The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

Frankly, the Great Evolution Upset has made me nervous, and I hesitate to say, in print, anything so problematic as “scientific opinion is . . .” or “biologists agree . . .” Chances are by now the biologists are in radical disagreement, but the last time I noticed, most of them seemed to think that what killed the dodo and the dinosaur—what causes the devolution of any species—is overspecialization.

It is an appealing concept—if only because it is a concept, and provides at last something like an informative synonym for “decadence.” (Perhaps even closer is Theodore Sturgeon’s definition of “perversion”: anything you do to the exclusion of everything else.)

Art, music, literature, then, become decadent when they lose contact with the living body of work, by overspecializing to an extreme degree. Is this, perhaps, the basis for our subjective evaluation? When the emphasis on any one value or set of values (in the arts, the scientific disciplines, public morality, or anything else) becomes so intense as to lose contact with the frame of reference provided by other values customary to the form, we react immediately with, “Decadence!”

(And of course, in any highly experimental or path-breaking effort, the connection with the frame of reference may be so tenuous, or so subtle—but still so significant—that only another adept in the same discipline will recognize it—thus providing the frequent distinction between critical and popular success.)

If this is a true measuring stick, it should be applicable to all areas of human behavior: not only to the comparatively well-understood rules of the “disciplines” (in art, science, etiquette, communications, for instance), but to those “games” we are least conscious of “playing,” and which evoke the greatest emotional stress—nation, family, religion, property rights, for example; or the even deeper-rooted codes and moralities related to those “inalienable” rights—life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.