Seekers of Tomorrow (57 page)

Modern science fiction is a relatively sophisticated product, whose techniques have been polished continually in the United States for over fifty years. During that period we have had a number of specialized publications printing it in substantial quantity. British writers, because they share the same language, have been able to find a ready market in the United States and have been thus enabled to perfect their skills. Countries not having English as their national language developed no such pool of writers and when, after World War II, interest in science fiction began to grow, publishers found it easier and cheaper to buy and translate American authors than to encourage their own. Science-fiction maga-zines published abroad are usually franchised counterparts of American periodicals or sometimes are independent publica-tions containing American stories bought separately and shuffled into an individual selection. So popular are American writers abroad that in Western Germany and Spain native science-fiction writers tend to adopt American pen names to gain readier acceptance.

The Russians have been the one nation earnestly trying to upgrade their native science fiction. They have put back into print everything worthwhile from Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky's 1895 anticipation of an Earth satellite,
Dreams of Earth and Sky,
through party-line-oriented Professor Ivan Yefremov's
The Heart of the Serpent
(1959), an ideological reply to American writer Murray Leinster's
First
Contact,
which describes the initial meeting of an Earth spaceship with that of an alien civilization. Soviet Russia, aware that American science fiction, for the most part aimed at a pulp market, is rarely written with political motivation, has been liberal in permitting a wide spectrum of it to be read and reprinted, because

"science fiction helps one peep into the thought and life of Americans." A recent anthology of American science fiction printed in the USSR was
Science Fiction Stories by
American Writers,
edited by Alexander Kazantsev, a leading contemporary So-viet science-fiction writer. Among the selections were works of Robert A. Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, Murray Leinster, H. Beam Piper, and Tom Godwin.

A surprise speaker at the September 6, 1964, session of The 22nd World Science Fiction Convention in Oakland, California, was Josef Nesvadba, a Czechoslovakian psychia-trist, who is also the leading science-fiction writer of the country. Several of his stories have appeared in America in the magazine of fantasy and science fiction, and eleven of them have been collected under the title of
Vampires Ltd.
and printed in English in Prague. In his talk, he confirmed that American science-fiction authors were the most popular not only in Russia, but in Czechoslovakia and Poland as well. He brought with him a copy of a handsomely elaborate science-fiction anthology published in Czechoslovakia titled
Labyrint.
Of the twelve stories in the book, eleven are by modern American authors, among them Ray Bradbury, A. E van Vogt, Robert A. Heinlein, Lewis Padgett (Henry Kutt-ner), Clifford D. Simak, Frank M. Robinson, and Robert Abernathy. The Iron Curtain countries do not have copy-right agreements with the United States, and this anthology stands unique as the first from that part of the world actually to send American authors payment for republished stories.

Within recent years The Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow has translated many Russian science-fiction stories into English and made them available in the West. These include works by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Count Alexei Tolstoi, Alexander Belyaev, Ivan Yefremov, Alexan-der Kazantsev, Vladimir Obruchev, and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, among others. Discounting stylistic inadequacies which are possibly attributable to translation, they are, by American standards, elementary in theme and overweighted with infusions of pro-Soviet propaganda.

One explanation of the simple concepts in Russian science fiction was offered by a Russian editor (who preferred to remain anonymous) interviewed at the Frankfort, Germany, Book Fair in 1963.
Gamma
(No. 3, 1964) reported that he said that Russians preferred the adventurous aspect of science fiction to its psychological and sociological manifesta-tions. He spoke with nostalgia of Edgar Rice Burroughs to underscore his points. In response to the direct question: "Is American science fiction popular in the Soviet Union?" he replied, "Very popular. But even there the stories we like best are the ones that avoid political or sociological consider-ations."

Western Germany, where American science fiction has been received with especial enthusiasm (where today fan conventions are held), has seen scholarly approval of the trend in
Die Entdeckung Amerikas
und die Sache der Wel-traumliteratur
by G. Gunther (1952) and undisguised admi-ration in Dr. Martin Schwonke's
Vom Staatsroman zur Science Fiction
(1957).

The most telling proof of the acceptance of American science fiction is that the term "science fiction" has sup-planted all other labels for the genre, not only in Germany but in all other foreign countries as well. So American-oriented are the world's science-fiction lovers that special editions of their fan magazines in German, French, Swedish, Japanese, and Spanish are translated by their
publishers
and sent to American enthusiasts, who thereby can stay in touch with world thinking on the subject. Interest in science fiction is rapidly becoming a more important link to friendship with the United States in many nations than elaborately planned intergovernmental cultural programs.

This mutual affinity resulting from science fiction was expressed most poetically by Takumi Shibano, editor of the International Edition of uchujin, official organ of the Science Fiction Club of Tokyo: "We find innumerable parti-cles of cosmic dust floating in the nothingness, when we turn our eyes to the universe. Some of them may be attracted by gravity to planets or stars and burn up to meteors, others may keep floating indefinitely. And some 'fortunate' ones among them may pull to each other and join together to be concentrated into a large heavenly body. Then it starts to shine brilliantly by itself in the darkness. . . . This is the process that symbolizes 'Uchujin' and its fandom."

The direction of science fiction remains indeterminate. The final chapter of this book must remain an open end. It is impossible to state that the era that we now regard as "modern" in science fiction, which came into full flower under the aegis of John W. Campbell in 1939 and the years that followed, has ended. If so, that something else which is gradually taking its place has not hardened into a definite form. The authors dealt with in this book are uncontestably the great names of today, but we do find that certain of the

"run-of-the-mill" writers who broke in a decade or more ago are developing into late bloomers and are just now beginning to make their mark. New names are appearing regularly and rising to popularity. More chapters remain to be written. The fiction whose main concern has always been the shape of the future incontestably still has a future.