by Isaac Asimov
Dystopias are intrinsically more interesting than utopias. Milton’s description of his dystopian Hell in the first two books of Paradise Lost is far more interesting than his description of utopian Hell in the third book. And in The Lord of the Rings, not much can be told about the stay of the Fellowship in the utopian elfland of Lorien, but how the story intensifies and grows more interesting as we approach the dystopian Morder.
But can there be dystopias today with science and technology advancing as they do?
Certainly! You need only view science and technology as contributing to the evil (which is not difficult to do).
And yet pure dystopian tales are as dull and as unbearable as pure utopian ones. Consider the most famous pure dystopian tale of modern times, 1984 by George Orwell (1903-1950), published in 1948 (the same year in which Walden Two was published). I consider it an abominably poor book. It made a big hit (in my opinion) only because it rode the tidal wave of cold war sentiment in the United States.
The pure utopian tale can only hit the single note of “Isn’t it wonderful-wonderful-wonderful. “ The pure dystopian tale can only hit the single note of “Isn’t it awful-awful-awful.” And one cannot build a melody on the basis of a single note.
Well, then, what is a science fiction writer supposed to do if both utopian and dystopian stories are dull?
Remember, they are poor only if they are pure, so avoid the extremes. Milton’s Hell was made interesting because of his portrait of Satan, courageous even in the ultimate adversity, feeling pangs of remorse even when immersed in ultimate evil. Milton’s Heaven was without interest because there was no way of introducing danger in the face of an omnipotent, omniscient God. His dystopia was not pure, his utopia was.
The evil of Mordor was made bearable by the courage and humanity of Frodo and the story would have remained interesting and successful even if Frodo had failed in the end. It was his courage and humanity, not his victory, that really counted.
The essence of a story is the struggle of one thing against another: a living thing against the impersonal universe; a living thing against another living thing; one aspect of a living thing against another aspect of himself.
In each case, you have to make it possible for the reader to identify with at least one side of the struggle, so that his interest and sympathy is engaged. I say “at least” one side, because if you are skillful, you can cause him to identify with both sides and be emotionally torn.
The side or sides with whom you identify must carryon the struggle with courage, intelligence, and decency-or, at least, learn to do so. The story won’t be effective if you are ashamed of the side you make your own.
Both sides must have a fair chance to win. It is tempting to pile the odds up against your side, so as to make your hero’s ultimate victory the more unexpected, exciting, and triumphant, but in that case you must be sure that your side does end up victorious. You can’t make it David versus Goliath unless David wins, and as one becomes more and more experienced and sophisticated in reading, that may come to seem too obvious and even too unrealistic.
It seems to me, then, that the best one can do is to present one’s story as a struggle between sides which are both mixtures of good and evil (thus placing it somewhere between the extremes of utopia and dystopia), and don’t make the odds overwhelming in either direction. One can then proceed to make one’s point without being forced into a happy ending and under conditions of maximum excitement and reader uncertainty. The reader will not only be uncertain as to how his side will win, but if it will win, or even, perhaps, which is truly his side.
I don’t say this is easy, of course.
Outsiders, Insiders
I am a great booster of “the brotherhood of science fiction.” I wrote an editorial on the subject, with just that title, in the fifth issue of IAsfm (January-February, 1978). I delight in thinking of us ardent writers and readers of science fiction as a band of brothers (and sisters, of course) fond of each other, and supporting each other.
Unfortunately, there are aspects of such a situation that are not entirely delightful. Let’s consider these unfavorable aspects, because if the field of science fiction is to remain as ideal as we all want it to be, we have to see the dangers. We may not be able to defeat those dangers even if we see them, but we certainly can’t, if we don’t see them.
For instance, if we are truly a small and intimate band (as I remember us being in the Golden Age of Campbell, though perhaps that may only be the consequence of nostalgia) then there is a danger that we might close our ranks, unfairly and petty-mindedly, against outsiders.
I remember, for instance, when Michael Crichton wrote The Andromeda Strain and it hit the best- seller lists. In those days, it had not yet become common for science fiction and fantasy to be actual best-sellers, and here was an “outsider” who had accomplished it. What made him an outsider? Well, he hadn’t sold to the magazines. He didn’t show up at conventions. He wasn’t one of us.
There followed reviews in various science fiction prozines and fanzines and it seemed to me, at the time, that they were uniformly unfavorable. I can’t judge how justified those reviews might have been for I never read the book (perhaps because I, too, felt he was an outsider) but there did appear, in my opinion, an extra helping of venom beyond what I usually notice in unfavorable reviews.
Was that fair? No, it wasn’t. Crichton, a person of great talent, went on to be very successful, both in his later books (some of them not science fiction) and in movies as well. Our objections to him did not hurt him and he doesn’t need us. In retrospect, we might conclude that some of us were petty.
Nor am I trying to preach from some high moral position, implying that I am myself above such things. Not at all.
I went through a period soon after World War II, in which I reacted badly (though entirely within myself), and I look back on that period in shame.
When one is part of a small and comparatively insignificant clique, warming one’s self in its closeness and camaraderie, what happens if one of the clique suddenly rises and becomes famous in the wild world outside?
Thus, in the 1940s, Robert Heinlein was quickly accepted as the best science fiction writer of us all (and in the opinion of many, he still is the grand master) and I accepted that, too. I was not envious, for I was just a beginner and I knew that many writers were better than I was. Besides, I liked Bob’s writing a great deal. And most of all, he was one of us, writing for the same magazines, going to the same conventions, corresponding with us, first-naming me and expecting me to first-name him, and so on.
But then, soon after World War 11, Bob Heinlein was involved with a motion picture, Destination: Moon. It wasn’t a very good motion picture; it didn’t make the hit that the later 2001: A Space Odyssey or Star Wars did. But it was the first motion picture involving one of us, and while I said not a word, I was secretly unhappy. Bob had left our group and become famous in the land of the infidels.
To make it worse, he had published “The Green Hills of Earth “ in The Saturday Evening Post and it had created a stir. It was a real science fiction story and it was in the slicks; not only in the slicks, but in the greatest and slickest slick of them all. We all dreamed of publishing in the SEP (I, also) but that was like dreaming of taking out Marilyn Monroe on a date. You knew it was just a dream and you had no intention of even trying to make it come true. And now Bob had done it. He hadn’t just tried, he had done it. I don’t know whether I simply mourned his loss, because I thought that now he would never come back to us; or whether I was simply and greenly envious. All I knew was that I felt more and more uncomfortable. It was like having a stomachache in the mind, and it seemed to spoil all my fun in being a science fiction writer.
So I argued it out with myself-not because I am a noble person but because I hated feeling the way I did, and I wanted to feel better. I said to myself that Bob had blazed new trails, and that it didn’t matter who did it, as long as it was done. Those new trail
s had been opened not for Robert Heinlein, but for science fiction, and all of us who were in the business of writing or reading science fiction could be grateful and thankful for we would sooner or later experience the benefit of Bob’s pioneering.
And that was true. Because Bob made science fiction look good to people who did not ordinarily read science fiction, and who despised it when they thought of it at all, it became more possible for the rest of us to have our stuff published outside the genre magazines-even in the SEP. (I had a two-part serial published in that magazine myself eventually, but that was when it was long past its great days.)
The result of my working this out meant I was free of sickness on later occasions. When my first book, Pebble in the Sky, appeared under the Doubleday imprint, it was followed in a matter of months by The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. I don’t have to tell you that Ray’s book far outshone mine. It didn’t bother me, for it seemed to me that the better Ray’s book did, the more people would read science fiction in book form, and some of them would be sure to look for more of the same and stumble over mine.
And they did. Pebble is still earning money, thirty-six years later.
And however annoying it might be that Michael Crichton could enter our field straight out of medical school, move right up to the novel level, and land on the best-seller list, and have everyone drooling over him, where’s the harm? He did it (unintentionally, perhaps) for us. He added to the respectability of science fiction among those who found us unrespectable, and made it easier for the rest of us to get on the best-seller list occasionally.
Far from snarling, we should have been cheering.
Another point. A band of brothers (and sisters) is at its best when there is nothing much to compete for. As long as we were all getting no more than one and two cents a word (as we did in that wonderful Golden Age of Campbell) with no chance at book publication, foreign sales and movies; as long as the only kudos we could get was first place in the “ Analytical Laboratory” which meant a half-cent-a-word bonus; as long as no one outside our small field had ever heard of any of us under any circumstances--what was there to compete over? The most successful of us were almost as permanently impecunious as the least so there was no reason to snarl and bite.
Now, however, times have changed. There are many more of us, and some of us write best-sellers.
In fact, the greatest best-seller of the 1980s, Stephen King, is, after a fashion, one of us. It’s no longer a few thousand bucks that’s at stake; it’s a few million. And that brother bit fades, bends, and crumples under the strain.
I don’t write reviews, but I do read them, and I’m beginning to see the venom again as one writer discusses the work of another member of the brotherhood. What’s more, the annual award of the Nebulas, which are determined by vote among the members of the Science Fiction Writers of America, seems to rouse hard feeling and contentiousness every year. The stakes are simply too high.
Thus, a young member of the brotherhood (to me he seemed a child) complained to me the other day that the “young writers” (young to him) were ferocious in their competitiveness. There was none of the friendliness, he said, that there was in our day (meaning his and mine, though I was a published writer when he was born).
I suppose he’s right, though.
In a way, I can’t ache to return to the good old days when we were all impoverished together. It seems a glamorous time in my mind now, but I remember Sophie Tucker’s immortal dictum: “I’ve tried poor, and I’ve tried rich, and rich is better.”
But is there a price we must pay for it? Must the camaraderie be gone? Must the friendly back-and-forth be over?
Why not remember that science fiction is still a relatively specialized field; that SF writers have to know a great deal more, and develop more unusual skill, than ordinary writers; that SF readers, too, demand more because they need more? Can we remember that we’re all in this together? That those in front pave the way for those behind? That at any time someone can appear from the strange land of outside, or the stranger land of youth, and carve out new territory for all of us, and that they should be welcomed gladly?
Let’s be friends. There are endless worlds of the mind and emotions to conquer, and we can advance more surely, if we support-not fight-each other.
Science Fiction Anthologies
I hear it said now and then that the short story is a lost literary art form, that the magazines and various outlets that fostered the short story are dead and gone, that fiction today concentrates on the novel.
That would be too bad if it were true; but, of course, it isn’t entirely true. In the field of science fiction, at least, the short story absolutely flourishes and the readers simply can’t get enough of it. Indeed, any good science fiction story can count on periodic resurrection in the form of items in single-author collections and in multi-author anthologies. Some of my stories have been anthologized up to thirty times, and I by no means hold the record for such things. I suspect that both Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison (to name but two) can cite stories of their own that have seen far more repetitions than any of mine have.
And there you have something that is oddly characteristic of science fiction-the vast number and varying nature of anthologies in the field. I have the impression that there is no precedent in literature for this.
Why is it so? Why should science fiction, rather than some other subsection of popular literature, spawn an unending series of anthologies of enormous variety?
I suspect that, in part at least, what is responsible is the unusual fervor of the devoted science fiction reader. Particular stories strike such a reader with the force of a sledgehammer. Combine this with the fact that magazine science fiction tends to be ephemeral. Few young readers save the magazines for long. Even if they start a collection, after a few years there comes college or marriage or other interests generally; and the collection falls apart, drifts away, vanishes.
Yet the memory of those particularly good stories lingers, and a glow of glory builds about them. I have long lost count of the number of letters I have received from readers who tell me that once, when the world was young, they read a story about thus-and-so. They can’t remember the title, the author, where it appeared or anything more than thus-and-so; but could I tell them what the story was and how they could go about finding it again?
Sometimes I remember the story from the small clues they present and can give them the missing information. More often I cannot.
You see, then, that anthologies offer a second chance. They sometimes bring back for readers stories once loved and then lost. Once I deliberately devised an anthology (Before the Golden Age, Doubleday, 1974) in order to present some stories that I myself had loved and lost.
Sometimes such stories are better not found, for they don’t, in actual fact, bear the prismatic colors that fond memory lends them; but sometimes they do. When I reread “Tumithak of the Corridors” during the preparation of my 1974 anthology, I found it to be a time machine that restored me to my teenage years for an hour or two.
The first anthology of magazine science fiction appeared in 1943. It was The Pocket Book of Science Fiction, edited by Donald A. Wollheim. Among the stories it contained was Stanley G. Weinbaum’s “ A Martian Odyssey,” which I had never read, having missed the issue in which it first appeared. I was able to enjoy it for the first time when I bought the anthology. And there is another service such books offer. They allow you to recover stories you never knew you had lost.
In 1946, there appeared the first hardcover anthology of magazine science fiction, The Best of Science Fiction, edited by Groff Conklin. It was an anthology of almost painfully intense interest to me for it was the first to contain a story of mine-”Blind Alley.” That was never one of my own favorites; in fact, I considered it then, and now, too, as rather second-rate. Still, I discovered eventually that Groff’s opinions of quality could usually be relied on, so perhaps I underestimate “Blind Alley.”
In any case, Astounding, the magazine in which “Blind Alley” had originally appeared, retained all rights in those days; but John Campbell insisted that anthology income go to the authors involved. It was in this way that I made the great discovery that the same story could be paid for twice and, therefore, by extension, any number of times. (It is only that which makes it possible for a science fiction writer to earn a living, so this was by no means a non-significant discovery.)
Later in that same year, the most successful science fiction anthology ever to appear was published. It was Adventures in Time and Space, edited by Raymond J. Healy and J. Francis McComas. It was a large, thick volume, with stories drawn almost entirely from the Golden Age of Astounding, and it contained my story “Nightfall. “ That was my introduction to the strange notion that one of my own stories was already considered a classic.
The success of the Healy-McComas anthology opened the floodgates. I haven’t the faintest idea how many anthologies have been published since, but I am quite certain that there isn’t an issue of any science fiction magazine that hasn’t been carefully picked over to see if any gems have remained undiscovered-nor any gem or even semi-gem that hasn’t been discovered and rediscovered and rediscovered.
Lately, I myself have joined the parade. I’m not entirely a novice at the anthologists’ game, for I edited The Hugo Winners (Doubleday, 1962) along with successor volumes in 1971 and 1977, all of which were quite successful.
However, I never let myself get too involved in such matters because every anthology entails a great deal of tedious scutwork-selection, obtaining of permissions, the making out of payments and so on. The result was that through 1978, I edited only nine anthologies, which is very few for a person of my own wholesale proclivities who considers nothing worth doing that isn’t worth doing a lot.
