by Ben Bova
Dr. Young felt desperate. And he knew that if he felt desperate, Henry must be on the verge of collapse.
Henry said, “You’re sure nobody else knows—”
“It’s two in the morning. This is my own building, my company owns it and occupies it exclusively. The guard couldn’t possibly have recognized you with that false beard and the sunglasses. I laid off every known or suspected Democrat in my company weeks ago. Stop worrying.” They came at last to Room X. Dr. Young opened the door and motioned Henry to follow him inside.
The room was well lit, neat, and orderly. There was a comfortable couch along one wall, a modest desk of warm mahogany with a deep leather chair behind it, and a panel of lights and grill work on the farthest wall. The panel was set into the wall so that someone reclining on the couch couldn’t see it.
Henry balked at the doorway. “I’m not sure—”
“Come on,” Dr. Young coaxed. “It won’t hurt you. The President himself authorized nearly a million dollars to allow me to build this system. You wouldn’t want him to feel that the money was wasted, would you?”
As he said that, Dr. Young almost laughed out loud. This system was going to make him the king of the computer selection business. And all built at government expense.
Henry took a hesitant step into the room. “What do I have to do?” he asked suspiciously.
“Just lie on the couch. I attach these two little electrodes to your head.” Dr. Young pulled a small plastic bag from his jacket pocket. Inside was something that looked rather like the earphones that are handed out on airplanes for listening to the movie or stereo tapes.
“It won’t hurt a bit,” Dr. Young promised.
Henry just glared at him sullenly.
“I’ll explain it again,” Dr. Young said, as calmly as he could manage. It was like coaxing a four-year-old: “You don’t want to talk to psychiatrists or anyone else—for security reasons. So I’ve programmed my own company’s computer with the correlations determined by six of the nation’s leading psychiatrists. All you have to do is answer a few questions that I’ll ask you, and the computer will be able to translate your answers into an understanding of your subconscious desires—your real wishes, the dream girl that your conscious mind is too repressed to verbalize.”
“I’m not sure I like this.”
“It’s harmless.”
“What are the electrodes for?”
Dr. Young tried to make his reply sound casual, airy. “Oh, they’re just something like lie detectors, not that you’re consciously lying, of course. But they’ll compare your brain’s various electrical waves with your conscious words and allow the computer to determine what’s really on your mind.”
“A computer that can read minds?” Henry took a halfstep back toward the door.
“Not at all,” Dr. Young assured him and grabbed him by the shoulder of his jacket. “It doesn’t read your mind. How could it? It’s only a computer. It merely correlates your spoken words with your brain waves, that’s all. Then it’s up to a human being—me, in this case—to interpret those correlations.”
As he half dragged Henry to the couch, Dr. Young wondered if he should tell him that the computer did most of the correlation work itself. And thanks to the clandestine link between his company’s computer here in this building and the FBI’s monster machine, the correlations would come out as specific names and addresses.
“You really think this will work?” Henry asked as Dr. Young pushed him down onto the couch.
“Not only do I think it will work, but the President thinks it will. Now we wouldn’t want to disappoint the President, would we?”
Henry lay back and closed his eyes. “No, I suppose not.”
“Fine,” said Dr. Young. He pulled the electrodes from the bag. “Now this isn’t going to hurt at all.” Henry jumped when the soft rubberized pads touched his temples.
“And if it doesn’t work?” the President’s voice sounded darkly troubled. “How can I get Chou to meet me at the airport if Henry isn’t available to set things up?”
“It will work, Mr. Pre-Uh, sir. I’m sure of it,” Dr. Young said into the phone. It better work, he said to himself. Tonight’s the night. We’ll find out for sure tonight.
“I don’t like it. I want to make that perfectly clear. I don’t like this one little bit.”
“It’s scientific, sir. You can’t argue with science.”
“It had better be worth the money we’ve spent,” was the President’s only reply.
Henry was strangely calm as he stepped out of the limousine and walked up the steps to the plain, red brick house in Georgetown. It was barely dusk, not dark enough to worry about muggers yet.
There was only one bell button at the door. Usually these homes were split into several apartments. This one was not. He and his dream girl would have it all to themselves.
He sighed. He had waited so long, been through so much. And now some computer-designated girl was waiting for him. Well, maybe it would work out all right. All he had ever wanted was a lovely, sweet woman to make him feel wanted and worthwhile.
He pressed the button. A buzzer sounded gratingly and he pushed the front door open and stepped inside.
The hallway led straight to the back of the house.
“In the kitchen!” a voice called out.
Briefly he wondered whether he should stop here and take off his topcoat. He was holding a bouquet of gladiolas in one hand, stiffly wrapped in green paper. Squaring his shoulders manfully, he strode down the hallway to the kitchen.
The lights were bright, the radio blaring, and the kitchen was filled with delicious warm aromas and sizzlings. The woman was standing at the range with her back to him.
Without turning, she said:
“Put the flowers on the table and take off your coat. Then wash your hands and we’ll eat.”
With a thrill that surpassed understanding, Henry said, “Yes, Momma.”
Science Fiction
This article was originally written for The New York Times Magazine, based on a suggestion of mine to one of the editors. It seemed to me that science fiction exploded out of its old habitat in 1982 and virtually took over the best seller lists of the literary establishment. The Times did not like my final manuscript, unfortunately, and ultimately asked another writer to do a piece on the same subject. The other writer, an academic who apparently set out to prove that science fiction is not of high literary standards, satisfied the Times’s editors. To those of us who know and love science fiction, it seems that the editorial policies of the Times have not advanced beyond the year 1937.
No matter. Science fiction titles are still hitting the best seller lists frequently. To someone who remembers 1937, that is a dream come true.
When I was a junior technical editor on the Vanguard project, back in 1956, I was rash enough to tell some of the rocket engineers with whom I worked that I not only read science fiction, I was trying to write it.
To my great surprise, they backed away from me. Here we were, struggling to launch the world’s first artificial satellite, and these men seemed totally disinterested in what was then called “the literature of the future.”
By the time I left the aerospace industry to edit Analog, one of the most influential science fiction magazines in the world, I was being invited to lecture about the future at think tanks and business meetings, because I was a science fiction writer.
For several generations, “hard core” science fiction tales of futuristic adventures have been one of the strongest literary genres, not merely in the United States, but in virtually every industrialized nation. Over the past few years, science fiction films such as the Star Wars series, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. have shattered every box office record in motion picture history.
More recently, the previously-sacrosanct hardcover best seller lists have been invaded by out-and-out science fiction novels. After 261 books, Isaac Asimov has finally become a best selling author.
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Earlier in 1982, the hardcover best seller lists around the nation featured Asimov’s Foundation’s Edge, Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two, and Douglas Adams’ Life, the Universe, and Everything along with James Michener’s Space, William Kotzwinkle’s E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial Storybook, and titles by Kurt Vonnegut, Stephen King, and Marion Zimmer Bradley, no strangers to the world of science fiction.
And although many of the leading lights of contemporary American literature may deplore the fact, science fiction themes, ideas, and writing techniques have infiltrated their way into the works of “straight” writers such as Len Deighton, Lawrence Sanders, Robert Ludlum, Doris Lessing, and many others.
Why is this literature of laser guns and starships playing such an increasingly important role in American reading? Critics of science fiction say that the phenomenon is merely another sign of the decreasing literacy of the American public: they believe science fiction is “boob tube” escapist entertainment. I propose an alternative possibility: the American reading public has become increasingly interested in science and the future, and is turning toward science fiction as a result of that interest in tomorrow’s problems and opportunities.
Two generations ago, it was easy to define just what science fiction was: it consisted of stories in which some aspect of future science or technology was so integral to the plot that if you removed the science, the story would collapse. The classic example is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; take away the science and there is no story remaining. Perhaps more important, but usually overlooked in such definitions, was the fact that the story attempted to show how science can affect humankind, both single individuals and whole societies.
While that definition still applies to hard-core science fiction, the field has expanded enormously in scope so that today science fiction includes a much broader range of themes, ideas, and treatments.
Science fiction still deals heavily with future scenarios, and many science fiction stories have successfully predicted future events such as the atomic bomb, space travel, genetic engineering, the energy crisis, and the population explosion. Some scientists, such as Lewis Branscomb, vice president for research of IBM, credit science fiction with being the best way we have to predict the future.
Most science fiction writers, however, are not attempting to predict the future. They do not believe that there is a fixed and immutable future that can be predicted. Instead, their tales are forays into possible futures, potential tomorrows, always based on the intriguing question, “What would happen if...?” In a sense, science fiction writers are society’s scouts; they look ahead into all the myriad possibilities of tomorrow and offer a kaleidoscopic view of what the future may bring. As Alvin Tofler put it, reading science fiction is the antidote to “future shock.”
Writers who have never dealt with science fiction before are turning to it now, because it gives them the flexibility and the techniques to examine the future.
Lawrence Sanders, author of The Anderson Tapes, The First Deadly Sin and other blockbusters, also wrote in 1975 an out-and-out science fiction novel, The Tomorrow File, which deals with the impact of the new biological discoveries coming out of today’s research laboratories: Frankenstein in a punk rock costume. Doris Lessing’s recent works use alien creatures and societies to throw our own social world into sharper relief, and Robert Ludlum’s thrillers incorporate high-technology gadgetry and shadowy, menacing presences who secretly control the world— both staples of science fiction since the 1920s. Perhaps the trend toward absorbing high-tech gimmickry into novels of intrigue and adventure began with Ian Fleming’s adventures of superspy James Bond.
Kurt Vonnegut, of course, grew up in science fiction— and out of it. But he consistently uses science fiction writing techniques and ideas. In Slaughterhouse Five, for example, the juxtapositions of time, the concepts of “time tripping” and of benign alien intelligences who are studying the Earth, all came straight from the science fiction writer’s kit.
Len Deighton’s highly-successful SS:GB, on the other hand, is what science fictionists call an “alternate world” story. It takes place in a post-World War II Britain where the Nazis have won the war. That is a world that does not, and never will, exist. Yet it allows the author to create a setting that is at the same time familiar to the reader and yet strange; a setting in which the characters and the society created by the author can be examined and tested in ways that are impossible in an ordinary novel.
“People are fed up with their present world and looking for alternatives,” says Arthur C. Clarke. “This is not escapism... it can be scenario planning.” Clarke, the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey as well as the originator of the concept of communications satellites, sees science fiction as a way of examining the future.
It is also mind-expanding. Clarke’s 2001 asks a fundamental question: Who are we? Where does the human race fit in with the rest of the universe? In his classic short stories, such as “The Star” and “The Nine Billion Names of God,” Clarke again examines how technological marvels such as computers and spaceships can be used to search for the face of God.
Stanislaw Lem, the Polish dean of European science fiction, made that theme the basis for his novel, Solaris. In other stories, such as his series of tales of Pirx the space pilot, Lem uses futuristic settings to poke fun at rigid, bureaucratic governments. Russian science fiction writers also have mildly criticized their society in the same way. As one Russian writer told me, “The government keeps one eye closed,” in its tolerance of science fiction. Social criticism is permitted—as long as it is criticism of a future world, not the present one.
But is it art? Arnold Klein, a poet and book reviewer, wrote in a recent issue of Harper’s magazine that “sci-fi1 is a hormonal activity, not a literary one. Its traditional concerns are all pubescent.... Aliens have tentacles. Telepathy allows you to have sex without the nasty inconvenience of touching. Womblike spaceships provide balanced meals. No one ever has to grow old.... As for the adult world, it’s simply not there...”
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1Sci-fi is an abbreviation that is abominated by most science fictionists. Generally, it is used only by the uninformed or to be deliberately denigrating.
^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^
Klein is obviously discounting works such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. For several generations now, the so-called literary world has labored under the misapprehension that “if it’s science fiction, it can’t be good; if it’s good, it can’t be science fiction.”
Science fiction practitioners freely admit that literary standards have usually been less important in their field than idea content and narrative drive. It is all too easy for stories of the future to degenerate into “space operas” set on distant planets, in which alien “bug-eyed monsters” are the villains.
Theodore Sturgeon, one of science fiction’s most literate writers, long ago coined Sturgeon’s Law:
“Ninety percent of science fiction is crud; but then, ninety percent of everything is crud.”
Sturgeon has established himself well within the good ten percent of the field, with novels such as More Than Human, in which he examines the next step of human evolution—“Homo gestalt”—a group entity consisting of several individual human beings linked by telepathy into a single, superior, but touchingly vulnerable creature.
Lester Del Rey, a veteran of science fiction’s “Golden Age” of the early 1940s and now Fantasy Editor of Del Rey Books, has a different view about literary quality. Admitting that science fiction “doesn’t come off too well” in the usual terms of characterization and psychological insights, Del Rey then adds: “But if you want to take some of the added things that science fiction brings to literature—the ability to have a much more flexible attitude, to think of things in different ways, not necessarily accepted ways... to recognize the reality of the world, because science is the reality of the world and this is almost totally n
eglected in general fiction—then you’ve got a new set of standards, and those standards would say that current [straight] fiction is totally junk.”
In the view of Del Rey, and many others in the science fiction field, contemporary literature sees the human individual as a tragically flawed creature, unable to understand the world around him and doomed to inevitable failure and death. It is generally pessimistic and anti-heroic, because it is based on the notion that humankind has fallen from grace.
Science fiction, on the other hand, is built on the fundamental optimism of science itself, the belief in the perfectability of the individual human being and of human society. While admitting that technology is not an unmixed blessing, science fiction maintains that humanity cannot exist at all without science and technology. A man without technology would not be a noble savage in some idyllic Eden; he would be a dead naked ape.
In science fiction, the human mind can not only create problems, it can create solutions. Rational thought is our saying grace; we can understand the world around us and our place in it. Albert Einstein summed up the attitude of scientists and science fictionists alike when he said, “The ultimate mystery of the universe is its understandability.”
Frank Herbert, author of the best-selling Dune novels, says, “I decided quite early on that science fiction was the main stream, that you were too much confined by fiction that was restricted in its settings. Science fiction gives you unlimited settings in which to place your human beings... and it has no restrictions whatsoever, you have enormous elbow room, you can just let your imagination run. It also has the other function of putting you into a context where you can make social comments about things that are quite contemporary, but you do them in a setting where people will accept them, for the sake of the story, until they are caught by the story and they realize, ‘Hey, he’s talking about things that are going on around me all the time!’”
