Nebula Awards Showcase 2006 (25 page)

T
he editor asked me to contribute a thumbnail sketch of the field as I’ve seen it change since 1926, when I discovered the classics of Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe, along with the best of A. Merritt and Edgar Rice Burroughs, reprinted by Hugo Gernsback in the early issues of
Amazing Stories
. The genre had yet to find a name. In 1928 Gernsback printed my own first story as “scientifiction.” He coined the term “science fiction” in 1929 for the contents of his new
Science Wonder Stories
.

The genre itself, of course, was hardly new. Its beginnings go back beyond Wells and Verne to Mary Shelley and Jonathan Swift, even to
The Odyssey.
Through the first half of the century, American science fiction was shaped by a few influential magazine editors. There were yet no regular book markets; novels were generally published as magazine serials.

One long-forgotten but once legendary editor was Bob Davis, at
Argosy
and other Monsey pulps, which ran the work of Burroughs, Merritt, and Ray Cummings as “unusual” or “different” stories. Cummings had been the lab assistant of Thomas Alva Edison. Davis launched him on a long pulp career when he got him to rewrite Wells’s
Time Machine
into a lost-race romance,
The Girl in the Golden Atom,
his most notable work.

Gernsback himself was no such editor, though the Hugos were named to honor him as “the father of science fiction.” He did name the field. Reprinting the classics in
Amazing,
he found a modern readership for it. Contemporary critics are apt to call him a pernicious influence, but actually I think he had almost no editorial influence at all.

Never creative, he rejected the first stories I sent him without comment, and printed later stories still with no comment except blurbs for the reader. Even as publisher he was finally a failure. He never paid a prevailing rate for new work, sometimes nothing at all. When he owed me for a hundred thousand words, at a promised half a cent, I had to get a lawyer to collect. Yet, like a few other beginners, I felt happy to get into print for anything at all.

Such pulp editors as Harry Bates and Desmond Hall were far more influential. Bates was the founding editor of
Astounding Stories of Super Science
for the Clayton pulp chain in 1930, Hall the first editor at Street and Smith, which took it over after Clayton failed. They paid real money. In those depression times, two cents a word for my first stories for
Astounding
and five hundred for a novelette in the Clayton
Strange Tales
made me rich for a day.

Street and Smith cut the rate to one cent, good money then, roughly equal to ten cents today. Gernsback preached the value of the genre as sugarcoating for science, though nothing stopped him from republishing Merritt’s “Moon Pool,” a dreamlike fantasy with no science at all. Bates and his fellow pulp editors cared nothing for science and little for literary excellence, but their influence was far more positive.

Their money went for stories that would sell their magazines. Stories with beginning, middle, and end. Stories generally about likable people overcoming difficult odds. The
Harper’s
editor Bernard DeVoto called it “sub-literate trash.” Much of it was, but Sturgeon’s law applies. Isaac Asimov made a collection of stories worth reprinting in
Before the Golden Age.

“The Golden Age” was a sudden flowering of the genre beginning when John W. Campbell became an editor at
Astounding
in 1937. He knew science and cared about it. A skeptical critic of conservative orthodoxy, he looked at possible worlds to come with an active imagination. Though apt to fall for crackpot ideas, he cherished a magnificent vision of the human future.

He breathed a fresh life into science fiction, finding and inspiring a whole generation of able writers, among them Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and A. E. van Vogt. His dream of the conquest of space is perhaps expressed most vividly in the dozen young adult novels Heinlein wrote for
Scribner’s,
beginning with two kids building a rocket in their backyard and ending in
Have Space Suit, Will Travel,
with the hero negotiating with the Lords of the Three Galaxies for the admission of the human race into civilization.

In translation, the same dream inspired German fans as well as American, leading to V2 rockets, ballistic missiles, men on the moon, and the world as we know it. World War II marks a watershed in the history of science fiction. Gernsback had opened it to a new generation of readers. The pulp editors trained a new generation of writers. Campbell inspired them with his vision of future human greatness. The war wiped it out.

Back in the last decade of the 1800s, Wells had painted a darker future when he dramatized the limits to progress in his great early work. The world ignored his warning. The worship of technology went on, inspiring rocket engineers and many others. I attended the Century of Progress exposition in Chicago in the 1930s, and saw my first television at the world fair in New York. The future could look golden.

Pearl Harbor changed everything. Technology unsheathed its sharper edge. In the shadow of the mushroom cloud, the old dream of endless progress toward some peaceful utopia faded into Cold War hysteria. Grisly mutants came to haunt the short story, and post-holocaust novels were published by the score.

Campbell’s influence faded when L. Ron Hubbard converted him to Dianetics. Other able editors appeared: Horace Gold, with his own pessimistic vision in
Galaxy,
Tony Boucher with
Fantasy and Science Fiction
and an eye for traditional literary values that steered the genre toward the mainstream.

Yet no new editor has dominated the field as Campbell did. The sands are always shifting. The magazines themselves are now in danger. Book markets opened after the war, when fans began setting up their own small presses to reprint the serials they had loved. Major publishers followed, with their editors making new demands and helping new writers to find new voices. Film and TV created new audiences for hybrid “sci-fi.” No longer American, science fiction became international.

Back in the 1930s we could know everybody and read everything. The field has now diversified too widely for any single perspective. Scores of writers have found circles of fans who may read little else. On one side science fiction is merging into fantasy and horror, on the other into sci-fi and the mainstream, with a robust corps of the old school still standing in the middle. It has grown too far for any simple description. Its future seems impossible to predict.

Literary forms are shaped by technologies of communication, and change as they change. Homer’s epics were composed in verse to be memorized for oral transmission. The invention of writing gave permanence to prose. The novel was invented for the printing press. The short story was born in mass magazines and orphaned when TV claimed the audience for sitcoms. Yet no genre is gone forever, and literature is left richer for the growing variety.

The effects of the information revolution are not yet clear. Worldwide communication is cheaper and faster. Literacy should become universal. The e-book may be perfected. Electronic “paper” could save forests and alter every aspect of our culture. Copyright law may change. The economics of distribution certainly will. The roles of editor and publisher as well, though they can hardly be replaced.

Science fiction itself was a child of changing technology. New technologies have always reshaped culture and society, but beginning at a glacial rate, hardly noticed until the time of Jonathan Swift, a stout defender of the past. Gulliver’s flying island of Laputa was his horrified response to the dawn of modern science and the creation of the Royal Society. Mary Shelley’s idea for the animation of Frankenstein’s monster must have come from Volta’s experiments with frog legs. New technologies seem now about to bury the globe beneath an avalanche of change. We are left to wait and wonder at what is to come. Speculative fiction will surely live on.

I
t was all very different once upon a time, of course. In the old days, fifty-some years ago, the magazines were the center of the whole thing—the soul of science fiction, as Barry Malzberg has said. The magazines were where nearly all science fiction was published, and the magazine editors were the suns around which we orbited. The Hugos hadn’t been invented yet, in that far-off antique era, nor the Nebulas, nor, for that matter, the Science Fiction Writers of America itself; and what I dreamed of then was not anything like getting a book on the
New York Times
best-seller list, or winning an award, or being named a Grand Master—that last one would have been a fantasy too absurd to waste a moment’s mental energy on, even if such an honor had existed then—but simply selling a short story, just one story, to any of the magazines. That was the big career-launching breakthrough that any would-be writer of the era yearned for—selling a story to one of the magazines.

By which I meant, back there around 1952, magazines named
Startling Stories
or
Thrilling Wonder Stories
or
Planet Stories;
or, more probably, the lowest-paying market in the field,
Future Science Fiction.
As the gaudy names of most of them indicate, they were pulp magazines, crudely printed on cheap, shaggy paper that left bits of itself all over your lap as you read them, and their bright, flashy, posterlike covers, showing wide-eyed brass-brassiered maidens being menaced by monsters or robots, were no more than half a notch up from comic-book covers in artistic quality. Those few disreputable-looking pulp magazines were the bastions that novices like me dreamed of storming: what we would think of today the entry-level markets.

There were, it’s true, a couple of magazines even pulpier than those—the Ziff-Davis pair,
Amazing Stories
and
Fantastic Adventures,
two bulky monthlies devoted to the publication of simple adventure fiction. But I had already discovered, by dint of sending stories to them over a period of two or three years and getting them all back with the speed of light, that they were entirely staff-written, and paid no attention whatever to submissions from the outside. Also there was what we called the Big Three—a trio of elite non-pulp magazines, neat little jobs, dignified in look and manner, published in what was called the “digest” format because it was the size that
The Reader’s Digest,
the dominant general-circulation magazine of the day, employed. I had slightly more hope of selling to one of them than I did to
Amazing
or
Fantastic,
because the editors of all three did, at least, read unsolicited submissions with some degree of sympathy. But I knew I wasn’t likely, at the age of sixteen or thereabouts, to be pushing Theodore Sturgeon or Hal Clement or A. E. van Vogt aside on the contents page of John Campbell’s austerely intellectual
Astounding Science Fiction,
nor did I have the polished narrative technique that Horace Gold demanded for his shiny new
Galaxy Science Fiction,
or the sophistication and literary breadth required by Anthony Boucher and J. F. McComas for
Fantasy and Science Fiction.
If I was ever going to make that first sale, I was going to have to make it to one of the pulps.

You’ll note that I say nothing about book publishers. It was entirely a short-story market then. A little hardback science fiction was being published by the children’s-book houses, where I would, in fact, make my first big sale in 1954. But when it came to adult science fiction there were, essentially, just two book publishers, each doing, at most, a book or two a month. Doubleday was the established leader, but its list was strictly top-echelon: Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein, John Wyndham, Isaac Asimov. Not for another few years would writers of merely middling fame like Edgar Pangborn, Poul Anderson, and Jack Vance be getting published there, and they certainly had no interest in beginners like me. The other major house, just getting started in 1952, was Ballantine Books, but at the outset it, too, was publishing the likes of Bradbury and Wyndham, along with such other big-name writers as Arthur C. Clarke, Frederik Pohl, Theodore Sturgeon, and one gifted newcomer who was making a spectacular splash that year, Robert Sheckley. We also had a handful of semi-pro houses—Fantasy Press, Shasta Press, etc.—but those concentrated mostly on reprinting classic magazine material of earlier years. For most science fiction writers of those early postwar days, selling a novel to a major publisher was a little like winning the lottery. It did happen to people now and then, yes, but counting on it wasn’t a smart career plan. Nearly everyone who hoped to earn some substantial fraction of his livelihood from writing science fiction, or was already doing so, looked to the magazines for his income, and (to minimize the risks inherent in putting in many months writing a novel and finding no taker for it) concentrated on short stories and novelets.

It’s all so different today.
Astounding Science Fiction
is still with us, transmogrified into
Analog,
and so is
Fantasy and Science Fiction,
and alongside them is a newcomer of 1970s vintage,
Asimov’s Science Fiction.
Those are today’s Big Three. Then there’s a fantasy magazine—
Realms of Fantasy
—and some titles like
Absolute Magnitude
that have been fighting their way up from semi-pro status, and a host of electronic “magazines,” of which the best-known is Ellen Datlow’s
SCI FICTION.
A list like that makes it appear that magazine science fiction is still a thriving operation, but what it actually is is a ghostly relic of its former self. The surviving magazines are all minor players in the vast, hectic marketplace that is modern SF. Even the top ones have only modest circulations, and the others are largely the work of publishers and writers who must be considered devoted hobbyists, amateurs in the best sense of that word. The real action is in the book field. And from the point of view of the reader seriously concerned with science fiction as an art form, or even the writer with the same concerns, it’s mostly the wrong kind of action.