the magnetic compass, and (most of all) gunpowder, leaked westward from China, and these things-for some reason not exploited by the technologically more advanced Chinese-were put to amazing use by Europeans.

And beginning about 1420, the tide of invasion was reversed. The “civilized” Europeans, with their ships and their guns, fell upon the coastlines of all the continents and, eventually, penetrated the interiors until Europe dominated the world politically and militarily (and as it still does, even today, culturally.)

But how did the non-Europeans feel about it? How about the Africans who watched the Portuguese ships come from nowhere and carry them off as slaves; the Asians who watched Portuguese, Dutch, and English ships come in set up trading posts, skim off profits and treat them as inferiors; the Native Americans who watched the Spanish ships come in and take over and destroy their civilizations? There must have been the feeling of monsters arriving from some other world.

All invasions, however, at least of the kind I’m discussing, were by human beings. However strange they might have seemed-Mongols to Europeans, or Spaniards to Incas-they were clearly human beings. (There were also invasions of infestations of non-human types-rats, locusts, the plague bacterium of the Black Death, the AIDS virus-but these fall outside the subject matter of this introduction, and even they were forms of terrestrial life.)

What if, however, the invaders were intelligent beings who were not human and, in fact, not Earthly. The possibility did not seriously arise until the time when it was thoroughly recognized that the planets were other worlds and that the universe might be full of still other planets outside the domain of our own sun.

At first, other worlds were the subject of “travel tales.” Human beings went to the moon (as early as the second century A.D. in fiction and more frequently as time went on), but there are no tales I can think of in which the inhabitants of the moon came to Earth.

In 1752, the French satirist Voltaire wrote Micromegas, in which visitors from Saturn and Sirius observe the Earth, but this cannot be taken literally. The visitors are merely Voltaire’s device for having Earth viewed with apparent objectivity from without in order to have its follies and contradictions made plain.

But then in 1877, there was the discovery of thin, dark markings on Mars. This was interpreted by some as “canals” and the American astronomer Percival Lowell was convinced that they were artificial waterways built by intelligent beings trying to use the ice of the polar caps to maintain agriculture on their increasingly desiccated planet. He wrote books on the subject in the 1890s that created quite a stir.

The British science fiction writer Herbert George Wells proceeded to make use of the notion and, in 1898, published The War of the Worlds, the first significant tale of the invasion and attempted conquest of Earth by more advanced intelligences from another world (in this case, Mars). I have always thought that Wells, in addition to wanting to write an exciting story with an unprecedented plot, was also bitterly satirizing Europe. At the time he wrote, Europeans (the British, particularly) had just completed dividing up Africa without any regard for the people living there. Why not show the British how it would feel to have advanced intelligences treat them as callously as they were treating the Africans?

Wells’s novel created a new subgenre-tales of alien invasion. The manner in which Wells made the Martians unpitying exploiters of humanity (for the sake of excitement and, I believe, satire); the memory, perhaps, of the Mongol invasion; the feeling of guilt over the European despoliation of all the other continents; combined to make it conventional to have the alien invaders unfeeling conquerors, for the most part.

Actually, we have no reason to think this would be so. As far as we know, no invaders from without have ever reached Earth and, for a variety of reasons, it might be argued that none ever will.

However, if they do come, there is no a priori reason to suspect they won’t come in friendship and curiosity, to teach and to learn.

Yet such is the power of humanity’s own shameful history and the conventions of fiction that very few people would be willing to consider alien invaders coming in peace as a real possibility. In fact, when plaques and recordings were placed on rocket probes designed to leave the solar system and go wandering off into interstellar space, in order that alien intelligences (if any) might find them someday, millions of years in the future, and that they might thus learn that Earthmen had once existed-there were those who thought it a dangerous process. Why advertise our existence? Why encourage ferocious aliens to come here in order to ravage and destroy?

Here, then, in this collection, are stories of alien invasion. We have selected a variety of contemporary treatments of the problem, some a matter of excitement, some thoughtfully philosophic, some even funny. They view the possibility from all angles and stretch our minds on the matter, as good science fiction should.

The Science Fiction Blowgun

In science fiction, experience seems to show that long stories have an advantage over short ones. The longer the story, all things being equal, the more memorable.

There is reason to this. The longer the story, the more the author can spread himself. If the story is long enough, he can indulge himself in plot and subplot with intricate interconnections. He can engage in leisurely description, in careful character delineation, in thoughtful homilies and philosophical discussions.

He can play tricks on the reader, hiding important information, misleading and misdirecting, then bringing back forgotten themes and characters at the moment of greatest effect.

But in every worthwhile story, however long, there is a point. The writer may not consciously put it there, but it will be there. The reader may not consciously search for it, but he’ll miss it if it isn’t there. If the point is obtuse, blunt, trivial or nonexistent, the story suffers and the reader will react with a deadly, “50 what?”

Long, complicated stories can have the point well hidden under cloaking layers of material. Academic people, for whom the search for the point is particularly exciting, can whip their students to the hunt, and works of literature that are particularly deep and rich can elicit scholarly theses without number that will deal with the identification and explanations of points and subpoints.

But now let’s work toward the other extreme. As a story grows shorter and shorter, all the fancy embroidery that length makes possible must go. In the short story, there can be no subplots; there is no time for philosophy; what description and character delineation there is must be accomplished with concision.

The point, however, must remain. Since it cannot be economized on, its weight looms more largely in the lesser overall bulk of the short story.

Finally, in the short short story, everything is eliminated but the point. The short short story reduces itself to the point alone and presents that point to you like a bare needle fired from a blowgun; a needle that can tickle or sting and leave its effect buried within you for a long time.

Here, then, are some points made against the background and with the technique of science fiction.

A hundred of them, to be exact, each from the science fiction blowgun of a master (to be modest, there are also a couple of my own stories), and each with a one-line introductory blurb by myself.

Now, since it would make no sense to have an introduction longer than the stories it introduces, and having made my point-I’ll stop.

The Robot Chronicles

What is a robot? We might define it most briefly and comprehensively as “an artificial object that resembles a human being.”

When we think of resemblance, we think of it, first, in terms of appearance. A robot looks like a human being.

It could, for instance, be covered with a soft material that resembles human skin. It could have hair, and eyes, and a voice, and all the features and appurtenances of a human being, so that it would, as far as outward appearance is concerned, be indistinguishable from a human being.

This, however, is not really essential. In fact, the robot, as it appears in science fiction, is almost always constructed of metal, and has only a stylized resemblance to a human being.

Suppose, then, we forget about appearance and consider only what it can do. We think of robots as capable of performing tasks more rapidly or more efficiently than human beings. But in that case any machine is a robot. A sewing machine can sew faster than a human being, a pneumatic drill can penetrate a hard surface faster than an unaided human being can, a television set can detect and organize radio waves as we cannot, and so on.

We must apply the term robot, then, to a machine that is more specialized than an ordinary device.

A robot is a computerized machine that is capable of performing tasks of a kind that are too complex for any living mind other than that of a man, and of a kind that no non-computerized machine is capable of performing.

In other words to put it as briefly as possible:

Clearly, then, a true robot was impossible before the invention of the computer in the 1940s, and was not practical (in the sense of being compact enough and cheap enough to be put to everyday use) until the invention of the microchip in the 1970s.

Nevertheless, the concept of the robot-an artificial device that mimics the actions and, possibly, the appearance of a human being-is old, probably as old as the human imagination.

The ancients, lacking computers, had to think of some other way of instilling quasi-human abilities into artificial objects, and they made use of vague supernatural forces and depended on godlike abilities beyond the reach of mere men.

Thus, in the eighteenth book of Homer’s Iliad, Hephaistos, the Greek god of the forge, is described as having for helpers, “a couple of maids…made of gold exactly like living girls; they have sense in their heads, they can speak and use their muscles, they can spin and weave and do their work.” Surely, these are robots.

Again, the island of Crete, at the time of its greatest power, was supposed to possess a bronze giant named Talos that ceaselessly patrolled its shores to fight off the approach of any enemy.

Throughout ancient and medieval times, learned men were supposed to have created artificially living things through the secret arts they had learned or uncovered-arts by which they made use of the powers of the divine or the demonic.

The medieval robot-story that is most familiar to us today is that of Rabbi Loew of sixteenth- century Prague. He is supposed to have formed an artificial human being-a robot-out of clay, just as God had formed Adam out of clay. A clay object, however much it might resemble a human being, is “an unformed substance” (the Hebrew word for it is “golem”), since it lacks the attributes of life. Rabbi Loew, however, gave his golem the attributes of life by making use of the sacred name of God, and set the robot to work protecting the lives of Jews against their persecutors.

There was, however, always a certain nervousness about human beings involving themselves with knowledge that properly belongs to gods or demons. There was the feeling that this was dangerous, that the forces might escape human control. This attitude is most familiar to us in the legend of the “sorcerer’s apprentice,” the young fellow who knew enough magic to start a process going but not enough to stop it when it had outlived its usefulness.

The ancients were intelligent enough to see this possibility and be frightened by it. In the Hebrew myth of Adam and Eve, the sin they commit is that of gaining knowledge (eating of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; i.e., knowledge of everything) and for that they were ejected from Eden and, according to Christian theologians, infected all of humanity with that “original sin.”

In the Greek myths, it was the Titan, or Prometheus, who supplied fire (and therefore technology) to human beings and for that he was dreadfully punished by the infuriated Zeus, who was the chief god.

In early modern times, mechanical clocks were perfected, and the small mechanisms that ran them (“clockwork”)-the springs, gears, escapements, ratchets, and so on-could also be used to run other devices.

The 1700s was the golden age of “automatons.” These were devices that could, given a source of power such as a wound spring or compressed air, carry out a complicated series of activities. Toy soldiers were built that would march; toy ducks that would quack, bathe, drink water, eat grain and void it; toy boys that could dip a pen into ink and write a letter (always the same letter, of course). Such automata were put on display and proved extremely popular (and, sometimes, profitable to the owners).

It was a dead-end sort of thing, of course, but it kept alive the thought of mechanical devices that might do more than clockwork tricks, that might be more nearly alive.

What’s more, science was advancing rapidly, and in 1798, the Italian anatomist, Luigi Galvani, found that under the influence of an electric spark, dead muscles could be made to twitch and contract as though they were alive. Was it possible that electricity was the secret of life?

The thought naturally arose that artificial life could be brought into being by strictly scientific principles rather than by reliance on gods or demons. This thought led to a book that some people consider the first piece of modern science fiction -Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, published in 1818.

In this book, Victor Frankenstein, an anatomist, collects fragments of freshly dead bodies and, by the use of new scientific discoveries (not specified in the book), brings the whole to life, creating something that is referred to only as the “ Monster” in the book. (In the movie, the life principle was electricity.)

However, the switch from the supernatural to science did not eliminate the fear of the danger inherent in knowledge. In the medieval legend of Rabbi Loew’s golem, that monster went out of control and the rabbi had to withdraw the divine name and destroy him. In the modern tale of Frankenstein, the hero was not so lucky. He abandoned the Monster in fear, and the Monster-with an anger that the book all but justifies-in revenge killed those Frankenstein loved and, eventually, Frankenstein himself.

This proved a central theme in the science fiction stories that have appeared since Frankenstein.

The creation of robots was looked upon as the prime example of the overweening arrogance of humanity, of its attempt to take on, through misdirected science, the mantle of the divine. The creation of human life, with a soul, was the sole prerogative of God. For a human being to attempt such a creation was to produce a soulless travesty that inevitably became as dangerous as the golem and as the Monster. The fashioning of a robot was, therefore, its own eventual punishment, and the lesson, “there are some things that humanity is not meant to know,” was preached over and over again.

No one used the word “robot,” however, until 1920 (the year, coincigentally, in which I was born).

In that year, a Czech playwright, Karel Capek, wrote the play R. U.R., about an Englishman, Rossum, who manufactured artificial human beings in quantity. These were intended to do the arduous labor of the world so that real human beings could live lives of leisure and comfort.

Čapek called these artificial human beings “robots,” which is a Czech word for “forced workers,” or “slaves.” In fact, the title of the play stands for “Rossum’s Universal Robots,” the name of the hero’s firm.

In this play, however, what I call “the Frankenstein complex” was made several notches more intense. Where Mary Shelley’s Monster destroyed only Frankenstein and his family, Čapek’s robots were presented as gaining emotion and then, resenting their slavery, wiping out the human species.

The play was produced in 1921 and was sufficiently popular (though when I read it, my purely personal opinion was that it was dreadful) to force the word “robot” into universal use. The name for an artificial human being is now “robot” in every language, as far as I know.

Through the 1920s and 1930s, R.U.R. helped reinforce the Frankenstein complex, and (with some notable exceptions such as Lester del Rey’s “Helen O’Loy” and Eando Binder’s “Adam Link” series) the hordes of clanking, murderous robots continued to be reproduced in story after story.

I was an ardent science fiction reader in the 1930s and I became tired of the ever-repeated robot plot. I didn’t see robots that way. I saw them as machines-advanced machines-but machines. They might be dangerous but surely safety factors would be built in. The safety factors might be faulty or inadequate or might fail under unexpected types of stresses; but such failures could always yield experience that could be used to improve the models.

After all, all devices have their dangers. The discovery of speech introduced communication-and lies. The discovery of fire introduced cooking-and arson. The discovery of the compass improved navigation-and destroyed civilizations in Mexico and Peru. The automobile is marvelously useful-and kills Americans by the tens of thousands each year. Medical advances have saved lives by the millions-and intensified the population explosion.

In every case, the dangers and misuses could be used to demonstrate that “there are some things humanity was not meant to know,” but surely we cannot be expected to divest ourselves of all knowledge and return to the status of the australopithecines. Even from the theological standpoint, one might argue that God would never have given human beings brains to reason with if He hadn’t intended those brains to be used to devise new things, to make wise use of them, to install safety factors to prevent unwise use-and to do the best we can within the limitations of our imperfections.

So, in 1939, at the age of nineteen, I determined to write a robot story about a robot that was wisely used, that was not dangerous, and that did the job it was supposed to do. Since I needed a power source I introduced the “positronic brain. “ This was just gobbledygook but it represented some unknown power source that was useful, versatile, speedy, and compact-like the as-yet uninvented computer.

The story was eventually named “Robbie,” and it did not appear immediately, but I proceeded to write other stories along the same line-in consultation with my editor, John w. Campbell, Jr., who was much taken with this idea of mine-and eventually they were all printed.

Campbell urged me to make my ideas as to the robot safeguards explicit rather than implicit, and I did this in my fourth robot story, “Runaround,” which appeared in the March 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. In that issue, on page 100, in the first column, about one-third of the way down (1 just happen to remember) one of my characters says to another, “Now, look, let’s start with the Three Fundamental Rules of Robotics.”

This, as it turned out, was the very first known use of the word “robotics” in print, a word that is the now-accepted and widely used term for the science and technology of the construction, maintenance, and use of robots. The Oxford English Dictionary, in the 3rd Supplementary Volume, gives me credit for the invention of the word.

I did not know I was inventing the word, of course. In my youthful innocence, I thought that was the word and hadn’t the faintest notion it had never been used before.

“The Three Fundamental Rules of Robotics” mentioned at this point eventually became known as

“ Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics,” and here they are:

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Those laws, as it turned out (and as I could not possibly have foreseen), proved to be the most famous, the most frequently quoted, and the most influential sentences I ever wrote. (And I did it when I was twenty-one, which makes me wonder if I’ve done anything since to continue to justify my existence.) My robot stories turned out to have a great effect on science fiction. I dealt with robots unemotionally-they were produced by engineers, they presented engineering problems that required solutions, and the solutions were found. The stories were rather convincing portrayals of a future technology and were not moral lessons. The robots were machines and not metaphors.

As a result, the old-fashioned robot story was virtually killed in all science fiction stories above the comic-strip level. Robots began to be viewed as machines rather than metaphors by other writers, too. They grew to be commonly seen as benevolent and useful except when something went wrong, and then as capable of correction and improvement. Other writers did not quote the Three Laws-they tended to be reserved for me-but they ass umed them, and so did the readers.

Astonishingly enough, my robot stories also had an important effect on the world outside.

It is well known that the early rocket experimenters were strongly influenced by the science fiction stories of H. G. Wells. In the same way, early robot experimenters were strongly influenced by my robot stories, nine of which were collected in 1950 to make up a book called I, Robot. It was my second published book and it has remained in print in the four decades since.

Joseph F. Engelberger, studying at Columbia University in the 1950s, came across I, Robot and was sufficiently attracted by what he read to determine that he was going to devote his life to robots. About that time, he met George C. Devol, Jr., at a cocktail party. Devol was an inventor who was also interested in robots.

Together, they founded the firm of Unimation and set about working out schemes for making robots work. They patented many devices, and by the mid-1970s, they had worked out all kinds of practical robots. The trouble was that they needed computers that were compact and cheap-but once the microchip came in, they had it. From that moment on, Unimation became the foremost robot firm in the world and Engelberger grew rich beyond anything he could have dreamed of.

He has always been kind enough to give me much of the credit. I have met other roboticists such as Marvin Minsky and Shimon Y. Nof, who also admitted, cheerfully, the value of their early reading of my robot stories. Nof, who is an Israeli, had first read I, Robot in a Hebrew translation.

The roboticists take the Three Laws of Robotics seriously and they keep them as an ideal for robot safety. As yet, the types of industrial robots in use are so simple, essentially, that safety devices have to be built in externally. However, robots may confidently be expected to grow more versatile and capable and the Three Laws, or their equivalent, will surely be built into their programming eventually.

I myself have never actually worked with robots, never even as much as seen one, but I have never stopped thinking about them. I have to date written at least thirty-five short stories and five novels that involve robots, and I dare say that if I am spared, I will write more.

My robot stories and novels seem to have become classics in their own right and, with the advent of the “Robot City” series of novels, have become the wider literary universe of other writers as well.

Under those circumstances, it might be useful to go over my robot stories and describe some of those which I think are particularly significant and to explain why I think they are.

1. “Robbie:” This is the first robot story I wrote. I turned it out between May 10 and May 22 of 1939, when I was nineteen years old and was just about to graduate from college. I had a little trouble placing it, for John Campbell rejected it and so did Amazing Stories. However, Fred Pohl accepted it on March 25,1940, and it appeared in the September 1940 issue of Super Science Stories, which he edited. Fred Pohl, being Fred Pohl, changed the title to “Strange Playfellow,” but I changed it back when I included it in my book I, Robot and it has appeared as “Robbie” in every subsequent incarnation. Aside from being my first robot story, “Robbie” is significant because in it, George Weston says to his wife in defense of a robot that is fulfilling the role of nursemaid, “He just can’t help being faithful and loving and kind. He’s a machine-made so. “ This is the first indication, in my first story, of what eventually became the “First Law of Robotics,” and of the basic fact that robots were made with built-in safety rules.

2. “Reason:” “Robbie” would have meant nothing in itself if I had written no more robot stories, particularly since it appeared in one of the minor magazines. However, I wrote a second robot story, “Reason,” and that one John Campbell liked. After a bit of revision, it appeared in the April 1941 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, and there it attracted notice. Readers became aware that there were such things as “positronic robots,” and so did Campbell. That made everything afterward possible.

3. “Liar!:” In the very next issue of Astounding, that of May 1941, my third robot story, “Liar!” appeared. The importance of this story was that it introduced Susan Calvin, who became the central character in my early robot stories. This story was originally rather clumsily done, largely because it dealt with the relationship between the sexes at a time when I had not yet had my first date with a young lady. Fortunately, I’m a quick learner, and it is one story in which I made significant changes before allowing it to appear in I, Robot.

4. “Runaround:” The next important robot story appeared in the March 1942 issue of Astounding. It was the first story in which I listed the Three Laws of Robotics explicitly instead of making them implicit. In it, I have one character, Gregory Powell, say to another, Michael Donovan: “Now, look, let’s start with the Three Fundamental Rules of Robotics-the three rules that are built most deeply into a robot’s positronic brain. “ He then recites them.

Later on, I called them the Laws of Robotics, and their importance to me was threefold:

a) They guided me in forming my plots and made it possible to write many short stories, as well as several novels, based on robots. In these, I constantly studied the consequences of the Three Laws.

b) It was by all odds my most famous literary invention, quoted in season and out by others. If all I have written is someday to be forgotten, the Three Laws of Robotics will surely be the last to go.

c) The passage in “Runaround” quoted above happens to be the very first time the word “robotics” was used in print in the English language. I am therefore credited, as I have said, with the invention of that word (as well as of “robotic,” “positronic,” and “psychohistory”) by the Oxford English Dictionary, which takes the trouble-and the space-to quote the Three Laws. (All these things were created by my twenty- second birthday and I seem to have created nothing since, which gives rise to grievous thoughts within me.)

5. “Evidence:” This was the one and only story I wrote while I spent eight months and twenty-six days in the Army. At one point I persuaded a kindly librarian to let me remain in the locked library over lunch so that I could work on the story. It is the first story in which I made use of a humanoid robot. Stephen Byerley, the humanoid robot in question (though in the story I don’t make it absolutely clear whether he is a robot or not), represents my first approach toward R. Daneel Olivaw, the humaniform robot who appears in a number of my novels. “Evidence” appeared in the September 1946 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

6. “Little Lost Robot:” My robots tend to be benign entities. In fact, as the stories progressed, they gradually gained in moral and ethical qualities until they far surpassed human beings and, in the case of Daneel, approached the godlike. Nevertheless, I had no intention of limiting myself to robots as saviors. I followed wherever the wild winds of my imagination led me, and I was quite capable of seeing the uncomfortable sides of the robot phenomena.

It was only a few weeks ago (as I write this) that I received a letter from a reader who scolded me because, in a robot story of mine that had just been published, I showed the dangerous side of robots. He accused me of a failure of nerve.

That he was wrong is shown by “Little Lost Robot” in which a robot is the villain, even though it appeared nearly half a century ago. The seamy side of robots is not the result of a failure in nerve that comes of my advancing age and decrepitude. It has been a constant concern of mine all through my career.

7. “The Evitable Conflict:” This was a sequel to “Evidence” and appeared in the June 1950 issue of Astounding. It was the first story I wrote that dealt primarily with computers (I called them “Machines” in the story) rather than with robots per se. The difference is not a great one. You might define a robot as a “computerized machine” or as a “mobile computer.” You might consider a computer as an “immobile robot.” In any case, I clearly did not distinguish between the two, and although the Machines, which don’t make an actual physical appearance in the story, are clearly computers, I included the story, without hesitation, in my robot collection, 1. Robot, and neither the publisher nor the readers objected. To be sure, Stephen Byerley is in the story, but the question of his roboticity plays no role.

8. “Franchise:” This was the first story in which I dealt with computers as computers, and I had no thought in mind of their being robots. It appeared in the August 1955 issue of If: Worlds of Science Fiction, and by that time I had grown familiar with the existence of computers. My computer is “Multivac,” designed as an obviously larger and more complex version of the actually existing “Univac.” In this story, and in some others of the period that dealt with Multivac, I described it as an enormously large machine, missing the chance of predicting the miniaturization and etherealization of computers.

9. “The Last Question:” My imagination didn’t betray me for long, however. In “The Last Question,” which appeared first in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly, I discussed the miniaturization and etherealization of computers and followed it through a trillion years of evolution (of both computer and man) to a logical conclusion that you will have to read the story to discover. It is, beyond question, my favorite among all the stories I have written in my career.

10. “The Feeling of Power:” The miniaturization of computers played a small role as a side issue in this story. It appeared in the February 1958 issue of If and is also one of my favorites. In this story I dealt with pocket computers, which were not to make their appearance in the marketplace until ten to fifteen years after the story appeared. Moreover, it was one of the stories in which I foresaw accurately a social implication of technological advance rather than merely the technological advance itself.

The story deals with the possible loss of ability to do simple arithmetic through the perpetual use of computers. I wrote it as a satire that combined humor with passages of bitter irony, but I wrote more truly than I knew. These days I have a pocket computer and I begrudge the time and effort it would take me to subtract 182 from 854. I use the darned computer. “The Feeling of Power” is one of the most frequently anthologized of my stories.

In a way, this story shows the negative side of computers, and in this period I also wrote stories that showed the possible vengeful reactions of computers or robots that are mistreated. For computers, there is “Someday,” which appeared in the August 1956 issue of Infinity Science Fiction, and for robots (in automobile form) see “Sally,” which appeared in the May-June 1953 issue of Fantastic.

11. “Feminine Intuition:” My robots are almost always masculine, though not necessarily in an actual sense of gender. After all, I give them masculine names and refer to them as “he.” At the suggestion of a female editor, Judy-Lynn del Rey, I wrote “Feminine Intuition,” which appeared in the October 1969 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It showed, for one thing, that I could do a feminine robot, too. She was still metal, but she had a narrower waistline than my usual robots and had a feminine voice, too. Later on, in my book Robots and Empire, there was a chapter in which a humanoid female robot made her appearance. She played a villainous role, which might surprise those who know of my frequently displayed admiration of the female half of humanity.

12. “The Bicentennial Man:” This story, which first appeared in 1976 in a paperback anthology of original science fiction, Stellar #2, edited by Judy-Lynn del Rey, was my most thoughtful exposition of the development of robots. It followed them in an entirely different direction from that in “The Last Question. “ What it dealt with was the desire of a robot to become a man and the way in which he carried out that desire, step by step. Again, I carried the plot all the way to its logical conclusion. I had no intention of writing this story when I started it. It wrote itself, and turned and twisted in the typewriter. It ended as the third favorite of mine among all my stories. Ahead of it come only “The Last Question,” mentioned above, and “The Ugly Little Boy,” which is not a robot story.

13. The Caves of Steel: Meanwhile, at the suggestion of Horace L. Gold, editor of Galaxy, I had written a robot novel. I had resisted doing so at first for I felt that my robot ideas only fit the short story length. Gold, however, suggested I write a murder mystery dealing with a robot detective. I followed the suggestion partway. My detective was a thoroughly human Elijah Baley (perhaps the most attractive character I ever invented, in my opinion), but he had a robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw. The book, I felt, was the perfect fusion of mystery and science fiction. It appeared as a three-part serial in the October, November, and December 1953 issues of Galaxy, and Doubleday published it as a novel in 1954.

What surprised me about the book was the reaction of the readers. While they approved of Lije Baley, their obvious interest was entirely with Daneel, whom I had viewed as a mere subsidiary character. The approval was particularly intense in the case of the women who wrote to me. (Thirteen years after I had invented Daneel, the television series Star Trek came out, with Mr. Spock resembling Daneel quite closely in character-something which did not bother me-and I noticed that women viewers were particularly interested in him, too. I won’t pretend to analyze this.)

14. The Naked Sun: The popularityof Lije and Daneel led me to write a sequel, The Naked Sun, which appeared as a three-part serial in the October, November, and December 1956 issues of Astounding and was published as a novel by Doubleday in 1957. Naturally, the repetition of the success made a third novel seem the logical thing to do. I even started writing it in 1958, but things got in the way and, what with one thing and another, it didn’t get written till 1983.

15. The Robots of Dawn: This, the third novel of the Lije Baley/R. Daneel series, was published by Doubleday in 1983. In it, I introduced a second robot, R. Giskard Reventlov, and this time I was not surprised when he turned out to be as popular as Daneel.

16. Robots and Empire: When it was necessary to allow Lije Baley to die (of old age), I felt I would have no problem in doing a fourth book in the series, provided I allowed Daneel to live. The fourth book, Robots and Empire, was published by Doubleday in 1985. Lije’s death brought some reaction, but nothing at all compared to the storm of regretful letters I received when the exigencies of the plot made it necessary for R. Giskard to die.

Of the short stories I have listed as “notable” you may have noticed that three-”Franchise,” “The Last Question,” and “The Feeling of Power”-are not included in the collection you are now holding. This is not an oversight, nor is it any indication that they are not suitable for collection. The fact is that each of the three is to be found in an earlier collection, Robot Dreams, that is a companion piece for this one. It wouldn’t be fair to the reader to have these stories in both collections.

To make up for that, I have included in Robot Visions nine robot stories that are not listed above as “notable.” This is no way implies that these nine stories are inferior, merely that they broke no new ground.

Of these nine stories, “Galley Slave” is one of my favorites, not only because of the wordplay in the title, but because it deals with a job I earnestly wish a robot would take off my hands. Not many people have gone through more sets of galleys than I have.

“Lenny” shows a human side of Susan Calvin that appears in no other story, while “Someday” is my foray into pathos. “Christmas Without Rodney” is a humorous robot story, while “Think! “ is a rather grim one. “Mirror Image” is the only short story I ever wrote that involves R. Daneel Olivaw, the co-hero of my robot novels. “Too Bad!” and “Segregationist” are both robot stories based on medical themes. And, finally, “Robot Visions” is written specifically for this collection.

So it turns out that my robot stories have been almost as successful as my Foundation books, and if you want to know the truth (in a whisper, of course, and please keep this confidential), I like my robot stories better.

Finally, a word about the essays in this book. The first essay was written in 1956. All the others have appeared in 1974 and thereafter. Why the eighteen-year gap?

Easy. I wrote my first robot story when I was nineteen, and I wrote them, on and off, for over thirty years without really believing that robots would ever come into existence in any real sense-at least not in my lifetime. The result was that I never once wrote a serious essay on robotics. I might as well expect myself to have written serious essays on Galactic empires and psychohistory. In fact, my 1956 piece is not a serious discussion of robotics but merely a consideration of the use of robots in science fiction.

It was not till the mid-1970s, with the development of the microchip, that computers grew small enough, versatile enough, and cheap enough to allow computerized machinery to become practical for industrial use. Thus, the industrial robot arrived-extremely simple compared to my imaginary robots, but clearly en route.

And, as it happened, in 1974, just as robots were becoming real, I began to write essays on current developments in science, first for American Way magazine and then for the Los Angeles Times Syndicate.

It became natural to write an occasional piece on real robotics. In addition, Byron Preiss Visual

Publications, Inc., began to put out a remarkable series of books under the general title of Isaac Asimov’s Robot City, and I was asked to do essays on robotics for each of them. So it came about that before 1974, I wrote virtually no essays on robotics, and after 1974 quite a few. It’s not my fault, after all, if science finally catches up to my simpler notions.

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 I928, “The Skylark Of Space” by Edward E. Smith appeared in Amazing Stories, and was instantly recognized as an important milestone in science fiction.

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 forefront 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 lifebearing, 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 opportunities 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.

In the case of “psychohistory,” however, I suspected that the word was not in common use, and might even never have been used before. (Actually, the O.E.D. cites one example of its use as early as 1934.) I first used it in my story, “Foundation,” which appeared in the May 1942 issue of Astounding Science Fiction.

I came up with the word because John Campbell and I were discussing the course I was to take in the Foundation series once I came to him with my initial idea on the subject. I was quite frank in my intention of using Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire as my model and as a basic guide for plot ideas, but I needed something that would make science fiction out of it. I couldn’t simply call it the Galactic Empire and then just treat it as a hypertrophied Roman Empire.

So I suggested we add the fact that a mathematical treatment existed whereby the future could be predicted in a statistical fashion, and I called it “psychohistory.” Actually, it was a poor word and did not represent what I truly meant. I should have called it “psychosociology” (a word which the O.E.D. lists as having first been used in 1928). However, I was so intent on history, thanks to Gibbon, that I could think of

nothing but psychohistory. In any case, Campbell was enthusiastic about the idea and we were off and running.

I modeled my concept of psychohistory on the kinetic theory of gases, which I had been beat over the head with in my physical chemistry classes. The molecules making up gases moved in an absolutely random fashion in any direction in three dimensions and in a wide range of speeds. Nevertheless, one could fairly describe what those motions would be on the average and work out the gas laws from those average motions with an enormous degree of precision.

In other words, although one couldn’t possibly predict what a single molecule would do, one could accurately predict what umptillions of them would do.

So I applied that notion to human beings. Each individual human being might have “free will,” but a huge mob of them should behave with some sort of predictability, and the analysis of “mob behavior” was my psychohistory.

There were two conditions that I had to set up in order to make it work, and they were not chosen carelessly. I picked them in order to make psychohistory more like kinetic theory. First, I had to deal with a large number of human beings, as kinetic theory worked with a large number of molecules. Neither would work for small numbers. It is for that reason that I had the Galactic Empire consist of twenty-five million worlds, each with an average population of four billion. That meant a total human population of one hundred quadrillion. (In my heart, I didn’t think that was enough, but I didn’t want to place any greater strain on the suspension of disbelief than I absolutely had to.)

Second, I had to retain the “randomness” factor. I couldn’t expect human beings to behave as randomly as molecules, but they might approach such behavior if they had no idea as to what was expected of them. So it was necessary to suppose that human beings in general did not know what the predictions of psychohistory were and therefore would not tailor their activities to suit.

This situation may actually develop in future books of the Foundation series, but so far I have stayed clear of non-human intelligences in my Galactic Empire (partly because Campbell and I disagreed fundamentally on what their role would be if they existed and since neither of us would give in).

Eventually, I thought that my psycho history would fade out of human consciousness because the term came to be used by psychiatrists for the study of the psychiatric background of individuals (such as Woodrow Wilson, Sigmund Freud, or Adolf Hitler) who had some pronounced effect on history. Naturally, since I felt a proprietary interest in the term psychohistory as a predictive study of large faceless masses of human beings, I resented the new use of the word.

But then as time went on, I grew more philosophical. After all, it might well be that there could be no analogy drawn between molecules and human beings and that there could be no way of predicting human behavior. As mathematicians began to be interested in the details of what is now called “chaos,” it seemed to me that human history might prove to be essentially “chaotic” so that there could be no psychohistory. Indeed, the question of whether psychohistory can be worked out or not lies at the center of the novel I have recently completed, Prelu de to Foundation, in which Hari Seldon (the founder of psychohistory) is portrayed as a young man who is in the process of trying to devise the science.

Imagine, then, how exciting it is for me to see that scientists are increasingly interested in my psychohistory, even though they may not be aware that that’s what the study is called and may never have read any of my Foundation novels, and thus may not know of my involvement. (Who cares? The concept is more important than I am.)

Some months ago, a reader, Tom Wilsdon of Arden, North Carolina, sent me a clipping from the April 23, 1987, issue of Machine Design. It reads as follows, in full:

“A computer model originally intended to simulate liquid turbulence has been used to model group behavior. Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratories have found that there is a similarity between group behavior and certain physical phenomena. To do the analysis, they assigned certain physical characteristics such as level of excitement, fear, and size of the crowd to model parameters. The interaction of the crowd closely paralleled the turbulent flow equations. Although the analysis cannot predict exactly what a group will do, it reportedly does help determine the most probable consequence of a given event.”

Then, too, Roger N. Shepard, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, has published an article in the September 11, 1987 issue of Science entitled “Toward a Universal Law of Generalization for Psychological Science.”

Unfortunately, although I made a valiant effort to read it, the mathematics was too tough for me and even the nonmathematical portions produced only a rather dim and hazy understanding within me. However, here is the summary of the article as given at the beginning:

“A psychological space is established for any set of stimuli by determining metric distances between the stimuli such that the probability that a response learned to any stimulus will generalize to any other is an invariant monotonic function of the distance between them. To a good approximation, this probability of generalization (i) decays exponentially with this distance, and (ii) does so in accordance with one of two metrics, depending on the relation between the dimensions along with the stimuli vary. These empirical regularities are mathematically derivable from universal principles of natural kinds and probabilistic geometry that may, through evolutionary internalization, tend to govern the behaviors of all sentient organisms.”

As I said, I don’t really understand this but I have the feeling that Hari Seldon would understand it without trouble. I am also concerned, suddenly, that psychohistory may be developed within the next century. I placed its development 20,000 years in the future. Is this going to be another case of my science- fictional imagination falling ludicrously short?

Science Fiction Series

I have received a letter from Nancy Bykowski of Bolingbrook, Illinois, which says, in part, “I have noticed the trend in recent years towards trilogies and serial volumes. I enjoy reading a series of books set in the same background, but it can be frustrating when the books do not stand alone…But there are some authors out there that seem to be writing serials so that we will be forced to buy their next book. I believe I read somewhere that the publishers tend to encourage that kind of thinking. So my question to you is, did you write your Foundation trilogy in response to a request from a publisher, or was it simply the result of an idea that was too big for one volume?”

As it happens, I, too, have noticed the tendency for novels to come in clumps these days. (It’s true of movies, also. Someday, we will have a motion picture called Rocky XVII Meets Superman XI.)

But why is that? Why are so many writers turning out a series of connected novels?

One very obvious reason is that it makes life simpler for them. Instead of having to invent a new social background for each story, they can make use of one that they have already devised. The writer can thus begin a new novel with a ready-made background and sometimes with ready-made characters. If you're not a writer yourself, you have no idea how much mental agony and psychic wear-and-tear that saves.

Then, too, readers who have enjoyed a book often welcome a return of the same characters and background. As a result, the pressure for a sequel and even for a continuing series is likely to come, at least to begin with, from those readers rather than from the author or publisher.

Publishers naturally welcome any book in which the chance of success and profitability is high. They are always more eager to receive a manuscript from an established writer than from a newcomer because they can usually be sure that the former will be profitable, while the latter always represents a risk.

By similar reasoning publishers would prefer to have an established writer do another book of a popular series than venture in a new direction altogether. The series book is more nearly a sure thing, and publishers are almost as fond of a sure thing as you and I are…

However, are these series of novels written simply to force readers to buy the next book against his will? Of course not. If readers don't like a particular book, they are not likely to buy a sequel. If they like the first three books of a series and find the fourth disappointing, they are less likely to buy the fifth.

In short, a maintained popularity and profitability will tend to keep a series going indefinitely. Non-popularity or declining popularity will bring an end to the series quickly.

As a matter of fact, far from a series of books continuing just to lure reluctant readers into purchasing volumes that they don't really want to read, it is the reverse that is likely to be true. It is the writer, not the reader, who is likely to be victimized. After all, writing a long series of related books can grow awfully tiresome for a writer. He may have sucked the juice out of his characters and background and may long to go in other directions, thus stretching and resting his cramped and aching mind.

The writer therefore quits and goes about his business-and then a storm arises. Readers express loud disappointment and make demands for another book in the series. Publishers, becoming aware of this, and seeing no reason to allow profitability to go glimmering, then proceed to put pressure on the writer, who is often far less enthusiastic about his series than anyone else is-and, in the end, he must write. In that case, anyone who says to him, “You're turning out endless reams of this junk just to con the reader into buying your books,” is likely to get a punch in the mouth if the writer is of the violent persuasion, or a sad look if the writer is as gentle and lovable as I am.

I’m talking from personal experience. The first three books of the Foundation series are compilations of separate pieces written for Astounding Science Fiction between 1942 and 1950. They were written at editorial insistence, but, for a while, I was eager to comply.

I had had enough of them after eight years, however, and, in 1950, determined to write no more. I resisted all entreaties for additions to the Foundation series and ignored all threats for thirty-two years! And then, finally, Doubleday began snarling and foaming at the mouth so I agreed to write Foundation’s Edge and Foundation and Earth, the fourth and fifth books of the series.

So there you are, Ms. Bykowski. My Foundation series was written, at least in part, as a result of publisher’s (and readers’) pressures, but they also deal with a theme too large to be contained in one story or one novel, and each portion of the series, whether a short story or a novel, stands on its own.

But is this business of stories and novels in series an invention of science fiction? It certainly is not. It is not even a modern phenomenon. The same pressures that lead to sequelization today were operative in ancient times as well so that sequels and series must surely be as old as writing.

The Iliad had the Odyssey as its sequel, and other Greek writers capitalized on the unparalleled popularity of these two epics by writing other epics concerning events preceding, succeeding, and in between these two (none of which have survived).

The great Greek dramatists tended to write trilogies of plays. Aeschylus built a trilogy around Agamemnon, Sophocles built a trilogy about Oedipus, and so on.

Coming closer to home, Mark Twain wrote Tom Sawyer and when that proved successful, he wrote a sequel, Huckleberry Finn, and when that proved even more successful, he wrote a couple of other tales of Tom and Huck, and when those were not successful, he stopped.

Of course, a series need not concentrate on “continuing the plot.” It may consist of a series of independent stories, which, however, share a common background and a continuing character. An enormously successful series of this sort was A. Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. So compelling a character did Doyle create in Sherlock Holmes that the public could never get enough of him.

Doyle quickly began to grow tired of writing the stories and, indeed, began to hate Sherlock Holmes who had grown so large in public consciousness as to totally overshadow Doyle himself. In desperation, Doyle killed Sherlock Holmes-and was then forced to bring him back to life. Here is an extreme example of the victimization of an author (though it did make Doyle extremely wealthy). Other mystery novel series featuring a continuing detective (Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe, etc.) followed as a matter of course.

When I was young, series of independent stories featuring continuing characters were extremely common. There were the Nick Carter books, the Frank Merriwell books, and others, too. There were magazines which, in each issue, carried a novella featuring some character such as the Shadow, the Spider, Doc Savage, Secret Agent X, Operator S, and so on.

Naturally, science fiction was influenced by such things. During the 1930s and 1940s, Neil R. Jones wrote some twenty stories featuring Professor Jameson and a group of companion robots with human brains; Eando Binder wrote ten stories about another robot, Adam Link; Nelson Bond wrote ten stories about a lovable bumbler named Lancelot Biggs.

However, the first successful series of novels in science fiction were by E. E. Smith. Between 1928 and 1934, he turned out three Skylark novels, and between 1934 and 1947, he turned out five Lensman novels.

In the 1940s, Robert A. Heinlein produced something new in his Future History series. Here the plots seemed independent and were set at widely different times, but they all fit into a consistent historical development of the solar system, so that there were references in stories set later in time to events in stories set earlier in time.

I began another series of this sort with Foundation in 1942. I expanded the background to the galaxy as a whole and proceeded to trace the history methodically from story to story, without jumping about. Later, I tied in my Robot series and my Empire series so that my own future history series now consists of thirteen novels-with others to come, I suppose.

Other series of the Foundation type followed, the most successful being Frank Herbert’s Dune series.

In fantasy, the great success was J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, which inspired a host of imitations. The late JudyLynn del Rey, and her husband, Lester, with their marvelous ability to spot trends, encouraged the writing of novel series and put them out under their publishing imprint of “Del Rey books,” so that we now have a virtual inundation of book series.

The fashion may pass, but while it is here, it seems to be bringing us a considerable number of good things to enjoy.

Survivors

Martin H. Greenberg and I have co-edited a series of anthologies for Daw Books, which include the best stories of a given year. We began with the best of 1939 (a book that appeared in 1979), and proceeded year by year until in 1986, the fifteenth volume appeared with the best of 1953. In press (as I write this) is volume sixteen which deals with the best of 1954, and in preparation is volume seventeen which deals with the best of 1955.

For each of these books, Marty writes a general introduction outlining the events of the year, both in the real world of science fiction, and in the imaginary world of the great outside. We then each supply a headnote for each of the stories in the volume. Marty’s headnotes deal with the science fiction writer’s career, while I write on some subject or other that either the author or the story has inspired in my weird brain.

I read Marty’s headnotes with avidity for they always tell me more about the writer than I know, but not more than I want to know, of course.

One thing that I’ve noticed, with some curiosity, is that science fiction writers tend to have a ten-year lifespan, or, if anything, less.

That is, they will write science fiction, sometimes copiously, for ten years or less, and then they will dwindle off and fade to a halt. Sometimes, they don’t even dwindle, they simply stop dead. It leaves me wondering why.

One explanation, of course, is that they find other and more lucrative markets. John D. MacDonald wrote science fiction in his early years and then made the big time in mystery thrillers. John Jakes wrote science fiction in his early years and then made the big time in historical fiction.

Another explanation is that they die-even science fiction writers die. Back in the 1950s, Cyril Kornbluth and Henry Kuttner died while each was at the peak of his career, and more recently the same was true for Philip K. Dick and Frank Herbert.

But there are those who simply stop and end what seems a fruitful career without switching to other fields and while remaining vigorously alive. I can even think of names of fresh young writers who graced the pages of this magazine in its early issues whom we (or anyone else) don’t hear from much anymore.

Why is that? Do they run out of ideas? Do they simply get tired of writing? Does science fiction change into new channels with which they are out of sympathy?

I simply don’t know.

Perhaps this is something that is true of all forms of writing and not of science fiction alone. Perhaps it is true of all forms of creative endeavor. Perhaps “burnout” is a common phenomenon which ought to be studied more than it is-by psychologists, not by me.

But if burnout is common, then what about those cases in which burnout does not occur? It may be just as useful to study those who are burnout-immune, and who have been writing high-quality science fiction steadily, prolifically, and successfully for, say, forty years and more, and who show no signs of breaking under the strain.

Lately, I have noticed that such people are termed “dinosaurs” by some observers in the field. I suspect that the term is used pejoratively; that is, it is not used as a compliment. From the things they have to say about the writers they call dinosaurs, I gather that, like the real dinosaurs, these writers are considered to be ancient, clumsy, and outmoded.

The term, however, is particularly inappropriate because the characteristic that we most associate with the real dinosaurs is that they are extinct, while the characteristic most noticeable about the writing dinosaurs is that they are not extinct. As a matter of fact, I gather from the nature of the comments made about these dinosaurs that those who use the term are rather aggrieved at them for not being extinct and for hogging too much of the spotlight for far too much time.

Well, that’s their problem. For myself, I prefer to use the term “survivors,” which is neither pejorative nor complimentary, but merely factual.

What are the characteristics that would qualify a science fiction writer to be a survivor?

To begin with, since I talked about a successful and steady and prolific writing life of at least forty years, a survivor would have to be at least sixty years old, and alive, and working. Naturally, he would have had to have started at quite a young age and been swatting away at it steadily since then.

I can think, offhand, of nine writers who fulfill these qualifications, and here they are:

1) Jack Williamson. His first story was published in 1928, when he was twenty years old. He has been writing steadily for fifty-nine years, and he is now eighty years old. To me, he is the undoubted and wellbeloved dean of science fiction. His “The Legion of Space, “ which bounced me off the wall when I was a teenager, appeared fifty-three years ago.

2) Clifford D. Simak. His first story was published in 1931, when he was twenty-seven years old. He has been writing steadily for fifty-six years and he is now eighty-two years old. His “City” appeared forty-three years ago, and “Cosmic Engineers” forty-eight years ago.

3) L. Sprague de Camp. His first story was published in 1937, when he was thirty years old. He has been writing steadily for forty-nine years and is now seventy-nine years old. His “Lest Darkness Fall” which I read in preference to studying for an all-important test in physical chemistry (without ever regretting it) appeared forty-eight years ago.

4) Isaac Asimov. (You didn’t think I’d leave myself out through some perverted notion of modesty, did you?) My first story was published in March, 1939, when I was nineteen. I have been writing steadily for forty-eight years, and I am now sixty-seven years old. My story “Nightfall” appeared forty-six years ago.

5) Robert Heinlein. His first story was published in August, 1939, when he was thirty-two. He has been writing steadily for forty-eight years and he is now eighty years old. His “Blowups Happen “ appeared forty-seven years ago.

6) Fritz Leiber. His first story was published in August, 1939, when he was twenty-nine. He has been writing steadily for forty-eight years and he is now seventy-six years old. His “Conjure Wife” appeared forty-four years ago.

7) Frederik Pohl. It’s hard to say because so much of his early stuff appeared under pseudonyms of one sort or another, but an undoubted story of his appeared in 1941 when he was twenty-one. He has been writing steadily for forty-six years, and he is now sixty-seven years old. His “Gravy Planet” (“Space Merchants”) appeared thirty-five years ago.

8) Arthur C. Clarke. His first story appeared in 1946, when he was twenty-nine. He has been writing steadily for forty-one years, and he is now seventy years old. His “Rescue Party” appeared forty-one years ago.

9) Poul Anderson. His first story appeared in 1947, when he was twenty-one. He has been writing steadily for forty years, and is now sixty-one years old. His “The Helping Hand” appeared thirty-seven years ago.

I don’t pretend that this list is necessarily definitive. Offhand, I can think of three other possible survivors. Lester del Rey’s first story was published in 1938, while A. E. Van Vogt and Alfred Bester were each first published in 1939. In recent decades, however, they have not published much, so I can’t honestly deny burnout in their cases.

If we look at the list, we can come to some conclusions, I think. In the first place the survivors were all science fiction fans from a very early age, and gained a life-long fascination with the field. That must be so.

Secondly, each must be a nonsuffering writer. Lots of good writers, even great writes, don’t necessarily like to write, and must force themselves to do so. This doesn’t prevent them from writing well, you understand, but it does prevent them from writing a lot, and my qualification for being a survivor is that one writes steadily and prolifically.

Thirdly, each resists the notion of abandoning science fiction. It is not likely that survivors can write only SF and nothing else. To my knowledge, Simak, Pohl, and Anderson have written good nonfiction; Clarke and de Camp have written quite a bit of good nonfiction; and I have written a thundering lot of it. In addition, Pohl has written mainstream fiction (he has a new novel entitled Chernobyl that’s coming out-very unusual and not science fiction). De Camp has written excellent historical novels. As for me, I have written a great deal of mystery fiction. In every case, however, no matter how they stray, these survivors always return to science fiction.

There you are. “Dinosaurs”? I think not. I think the survivors (even I) are the great pillars of science fiction. I wonder how many more of them will appear in the future.

Nowhere!

In 1516, the english scholar Thomas More (1478-1535) published a book (in Latin), with a long title-as was the fashion in those days-that was also in Latin. When it finally appeared in its first English edition in 1551, the title was given as “ A fruteful and pleasant Worke of the beste State of a publyque

Weale, and of the newe yle, called Utopia.” We refer to the book simply as Utopia.

In the book, More described the workings of what he considered an ideal human society, as found on the island nation of Utopia, one that was governed entirely by the dictates of reason. His description of such a society is so noble and rational that it would seem enviable even today.

More was under no illusions as to the real world, however. The word “utopia” is from the Greek “ou” (“not”) and “topos” (“place”) so that it means “nowhere.” More realized, in other words, that his ideal existed nowhere on Earth (and still doesn’t). In fact, his book, in describing his ideal society, served also by clear contrast to excoriate the actual governments of his day, particularly that of his native England which, of course, he knew the best.

An easy mistake was made, however. Since Utopia, as described, was such a wonderful place, it could easily be imagined that the first syllable was from the Greek prefix “eu-” meaning “good” so that Utopia became not “nowhere” but the “good place.”

The word “utopia “ entered the English language, and the other European languages as well, as meaning an ideal society. The adjective “utopian “ refers to any scheme that has what seems a good end in view, but that is not practical, and cannot be carried through in any realistic sense.

We might speak of utopian literature-written accounts in which ideal societies are described, with More’s as the classic, but not the earliest, example. Plato’s Republic was a description, nineteen centuries earlier than Utopia, of an ideal state dependent upon reason. Earlier still, were accounts of ideal states in mythological or religious literature, in the form of past golden ages or of future messianic ones. The Garden of Eden is a well-known example of the former, and the eleventh chapter of Isaiah of the latter.

The production of utopian accounts has not fallen off since the time of More, either. The most influential recent examples have been Looking Backward, published in 1888 by Edward Bellamy (1850-1898), which described the United States of 2000 under an ideal Socialist government, and Walden Two, published in 1948 by B. F. Skinner (1904-), which described an ideal society based on Skinner’s own theories of social engineering.

All such utopias are not convincing, however. Unless one accepts the conventions of religion, it is difficult to believe in golden or messianic ages. Nor can one easily suppose that sweet reason will at any time dominate humanity.

In the course of the nineteenth century, however, something new entered the field of utopianism. The possibility arose that scientific and technological advance might impose a utopia from without, so to speak. In other words, while human beings remained as irrational and imperfect as ever, the advance of science might supply plenty of food, cure disease and mental ailments, track down and abort irrational impulses, and so on. A perfect technology would cancel out an imperfect humanity. The tendency to take this attitude and to paint the future in glowing technological colors reached the point where what we call science fiction is called, in Germany, “utopian stories.”

As a matter of fact, however, it isn’t at all likely that the average writer is going to try to write a truly utopian story. There’s no percentage in it. All you can do is describe such a society and explain, at great length, how good it is, and how well it works, and how it manages not to break down. There can’t be any drama in it, no problems, no risks, no threat of catastrophe, no pulling through by the merest squeak.

Clearly, if such things were possible, the utopia would be no utopia. It follows that utopian stories are, by their very nature, dreadfully dull. The one utopian novel I’ve actually managed to read was Looking Backward, and although it was a best-seller in its times and still has its enthusiasts, I tell you right now that if dullness could kill, reading it would be a death sentence.

So dull are utopian books that they fail to fulfill their function of pointing out the errors and faults of the societies that really exist. You can’t grow indignant over these faults if you fall asleep in the process.

There developed, therefore, the habit of attacking societies in a more direct fashion. Instead of describing the good opposite, one described the evil reality, but exaggerated it past bearing. Instead of a society in which everything was ideally good, one described a society in which everything was ideally bad.

The word coined for a totally bad society is “dystopia,” where the first syllable is from the Greek prefix “dys-” meaning “abnormal” or “defective.” Dystopia is the “bad place.” Thus, you can figure out what “dystopian literature” would be.

Dystopias are intrinsically more interesting than utopias. Milton’s description of his dystopian Hell in the first two books of Paradise Lost is far more interesting than his description of utopian Hell in the third book. And in The Lord of the Rings, not much can be told about the stay of the Fellowship in the utopian elfland of Lorien, but how the story intensifies and grows more interesting as we approach the dystopian Morder.

But can there be dystopias today with science and technology advancing as they do?

Certainly! You need only view science and technology as contributing to the evil (which is not difficult to do).

And yet pure dystopian tales are as dull and as unbearable as pure utopian ones. Consider the most famous pure dystopian tale of modern times, 1984 by George Orwell (1903-1950), published in 1948 (the same year in which Walden Two was published). I consider it an abominably poor book. It made a big hit (in my opinion) only because it rode the tidal wave of cold war sentiment in the United States.

The pure utopian tale can only hit the single note of “Isn’t it wonderful-wonderful-wonderful. “ The pure dystopian tale can only hit the single note of “Isn’t it awful-awful-awful.” And one cannot build a melody on the basis of a single note.

Well, then, what is a science fiction writer supposed to do if both utopian and dystopian stories are dull?

Remember, they are poor only if they are pure, so avoid the extremes. Milton’s Hell was made interesting because of his portrait of Satan, courageous even in the ultimate adversity, feeling pangs of remorse even when immersed in ultimate evil. Milton’s Heaven was without interest because there was no way of introducing danger in the face of an omnipotent, omniscient God. His dystopia was not pure, his utopia was.

The evil of Mordor was made bearable by the courage and humanity of Frodo and the story would have remained interesting and successful even if Frodo had failed in the end. It was his courage and humanity, not his victory, that really counted.

The essence of a story is the struggle of one thing against another: a living thing against the impersonal universe; a living thing against another living thing; one aspect of a living thing against another aspect of himself.

In each case, you have to make it possible for the reader to identify with at least one side of the struggle, so that his interest and sympathy is engaged. I say “at least” one side, because if you are skillful, you can cause him to identify with both sides and be emotionally torn.

The side or sides with whom you identify must carryon the struggle with courage, intelligence, and decency-or, at least, learn to do so. The story won’t be effective if you are ashamed of the side you make your own.

Both sides must have a fair chance to win. It is tempting to pile the odds up against your side, so as to make your hero’s ultimate victory the more unexpected, exciting, and triumphant, but in that case you must be sure that your side does end up victorious. You can’t make it David versus Goliath unless David wins, and as one becomes more and more experienced and sophisticated in reading, that may come to seem too obvious and even too unrealistic.

It seems to me, then, that the best one can do is to present one’s story as a struggle between sides which are both mixtures of good and evil (thus placing it somewhere between the extremes of utopia and dystopia), and don’t make the odds overwhelming in either direction. One can then proceed to make one’s point without being forced into a happy ending and under conditions of maximum excitement and reader uncertainty. The reader will not only be uncertain as to how his side will win, but if it will win, or even, perhaps, which is truly his side.

I don’t say this is easy, of course.

Outsiders, Insiders

I am a great booster of “the brotherhood of science fiction.” I wrote an editorial on the subject, with just that title, in the fifth issue of IAsfm (January-February, 1978). I delight in thinking of us ardent writers and readers of science fiction as a band of brothers (and sisters, of course) fond of each other, and supporting each other.

Unfortunately, there are aspects of such a situation that are not entirely delightful. Let’s consider these unfavorable aspects, because if the field of science fiction is to remain as ideal as we all want it to be, we have to see the dangers. We may not be able to defeat those dangers even if we see them, but we certainly can’t, if we don’t see them.

For instance, if we are truly a small and intimate band (as I remember us being in the Golden Age of Campbell, though perhaps that may only be the consequence of nostalgia) then there is a danger that we might close our ranks, unfairly and petty-mindedly, against outsiders.

I remember, for instance, when Michael Crichton wrote The Andromeda Strain and it hit the best- seller lists. In those days, it had not yet become common for science fiction and fantasy to be actual best-sellers, and here was an “outsider” who had accomplished it. What made him an outsider? Well, he hadn’t sold to the magazines. He didn’t show up at conventions. He wasn’t one of us.

There followed reviews in various science fiction prozines and fanzines and it seemed to me, at the time, that they were uniformly unfavorable. I can’t judge how justified those reviews might have been for I never read the book (perhaps because I, too, felt he was an outsider) but there did appear, in my opinion, an extra helping of venom beyond what I usually notice in unfavorable reviews.

Was that fair? No, it wasn’t. Crichton, a person of great talent, went on to be very successful, both in his later books (some of them not science fiction) and in movies as well. Our objections to him did not hurt him and he doesn’t need us. In retrospect, we might conclude that some of us were petty.

Nor am I trying to preach from some high moral position, implying that I am myself above such things. Not at all.

I went through a period soon after World War II, in which I reacted badly (though entirely within myself), and I look back on that period in shame.

When one is part of a small and comparatively insignificant clique, warming one’s self in its closeness and camaraderie, what happens if one of the clique suddenly rises and becomes famous in the wild world outside?

Thus, in the 1940s, Robert Heinlein was quickly accepted as the best science fiction writer of us all (and in the opinion of many, he still is the grand master) and I accepted that, too. I was not envious, for I was just a beginner and I knew that many writers were better than I was. Besides, I liked Bob’s writing a great deal. And most of all, he was one of us, writing for the same magazines, going to the same conventions, corresponding with us, first-naming me and expecting me to first-name him, and so on.

But then, soon after World War 11, Bob Heinlein was involved with a motion picture, Destination: Moon. It wasn’t a very good motion picture; it didn’t make the hit that the later 2001: A Space Odyssey or Star Wars did. But it was the first motion picture involving one of us, and while I said not a word, I was secretly unhappy. Bob had left our group and become famous in the land of the infidels.

To make it worse, he had published “The Green Hills of Earth “ in The Saturday Evening Post and it had created a stir. It was a real science fiction story and it was in the slicks; not only in the slicks, but in the greatest and slickest slick of them all. We all dreamed of publishing in the SEP (I, also) but that was like dreaming of taking out Marilyn Monroe on a date. You knew it was just a dream and you had no intention of

even trying to make it come true. And now Bob had done it. He hadn’t just tried, he had done it.

So I argued it out with myself-not because I am a noble person but because I hated feeling the way I did, and I wanted to feel better. I said to myself that Bob had blazed new trails, and that it didn’t matter who did it, as long as it was done. Those new trails had been opened not for Robert Heinlein, but for science fiction, and all of us who were in the business of writing or reading science fiction could be grateful and thankful for we would sooner or later experience the benefit of Bob’s pioneering.

And that was true. Because Bob made science fiction look good to people who did not ordinarily read science fiction, and who despised it when they thought of it at all, it became more possible for the rest of us to have our stuff published outside the genre magazines-even in the SEP. (I had a two-part serial published in that magazine myself eventually, but that was when it was long past its great days.)

The result of my working this out meant I was free of sickness on later occasions. When my first book, Pebble in the Sky, appeared under the Doubleday imprint, it was followed in a matter of months by The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. I don’t have to tell you that Ray’s book far outshone mine. It didn’t bother me, for it seemed to me that the better Ray’s book did, the more people would read science fiction in book form, and some of them would be sure to look for more of the same and stumble over mine.

And they did. Pebble is still earning money, thirty-six years later.

And however annoying it might be that Michael Crichton could enter our field straight out of medical school, move right up to the novel level, and land on the best-seller list, and have everyone drooling over him, where’s the harm? He did it (unintentionally, perhaps) for us. He added to the respectability of science fiction among those who found us unrespectable, and made it easier for the rest of us to get on the best-seller list occasionally.

Far from snarling, we should have been cheering.

Another point. A band of brothers (and sisters) is at its best when there is nothing much to compete for. As long as we were all getting no more than one and two cents a word (as we did in that wonderful Golden Age of Campbell) with no chance at book publication, foreign sales and movies; as long as the only kudos we could get was first place in the “ Analytical Laboratory” which meant a half-cent-a-word bonus; as long as no one outside our small field had ever heard of any of us under any circumstances--what was there to compete over? The most successful of us were almost as permanently impecunious as the least so there was no reason to snarl and bite.

Now, however, times have changed. There are many more of us, and some of us write best-sellers.

In fact, the greatest best-seller of the 1980s, Stephen King, is, after a fashion, one of us. It’s no longer a few thousand bucks that’s at stake; it’s a few million. And that brother bit fades, bends, and crumples under the strain.

I don’t write reviews, but I do read them, and I’m beginning to see the venom again as one writer discusses the work of another member of the brotherhood. What’s more, the annual award of the Nebulas, which are determined by vote among the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America, seems to rouse hard feeling and contentiousness every year. The stakes are simply too high.

Thus, a young member of the brotherhood (to me he seemed a child) complained to me the other day that the “young writers” (young to him) were ferocious in their competitiveness. There was none of the friendliness, he said, that there was in our day (meaning his and mine, though I was a published writer when he was born).

I suppose he’s right, though.

In a way, I can’t ache to return to the good old days when we were all impoverished together. It seems a glamorous time in my mind now, but I remember Sophie Tucker’s immortal dictum: “I’ve tried poor, and I’ve tried rich, and rich is better.”

But is there a price we must pay for it? Must the camaraderie be gone? Must the friendly back-and-forth be over?

Why not remember that science fiction is still a relatively specialized field; that SF writers have to know a great deal more, and develop more unusual skill, than ordinary writers; that SF readers, too, demand more because they need more? Can we remember that we’re all in this together? That those in front pave the way for those behind? That at any time someone can appear from the strange land of outside, or the stranger land of youth, and carve out new territory for all of us, and that they should be welcomed gladly?

Let’s be friends. There are endless worlds of the mind and emotions to conquer, and we can advance more surely, if we support-not fight-each other.

Science Fiction Anthologies

I hear it said now and then that the short story is a lost literary art form, that the magazines and various outlets that fostered the short story are dead and gone, that fiction today concentrates on the novel.

That would be too bad if it were true; but, of course, it isn’t entirely true. In the field of science fiction, at least, the short story absolutely flourishes and the readers simply can’t get enough of it. Indeed, any good science fiction story can count on periodic resurrection in the form of items in single-author collections and in multi-author anthologies. Some of my stories have been anthologized up to thirty times, and I by no means hold the record for such things. I suspect that both Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison (to name but two) can cite stories of their own that have seen far more repetitions than any of mine have.

And there you have something that is oddly characteristic of science fiction-the vast number and varying nature of anthologies in the field. I have the impression that there is no precedent in literature for this.

Why is it so? Why should science fiction, rather than some other subsection of popular literature, spawn an unending series of anthologies of enormous variety?

I suspect that, in part at least, what is responsible is the unusual fervor of the devoted science fiction reader. Particular stories strike such a reader with the force of a sledgehammer. Combine this with the fact that magazine science fiction tends to be ephemeral. Few young readers save the magazines for long. Even if they start a collection, after a few years there comes college or marriage or other interests generally; and the collection falls apart, drifts away, vanishes.

Yet the memory of those particularly good stories lingers, and a glow of glory builds about them. I have long lost count of the number of letters I have received from readers who tell me that once, when the world was young, they read a story about thus-and-so. They can’t remember the title, the author, where it appeared or anything more than thus-and-so; but could I tell them what the story was and how they could go about finding it again?

Sometimes I remember the story from the small clues they present and can give them the missing information. More often I cannot.

You see, then, that anthologies offer a second chance. They sometimes bring back for readers stories once loved and then lost. Once I deliberately devised an anthology (Before the Golden Age, Doubleday, 1974) in order to present some stories that I myself had loved and lost.

Sometimes such stories are better not found, for they don’t, in actual fact, bear the prismatic colors that fond memory lends them; but sometimes they do. When I reread “Tumithak of the Corridors” during the preparation of my 1974 anthology, I found it to be a time machine that restored me to my teenage years for an hour or two.

The first anthology of magazine science fiction appeared in 1943. It was The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, edited by Donald A. Wollheim. Among the stories it contained was Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “ A Martian Odyssey,” which I had never read, having missed the issue in which it first appeared. I was able to enjoy it for the first time when I bought the anthology. And there is another service such books offer. They allow you to recover stories you never knew you had lost.

In 1946, there appeared the first hardcover anthology of magazine science fiction, The Best of Science Fiction, edited by Groff Conklin. It was an anthology of almost painfully intense interest to me for it was the first to contain a story of mine-”Blind Alley.” That was never one of my own favorites; in fact, I considered it then, and now, too, as rather second-rate. Still, I discovered eventually that Groff’s opinions of quality could usually be relied on, so perhaps I underestimate “Blind Alley.”

In any case, Astounding, the magazine in which “Blind Alley” had originally appeared, retained all rights in those days; but John Campbell insisted that anthology income go to the authors involved. It was in this way that I made the great discovery that the same story could be paid for twice and, therefore, by extension, any number of times. (It is only that which makes it possible for a science fiction writer to earn a living, so this was by no means a non-significant discovery.)

Later in that same year, the most successful science fiction anthology ever to appear was published. It was Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas. It was a large, thick volume, with stories drawn almost entirely from the Golden Age of Astounding, and it contained my story “Nightfall. “ That was my introduction to the strange notion that one of my own stories was already considered a classic.

The success of the Healy-McComas anthology opened the floodgates. I haven’t the faintest idea how many anthologies have been published since, but I am quite certain that there isn’t an issue of any science fiction magazine that hasn’t been carefully picked over to see if any gems have remained undiscovered-nor any gem or even semi-gem that hasn’t been discovered and rediscovered and rediscovered.

Lately, I myself have joined the parade. I’m not entirely a novice at the anthologists’ game, for I edited The Hugo Winners (Doubleday, 1962) along with successor volumes in 1971 and 1977, all of which were quite successful.

However, I never let myself get too involved in such matters because every anthology entails a great deal of tedious scutwork-selection, obtaining of permissions, the making out of payments and so on. The result was that through 1978, I edited only nine anthologies, which is very few for a person of my own wholesale proclivities who considers nothing worth doing that isn’t worth doing a lot.

With my ninth anthology, however, One Hundred Great Science Fiction Short-Short Stories (Doubleday, 1978), I made the marvelous discovery that my friend, Martin Harry Greenberg-tall, a little plump, intelligent, conscientious, hard-working, and good-humored-found a peculiar perverted pleasure in doing all those things, like getting permissions and taking care of payments, that I hated to do.

Then the two of us discovered Charles G. Waugh, also tall, hard-working, intelligent, and conscientious, but less plump and much more grave than either Martin or I. It turned out, he knew every science fiction story ever published, remembered all the statistics and plots, and could put his hand on any of them instantly. Ask him for a story about extraterrestrials from Uranus who reproduce by binary fission and I imagine he would have three different sets of xeroxes in your hand the next day.

That changed everything. In 1979 and 1980, I helped edit no less than twelve anthologies and, at the moment of writing, there are six in press and more in preparation. (Not all are with Martin and Charles: a couple are with Alice Laurance, who has an attribute that the first two lack to an enormous degree- beauty; and one is with J. O. Jeppson, to whom I am closely related by marriage.)

Very often these recent anthologies have had my name blown out of proportion on the covers for crass commercial reasons, and over my protests, since I contribute no more than my fair share.

On the other hand I contribute no less than my fair share either, and it chafes a little when someone takes it for granted that I am merely collecting money for the use of my name. I would overlook the slur on my integrity involved in this, since all great men suffer calumny; but I hate to lose credit for all the work I do.

Charles, Martin, and I constantly consult each other by mail and phone; and we each dabble in every part of the work; but there is division of labor, too. Charles works particularly hard at locating stories and making photocopies. Martin works particularly hard at the business details.

And as for me-Well, all the stories descend on me; and I read them all and do the final judging (what I throw out is thrown out). I then write the introduction or the headnotes or (usually) both. And since I’m the one who lives in New York, I tend to do the trotting round to various publishers when that is necessary.

The net result is that each of the three of us does what he best likes to do so that preparing the anthologies becomes fun for all of us. To be sure, I labor under the steady anxiety that something might happen to Martin or Charles; but, under my shrewd questioning, both Sally Greenberg and Carol-Lynn Waugh have made it clear that each entirely understands the importance of keeping her husband functioning; and I rely on them with all confidence.

The Influence Of Science Fiction

I suppose it's only natural that those of us who are devotees of science fiction would like to find in it something more than a matter of idle amusement. It ought to have important significance.

On many occasions in the past I have advanced arguments for supposing such significance to exist. Here is how it goes:

The human way of life has always been subject to drastic and more or less irreversible change, usually (or, as I believe, always) mediated by some advance in science and/or technology. Thus, life is forever changed with the invention of fire-or the wheel-or agriculture-or metallurgy-or printing.

The rate of change has been continually increasing, too; for as these changes are introduced, they tend to increase the security of the human species and therefore increase its number, thus in turn increasing the number of those capable of conceiving, introducing, and developing additional advances in science and technology. Besides that, each advance serves as a base for further advance so that the effect is cumulative.

During the last two centuries, the rate of change has become so great as to be visible in the course of the individual lifetime. This has put a strain on the capacity of individuals, and societies, too, to adapt to such change, since the natural feeling always is that there should be no change. One is used to things as they are.

During the last thirty years, the rate of change has become so great as to induce a kind of social vertigo. There seems no way in which we can plan any longer, for plans become outdated as fast as they are implemented. By the time we recognize a problem, action must be taken at once; and by the time we take action, however quickly, it is too late; the problem has changed its nature and gotten away from us.

What makes it worse is that, in the course of scientific and technological advance we have reached the stage where we dispose of enough power to destroy civilization (if it is misused), or to advance it to unheard-of heights (if we use it correctly).

With stakes so high and the situation so vertiginous, what can we do?

We must learn to anticipate fairly correctly and, in making our plans, take into account not what now exists, but what is likely to exist five years hence-or ten-or twenty-whenever the solution is likely to come into effect.

But how can one take change into account correctly, when the vast mass of the population stolidly refuses to take into account the existence of any change at all? (Thus, most Americans, far from planning now for 1990, have shown by their recent actions that what they want is to see 1955 restored.)

That is where science fiction comes in. Science fiction is the one branch of literature that accepts the fact of change, the inevitability of change. Without the initial assumption that there will be change, there is no such thing as science fiction, for nothing is science fiction unless it includes events played out against a social or physical background significantly different from our own. Science fiction is at its best if the events described could not be played out at all except in a social or physical background significantly different from our own.

That doesn’t mean that a science fiction story should be predictive, or that it should portray something that is going to happen, before it can be important. It doesn’t even have to portray something that might conceivably happen.

The existence of change, the acceptance of change, is enough. People who read science fiction come, in time, to know that things will be different. Maybe better, maybe worse, but different. Maybe this way, maybe that way, but different.

If enough people read science fiction or are, at least, sufficiently influenced by people who read science fiction, enough of the population may come to accept change (even if only with resignation and grief) so that government leaders can plan for change in the hope of meeting something other than stolid resistance from the public. And then, who knows, civilization might survive.

And yet this is highly tenuous; and while I accept the line of reasoning thoroughly (having, as far as I know, made it up), I can see that others might dismiss it as special pleading by someone who doesn’t want the stuff he writes to be dismissed as just… stuff.

Well, then, has science fiction already influenced the world? Has anything that science fiction writers have written so influenced real scientists, or engineers, or politicians, or industrialists as to introduce important changes?

What about the case of space flight, of trips to the Moon?

This has been a staple of imaginative literature since Roman times; and both Jules Verne and H.G. Wells wrote highly popular stories about trips to the Moon in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Certainly, those scientists and engineers who began to deal with rocketry realistically had read science fiction; and there is no question that men such as Robert Goddard and Werner von Braun had been exposed to such things.

This is not to say that science fiction taught them any rocketry. As a matter of fact, Wells used an anti-gravity device to get to the Moon, and Verne used a gigantic gun, and both of these devices can be dismissed out of hand as ways of reaching the Moon.

Nevertheless, they stirred the imagination, as did all the other science fiction writers who flooded into the field as the twentieth century wore on, and who began to write material in large masses (if not always in high quality). All of this prepared the minds of more and more people for the notion of such trips.

It followed that when rockets were developed as war weapons during World War II, there were not lacking engineers who saw them as devices for scientific exploration, for orbital flights, for trips to the Moon and beyond. And all this would not be laughed out of court by the general public, all the way down to the rock-bottom of the average Congressman-because science fiction had paved the way.

Even this may not seem enough-too general-too broad.

How about specific influence? How about something a specific writer has done that has influenced a specific person in such a way that the world has been changed?

That has been done, too. Consider the Hungarian physicist, Leo Szilard, who-in the middle 1930s-began thinking of the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction that might produce a nuclear bomb, who recognized that his thought had become a very real possibility when uranium fission was discovered in 1939, who moved heaven and earth to persuade Allied scientists to censor themselves voluntarily in order to keep information from reaching the Nazi enemy, who persuaded Einstein to persuade President Roosevelt to initiate a vast project for developing a nuclear bomb.

We know how that changed the world (whether for better or for worse is beside the point right now, but I certainly would not have wanted Hider to have gotten the first nuclear bomb in the early 1940s), so we can say that Leo Szilard changed it.

And how did Szilard come to have his original idea? According to Szilard himself, that idea came to him because he read a story by H. G. Wells (originally published in 1902) in which an “atomic bomb”- the phrase H. G. Wells himself used-had been featured.

Here’s another case. At the present moment, industrial robots are appearing on the assembly line with increasing frequency. In Japan, whole factories are being roboticized. What’s more, the robots themselves are being made more versatile, more capable, and more “intelligent” very rapidly. It isn’t far- fetched to say that in a couple of decades this roboticization will be seen to have changed the face of society permanently (assuming that civilization continues to survive).

Is there anyone we can credit for this? It is difficult to place that credit on a single pair of shoulders, but perhaps the pair most likely to deserve it belongs to a man named Joseph F. Engelberger, who is the president of Unimation, which manufactures one-third of all the robots in use and has installed more of them than anybody else.

Engelberger founded his company in the late 1950s, and how do you suppose he came to found it?

Some years before, according to his own account, when he was still a college undergraduate, he became enthusiastic about the possibility of robots when he read I, Robot by Isaac Asimov.

I assure you that when I was writing my positronic robot stories back in the 1940s, my intentions were clear and simple. I just wanted to write some stories, sell them to a magazine, make a little money to pay my college tuition, and see my name in print. If I had been writing anything but science fiction, that’s all that would have happened.

But I was writing science fiction-so I’m now changing the world.

Women And Science Fiction

My early science fiction stories had no women in them for the most part. There were two reasons for this, one social, one personal. The social reason first.

Prior to public recognition in the United States that babies are not brought by the stork, there was simply no sex in the science fiction magazines. This was not a matter of taste, it was a matter of custom that had the force of law. In most places, non-recognition of the existence of sex was treated as though it was the law, and for all I know, maybe it was indeed local law. In any case, words or actions that could bring a blush to the leathery cheek of the local censor were strictly out.

But if there’s no sex, what do you do with female characters? They can’t have passions and feelings. They can’t participate on equal terms with male characters because that would introduce too many complications where some sort of sex might creep in. The best thing to do was to keep them around in the background, allowing them to scream in terror, to be caught and then rescued, and, at the end, to smile prettily at the hero. (It can be done safely then because THE END is the universal rescue.)

Yet it must be admitted that science fiction magazines showed no guts whatsoever in fighting this situation. That brings us to the personal reason. In the 1930s and 1940s, the readership of the science fiction magazines was heavily (almost exclusively, in fact) masculine. What’s more it was young-and-intellectual masculine. The stereotypical science fiction reader was a skinny kid with glasses and acne, introverted and scapegoated by the tough kids who surrounded him and were rightly suspicious of anyone who knew how t o read.

It stands to reason these youngsters knew nothing about girls. By and large, I imagine they didn’t dare approach them, and if they did, were rejected by them scornfully, and if they weren’t, didn’t know what to do next. So why on Earth should they want this strange sub-species in the stories they read? They had not yet gotten out of the “I hate (translation: “I’m scared of”) girls” stage.

This is an exaggeration, perhaps, and no doubt there were a number of tough young men and girl- chasing young men who read science fiction, but by and large, I suspect it was the stereotypical “skinny intellectual” who wrote letters to the magazines and denounced any intrusion of femininity. I know. I wrote such letters myself. And in the days when I was reading and rating every science fiction story written, I routinely deducted many points for any intrusion of romance, however sanitized it might be.

At the time I wrote and sold my first few stories, I had not yet had a date with a young woman. I knew nothing about them except what I could guess by surreptitious glances from a distance. Naturally, there were no women in my stories.

(I once received a letter from a woman who denounced me for this lack. Humbly, I wrote back to explain the reason, stating that I was, very literally, an innocent as far as women were concerned at the beginning of my writing career. She had a good answer for that, too. She wrote back in letters of flame, “That’s no excuse!”)

But times change!

For one thing, society changed. The breath of liberty brought on by all the talk about it during World War II weakened the censor, who retreated, muttering sourly under his breath. The coming of the pill heralded the liberation of women from unwanted pregnancy, and marked the weakening of the double standard.

For another, people will grow up. Even I didn’t remain innocent. I actually went out on a date on my twentieth birthday. I met a particular woman two years later, fell in love at first sight, and all trace of fear suddenly left me. I was married five months later and you’d be surprised how I changed! I have in my proud possession a plaque handed me by a science fiction convention. On the brass plate is inscribed that quality of mine that had earned me the plaque. It reads “Lovable Lecher.”

And yet science fiction lagged a bit, I think. Old habits didn’t change easily. My own stories, for instance, remained free of sex except where it was an integral part of the development and then only to that extent, and still so remain. I have gotten rid of my fear (witness my five volumes of naughty limericks), but not of my sense of decorum.

What, then, really brought on the change and brought science fiction more nearly into the mainstream of contemporary literature?

In my opinion, it was not chiefly social evolution; it was not the daring new writers; not the Russes and LeGuins.

It was the coming of women into the science fiction readership!

If science fiction readers had remained almost entirely masculine-even had the acne cleared up and the youth withered-I think science fiction would have remained male chauvinist in the crudest possible way.

Nowadays, I honestly think that at least a third, and possibly nearly half the science fiction readers are women. When that is so, and when it is recognized that women are at least as articulate as men and (these days) quite ready to denounce male chauvinism and to demand treatment as human beings, it becomes impossible to continue villainy.

Even I have to bow to the breath of decency. In my new novel, Foundation’s Edge, of my seven central characters, four are women-all different, all perfectly able to take care of themselves, and all formidable. (For that matter, I introduced Susan Calvin in 1940, and she strode through a man’s world, asking no quarter, and certainly giving none. I just thought I’d mention that.)

And what brought in the women readers? I suppose there are a large number of reasons, but I have one that I favor. It’s Mr. Spock’s ears.

There is no question in my mind that the first example of decent science fiction that gained a mass following was the television show Star Trek, nearly twenty years ago. For a wonder, it attracted as many women as men. I don’t suppose there is room to doubt that what chiefly served to attract those women was the unflappable Mr. Spock. And for some reason I won’t pretend to guess at, they were intrigued by his ears.

Very few of the “Trekkies” leaked over into print science fiction (or all the magazines would have grown rich), but a minor percentage did and that was enough to feminize the readership of the science fiction magazines. And I think that was all to the good, too.

With so many women thumbing the magazines, women writers were naturally more welcome and their viewpoints greeted with greater reader sympathy-and women editors made more sense, too.

Don’t get me wrong. There were women writers even in the early days of magazine science fiction, and women editors, too. When I was young, some of my favorite stories were by A. R. Long and by Leslie F. Stone. I didn’t know they were women, but they were. In addition, Mary Gnaedinger, Bea Mahaffey, and Cele Goldsmith were excellent editors. I never met Ms. Gnaedinger, but I did meet Bea and Cele and I hereby testify that in addition to lots of brains, character, and personality, they each happened to be beautiful. (Irrelevant, I know, but I thought I would mention it.)

Consequently, when George Scithers left us, I found it delightful that Kathleen Moloney agreed to be the new editor. It never occurred to me for an instant that a woman couldn’t handle the job just because she was a woman and, as a matter of fact, Kathleen took to it with a kind of rabid delight. She introduced interesting changes and stamped her personality on the magazine.

But then, there came along the all-too-frequent villain in such cases, the offer-one-can’t-refuse. It may have been Kathleen’s performance here that aroused interest in other publishing houses and-well, one can’t turn down a chance to advance in one’s chosen profession, so we lost Kathleen.

And yet all is not lost, either. I have on numerous occasions mentioned the charming Shawna McCarthy, who is as sharp as a scalpel, and who is universally liked for the excellent reason that she is universally likable. I like her.

Shawna served faithfully as right-hand person first to George, and then to Kathleen. In the process, she learned every facet of the editing business and developed (thank goodness) the ambition to hold the top position.

So when Kathleen left, I said, “It has to be Shawna “ and everyone agreed with me, especially Shawna.

And here she is. Readers-female and male-I give you Shawna!

Religion And Science Fiction

In the November, 1983 issue of Asimov’s, the cover story was “The Gospel According to Gamaliel Crucis “ by that excellent writer, Michael Bishop. It dealt with a sensitive subject-the coming of a savior, or, in effect, the second coming of Christ.

What makes it even more effective as a science fiction story is that the savior is an extraterrestrial, and not a particularly attractive one to our human eyes since she (!) is a giant mantis. This is entirely legitimate, it seems to me, since if there is other life in the universe, especially intelligent life, one would expect that a truly universal God would be as concerned for them as for us, and would totally disregard physical shape since it is only the “soul,” that inner intellectual and moral identity, that counts.

What is more, Bishop decided to make the story more powerful by casting it into a biblical shape, dividing it into chapters and verses and making use of a touch of suitable biblical wording.

The result was a tour de force which we obviously considered quite successful, or we would not have published it. Still we were prepared for the fact that some readers might feel uneasy with, or even offended by, the subject matter and/or style.

One letter was quite angry, indeed. The writer was “strongly displeased” and considered it “a burlesque of the scriptures” and, finding no other value to the story, considered it to have been written and published only for the sake of the burlesque.

This can be argued with, of course, but never entirely settled. If a reader sees in it only burlesque, he or she can scarcely be argued out of it. There will always be differences of opinion, often based upon emotion rather than reason, with regard to the value of any work of art.

But there is something more general here. There is the matter of how science fiction ought to deal with religion, especially our religion. (Few people worry very much about how some other religion is handled, since only our own is the true one.)

No one wants to offend people unnecessarily, and religion is a touchy subject, as we all know. In that case, might it not be best simply to avoid religious angles altogether in writing science fiction? As our angry correspondent says, “I suggest…that offending any substantial religious group is not the way to win friends or sell magazines.”

Yes, we know that, and since we do want to win friends and sell magazines, we would not knowingly go out of our way to embarrass and humiliate even non-substantial groups of our readers just for the fun of it.

But we are also editing a serious science fiction magazine that, we earnestly hope, includes stories of literary value, and it is the very essence of literature that it consider the great ideas and concerns of human history. Surely that complex of ideas that goes under the head of “religion” is one of the most central and essential, and it would be rather a shame to have it declared out of bounds. In fact, for a magazine to self-censor itself out of discussing religion would be to bow to those forces that don’t really believe in our constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and press. If we were to do so, we would be, in a very deep sense, un-American.

Besides, if we were to try to avoid this very touchy subject where do we stop? I tend to ignore religion in my own stories altogether, except when I absolutely have to have it. Well, I absolutely had to have it in some of my early Foundation stories and in “Nightfall,” and so I made use of it. And, whenever I bring in a religious motif, that religion is bound to seem vaguely Christian because that is the only religion

I know anything about, even though it is not mine. An unsympathetic reader might think I am “burlesquing” Christianity, but I am not.

Then, too, it is impossible to write science fiction and really ignore religion. What if we find intelligent beings on other worlds. Do they have a religion? Is our God universal, and is he/she/it their God as well? What do we do about it? What do they do about it?

This point is almost never taken up but, since it would certainly arise if such beings were discovered in actual fact, science fiction loses touch with reality in taking the easy way out and pretending religion doesn’t exist.

Or, consider time-travel. I don’t know how many stories have been written about people going back in time to keep Lincoln from being assassinated, but how about people going back in time to keep Jesus from being crucified? Surely that greater feat would occur to someone in actual fact, if time-travel were possible.

Think of the changes that could be rung on such a theme. If Jesus were rescued while on his way to the site of crucifixion, and if the rescue were made by modern technology-a helicopter or something more advanced, while the Roman soldiers were held off by rifle-fire at the very least-would it not seem to the people of the time that supernatural forces were rescuing Jesus? Would it not seem that angels were coming to the aid of a true savior? Would it not establish Christianity as the true religion at once?

Or would it? Clearly, it was God’s divine purpose (assuming the God of the Bible exists) to have the crucifixion take place in order that Jesus serve as a divine atonement for Adam’s sin. Would the subversion of this plan be allowed to take place?

It’s a nice dilemma, and it is within the province of legitimate science fiction. Yet who has ever considered writing such a story, even though it would give us a chance to deal with what many consider the central event of history? The story would be an extremely difficult one to write, and I wouldn’t feel up to it myself, but I think it is primarily self-censorship that keeps it from being written.

For that matter, what if we went back in time and found that the biblical Jesus never existed?

The mere existence of time-travel makes all these speculations irresistible, so is it possible that very religious people might object to time-travel themes, and call them blasphemous, simply because of the possibilities they give rise to?

The correspondent says in his letter, “Dr. Asimov, I know that you are an atheist-” and there may be the implication that because of this I am insensitive to the feelings of religionists, or perhaps even anxious to make them seem ridiculous.

As a matter of fact, I have frequently, in my writings, made it clear that I have never encountered any convincing evidence of the existence of the biblical God, and that I am incapable of accepting that existence on faith alone. That makes me an atheist, but, although this may surprise some Americans, the Constitution safeguards my right to be one and to proclaim myself one.

Nevertheless, although I am an atheist, I am not a proselytizing one; I am not a missionary; I do not treat atheism as a kind of true faith that I must force on everyone. After all, I have published more than almost anyone, about 20,000,000 words so far, and I have frequently discussed controversial problems.

You are free to go through my writings and search for any sign that I ridicule religion as such. I have opposed those people who attack legitimate scientific findings (evolution, as an example) in the name of religion, and who do so without evidence, or (worse yet) with distorted and false evidence. I don’t consider them true religionists, however, and I am careful to point out that they disgrace religion, and are a greater danger to honest religion than to science.

And suppose I weren’t an atheist. My parents were Jewish and I might have been brought up an Orthodox Jew, or become one of my own volition. Might it then be argued that I would naturally favor any story burlesquing Christianity?

Or suppose I were a Methodist; would I therefore look for stories that burlesqued Judaism, or

Catholicism-or atheism?

If I were in the mood to run this magazine in such a way as to offend “any substantial religious group” I wouldn’t have to be an atheist. I could do it if I were anything at all, provided only that I were a bigot, or an idiot, or both.

In actual fact, I am neither and again, I offer my collected writings as evidence. As for Shawna, she doesn’t have a similar body of written works to cite but, if I may serve as character witness, I can tell you right now she is certainly not a bigot, and a hundred times certainly not an idiot.

Needless to say, I am sorry that our correspondent was upset by “The Gospel According to Gamaliel Crucis.” If we lived in an ideal world, we would never publish any story that upset anyone. In this case, though, we had to choose. On the one hand, we had a remarkable story that considered, quite fearlessly, an important idea, and we felt that most readers would recognize this point-if not at once then upon mature consideration. On the other hand, we had a story that might offend some of our readers.

We made the choice. We put quality and importance ahead of the chance of some offence. We hope that our angry correspondent will consider the matter again and see that the story is far more than a burlesque. He might even give Bishop points for skill and courage.

Time-Travel

I have often said, in speaking and in writing, that the qualified science fiction writer avoids the scientifically impossible. Yet I can’t bring myself to make that rule an absolute one, because there are some plot devices that offer such dramatic possibilities that we are forced to overlook the utter implausibilities that are involved. The most glaring example of this is time-travel.

There are infinite tortuosities one can bring to plot development if only you allow your characters to move along the time axis, and I, for one, can’t resist them, so that I have written a number of time-travel stories, including one novel, The End of Eternity.

You can get away with a kind of diluted time-travel story, if you have your character move in the direction we all move-from present to future-and suspend the usual consciousness that accompanies the move by having him (please understand that, for conciseness I am using “him” as a shorthand symbol for “him or her”) sleep away a long period of time, as Rip van Winkle did, or, better, having him frozen for an indefinite period at liquid nitrogen temperatures. Better still, you might make use of relativistic notions and have your character move into the future by having his subjective time slowed through motion at speeds close to that of light, or motion through an enormously intense gravitational field.

These are plausible devices that do not do damage to the structure of the Universe, but they are one-way motions, with no return possible. I did it in Pebble in the Sky although I made use of an unknown (and unspecified) natural law involving nuclear fission, which was then quite new. This was a weakness in the plot, but I got past it in the first couple of pages and never brought it up again so I hoped no one would notice it. (Alas, many did.)

The same device can be used to make repeated jumps, always into the future, or to bring someone from the past into the present.

Once you have a device that sends someone into the future, however, it is asking too much of writer-nature not to use some device-such as a blow on the head-to send a person into the past. (Mark Twain does it in “ A Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur’s Court.”) For that, there is some scientific justification at the subatomic level, where individual particles are involved and entropy considerations are absent. For ordinary objects, where entropy is involved, there is none.

But all one-shot changes in either direction are only devices to start the story, which then usually proceeds in a completely timebound fashion. That’s not the true, or pure, time-travel story. In true time- travel, the characters can move, at will, back and forth in time. Nor is it fair if this is done through supernatural intervention as in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. It must be done by an artificial device under the control of a human being.

The first true time-travel story was H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, published in 1895. Wells, who was probably the best science fiction writer of all time [If others, since, seem to have reached greater heights, it is only because they stand on Well’s shoulders.], carefully explained the rationale behind it. It requires four dimensions to locate an object: it is somewhere on the north-south axis, somewhere on the east-west axis, somewhere on the up-down axis, and somewhere on the past-future axis. It exists not only in a certain point of three-dimensional space but at a certain instant of time. A merely three-dimensional object is as much a mathematical abstraction as is a two-dimensional plane, or a one-dimensional line, or a zero-dimensional point. Suppose you considered the Great Wall of China as existing for zero time and therefore consisting of three dimensions only. It would then not exist at all and you could walk through its supposed position at any time.

Since duration is a dimension like height, width, and thickness, and since we can travel at will north and south, east and west, and (if only by jumping) up and down, why shouldn’t we also travel yesterward and tomorrowward as soon as we work out a device for the purpose?

That was 1895, remember, and Wells’s analysis at that time had some shadow of justification. But then, in 1905, came Einstein’s special theory of relativity, and it became clear that time is a dimension but it is not like the three spatial dimensions, and it can’t be treated as though it were.

And yet Wells’s argument was so winning and the plots it made possible so enticing that science fiction writers generally just ignore Einstein and follow Wells. (1 do so myself in The End of Eternity. )

The dead giveaway that true time-travel is flatly impossible arises from the well-known “paradoxes” it entails. The classic example is “What if you go back into the past and kill your grandfather when he was still a little boy?” In that case, you see, the murderer was never born, so who killed the little boy?

But you don’t need anything so drastic. What if you go back and change any of the many small items that made it possible for your father and mother to meet, or to fall in love after they met, or to marry after they fall in love. Suppose you merely interfered with the crucial moment of sex and had it happen the next evening, or perhaps just five minutes later than it did, so that another sperm fertilized the ovum rather than the one that should have. That, too, would mean the person committing the act would never come into existence, so who would commit the act?

In fact, to go into the past and do anything would change a great deal of what followed perhaps everything that followed. So complex and hopeless are the paradoxes that follow, so wholesale is the annihilation of any reasonable concept of causality, that the easiest way out of the irrational chaos that results is to suppose that true time-travel is, and forever will be, impossible.

However, any discussion of this gets so philosophical that I lose patience and would rather consider something simpler.

Suppose you get into a time machine and travel twenty-four hours into the future. The assumption is that you are traveling only in the time dimension, and that the three spatial dimensions are unchanged. However, as is perfectly obvious, Earth is moving through the three dimensions in a very complex way.

The point on the surface on which the time-machine is located is moving about the Earth’s axis. The Earth is moving about the center of gravity of the Earth-Moon system, and also about the center of gravity of the Earth-Sun system; is accompanying the Sun in its motion about the center of the galaxy, and the galaxy in its undefined motion relative to the center of gravity of the Local Group and to the center of gravity of the universe as a whole if there is one.

You might, of course, say that the time-machine partakes of the motion of the Earth, and wherever Earth goes, the time-machine goes, too. Suppose, though, we consider the Earth’s motion (with the solar system generally) around the galactic center. Its speed relative to that center is estimated to be about 220 kilometers per second. If the time-machine travels twenty-four hours into the future in one second, it travels 220 kilometers x 86,400 (the number of seconds in a day), or 19,008,000 kilometers in one second. That’s over sixty-three times the speed of light. If we don’t want to break the speed-of-light limit, then we must take not less than twenty-three minutes to travel one day forward (or backward) in time.

What’s more, I suspect that considerations of acceleration would have to be involved. The time- machine would have to accelerate to light speed and then decelerate from it, and perhaps the human body could only stand so much acceleration in the time direction. Considering that the human body has never in all its evolution accelerated at all in the time direction, the amount of acceleration it ought to be able to endure might be very little indeed, so that the time-machine would have to take considerably more than an hour to make a one-day journey-say, at a guess, twelve hours.

That would mean we could only gain half a day per day, at most, in traveling through time. Spending ten years to go twenty years into the future, would not be in the least palatable. (Can a time machine carry a life-support system of that order of magnitude?)

And, on top of that, I don’t see that having to chase after the Earth would fail to cost the usual amount of energy just because we’re doing it by way of the time dimension. Without calculating the energy, I am positive time-travel is insuperably difficult, quite apart from the theoretical considerations that make it totally impossible. So let’s eliminate it from serious consideration.

But not from science fiction! Time-travel stories are too much fun for them to be eliminated merely out of mundane considerations of impracticability, or even impossibility.