Author's Afterward










 

Author's
Afterward

 

I LIKE TO
think that the science-fiction fan's curiosity about authors is fundamentally
different from the movie fan's curiosity about acting personnel; I hope, in
other words, that the first types are not just gossips. I can justify the hope
to some extent. A science-fiction story tends to have a more extensive and
complex back­ground than that found in a more mundane tale. Much of this
background is implicit, leaving room for specula­tion, and even for thought,
about its nature. I know from experience that science-fiction enthusiasts spend
time and argument on this aspect of the field, to the near exclusion of debate
over Joe Author's third di­vorce.

I'm glad to
furnish basis for such debates, if only be­cause they occasionally provide me
with new ideas. I am not really sure that my own conscious memory will furnish
all the data which the more careful analysts will need. I do concede the claim
that every story has its origin in things which I have experienced, directly or
otherwise; but I am just about certain that the connection between the original
events and the final tale is far more tenuous and tangled and much, much less
open to analysis and reconstruction than the followers of von Däniken and
Velikovsky like to believe.

I am not,
therefore, certain that the following bits of biography and self-analysis will
be really helpful to any­one, but here they come anyway. Amateur psychoana­lysts,
switch on your computers.

First,
elementary characteristics. I like the old scientific gimmick story, and I like
space opera. If Verne had been able to combine the events of his trip to the Moon
with the ending of Phileas Fogg's tour of the world, he would have written the
ideal science-fiction storyone packed with adventure in unfamiliar envi­ronments,
with an ending which any educated adult could kick himself for not foreseeing.

My Fantasy
Press copies of the old novels by E. E. Smith, Jack Williamson, and John
Campbell are visibly decrepit from rereading. My most valuable collector's
items from the early magazines are getting steadily worse from the same cause.
I wish I knew some way of preserving them short of sealing them in tanks of
heli­um, which would prevent my reading them. So much for what I like in
science fiction.

I suppose
there are other facets of personality needed by the psychoanalyst, but I'm not
sure which will be most helpful. I suspect, though, that my stories have been
influenced quite heavily by my innate conserva­tism, though this is not a
matter of age, I am quite cer­tain. "Impediment," which expresses the
doubts I have always felt about telepathy, was written and sold when I was
nineteen, still a junior in college. The same con­servatism has, I fear,
controlled a lot of what I haven't written: I am equally dubious about
antigravity, the little-green-man branch of UFOlogy, the Bermuda Triangle, and
the various branches of what is now called psionics. I have greatly enjoyed
James Schmitz' Telzey Amberdon stories, but I doubt very much that I could
write one. I was completely unimpressed by the original article on Dianetics
back in 1950, and have re­mained so as the concept evolved into Scientol­ogy. I
am, in other words, what the crasser mystics call a crass materialist and have
great trouble visualizing an event on my owneven when it is intentionally fic­tionalunless
I have some sort of belief that it could really happen. I can enjoy reading or
hearing fantasy stories, but doubt very much that I could ever write one.

For example, a
number of years ago I received a re­quest from a gentleman who was planning an
anthology of vampire stories. He wanted me to contribute to it. I had the
ordinary literate adult's familiarity with Dracula and a few other tales of the
same general sort; there seemed nothing particularly difficult about the assign­ment.
I took it on.

The story
which resulted was essentially science fic­tion. The vampire anthology never
appeared, but "A Question of Guilt" was finally published in a
collection of horror stories, and is now being published here as science
fiction. I was much more concerned about the problems of an intelligent
believer in cause and effect as he tried to solve the blood transfusion problem
at a time in history when it was essentially insoluble, than I was about the
hypothetical protective powers of garlic, sil­ver, and other symbolic devices.

Of course, I
pay lip service to the concept of the open mind. I don't happen to believe in
vampires. I don't believe in magic of the sort which claims that symbols have a
feedback on reality. I do, however, ad­mit that my own visualization of what
the Arisians called the Cosmic All is certainly very incomplete and may be
grossly wrong in spots. This is an admission on the strictly intellectual
level. Emotionally I have as much trouble believing in the wrongness of my
picture as a John Bircher would have in doubting The Conspir­acy, or a
Bible-belt fundamentalist in facing the fact that evolution is regularly and
commonly observed in process.

There may be
an afterlife. Telepathy and other psionic manifestations may be real and may
some day come under orderly human control. There may be flaws in the laws of
thermodynamics, even the first one. It is fun to read stories about such
possibilities, but I seem to lack what it takes to write themwith one
exception. The relativity theories have survived theoretical and experimental
attack for about two-thirds of a century, and if I were really consistent I
would be unable to write an interstellar story claiming or implying
faster-than-light travel. I am not that consistent; psychologists are welcome
to their fun as they figure out why (or maybe the reason is blatantly obvious).

Even though I
tend to be conservative, and to heed unthinkingly such things as traffic signs
and the moral rules I learned from my mother, some of my stories have
originated from a streak of contrariness some­where back of the eyes. This has
never gotten me into serious troubleexcept for World War Two I have led an
incredibly uneventful life, which is the principal rea­son I am not doing this
Afterword biographically. How­ever, it has provided ideas. The principal
trigger to the contrary urge is provided by the words "of course,"
and several stories"Uncommon Sense," "Technical Er­ror,"
"Assumption Unjustified," and perhaps "An­swer"have
definitely resulted from my reaction to this phrase.

In the early
1940's I was an astronomy major; my tutorhe would have been called a faculty
advisor any­where else, but this was Harvardwas the solar expert Donald H.
Menzel. He was a science-fiction fan, knew that I wrote it, and would
occasionally discuss it with me. He did not talk down to me. There may be
stuffy, unimaginative, self-righteous types in scholarly fields and in uniform,
but the only ones I have met were in the branch of scholarship called
"humanities" (by them), and in hippie garb. Dr. Menzel was
imaginative, and he wrote as well as read science fiction. He was even involved
with the production of a short-lived magazine, Science Fiction Plus, a decade
or so later. At one time we disagreed on a rather trivial point; he felt that
Martians would have long, trunklike noses to per­mit an effective sense of
smell in such thin air, while it seemed to me that low atmospheric density
would ac­tually favor molecular diffusion and make smell a more effective sense
than on Earth. I don't recall that either of us ever used the "of
course" phrase, but its spirit hovered in the near background. Neither of
us was silly enough to carry the argument to great lengths, since doing so
obviously involved too much pure speculation about undemonstrable points. But a
few years later while I was returning from Europe on a troop ship with my
typewriter and a good deal of time, I settled the question to my own
satisfaction with "Uncommon Sense." I never discovered his reaction
to the story, or even whether he ever read it. If he did, he was probably more
bothered by my giving planets to a supergiant star like Deneb.

As for the
other examples"Of course" there is a right way and a wrong way to do
things, or at least a best way and a lot of worse ones. "Of course"
if you follow the handbook carefully in dealing with alien or­ganisms which are
in the book, everything will go prop­erly. "Of course" it's possible
to understand in princi­ple the workings of your own mind.

However, there
may be justified differences of opin­ion as to which way is really best. John
Campbell, for so many years the major editor and brightest guiding light of
science fiction, pointed this out to me in our first face-to-face conversation.
This was in early 1943, just after my graduation, when I stopped in New York on
my way to Atlantic City and Army basic training. Why, he asked, should so many
of our tools be forcing devices? Shouldn't skill, generally speaking, be better
than force? He supplied a few specific suggestions, I was able to come up with
a few more, and I was given my first magazine cover for "Technical
Error," written at odd moments during various stages of classification and
flight training. The story was published shortly before I got my gold bars and
pilot wings.

I suppose, in
a way, "Assumption Unjustified" is really another vampire story
turned into science fiction, but the "of course" is still behind it.
Like most people, I was familiar with the notion that legends may well have
roots a bit outside the undiluted human imagination. I have never carried the
"may well" to the "must" level of a Velikovsky or a von
Däniken, and am perfectly willing to admit that the story is fictionthough I
still like to believe it could have happened. There seemed nothing unreasonable
to me then about Earth's being on a list of planets containing animal life
suitable for beings who needed an occasional blood fix. Most of my chemistry
was learned long after I finished my under­graduate work. I now have more
realistic notions about protein chemistry, and if I had written the story about
my honeymooning vampires a couple of decades later I could have created a much
more tense situation. "Assumption Unjustified" might still have been
the title; or perhaps "Assumptions . . . "

On the other
hand, I'm not sure I'd have written "Answer" at all if I'd known as
much then as I do now.

The general
idea of how a self-duplicating machine would work had not yet appeared in
Scientific Ameri­can; neither had solid-state devices, something which hadn't
occurred to me either. In my mathematical igno­rancethere is good reason why
I'm a high school teacher instead of a professional astronomerI had concluded
that analog computers held more promise than the digital types. I doubt that I
could ever have made a workable farce out of the idea, as Arthur Clarke did a
few years later in "The Ultimate Melody." I seem to be one of these
dead-serious types; I think I have a sense of humor, but my funniest remarks
seem to be unintentional. I don't yet understand why I got such a laugh at a convention
a few years ago when I pointed out that humor was essentially the relay-chatter
dis­played by the human nervous system upon conscious perception of an
incongruity. I hadn't thought of that, either, when "Answer" was
gestating.

I do have to
admit that not all stories come from my contrariness. Sometimes they arise from
an actual urge to get my ideas out in the open, sometimes from other people's
suggestions, and sometimes from something very much like panic. "Mistaken
for Granted" is an ex­ample of the last. For many years I had a reputation
as a good storyteller around Boy Scout campfires. The sto­ries were usually
other people'sJohn Campbell's "Who Goes There" has been responsible
for a lot of nightmares in tents over the last forty yearsbut on one occasion
I was caught short and had to make up a story on no notice at all. Since the
audience did consist of Scouts, some with astronomy merit badges which I had
issued, a version of "Mistaken" developed almost at once under the
pressure.

A few years
later, while teaching at a primary-grade summer school, I was informed by the
director that my group would be putting on the following Wednesday's assembly.
It was then Friday, and "Mistaken" appeared in the form of a play in
due course, thanks mostly to a very capable teen-aged girl to whom
responsibility could be delegated. Writing the thing in story form was almost
an afterthought.

I have already
admitted that some stories were suggested, in one form or another, by editors.
Judy-Lynn del Rey does not greatly resemble John Campbell in very many ways,
but like him she can light fires under authors. "Stuck With It" was
her idea; she specifically told me she wanted a story about a civilization
which had become overdependent on a superadhesive. My own contrary nature did
emerge, obviously. I had been getting more and more irritated with
"environmental­ists" who belittle physical-science engineering and
tech­nology and claim that everything should be done biolog­ically. They are
especially annoying when conversation reveals that they don't happen to know a
chromosome from a microtome, but are still sure that the "natural"
way is best. Personally I'd rather spend thirty years dying of nitrite
poisoning than thirty hours dying of nat­ural botulism. Since biological
engineering can be just as good a pollutant as the chemical kind, I made it so,
and this was before the flap about recombinant DNA re­search.

Requests come
in various forms. Fred Pohl, while ed­iting Galaxy and If magazines, used to
buy paintings which he thought would make good covers and then have stories
written to fit them. I was asked to do one for what looked like a trite
situationa giant meteor fitted with rocket motors being driven Earthward. My
contrariness made me interpret the picture as differently as I could, and
"Bulge" resulted. Larry Niven's "Neu­tron Star" appeared
after I had sent "Bulge" off to Fred, and for a little while I
worried about accidental plagiarism; I think I even went so far as to call
Larry up and apologize. Then reason reasserted itself, and I de­cided that
Larry had no prior rights to tidal forces, and I don't think the yarns are
similar enough to call for the convention of an Ethics Committee.

And finally,
there is some serious science. Nearly a quarter of a century ago there appeared
in The Strolling Astronomer, the official organ of the Association of Lunar and
Planetary Observers, a report to the effect that some of the craterlets on the
floor of Plato were sometimes visible and sometimes not with the same in­strument
under apparently identical conditions of at­mospheric transparency and seeing.
I submitted a very brief paper to the same journal suggesting that electric
effects might raise dust from the crater floor, and that this might also
account for some anomalous occultation effects reported in the same
publication. The suggestion met with a deafening silence in professional
circles, but it did provide a story background. In "Dust Rag" I as­sumed
a local Lunar magnetic field to provide a focus­sing effect for charged
particles from the solar wind. Isaac Asimov remarked, when he used the story in
an anthology for science teachers, that Hal was wrong; the Moon has no magnetic
field. I'll let history settle that one, but I still think the basic idea has
merit. Maybe the charge is friction-generated by landslides down the inner
slopes of the Plato ringwall, maybe it's caused some other way. I'd still like
to see something quantitative written about it by a competent physicist.

That's my
closest to political writing, so far.