by Isaac Asimov
With my ninth anthology, however, One Hundred Great Science Fiction Short-Short Stories (Doubleday, 1978), I made the marvelous discovery that my friend, Martin Harry Greenberg-tall, a little plump, intelligent, conscientious, hard-working, and good-humored-found a peculiar perverted pleasure in doing all those things, like getting permissions and taking care of payments, that I hated to do.
Then the two of us discovered Charles G. Waugh, also tall, hard-working, intelligent, and conscientious, but less plump and much more grave than either Martin or I. It turned out, he knew every science fiction story ever published, remembered all the statistics and plots, and could put his hand on any of them instantly. Ask him for a story about extraterrestrials from Uranus who reproduce by binary fission and I imagine he would have three different sets of xeroxes in your hand the next day.
That changed everything. In 1979 and 1980, I helped edit no less than twelve anthologies and, at the moment of writing, there are six in press and more in preparation. (Not all are with Martin and Charles: a couple are with Alice Laurance, who has an attribute that the first two lack to an enormous degree- beauty; and one is with J. O. Jeppson, to whom I am closely related by marriage.)
Very often these recent anthologies have had my name blown out of proportion on the covers for crass commercial reasons, and over my protests, since I contribute no more than my fair share.
On the other hand I contribute no less than my fair share either, and it chafes a little when someone takes it for granted that I am merely collecting money for the use of my name. I would overlook the slur on my integrity involved in this, since all great men suffer calumny; but I hate to lose credit for all the work I do.
Charles, Martin, and I constantly consult each other by mail and phone; and we each dabble in every part of the work; but there is division of labor, too. Charles works particularly hard at locating stories and making photocopies. Martin works particularly hard at the business details.
And as for me-Well, all the stories descend on me; and I read them all and do the final judging (what I throw out is thrown out). I then write the introduction or the headnotes or (usually) both. And since I’m the one who lives in New York, I tend to do the trotting round to various publishers when that is necessary.
The net result is that each of the three of us does what he best likes to do so that preparing the anthologies becomes fun for all of us. To be sure, I labor under the steady anxiety that something might happen to Martin or Charles; but, under my shrewd questioning, both Sally Greenberg and Carol-Lynn Waugh have made it clear that each entirely understands the importance of keeping her husband functioning; and I rely on them with all confidence.
The Influence Of Science Fiction
I suppose it's only natural that those of us who are devotees of science fiction would like to find in it something more than a matter of idle amusement. It ought to have important significance.
On many occasions in the past I have advanced arguments for supposing such significance to exist. Here is how it goes:
The human way of life has always been subject to drastic and more or less irreversible change, usually (or, as I believe, always) mediated by some advance in science and/or technology. Thus, life is forever changed with the invention of fire-or the wheel-or agriculture-or metallurgy-or printing.
The rate of change has been continually increasing, too; for as these changes are introduced, they tend to increase the security of the human species and therefore increase its number, thus in turn increasing the number of those capable of conceiving, introducing, and developing additional advances in science and technology. Besides that, each advance serves as a base for further advance so that the effect is cumulative.
During the last two centuries, the rate of change has become so great as to be visible in the course of the individual lifetime. This has put a strain on the capacity of individuals, and societies, too, to adapt to such change, since the natural feeling always is that there should be no change. One is used to things as they are.
During the last thirty years, the rate of change has become so great as to induce a kind of social vertigo. There seems no way in which we can plan any longer, for plans become outdated as fast as they are implemented. By the time we recognize a problem, action must be taken at once; and by the time we take action, however quickly, it is too late; the problem has changed its nature and gotten away from us.
What makes it worse is that, in the course of scientific and technological advance we have reached the stage where we dispose of enough power to destroy civilization (if it is misused), or to advance it to unheard-of heights (if we use it correctly).
With stakes so high and the situation so vertiginous, what can we do?
We must learn to anticipate fairly correctly and, in making our plans, take into account not what now exists, but what is likely to exist five years hence-or ten-or twenty-whenever the solution is likely to come into effect.
But how can one take change into account correctly, when the vast mass of the population stolidly refuses to take into account the existence of any change at all? (Thus, most Americans, far from planning now for 1990, have shown by their recent actions that what they want is to see 1955 restored.)
That is where science fiction comes in. Science fiction is the one branch of literature that accepts the fact of change, the inevitability of change. Without the initial assumption that there will be change, there is no such thing as science fiction, for nothing is science fiction unless it includes events played out against a social or physical background significantly different from our own. Science fiction is at its best if the events described could not be played out at all except in a social or physical background significantly different from our own.
That doesn’t mean that a science fiction story should be predictive, or that it should portray something that is going to happen, before it can be important. It doesn’t even have to portray something that might conceivably happen.
The existence of change, the acceptance of change, is enough. People who read science fiction come, in time, to know that things will be different. Maybe better, maybe worse, but different. Maybe this way, maybe that way, but different.
If enough people read science fiction or are, at least, sufficiently influenced by people who read science fiction, enough of the population may come to accept change (even if only with resignation and grief) so that government leaders can plan for change in the hope of meeting something other than stolid resistance from the public. And then, who knows, civilization might survive.
And yet this is highly tenuous; and while I accept the line of reasoning thoroughly (having, as far as I know, made it up), I can see that others might dismiss it as special pleading by someone who doesn’t want the stuff he writes to be dismissed as just… stuff.
Well, then, has science fiction already influenced the world? Has anything that science fiction writers have written so influenced real scientists, or engineers, or politicians, or industrialists as to introduce important changes?
What about the case of space flight, of trips to the Moon?
This has been a staple of imaginative literature since Roman times; and both Jules Verne and H.G. Wells wrote highly popular stories about trips to the Moon in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Certainly, those scientists and engineers who began to deal with rocketry realistically had read science fiction; and there is no question that men such as Robert Goddard and Werner von Braun had been exposed to such things.
This is not to say that science fiction taught them any rocketry. As a matter of fact, Wells used an anti-gravity device to get to the Moon, and Verne used a gigantic gun, and both of these devices can be dismissed out of hand as ways of reaching the Moon.
Nevertheless, they stirred the imagination, as did all the other science fiction writers who flooded into the field as the twentieth century wore on, and who began to write material in large masses (if not always in high quality). All of this prepared th
e minds of more and more people for the notion of such trips.
It followed that when rockets were developed as war weapons during World War II, there were not lacking engineers who saw them as devices for scientific exploration, for orbital flights, for trips to the Moon and beyond. And all this would not be laughed out of court by the general public, all the way down to the rock-bottom of the average Congressman-because science fiction had paved the way.
Even this may not seem enough-too general-too broad.
How about specific influence? How about something a specific writer has done that has influenced a specific person in such a way that the world has been changed?
That has been done, too. Consider the Hungarian physicist, Leo Szilard, who-in the middle 1930s-began thinking of the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction that might produce a nuclear bomb, who recognized that his thought had become a very real possibility when uranium fission was discovered in 1939, who moved heaven and earth to persuade Allied scientists to censor themselves voluntarily in order to keep information from reaching the Nazi enemy, who persuaded Einstein to persuade President Roosevelt to initiate a vast project for developing a nuclear bomb.
We know how that changed the world (whether for better or for worse is beside the point right now, but I certainly would not have wanted Hider to have gotten the first nuclear bomb in the early 1940s), so we can say that Leo Szilard changed it.
And how did Szilard come to have his original idea? According to Szilard himself, that idea came to him because he read a story by H. G. Wells (originally published in 1902) in which an “atomic bomb”- the phrase H. G. Wells himself used-had been featured.
Here’s another case. At the present moment, industrial robots are appearing on the assembly line with increasing frequency. In Japan, whole factories are being roboticized. What’s more, the robots themselves are being made more versatile, more capable, and more “intelligent” very rapidly. It isn’t far- fetched to say that in a couple of decades this roboticization will be seen to have changed the face of society permanently (assuming that civilization continues to survive).
Is there anyone we can credit for this? It is difficult to place that credit on a single pair of shoulders, but perhaps the pair most likely to deserve it belongs to a man named Joseph F. Engelberger, who is the president of Unimation, which manufactures one-third of all the robots in use and has installed more of them than anybody else.
Engelberger founded his company in the late 1950s, and how do you suppose he came to found it?
Some years before, according to his own account, when he was still a college undergraduate, he became enthusiastic about the possibility of robots when he read I, Robot by Isaac Asimov.
I assure you that when I was writing my positronic robot stories back in the 1940s, my intentions were clear and simple. I just wanted to write some stories, sell them to a magazine, make a little money to pay my college tuition, and see my name in print. If I had been writing anything but science fiction, that’s all that would have happened.
But I was writing science fiction-so I’m now changing the world.
Women And Science Fiction
My early science fiction stories had no women in them for the most part. There were two reasons for this, one social, one personal. The social reason first.
Prior to public recognition in the United States that babies are not brought by the stork, there was simply no sex in the science fiction magazines. This was not a matter of taste, it was a matter of custom that had the force of law. In most places, non-recognition of the existence of sex was treated as though it was the law, and for all I know, maybe it was indeed local law. In any case, words or actions that could bring a blush to the leathery cheek of the local censor were strictly out.
But if there’s no sex, what do you do with female characters? They can’t have passions and feelings. They can’t participate on equal terms with male characters because that would introduce too many complications where some sort of sex might creep in. The best thing to do was to keep them around in the background, allowing them to scream in terror, to be caught and then rescued, and, at the end, to smile prettily at the hero. (It can be done safely then because THE END is the universal rescue.)
Yet it must be admitted that science fiction magazines showed no guts whatsoever in fighting this situation. That brings us to the personal reason. In the 1930s and 1940s, the readership of the science fiction magazines was heavily (almost exclusively, in fact) masculine. What’s more it was young-and-intellectual masculine. The stereotypical science fiction reader was a skinny kid with glasses and acne, introverted and scapegoated by the tough kids who surrounded him and were rightly suspicious of anyone who knew how t o read.
It stands to reason these youngsters knew nothing about girls. By and large, I imagine they didn’t dare approach them, and if they did, were rejected by them scornfully, and if they weren’t, didn’t know what to do next. So why on Earth should they want this strange sub-species in the stories they read? They had not yet gotten out of the “I hate (translation: “I’m scared of”) girls” stage.
This is an exaggeration, perhaps, and no doubt there were a number of tough young men and girl- chasing young men who read science fiction, but by and large, I suspect it was the stereotypical “skinny intellectual” who wrote letters to the magazines and denounced any intrusion of femininity. I know. I wrote such letters myself. And in the days when I was reading and rating every science fiction story written, I routinely deducted many points for any intrusion of romance, however sanitized it might be.
At the time I wrote and sold my first few stories, I had not yet had a date with a young woman. I knew nothing about them except what I could guess by surreptitious glances from a distance. Naturally, there were no women in my stories.
(I once received a letter from a woman who denounced me for this lack. Humbly, I wrote back to explain the reason, stating that I was, very literally, an innocent as far as women were concerned at the beginning of my writing career. She had a good answer for that, too. She wrote back in letters of flame, “That’s no excuse!”)
But times change!
For one thing, society changed. The breath of liberty brought on by all the talk about it during World War II weakened the censor, who retreated, muttering sourly under his breath. The coming of the pill heralded the liberation of women from unwanted pregnancy, and marked the weakening of the double standard.
For another, people will grow up. Even I didn’t remain innocent. I actually went out on a date on my twentieth birthday. I met a particular woman two years later, fell in love at first sight, and all trace of fear suddenly left me. I was married five months later and you’d be surprised how I changed! I have in my proud possession a plaque handed me by a science fiction convention. On the brass plate is inscribed that quality of mine that had earned me the plaque. It reads “Lovable Lecher.”
And yet science fiction lagged a bit, I think. Old habits didn’t change easily. My own stories, for instance, remained free of sex except where it was an integral part of the development and then only to that extent, and still so remain. I have gotten rid of my fear (witness my five volumes of naughty limericks), but not of my sense of decorum.
What, then, really brought on the change and brought science fiction more nearly into the mainstream of contemporary literature?
In my opinion, it was not chiefly social evolution; it was not the daring new writers; not the Russes and LeGuins.
It was the coming of women into the science fiction readership!
If science fiction readers had remained almost entirely masculine-even had the acne cleared up and the youth withered-I think science fiction would have remained male chauvinist in the crudest possible way.
Nowadays, I honestly think that at least a third, and possibly nearly half the science fiction readers are women. When that is so, and when it is recognized that women are at least as articulate as men and (these days) quite ready to denounce male chauvinism
and to demand treatment as human beings, it becomes impossible to continue villainy.
Even I have to bow to the breath of decency. In my new novel, Foundation’s Edge, of my seven central characters, four are women-all different, all perfectly able to take care of themselves, and all formidable. (For that matter, I introduced Susan Calvin in 1940, and she strode through a man’s world, asking no quarter, and certainly giving none. I just thought I’d mention that.)
And what brought in the women readers? I suppose there are a large number of reasons, but I have one that I favor. It’s Mr. Spock’s ears.
There is no question in my mind that the first example of decent science fiction that gained a mass following was the television show Star Trek, nearly twenty years ago. For a wonder, it attracted as many women as men. I don’t suppose there is room to doubt that what chiefly served to attract those women was the unflappable Mr. Spock. And for some reason I won’t pretend to guess at, they were intrigued by his ears.
Very few of the “Trekkies” leaked over into print science fiction (or all the magazines would have grown rich), but a minor percentage did and that was enough to feminize the readership of the science fiction magazines. And I think that was all to the good, too.
With so many women thumbing the magazines, women writers were naturally more welcome and their viewpoints greeted with greater reader sympathy-and women editors made more sense, too.
Don’t get me wrong. There were women writers even in the early days of magazine science fiction, and women editors, too. When I was young, some of my favorite stories were by A. R. Long and by Leslie F. Stone. I didn’t know they were women, but they were. In addition, Mary Gnaedinger, Bea Mahaffey, and Cele Goldsmith were excellent editors. I never met Ms. Gnaedinger, but I did meet Bea and Cele and I hereby testify that in addition to lots of brains, character, and personality, they each happened to be beautiful. (Irrelevant, I know, but I thought I would mention it.)
