Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (73 page)

What then is the specific literary role of the science-fiction writer? I think it can be said to derive in equal parts from what I call the fictional quality in science and the scientific quality in literature.

Before the development of the electron microscope and sundry useful gadgets like cloud chambers and special photographic devices, it was obvious to most chemists that very definite laws governed the combinations of elements as well as more complex substances. Various laws were worked out, expressed in what were called "combining weights," to cover the observed phenomena. But the question of why the elements combined in the specific ways, weights, and quantities that they did could not be answered with the research equipment then available. So, over a century ago, an Englishman named John Dalton revived an ancient piece of Greek metaphysics, altering it to fit the observed data, and gave the world Dalton's Atomic Theory. And that's the theory which, with the necessary amendments to fit new facts as they've been discovered, is behind the modern atomic bomb. Dalton died without seeing either an atom or its path on a photographic plate, but the theory which bears his name still stands in all essentials.

A little while earlier, there was the matter of phlogiston. Unable to explain the phenomenon of combustion any other way, the alchemists and early chemists decided on an imaginary substance which had to be in all things that could catch fire. The more phlogiston, the hotter the flame. Eventually, of course, all the phlogiston would be burned away and only the original substance left. The trouble was that when Lavoisier finally burned material under laboratory conditions and weighed the residue carefully, he found that the weight increased because of the acquisition of oxygen and thus destroyed the phlogiston theory.

As a nonscientist, I have always been fascinated by both theories, one accepted even today and the other mentioned now only to be ridiculed. I have always felt that their respective originators, Dalton and Becher, were essentially poets of science. Operating from definite facts, they went beyond facts to create a scintillating explanation of how a specific part of our universe operated. With all due deference to hard-headed laboratory technicians, I call this the fictional quality in science and include in it such delightful items as Einstein's curved space and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The entertainment and stimulation of such theories, utterly apart from their value to science, is prodigious to a speculative mind.

But the writer, and I mean any writer here, has to be scientific in his turn. To put it very simply, if the author constructs a character who is miserly and selfish, he cannot absent-mindedly allow him to be generous at odd moments for no good reason, without destroying the inner consistency of the work. And it is this inner consistency which is the scientific quality in literature. Every good story is a kind of sealed universe, in which, as the action unfolds, the reader is made privy to the laws peculiar to it. If the author destroys a law, he must rapidly reveal a higher one, or lose the reader's confidence irrevocably.

These two seemingly contradictory qualities from both science and literature have fused in science fiction and produced a situation where the possible number of "sealed universes" the author can create has multiplied enormously in number and variety. And the author who is true to his craft and daring in it can in this way employ the facts of science to liberate himself from the facts of everyday life and go exploring all kinds of dramatic situations far beyond the dreams of literature to date.

Science fiction, thus considered, is not a mere pocket in the varicolored vest of modern writing; it is a new kind of fiction, the beginnings of a long-delayed revolution in letters consequent upon the revolutions that the last two hundred years have witnessed in science, industry, and politics. By this I do not at all mean that it is the only possible literature of the present time, just that it is the type most peculiar to it, most indicative of its larger intellectual trends. The
chansons de geste
of the eleventh and twelfth centuries faithfully reflected the rigid feudal thinking of medieval, hero-worshipping Europe. Later, when the sacred institutional framework of church and knighthood was weakened by increasing trade, broadened cultural contacts, and the beginnings of modern thought, the picaresque novel appeared as an expression of the skepticism that was then exciting the minds of men. Just so, I feel, has the present age produced out of its own grating necessities and future-mindedness a science capable of examining man in the various psychosocial arenas he can occupy—and a literature to run parallel to the science, a literature which must, like all art forms, frequently outstrip the facts which birthed it. Nor, peculiarly enough, is science per se the only proper subject of science fiction. An Oxford don, the aforementioned C.S. Lewis, constructed a magnificent and indisputably science-fictional trilogy on purely religious themes, using the extrapolative techniques of the twentieth century's most flexible medium to affirm beliefs of the thirteenth!

Here it strikes me that I have flung down gauntlets enough all around this, my very first book of short stories. I should remind the reader that I have been attempting to show the potential as well as historical placement of the field as a whole, not by any means to imply that my own thin achievements have measured up to it. In fact, I may well paraphrase Wolsey's humbling comment to the eighth Henry: this, my realm of written stories, is but in an angle of the world of science fiction. I have worked the several fields which have interested me most, to the limits of my talents, moving on whenever urged by inner restlessness or the sudden vision of a brighter green. But there are others who have ranged much further, or cultivated a single, unchanging plot much more assiduously—with truly wonderful results.

How wonderful? Has science fiction produced a Cervantes yet, or a Fielding? No, but neither did the swarming golden glory of the Elizabethan stage produce an Aeschylus. Yet, in that day, the so-called university playwrights were desperately trying to revive the classic dramatic modes. They complained that "no right comedies or right tragedies" were being written. And they must certainly have looked with contempt on thumb-ruling, money-hungry, crowd-pleasing boors like Will Shakespeare, until, of course, Shakespeare's enormous achievement became undeniable. Whether or not science fiction will eventually develop a Shakespeare, I would not dare to predict. But I do claim that it is a literature produced by our times as much as Shakespeare's was by his. And its unfortunate, frequent vulgarities can well be equated with the vulgarities and plebeian absurdities of much Elizabethan writing, both reflecting the primitive vitality of the mass audience that responded to them. It is, of course, in any age, only moribund fiction that is polished to a point of antisepsis, and that will, in losing touch with its audience, "lose the name of action." This new medium has as yet lost neither.

The human mind is lit by an elemental sense of wonder, a probing, restless curiosity that is our primate heritage and that from its beginnings has sought a knowledge,
some
knowledge, of the future. To satisfy that need there has come into being a massive and thoroughly modern creation, science fiction, the literature of extrapolative, industrial man.

Very early in 1954, I was having a conversation with Harry Harrison, then the editor of
Science Fiction Adventures
. I said something about how nobody in the field seemed to be paying any attention to the second word in the term "science fiction": most of the arguments seemed to deal only with the "science"—how to define it and just how much of it should be in a given story.

Harry, one of the most alert human beings I've met in my life—Harry pounced. "The fiction in science fiction," he said. "A good title. Write it fast. I have an open slot for it."

I liked the title myself, and I went home and wrote it that afternoon. I put into the essay all sorts of angers and theses and rebuttals that had been percolating inside of me for years. Harry rewarded me with an adequate check and a more-than-adequate editorial lunch.

When Ian and Betty Ballantine decided to publish my first collection of short stories a year later, they insisted on using the essay as the introduction. Why not, I felt.

Well, several times since I've thought of why not. For one thing, it's much too large a topic for a single short essay. For another, the piece makes too many large and overly casual assertions about literature, history, drama—all kinds of intellectual areas. And I've changed my mind about many of the positions it takes, so many times, so many different ways.

But.

The piece keeps getting mentioned favorably in science-fiction publications. There's apparently something in it that my colleagues rather like. One of them, Connie Willis, spoke warmly of it in her introduction to the first volume (
Immodest Proposals
) of this complete-works thingumajig.

And Jim Mann and Mary Tabasko, my editors here, both specifically want it to be included, despite the fact that it's nonfiction, unlike all the other stuff that surrounds it. And I'm not yet sufficiently senior as a writer to snap my fingers at an editor, especially, if you please, a book editors.

Finally, my thirty-four-year-old self deserves some consideration and respect. He thought it was a very good piece, and for years was quite proud of having written it.

The fact that, at eighty, I've become quite stinkingly literary and could argue a dozen points with him, shouldn't be allowed to stand in the way.

It's his piece, and, truth to tell, I always liked working with the guy.

Written 1954——Published 1954

"It doth not appear from all you have said, how any one virtue is required towards the procurement of any one station among you; much less that men are ennobled on account of their virtue, that priests are advanced for their piety or learning, soldiers for their conduct or valour, judges for their integrity, senators for love of their country, or counsellors for their wisdom... I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth."

—Jonathan Swift,
Gulliver's Travels
: "A Voyage to Brobdingnab."

Mankind consisted of 128 people.

The sheer population pressure of so vast a horde had long ago filled over a dozen burrows. Bands of the Male Society patrolled the outermost corridors with their full strength, twenty-three young adult males in the prime of courage and alertness. They were stationed there to take the first shock of any danger to Mankind, they and their band captains and the youthful initiates who served them.

Eric the Only was an initiate in this powerful force. Today, he was a student warrior, a fetcher and a carrier for proven, seasoned men. But tomorrow, tomorrow...

This was his birthday. Tomorrow, he would be sent forth to Steal for Mankind. When he returned—and have no fear: Eric was swift, Eric was clever, he would return—off might go the loose loincloths of boyhood to be replaced by the tight loin straps of a proud Male Society warrior.

He would be free to raise his voice and express his opinions in the Councils of Mankind. He could stare at the women whenever he liked, for as long as he liked, to approach them even, to—

He found himself wandering to the end of his band's burrow, still carrying the spear he was sharpening for his uncle. There, where a women's burrow began, several members of the Female Society were preparing food stolen from the Monster larder that very day. Each spell had to be performed properly, each incantation said just right, or it would not be fit to eat—it might even be dangerous. Mankind was indeed fortunate: plenty of food, readily available, and women who well understood the magical work of preparing it for human consumption.

And such women—such splendid creatures!

Sarah the Sickness-Healer, for example, with her incredible knowledge of what food was fit and what was unfit, her only garment a cloud of hair that alternately screened and revealed her hips and breasts, the largest in all Mankind. There was a woman for you! Over five litters she had had, two of them of maximum size.

Eric watched as she turned a yellow chunk of food around and around under a glow lamp hanging from the ceiling of the burrow, looking for only she knew what and recognizing it when she found it only she knew how. A man could really strut with such a mate.

But she was the wife of a band leader and far, far beyond him. Her daughter, though, Selma the Soft-Skinned, would probably be flattered by his attentions. She still wore her hair in a heavy bun: it would be at least a year before the Female Society would consider her an initiate and allow her to drape it about her nakedness. No, far too young and unimportant for a man on the very verge of warrior status.

Another girl caught his eye. She had been observing him for some time and smiling behind her lashes, behind her demurely set mouth. Harriet the History-Teller, the oldest daughter of Rita the Record-Keeper, who would one day succeed to her mother's office. Now there was a lovely, slender girl, her hair completely unwound in testament to full womanhood and recognized professional status.

Eric had caught these covert, barely stated smiles from her before; especially in the last few weeks as the time for his Theft approached. He knew that if he were successful—and he
had
to be successful: don't dare think of anything but success—she would look with favor on advances from him. Of course, Harriet was a redhead, and therefore, according to Mankind's traditions, unlucky: she was probably having a hard time finding a mate. But his own mother had been a redhead.

Yes, and his mother had been very unlucky indeed. Even his father had been infected with her terrible bad luck. Still, Harriet the History-Teller was an important person in the tribe for one her age. Good-looking, too. And above all, she didn't turn away from him. She smiled at him, openly now. He smiled back.