Scifi Films PDF

The Center for The Study of Science Fiction
Film Series
Produced by James Gunn
for the Extramural Study Center
of the University of Kansas
Division of Continuing Education
DVD produced by Eric Solstein and Digital Media Zone
Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series 1

Table of Contents
Creating the Literature of Science Fiction Film Series _________________________ 3
Technical Notes on The Films_____________________________________________ 6
Science Fiction Films: A Lecture By Forrest J. Ackerman _____________________ 8
Plot In Science Fiction: A Lecture By Poul Anderson ________________________ 17
The History Of Science Fiction After 1938: A Lecture By Isaac Asimov _________ 28
Science Fiction And The Mainstream: A Lecture By John Brunner _____________ 36
Theme In Science Fiction: A Discussion Between Gordon Dickson &
James Gunn _______________________________________________________ 42
New Directions In Science Fiction: A Seminar With Harlan Ellison ____________ 55
The Early History Of Science Fiction: A Lecture By Damon Knight ____________ 64
The Ideas In Science Fiction: A Lecture By Frederik Pohl ____________________ 73
An Interview With Clifford Simak: A Career In Science Fiction________________ 84
The Early Days Of The SF Magazines: An Interview With Jack Williamson ______ 84

Creating the Literature of Science Fiction Film Series
by James Gunn
The idea of filming the people who had helped shape science fiction
originated at the 1969 World Science Fiction Convention in St. Louis.
Gordon Dickson was the president of the Science Fiction Writers of
America, and he was trying to persuade me to run as his successor (I later
succumbed). One of the matters we talked about was what we could do to
promote science fiction. We came up with ideas for a speakers bureau and a
review column and news releases (I was still in charge of the University of
Kansas public relations, and full of information about how such things
worked). Then I mentioned the possibility of a film series that might be
used in public gatherings and college classrooms.
The series would never have gotten off the drawing board had it not been for
the contributions of many people. Alex Lazzarino was the key figure. He
was the director of a division of the Universitys Continuing Education
program that was called The Extramural Independent Study Center; he
saw the potential of the series and agreed to fund it. Prof. Peter Dart, a
faculty member in the School of Journalism, directed the first few films and
Bob Gardner, a cameraman for the Universitys Childrens Research Center,
did the filming; later directing and camera work was done by personnel at
the EISC.
Mostly the credit goes to the science-fiction people who agreed to
participate. I went to New York in the fall of 1969 for SFWAs editor-
publisher reception and asked people if they would participate. Isaac
Asimov said of course, and so did Fred Pohl and many others. We made
the first films on the West Coast. We took our crew to the Nebula Awards
held that year in Oakland, California, and filmed Poul Anderson talking
about Plot, then went down the coast to Los Angeles to film Forry
Ackerman who had turned his home into a science-fiction library/museum.
That year I had agreed to help teach a class in science fiction that my son
and a friend had organized, and I used the class to film Harlan Ellison, who
was on campus to give a lecture. He talked about New Directions, now
thirty years in the past.
In 1971 we took a crew to New York and filmed Lunch with John
Campbell (and discovered, when the camera we rented in New York didnt

work, the virtues of cinema verit) arranged by Harry Harrison. Campbell

didnt want to discuss the recent history of science fiction (he had been too
busy editing a magazine, he said) and we filmed Isaac Asimov describing
science fiction from 1938 to the present (as science-fiction writers, we
should have had more sensitivity to the passage of time). We also tried to
film Damon Knight on the street across from the United Nations building
(guards wouldnt let us film on the grounds) and later discovered that street
noise obscured his voice; we brought Damon to Lawrence to film the Early
History of SF in Alex Lazzarinos home. Then we went up to Boston for
the World Science Fiction Convention called Noreascon and filmed John
Brunner talking about Science Fiction and the Mainstream and an
interview with the WorldCon guest of honor, Clifford Simak, and got some
WorldCon atmosphere. One student in my three-week Intensive English
Institute on the Teaching of Science Fiction, Barbara ODell, was a film
major at San Diego State University, and as her class project organized all
the class members to produce an interview with Theodore Sturgeon. Some
(Fred Pohl, Jack Williamson, Gordon Dickson) we filmed in a studio in the
EISC building.
So it went. I made plans to produce 18 or so of the films and use them as
part of a course in science fiction that could be offered to high schools and
colleges. But Alex got hired by the Menninger Clinic in Topeka to become
a fund raiser and project manager, the Extramural Independent Study Center
slowly got re-absorbed into Continuing Education and funding disappeared.
I had plans to add some films about other key figuresRobert A. Heinlein,
for instance, and Ray Bradbury, and a number of othersbut we never were
able to complete arrangements. The series got shown, in part, at the Los
Angeles World Science Fiction Convention of 1972, and at a Science Fiction
Research Association meeting or two. I used all of them in my large
science-fiction classes. Continuing Education rented out the films (and sold
a few) for a decade or sothey were shown in various places around the
world, but mostly in the U.S.and I am pleased to report that Continuing
Education eventually earned back the $50,000 or so that it put into the series.
Then Continuing Education went out of the film rental business and turned
ownership of the series, then mostly available on VHS tapes, over to the
Center for the Study of Science Fiction.
For a couple of decades the Center has been trying to get a grant to update
the films and add some new ones, and that still may happen. Times have
changed (I remember asking whether we couldnt tape the pieces rather than
film them and was told it would take a truck full of equipment). Science

fiction has changed too since the 1970s: these accounts of those times record
the people (too many of them gone) who helped create and shape it. Now
the time machine passes to other hands. One of those pairs of hands belongs
to Eric Solstein, through whose vision and expertise these glimpses of a
storied past are being made available and who is compiling a new and more
comprehensive record.
James Gunn

Technical Notes on the Films
By Eric Solstein
All of the films in this collection were produced by James Gunn in the early
1970s as a Professor of English at, what is now, the J. Wayne and Elsie M
Gunn Center for the Study of Science Fiction, of the University of Kansas in
Lawrence.
These works represent the first serious effort to capture Science Fiction
writers on film. With few exceptions, these men and women have been
very poorly documented. Even the legendary Robert A. Heinlein has been
filmed on less than a half dozen occasions, and no recordings do him justice.
When Professor Gunn managed to find the funding for this project, VHS
was not yet invented, and film production was pretty much limited to the
well heeled and stout hearted.
But beyond any cost and effort, Jim Gunns films are precious. They may
not have the sheen of Hollywood productions, but they are very rare primary
historical documents of very intelligent people making very strong
presentations under the guidance of a supremely knowledgeable and caring
peer. If you want the eye-witness account of how Science Fictions
founding fathers perceived the birth and maturation of a Twentieth
Century art form, there is nowhere else to go.
Once created, these films were circulated (primarily to colleges) as 16 mm.
projection prints. Once videotape became available and economical, many
old film reels got lost in the shuffle as the entire educational film industry
was transformed. By the time VHS versions of these films were finally
made, the originals were getting misplaced, project funding had long
disappeared and interest was waning.
When I began to document Science Fiction writers for my own project, the
University of Kansas was one of my principal destinations. Jim Gunn had
already made copies of his films for me from the somewhat beaten-up VHS
copy he considered the master, and what a copy it was. This tape was
painful to watch, a copy of a copy of a copy. It exhibited nearly every kind
of noise, distortion and artifact that bad video can, a tragedy I was hoping to
set right.It turned out that most of the original materials from which the
films had been composed, had been tossed in a dumpster and salvaged by a

concerned student in the nick of time; they were now resident in the
basement of Spencer Library. While many of these materials were intact,
they were badly faded (from poor storage) and essential components were
gone.
In order to make the new video versions presented here, we had to take the
second best route. With the assistance of the Spencer staff, all existing (and
long uncirculated) projection prints were assembled for my inspection. Over
a weekend, I carefully went through each of the many prints to find which
was in the best condition for each film.
A full set of prints was brought to DMZ in New York to be cleaned and
transferred to video. The copies varied in quality: all were scratched to
different degrees, some had dirt printed into them from the original
internegatives, some had bad splices that needed to be repaired, most had
faded somewhat and some had aged to a perfect pink. Unfortunately, the
Forrest Ackerman piece (Science Fiction Films) has some bad splices and is
missing bits of the picture and sound at its head.
We transferred the worst of them on a Phillips Spirit Datacin with a Pogle
color corrector at The Tape House, and the balance at our own facility. All
of the films required additional color correction before cloning them to their
final versions on Digital Betacam. They were all transferred in 16:9 aspect
ratio, a decision we had to make, and one that served some films better than
others. While the end results are far from perfect, please be assured that the
versions before you are far superior to all other extant versions, and the best
we could do without a significant additional expenditure.
To create these DVDs, we carefully tested and finessed our MPEG encodes,
to achieve the best possible results for the compression required. These
films now have another hundred years or so of life (if the DVD standards are
to be believed) and we are proud to have made them available again, if only
to a small but knowledgeable audience. We trust you will find them
valuable.
Eric Solstein

Science Fiction Films: A Lecture by Forrest J. Ackerman
Science Fiction Films: A Lecture By Forrest J. Ackerman
[The opening seconds of this film were not available to us in any condition that
permitted their restoration, so we have excised the text but re-edited most of its
original footage to provide a natural beginning. The missing text introduces
Ackerman as a SF fan who has shared his expertise for many years. He has had
many careers: agent, editor, columnist, collector, but all have been related to his
lifelong love, science fiction.]
Forry, as he is known to his friends and correspondents, has had a way of life out
of being a fan. He has brought together one of the most complete collections of
science fiction magazines and books in the world. And perhaps because of the fact
that he has lived all his life near Hollywood, he turned early to an associated
medium for science fiction the film.
He originated and edits a magazine about movie monsters; and science fiction
might be called The Monster That Ate Forrest J. Ackerman. Eventually, his
collection of books and magazines, motion picture posters, and still photographs
grew so extensive that it blotted out every window and began devouring kitchen
and bedroom. Forry moved into an apartment and turned his Spanish-style stucco
house into a museum. There, in the midst of that incredible collection, he
describes the history of the science fiction film.
My name is Forrest J. Ackerman. As I speak to you from the year 1970, Im 53

years old. For 46 of those years Ive been seeing science fiction films. The first I
ever saw was in 1926 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, his famous
novel of a brontosaurus alive today and loose in London.
He meddled with things man was meant to leave alone He tampered in Gods
domain. These anti-science cliches that have dominated the majority of science
fiction films but never dampened the ardor of the mad scientist persecuted by the
superstitious mankind. Boris Karloff acted into his 81st year and suffered
horrendous fates for daring to probe beyond the bounds of orthodox science. And
what were some of these blasphemous experiments? Cryogenics in The Man With
Nine Lives, 1940; prolongation of live with an artificial heart in The Man They
Could Not Hang, 1939; revivification of an electrocuted man in The Walking
Dead, 1936.
Have screen playwrights, producers, motion picture companies, really believed the
myth of too much science being a bad thing? Not really. Mad science merely
means good box office just as horror headlines sell newspapers. There have been

a few films about sane scientists: The Story of Louis Pasteur; Sinclair Lewis
Arrowsmith; Dr. Erlichs Magic Bullet, the syphilis story. But the general public,
in picking pictures, has evidenced a greater interest in scientists who shrink people,
or appropriate their brains, or render them invisible than those good Samaritans
who seek a cure for cancer or emphysema.
Before chronicling the science fiction film history further, I imagine its probably
desirable to define the genre and name the first science fiction film ever made. To
the best of my knowledge, until the end of 1931, no one ever attempted to compile
a list of all known science fiction films. That compilation was published on the
first page of the first amateur science fiction magazine, The Time Traveller, at the
beginning of 1932. I created the list. Today I dont agree with many of my own
selections: for instance, by no stretch of imagination would I now include the
outright supernatural Dracula.
I think a science fiction film pretty well defines itself. Most of the pictures are
about inventions or catastrophes outside the normal, experiments gone disastrously
wrong, life on or from other worlds, the multiple extrapolations of the future.
Now, accepting the possibility of chemically separating the evil nature of man
from the good, then the first science fiction film may very well have been a short
Scandinavian version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1897. The Jekyll-Hyde
syndrome, with the inevitable son and daughter sequels, seems to hold a record for
remakes, with something like 25 versions to date. Rouben Mamoulians classic of
1932 garnered an Academy award for its star, Frederick March, in the dual role of
man and monster.
In 1898, Georges Melies, the cinemagician of France, produced a short lunar
fantasy, An Astronomers Dream, following it in 1899 with a brief sequence from
H. Rider Haggards She, showing the rejuvenation of the immortal goddess in a
film called Column of Fire.
Best known early example of science fiction on film surviving to this day is the
French 1902 combination of elements from Vernes From the Earth To the Moon
and Wells First Man On the Moon in a short science farce. In 1909 French Pathe
audiences were taken on A Trip to Jupiter. In the following year, the film
company of Thomas Edison itself offered A Trip to Mars, a daring flight repeated
eight years later by a Danish film producer with Sky Ship, and again in 1920 by
Tower Films.
In 1919 England finally filmed The First Men In the Moon by its most famous sf
son, H. G. Wells; but it remained for the greatest animator of his time, Ray
Harryhausen, to make a definitive version in 1965.

A Message From Mars, 1921, was a utopian morality play transferred to film,
while Radio-Mania, 1923, gave us an amusingly imaginative look at the weird
inhabitants of our neighbor planet. The Russians filmed a highly stylized
civilization of robotic Martians in Aelita, 1924. And Science & Invention
Magazine from 1923 records a highly unusual story of The Stellar Express, the
rocketship that flew faster than light with the result that its astronaut, after landing
on a distant planet, observed through the telescope his own arrival.
Our Heavenly Bodies, German-made in 1926, would appear to be a lost
masterpiece - perhaps the most serious, ambitious space film ever made. A few
surviving stills show us an ethership taking off from a metropolis of the future
century and engaging in a more literal sense in the much latter Cinerama
production of the same name in a space odyssey. The weightlessness of the crew
appears to have been convincingly portrayed. I believe the conclusion of this
picture depicted several ways that the world might come to an end: as by fire or
freezing; and that portions of these were incorporated in either a film called
Evolution, or The Mystery Of Life they were two separate pictures, one or
possibly both of which I saw a single time at the beginning of the 30s.
Fritz Lang, of course, made Die Frau im Mond, the prophetic Woman In the Moon,
Girl In the Moon, By Rocket To the Moon, as it was variously known; and it was
shown here and abroad in 1929, the year that he actually on film invented
countdown. Langs Moon, wrongly, had an atmosphere; rightly, a powdery
surface.
A trip to mars was taken the following year, 1930, in the farcical music comedy
Just Imagine, which will be covered later when I discuss future films.
Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers rocketed around the universe in four serials from
1936 through 1940; but of course these chapter plays bear the same relationship to
science fiction films in general as comic strips to magazine and book science
fiction.
The first space film with international impact in the era of talking pictures was
George Pals Destination Moon in 1949: in color, with the fortuitous and felicitous
combination of author Robert A. Heinlein and artist Chesley Bonnestell
collaborating closely on the creation of a memorable work, with Willy Lay as the
technical advisor. 20 years ahead of the reality of 20 July of 1969, the picture was
a praiseworthy effort flawed only slightly by the unnecessary comic relief.
Space films to follow, such as This Island Earth in 1955 and Forbidden Planet in
1956 were less documentary and more derring-do, culminating in a multimillion-
dollar, brain-bewildering 2001 of Arthur Clarke and Stanley Kubrick. No science
fiction film since Metropolis has been received with such religious fervor and

fanatic devotion, or else condemned with passionate displeasure. No viewer, pro

or con, faulted it for its fabulous special effects; but arguments will probably still
rage into the 21st century as to what the significance of its ending was, if indeed it
had any.
Space, per se, has rarely inspired productions above a lowbrow level in the films,
mirroring more the hack work of space operas of old pulp publications such as
Planet Stories, which eloquently emphasized the inarguable observation of sf
author Theodore Sturgeon some years ago that 90% of everything printed and by
extension, filmed is of inferior quality. Space pictures from Japan, Italy, and
elsewhere other than Russia had been pretty much of a piece: all pyrotechnics and
tinker toy models.
Leaving space for a look at the future, we turn back the clock to 1926
Metropolis. It was the best: the technical and technological masterpiece of
Austrian auteur Fritz Lang, which is an indelible creation of a unique supercity of
60 million people held in the thrall of incredible malignant machinery, and features
Ultima Futura Automaton, the most glamorous robot ever to grace the screen.
As I have been known to lecture an hour and a quarter extemporaneously about the
merits of this single film, which I have seen perhaps twenty-five times to date, it is
obvious that in this limited time I must hastily pass on to other futuristic
productions, summarizing Metropolis succinctly as the supreme achievement of
filmic future history.
Just Imagine, made in 1930, forecast the world of 1980 the world, as Will
McMorrow once put it, of indexed numbers, where Mia Farrows mother, Maureen
OSullivan, was a numeral made LN-18, who sang to her hero J-21, when he was a
captive on Mars of the race of bad twin Martians. Incredibly infantile in its plot
and humor, no more than five or ten minutes of the entire film were worth
watching. But the Gotham of 1980 was probably more breathtaking in its aerially
photographed grandeur than the reality that will soon overtake us indeed, one
day, if youre studying this course beyond 1980, may be in the past.
High Treason, the second British talking film released in the USA in 1930, forecast
the world and the war of 1940. There was a channel tunnel between London and
Paris (which was blown up); photophones to see the person conversed with; one of
the federated Atlantic states gas-bombed by enemy zeppelins of the Europeans;
while the MGM plea for pacifism in 1933, Men Must Fight, was similar in theme
but inferior in effects to High Treason.
Other glimpses of the future were seen in F.P.1 Does Not Answer, (1933s vision
of trans-oceanic flights to come), the German Tunnel of 1933 and its British
remake of 1935, Transatlantic Tunnel; the German Gold, (transmutation of

elements); and Master Of the World, (robots), in the mid-30s; up to the fair
adaptation in 1956 of George Orwells frightening literary warning 1984, but less
than inspired adaptation, 1967, of Ray Bradburys powerful book-burning
extrapolation, Fahrenheit 451. The French Alphaville and Italian 10th Victim, both
1965 releases, were perverse projections of possible futures.
H. G. Wells in Things To Come, 1935, created a scientifilm masterpiece for all
time. If you have seen Things To Come and rate it less than memorable, you flunk
the course. I have seen it in excess of 40 times a record which I think attests to
my estimate of the value of the film.
The themes treated in science fiction films have been many. Among those worth
noting:
Invisibility: H. G. Wells Invisible Man, 1933, superior in all respects.
Lilliputianism: The adaptation of The Incredible Shrinking Man by the books
own author, Richard Matheson, with first-rate effects, in 1957. The breathtaking
Fantastic Voyage in a miniaturized submarine through the human body in 1966.
Other only slightly less effective shrinking stories were Dr. Cyclops in 1939 and
the film that was based on the Merritts famous book Burn, Witch, Burn! called
The Devil Doll made in 1936. This is a series of stills demonstrating the shrinking
process which the special effects men created for the film.
No really superior treatment of a gigantic human has yet been filled. The
purchased but un-produced Nth Man might possibly be the answer to this; but giant
beasts, things, and creatures have abounded, King Kong of 1933 being the classic
hallowed by time. This is the actual model of the pteranodon which was
attempting to fly away with Fay Wray in the production of King Kong. This is the
sea beast that reared up and overturned the raft: This, the remnants of the
brontosaurus that treed one of the many members of Denhams doomed party. The
triceratops;And this is believed to be the metal skeleton of the tyrannosaurus rex,
which had the monumental battle with King Kong and was finally bested by him.
This, the creature called the ymir, the plaster of paris prototype of it which was
created by Ray Harryhausen for his film about Venus called 20 Million Miles to
Earth.
Time, smog, simply air itself are unkind to creatures like this hand puppet which in
1955 was the ferocious Beast With a Million Eyes. The new breed of model
makers of the 70s may be giving some thought to the preservation of their
miniature creations, but maestros like Marcel Delgado of yesteryear no more
anticipated their models would be collected, respected, dissected, studied,
cherished, preserved, than manufacturers of, say, cigar bands.

Longevity has proven a popular theme in Black Oxen of 1924; The Young Diana of
1922; The Man In Half-Moon Street in 1944, and its subsequent remake, The Man
Who Could Cheat Death, 1958. No one ever seems to actually win the war with
the grim reaper, however; and inevitably the artificially preserved people age years
in seconds in the grim climaxes. From Lost Horizon to The Leech Woman, it
ritualistically happens.
After dreaming as a young man of the spectacular destruction of the Earth by
cometary collision, I could scarcely believe how dull and boring The End Of the
World could be when I saw the French version of 1931. At a revival in 1969, the
picture had not improved with age. Deluge, to my mind remains the definitive
world destruction depiction, when in 1933 on a table top at a cost of $25,000, New
York Citys skyscrapers were toppled by earth-wrenching quakes, then the stricken
island of Manhattan drowned by tidal waves. The amazing achievement by Ned
Mann was reprised in an otherwise weak film known as SOS Tidal Wave. The
same cataclysm depicted in 1951 in When Worlds Collide was pale by comparison;
although the Balmer/Wilie novel produced in color by George Pal was the superior
picture of the two. Two very interesting variations on the theme, however, were
The World, the Flesh, and the Devil, and Nevil Shutes bestseller On The Beach,
released in 1959 and 1960, respectively.
Alraune, an artificially created soulless woman, has heartlessly caused men to lose
their heads no fewer than seven times in a variety of European versions, the last of
which, Unnatural, featured Erich Van Stroheim. Barbarella, incarnated by Jane
Fonda, was an astronaughty adventuress of many millennia hence, whose gadgetry
wouldve made Buck Rogers green with jealousy, as in 1968 she did her thing in
Roger Vadims incredibly lush, bizarre, exotic, decadent depiction of a
phantasmagorical cosmic future from the comic-oriented mind of French artist
Jean-Claude Forest.
Fared better: The Day the Earth Stood Still, from the Harry Bates novelette
anthologized in Adventures in Time and Space, (original story title Farewell to the
Master); The Thing From Another World, 1951, by John W. Campbell, to be found
in the same collection under its original magazine title of Who Goes There?.
[These are the actual claws of the thing from another world, as modeled for us
today by James Gunn. Thank you, Mr. Gunn, for the very effective demonstration
of the claws]. And 1941, there was The Devil Commands, a Boris Karloff attempt
to scientifically establish communication with the astral plane, based on the well-
received book by William Sloan The Edge of Running Water; and especially
effective adaptation of John Wyndhams book, The Midwich Cuckoos, filmed in
1960s as Village of the Damned. Windhams watershed work, The Day of the

Triffids, was not quite the success of its Midwich predecessor when it reached the
screen in 1963.
Frankenstein, the worlds number one nightmare, conceived in the teenage mind of
Mary Shelley in 1816, first reached the screen in 1910 via the film company of
Thomas Alva Edison; was filmed a second time as Life Without Soul in 1915; The
Monster of Frankenstein (Italian), in 1920; and then definitively in 1931 with Boris
Karloff. A German serial in six hour-long installments called Homunculus was
released in 1916 and climaxed with its soulless artificial creature meeting death at
the hands of nature via lightning bolt, as Wylies gladiator would do many years
later.
In addition to films previously called to your attention as worthwhile or
outstanding, serious students of the science fiction cinema can not afford to miss a
viewing of any of the following, should the opportunity afford itself:
The War of the Worlds, George Pal, out of H. G. Wells, with breathtaking special
effects, which in fact won an Oscar in 1953. [This is the actual model of the
Martian war machine.]
The Island of Lost Souls, 1932, screenplayed from H. G. Wells Island of Dr.
Moreau, treating insidiously of the accelerated evolution of animals into
manimals...
The Invisible Ray, 1936, the vintage Karloff and Lugosi at their mad-bad scientist
best
Dr. X, 1932, a gripping scientific mystery with a chilling climax featuring synthetic
flesh
The Mysterious Island, a milestone for its time, 1929, with a sub-sea civilization
discovered by Vernes pioneer submarines, a creation of haunting beauty
It Came From Outer Space, 1953, about 85% pure Ray Bradbury in the third
dimension
Them!, best of the giant insect tales in 1954
The Time Machine, 1960, favorite of some George Pal enthusiasts...
The Planet of the Apes, 1968, an eminently satisfactory treatment of screen science
fiction.
Journey To the Far Side of the Sun, 1969, excelled with its realistic models,
obviously influenced by the first-rate miniature work of 2001.
And what conclusions are to be drawn after 70 years of science fiction on the
screen? The estimate of those most knowledgeable in the field Walter Lee and

Carlos Clarens of America, Luis Gasca of Spain, John Baxter of England; Lotte
Eisner of France, the Belgian Groupe DEtude pour le Cinema Fantastique -
[pronunciation of which I dont guarantee - Esperanto is my native language]
these experts estimate that a figure approaching 2500 is the number of films which
the sf cineastes would agree on as having been produced during the first seven
decades of the 20th century.
2500 films! but how many classics, how many even based on magazine stories or
books? How much richer the past history of sf films couldve been had producers
reached into the pages of Astounding and Galaxy Magazine, the minds of men like
Asimov, and Van Vogt, and Frederik Pohl.
Quality and box office are not entities alien to each other. Artistic successes can
also be financial successes. The time is long past when we should already have
seen Brave New World, Looking Backward, R.U.R, The Vicarion, The World
Below, Ralph 124C41+, To Walk The Night, Sinister Barrier, Slan, The World of
Null-A, The Voyage of the Space Beagle, Odd John, half of Heinlein, a lot of
Sturgeon and Weinbaum, and Stapledon and Van Vogt and Campbell and even
much more of H. G. Wells. Pioneers of basic ideas of science fiction, like Ray
Cummings, Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson, have been shamefully neglected,
their works overlooked, when themes they either originated or perfected frequently
were scripted by late-comers or nonentities not even associated with the field.
Study the best of the past-
Fritz Lang, for imaginative interpretation of his written material
Jack Pierce, for the ultimate in makeup
Boris Karloff, for integrity of performances
George Pal, for subject matter
James Whale, for direction
Carl Freund, for camera work
Marcel Delgado, for prehistoric life models
Willis OBrien and Ray Harryhausen, for animation
Kenneth Strickfaden, for electrical laboratories
Max Steiner, for musical scores.
There were 13 golden years of science fiction films, including fantasy; and
these were from 1923 through 1936. Whenever you can, see the fantastic
films of this period, including The Phantom of the Opera, Siegfried, Faust,
The Magician, and similar motion pictures for there are many of the same

elements in them as in science fiction films. The dragon of Siegfried is not

so different from the dinosaur of The Lost World; the laboratory of The
Magician can serve for The Young Diana.
Lastly, a personal note:
Im sure author Theodore Sturgeon would happily be made out a liar for his
observed law of mediocrity be violated, reversed, so that 90% of science
fiction films became superior, and only 10% were worthless trash. I have
seen every science fiction film made possible to me in approximately 50
years - more I believe than anyone else on earth - and I plan to continue to
do so until at least 2001. It would be a great reward to me - one shared in by
all interested in the subject matter - if there should be a noticeable increase
in the quality of science fiction films in the years from here to the 21st
century.
The message of Metropolis was that halfway between the hand and the
brain must be the heart. Dr. Ackermans diagnosis is that if you have it in
your hearts to do so, then use your heads and your hands to improve on the
past. Whenever any opportunity presents itself for you to select, project,
view, criticize, or create that most challenging of motion picture art forms
science fiction film do so with one eye on the past and one on the future.
In fact, considering the strangeness of the subject matter, it would not be
amiss to operate with three Is, by which I mean intelligence, imagination,
and integrity.

Plot In Science Fiction: A Lecture By Poul Anderson
In 1947 a young Pennsylvanian, then attending the University of Minnesota,

studying toward a degree in Physics, sold two novelettes to the magazine
Astounding Science Fiction and launched a career as a writer which has
supported him ever since, as well as a wife and daughter he acquired along this
particular time sequence.
Some several hundred stories and more than 50 books later, Poul Anderson lives
and works in Orinda, California - when he is not traveling in Europe, building his
own Viking ship, or participating the Society for Creative Anachronisms.
He has written science books and mysteries, but most of his writing has been
science fiction. He is one of its recognized masters. He is, in that glorious
tradition, a teller of tales. And in the 30 minutes that follow he is going to answer
the layman's perennial question to the science fiction writer, "Where do you get
those crazy ideas?"
More precisely, where do science fiction stories come from? How do they grow?
How are they put together? At a recent meeting of science fiction writers held at a
resort hotel in Berkley, California, Poul Anderson discussed plot in science fiction.
[James Gunns questions are italicized; Poul Andersons answers appear in roman
text.]
It's an honor to be asked for a contribution to this series and a pleasure to oblige.
But let me warn you right at the beginning that I have no word to give you from on
high - the only thing I can offer is a few suggestions that may or may not be
helpful to the audience for this series.
Paul, I've asked you to talk about plot for two reasons: first, because plot plays so
important a part in science fiction; and second, because your stories are
distinguished by their strong plot lines. Clearly, you have thought about the matter
of plotting.
Let me start out by remarking that I believe whatever I have to say will apply
equally well or badly to every sort of fiction. In fact, I don't think any real
distinction exists between science fiction and any other kind - science fiction is at
most a set of literary techniques. These techniques are helpful in dealing with
certain aspects of life. For instance, by sending the hero to a different planet we
can convey some sense of the wonder of this universe, of life itself; of by

projecting a future society we can examine the possible ways in which men could
order their affairs.
But in science fiction, as in any kind of other story, it is real here and now
experience on which we draw; and our work always refers back to that same
reality.
Now, one problem in talking about the plot of a story is that is that we don't have a
clearly defined subject of discussion. A very well-known novelist once remarked
to me, "Plot, characterization and the rest are nothing but words made up by
English professors to describe what real writers have been doing all along." I don't
think that remark is entirely fair, but it does contain a certain amount of truth: you
simply can not separate plot from character, background, philosophy, and
everything else that goes into a story. At least you can not if the story is to be
anything more than a mechanical piece of hack work.
Nevertheless, we need to get on with our discussion. So let's define the plot
roughly as the scheme of events in a story. Remember, that's only a very crude
definition. Maybe what I have to say later on will suggest refinements to you.
To start off, I'll offer a couple of examples. The plot of The Iliad is: Achilles,
angry with his king, withdraws from battle until his best friend is killed,
whereupon he comes forth to get revenge. The plot of Hamlet is much more
intricate than that, of course. In fact, Hamlet consists of several interweaving story
lines. One of them, by the way, is a skillfully constructed piece of detective
fiction. You remember Hamlet doesn't simply take the ghost's word about his
uncle's guilt: the ghost could, after all, only be a demon whose lies are intended to
trap Hamlet into sin. So the prince has to investigate for himself. In the course of
this, he interacts with a whole cast of people, each with his or her own story that is
part of the larger whole.
Note how much of this complex plot turns on background and character. Take, for
instance, the scene where Hamlet finds the king at his prayers, almost stabs him
then and there, but refrains. The background is Catholic. In Catholic belief, if the
king were killed while praying in sincere repentance he would go to heaven. What
kind of vengeance is that? Therefore Hamlet stays his hand. But the king's
remorse and Hamlet's cold calculation derive from their inmost personalities.
That's what I mean by claiming that plot is not really separable from the other
aspects of the story.
Still, you do have a narrative line, whatever its driving forces. In a work like
James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, this line is mostly interior: we see what goes on in
a human mind, and thus we come to know that human and his milieu. On the other
hand, in Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island the storyline is almost entirely

exterior. We meet marvelous people like Long John Silver and Ben Gunn; we get
to know them in the course of the action, but this is the operative difference from
Joyce. We get to know them in the course of the action. Physical events dominate
their story, and the scheme under which these events happen is the plot.
Now, I don't subscribe to the fashionable snobbish view that the only purpose of
serious literature is the sensitive analysis of character. I think action writers like
Homer are every bit as important as psychological writers like Capek it's just a
question of which aspect of reality the author wants to emphasize.
Usually, the external part - that is, what a hero does, what happens outside of his
skin - usually this is what is emphasized in science fiction. And thus we come to
the matter of plot. How do we construct a good plausible narrative scheme?
Have you found a good method?
According to Robert Heinlein in a critical essay of years ago, there are only three
basic plots, and everything written is a variation or combination of them. First is
boy-meets-girl. Second is The Little Tailor, that is, the character faced with a
problem who finds ways to solve it. Third is the Man Who Learned Better, the
story of someone whose mistaken belief or attitude is changed by experience.
Of course each of these can be turned around. Boy can lose girl, or in some modern
fiction we might have boy-meets-boy. The Little Tailor can fail, in which case the
story might become tragic. The Man Who is Supposed to Learn Better may
likewise fail to do so, or the lesson he learns may turn out to be inappropriate, thus
making the story ironic. And as I remarked, usually elements of all three types
enter into a story.
For example, we might have a man and woman stranded on an alien planet. Their
problem is to get help. Somehow they solve it - that's The Little Tailor. The
solution turns on their discovering some fact they hadn't known, or making some
invention hitherto unheard of - that's the Man Who Learned Better. And obviously
their personal relationship meanwhile comes under boy-meets-girl.
Don't knock it: this is the structure of a lot of highly successful stories, like any
number of Heinlein's excellent novels for younger readers. And I might
immodestly mention my own The Man Who Counts, known in its paperback
version as War of the Wing- Men.
I used the same combination in The Ancient Gods, paperback titled World Without
Stars. In that case the girl never comes on stage, though the hero is obsessively in

love with her. It turns out that she died long before the story opens; and the
narrator who discovers this thereby becomes the Man Who Learned Better.
I do not want to say that Heinlein's interesting theory is necessarily right. Other
people claim there is really only one plot. Still others claim there is some different
number of basic plots, like maybe six. Still others doubt that any neat
classification actually works. To tell the truth, I'm myself inclined to that last
school of thought. I don't really believe that plots can be categorized, and in fact I
don't care whether they can. I do suggest, though, you think about Heinlein's idea
and see if you can apply it to various literary works. The practice will open your
eyes to the structure beneath all these stories.
What is the function of plot in a story?
Plots are structures. They are the sets of definite events and other developments by
which stories get from hyar to thar. A story which emphasizes background and/or
character may have very little formal plot. Cases in science fiction include
Heinlein's novels Beyond This Horizon and Starship Troopers. In contrast, his
more recent book The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress has a complicated and carefully
organized formal plot.
I'd like to repeat that one kind of book is not inherently better than another. The
amount of plot you need depends entirely on what you aim to do.
Probably the prime example of a book in which plot is all-important lies in the old-
fashioned puzzle kind of murder mystery. Characters are there of course: they're
often eccentric or otherwise larger than life - think of Sherlock Holmes or Nero
Wolf. Certainly Holmes at least is as vivid a personality as exists in fiction; and
the stories about him are among the best portraits we have of the late Victorian era.
Therefore, a strong plot is no barrier to literary value. What I want to say about the
classic detective story is just that typically it's events are so laid out that all the
clues get presented. The function of the plot is to introduce the clues.
For instance, suppose without actually saying so the author gives enough
indications for the alert reader to see that the murder must have been done by a
left-handed man. Now suppose that later on the detective finds occasion to visit a
tavern and have a drink with another character, who picks up his glass with the left
hand. That scene in the tavern may have many purposes; there may be character
exposition or social commentary or whatever. But the storyline has brought the
detective there for the principal purpose of introducing the reader to that south
paw.

Much science fiction is structurally similar to the classic mystery. Take Isaac
Asimov's robot stories. In these, the robots are constrained by three laws of
behavior built into them. The first law is that no robot may ever harm a human
being or by inaction allow a human being to suffer harm. The second law is that
the robot must obey any order given by a human being, provided this does not
conflict with the first law. The third law is that the robot must protect itself against
damage and destruction provided this does not conflict with the first or second law.
From this background Asimov derived many story plots. Typically a robot would
be behaving in some irrational fashion. It would turn out that the cause was a
conflict between the three imperatives. Thus, one robot untangled itself in a more
and more complicated web of lies. Finally the humans discovered that the robot
was striving to avoid revealing a truth which it knew would hurt a particular person
to hear.
This illustrates again how plot can be a stepping stone toward other literary values,
instead of just a rigid framework. In Asimov's story the anguish of both the robot
and the human are touchingly shown. The tragedy is a logical outcome of a
thoroughly logical plot.
Obviously this is far from being the only kind of storyline in science fiction.
Toward the opposite extreme you'll find, let's say, Harlan Ellison's I Have No
Mouth and I Must Scream. This story deals entirely with the sufferings of the
characters, who are being tormented by a giant nearly omnipotent computer and
the machines it controls. About the only hint of formal plot occurs at the end,
when the hero finds a way to liberate another victim by killing her. Yet the story is
certainly effective.
What are the requirements of a good plot, and how do you get one in the first
place?
Or as the science fiction writer is always being asked, "Where do you get those
crazy ideas?" The answer is, you get them any place - from direct experience,
reason, reflection, conversation, reading, television, or Lord knows what. Virtually
anything will suggest a story, if you have that kind of mind. What counts is what
you afterward do with that idea.
Let me offer you a couple of personal examples, not so much from egotism as
because I can't presume to speak for any other writer. Years ago when the theory
and practice of automation was still in their infancy, I read Norbert Wiener's book
Cybernetics. In passing, the author worried about what he called the second
industrial revolution. The first industrial revolution brought in powered machinery

and put most unskilled manual laborers out of a job. The second industrial
revolution, Wiener foresaw, the automation revolution, would displace the white-
collar routineer, the bookkeeper, the clerk, everybody whose work could be done
better and faster by a computer. "A-ha!" I said, and promptly wrote a story about
the cruel situation of such people in the future, people intelligent enough to
recognize that they have nothing to offer which the world wants any longer.
Since then everyone has become aware of this disturbing possibility; but I was
writing about it more than 20 years ago. I don't claim any great foresight: Norbert
Wiener had that. I merely saw his warning in terms of a story.
About that same time I spent some months batting around Europe on a bicycle. It
was a lot of fun; but as an American, I gradually got fed up with having to fill out a
form everywhere I stayed, a bit of paper for the police demanding name,
occupation, passport number, where I was last night, and so forth. Nowadays, I'm
sorry to say, we are getting more and more of that kind of a thing in this country;
but I'm speaking of a relatively innocent era. Since nobody ever checked up, I
finally took to signing false names just as a gesture of scorn. Among them was
Sam Hall. You may remember that there is a very coarse and profane and
generally grand old English ballad about a character named Sam Hall. To this day
probably moldering away in assorted European police archives is the statement that
a Sam Hall slept here.
When I came back to the States, I found myself right in the middle of the era when
Joe McCarthy was running rampant. Now, this wasn't actually as bad as academic
folklore would have you believe. Some people were looking for communist spies
under every bed, true; but others were resisting such hysteria, mocking it, and
generally giving the witch hunters a bad time. I was among these resisters, and
nobody punished me for it; rather, my blows for the cause of liberty earned me a
fair amount of money.
You see, I could imagine a dictatorial government in the future America. I could
imagine that it would us advance technology to keep day-by-day track of everyone
of its citizens. Lately it's become commonplace to worry about the evils of a
computerized national databank; but at that time there were comparatively few big
computers or memory units, and they were comparatively primitive. It didn't take
much imagination, however, to see the possibility of a dictatorship which kept a
continuously updated electronic dossier on each of us.
This thought fused with my mildly annoying experience in Europe, and the plot
came forth. A single key employee of the databank could cause all kinds of
trouble. Why would he do so? Well, for one thing, he had slowly become more
and more disgusted with the government. Hence I saw him as a middle-aged man

and a thoughtful man who had read history and knew that freedom had once
existed in America. So the developing plot suggested characterization. It
suggested background too: just what would daily life be like in a totalitarian
America? These were points to think about and work out in detail.
My quiet middle-aged hero would not rebel suddenly and dramatically; but a
particularly nasty incident might get his back up. Having access to the citizen data
machine, he could take out his resentment on it. Oh, he wouldn't sabotage; that
would be too dangerous. But suppose he slipped in a file on a fictitious character,
a violent criminal at large named - you guessed it - Sam Hall. Bit by bit, over the
months, he would add to the dossier of this nonexistent person.
So far, so good. However, I wanted my hero to do something really decisive.
What would motivate him to do that? I confess that at this point I used an old
gimmick. Still it's based on something that's happened too many millions of times
in places like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. I gave my protagonist a favorite
relative who fell under suspicion of being associated with the revolutionary
underground. The secret police took this young man away, and he didn't come
back. In a sorrow and frustrated anger my hero had to do something. Another
political policeman had lately been murdered by persons unknown. On impulse
my man slipped into the electronic files and made up account of evidence which
indicated that Sam Hall might have been the hero.
With electronic scanning and cross-correlation the authorities were soon alerted
and started to search for the suspect. You can take the story from there for
yourself. My hero keeps feeding in more and more about Sam Hall; the
underground hears of this violent anti-governmental figure; though no one has ever
seen him, Sam Hall becomes a legend among them, a symbol and rallying point.
Meanwhile, back in the computer center, my hero plants indications that various
higher-ups in the government itself may have had something to do with Sam Hall.
The syndrome of guilt by association spreads ever more chaos. This finally makes
the government vulnerable enough that it falls before a democratic insurrection.
The hero is lionized and uses his prestige to make sure that the computer and its
databank are destroyed.
I've gone into this example in so much detail because it's typical of one way that
plots develop. At least this is one way that plots develop for me.
I think your method is typical, at least of some kind of stories. How do you develop
an idea into a full-fledged story?

First I decide in a general way what story line I want. Is it to be about a man
coping with a future world he never made, or coping with the hazards of another
planet, or what? The specific concept usually makes my story line decision for me.
For instance, frequently I start by designing a strange world in considerable detail.
The story then becomes in part a Cooks tour of that world. Or I might want to
make some particular point, like "freedom is groovy," or "the Persians were more
important to world history than the Greeks," or "a conqueror can get in trouble by
acquiring too much real estate," or whatever else I have to say that looks as if it
would make an entertaining story. In all these cases I build my plot outward from
the core idea. Events are so designed that the characters will be exposed to the
different facets of the idea.
To give a specific example, let's imagine that we want to say a good word for
freedom. We might do this by having a time traveler from the slave era visit a
libertarian milieu - or vice versa, of course. In either case we'd want a narrative
line which would expose him to as many aspects of the period he is visiting as
possible. The plot should also give us a chance to show something of his own
background. This we can most readily accomplish by having him do whatever he
does in close contact with someone who belongs to the other society. If he is from
culture A for instance, the heroine might be from culture B. Their conversations
and conflicts will dramatize as well as exemplify their origins.
Things are still pretty vague, though, at this stage. What I usually do next is flesh
out the characters and background. The people and the situation have to be such
that the events can logically happen. Let me make this clear by a reductio ad
absurdum: the events of The Iliad could not have happened if the main character
had been St. Francis of Assisi rather than Achilles. And if the main character, who
got offended with Agamemnon, had been, let's say, Odysseus, events would at
least have taken a somewhat different course, even if the ending was more or less
what we now have.
Elements of character and background do more than justify a plotline. Frequently
they suggest parts of it. For instance, I may have a nicely designed planet and the
intention of using the story to show you how oddly the laws of nature operate
under special conditions. But obviously it makes quite a difference whether the
human exposed to these conditions is fat, greedy, boisterous old Nicholas Van Rijn
or suave and existentialist Dominic Flandry, to name a couple of serious
characters. Likewise, the milieu you pick is important. Van Rijn lives in a raw
pioneering era; Flandry in the twilight of an empire. So quite aside from their
personal characteristics, the possibilities open to them are different.

That answers the second question, where do you get those crazy ideas. But what
about the first question: what are the requirements of a good plot? What are the
standards to meet?
Well, again I have no simple answer. If you are a great enough writer, you can get
away with anything, like Mark Twain, whose Connecticut Yankee just happened to
arrive shortly before a solar eclipse and just happened to remember that it was due.
But we can't all be that great. Besides, no matter how fine a writer is, it does him
no harm to get his logic straight. So I'll talk a little about the requirements for a
sound workmanlike plot. When the rules need breaking, by all means break them -
however, I would say these rules are not arbitrary; they're extracted from many
centuries of experience, and therefore they should not be broken unless you
absolutely must.
The basic requirements of plot as I see them are first, logic; and second, surprise.
Let's take them up in order and afterward together.
By logic I mean merely playing fair with the reader. What happens next in your
story should be reasonable in view of what is already happened. For instance, if
the hero has been a timid mouse all his life, he may eventually become a raging
Genghis Khan type, but this won't take place overnight. In fact, in a case like this
the gradual transformation of his personality is the very core of the plot.
This idea of playing fair is what underlies the general disapproval of coincidences
which get the hero out of a tight spot. Let's say he is an American astronaut
trapped on Mars, running out of oxygen, desperately trying to improvise some
means of staying alive - and a Russian expedition that he's never heard about just
happens by and saves him, end of story. Wouldn't you as a reader feel cheated?
On the other hand, suppose he knows there's a Russian ship somewhere on Mars,
and his problem is to find a way to give it a distress call. Or suppose we have him
marooned, and the Russians chancing by and picking him up - only this isn't the
end of the story, it's the beginning. The real story then becomes the relationship of
this American taken aboard under these peculiar circumstances to the Russians.
Perhaps the story will in addition be about the relationship of all these people to
Mars, and thus symbolically will be about man's relationship to the universe as a
whole.
Is there any place in a story for coincidence?

The reader will accept coincidences when they work to the disadvantage of a hero.
In such cases, the coincidence is not a magical solution. Rather it is an extra
element thrown into the problem that the central character has to solve.
He may solve it in various ways: he may be a brawny swordsman who simply
hacks his way out of a dilemma, like Conan the Conqueror. This is legitimate,
since we have been repeatedly told and shown that Conan has the strength of ten
ordinary men. Or he may solve it by sheer doggedness, like Frodo in The Lord of
the Rings. Or he may use any of several other possible approaches, or
combinations of them. But as a rule, science fiction being somewhat cerebrally
oriented, the science fiction reader is most happy when the solution comes out of
ingenuity on the hero's part.
As said before, when the hero fails to solve his problem, you have a tragedy - or
maybe a farce, if you're writing like Wodehouse - or the hero may solve one
problem but fail on another, giving you a bittersweet ending. The principle is
always the same, though, that whatever happens ought to make sense.
The second requirement for a good plot is surprise. If the reader knows exactly
what's sure to happen next, why should he bother reading? He might, of course, be
re-reading a known and beloved story. But isn't one important reason for his love
the fact that first time around the story gave him the delicious thrill of
astonishment or the almost religious thrill of a new deep insight?
Surprise is not identical with suspense. We know, for example, that Horatio
Hornblower is not going to be killed in a given story; but we're interested to learn
what will happen to him and his fellow characters. With a top-notch writer like C.
S. Forester, we know that we won't be able to predict events much better than we
can predict them in that disorderly jumble known as real life. Something
unexpected will always come along to shock or delight us, just as something
unexpected always comes along in our everyday experience.
At the same time the novelty won't be a mere rabbit out of the hat, it will be a
logical consequence of the story premises. The reader should ideally say to
himself, "My god, what a surprise, but how natural: why didn't I see it coming?"
This is the ideal to strive for. I think it applies to every kind of writing, technical,
cookbooks, poetry, essays, fiction, you name it. What we as readers want are the
simultaneous senses of newness and of rightness. We want the author to take the
building blocks he has laid out before our eyes and make them into something we
would never have imagined for ourselves. The world is full of stone and glass; but
Salisbury Cathedral stands on its flat plain as a stunning and eternal surprise. A
Tolstoy presents his characters and lets us see aspects of them we would not have

expected, but which ring perfectly true. In its more humble fashion the formal plot
does the same kind of job, perhaps most especially these days in science fiction.
Poul Anderson has told us about plot in science fiction. This is one of a series of
films by the people who have helped make science fiction what it is.

The History Of Science Fiction After 1938: A Lecture By Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov is one of the major authors of science fiction: in spite of the fact that
he's written virtually no science fiction in the past dozen years, his works are
landmarks and building stones. He still writes - he writes for a living. He is a
compulsive writer, writing eight, nine, ten hours a day; and the volume of his
production is staggering. In 1970 his 100th book was published. His first story,
Marooned off Vesta, was published in Amazing Stories in 1939, when he was a
19-year-old student at Columbia University. He soon was turning out fiction for
the late John Campbell's Astounding Science Fiction while he pursued his
academic career. He was one of the four writers introduced in 1939, any one of
whom would've made that year significant in science fiction history. The others
were Heinlein, Sturgeon, and Van Vogt.
In 1949, Asimov earned his Ph. D. in biochemistry and joined the faculty at the
Boston University School of Medicine, but he continued to write science fiction and
fact articles. In 1958 he turned to full-time writing of articles and books about
science. He has been acclaimed as one of the finest science popularizers of all
time. His success may be due to the fact that he writes his articles and books as if
they were fiction.
It is Asimov the science fiction writer and observer we meet today. His
contribution to science fiction was not only skillfully told stories, but original
concepts: concepts like the three laws of robotics in his Robot Stories; concepts
like the robot detective which blend the detective stories and science fiction in The
Caves Of Steel and The Naked Sun; and concepts like a future history for
mankind in which man spreads his empire through the galaxy, an empire which
falls and then is brought back again to civilization in The Foundation trilogy.
Asimov fans will be pleased to learn that Asimov is alive and well and once more
writing science fiction.
Hello. You've caught me typing, but that's no surprise - I'm typing all the time.
Now I'm talking, which is only a little less likely.
The subject of the lecture is The History of Science Fiction After 1938; and that
date is not chosen by mistake. 1938 is a watershed in the history of science fiction,
perhaps the most important after 1926, when magazine science fiction first began
with Gernsback's Amazing.
John W. Campbell, Jr. became editor of Astounding Stories in 1937. It was not,
however, until 1938 that the former editor, Mr. F. Orlin Tremaine, left, and the

inventory that Mr. Tremaine had gathered, was more or less used up. Therefore, it
was in 1938 that readers began to discover Campbellesque stories, the kind of
stories that John Campbell accepted and published. And this made a great
difference.
Prior to 1938, those who wrote science fiction were primarily pulp writers in their
orientation. This perhaps sounds uncomplimentary, but it isn't meant to be. There
were a group of writers who wrote for what were then called the pulp magazines,
which published specialty literature of all sorts: westerns, romances, detective
stories, jungle stories, adventure stories, sea stories, war stories. And they paid
very little: in order to make a decent living, someone who wrote these stories had
to write a great many of them; and the only way to write a great many was to write
in many categories; and some of them wrote science fiction as well.
As a result, science fiction was heavily adventure-flavored. The writers did not
necessarily know much science outside of that which they read in the Sunday
supplements or in each other's stories. They probably had never met real scientists.
And therefore, when science entered, it was with a certain amount of inaccuracy,
certain amount of what shall I say, well, certain amount of categorical stereotypical
characters - mainly the mad scientist. He was great in these early science fiction
stories; almost every story had a mad scientist till you wondered if it was possible
to be a scientist without being mad. But the only saving grace they had was that
they all had beautiful daughters; and the hero, a sturdy, large-viewed, blonde
American, who knew no science but was great in a fight, always fell in love with
the scientist's daughter, who was pretty much helpless except for screaming.
At any rate, Campbell changed all that. Campbell himself had gone to MIT and
Duke University, had majored in physics, and had the engineering attitude. And
what he wanted were people who would write stories in which the science was
realistic - not realistic in the sense that they couldn't go out into the blue yonder;
not realistic in the sense that they couldn't extrapolate wildly; but realistic in the
sense that people who worked with science resembled people who actually worked
with science; that scientists acted the way scientists do; that engineers acted the
way engineers do; and in short that the scientific culture be represented accurately.
As a result, he tended to choose stories by people who were either scientists
themselves, who had studied science, or who were at least sufficiently well-aware
of the scientific culture to be able to speak plausibly in its terms.
Consequently, we began to find a new group of authors in science fiction, quite
different from the old. They were not primarily pulp writers; they were engineer-
oriented. And this was met with great enthusiasm on the part of the readers:
almost any change, almost any radical change is bound to generate enthusiasm,

because a certain group of readers who were jaded by what went before would
greet the new with cries of joy. Furthermore, those among the readers who could
not or would not write stories of the types that had previously been prominent were
very likely to try to write once they read stories that they particularly liked; or else
they might have been writing all along, but where as earlier editors did not like
their orientation, a new editor like Campbell might.
As a result, a flood of new writers came in beginning in 1938 and through the early
'40s. Of these by all odds the most important and the one who most nearly gave
his personal flavor to the times was Robert A. Heinlein. His first story was
published in the August 1939 issue of Astounding Stories; it was called Lifeline.
And instantly, instantly he became a favorite with the readers. And from then
through 1942 he dominated Astounding, and Astounding dominated the field as
few single authors and single magazines have ever been able to dominate the
magazine field. Heinlein is still an important writer, still a major talent.
Heinlein and those like him were indeed engineer-oriented: Heinlein himself had
gone to Annapolis and was an engineer. Van Vogt was another author - A. E. Van
Vogt - who gave great flavor to what we might call the Campbell era. Now, he
was not a scientist; and this shows how easily one can make categories that are not
really accurate. It is not possible to say that in 1938 all the earlier romantic
adventure pulp - and I stress that I'm not using the word "pulp" in a derogatory
sense - vanished and that in its place came along only Heinlein-type engineer-
oriented stories. For one thing there, Heinlein couldn't write enough, and other
writers weren't as good as he was; and you couldn't fill a magazine with that alone.
And if you wanted to, it wouldn't work anyway, because nothing is so good that
will please all by itself. And as a matter of fact, even after 1938 you had the
colorful adventure story of the previous era continuing.
E. E. Smith, who was a leading light of the first period with his Skylark stories,
continued in very much the same way and even a larger scale with Galactic Patrol,
which appeared in 1938, and with succeeding stories based on the Galactic Patrol
universe. A. E. Van Vogt, whom I just mentioned, also had incredibly exciting
adventure stories in which the science was sometimes not quite comprehensible.
There were other writers as well who came in then, or who having come in earlier
now changed more or less gladly to meet the Campbell style: those were Sprague
De Camp, and Theodore Sturgeon, and Alfred Bester who was a good example of
one who didn't write in John Campbell's magazine but who was also writing in the
new style and who eventually became a major talent.
If Heinlein and Van Vogt were par excellence, the writers of what we now call,
lots of us, the golden age of science fiction, I must mention that a third writer, who

from hindsight would seem to go along with those two, was none other that myself,
Isaac Asimov. I've never been afflicted with false modesty, or true modesty either
for that matter; and so I might as well say that during the 1940s I wrote Robot
Stories as an example of engineer-oriented science fiction, and The Foundation
stories which were rather in the older tradition of the wide-spanning galactic
romance. Both were more successful in later time than they were at the moment -
that's why I say in hindsight, looking back now it seems to me that I was a major
entry in the race then, although at the time I must admit I was never aware of being
anything but a minor writer.
In any case, what Campbell had done was to create a science fictional world that
was very largely a consensus: not everybody wrote in the Campbell background;
those who didn't, didn't always write. But the most remarkable stories of the
period did create a world of computers, of trips to outer space, of missiles, of a
science-important culture. As a matter of fact, the science fictional world of the
1940s was very like in many respects the real world of the 1960s, to the point
where to those of us who remember the golden age, we are now living in a science
fictional world, in one which Campbell's science fiction did significantly succeed
in creating. In other words, no one is going to say that science fiction readers
brought a man to the moon all by themselves, but we can say that the kind of
science fiction that was published in 1940 helped prepare the public for the
acceptance of programs to take a man to the moon. Many of the people involved
in it undoubtedly did read science fiction; many of the people involved in it were
influenced one way or another by science fiction, even if they hadn't read it. And
so we in a real sense, we science fiction writers and readers helped create the
present world.
In a sense we also helped destroy our own, at least the type of science fiction that
appeared in the 1940s. As time went on, there was a reaction - and perhaps we can
date it from the invention of the atomic bomb, or its first use in 1945. As a matter
of fact, we had predicted it: the atom bomb was a very easy thing to predict. Cleve
Cartmill in 1944 wrote a story called Deadline, which was sufficiently accurate in
its description of the atom bomb and its consequences to get himself and John
Campbell investigated by military intelligence. Naturally, they found nothing out
of the way, but it does show just exactly how accurate the discipline a science
fictional imagination can be. Heinlein himself wrote Blowups Happen in 1941,
which realistically describes what an atomic energy plant might be like, even
though the reality is different in some ways. He wrote Solution Unsatisfactory
under a pen name Anson MacDonald, in which he accurately predicted the nuclear
stalemate that followed the invention of the atomic bomb, and did that even before
the invention of the atomic bomb.

Nevertheless, although some science fiction enthusiasts, including myself, thought

that the atomic bomb would bring about a vast increase in science fictional
audience, it brought about only a small increase really. And as time went on and
more and more of the science fictional predictions came to reality, its effect on
increasing the sales of science fiction magazines proved increasingly minimal.
Well, now that sounds decreasingly minimal. It did less and less good.
There were several reasons for this: in the first place, science fiction did increase
and intensify, but not in the magazine direction. In the late '40s and early '50s the
hardcover publishers began to put out science fiction novels. Science fiction began
to appear with increasing frequency in softcovers, the paperbacks. And there were
new magazines: one, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, originally just
The Magazine of Fantasy, appeared in 1949; and another, Galaxy, appeared in
1950. The former was under the editorship of J. Francis McComas and Anthony
Boucher; the second was under the editorship of Horace Gold. Both represented
reactions to Campbell's Astounding. In both cases there was a greater tendency to
dismiss the engineering aspect of science fiction. The Magazine of Fantasy and
Science Fiction emphasized literary quality, style - the mere fact that they had the
word "fantasy" in the title showed that they were less interested strict science
fiction. Horace Gold was interested in more in the reaction to scientific advance
than to the scientific advance itself, which made in some cases for more
sophisticated stories. For instance, Wyman Guin wrote a story called Beyond
Bedlam, which described a world in which schizophrenia was handled by allowing
everybody to have more than one personality alternately in their bodies; Alfred
Bester wrote The Demolished Man, an extraordinarily interesting novel and an
unusual one which detailed the kind of society that would follow if telepathy were
commonplace; Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth published their novel Gravy
Planet, which was eventually, which eventually appeared in book form as Space
Merchants, in which a detailed picture of an overcrowded society in which
advertising was dominant, was pictured.
These were not Campbell-type stories. Once again, the center of interest had
moved away from scientists themselves towards society. It wasn't back to the
adventurous hero; it was towards society. Science fiction became even more
socially significant. And Campbell's Astounding, while continuing to be the most
successful single magazine in the field, was no longer unchallenged. Now and to
the present day there are three important magazines in the field, which maintaining
the position it started with: Astounding Science Fiction has changed its name to
Analog. Galaxy has had a number of editors, as has had The Magazine of Fantasy
and Science Fiction, but in both cases the original orientation is essentially still
there. Galaxy is still more interested in what we might call social satire, the

pictures of societies under radically different conditions than our own; Magazine of
Fantasy and Science Fiction is still interested in emphasizing style and is perhaps a
little more experimental than the other two magazines, a little more apt to publish
the stories which one can with only difficulty recognize as science fiction. And all
three serve the public well. Nevertheless, all three are also only marginally
successful from a financial standpoint: science fiction remains today, magazine
science fiction remains today where it was in 1938 - that magazine is fortunate if it
can be slightly in the black. And yet, science fiction on the whole has managed to
spread out both extensively and intensively. We live now in a world which takes
science fiction for granted, a world which science fiction helped create.
An indication of the manner in which the science fiction world of the 1940s
became the real world of the 1960s can be taken from a personal example. I could
have written an article on colonization of the Moon in the 1940s, and I could also
have written the very same article in the 1960s. The difference is this: in the 1940s
I would have been able to publish the article only in Astounding Science Fiction; in
the 1960s I could and did publish the article in The New York Times - same article,
but what had been only a science fictional idea only smiled at by "sensible" people,
was now thoroughly accepted in even the most respectable of the publications.
In addition, another indication of the broadening scope of science fiction
acceptance is the fact that hardcover and softcover publications of science fiction
increased steadily through the 1960s. What's more, the visual media also were
represented: as early as 1947, I believe, Destination Moon appeared as a movie.
Robert Heinlein had been involved in it writing the story. Chesley Bonestell, the
great science fiction realist illustrator - in other words, he illustrated other-
planetary scenes with science fiction interest but in a thoroughly scientific manner
-was also involved.
The number of science fictional movies that appeared after Destination Moon were
for the large part rather primitive; but increasingly, one would find major
productions of value: War of the Worlds, for instance. And then in 1967 perhaps
there appeared Fantastic Voyage, and later still what is until now the real climax of
the science fictional movie, 2001, on which Arthur Clarke worked.
In television too there have been increasing examples of science fiction, of which
the best obviously - I say obviously because to me it's obvious - was Star Trek,
which for three seasons gathered an enormous following; not enough to keep it on
indefinitely (nothing can stay on television indefinitely) but certainly much larger
than the magazines ever had.
Indeed, the magazines themselves were directly competed with in a new way:
increasingly there are collections of original stories appearing in anthology form in

softcovers or even in hard covers, and more and more of these are appearing
periodically. For instance, Damon Knight edits Orbit, which is a collection of
original science fiction stories. Robert Silverberg is now going to put out an
annual collection of original science fiction stories published by Doubleday.
This is important because one needs to have what we might call room for
education of science fiction writers. The science fiction magazines not only served
as a source of science fiction, but also as a proving ground for science fiction
writers. A magazine that comes out every month and has to have four or five short
stories in every issue offers an unexampled opportunity for the writing amateur to
practice on and eventually make his mark. If the magazines failed, if people were
expected to write only novels, it would be more difficult than it sounds: a novel is a
large investment of time and effort and represents a huge jump for the amateur.
The anthology of originals will supplement the magazines in that respect and even
eventually perhaps, though I hope not because I myself may have a sentimental
attachment to the magazines, eventually perhaps replace them.
There is a drain on science fiction writers these days: that is, there is a greater
tendency for the magazine science fiction writer to switch to the movies or to
television. There is a tendency to switch to science writing: the American public is
more interested in science than it used to be, and it reads more nonfiction on
science.
On the other hand, there is also an influx of a new kind of writer now; a writer who
is not primarily interested in science even - maybe even anti-science - but who
recognizes in science fiction an unexampled market for novel ideas, for
experimentation. We have what we now call the new wave, composed of stories
that represent experimentation, which are daring not only in their ideas but in their
forms and in their treatments. And we have writers, such as Harlan Ellison,
Norman Spinrad, Roger Zelazny, J. G. Ballard, and others whose stories might not
have sold at all in the 1940s and 1950s but are now doing very well.
This is not to say that there aren't authors today who aren't writing stories in the
strict Campbell tradition: Ben Bova for instance; Larry Niven - in fact, Larry
Niven's recent Dream World might easily have been written by Hal Clement in the
early 1940s.
To me, however, the real climax of science fiction is the fact that on July 20th Neil
Armstrong set foot on the Moon. I was watching on television; and the appearance
of Neil Armstrong in his spacesuit, the spaceship from which he descended, the
quality of the terrain - everything about it was precisely what I had been reading
about in the 1940s, precisely what I have seen in science fiction illustrations,
precisely what I saw in Destination Moon. The world of the 1940s that I had been

so immersed in had come to actual life exactly in 1969. That, to me, was my
climax in science fiction.

Science Fiction And The Mainstream: A Lecture By John Brunner
John Brunner collected his first rejection slip at 13 and sold his first paperback
novel while he was still in school. Today, only some 40 years old, he has written
more than 60 books, creating such novels as The Jagged Orbit; Stand on
Zanzibar, which won a Hugo Award in 1969; and The Sheep Look Up.
In England, where Brunner lives, science fiction never has been so rigorously
segregated as in the United States; and he is unusually well-equipped to discuss
science fiction and the mainstream.
Let me get one thing clear straight away: for me the label science fiction is
primarily a book sellers convenience - it tells the guy who runs the store on which
particular shelf he should put this particular book.
Im not a science fiction writer, (quotes on and off); Im a writer, punt. I have
done practically everything that one can do in the writing field short of technical
manuals and advertising copy; and I suppose if you count jacket blurbs as ad copy,
Ive even done that. Let me, in fact, read you a science fiction poem to illustrate
this point that there is no discontinuity in my own mind between the different
things that I do. Its called What We Have Here, because I found scrawled up in a
hallway of a slum apartment building in New York in 1968 What we have here is
a failure to communicate.
When those creatures who have men for ancestors set off in the amber glow of the
dying galaxy in search of fellow mourners for its funeral, they came very shortly to
Arcturus and there found bones in heaps around machines which had been
listening to the sky a million years; and likewise found at Regulus and Rigel and
Deneb and Polaris and Denebola and Canopus and Capella and Achernar and 60
systems in the Magellanic clouds, bones, piled up bones; and electronic ears,
listening and listening while no one spoke.
I know some people find it strange that a science fiction writer should also be a
poet of some small standing. But to me it is not in the least puzzling, because for
example I admire above all contemporary British writers Anthony Burgess, whose
most outstanding quality is his versatility. It is not that he can be relied on every
time to produce a unique masterpiece; its far more that everything he does, from
his historical novel about Shakespeare to his fine one-volume guide to Joyces
work, in everything he does he displays an unfailing level of competence and
craftsmanship.
And when it comes to what Dale Mullen has so graphically called the science
fiction ghetto, one has to recognize that its of relatively recent creation. People

who read Anthony Burgesss work take it for granted that since he is a talented
novelist living in a world thats been changed out of recognition by the impact of
science and technology, he should now and then hit on a science fiction theme, as
he did in for example A Clockwork Orange.
And this I think is the way it ought to be. In earlier times I dont honestly believe
there was any discontinuity between the audience that Doyles books reached
whether he was writing the Sherlock Holmes cannon or his historical novels I
honestly dont believe that The Lost World, which is an out-and-out science fiction
novel, startled or displeased his readers. Granted, there may have been some
difference in the audience between H. G. Wellss socially conscious novels of the
present day and his scientific romances; but Im certain equally there was a very
considerable overlap.
It seems sensible from this to assume that there is always an audience for fantastic
and marvelous tales. And in fact, if one looks back at the historical record, it
makes far better sense to try and trace a continuity of an audience of this kind than
it does to try and trace some kind of literary genealogy in which a writer of one
generation specializing in or dabbling in marvel tales influenced directly a writer
of the following generation. I would say, in short, that The Voyages of Sir John
Mandeville, which were the equivalent of the bestseller back in the Middle Ages,
would be far closer to the linear tradition that gave rise to science fiction than
would, for example, Bishop Godwins book about Domingo Gonsales voyage to
the moon.
In each generation there is a greater or lesser interest in fantastic and marvelous
events. Some expansive cultures are excited about strange far-off places and future
times. Others, perhaps more introverted, perhaps more frightened, tend to shy
away from the strange. But the continuity of the audience for fantastic literature
has come down through the ages, right the way back to Lucian of Somasata and on
through, oh one might mention Gullivers Travels; one might mention Rider
Haggards She. Essentially, the impulse seems to be the same, although the nature
in which it does manifest varies according to the culture.
It is, I think, absolutely no coincidence that regular readers of science fiction also
enjoy historical novels, such as Mary Renos novels about Theseus, The Bull From
the Sea. I think it is also no coincidence that the only definitive biographical novel
about Roger Bacon, Doctor Mirabilis, has been written by a man who got his
grounding in science fiction by James Blish.
I myself have a tremendous interest in periods of history which I was not taught
much when I was at school because they were out of fashion and didnt seem to
relate directly to our present-day culture. But the inclination towards science

fiction tends to imply also an inclination towards the fantastic, the marvelous, the
extraordinary; and the barriers between science fiction, so-called, and the
mainstream not only of literature but of entertainment in general, are being very
steadily eroded, thanks particularly I would say to the use of what we would
formerly have called science fiction imagery in television series like The Avengers
or in movies like the Bond thrillers. What would a few years ago have been
dismissed as hopelessly fantastic is done so realistically that one is convinced these
gadgets could exist in present time.
Still, more important in the erosion of the barriers between science fiction and the
rest of fiction is a rapprochement of styles, which is and has been for some years
very conspicuous. On the one hand, one might sight people from outside the field,
like Kurt Vonnegut and Anthony Burgess who have used science fiction themes.
Equally, on the other side, one might sight people inside science fiction who have
used techniques drawn from elsewhere: Jimmy Ballard in England, for example,
has drawn quite heavily on stylistic effects, some of which can be traced back to
Jorge Luis Borges, and many of which are reflected in contemporary poetry. Brian
Aldiss has made a deliberate adaptation of Joyces most extreme styles in the book
of his called Barefoot In the Head.
And for me, this is an excellent thing. While it is true that the standard
chronological narrative form has served writers whose shoestrings I am not worthy
to unlatch, it is equally true that the matter and the manner must be matched in
whatever kind of writing. For many years science fiction has been stylistically
rather conservative. In the hands of Wells, who was not writing category sf, it was
not. I think it is an extremely healthy trend that the stylistic techniques evolved in
the so-called mainstream are now being applied to science fiction, just as I feel it is
very healthy that writers in the mainstream are falling upon science fiction themes,
and instead of treating them with the disdain which was typical perhaps as recently
at 20 years ago, are according them as much intensity, as much application, and as
much imagination as the more contemporary subjects, the more conventional
subjects, I would say, to which they have also applied their craft.
There is one quite serious problem, of course, which develops when one attempts
to apply experimental or so-called way out techniques to science fiction. Many
people in science fiction are excellent on science and not so good on the literary
side. Id like to see us go back to the original meaning of the word masterpiece
it was the piece of work which an apprentice had to produce at the end of his
time in order to prove to his teachers that he was a complete master of the
techniques of his specialty and was fit to go out and teach them to other people.
After that he was free to do and do his own thing. And in connection with whats
been so often termed the New Wave in science fiction, Id like to underline one

extremely important point: before one breaks the rules in a field where giants have
walked, one must know why those rules were created in the first place. The
example which I usually adduce is to say that if it were not for the fact that Picasso
was one of the half-dozen great portrait painters of his generation, he could never
have become the seminal influence which he is on modern art.
I myself have tried to adopt this particular posture in my own work. I find, as I
said at the beginning, no discontinuity in my own mind between the various types
of things that I do. Ive written novels like Stand On Zanzibar and The Jagged
Orbit which involve some quite unconventional narrative techniques; and yet I
would not claim that these are particularly new - they are adaptations. I would
further say that I have shown in some sense I can do the standard narrative bit
standing on my head. In fact, I go to these more exotic narrative techniques
primarily in order to make points which simply can not be made in any other way
in my estimation. A book like Double, Double, which is an updated horror story; a
book like Timescoop, which is an, I suppose, a kind of science fiction black
comedy, belongs to me in the same continuum of my work as do the more literarily
ambitious and pyrotechnically novels such as Stand On Zanzibar.
I find, therefore, that the term New Wave is basically an optical illusion. The style
one adapts presumably is the one which is best adapted to the material one is
working with. But I stress, before breaking rules one must, absolutely must
understand why those rules were made in the first place; otherwise, there is a
tremendous risk of confusing and even losing the reader.
Let me again refer to my own experience vis a vis the audience for science fiction.
There was a time when, if I went to a party and with a stranger, I got into the usual
what do you do/what do you do routine. And I said, I write; and she said it
could be a he, but it was usually due to trying to chat up an attractive bird she
said, Really, what kind of thing do you write? Id say, Mostly science fiction.
There would be one of two responses: either shed say, Oh groovy, I read a lot of
science fiction; I never met anybody who wrote it before, which would be fine; or
else there would be a dead pause, and shed say, Oh, I dont read much science
fiction, Im afraid. But that I think has changed, because now the response is far
more likely to be, Oh groovy, I saw 2001, or possibly The Andromeda Strain or
something of that kind. And I must say that this is very much of a conversation
stopper, because on this basis the person in question almost invariably thinks that
he or she knows all there is to be known about science fiction; and this is a terribly
false impression.
In fact, science fiction is infinitely wider than most peoples preconception of it;
and its an integral part of the spectrum of fiction. As Ive already said, it makes

far better sense to view the continuity of the audience for tales of wonder, marvel
tales, whatever you call them, than it does to try and trace a direct literary
genealogy for the writers of the present day.
Similarly, living as we do in a world which is likely to change out of recognition
while our backs are turned, we should not be surprised to find that visitors from
another star system feature prominently in Slaughterhouse 5 by Kurt Vonnegut; we
should not be at all surprised to find that what were known as cyborgs a few years
ago in the pulp science fiction magazines turn up in novels like John Hearses The
Child Buyer. And equally, we should not in the least be astonished to discover that
somebody like Philip K. Dick in The Man In the High Castle has taken the full
range of contemporary formal narrative structure and applied it to a world in which
history turned out totally different from what it did in real life. If you are not
familiar with The Man In the High Castle, I should indicate that it is set in the
world where the Axis powers conquered the United States.
Well, these rather brief indications I think could be summed up by saying that so
long as there is an overlap for the audience of various types of fiction, one can not
possibly hope to create a definition of science fiction, pure and simple, which is
any more exclusive than the traditional rain storm. For me, this is a very good
thing indeed. I come to science fiction conventions; I travel to many countries;
meet science fiction readers who speak diverse languages, whove read my books
in Italian or Portuguese or German or Swedish; and one factor remains constant: I
get feedback. I would far rather have feedback from people whose horizons are
not limited by reading nothing but science fiction. It impresses me a great deal
more if the person who has just said, I like such and such a book of mine, then
proceeds to discuss poetry or the novel in general or the question of history or the
question of politics, than if the person then proceeds to discuss nothing else but the
work of my fellow science fiction writers. Im a great believer in broadening
horizons to the maximum possible. And I have learned the hard way that it is
literally out of the question for a science fiction writer to imagine anything more
extraordinary than what is bound to appear in tomorrow mornings paper.
I hope very much that under the impact of the growing interchange between
category science fiction and mainstream fiction the walls of what Dale Mullen
called the science fiction ghetto will finally be eroded away for good and all,
because I like to go wherever my imagination takes me.
We do, lets face it, live in a world which to our grandparents, even to our parents,
would be impossibly fantastic; and yet, our present and our past coexist to a degree
which has never been possible before in history. Oh for goodness sake, what
would Geoffrey Chaucer have thought if hed known that his Canterbury Tales

were going to become a long-running musical play? Our present and our past
overlap, and so too does our future. And its been very rightly said, It behooves
us all to be interested in the future, because that is where were going to spend the
rest of our lives.

Theme In Science Fiction: A Discussion Between Gordon Dickson & James Gunn
Theme In Science Fiction: A Discussion Between Gordon Dickson & James

Gunn
Gordon Dickson is a hardy, hard-working, hard-living 50-year-old Minnesotan,

born in Canada of Scots ancestry. He studied creative writing at the University of
Minnesota, and has been a full-time writer since 1950. He has written more than
200 short stories and some 30 novels, one of which, Soldier, Ask Not, won a Hugo
Award in 1964. He was my predecessor as President of the Science Fiction
Writers of America; and like me, he is greatly concerned about the role of theme in
science fiction.
[James Gunns questions are italicized; Gordon Dicksons answers appear in

roman text]
What are the distinguishing characteristics that really distinguish mainstream

fiction from science fiction, or science fiction from mainstream fiction?
Well, by and large, its actually the concern of science fiction versus the concern of
mainstream fiction. The hallmark of science fiction has actually always been its
theme. The theme of science fiction has always been a far-out matter of hard-
core science fiction; and its is far-outedness that attracts the solid science fiction
reader and repels the occasional or the mainstream reader.
The casual science fiction reader finds the concepts unsettling or disturbing.
Well, generally, the job of the science fiction reader is to put faces on daydreams
and nightmares, both.
The science fiction writer?
The science fiction writer this is essentially what he does. And a lot of people
are shy of having faces put on their daydreams, self-conscious about it; or, and
scared of having faces put on their nightmares; in other words, having them
rendered realistic.
Do you think it has something to do with the fact that the casual reader finds in
science fiction that the basis for what he believes are fixed and sound have been
cut out from under him?

By and large, this is it, yes. The whole thematic approach of science fiction is to
take something so far out of context that there is no familiar ground to stand on.
Now, this is an advantage for, as I say, the core reader; and its an advantage for
the writer himself, because he gets it so far out of context that its everyday
connotations dont mess the picture up. But as I say, its bothersome or rather
you said its bothersome to the occasional reader because he finds no place
where he can stand.
What were some of the themes of science fiction which traditionally have, science
fiction has dealt with, uniquely?
Well, theres quite a list of them. To begin with, theres the theme of far traveling:
the wonders of the Earth and the universe. Jules Vernes 20,000 Leagues Under
the Sea. This has always been with us; and this is one of the main and early
themes of science fiction.
In this kind of story, the reader finds himself in a place where customs are
different, where change is what he must accommodate himself to.
Thats right, where things wonderful and terrible are happening. And of course he
takes this voyage from the security of his own reading chair. But if its too real, if
its too different, if it implies a reality that may come to pass, again it frightens
him. Or it is capable of frightening him.
Time travel, for example, is a case its all very well to think about traveling in
time; it sounds rather exciting. How about going back and seeing the pyramids
being built; how about going forward and seeing the wonders of the future. But
you start to entertain the thought of what if somebody went back and killed your
grandfather, and you never, as a result, were never born. And the concept becomes
uncomfortable.
And then theres the time travel into the future, as in The Time Machine; and this
can be just as unsettling, dont you think?
Well, yes the whole idea, its Usually when these ideas first come out, its, when
they come on stage completely without warning, they have a tendency to frighten
and attract. Usually the people who write them and read them in their original
forms are people who are looking for mind stretching possibilities. But the
average person tends to come back from that. For example, one of the strong
themes is the wonders of science, the wonderful inventions.

Here again, Jules Vernes 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the submarine, so on, so
forth. At first gasp they seem interesting. But then the question is, you know,
what would happen if: what if the Nautilus should pop up out of nowhere
And sink our ship. [G laughs]
Thats right [D laughs], ram it and sink it. And as a matter of fact, of course,
Nautilus-like ships made most of the difference in the World War I and World War
II Atlantic sea traffic, when they did become real monsters, the submarines.
The mad scientist is the special case of the wonderful invention.
Yes. In fact, well, hes almost a theme in himself, simply because of the very
strong things that have been done, the very early things that have been done: The
Island of Dr. Moreau, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man all these were, well,
classics in their own right. And they all centered around the, well, around the line
that crops up in the movie The Invisible Man: He meddled with things that man
was not meant to know.
Beyond that, one goes into the kind of terror man has, I think, of the not just the
scientist himself but the product of his science, the technology, and technology out
of control.
Yes, the galloping technology - technology is a monster in itself. This is

something of course that has began to worry the hardcore science fiction writers
and their readers as themes, as I say, in the early 50s. It began to hit home to the
more general public, well, in the mid-60s and even recently.
But the concept of what might come out of Pandoras box.
Oh yes. The old question of perhaps it would be safer if we didnt have scientists
around they might uncover things that are too dangerous.
Pandoras box, of course is an old fable, but its still with us and very much still
with us.
As I remember, the last thing out of Pandoras box was hope.
Thats right.

There still, you know, is in science fiction this theme of hope, is it not, in the terms
of progress?
Yes. Generally speaking, people who are close to science, or people who are close
to the science element in science fiction, maintain their hope and maintain their
faith in science. The you find them going around and explaining that while there
are bad effects, most of the good effects are yet to come.
H. G. Wells, I suppose, really was the great prophet of progress who has made
progress one of his great concerns in some of his early works, such as The Time
Machine.
Thats right, he was Well, of course he was not the hard-science science fiction
writer that Verne was, and admitted he wasnt. Both men pointed out this
difference in their work. And he was a utopianist: for example, in his Men Like
Gods, in which a number of people of his day are sort of trapped forward into time
and find a sort of superhuman race living that has gone beyond ordinary times,
troubles, worries, so on and so forth.
Now, of course, this has been matched, this utopian attitude of Wells has gone on
to be matched by a dystopian or anti-utopian attitude by, during the last 20 or 30
years, by a lot of our writers.
Incidentally, it is interesting to notice that the, essentially in the field, there are
more centrists among the writers Pohl as in contrast to Vonnegut, for example.
While they wrote dystopian, while Pohl wrote dystopian, anti-utopian novels, they
are much less humanly bitter than what has been written by a lot of people who are
outside the mainstream of science fiction itself, like Huxley.
Its almost as if the mainstream writers were saying man inevitably is doomed by
his circumstances, whereas the science fiction writers say, Things will be
difficult, but by god, man will blunder through.
Yeah. [D laughs] Its awfully hard, of course, for a science fiction writer that sees
an infinite possibility of, well, an infinity of possibilities of worlds for men from
the alternate universes, to an unlimited future in any one of countless directions, to
see men as being doomed. Its almost as if he, the statistics against it were too
heavy.
One of the things that came out of Pandoras box, as I recall, was war, was it not?

Thats right. Lets see, this has been one of the major themes of science fiction,
the Armageddon, in particular: the picture of a last war, of final war that will sort
of clear the stage beyond which possibly there may be a new and better human race
emerging.
We can go back to H. G. Wells for that as well, can we not, for The War In the Air
and Things to Come
Thats right.
and I think even When the Sleeper Wakes.
Yes, theyre all very good examples. And of course Things to Come is almost a
definitive example there was at the time not only as a book but as a movie. And
as you know this obsessed people when World War II came along. Even before
World War II, we got Final Blackout by L. Ron Hubbard. And after World War II,
the number of cataclysmic stories, stories in which the world is wiped out by war
as well as by other means well get to that in a moment
Classic story by Ted Sturgeon called Thunder and Roses
Oh yes, thats right.
I recall, about the final it was in 1946 or 47, I believe, the launching of an
atomic war and the decision by the characters in this particular story to withhold
the retaliation so that all mankind will not be wiped out.
Thats right. I believe, in fact, he did a song along that...
Yes, there is within it I think a song, Thunder and Roses.
Yes, thats right. He said that thatd been done on record. I tried to get him to sing
it himself one time up at Milford, and he wouldnt do it.
Beyond war, beyond Armageddon which science fiction as a whole tends to regard
as being part of mans future in some sense; beyond that in a way we have
cataclysm, total destruction, which itself is a theme of science fiction.
Yes, perhaps the biggest in a way. When Worlds Collide, for example, by Balmer
and Wilie; and, oh let me see No Blade of Grass, of course.

By John Christopher.
By John Christopher.
In which the destruction of
All living things.
all living, all growing things.
All growing things, thats right, yes, which means the world will starve to death.
But the idea of the total destruction of the world is not here, again, this is
interesting how time changes things this isnt anywhere near as shocking to us
now as it was when these books were first written.
One of the persistent themes in science fiction have been the unusual powers that
man might develop, the super powers they might even be considered to go back
to the original myths of, fairy tales of mankind.
Yes. Well, The Invisible Man that we talked about earlier is a good example of
one.
The cloak of invisibility.
Yes. This is the, one of the ancient dreams, you know: If I could somehow be
there but nobody could see me type of thing. All, almost all the wish fulfillment
stories
The kind of seven-league boots might be on
Thats right, teleportation, oh, such as in Harry Harrisons Matter Transmitter

novel recently Oh, what are some of the others Theres
The mental control over people, for instance, or things or events. My own book,
The Reluctant Witch, and
The Reluctant Witch is a very good example.

And The World of Null-A, in which we have superpowers transmission,

teleportation and telekinesis as well.
This concept of strange talents, the development of one aspect of superior ability in
an individual or in a group of individuals merges in a sense into another theme:
the concept of the superior man, the superman, who is superior in all ways.
The superman is a bundle of strange talent, or a bundle of higher talents. Usually

the difficulty in dealing with a superman well, the basic difficulty is the one
thats been stated a number of times; and that is that just as an ape cant imagine a
man, its impossible for a man to really imagine a superman.
What you usually do is hunt for a different dimension, a different added dimension
to him. In Dorsai, the first book of the Dorsai cycle, I have an effective superman
in the hero Donald Graham. What he is, hes an intuitional superman: in other
words, he doesnt have to follow through the chain of logic, a to b to c and so on to
z; he can jump directly from a to z. In other words, z is implied by a.
Beyond the superman, we have another theme: the theme of the alien, the person
who is completely or the creature who is completely unlike man.
The alien has been a fascinating thematic field for science fiction writers for some
time. It opened two doors: well the beginning actually, back with War of the
Worlds
H. G. Wellss...
H. G. Wellss War of the Worlds
one of the early novels.
Yes.
And the contemporary example of that might be Robert Heinleins The Puppet
Masters.
Yes, The Puppet Masters. Again, we have the invasion of an inimical alien force
that is intending to take us over one way or another. H. G. Wellss Martians were
simply out to conquer Earth; Heinleins puppet masters were out to dominate and

parasitize, become parasites on individual human beings. And as a spine-chilling

exercise, it was very excellent.
On the other hand, simply because the Martians in H. G. Wells story came earlier,
I think they had more shock value, since they came on a readership that was really
essentially unprepared for this
That, I think, was the first novel of alien, of aliens at all
I think so.
Certainly of alien invasion.
We have strange creatures, but we dont have extraterrestrials, which is what these
were. We have Well, of course, the alien invasion, the alien attack, the alien as
an inimical being, is only half of the alien contact question. Another question, one
that is very interesting, is the matter of the aliens from which we learn, or the
aliens who instruct us, or simply the aliens who are equal to us but whom we dont
understand, or who misunderstand us.
Or whom we can interrelate with in some useful fashion, if we can just learn to live
with them.
Thats right.
Stories like Murray Leinsters First Contact. And I think you wrote a story
Dolphins Way.
Oh, Dolphins Way, yes. This is one in which the more intelligent aliens, the more
advanced aliens from the stars finally land on Earth to give a helping hand, but
they walk right past the human being and extend the helping hand to the
dolphins
Who may be, and is in their estimation, more intelligent and more promising than
human beings.
More civilized.
More civilized, right.

And then of course theres this matter of alien environment, which is totally
fascinating. It just occurs to me, we didnt discuss this earlier, but whats this
recent novel by Joanna Russ?
And Chaos
And Chaos Died.
And Chaos Died.
This is essentially an alien environment novel.
There is a story I think by Clifford Simak, the concept of the lopers a kind of
creature, a wolf-like creature of super ability on Jupiter.
Thats right, able to withstand the gravity and the pressure and everything like that.
And the cold and so forth. And two, a human being and a dog who get
transplanted in sense their mental states into these creatures to explore the
surface of Jupiter; and then they find the experience so, so thrilling, so rewarding
that they dont want to go back.
Yes. That story by the way is a fine example of Cliffs particular talent for
handling the situation, because he describes the surface of Jupiter as if it was, as
its seen through human eyes and its totally forbidding. And then he describes it
as seen through the eyes of these
Lopers.
lopers and its completely enthralling. And very few writers could do that off
the cuff.
One of the basic novels of an alien in an alien environment is Hal Clements

Mission of Gravity, in which the basic problem is an adaptation to a different
environment.
Yes. Of course the thing about Mission of Gravity, like all of Hal Clements
books, is that it was so thoroughly researched and so thoroughly worked out: the
physical science in it is unimpeccable not unimpeccable its impeccable. [D

laughs] Very few writers will go to the trouble to work things out in this
tremendous detail.
As you know, the heroes were something like little 6 to 9 woolly caterpillars, but
about as strong as, they say, a full-grown polar bear would be on this world, simply
because they operate under this tremendously crushing gravity. At the same time
they were very vulnerable in their home territory: if they reared up half their
length, they risked a fatal fall.
Because the gravity was several hundred times that were familiar with.
Yes, thats right.
And the story itself, as I recall it, deals with the trip to the equator where the rapid
spinning of this world neutralized much of the effect of gravity, and it was only,
what, 2 or 3 times that on Earth.
Thats right. And these little woolly caterpillar fellows from near the pole had to
overcome all sorts of old habits, because they were like men on the Moon they
discovered they could jump amazing heights and fall amazing distances without
being hurt. And this was against instinct, you know: they werent used to, as I say,
lifting their head more than a fraction of an inch off the ground.
The value of this for the science fiction reader, I think, was that he begins to
wonder what kinds of prejudices, preconceptions he has which are equally
conditioned by the kind of environment which he finds himself.
Thats exactly it. You start to consider how it must be like under that kind of
gravitation, and you almost have to find yourself considering what its like under
your own gravitation, and realizing that, how it has conditioned not merely man
but all the animal and vegetable life here on earth.
This is why the themes of this sort is so valuable well get into that later.
One of the persistent themes that has been common in science fiction ever since
R.U.R., I think, the Karel Capek play, man and the machine has run throughout.
Man and the machine man of course Machine followed the same pattern that
men and science ran: at first it looked marvelous; then there was worry whether the

machine would run away with men, which as a matter of fact several hundred years
ago it threatened during the Industrial Revolution, when
Then there came another honeymoon in which the machine looked like it would
solve all of mans problems, or at least a great many of them. And R.U.R.., the
play from which the word, in which the word robots first appeared, opened up a
whole new galaxy of science fictional possibilities, actually. From this has come
oh, a number of stories: Isaac Asimovs stories on robotics
I, Robot and The Rest Of the Robots.
Thats right. And more important is his own thinking on the robotic question from
which came the three laws of robotics, which has been incorporated in the thinking
of most people who were seriously working with robotics nowadays.
Beyond man and the machine, I think the concern of science fiction in large is to
consider mans total environment: the kind of thing that he constructs around him
or in which he finds himself, in which he must become a part of in some way.
This is something that of course is our present environment has begun to become
a concern generally. Science fiction attacked this from two angles, got concerned
with it as a theme from two angles: one was man and his environment on Earth
here would he dominate it, would it dominate him; and also, how would man
shape up or face up to alien environments, environments on other worlds would
he dominate them or would they dominate him.
I had two short stories now in which we see human children essentially being
captured by the alien environment. And theres been some novels on it
A novel like Frank Herberts Dune, for instance.
Dune is an excellent example of man and environment. Here is a case where man
dominates the alien environment by living under almost inhuman stresses. We
have a completely desert planet where life is only possible by conserving literally
every drop of water and using and reusing and reusing it.
Right. In part, the environment gets down to the man-made environment that we
find in a story such as Fritz Leibers Coming Attraction, and even a book like Pohl
and Kornbluths The Space Merchants.

Thats right. The whole pattern of mans own environment becoming either an
enemy or a friend is something that began to concern writers in the early 1950s.
And it was given quite a work-out at that time, as a matter of fact.
Well, with, it trended into a concern I think for man and his society, which is
another theme which springs out of man and environment perhaps a special
case, beginning with a work weve already mentioned, Aldus Huxleys Brave New
World; George Orwells 1984; but perhaps even more a book like Robert
Heinleins Stranger In a Strange Land.
Yes. In fact, this is very interesting: this is the human being in an alien
environment given a twist, where the human being is essentially the alien: the
human thats been brought up on Mars, and the alien environment is Earth as we
know it.
And it is a concern for society in which the individual is having an impact upon
this society, is actually altering the society, instead of, as in The Space Merchants,
being a victim of the society.
Yes. We see, we see the individual with society as his antagonist. And in Stranger
In a Strange Land, we see him win.
One consistent theme, a final consistent theme that man, that science fiction
writers have used, is the theme of man in the future, almost as if they were writing
a future history of mankind.
This is the, in a way one of the largest and one of the most recurrent themes in
science fiction. Theres a great, theres almost infinite possibilities in looking into
the future for story material and for story ideas and for locales in which stories can
be put. Its possible to step forward and to clear your idea or your theme of your
idea or story from any present-day connotations: isolate it completely, put it in a
new context, and examine it with completely fresh eyes.
How does science fiction use these themes that weve discussed in reacting against
the fictional content that the stories contain?
Well, this is a fascinating part of it. Science fiction this is a fascinating part
about science fiction as a genre: it offers an opportunity to the writer that he finds
in no other literary area to take a very hot present-day question and put it
essentially in a cool and separate chamber where he can make a statement about it

or examine it or offer alternatives to it in such a form that his readers, who are
already conditioned to react one way or another to it, wont be put off by the first
word they hear. In other words, they will be forced to look at it. And this possibly
is one of the greatest services that science fiction as a literature can offer is this
opportunity to the author, to the reader, and as a matter of fact to literature itself.
One aspect I think of what weve been talking about is the kind of viewpoint on
man that science fiction is able to take, the kind of view from space
Yes.
the kind of view from an alien viewpoint, the kind of view from the future, all of
which enable science fiction to look upon mankind in a way in which he has never
been looked upon before.
Thats right. The dispassionate angle of observation. These things have always
been theoretically possible in contemporary novels; but the trouble is, your reader
is so conditioned to the connotations of of problem expressing present-day
terms, that he can hardly be brought to look at it dispassionately. He can from the
science fictional point of view; and as a matter of fact, most hardcore science
fiction readers read it precisely because they can get this long view.
And this is the essence of science fiction.
I would say so, yes. Its the essence of the theme in science fiction: the theme, as I
say, is the backbone of the genre.

New Directions In Science Fiction: A Seminar With Harlan Ellison
Harlan Ellison is a phenomenon. There is no other way to describe him. In fact,

to describe him - 55, 135 pounds, 36 years old, brown hair, blue eyes, non-
sleeping, contemporary, an actor playing the role of Harlan Ellison is to falsify
him. Like a volcano, he must be experienced. Harlan happened, and science
fiction should be grateful.
It did not always seem so: not when Harlan was an aggressive teenage fan; nor
when he was a bantam novice pro. And there are writers and editors in the field
today who do not feel grateful. Harlan has said that science fiction saved him
from becoming quite different. They would say, But who will save science fiction
from Harlan? Not everyone appreciates volcanoes, even little ones.
Harlans fiction is like himself: liberated and energetic. He is a salesman for what
he believes in and what he likes. He is against war in Vietnam, injustice,
discrimination, and ignorance. He believes frequently in marriage, technique, and
the New Wave in science fiction. If he has held half the jobs and gone through half
the experiences he claims, he has lived the lives of two men already. He has
written not only science fiction and fantasy but true confessions; westerns;
mysteries; street gang, juvenile delinquency, and mens magazine stories;
interviews; reviews; television scripts, and motion picture screenplays.
And he is an editor: A few years ago he told writers he was going to publish an
anthology of original science fiction, and he wanted to see stories that were too
bold, too frank, too far out for other publications. The result: the explosive,
critically acclaimed, best-selling Dangerous Visions.
I asked Harlan to talk about new directions in science fiction. Where is science
fiction today and why? Where is it heading?
[James Gunns and the students questions are italicized; Harlan Ellisons answers
appear in roman text.]
We seem to find ourselves in the midst of a revolution. Its a revolution of thought

thats as important and is up-ending as the Industrial revolution was, sociologically
speaking. Were coming into a time now when all the old -isms and philosophies
are dying: they dont seem to work anymore. All the things that mommy and
daddy told you and told me were true, were only true in the house. The minute you
get out in the street, they arent true anymore. The kids in the ghetto have known
that all their lives; but now the great white middle class is learning it, and its
coming a little difficult to the older folks, which is always the way it is.

Were no longer just Kansas or Los Angeles or New York its the whole planet
now. Theyve got smog in the Aleutian Islands, man; theyve got smog in
Anchorage, Alaska; theyve got smog at the polar ice caps can you believe it,
smog at the polar ice caps. Theres no place you can go to hide anymore. So the
days of thinking that the Thames or the English Channel or the Rocky Mountains
was going to keep you safe from some ding-dong on the other side doesnt go
anymore. A nitwit in Hanoi can blow us all just as dead as a nitwit in Washington.
And so were beginning to think of ourselves not as just an ethnic animal or a
national animal or a local or family kind of animal we are now a planetary
animal. Its all the dreams of early science fiction coming true: I mean, slowly and
with great pain the world is beginning to think of itself as Earth men; and its kind
of startling to see it happening, because its coming out of pain and blood and fire.
But I guess thats where all important revolutions come from.
What it is, is that were beginning to realize and recognize ourselves as part,
literally, of the universe not just of ourselves and number one, but our
responsibility to the entire universe. We throw a cigarette butt down on the grass,
or we throw our picnic lunch in a lake thats not just us getting rid of our garbage
so we dont have to be burdened with it: man, we are screwing up the ecology; and
thats all the ecology, thats the whole planet. And that means that were thinking
in larger terms.
So incidentally, the emphasis on ecology now I think is another manifestation of
that, even as the manifestation of revolution in so many countries in so many
different forms speaks to that.
So for this time of unrest, this time of turmoil, with revolution and dawning
awareness of ourselves as one with the cosmos, we need a new literature that
speaks to this kind of feeling and to these needs. Science fiction, speculative
fiction, is speaking to all kinds of people. And I think thats because now its
becoming a fiction of the people: in essence, street fiction, which is a very old and
a very common term for a fiction of the people, even as the stories that Dickens
wrote were written for the penny newspapers, were fiction of the people. Like, I
see the trouble in colleges invariably boils down to: the voice of the people is being
heard, and people with authority here are saying, No, weve made our decision,
we dont care what the people in the streets say. And that can no longer work,
that can just no longer work.
Speculative fiction is emerging because it seems to manage to convey the feeling
of the strangeness of the times, the blurring of reality and fantasy in our world.
Now, if you dont think that were living in a fantasy time, just say to yourself, the
delegate to the United Nations is Shirley Temple, you know, and your head has to

go somewhere else. You give people evidence of a slaughter at My Lai, and its
more horrifying than any work of fiction could be. I mean, how do men who are
supposed to be the lineal descendants of Jack Armstrong come to pull the trigger
on women and children? How do they do that? You know, you look at the
pictures, and you see the mothers trying to throw their babies away, because if they
have to die its alright, but they dont want the kids to die; and the babies blown
apart in their arms. Is this reality? It cant be anymore. I mean, weve come to
another place in our development as human beings.
And mainstream fiction, with all of its fusty traditions, can wind up in the cul de
sac of Portnoys Complaint, which is literally masturbation; or it can go someplace
else. And one of the places that it seems to be going is into speculative fiction,
where dreams prevail. And the dreams seem more real than the reality these days.
And that is what I think is the important gift that science fiction and speculative
fiction have for our times.
People just instinctively need an order to their universe. You can see it in, from
the most primitive tribes to the present. We like a natural order; we like to know
the answers, whether its in Christianity, or astrology, or Zoroastrianism, or
whatever it may be. You know, the Druids, Im sure, had the right answer too.
The answers that were getting from the natural orders of the universe today are the
wrong answers: they keep telling us that one and one is six. And we go out and try
and apply it, and it doesnt work; and we wind up in more trouble than before.
And so people are looking around for new answers, which is why almost every
chick in Los Angeles is into astrology, you know what I mean.
Science fiction writers, fantasists, are special kinds of dreamers. Their minds come
from someplace else; their thoughts are someplace else; they deal with this oneness
with the cosmos every day, in every story. And I think that if any fiction can offer
us answers, can move us to action, it may well be speculative fiction; maybe not in
the same way that Uncle Toms Cabin, you know, helped move the Civil War, or
Frank Norriss books moved to social reform in the 30s; but perhaps in helping
this revolution of thought, of literally opening peoples minds, of unclogging the
channels of the detritus, however you pronounce it.
I know you already mentioned the fact that science fiction hasnt taken the stabs
quite that Frank Norris took in moving, in trying to move society; and I know you
said science fiction is a mirror and a sounding board for society. But I wonder if
you think it will ever, or should, take some kind of a path thats aggressive in
trying to move society.

Well, should, could, and will are three different things. Yeah, I think it should. I
think its the responsibility of any true artist with the talent to speak to people to
help try and change things for the better. I think its his duty, its his obligation to
speak to his times.
Whether it will do any good, whether anyone will pay any attention, I dont know.
God knows science fiction has been talking about ecological imbalance and the
eco-crash, for gods sake, for goes all the way back to Wells. And theres
nothing more terrifying than John Christophers No Blade of Grass and that was
done in the early 50s. Nobody paid any damn attention to that. Weve been
sounding the clarion call for years, and no one seems to pay attention.
Can you give us a couple of examples of writers who are dealing with
contemporary issues in science fiction terms?
Most notable to my mind right at the moment is Norman Spinrads book Bug Jack
Baron, in which he deals with the effect of McLuhan media message on masses of
people; on the effects of power and the uses of power in terms of media message
power corrupting and absolute power corrupting absolutely, all that kind of
nonsense which is, you know, old hat. But he does it in the terms of the medium: I
mean, the novel is written the same way you would watch a television show. I
mean, its, the medium of the book is part of the message of the book. And I think
its a very effective book.
Roger Zelazny is dealing with religion today in a very strange kind of reality-
fantasy way: he is reexamining the various pantheons of gods - Hindu, Egyptian
in his various novels and bringing them up to date and speaking about them in
terms of our times and their relevance therefrom, or thereto, whichever one is
correct.
Its difficult trying to pin down the writers who I think personally will have
powerful voices, because its too early to know: weve only been doing this kind of
thing for five or six years in the whole history of science fiction. I mean, from the
beginning in 1926, science fiction writers always dealt with, you know, problems
of ecology, and always dealt with problems of the culture, and always dealt with
the effects of science on people, but not in this way, not with this kind of strength,
not with this almost pamphleteering kind of messianic urge.
Is this what you try to do?

Im doing it quite a lot. Im dealing in Well, for instance with the last two
stories Ive done, have been about the white mans stealing the black mans
heritage, his birthright; of turning him into kind of a mocha-colored white man.
And Ive done it in fantasy terms. Pennies Off a Dead Mans Eyes deals with a
black girl who is passing for white; whose father, the black man, has died; and at
the funeral, when the funeral is over, she removes the silver dollars from his eyes,
thereby consigning him to hell he cant get across the river Jordan: the dollars
had to pay his way with the man. And a guy who is watching this, who was picked
up by the father and calls himself a stray cat, goes after the girl to find out why she
did it and doesnt know that its his daughter. And when he finds her, finds out
that shes passing, finds out why she hates the father because the father rejected
her. Yet he, the guy, is an alien from another planet who washed up on our shores.
And the black man took him in and helped him learn to pass. And I play the
counterpoint of an alien passing as an Earth man against a black girl passing as a
white girl. Its, I think, the strangest story Ive ever written, because Ive dealt
with this theft of a black mans birthright in completely symbolic terms and
completely fantasy terms. What Im trying to do in my work is to take the burning
issues of our times (he said pompously) and entertainment-ize them, make them
interesting to read; yet by the same token, when you get done with them, your gut
will somehow have been affected.
What place does Dangerous Visions have in this scheme of things?
I think what it, the place it has in this current movement or in this current flow of
the field is that its a rallying point. Its a demonstration: it was the kind of book
that they said could not be done, that no one would publish it; that if it was
published, it would be ignored. And it wasnt it was a book that received
tremendous critical attention and seemed to be one of the first books in the
vanguard of this new way of thinking.
But I think Dangerous Visions solidified a lot of thinking for a lot of people: that
they said, Yes, we can go in other directions; no, we dont have to hold on to all
the old formulas of science fiction. Yes, we can talk about sex; yes, we can talk
about religion; yes, we can talk about labor relations and politics and coprophilia,
if we feel like it. So I think Dangerous Visions opened up doors that people
didnt even know existed. And there are other people whove opened up doors
similarly: Damon Knight with his Orbit series; Chip Delany is now editing the
magazine called Warp, paperback magazine which will do more; thereve been a
few other anthologies and a few other now some of the magazines are starting to
do it, you see, because the magazines were the ones that held it back for so long

because they were the only markets. And as long as they were being sold on the
newsstands, and as long as the mommies of the 14-year-old kids who read them
were looking through them, they couldnt run anything very heavyweight. But
now they have to compete; now they have to keep up. And so theyre starting to
buy really topical and interesting and gut-wrenching stories.
Why did they think it couldnt be done?
Well, you see, what most people fail to realize about science fiction is that
essentially it is a pulp medium. It started in the pulps; its a commercial fiction;
and all of the taboos that have hung on for 30 years, 40 years, with pulp magazines
of all kinds love story magazines, western stories, detective stories all of them
were gathered into the science fiction field. These were all barriers that were
imposed by the form, by the medium itself. I mean, a guy in a spaceship could
take a 45-year journey from here to Proxima Centauri, and he never had to go to
the bathroom once. And you know, girls didnt have breasts in science fiction
stories god forbid, you know, if there was ever a relationship between a man and
a woman, it was as antiseptic as making love in an autoclave.
And the stories of Doc Smith, the Lensman stories, are classics of that. And for
what they are and what they do theyre great, because they have that great
galloping sense of space and adventure and what Sam Moskowitz likes to call the
sense of wonder in them. But god knows there isnt one human being from start to
finish. I mean, theyre all cardboard.
And so that kind of restriction and taboo and order was built into stories all the
way up into the 50s, when Tony Boucher and Mick McComas began Magazine of
Fantasy and Science Fiction - they said, No more of that; lets start dealing with
people and lets start dealing in literary terms. And lets stop thinking about it as a
pulp medium lets start demanding of speculative fiction, science fiction, that
which is demanded of all good fiction: that it meet the requirements of literature.
And its taken the writers 15, 17 years to finally get to the point where, yes, now
The difference between I mean, if theres a New Wave and an old wave, the
difference between old wave writers and New Wave writers is that New Wave
writers think of themselves as artists; and they are not ashamed of the big A;
whereas the others thought of themselves as storytellers and, you know, amusing
entertainers. And artists can be storytellers too. The one does not negate the other.
What was different about Dangerous Visions?

Well, the stories were written especially for the book; and so by intent the
anthology tried to go some places that anthologies had not gone before. As much
vehemence as is put into restrictions on writers, as much as theyre told, Dont
curse, dont write about unnatural sex, dont offend the establishment by most of
the commercial media, that was the same vehemence with which I told the writers,
Get it on, you know, really do it. I really want you to write what youve never
written before: I want you to just put your stomach on paper. And I was lucky:
out of the 32 writers in the book, maybe 10 knew what I was talking about, and 10
were free enough to actually open and do it. And so with that kind of freedom, and
knowing they had that kind of freedom in front, they I think opened their heads
more than they would for an ordinary story they were doing.
What role do you think, again, Dangerous Visions and Last Dangerous Visions
will play in this?
Dangerous Visions was good because it was the ice breaker. Again Dangerous
Visions is going to put people away: its going to twist their minds, because it takes
up where the heaviest stories in Dangerous Visions left off. It goes about 50 miles
further toward real, complete, total literary freedom in the speculative fiction vein
than anything in Dangerous Visions did.
And the most impressive writing is being done by not the established writers with
great reputations but the young Turks - I mean, guys you may never have even
heard of: Ken McCullough, and Jim Hemesath, and Jim Sutherland, and Ed
Bryant, and the women the women, their minds are incredible, you cant believe
it! Ursula LeGuin, and Josephine Saxton women like that are writing science
fiction thats never been written before, because theyre doing it with that special
strange, alien thinking that a woman has when she does it. And its brilliant stuff.
I expect to get some very strong criticism on the second book. There are some
really far-out stories; and thats, I mean, thats the best phrase I can think of to use
for them. They are very explicit sexually; they are very explicit politically; they
are very explicit style-wise. There are no soft, easy ways into any of these stories:
they all come at you with their fangs bared and dripping. And I cant think of
anybody whos ever going to walk away from this book the same way he went to
it, even as apparently those who went at Dangerous Visions were changed.
What had been the reactions to Dangerous Visions?
Well, about 99% awe, joy, delight, approbation. People not thinking it could be
done, of course

You see, most of the time people dont write to you when they like something
they only write to you when theyre ticked off about something, they only write
when theyre annoyed about something. Yet I got 2,000, nearly 2,000 letters from
people saying thank you you know, I mean, just that much, Thank you, we
One guy wrote, My life was changed, which is, you know, insanity too. But
college students writing and saying, Ive been shacked up with Silas Marner for
the last eight months, and I didnt know people were even writing like this; and
writers writing in. And thats the important thing: other writers writing in and
saying, My god, we can do it! You know, and now their whole careers are
changed, their lives are changed.
And even the people who were annoyed, you know, even the ones that I get
crummy letters from the tone of the letters tells me that I am really jamming
them, because Clausewitz was right: it doesnt matter whether you attack or you
retreat, as long as you move. Something happens. Lets see some life.
It was intended, the book was intended to shake things up; and I think thats what it
did. In the process it got an awful lot of critical attention, a lot of critical acclaim;
and it wound up on the Best Book list of 17 different newspapers in the country:
Chicago Book World put it on its Best Paperbacks of the Year. Sold over 50,000
copies in various editions. Its been translated into 6 languages. It won more
awards than any other science fiction book in the last 25 years. And all in all, its
pretty nice little job.
Where do you think things are going from here in terms of science fiction and what
it has to say about the contemporary scene?
I think science fiction has some strange anomalies, or anachronisms about it

actually: its beginning to use literary techniques that were outdated in the 30s,
now its beginning to use them; yet at the same time it has an imaginative content
that is light years ahead of the mainstream in fiction. And I think that speculative
fiction will continue to borrow the literary techniques of the mainstream, and the
mainstream will kind of get a leak-off or bleed-off of imagination; and the two will
merge in that way, and they will enrich each other. I think science fiction has now
become an important, accepted literary medium, one with, one thats viable and
thats valid.
Q. Alexei Panshin has written a criticism of science fiction a few months ago in the
Fantasy and Science Fiction, in which he states an attitude he holds towards
science fiction as a sort, as being in the condition of the Elizabethan theater in
1590, waiting for Shakespeare. Do you think thats a valid assumption?

Not so much a Shakespeare I dont think the field is looking for a Shakespeare as
much as it is a who was Thomas Wolfes editor?
Maxwell Perkins.
Maxwell Perkins, thats what we need. We need a, yeah, dig it. Weve already got
writers now who are doing things no writers ever done before. We have writers
who are so brilliant that theres no place for their work to go. They cant be
published, you know, their best stuff cant be published. We dont need another
Shakespeare, we dont need a Shakespeare in our field. What we need now is an
editor with literary credentials, so big, so beautiful, so unassailable that he will be
able to you know, a man who will take science fiction writers, the best science
fiction writers, and get them their Globe Theater.
Then, would you say you are optimistic, I mean, that you think science fiction will
help produce a better society?
Speculative fiction seems to be emerging as this kind of fiction, which isnt so

peculiar really when you think about it, because speculative fiction is really the
only optimistic fiction being written today, because it says there will be a
tomorrow: maybe a lousy tomorrow; it may be a messed-over tomorrow, but there
will be a tomorrow of some kind.
Not everyone would agree with Harlan Ellison about the importance of science
fiction in todays world, or where it is going from here. Some would ask, Where
is the sense of wonder? Others, Where is the science? Where is the
extrapolation of the present into the future? But most of them would agree that
science fiction is going somewhere. Where it is going in the final analysis is up to
you you who are watching this film today.

The Early History Of Science Fiction: A Lecture By Damon Knight
The history of science fiction is difficult to describe because no two critics agree
on what science fiction is. As a genre, that is a collective system of expectations in
the reader's mind stemming from his past experience with a certain type of writing,
science fiction existed, if at all, only hazily before 1926. But stories and novels
which clearly contain some of the same elements as science fiction and help
contribute to the creation of the genre existed earlier. How much earlier - the
second century AD, the Renaissance, the Industrial Revolution, 1854 - is a
question to be debated. The answer depends on what element of science fiction -
the imagination, the intention, the plausibility, the mechanism, the system of belief
- one considers more important.
The first half of science fiction's history then covers about 2000 years in a way.
The second half, which has been described by Isaac Asimov in another film in this
series, covers only the period since 1938. Such is the manner in which science
fiction, like population and science itself, has exploded in the past quarter century.
Damon Knight, who describes the first half, was born in 1922 and educated in
Oregon. He came to New York City in 1941 and held a variety of jobs: reader for
a literary agent; editor of a pulp magazine; stripper in an off-set printing shop;
and freelance writer. He contributed criticism mostly to science fiction fan
magazines. He was one of the first science fiction critics, as contrasted to
reviewers. He has written and edited more than 30 books; among his novels are
Hell's Pavement, A For Anything, and The People Maker. Perhaps more
important, he created Orbit, a semi-annual anthology of original science fiction
stories which has published some of the best writing in the field. He was co-
founder of the Milford Science Fiction Writers' Conference, founder and first
president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, and the first editor of its
annual collection of the best science fiction stories of the year, Nebula Award
Stories. He won a Hugo, awarded by the World Science Fiction Convention for
science fiction criticism collected in his volume In Search of Wonder.
And here is Damon Knight, in search of wonder.
Most people who talk to you about the early history of science fiction begin with
Lucian of Samosata, a Hellenistic writer who lived in the second century AD.
Lucian's true history is a story in which the narrator is caught up in a water spout
and carried to the Moon. And I think that's science fiction to just about the extent
that the whirlwind that carried Elijah to Heaven is.

If you're interested in that kind of thing, the literature is full of imaginary voyages
to the Moon in which the means of getting there is whimsical or supernatural. In
one of Cyrano De Bergerac's voyages, for example, he surrounded himself with
little bottles of dew; and when the sun made the dew rise in the morning, it carried
him up with it. Some writers harness flocks of birds. But the most popular and
reliable method of getting to the moon was just to have an angel come down and
get you.
Before there could be science fiction, there first had to be science. And that means
we begin with a period roughly 150 years, from 1530, when the first treatise
Copernicus wrote was circulated in manuscript, to 1687, when Newton's Principia
was published. During this short period man's way of looking at the universe was
turned on its head: the Copernican system was the first shock; and then a century
later came Galileo with his discovery that there are other worlds out there in space.
And this was an event so far reaching that you can almost see humanity's collective
head turning to look at the heavens with new eyes. Then came Leeuwenhoek with
his lenses and his discovery of the world of the invisibly small, and finally Newton
with his universal law of gravitation - all this in just over 150 years.
This series of discoveries overturned the view of creation that had been essentially
stable for 4000 years. Now, science fiction is based on an assumption of a
dynamic universe governed by natural law; a dynamic universe as opposed to a
static or a cyclical universe of classical times, and gathered by natural law rather
than by the whims of the gods. In these two ways science fiction reflects the
worldview that didn't begin to come into existence until the 16th century and was
not widespread until the 28th.
All through this period there were many imaginary voyages to the Moon and the
Sun. They were very popular, and people got very excited about the idea of
plurality of worlds. Bishops devoted their sermons to it; Swedenborg made it a
part of his philosophy. You might think that questions about the souls of
inhabitants of other worlds and whether they're fallen or not are modern
inventions; but our ancestors hashed all that out in the 17th century. But these
imaginary voyages were satires; and the Moon or the Sun was just a convenient
place to put an invented society that could be used to mirror the eccentricities of
our own. When the satire is good, as it is in Swift's Voyage to Laputa or Voltaire's
Micromegas in which an inhabitant of Saturn visits us, then these voyages are
lively. When it's poor - and it is usually poor - you might as well forget it.
In 1848, here in this cottage, in what is now part of greater New York, a sick
discouraged young writer named Edgar Alan Poe wrote Mellonta Tauta, a story
about a balloon trip in the year 2848, 1000 years in the future. This story is satire

of a not particularly subtle kind: it's in the form of a letter dated April 1st. But it is
satire laid in a changed future rather than a remote country, and the first such story
that I know of. Alan Poe's predictions in this story are magnetic engines and the
trans-Atlantic cable, which he imagines being laid on floating platforms. In this
little story I think we see the first unequivocal appearance of the idea that the
future will be essentially different from the past; the idea of irreversible social
changes brought about by changes in technology. In this sense, even though every
one of Poe's predictions was wrong, Mellonta Tauta is modern science fiction, and
Jules Verne's stories, which are full of amazingly accurate forecasts, are not.
Verne laid his stories in the present, and he used only inventions which were
actually available at the time he wrote: submarines and airships and other devices
that he wrote about all existed; he only imagined bigger submarines and bigger
airships. There is a legend that got started god knows how that the periscope
couldn't be patented because Jules Verne had already described it in 20,000
Leagues Under the Sea. In fact, as Ted Thomas has pointed out, the periscope is
not mentioned in that novel; the Nautilus didn't have one. And when Verne wanted
to send his gun club members to the Moon, he didn't use any exotic or fantastic
method - he used a cannon, but he put that cannon in Florida, only on the West
Coast instead of the East; and he had the space vehicle circle the Moon and then
splash down in the Pacific.
The interesting question is, was this prophecy on Verne's part or imitation on ours?
What would you call it when we build a supersubmarine and call it a Nautilus and
send it on the same route that Verne's Nautilus took under the polar ice?
Verne, incidentally, was not the world's greatest stylist, but he was nowhere near as
bad as you would think from reading the English translations made by hacks at the
turn of the century. The French language expresses itself naturally in a chain of
dependent clauses like tinker toy pieces, one stuck onto the end of the next. If you
translate that literally, you're going to get an arthritic English sentence; and that
was what was done to Verne, in spite of which five or six of his 64 novels have
been continuously in print for more than 70 years and have fascinated generations
of English and American readers.
And still this was not quite what we mean by science fiction because it was too
cautious in forecasting technological change and because it did not take into
account any social change at all. For that, after Poe, we have to wait a few years
for the first scientific romances of H. G. Wells. For all practical purposes, what we
now call science fiction was Wells' invention. Between 1894 and 1908 he wrote
nine novels and 24 short stories in which he set forth nearly every one of the major
themes that have kept science fiction going ever since. The Invisible Man, The

War of the Worlds, The Time Machine, The First Man on the Moon, The Star, The
New Accelerator, and so many more. He described tanks in a story called The
Land Ironclads published in 1903; he predicted the atomic bomb in 1908 in a
novel called The War in the Air; in The Story of the Days to Come and in The
Sleeper Wakes he described a megalopolis of the future - something that hasn't
quite happened yet, but we can see it coming, and it's horrifying.
About the same time Kipling was also writing science fiction of the utmost
circumstantiality in Easy as ABC and With the Night Mail. Now, this is science
fiction because it introduces imaginative technological changes and social changes:
it's based on the idea of the rational universe governed by natural law and the
dynamic universe, the universal change.
But all through the 19th century, in fact, things that were at least proto-science
fiction, trembling on the verge, were being written by the most respected authors.
Balzac's Elixir of Life and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and many others like
Cooper, Hawthorne, Holmes, Bulwer Lytton, Bellamy, Bierce, Du Maurier, Mark
Twain.
And where does this sudden flowering of science fiction come from? Not from the
imaginary voyages of Lucian and Cyrano - it comes from science. Wells studied
biology under Huxley and became an encyclopedic popularizer of science, much
like our own Isaac Asimov. Verne had the same enthusiasm: you can see it in
every page he wrote; and so did Poe with his Balloon Hoax and his 1,002nd Tale of
Scheherezade.
Here it all begins to come together. The journey to another planet is one thread out
of many that join and become science fiction. A story of the marvelous invention,
for example, might begin in the pre-history of science fiction with the story of
Talos, the metal giant who patrolled King Minos's island. And then we could trace
it through The Arabian Nights, the story of the mechanical winged horse, and so on
down through Edward Hale's Brick Moon, Mark Twain's Telelectroscope, and so
on. There's the Utopia beginning with Plato's, and then Sir Thomas More's,
Samuel Butler's Erewhon, and so on. There's the influence of the gothic novel and
historical novel: you see this in a certain tendency for science fiction characters to
wear jock straps and long cloaks and carry big swords. There's the influence of
Madame Blavatsky - Bulwer Lytton's full of it, and so are the Mars novels of
Edgar Rice Burroughs.
But by and large, as H. Bruce Franklin has showed us, science fiction or things
hard to distinguish from it were published as a matter of course in all the leading
American literary magazines down to around 1900. Then they dropped it, and the
dime novels took it up. Now, I'm not sure which event was the cause of the other,

or even if there was any causal relationship. At any rate, in the 1920s something
unprecedented happened, and its name was Hugo Gernsback.
Gernsback was born in 1884 in Luxembourg. He came to this country as a boy and
became an inventor and the publisher of what we would now call popular science
magazines. In one of these, Electrical Experimenter in the '20s, he began to
publish short science fiction stories. And the popularity of these was such that in
1926 Gernsback launched the first magazine entirely devoted to this kind of
fiction, Amazing Stories. For good or ill, this event shaped the path of science
fiction for more than 40 years.
Gernsback was a space flight enthusiast at a time when that took a certain amount
of courage. He reprinted articles and fiction translated from the German about the
problems of space travel. Some of his early magazine covers look now a great deal
like NASA drawings. Beyond that, Gernsback was an enthusiast of anything
scientific, particularly anything to do with radio and electricity. He reprinted a lot
of Verne and Wells and A. Merritt, and also translations of European authors who
had never before appeared in English, like S. S. Held, Otto Willi Gail and Otfried
Von Hanstein. The German stories were really closest to Gernsback's heart I think;
and they were expressions of naive optimism in which technology, represented by
great clanking steam machines, became a messianic religion.
It has taken us a long time to get away from this, from all those pistons and rivets,
back to the mood of pessimistic irony which was the attitude of literary science
fiction writers long before Gernsback.
Gernsback lost Amazing Stories in one of his several bankruptcies and started two
other magazines, Air Wonder and Science Wonder. He combined them into
Wonder Stories and lost that. He kept other more lucrative magazines, including
Sexology, which is still being published; but he was out of science fiction for good
in 1936 except for one brief fling in the '50s. But what he had started kept on
going - in 1930 another publisher brought out a science fiction magazine,
Astounding Stories, and that made three. The magazines, although they were
always in trouble, staggered on somehow from one owner to another. By 1939
there were 11.
Now, Gernsback had built up a stable of writers who were essentially enthusiasts
like himself and not professional authors; and enthusiasm was the most marked
characteristic of their work. But gradually in the late '20s and early '30s we begin
to see a few people making what could be described as a career in science fiction
writing. Two of the earliest of these were Jack Williamson and Edmond Hamilton,
both still with us and both still active. Another was Murray Leinster, whose first

published science fiction story The Runaway Skyscraper appeared in Argosy in

1919.
Meanwhile, entirely apart from this chain of influence, literary science fiction
continued to be written by Kipling, Jack London, Saki, Karel Capek, E.M
Forrester, Aldous Huxley, and many others. But because the magazines had drawn
to themselves all the really enthusiastic readers of this kind of material, and
because literary writers despised the magazines for their crudity, a gulf opened
between literary and cult writers.
The most influential literary writer of this period was probably Olaf Stapledon,
whose two long lyrical narratives of the future of intelligence spanning millennia
and hundreds of light years are full of ideas that have been of use to other writers.
He also wrote the first, and some think the best, superman novel, Odd John. He
had some unusual ideas about sex that made him appear freaky then, not so much
now.
The thing that strikes you about the literary writers is that each one was working
more or less by himself, apart from all the others, whereas the commercial writers
of this time were building up a set of shared assumptions: widespread use of space
travel, the galactic empire; and even a set of shorthand terms, a kind of jargon:
hyperdrive, space warp, and so on, which helped them go on with their stories but
repelled and irritated the literary writers and readers even more. Cult or
commercial science fiction was beginning to take characteristics different from
those of literary science fiction to evoke and try to satisfy different expectations.
I'm not talking now about the quality of the stuff - most of it was dreadful, but then
so was most literary science fiction. In its best writers these characteristics were
developing. One was obsessive interest in background, particularly in landscape;
and unless you grasp this, you will miss the point of most cult science fiction right
down to the present time: the background was the thing - the Martian desert, or the
city of the future, or the ships maneuvering in space. Another was the demand for
romantic hero and for colorful adventures. You can see where this came from,
right out of the pulps - and in fact, by the mid '30s science fiction was being treated
by its publishers as just another kind of pulp. You had the steely-jawed hero on the
cover, but instead of jodhpurs he had a spacesuit, and instead of a rifle he was
holding a raygun. And you had the usual disheveled heroine, but she was in the
grip of a robot or a bug-eyed monster rather than in that of a Turk or Berber.
It became increasingly clear that for many adult readers science fiction at its best
was a form of the epic. Most popular authors were those who wrote novel cycles,
like E. E. Smith with his Skylark and Lensman novels, which ranged over dozens
of planetary systems and perhaps half a century in time. We see the same thing

today in the enthusiasm for Tolkien and Frank Herbert's Dune. Scale was terribly
important: anything that widened it a great deal or even narrowed or distorted it
was well-received. In the '30s there were a good many stories about a descent into
the microcosm to visit the inhabitants of an electron, or of less drastic reduction in
size so that the protagonist could enter an anthill, for instance. You don't see these
anymore, because they began to strain our credulity I suppose; but I think it's rather
a shame - I liked them.
Another much used theme was that of time travel to remote eras, either to the past
or the future. Another was the penetrability of matter, so that with a proper
equipment you could walk into a wall or down into the earth, as in Murray
Leinster's The Mole Pirate. The people in these stories tended to be rather simple
types, absent-minded scientists and their beautiful daughters and handsome young
men mostly. The young men wore leather jackets and didn't have much
conversation. Nobody cared much about that, because the point of the story was
the wonderful gadget or the alien landscape or, better yet, both.
Another thing that happened that could not conceivably have happened without
Gernsback was that science fiction readers began to grope into contact with each
other: they wrote letters to the magazines praising their favorite authors and
discussing their work; then using the addresses on these letters they actually began
to correspond and even meet. They formed clubs and organized conventions; they
published amateur magazines, hectographed or mimeographed in those days, full
of amateur fiction and artwork. A complete collection of these magazines from the
'20s to the present would probably fill a fair-sized swimming pool.
This is something that has never happened with any other kind of category fiction.
Western readers do not get together and moon over Zane Grey?, for instance. It's
more reminiscent of sports or movie fandom; and yet, not quite like either, because
the science fiction fans, although somewhat boy-faced, are intelligent and highly
articulate. And this too has had an indelible influence on the field, because out of
the ranks of these fans began to come professionals who devoted their working
lives to science fiction.
Commercial science fiction in the '30s was largely written by professionals of
another sort: men who prided themselves on their ability to turn out any kind of a
pulp yarn that anybody would pay for. One of these was a man named Arthur J.
Burks, who wrote 10,000 words a day for years and sold most of it. Remember
that this was a time when there were scores of pulp magazines of every
conceivable description. They paid by the word; and if you could turn it out, you
could live very well. Burks used to boast that he could write a story about
anything you pointed to in his hotel room. Somebody took him up on it once and

pointed to the keyhole. Burks thought a moment, then sat down at his typewriter,
and presently out came the opening pages of a novelette about corpses with
mysterious keyhole-shaped bullet holes in them.
But among these pulpsters other types were beginning to appear just here and
there. They were not near the seats of power just yet, but you could find them on
the outskirts organizing, publishing their broadsides. One of these was Donald E.
Wollheim, a fan who in the late '30s became a science fiction editor and has been
one ever since.
Increasingly since about 1950 commercial science fiction has been under the
influence and sometimes the direct control of people who came out of fandom and
who take science fiction much more seriously than any outsider does. Science
fiction fans tend to be idealistic and dramatic types who are repelled by the
ugliness of the real world and use science fiction as an escape from it. They
rationalize this by saying that they're trying to achieve a better world through the
extrapolative thinking that science fiction teaches you - and in fact, there may be a
little something to it. There has always been a moralistic flavor in the attitudes of
the hardcore fans from the '20s on. In Gernsback's time it took the form of a belief
that science fiction existed to teach people science and draw them into scientific
careers; and in a number of cases this actually happened. A speculation in a story
by David H. Keller, one of Gernsback's writers, that the longevity of queen bees
was due to their special diet, led a reader named Thomas S. Gardner to go into that
field and discover that in fact Keller was right. To this day, the research
institutions in this country are peppered with devoted science fiction readers,
people who were drawn there by science fiction.
And in the '20s and '30s too we begin to get - forgive me for saying this - the
science fiction art story. There was Stanley G. Weinbaum, who had a brilliant
career that lasted about two years before he died of throat cancer at 35. He was the
most inventive science fiction writer since Wells. He specialized in aliens; and his
aliens were fantastic and yet believable - they weren't the standard blobbery
menace that we inherited from Wells, they were funny and interesting, and every
one was different. But his stories have not survived into the anthologies, with the
exception of the first one, A Martian Odyssey, because they're full of the standard
1934 boy-girl talk, which was just another convention then but is unbearable now.
Nearly all the best writers of the '30s have aged badly in this way; that's why you
don't see their stories anymore. I've often thought that the best ones ought to be
rewritten and published as translations from the English; but I've never had the
nerve to make the suggestion to the authors' estates.

These, at any rate, were the circumstances in which we found ourselves at the end
of the '30s. Science fiction as a commercial medium was well-established 13 years
after Gernsback began it. Over at Street and Smith, a popular young writer named
John W. Campbell, Jr. had taken over Astounding Stories and was beginning to
make some changes. The end of the pulps was in sight, although we didn't know it.
Within the next few years they would begin to fail, and by 1950 they would almost
all of them disappear, except the science fiction magazines. But that's another
story.

The Ideas In Science Fiction: A Lecture By Frederik Pohl
Science fiction has been called a literature of ideas. And one of the best idea men
in science fiction is Frederik Pohl, a man now in his 50s, who has done almost
everything in science fiction except draw the illustrations. As a boy, he was a
member of an important fan group in New York City called the Futurians. Before
he was 20, he became editor of two science fiction magazines and was writing
stories for these and other magazines under pseudonyms on his own and in
collaboration with other Futurians. In the early '50s he became a literary agent.
In 1952, with Cyril Kornbluth, he wrote one of the most significant science fiction
novels of recent times, the first under his own name, The Space Merchants.
He edited the first annual anthology of original science fiction, Star Science
Fiction; succeeded Horace Gold as editor of Galaxy and its sister magazines;
became an editor successively for two paperback publishers, and continued to
produce incisive, witty, satirical science fiction stories and books filled with ideas.
A few years ago two science fiction fans named Bill Bowers and Bill Mallardi
decided to try to find out what science fiction writers think they're doing when they
write science fiction. And so they interviewed about 90 or so of the best and most
accessible of them and put the responses together in a symposium.
One of the questions was, "Why do you write science fiction?" And here are a few
of the responses:
Theodore Sturgeon said, "It gives me almost complete freedom of speech and
absolute freedom of thought."
The late Charles Beaumont said, "Originally it was because I liked this sort of
thing; later because I realized certain social comments could be made, which
otherwise couldn't be made or would come too hard."
And Arthur Clark said succinctly, "Because most other literature isn't concerned
with reality."
Responses like this take out a pretty ambitious sort of claim for science fiction, and
for some people they might seem rather overblown. To anybody whose experience
of science fiction is limited to something like, say, The Andromeda Strain or The
Beast From 2000 Fathoms, this sort of claim might seem preposterous. And
beyond question, there's a good deal of material which is published or produced
under the brand name of science fiction which is not concerned with reality or with
social comment, which requires no freedom of thought and probably has not too
much requirement of thought at all.

But although this is true, when you've said it, all you really said is what is equally
true of any specialized kind of creative endeavor, whether it's literary or music or
artistic or whatever: namely, that most of what is done in any field is pretty
plodding stuff. The glory of science fiction is that in among the tons of schlock
and the space opera, the stuff that amuses or excites or titillates and does nothing
else, there's a sizable fraction of stories and books that lead to quite another
activity, that activity of the forebrain which distinguishes man from the other
animals which is called thought.
I'm always reluctant to say things like this about science fiction, because far from
boasting about it, I'm tempted to try to conceal it. It's pretty clear that from the
commercial point of view, the one organ of the human body that there is no money
in exploiting is the brain. I don't mean to say that the average buyer of books and
magazines is opposed to thought, but I think he prefers to have it done for him by
experts, like any other spectator sport. And science fiction, at least at its best, is
not like that.
Let me try to make clear exactly what it is I'm trying to say here: it isn't so much
that science fiction makes it possible to express ideas that can not be said in any
form, as that the need to express such ideas is probably what led a few writers a
long time ago to invent the kind of literature that we now call science fiction.
I don't want to go into the history of science fiction in any detail, but to illustrate
what I mean by this, I'd like to look back briefly a couple of hundred years to what
most people might not consider a science fiction novel at all, Jonathan Swift's book
Gulliver's Travels. Is Gulliver's Travels science fiction? I would say certainly: it
has all of the diagnostic features of science fiction. It has a superscientific gadget -
in this case the magnetic core that makes it possible for the island of Laputa to
float around in the air; it has the exploration of far-off fantastic worlds - they're not
in space, to be sure, but in 1726 an unknown island in the South Seas was quite as
remote and mysterious as Mars and Mercury is to us today. And above all,
Gulliver's Travels contains the quality of ideation, of examining our own world
from an extra-human and objective point of view, which is what the best science
fiction is all about.
George Orwell, who himself wrote excellent science fiction like 1984 and
discussed it intelligently from time to time, and managed to do all this without ever
once using the term "science fiction" - in fact, perhaps, without ever having heard
it - describes just what this sort of examination of Swift's world shows. In his
essay Politics Vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels he talks about
Swift's brilliant and effective use of the novel for political purposes. He says,
"Swift's greatest contribution to political thought is its attack, particularly in Part

III, on what now would be called totalitarianism. He has an extraordinarily clear

prevision of the spy-haunted police state with its endless heresy hunts and treason
trials. And one must remember that Swift is here inferring the whole from a very
small part, because the feeble governments of his own day did not give him the
illustrations ready made."
To be sure, Swift was a polemicist of great prowess, and he didn't really need
science fiction to make a political point. His celebrated essay on relieving the
famine and population problem in Ireland by eating the surplus babies, his political
pamphlets, and his essays, were couched in mundane terms, and they lost nothing
in effectiveness. But the great triumph of Gulliver's Travels was its universality: it
has survived and is read where nearly all the rest of his prodigious output is
forgotten because its fanciful setting, its science fiction quality, if you will, gave it
relevance far beyond the time and place of its composition.
And of course it bred a host of imitations: one of the nearest and most direct was
the romance written by Swift's near-contemporary and somewhat disciple Voltaire,
which is called Micromegas, and was in a sense the first of the space operas since
it roamed the solar system in much the same way and to the same ends as
Gulliver's Travels roamed the seas of Earth.
Now, the quality in Gulliver's Travels that caused George Orwell to marvel was the
uncanny accuracy of its predictions, not of inventions or discoveries but of social
conditions. And science fiction has long laid claim to excellence in this area.
There's a lot of justice in this claim: it's true that science fiction stories dealt
casually with such phenomena as space travel and television, atomic bombs, radar,
submarines, air travel, and a host of other modern wonders long before they had
any reality in the real world. But it's not the claim that I would like to make for
science fiction, at least not just now, for two reasons. The first is that the accuracy
of these predictions is pretty much a matter of luck: there's an old French saying,
"Even a broken clock is right twice a day." And so much science fiction has been
written describing so many tens of thousands of machines and inventions and
gadgets and gimmicks that it would be pretty remarkable if none of them had ever
come true. As far as I know, nobody has ever compiled a batting average of
science fiction predictions; I don't even know if the record should be called good or
bad, but what I do know for certain is that there are many tens of thousands of
science fiction predictions which have never some true and never will.
But the more important reason is that a prediction in itself is neither particularly
useful nor even particularly interesting. This sort of statement seems unlikely at
first hearing because it seems to go against conventional wisdom. You tend to
think that, "Oh boy, if only we could know what the future holds, we could clean

up somehow or other." And it's easy to imagine ways in which this would be so.
But the ability to change the future to our best advantage implies that the future
isn't fixed; and that in turn implies that it can't be predicted. And that in turn leads
to the discovery that the only kind of prediction of the future that is of any real use
is either one which was incomplete so that we have an unpredicted area in which to
operate, or one which is unreliable so that some act of ours can change it. If we
visit a tea leaf reader store and learn from her that as we walk out the door we're
going to be hit by a trick and killed instantly, we really haven't gained very much.
It's only if we learned that such a danger exists but is not inevitable, that we can be
warned of the danger in time to prevent it.
So one can not attach too much weight to the character of the predictions in
Gulliver's Travels, because it's pretty clear that Swift really was not intending to
predict anything but simply to use the device of political satire to discuss his own
18th-century England.
Let's turn to some other examples to give ourselves a more secure footing. We can
leap ahead to Orwell's own 1984 in which he carries the totalitarian collectivist
society to its final steady-state hell. We can stop off at Aldous Huxley's Brave
New World, meant to satirize and deplore the assembly-line world of the '20s, in
which Henry Ford becomes a sort of god, and people are born through identical
mass-production artificial births. Or we can do even better and look at science
fiction where it really is, in the science fiction magazines like Galaxy and Analog
and Amazing Stories, and the books which are not ashamed to identify themselves
as science fiction on their jackets.
What Orwell and Huxley were up to was a device of examining trends in
contemporary society, isolating a few of them, playing them through to their
logical ultimate concluding, and through this reductia ad absurdum showing their
disastrous potentials. And almost half a century ago in magazines like Amazing
Stories and Wonder Stories writers like David H. Keller and Stanton A. Coblentz
were doing pretty much the same thing. One must concede that in those times the
satire was a little heavy-handed, and the thought might have been a little
superficial; but there's much to be said for Keller and Coblentz and the others. A
novel like Coblentz's After 12,000 Years with its dour picture of a world in which
insect-like humans conduct wars between city-states that are like enormous insect
hives and use droves of specially bred and trained insects as weapons, as clear
morality and as thoughtful a warning as Huxley's sermon on the same subject.
Keller's Revolt of the Pedestrians was as anti-Ford as Huxley; but what Keller
warned against was not the effect of the automobile age on the mind or character,
but its effect on the body. His short story The Revolt of the Pedestrians shows a

world in which men have lost the habit of walking so long that their legs have
atrophied to tiny vestigial stumps.
More recently Fritz Leiber turned on, touched on the same anti-car theme from still
a different direction: in stories like Coming Attraction and X Marks the Pedwalk,
he looks at the automobile as a weapon, and on driving as a sort of a duel.
The difficulty in constructing this sort of a story, the cut by which Orwell and
Huxley could survive pretty well while Keller and Coblentz perhaps have not, is in
fleshing out one's vision of disaster with enough insightful surround to make the
disaster plausible. It's not a matter of accuracy of prediction - The Revolt of the
Pedestrians will never come true, but neither will Brave New World, and neither is
meant to. They're cautionary rather than predictive; they're like your dentists say,
"You're going to loose that tooth if I don't fill it," only the "if" in the story is
unspoken. It's, in the words of Poobah and the Mikado, a matter of adding
corroborative detail to land artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bold and
unconvincing narrative. In other words, you must imagine in depth if you want
your imaginings to carry conviction.
In the novel The Space Merchants, which Cyril Kornbluth and I originally wrote
for Galaxy around 1950, and which since has been published pretty widely around
the world, the concern in our minds was with the effects of the advertising industry
on society. The thesis of the book was that by the time of its setting, which is
perhaps around the end of this century, essentially everything people do in their
private lives, in their social affairs, in their government activities and everything
else, will be the result of behavior patterns instilled in them by advertising pressure
- nearly all instead of the 90% or so that's true today. Now, at a date which is
perhaps 20% of the time from the time when we wrote it to the time when it's
supposed to take place, I must confess that I can not really say that the advertising
industry has progressed particularly toward that point. But some other things have,
at least to some extent, come true; and this is a bit surprising even to me - I had not
fully realized it until I began to prepare this discussion.
In The Space Merchants there's a good deal of discussion of air pollution. People
in it wear filters to keep out the pollutants when they walk in the city streets. And
I've seen such filters being worn in Tokyo last year and in London last month and
any day of the week in Los Angeles or New York. In The Space Merchants
overpopulation is discussed as an urgent danger; and surely, that's what it has
become. The destruction of fresh-water resources is described as a fact; and in
places like Lake Eerie and most of the eastern rivers at least that's come true. So
what has come true in The Space Merchants is not its central warning but some of
the surround or the corroborative detail in which the central warning is imbedded.

It's pretty hard for a writer to look at his work objectively, but I think that one
reason why The Space Merchants has survived rather well lies in these two
observations: its central warning, which is against the deadening overall effects of
advertising on society, has not actually come to pass but remains relevant as a
danger to be guarded against, while its subsidiary themes have at least in part
shown themselves to be well-based by the developments of history. In exactly the
same way I think the survival value of Gulliver's Travels lies not so much in the
parts that have come true but in the parts which have not. The fulfillment of
Swift's nightmare of the totalitarian state helps us to accept the urgency of his
warnings against treachery and hypocrisy and cant.
Now, all of these stories that I've mentioned belong to a certain sub-class of
science fiction, largely political satire which Kingsley Amis calls the anti-utopia.
We haven't touched at all on the utopia itself, although to be sure it exists in the
field of science fiction with some celebrated examples. Edward Bellamy's Looking
Backward was perhaps the most famous a century ago, but it was only one among
hundreds and perhaps not the best. To my mind, the most rewarding of the
utopians was H. G. Wells.
Wells was no jolly optimist: he had some hope for the perfectibility of man, but he
didn't see any of his utopias as either inevitable or easy. The splendid society of
his novel A World Set Free was to come about only after a totally destructive war,
much like the war and consequent earthy paradise of his film Things to Come.
More frequently in his work it seems that even at his most hopeful he could see no
way to get from here to there, so he located his ideal societies in another dimension
entirely or after some such miraculous intervention as the character reforming gas
that remakes the human race in his novel In the Days of the Comet.
Because Wells was a major writer, perhaps the most moving and innovative ever to
have functioned in the field of science fiction, his utopias carry a certain
conviction. They were meant to - they were meant to move people in the direction
of remaking the world to its betterment by showing what a better world could be
like. He's most effective where, as in The Days of the Comet, he juxtaposes earthly
hell and future heaven in the life of a single narrator: his protagonist there is a man
who is dwarfed by the poverty and deprivation of early 20th-century England and
driven into a life of petty jealousies and mean hatreds and then reborn into a sort of
a demi-god of temperance and wisdom and compassion by the gases in the tail of a
comet that enter the Earth's atmosphere overnight.
There is not much in any of this that is either scientific or predictive: the comet is a
purely literary invention. There was then and is now no such chemical that will
make us sinners into saints; and if there was, there's no reason to believe we'd find

it in a comet's tail. But there is much in the novel that is both exact and
descriptive. Wells' picture of the life of the poor educated Englishman at that time
and place is minute and moving and sympathetic and shocked - he looks at his own
life from afar, with some revulsion. His demonstration that all it would take to
convert that grubby inferno into something closely approximating paradise on
earth would be a change of man's behavior to man is wholly convincing - at least it
is while you're reading the novel.
But most utopias, even Wells' own, have a certain sterility: they seem to suggest,
probably against the will of their creators, that even heaven becomes tiresome if it's
perfect and unchanging. And if Wells is rewarding as a utopian, he is even more
so as an anti-utopian. When The Sleeper Wakes, which is a sort of a vision of our
own world from the point of view of the turn of the century, our own world of
today, is wholly wrong in every one of its details but very nearly wholly right in its
overall impression: it's a world in which people inhabit huge cities, in which they
are regimented but lawless, driven but bored. In The Time Machine, while he
envisions a nearly idyllic world of the far future in which gentle, pretty little people
play at love and pleasure in the sunlight, he also sees beneath the surface of that
same world a cavernous underworld where apelike creatures who produce the food
and clothing for the beautiful people of the surface live and at night come out to
catch and kill and eat them. This is Wells' crypto-Marxism speaking: the gentle
Eloi of the surface are the descendants of today's capitalists, and the bent and
murderous Morlocks of the caverns are the children of the workers; and what
Wells is saying is that if the class system persists, this mutually destructive society
is what it will bring about, and what he means us to understand from what he is
saying is not that this is inevitable but that it is a danger we must work to avert.
If one looks at the work of almost any single science fiction writer of some ability,
it's easy to see that prediction is not what we're about, because each of us makes
hundreds of statements about the future, and the majority of them are mutually
contradictory. Now and again someone like Robert A. Heinlein or Larry Niven
will attempt to organize his work into a sort of a future history, which is how
Heinlein described most of his early stories; but even in Heinlein's work the frame
outlived out its usefulness. His four major recent novels, Stranger in a Strange
Land, and Farnham's Freehold, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and I Will
Fear No Evil, have in common only the fact that they have nothing in common: if
any one of them came true, the other three could not.
What science fiction writers individually and science fiction as a kind of normative
forecasting of the future in general offers us then is not predictions about the future
so much as a sort of a mail order catalog of possible alternate futures. And from
this we can compile a shopping list of the sorts of futures we would like to see, and

then proceed to bring them about. The science fiction writers are not the only
players in this particular game: it's what the people at the think tanks, like the Rand
Corporation and the Hudson Institute and the Institute for the Future in
Connecticut are doing; but science fiction is able to do it in a way which is not only
pleasantly flavored and agreeable by virtue of such literary skill as its authors
possess, but a way which makes it possible to show the side effects, what you
might call the second- and third-order derivatives, of existing trends.
One might invent a hypothetical example to show the difference: suppose at the
time of the sermon on the mount there were in the audience a man from the RAND
Corporation and a science fiction writer. Speculating on what might come of
Christ's gospel, each might draw up a future scenario. And the RAND man, if he
was lucky, might be able to foresee things like the St. Peter's basilica and the
massacre of Christians in the arena, maybe even the crusades. But it would only be
the science fiction writer who would be able to foresee the Spanish inquisition or
Thursday night bingo at your neighborhood church.
So a science fiction writer has, at least now and then, been able to cast illuminating
lights on our own society, both by showing where some aspect of it may lead if not
checked, which is the cautionary story, or simply by showing us how we might
look to some Martian or a visitor from another star. Even in the science fiction
stories which are primarily blood-and-thunder action-adventure, or even in the so-
called heavy science stories which are devoted largely to exploring the possibilities
of alien and future technologies and physical environments, these elements are
usually present - it's simply too good an opportunity to miss, because it allows a
writer to score points off some person or institution who has earned his
displeasure.
For example, Edgar Rice Burroughs was not above it in stories like The
Mastermind of Mars. One would not normally expect a good deal of sophisticated
social comment from the creator of Tarzan, but in the Mars novels he had much to
say about the cheapness and vulgarity of Earthly life. And in his novel The
Mastermind of Mars, he devoted a whole section to a thinly disguised attack on the
church in which terrified worshippers mourn meaningless liturgies like "Tur is
Tur" - sometimes they say it backwards, "Tur is Tur," while a fake idol scowls and
rolls its eyes at them in a staged miracle.
For that matter, even Tarzan is depicted as a sort of a Jean-Jacques Rousseau noble
savage, and used to score points off the English aristocracy, of whom at that time
Burroughs knew so little and disliked so much.
To propagandize in this way, encoding one's opinions in the form of science fiction
rather than stating them clear, is not only often more effective, but it is sometimes

a good deal safer. When I quoted Ted Sturgeon's remark earlier about why he
wrote science fiction - because it gave him almost complete freedom of speech and
total freedom of thought - I was thinking of comments which I've heard from many
men who were in responsible positions in politics or business or the church in the
early 1950s to the effect that they treasured science fiction particularly at that time
because in those Joe McCarthy years it was one of the few remaining areas in the
American periodical press where freedom of speech was still clearly visible. As
far as science fiction is concerned, the repressive '50s and the permissive '70s are
pretty much the same: there may be some difference in permitted vocabulary, but
there was then, as there is now, simply no limit to what can be talked about in
science fiction.
I would not have you think, however, that the ideas in science fiction are all either
technological, scientific, or propagandistic. There's another kind of science fiction
speculation which is neither of these things, and in fact is something which I have
never observed in any fully developed form in any other human activity. C. S.
Lewis, the author of Perelandra and The Screwtape Letters, gave it a name: he
called it eschatological fiction, and he defined it as a subspecies of science
fiction concerned with speculations about the ultimate destiny of our species.
Because Lewis himself was deeply religious, his own science fiction stories are
essentially religious propaganda - brilliantly done and surrounded by exciting
interesting detail. It's perhaps natural that he should usually, that he should think
in such terms as this, which is usually taken to mean subjects like the day of
judgment and god's intentions for the world. But the stories that he was talking
about were not at least conventionally religious. He meant stories like Arthur C.
Clark's Childhood's End and W. Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men. Stories like
these are no longer about the future of mankind, or at least should not be called so
unless one at the same time is prepared to call something like The Decline and Fall
of the Roman Empire a sort of an account of the future of pithecanthropus erectus,
because they're about our evolutionary descendants - not future men, but those
beings which will replace man as man has replaced his predecessors.
I'm not sure that Lewis ever saw any of his work, but to my mind one of the most
interesting writers of this eschatological fiction was the late Paul Linebarger, a
professor of political science, an occasional roving diplomat for the US State
Department, godson of Sun-Yat-Sen, and under his pen-name of Cordwainer
Smith, one of the most original science fiction writers of the past 20 years or so.
Cordwainer Smith's entire science fiction catalog comprises only a couple of
novels and a dozen or two short stories and novelettes written almost entirely in the
decade from the late 1950s to his death in the mid-1960s. The Cordwainer Smith
stories, novelettes like The Ballad of Lost CMell and On Alpha-Ralpha Boulevard

and The Dead Lady of Clown Town had to do with the remote future many
thousands of years from now. The people are no longer human. Some are human
by biological ancestry, but they're so changed through drugs and surgery and
prolongation of life that they seem god-like to our eyes. Some are robots, robots of
many shapes and sizes. And some are both - they are machines which had been
imprinted with the mind and personality of a human being. And some, and some
of the most interesting ones, are animals like lost CMell herself, who is a human-
like creature created from a cat. In the Cordwainer Smith stories all of these
strange creations meet and live and interact with each other in worlds scattered all
over the universe, disposing of energies capable of shaking suns, on errands that
seem stranger than the characters themselves.
There are many works of this sort of eschatological fiction in science fiction.
I've even dealt in it a little myself in the collaboration with C. M. Kornbluth called
Wolfbane or in a short story called Day Million more recently.
Day Million is a day 2,000 years or so from now, and the story is a love story that
happens on that millionth day of the Christian era. When people ask me what Day
Million is about, I sometimes say that it's a story about a boy who falls in love with
a girl who's 8 feet tall and smells of peanut butter - because it is - but it's also about
other things, like most of the complex eschatological science fiction stories I
know. It's not very easy to describe it briefly, because these stories need to be read
in full to mean anything at all. But they do mean something: they give us a chance
to stretch our minds; they give us a chance to think for ourselves, having seen what
one writer thinks may happen at a certain time under certain conditions, what we
think may happen. They carry with them a sort of a glorious aftertaste of thought,
they open new vistas. And the best part of them is often not in what we read while
we have the book or the magazine in our hands but in what we think after we put
them down.
We, human beings, are after all mammalian, biped, vertebrate, warm-blooded
animals. We live on a planet that has a certain chemical composition; we breathe a
certain particular kind of a mixture of gases; we're used to certain ranges of
temperatures; we feel a specific acceleration of gravity every day of our lives. But
every indication we now have is that we're not alone in the universe: some
scientists have guessed that in our own galaxy alone there may be some 63 million
other planets that are capable of harboring life, and experiments that have been
conducted with tanks of gas like the primitive atmosphere of earth radiated with
the kind of radiation that then reached us from the sun seemed to show that where
life is possible, it will develop automatically and inevitably. And what we know of
genetics and evolution seems to show that if life once begins, it will proceed
towards something in an advanced state which may include intelligence.

So as a gambling bet, it seems a pretty good probability that somewhere or other

there are races like ours in at least that they display what we call intelligence and
have developed what we call science and live in what we call civilizations. But
they may not be in a physical or chemical sense like us at all.
Science fiction is our principal mode of discussing these possible aliens, and
science fiction stories often use them to show us some aspect of the truth about
ourselves which we might not otherwise suspect. How much of our religion and
our social laws and our habits, for example, derive from the fact that we're live-
born and need protection for the first years of our lives? What would these
customs be like if we were, as some extraterrestrial creatures somewhere may be,
something like the sea urchin whose mother casts 100 million eggs at random into
the sea, and whose father fertilizes them by chance as he passes by, and who never
sees either of them except by the most unlikely chance at any time in his life?
What sort of a god would an intelligent sea urchin worship? What sort of a
government would he obey? And what do these thoughts tell us about the nature
of our own religions and societies?
Brian W. Aldiss wrote a provocative story in this area some years ago which was
called The Dark Light Years. He didn't go quite as far as a sea urchin; he only
invented an alien race which had much the same physiology and chemistry as
ourselves but one major scientific, psychological difference: we attach enormous
social and religious importance to some biological functions like eating and
reproduction; we make eating a sacrament or a ritual or a social occasion, like the
love feast or the editorial lunch; and we make reproduction a sacrament in the form
of a wedding ceremony, as well as a major concern of our morality and a basic
consideration in our laws of citizenship and inheritance and so on. Now, Aldiss'
aliens were like us to a degree; the difference was that the physical function to
which they attached psychological and religious significance was neither eating or
reproduction - it was excretion.
I think I will tell you no more about that particular story just now. When I
originally published it in one of my magazines a few years ago, it caused us a good
deal of trouble one way or another. I have no uncontrollable desire to repeat it
now. But it's easy to see that a story which brings together a race which has our
attitudes toward food and sex with one which has similar attitudes toward
excrement is bound to produce complications. The point is not what the
complications are, or even that they are ludicrous and arbitrary - the point is that
the attitudes are ludicrous and arbitrary, both the aliens' and our own. And this
ability to look at the human race from afar, what Harlow Shapley in a different
context once called the view from a distant star, is one of the greatest triumphs of

science fiction. For me at least, if there were nothing else that could be said in
defense of science fiction, that would be enough to justify its existence.
There are many definitions of science fiction, and I have no particular fondness for
any of them, because the best of them seem too rigid - they try to describe a field
which has as its principal virtue the characteristic of growing and changing. When
I was editing Galaxy Magazine, I had a definition of science fiction which went,
"A science fiction story is that story which I can publish in Galaxy without causing
readers to cancel their subscriptions", but clearly that's a definition which would
change in time.
But one can say of at least some kinds of science fiction that they promote
conceptual thinking as distinct from the crude calculation that's enough to get most
of us through daily lives. And they help us to prepare for the violent cultural
shocks that the accelerating rate of change of modern society is throwing at us
every day, not so much by warning us of what will happen as by leading us to
think in terms of consequences and future developments.
So science fiction, you see, is not only about trips to Mars or giant man-eating
cockroaches rising from the sea; it is about man himself, not only man as he is but
as he might be and as he can become. Man is the thinking animal, and the tool-
using animal, and the time-binding animal; and these are the things that science
fiction is about.

An Interview With Clifford Simak: A Career In Science Fiction
Clifford Simak is a Minneapolis newspaperman born in 1904, who has spent much
of his life writing about events that never happened. He began writing science
fiction in the '30s and had his first big success in 1939 with a series of stories and
novels for Astounding. His best-known novel, City, won him a reputation as a
philosophical writer with a gentle heart. He writes about solitary capable people
alone on farms, in woods, at one with nature and themselves, who face unexpected
challenges from life or the stars.
He has won many awards, such as the Hugos for The Big Backyard and his novel
Way Station. And he was guest of honor at the 1971 World Science Fiction
Convention in Boston, where I spoke with him about his career.
[James Gunns questions are italicized; Clifford Simaks answers appear in roman
text]
What was your first story?
My first story was Cubes of Ganymede; and it was sent off to Amazing, and
Sloane... was it O'Conor Sloane?
T. O'Conor Sloane.
T. O'Conor Sloane had it for a year or so. And I heard nothing from him. And
then one of the fan magazines said that it was scheduled for publication. And I
waited - in the meantime I wrote another story and did sell it, and it was published;
but I waited for the Cubes of Ganymede to be published. And after four years
Sloane sent it back and said that he found it unacceptable for publication because it
was a little outdated.
I have tried to find that story since. Sam Moskowitz has urged me time after time
to try to find this story, because he said he'd find some means to get it published.
And I have, it's probably among my papers somewhere. But I haven't been able to
find it.
And the first published story was World of the Red Sun - that was in the Wonder
Stories; that was sold to Gernsback.
That was after Gernsback had lost Amazing Stories and...
Well, no, this was... Gernsback was still publishing Amazing Stories I think at the
time that The World of the Red Sun was published.
I see. What date was this?
I can't tell you. I think it was in '29 or '30. I'm sorry, I would've looked it up if I
thought you'd ask me the question.
What, why did you decide to write the Ganymede story and The World of the Red
Sun?
Well, I think all writers feel within themselves a compulsion for expression. And
of course as a newspaper man, you do have some means of expression, but it's not
quite, not quite the thing that you wanted to do. And I had wanted to write
something; and I had become considerably intrigued with science fiction: I had
read Poe and H. G. Wells and Rider Haggard when I was in high school. And
then, oh, in '27 or '28 I picked up the first of the Amazings, one of the first of the
Amazings. I was extremely thrilled to think that there was such a magazine as this.
And so I think it was a matter of a rather slow coming to realization that probably
this is what I should be writing in. And I was lucky perhaps in choosing this field,
because I came in at a relatively early time when there wasn't too much
competition; and if a man could write anywhere near competently, you could sell,
you could establish yourself, you could gain some confidence. And today it's
much harder for a young writer to break in.
So I was lucky in many ways: I got in sort on... not ground floor, but probably the
second or third floor.
You're, you wrote how many stories before 1935, roughly?
I would think four or five, six maybe - not too many.
This was just in your spare time while you were working as a reporter?
This was just in my spare time.
And editor?
That's right.
You moved around a little bit.
I moved around. I started my newspaper career at Arm River, Michigan; and I

moved from there to Spencer, Iowa; from there up to Dickinson, North Dakota,
and to Brainerd, Minnesota. And I guess that moving around the country for about
ten years in my newspaper time, and then I, in 1939, July... June the 15th, 1939 - I
remember the day exactly - I came to the Minneapolis Star and Tribune, and I've
been there ever since.
Did you find that you had more time to write when you went to Minneapolis?
Yes, I did. On the smaller newspapers, I was working the schedule that all
newspaper men worked - there was no such a thing as an eight-hour day or a forty-
hour week. But when I went to Minneapolis, here we did have a forty-hour week;
and that did give me more time to write.
I had started writing a little bit before that, when John Campbell first was named
editor of Astounding. I had not been writing at that time. And I said, "John
Campbell is the kind of a man I can write for; is the kind of an editor that I want to
write for."
So I did start. And I think it was, I was working in 1938 and 1939 before I went to
Minneapolis. But after that there was considerably more room.
Why did you feel that John Campbell was the kind of an editor you could write for?
Oh, I had, I had been reading what John Campbell had written, not what John
Campbell'd written but what Don Stuart had been writing: The Twilight and some
of the other stories that he'd written in this rather mystical, philosophical vein.
And I thought that was just the kind of literature that we should be writing. So, it
was moving away from the power story that John had advocated and had written so
well. And it seemed to point in a new direction. And I thought that if the man
could write this kind of story, he was the kind of a man to follow.
Did you get much reaction to your early, earlier stories?
I got practically no reaction. The reaction didn't come until after many years.
Forrie Ackerman wrote to me - I think he was the first man who wrote, asked for
my autograph. I was more thrilled by Forrie writing to me than, I am sure, than he
was in getting my autograph. And then a few years later Isaac Asimov wrote to me
- Isaac was, I think he was still in high school at that time. He was trying to write.
And we corresponded back and forth.
I never, I'll never forget the exuberance of the letter in which Isaac told me he'd
made his first sale: I think it was something On Vesta to Amazing, yeah.
In the early fiction that you did, what did you feel that you were trying to write
then?
Well, first of course I was simply trying to write stories. I had not arrived at a
point where I was giving too much stock to what I'd write: it was simply a matter
of telling a story well enough that it could be sold and published.
Was it mainly about hard sciences, physics and astronomy, or just adventure?
No, I... it was more of as adventure. There might be some physics and chemistry
in it, but not too much, because after all, at that time I knew even less about it than
I do now; and now I don't know as much, anywhere near as much as I should.
You think it's necessary for a science fiction writer to be really well-informed?
I think that a science fiction writer... Let's put this another way: a man who is
well-informed and well-based may be at a disadvantage because he knows so well
the restrictions of the sciences that he's writing about that it may inhibit the work
that he's doing.
Puts chains on his imagination.
It does, I think it does.
Then there was I think a change in your attitude towards your work, and in the
work you did in 1938 and '39. What happened, aside from the fact that you were
writing for John Campbell principally?
I was writing for John Campbell - I wrote those stories for John Campbell, John
Campbell in mind. I thought that writing for John, I'd have some freedom, and that
I didn't need to stick to the mad scientist syndrome anymore. Of course there were
a lot of things not mad scientist, but that was the context of the thing.
And I tried to write more naturalistically. The first story that I sold to John was a
story about a football game between Mars and Earth; and the second one I sold to
him was about Iowa farmers homesteading Venus.
And this was a departure. I, there may've been other people who were doing the
same thing, but I was one of the first to do this, to take ordinary characters and put
them into strange situations and see what happened.
How did John react?
John reacted, was delighted with it. And the thing was that John thought that he
found a new author - he'd forgotten that I had been writing and announced me as a
new author.
Did the fans, other people react as well?
I don't think that, I don't think that the reaction was so, was as good as it might be.
I think it caught them by surprise: it took three or four years before they began to
see what myself and some of the other people were trying to do at that time.
Then it seems to me there was another change in your, the way you began to work,
about the time you wrote Time Query, wasn't it?
Yes, I think perhaps it was. Well, you see, writing the way I was and with the
comparative freedom of the magazines that were, that was developing at that time,
I was getting an awful lot of confidence. And I was then beginning to ask myself
now, instead of just writing, should I begin to try to say something worthwhile?
And then of course you have to go through the agony of thinking exactly what
should I say, what is worthwhile saying. And I think probably Time Query was the
first story in which I really tried to do that. There may have been some earlier
ones, but...
The theme of Time Query, as I remember it, was the fact that all living creatures
are brothers, isn't that?
That's right. It was the brotherhood idea. After all, life is in the minority in the
universe; and the universe is antagonistic toward it. You have to, a life does have
to cooperate: it's something rather unique. And it's just unique enough that the
mere fact that life exists is enough to make for a brotherhood.
Then it seems to me perhaps, do you think your writing has changed since then,
since Time Query and Here Gather the Stars?
Oh, I think, I think, Jim, that every writer evolves. I don't think this is unique with
myself. You're not the same man you were a year ago or five years ago; there is a
continual intellectual ferment going on - I think there is, I hope there is. When it
ceases, why, the person is no longer a writer. And you change; you grow; and you
evolve; and your thinking changes. It's a continual process.
For example, I couldn't possibly write City now - I was able to write City when I
did write it. I wouldn't have a ghost of a chance for writing that kind of a story
now. I probably am writing better than I wrote then. But there was an exuberance
then that was present then that I probably haven't got now.
What were you trying to say in City?
I was, oh... I was trying, it was at the time of World War II; and I was terribly
disillusioned with what the human race was doing to itself. I was extremely upset
at the idea that we could continue to use war as a matter of national policy. I was
upset by man's inhumanity to man: we were hearing about Dachau and some of the
other camps. And so I tried to, I tried to create a world that would be the kind of a
world I'd want to live in; and I've always often said, without really meaning it I
think, that I made a world of dogs because you couldn't make that kind of a world
and fill it with human beings.
It was a plea for some intellectual honesty and for some kindness and for some
brotherhood.
In more recent times, in, say, middle '60s you've been writing more along a fantasy
vein. Is this for a particular purpose?
I'm not too sure it is. You can't reach inside yourself and find out exactly why
you're doing a thing. But I have found, I experiment with this, experimented with
it a little bit and found that it worked, this business of time fantasy and science
fiction concepts together. And I was a little bit horrified at myself when I started
to do it, because I thought, "Well, if this is not science fiction, it's not really fantasy
- it's a hybrid." And the more I did it, the more I thought about it, I thought, well,
why not? Because they do relate to one another; and they can be used very
effectively I think. And I'm not the only man who's doing it - a lot of people are
doing this.
Do you think there is still something you want to say that you haven't yet said?
I know that I want to continue writing. I still feel the old compulsion to write. I
think there are some things I want to say, I hope so.
You've just finished a new book, I think.
Yes, I did.
Is this different than what you've said before?
I think this is... I've said a good deal more of a lot of things that I wanted to say.
And it was an experimental novel, not necessarily because I wanted to write an
experimental novel, but because I had to write a non-structure novel to get at the
problems I wanted to present. And thank goodness, I found a publisher that is
going to publish it.
Were you conscious when you were writing of what other people were trying to
say?
I think I was conscious of it. I knew that a great many people were thinking
different things, trying to express the philosophies and new thoughts. It might
have influenced me - I don't think I had too great an influence. After all, when
you're writing in that way, you have to be honest; you have to be honest to yourself
and to your public; you can't ape somebody else.
Could you, would you say that the fact that they were trying to say something
encouraged you to say something yourself?
Oh certainly. I'd, it'd be pretty lonesome situation to be the only man in the field
who's trying to say something. It was a great comfort to me to find out that other
people were trying to do some of the same things I was trying to do.
Do you feel science fiction has changed significantly during this 40-year span?
As far as the structure of the field is concerned, it has changed. And the change
has come in a broadening-out and in a more and greater flexibility. You've got
more ground you can cover; there is more, there are more themes you can talk
about; there are more ways in which you can write. I think it's changed for the
better all the time, not, probably not year by year but period by period, going
through different periods of writing.
Do you feel there's anybody in particular you've learned from?
I... No, I don't think that I can name one single name. I think I've learned from a
lot of people: I've learned from Isaac Asimov, and Heinlein, and Sturgeon, and
Fritz Lieber, and Poul Anderson - a great many, great many people.
Do you feel that the new diversity in science fiction that you were speaking about
has made it possible to do things that you couldn't have done before?
Oh yes, I very definitely feel that. But there was no restriction ever for a man to go
out as far into left field as he wanted to; but seeing other people do it, it gives you
an encouragement of sort; it gives you a license to go out and to match what they're
doing, or even to go beyond where they've gone.
Is that true of this new novel?
I think that... I don't think that I could've written this new novel five years ago.
But seeing what people like Zelazny, Delany, and perhaps even Heinlein have
done gave me the courage to go ahead and do this. And I don't mean to say that
this is an outstanding or ice-breaking novel or anything - it certainly is different
from anything I have written. And I hope that people like it.
It's ice-breaking for you.
It's ice-breaking for me. But not for the field.
What's the title of the book?
A Choice of Gods.
Are you working on another one?
I'm working on another one. It is not an experimental novel - it's what I have been
doing before.
Not the same theme?

Not the same theme, no, no.
There's always something new.
There's always something new. You don't... Occasionally you, one book follows
another in pretty much the same pattern; but after all, there are other things to do.
You move away. I don't think it's a conscious thing: unconsciously you say this
book is going to be a little bit different.
Isn't that perhaps what science fiction is all about?
I think so. I think so, entirely. I don't, we don't have too many people in science
fiction who get stuck in a rut: they change, they evolve. Like I told, like I said
before, there's evolution within the writers and within the field.
The Early Days Of The SF Magazines: An Interview With Jack Williamson
Born and raised on an arid New Mexico farm, Jack Williamson used science
fiction as a doorway into another world created with the publication of the first
science fiction magazine in 1926, Amazing Stories. In his 50s he earned a Ph.D.
in English and took up a career as a university teacher in his home town of
Portales, New Mexico. He still writes, mostly in collaboration with Fred Pohl, but
he can not forget the wonderful early days of the magazines.
[James Gunns questions are italicized; Jack Williamsons replies appear in roman
text]
Jack, your career in science fiction is almost identical with magazine science
fiction itself. What brought you into the field?
I grew up on a sort of semi-desert farm in South-Eastern New Mexico. The

weather was dry; farm prices were low. I wanted to be a scientist with no
opportunity to get the training, to get into it. When I came across my first copies
of the old Amazing Stories, this was a fantastic new world - it was something I
could get into. It was better than real science because it had all sorts of
implications for the future as well as today, the experiments worked. And that was
exciting.
Do you think this attitude was typical or at least symbolic of most science fiction
writers and readers?
It seems to me that it was. It seems to me that the young reader, the new reader,
the typical reader, is excited about science fiction as revealing something that
could happen - it's a sort of window into tomorrow. It has this sense of possible
achievement, as distinct from fantasy that is about what couldn't happen. And
people are excited with the idea that science and reason can make a better society,
a new world; it can give us sorts of experience that we can't have in the world
today.
What about this feeling of isolation that you mentioned, and this feeling of
dissatisfaction with reality? Do you think this was typical of the science fiction
writers and readers?
I think so. It's - most popular literature is probably escape literature; and science
fiction, as much as any of it, is written and read primarily for entertainment and
escape, and only incidentally for depth, for literary values or themes or whatever.
I think somebody however has suggested - perhaps it was Isaac Asimov or Arthur
Clarke - that it is, I think it was Isaac who said it was escape into reality. Do you
agree with that?
Well, in a sense. That is, the mainstream fiction is about the world as it is, or it
was; and it ignores the fact that it's changing. And it seems to me the basic truth,
reality about our world today, is that it's changing very rapidly, primarily because
of technology, technological change. And it seems to me that this is the first fact
of reality; and accepting this change makes science fiction real, realistic in a way
that the mainstream fiction is not.
Your first story was published in 1928. Did you sense that this time, that feeling of
change that you referred to?
I think so. About the same time that I wrote the story, I wrote an editorial called
Scientifiction, Searchlight of Science in which the basic idea was that science
fiction looks ahead of science; it explores the possibilities; it shows what the
machines can do. And the idea in the editorial at least was that scientists could
follow, they could - science could build the hardware that science fiction had
imagined.
How long was it before you came into contact with editors and other writers of
science fiction?
It was pretty slow at first, but within a few years I went to New York and began
meeting other writers and editors briefly. I met Ed Hamilton, who was a pioneer
science fiction writer for Weird Tales, and drifted down the Mississippi with him.
What editors did you meet at the time?
Well, I met Farnsworth Wright at Weird Tales first of all, who was one of the great
editors, and...
You met Hugo Gernsback?
Only briefly.
What kind of a person was he?
Well, he was a very aggressive, successful businessman. He was interested in

gadgets. He published radio electronics magazines, how to do it; gadget
magazines; and as an editor he was, he liked science fiction. He in a sense
deserves all his credit for being the father of American science fiction, but I feel
myself that his greatest achievement was probably rediscovering H. G. Wells and
popularizing him. I was just checking my files, and I see that for the first 29 issues
of Amazing Stories there was a Wells story inside, and Wells' name in big letters
on the cover.
That's amazing, really amazing. [Gunn laughs] What about Jules Verne? Did he
also use a lot of Jules Verne?
He used a lot of Jules Verne, and Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. Merrit. As an editor,
he had good taste in that he liked good science fiction. His weakness as an editor,
it seems to me, is that he left the editorial management to subordinates, and that he
was reluctant to pay for science fiction, for new science fiction; that he didn't really
encourage new writers.
I think it was Horace Gold who said that in the early days of science fiction one
got paid at a fraction of a cent a word, and only upon lawsuit.
In my case it was half a cent or less. And I got a lawyer at the fiction guild to
collect for me finally.
[Gunn laughs] It was in the early '30s that the Clayton Magazines founded
Astounding. And you sold some stories to that magazine too.
Yes. Harry Bates was the first editor. The original title of the magazines was
Astounding Stories of Superscience. And they, Harry Bates was a good editor in
that he paid well - he paid 2 cents a word; he had a definite formula; he encouraged
writers. The word "formula" has a bad ring, but I don't think it's altogether bad:
that is, Clayton had a chain of pulp magazines, and Astounding had to fit the
pattern of the chain. And this meant... well, plotted stories, shaped stories with a
beginning, a middle, and an end, but the action had to be motivated - it had to get
somewhere. There was a reason for things. And I think this was, writing for
Astounding was good and encouraged a writer to achieve a sense of form and
direction, even though the pulp formula itself was narrow, limited.
Did writers at that time talk a lot about formulas, about how to find the perfect
formula?
I think so. I was trying to write pulp fiction; and I think the pulp fiction writer had
a formula in somewhat the same way that the epic poet did in the oral tradition:
that is, pulp writers traditionally wrote fast; they pounded the stuff out first-draft
and sold it. And this involves a sort of limited and narrowed approach. And the
pulp formula I think was good in some ways: it required a form for the story, a
beginning, a middle, and an end, motivation for the action, a sense of direction that
was good for a writer to learn, though it was sort of limiting.
Is this what you and Ed Hamilton talked about briefly?
Well, all sorts of things. Ed had, I think, a too-narrow formula: that is, when you
consider his background, his reading, his knowledge of the field, his sensibilities,
he could've written more diversified stuff than he did, but he tended to do the same
basic story over and over again for Weird Tales. But it was a wonderful story: it
was a sort of myth of the future in which his interstellar patrol many thousand
years in the future was saving a future society from all sorts of dangers. And this I
think was the beginning or an early part of the myth of the future that has been
developed by Stapledon, by Isaac Asimov, and by a lot of other people and to...
something that is a sort of a central myth in science fiction, as the Trojan War was
the central myth for the Greeks.
Is this a conscious or an unconscious process, do you think?
Well, unconscious. It made a background for the stories. It was part of, well, the
sense of wonder, the motivation, the reason for being. But I don't think anybody
deliberately planned it out. But when the idea occurred, it was wonderful.
Sort of a trial-and-error process of the best idea survive?
I suppose so.
Ed Hamilton got a nickname out of his writing, didn't he? What was he called?
Worldsaver, Worldwrecker Hamilton.
Yes, that was it, I believe.

Which wasn't, not quite fair. He wrote better stories at the time that nobody would
buy them, and better stories later that people did buy, such as What's It Like Out
There.
To get back to some of the earlier editors, some names that I recall, people like T.
O'Conor Sloane in the early days of Amazing Stories, and F. Orlin Tremaine. Did
you know anything of them?
Well, Sloane was I think, the son-in-law of Thomas Alva Edison. I didn't actually
meet him, though he was there. But I feel that he was a pretty passive, inactive
editor. Tremaine I met, knew; I feel that he was an excellent editor in that he was
interesting, he was dynamic, he had a goal for the magazine, he planned things for
it and carried them through. And he was exciting to work with in the same way
that Wright was and that John Campbell was later and that Horace Gold always
was for the people who worked for him.
His successor in 1937 was John W. Campbell, Jr. What were your relationships
with Campbell? Did he write to you? Did you write to him?
Well, I was already writing for the magazine. And I met Campbell about the time
he came in, if not earlier, and...
It was 1937.
Yes. And I continued sending him stories. Campbell liked the most of them; and
later he suggested ideas. He was a creative mind with a sense of direction, and he
was a man who inspired and led writers and who made the magazine what he
wanted. And it was something different. Tremaine had not been a scientist in the
sense that Campbell was - he didn't have the same sense of science and direction.
And so that Campbell, with a special, let's say dream or the role of science and the
shape of the future and so forth, energized or inspired a new group of writers, such
as Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, L. Ron Hubbard, A. E. Van Vogt, Ted Sturgeon.
You mentioned that John Campbell suggested ideas to his writers. What kind of
ideas did he suggest to you?
For example, I had written a novelette called With Folded Hands, and he suggested
a sequel. And With Folded Hands, they are the humanoids, little robots created to
serve and obey and guide man from harm that do this too well so that they
suffocate individuality, initiative, freedom; they smother the human race. He

suggested that I use Ryan's work in parapsychology at Duke and as a force that
man might develop when they're denied their ability to use their hands - as he saw
it, a force to use against the robots. But with my own sense of the story, I felt that
the robots would control this force too, and...that is, they're created by definition to
be perfect; and the statement of the story is that the perfect machine is perfectly
destructive. So logically the humanoids had to mechanize this and become more
destructive than ever.
What other story ideas did Campbell have a part in for you?
During the war, when his writers were being drafted, he felt that he wanted new
names. And this was the time when I was having problems in - it was a writer's
block; and he suggested a new name, a new personality, new stories: somewhat the
same sort of thing he'd done when he became Don A. Stuart with a new style, a
new sort of story instead of the space operas that Campbell had been writing. And
what I had for a story idea was a story about the planetary engineers who terraform
asteroids, make them inhabitable. And Campbell suggested that some of these
asteroids should be anti-matter. And working with these, this framework, I came
up with eventually a couple of novels about what we call "CT," for contra-terrine
matter.
Another thing that Campbell didn't actually do, but he suggested a story about the
mechanical ants who would be somewhat like my own humanoids in that they
would be machines that would be too much for us. And this I never was able to do
for Campbell, probably because I'd used up my own motivation and so forth and
The Humanoids. But it worked into a novel I've just finished called The Moon
Children.
Which will appear...
It's supposed to be published in Galaxy, and to be published by Berkley and

possibly Putnam.
This will represent six decades in which you have had science fiction published.
Which makes me seem pretty antique. [Williamson laughs]
Right. Although there is a science fiction writer even more, who goes back farther
than that: Will Jenkins.
Murray Leinster.
Murray Leinster, whose first story was published in 1919 but still in the '60s I think
was considered a contemporary science fiction writer. Did you ever meet him?
Only briefly, during the war, about Campbell's office. Quiet, reserved, humorous
man; pleasant, likable. I don't know him well.
There were, I believe, at least two other major creative editors in the field,
although perhaps you never sold to either one of them: Horace Gold and Tony
Boucher.
I never did. I knew them both socially; I admired them, and I appreciate what they
for the field. Horace Gold I think brought an element of ironic or satiric or the
anti-utopian into the science fiction magazine field out of the stream of literature
that's represented by Huxley's Brave New World, by Orwell's 1984, and so forth.
And Boucher with McComas brought into the field a literary quality that it didn't
have anywhere else.
Back, going back to the '30s, I asked Isaac Asimov the question about the time
when he was first involved in science fiction. I'd like to ask you, what did you, you
and the other writers, have the sense that you were doing?
I was tremendously excited about science fiction as a real way of looking ahead of
exploring the possible future, of envisioning what might happen. And I was also
excited about it in a way that I can't easily define - it's something to be created: that
is, this was something I was deeply concerned about, something I could do. It was
the form, the possibilities, the genre, the medium with a challenge. It was just an
avenue for creation.
We've said that there was not much money in it. Why did you do it if it wasn't for
money?
Just for love, for excitement, for this special kind of creation, of freedom to do
something the way I wanted it as nearly as I could.
You thought that you were involved in the, in creating something, in the beginning
of something.
I definitely did. That science fiction was to me - I think to most of us - something

new. The society around us in depression times and so forth was pretty, pretty
discouraging; and this was a way out personally and socially to something new,
something different, something better, something wonderful.
Did you get any feedback in terms of reaction from readers and other writers?
Especially in letter columns in the magazines. They used to print a dozen pages of
letters, and many of these readers were as excited about the whole thing as I was.
You could've been a physicist or a bank clerk. In fact, you opted to be a kind of
outsider, a writer until the last 10 or 15 years when you sort of rejoined the
establishment, I think you've said. Do you have any regrets about this period?
None at all. It was a lonely life, and in some ways pretty bitter, but in another way
it was tremendously thrilling and rewarding because science fiction is a kind of
community or culture that I think is unified by this, I say, myth of the future, of
science fiction, of something that can extrapolate, predict what is going to happen
and perhaps influence what's going to happen - at least that's the way we kid
ourselves: that we might somehow make the world better than it would otherwise
be. At least I think that's part of the dream. And I think that certainly I'm glad to
belong to something, and this I think is something worth belonging to. And the
sense of belonging I think is good for the individual.
You belong to the science fiction community.
A small community, but it's there. [Williamson laughs]

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The Center for The Study of Science Fiction

DVD produced by Eric Solstein and Digital Media Zone

Center for The Study of Science Fiction Film Series 1

Creating the Literature of Science Fiction Film Series _________________________ 3

Technical Notes on The Films_____________________________________________ 6

Science Fiction Films: A Lecture By Forrest J. Ackerman _____________________ 8

Plot In Science Fiction: A Lecture By Poul Anderson ________________________ 17

Science Fiction And The Mainstream: A Lecture By John Brunner _____________ 36

Theme In Science Fiction: A Discussion Between Gordon Dickson &

James Gunn _______________________________________________________ 42

New Directions In Science Fiction: A Seminar With Harlan Ellison ____________ 55

The Early History Of Science Fiction: A Lecture By Damon Knight ____________ 64

The Ideas In Science Fiction: A Lecture By Frederik Pohl ____________________ 73

An Interview With Clifford Simak: A Career In Science Fiction________________ 84

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Creating the Literature of Science Fiction Film Series

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work, the virtues of cinema verit) arranged by Harry Harrison. Campbell

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Technical Notes on the Films

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Science Fiction Films: A Lecture By Forrest J. Ackerman

My name is Forrest J. Ackerman. As I speak to you from the year 1970, Im 53

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fanatic devotion, or else condemned with passionate displeasure. No viewer, pro

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elements in them as in science fiction films. The dragon of Siegfried is not

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Plot In Science Fiction: A Lecture By Poul Anderson

In 1947 a young Pennsylvanian, then attending the University of Minnesota,

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Have you found a good method?

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What is the function of plot in a story?

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Is there any place in a story for coincidence?

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The History Of Science Fiction After 1938: A Lecture By Isaac Asimov

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Nevertheless, although some science fiction enthusiasts, including myself, thought

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Science Fiction And The Mainstream: A Lecture By John Brunner