The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

Hap Cawood is a graduate student at Ohio State University. Has published satires and poetry in University publications and in motive. Spent two years teaching with the Peace Corps in Sierra Leone. Is now completing work for his Master’s in —you guessed it—journalism.

He says what he wrote is a satire. I agree, the style is satirical. But what bothers me is, while everybody’s talking about how “science is catching up with science fiction,” nobody seems to notice how IBM is catching up with satire.

There is an IBM down in Florida that writes love poems. Like:

Darkly the peaceful trees crashed

In the serene sun

While the heart heard

The swift moon stopped silently.

What really hurts is, the 709 had a vocabulary of exactly 78 words when that was written. Presumably it knows more now. At the time that Russell Baker reported on it (but this one was no joke; it was a straight news article), 709 could only do 30 poems a minute, but it was supposed to work up to 500/per shortly.

And then there was this inspirational photograph in the paper the other day—a happy schoolgirl looking up at the beaming broad panel of the teacher. I mean, that one was no joke, either.

Sometime between the spring when I write this, and the winter when it is published, Peter Redgrove (who was represented in the Ninth Annual with a prose-poem short story, “Mr. Waterman”) will have initiated a series of programs on the B.B.C. to show, he hopes, that “poetry and SF are trying to digest the same things.”

“Machines are so much in our lives,” he says. “Why have so few poets tackled this? Is it that they don’t know enough? Is it that they’re so afraid of the machine that all they can make of it is satire . . .?

“Hart Crane saw that one way of making a complete living world-picture was to treat machines as a kind of comrade in evolutionary advance—if you treat them as mere instruments, when of course they’re images of the mind, then you deaden yourself and them. . . .

“We don’t want satire,” he concludes, “we want synthesis.”