by Damon Knight
ORBIT 20
Edited by Damon Knight
HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS
New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London
ORBIT 20. Copyright © 1978 by Damon Knight.
All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information address Harper 8c Row, Publishers, Inc., 10 East 53rd Street, New York, N.Y. 10022. Published simultaneously in Canada by Fitzhenry 8c Whiteside Limited, Toronto.
FIRST EDITION
ISBN: 0-06-012429-6
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER! 77-11784 Designed by C. Linda Dingier
78 79 SO 81 82 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
They Say
Like all fiction, science fiction rests on the four sturdy legs of theme, character, style, and plot. For practical purposes, it includes all stories and novels in which “the strange” is the dominant characteristic. SF's particular problems result from the author’s need to make this element—“the strange”—acceptable to the reader.
In the broadest sense, theme is the story’s central concern. In a science fiction story, for example, the theme might be the effects of a system of embalming so improved that the dead could be distinguished from the living only with difficulty. (This was the theme of my story, “The Packerhaus Method,” in which the chief character’s father was proven dead only by the fact that he could not get his cigar to draw.) Notice that the theme has nothing to do with what happens to the characters. Theme is what the story is about.
In science fiction, it is imperative that the theme of each story be fresh or treated from a new angle: If the theme is not original or given a fresh treatment, it cannot be “strange.” The most common—and the most disastrous—error beginning sf writers make is to assume that editors want more stories on the same themes as the ones they have already published. The writer reads the collected works of Isaac Asimov and Jack Williamson, for example, and tries to write a robot story like theirs. His story cannot be “like theirs” because their stories were fresh and original when they appeared; an imitation cannot be either.
On the other hand, it is still possible to write original robot stories. In “It’s Very Clean,” I wrote about a girl who posed as a robot because she could not find work as a human being. I like to think that was original. In “Eyebem,” I wrote about a robot forest ranger, and in “Going to the Beach,” I described an encounter with a robot streetwalker down on her luck.
The trick (and I think it one of the most difficult in writing) is to see things from a new angle. I have found three questions useful in stimulating sf story ideas.
The first is: What if something new came along? Think of something some people (not necessarily everyone) would like to have, and imagine that it has been invented. During the Vietnam War, for example, it occurred to me that the Pentagon would probably like to be able to grow soldiers in laboratory flasks. I added an almost inevitable near-future development, the unmanned, computer-controlled battle tank, and came up with a story called “The HORARs of War.” . . .
The second idea-generator is: What if it gets better? Take some existing art, skill, or what-you-like, and imagine that some brilliant technician is to spend his life improving it. What will it be like when he is finished? What will the social consequences of his improvements be? What if it gets better?—the source of my “The Packerhaus Method.” A less macabre example is “The Toy Theater,” in which I had life-sized marionettes equipped with remote controls.
The third question: What if those two got together? Combine two existing customs, practices, sciences, or institutions. In “Beech Hill,” I merged the writers’ conference (where people who write fiction assemble) with the class of the poseur, the person whose life is his fiction. What I got was an annual gathering of those who pretend to be what they are not—a “secret agent,” an “international adventuress,” a “wild animal trainer,” “the richest man in the world,” and so on. My “secret agent” was really a short-order cook, and he wrote the rest of the story.
—“The Special Problems of Science Fiction,” by Gene Wolfe (The Writer, May 1976)
* * *
As a salesman, [Gerard] O’Neill faithfully utters every shibboleth of the cult of progress. If we will just have the good sense to spend one hundred billion dollars on a space colony, we will thereby produce more money and more jobs, raise the standard of living, help the underdeveloped, increase freedom and opportunity, fulfill the deeper needs of the human spirit, etc., etc. If we will surrender our money, our moral independence and our judgment to someone who obviously knows better what is good for us than we do, then we may expect the entire result to be a net gain. Anyone who has listened to the arguments of the Army Corps of Engineers, the strip miners, the Defense Department or any club of boosters, will find all this dishearteningly familiar.
The correspondence between the proposed colonization of “the high frontier” of outer space and the opening of the American frontier is irresistible to Mr. O’Neill. I find it at least as suggestive as he does, and a lot more problematical. The American prospect after, say, 1806 inspired the same sense of spatial and mental boundlessness, the same sense of limitlessness of physical resources and of human possibility, the same breathless viewing of conjectural vistas. But it is precisely here that Mr. O’Neill’s sense of history fails. For the sake, perhaps, of convenience he sees himself and his American contemporaries as the inheritors of the frontier mentality, but not of the tragedy of that mentality. He does not speak as a Twentieth Century American, faced with the waste and ruin of his inheritance from the frontier. He speaks instead in the manner of a European of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, privileged to see American space and wealth as conveniently distant solutions to local problems.
That is to say that, upon examination, Mr. O’Neill’s doctrine of “energy without guilt” is only a renewal, in “space-age” terms, of an old chauvinism: in order to make up for deficiencies of materials on earth we will “exploit” (i. e., damage or destroy) the moon and the asteroids. This is in absolute obedience to the moral law of the frontier: humans are destructive in proportion to their supposition of abundance; if they are faced with an infinite abundance, then they will become infinitely destructive.
—Wendell Berry, in The CoEvolution Quarterly, Spring 1976
* * *
I enjoyed Watership Datum immensely, and read it through in two days—that’s 477 pages in the Puffin edition. If a good book’s good, a good long book’s better! It is a tremendous story, and so well made, so brilliantly and yet soberly conceived and worked out, that I feel mean-minded stating any reservations or qualifications that might cool a prospective reader. And yet there is something about the book that bothers me. I’m not sure what it is, but I can point to certain manifestations of it, that seem to indicate a lack of balance somewhere very deep in the conception of the work. For instance—and above all—the role of women. Women rabbits, yes, to be sure. What do doe-rabbits do? They have baby rabbits, yes, to be sure. Many jokes on the subject. Do they do anything else? Well, not in the book. They are—like women in macho thrillers or sword-and-sorcery—objects: prizes of conquest, breeding-stock. One or two rise briefly as characters, equal for a moment to the vivid male characters, but they do nothing, and soon sink back into nameless passivity. Now I wonder, first, if this is accurate observation of rabbit behavior. The female of a social species is often more adaptable, shrewder, and more inventive (imaginative) than the male, since the raising of the young is a complex social act requiring real intelligence, whereas the procreative impulse of the male is a blinding compulsion, not requiring intellig
ent behavior, merely strength and active gonads. Would it really be the bucks who led a rabbit migration, or would it—as with wild cattle, deer, and elephants—more likely be the mature females of the group? But then, these rabbits are also seen as people, are humanized. Well, then, what is Mr. Adams saying about people? Why does he treat half of them as essentially subhuman, without wit or initiative?
The politics of the book reflect a similar bias, faintly. I find it rather dreary that the non-rabbit animal characters are “humorous foreigners” of the type dear to English cheap fiction decades ago. They’re so funny, don’t you know, they can’t speak English properly! The satirical projection of a rabbit Police State is superb, and the description of its destruction is a marvelous stretch of suspense and strategy; but I find the rabbit Utopia that replaces it to be curiously unsatisfying. Everybody “knows his place” so well. It seems just a touch Victorian, for either rabbits or Utopia.
—Ursula K. Le Guin, in Hedgehog #7, 1977
* * *
Behind my own work with the government are three basic imperatives with which I have been concerned since 1950: to avoid nuclear war, not only year-by-year but for the long term; to bring the annual growth rate of the world population to zero —not to 2 per cent or 1 per cent; to avoid a transformation of our society into a system of social organization or government where individual values have no influence.
These are imperatives because their negatives are irreversible transformations, which will mean the end of our society, if not of human life. We can not see or plan beyond these catastrophes, which are thus in the nature of essential singularities. Any of the three could bring the world to a life among the ruins of a vaguely remembered past splendor of science, law and architecture. . . .
Zero population growth rate is necessary if we are to look more than a few decades into the future and to avoid making irrevocable choices. After all, a growth rate of 1 per cent per year, corresponding to the difference, I suppose, between 2.6 children per family and 2.0 per family, means a factor 3 in population in a hundred years, a factor 30 in three hundred years and so on. There is no long-term future for humanity unless the average population growth rate is strictly zero. . . .
There is also a great imbalance in the public reaction to many of these problems. For instance, the problem of nuclear reactor accident, or more particularly the possibility of terrorist attack against nuclear reactors, looms fairly large in the public press. At the same time, it is national policy expressed through the public health service that children no longer should be vaccinated against smallpox. But the smallpox virus persists; it is in storage in many places all over the world. When we have a population that is not vaccinated against smallpox, one terrorist distribution of this virus will kill not tens of thousands, but tens of millions or hundreds of millions of people in the U. S.
—Richard L. Garwin, speech on acceptance of the Leo Szilard Award, April 27, 1976: quoted in Physics Today, February 1977
MOONGATE
It came with the moonlight over the cliff— something so alien that it profoundly changed everyone who experienced it, each in his own very different way.
Kate Wilhelm
I
When anyone asked Victoria what the GoMarCorp actually did, she answered vaguely, “You know, light bulbs, electronics, stuff like that.” When her father pressed her, she admitted she didn’t know much about the company except for her own office in the claims department of the Mining Division. She always felt that somehow she had disappointed her father, that she had failed him. Because the thought and the attendant guilt angered her she seldom dwelled on it. She had a good apartment, nice clothes, money enough to save over and above the shares of stock the company handed out regularly. She was doing all right. At work she typed up the claims reports on standard forms, ran a computer check and pulled cards where any similarities appeared— same mine, same claimants, same kinds of claims . . . She made up a folder for each claim, clipped together all the forms, cards, correspondence, and placed the folder in her superior’s in-basket. What happened to it after that she never knew.
Just a job, she thought, but when it was lunch time, she went to lunch. When it was quitting time, she walked away and gave no more thought to it until 8:30 the next morning. Mimi, on the other hand, boasted about her great job with the travel agency, and never knew if she would make it to lunch or not. Victoria checked her watch against the wall clock in the Crepe Shop and when the waiter came she ordered. She ate lunch, had an extra coffee; Mimi still had not arrived when she left the restaurant and walked back to her office. “Rich bitch, couldn’t make up her mind how to get to Rio,” Mimi would say airily. “I’m sending her by dugout.”
Late in the afternoon Diego called to say Mimi had had an accident that morning; she was in the hospital with a broken leg. “You can’t see her until tomorrow. They’ve knocked her out back into last week to set it, so I’ll come by later with the keys and maps and stuff. You’ll have to go get Sam alone.”
“I can’t drive the camper alone in the mountains!”
“Gotta go. See you later, sugar.”
“Diego! Wait . . .” He had hung up.
Victoria stared at the report in her typewriter and thought about Sam. He had worked here as a claims investigator eight years ago. She had been married then; she and Sam had developed a close nodding relationship. He was in and out for two years, then had grown a beard and either quit or been fired. She hadn’t seen him again until six months ago, when they had met by chance on a corner near the office.
His beard was full, his hair long, he was dressed in jeans and sandals.
“You’re still there?” he asked incredulously.
“It’s a job,” she said. “What are you up to?”
“You’ll never believe me.”
“Probably not.”
“I’ll show you.” He took her arm and began to propel her across the street.
“Hey! I’m on lunch hour.”
“Call in sick.”
“I can’t,” she protested, but he was laughing at her, and in the end, she called in sick. When she told Sam it was the first time she had done that, he was astonished.
He drove an old VW, so cluttered with boxes, papers, magazines, other miscellaneous junk, there was hardly room for her to sit. He took her to a garage that was a jumble of rocks. Rocks on the floor, in cartons, on benches, on a picnic table, rocks everywhere.
“Aquamarine,” he said, pointing. “Tourmaline, tiger-eye,jade-ite from Wyoming, fire opal . . .”
There was blue agate and banded agate, sunstones, jasper, garnet, camelian . . . But, no matter how enthusiastic he was, no matter by what exotic names he called them, they were rocks, Victoria thought in dismay.
When he said he made jewelry, she thought of the clunky pieces teenaged girls bought in craft shops.
“I’ll show you,” he said, opening a safe. He pulled out a tray and she caught her breath sharply. Rings, brooches, necklaces— lovely fragile gold chains with single teardrop opals that flared and paled with a motion; blood red carnelians flecked with gold, set in ornate gold rings; sea-colored aquamarines in silver . . .
A few weeks later he had a show in a local art store and she realized that Sam Dumarie was more than an excellent craftsman. He was an artist.
“You get off at noon on Good Friday,” Sam had said early that spring. "Don’t deny it. I lived with GoMar rules for years, remember. And you have Monday off". That’s enough time. You and Mimi drive the camper up to get me and I’ll show you some of the most terrific desert you can imagine.”
“Let’s do it!” Mimi cried. “We’ve both asked off"until Wednesday. We were going to my parents’ house for the weekend, but this is more exciting! Let’s do it, Vickie.” With hardly a pause she asked if Diego could join them. “He’s a dear friend,” she said to Sam, her eyes glittering. “But he wants to be so much more than that. Who knows what might develop out on the desert?” Watching her, Victoria knew she
was using Diego, that it was Sam she was after, and it didn’t matter a bit. Hadn’t mattered then, didn’t matter now, she thought, driving slowly looking for a restaurant, remembering Diego’s words:
“Get hungry, just pull over and toss a steak on the stove. Enough food for a week for all of us. Get sleepy, pull over, crawl in one of the bunks. That simple.”
But there was no place to pull over on the highway, and no place to park and broil a steak. She spotted a restaurant, had dinner, and wished the motels had not had their no-vacancy lights on all down the main street of this small town. According to the map, she was about fifty miles south of Lake Shasta, and there would be camp grounds there, places to park and sleep. She climbed back inside the camper and started driving again.
Sam had given Diego explicit directions, and the more Victoria thought about them, and about the roads—everything from double green lines down to faint broken lines on the map—the more she wished she had taken Mimi’s suggestion and called the Oregon state police. Sam had gone up to the mountains with friends who had left him there. The police could find him, she thought, or find his friends and locate Sam that way. They could give him a ride to the nearest town where he could rent a car to drive himself home. Sam would understand why no one had showed up at the appointed hour. And she knew she had refused that way out because Mimi had angered her finally.
“Why?” Mimi had asked petulantly. She was very lovely, her hair black and lustrous, her brown eyes large as marbles. “After all, if you haven’t snagged him in six months, why do you think this weekend will do it?”
It was after twelve when she finally came to a stop, hit the light switch and rested her head for several minutes on the steering wheel. She had been up since six that morning, had worked half the day, and she felt as if she had been wrestling elephants all evening. She neither knew nor cared where she was, someplace near the lake, someplace where the traffic was distant and no lights showed. She hauled herself up, staggered through the camper to the bunks and fell onto one of them without bothering to undress. Presently she shifted so that the covers were over her instead of under her, and it seemed she had hardly closed her eyes before she was wakened by shouts.
