Seekers of Tomorrow (56 page)

"It seems like a fortune to our families, and we dazzle them with our glamour. . . . We realize that people want their friends to be glamorous, so we've stopped trying to avoid undeserved admiration." The science-fiction world has, since 1953, understandably expected Bester at any moment to become the frontrunner of the field. One other novel, and a scattering of short stories that followed, neither advanced his standing nor diminished his promise. But to become the leading science-fiction writer is not a prize to which Bester can economically afford to aspire; he probably will remain an admired dilettante. Before the Hugos became part of the science-fiction scene, the most respected presentations in the field were The Inter-national Fantasy Awards, originated by a group of British science-fiction fans in 1951 and presented annually (except for 1956) through 1957. The selections were made by a committee of science-fiction book reviewers for the leading magazines and newspapers and so excellent were their choices that there was rarely a murmur of protest. When Edgar Pangborn's
A Mirror for Observers
was selected as the best fantasy novel of 1954, it did raise questions because it had appeared only in book form (Doubleday), and few had read it. It beat out so illustrious a contender as
Mission of Gravity
by Hal Clement, but its choice was deserved. Two segments of a Martian culture who have lived secretly on Earth for many centuries wage a battle for the mind of the youthful genius, Angelo Pontevecchio. In the process, the author carries on a running commentary concerning mankind and civilization, which, despite its pedestrian pace, proves utterly fascinating. This book, which could not enjoy wide appeal, reads like something written by a leisurely Olaf Sta-pledon with limited ambitions. It is, nevertheless, extremely rewarding.

Pangborn first came to the attention of the science-fiction world when his short story
Angel's Egg
appeared in the June, 1951, issue of galaxy science fiction. His 1964 novel,
Davy,
received so widespread a positive reaction from science-fiction readers that it may eventually eclipse
A Mir-ror for Observers
as his chef-d'oeuvre. Here with more stress on adventure and less on philosophy, in a story of a post-atomic-war world, the elements of realism combine with fine characterization to redeem an overworked plot. The original concept of the American paperback book was to offer the public a volume (for only 25

cents) that in hard covers might cost up to $5. For some time, paperback publishers would have little to do with originals, feeling, among other things, that this would destroy the bargain-base-ment image and put them in the class with the dime novels. As the years progressed, certain paperback publishers occa-sionally subsidized a very limited hard-cover edition and used the same plates for a paperback. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., author of
The Sirens of Titan,
an original paperback published by Dell in 1959, helped break precedent by selling that novel for a subsequent hard-cover edition.

Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, picked up
The Sirens of Titan,
originally sold for 35 cents by Dell, and issued it in cloth binding at $3.50 in 1961. The novel rated it. A wildly imaginative extravaganza of the future, involving many of the planets of the solar system, it was in every sense an avant-garde fantasy. It may seem tiresome to the reader to have everything compared to something by Olaf Stapledon, but he is clearly the source of the plot embellishments of
The Sirens of Titan.
What belongs to Vonnegut is an air of flippancy, cynicism and irreverence, enough to give him an edge in novelty over many other hard-working writers.

Vonnegut possesses a better scientific background than most science-fiction authors, particularly in the areas of bio-chemistry and anthropology. His science fiction began to appear frequently in collier's in 1950

and was sometimes inept—as typified by
Thanasphere
(September 2, 1950), in which a rocket test pilot, 2,000 miles above the earth, finds the spirits of the dead revolving around like a legion of satellites —or strictly cornball—like
Epicac
(November 25, 1950), in which a computer falls in love with a girl. A first novel,
Player Piano
(1953), an anti-Electronic Age Utopia was well received despite a lack of originality. Vonnegut is excellent raw material unfortunate enough to get started in the better magazines instead of learning his trade in the pulps. He needs discipline, practice, and consid-erably less smugness. He increasingly strikes notes of freshness which promise much, but he doesn't often deliver. It would help him to know not only what concepts have been done to death, but also what it was that finished them off. The great boom in science-fiction magazines that started in 1949, reaching its peak in 1953, provided a golden opportu-nity for new talent. A score of young science-fiction writers found they could sell almost everything they wrote as fast as they could write it. Some of them had little difficulty in selling forty or fifty stories a year. Among such recruits was Philip K. Dick, who prolifically filled the pages of science-fiction magazines, gaining more positive than negative reac-tion but no special recognition. That was the way it continued through 1962, when his novel
The Man in the High Castle
was issued by Putnam. It hypothesized a world in which the Berlin-Tokyo axis had won World War II, partitioned the United States and the world between them.

The idea had been done before by no less distinguished an author than William L. Shirer; look (December 19, 1961) devoted 13 illustrated pages to his feature,
If
Hitler Had Won World War II.
Shirer's effort was the framework upon which
The Man in the High Castle
was built, and Dick did a great deal with what he borrowed. Most of the story is set in the western United States, dominated by the Japanese through a white puppet government. The Japanese are humane, de-cent, and to a degree democratic. The Japanese craze for collecting such Americana as old comic books, election post-ers, and bottle caps lends a note of originality and authentic-ity to the work. The "Man" in the High Castle is an author who has written a book telling what would have happened if the United States had won the war. All these elements gave the novel a difference which helped win the Hugo as the best novel of 1962 and lifted Dick a substantial notch upward in general regard.

The "Worlds of If" theme had long been a popular one in science fiction and Dick's novel proved that it could produce fiction good enough to outrank the entire year's production. Working on what would have happened if the South had won the Civil War, an all-but-unknown author, Ward Moore, sprang to prominence with a single short novel,
Bring the Jubilee
(the magazine of fantasy and science fiction, November, 1952). Moore's previous novel, published by William Sloane Associates in 1947, told of a chemical that causes a special variety of grass to grow with such uncon-trolled vigor that it crowds out the crops of the world. Told with broad catastrophic sweep, Moore's
Greener Than You Think
went all but unnoticed.

The resourceful inventiveness of
Bring the Jubilee,
project-ing the possible difference in technology as well as politics of today's world if the South had won the war, helped win it recognition. A man living in that hypothetical world goes back in time to a pivotal action at the battle of Gettysburg, to deliberately swing the battle in favor of the North to secure what he feels must inevitably be a better future. To appreciate how exceptionally difficult was Moore's job and how fine his achievement, one need only compare it with a similar attempt made by MacKinlay Kantor, in look, November 22, 1960, called
If
the South Had Won the
Civil War.
Kantor, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
Andersonville,
displayed a lack of imagination and a paucity of convincing detail which stand in sharp contrast to the achievement that is
Bring the Jubilee.

"The Worlds of If" theme was in vogue in the early sixties, for John Hersey, who used science fiction in 1960 in
The Child Buyer,
used it again in
White Lotus
(1965) to present a world in which atomic energy has never been invented, but in which elements of the American civilization of the 1930's still exist. Hersey is a reporter who writes directly and extremely well. Yet, in this "tale of an old shoe on a new foot," his parallel between the hypothetical world in which Occi-dentals are the inferior race in a world ruled by Orientals and the situation of the whites and Negroes of today is so exaggeratedly obvious and his situations so deliberately con-trived that the book becomes an affront to the intelligence.

"The Story That Shocked the Editors" was what the Saturday evening post called
No Blade of Grass
by John Christopher as they began its serialization in their April 27, 1957, issue. "This, as my colleagues had warned me, was no mere adventure story," Ben Hibbs, the post editor, wrote, "no epic with a happy ending, no pleasant escape to the world of let's pretend. This was a book unlike any the Saturday evening post had ever published—a story that for violence of deed, for horrible fascination, was unknown to our columns." A virus attacks the basic sources of food supplies: the rices and grains. Once they are depleted, the entire structure of civilization collapses and the "law of the jungle" prevails. John Christopher tells the story of the shocking breakdown in morality of a small group in England, seeking to survive on their way to a valley haven. In the process, the meek become remorseless killers and these conscienceless killers almost emerge as heroes in the fight for survival.

On the strength of the post's buildup, motion picture rights were sold for a figure alleged to be $80,000

and the author, John Christopher, was catapulted overnight into a position of literary prominence. Untold was the fact that
No Blade of Grass
had been rejected by one-cent-a-word markets only weeks before it was taken by the post. The theme was far too elementary for the regular science-fiction magazines.

Christopher Samuel Youd, the Englishman behind the pen name John Christopher, had gone through life with a position in the diamond-cutting industry, only infrequently selling a short story to some low-paying market. His major influence in style and method was another British author, John Wynd-ham, who had come to renown a few years earlier when collier's made a similar fuss over
The Day of the Triffids.
If anything, Christopher was even more conservative than Wyndham as he continued to try for that one big novel by taking elementary science-fiction themes to create an abnor-mal situation and throwing the weight of his narrative onto the reaction of human beings under stress. Among the novels that followed were
The
Long Winter
(1962), in which a new ice age drives the whites into Africa for survival and they become the subservient race;
The Possessors
(1964), in which alien wills assume control of members of a Swiss chalet cut off by a snowslide; and
Sweeney's Island
(1964), built on the much-abused theme of civilized people reverting to their true natures on a deserted island, but this time on an island in which an atomic experiment has mutated the local vegetation and animals.

A single novel elevated ex-newspaperman and professional photographer Frank Herbert to a position of distinction among science-fiction writers and it was a novel placed in the world just beyond tomorrow. Science fiction had anticipated atomic submarines by employing the precise terminology as far back as Stanton A. Coblentz's
The Sunken World
(amaz-ing stories quarterly, Summer, 1928). Frank Herbert in his novel
Under Pressure
(astounding science-fiction, November, 1955 to January, 1956) extrapolates only modest-ly from the atomic fleet that we know today.

A four-man crew on an atomic submarine of the future, one of them a saboteur and another a psychologist intent upon ensuring the mental stability of the captain, set out to capture an undersea oil supply as part of the twenty-first-century war. The tensions and strains of their prolonged living cooped up together, accentuated by a number of brushes with death, lend a realism to the proposed situation that scored impressively with the readers.

Anyone who produces a truly outstanding literary work in any specific field is watched with care to see if he can do it again. Herbert made another bid with
Dune World
(analog science fact & fiction, December, 1963, to February, 1964), a novel graphically bringing to life the ecology of a world that was virtually bereft of moisture, of the precious spice melange that represents its major source of wealth, and of the structure of the society which rules it. This was followed by a massive sequel,
The Prophet of Dune
(analog science fact & fiction, January to May, 1965), portraying the struggle for survival and dominance in this grim land. It may be said that, in the sense that the battle for intelligence over alien environment serves as a backdrop, the dune stories bear an affinity to Hal Clement's
Mission of Gravity.
How-ever, the incorporation of the atmosphere of Earth's medieval political and moral climate make the plot development almost traditional by modern standards. Further, the prominent use of psi phenomenon adds a note of conformity, which, combined with the political climate, robs the effort of realism and transforms it into little more than a well-done adventurous romance.

Science fiction of the past quarter century has had a greater impact on world thinking than even most of its enthusiastic devotees claim. People of every nation with a high order of technology, particularly those behind the Iron Curtain, have read it with an intellectual avidity that goes far beyond the relative importance in the literary scene of its leading writers.

The bulk of this science fiction is the work of American writers, the contributors of the next largest segment being British. Science fiction is not carried abroad as part of a cultural exchange program. Officialdom usually does not even consider it in that light. Instead, it is imported by popular demand into Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, West Germany, France, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Argentina, Mex-ico, and Japan. In all of these countries, and others besides, publishers turn out a stream of books and magazines contain-ing science fiction, most of it reprints or translations of stories published in the United States and Great Britain.