Mama said, “My Lord. Who would do such a thing?”
“Oh,” Sheriff Cowan said, “there’s no doubt in my mind who did it. But I don’t expect I’ll ever prove it.”
Daddy said, “Floyd Haney.”
“Yep. Nobody else around here that crazy and mean,” Sheriff Cowan said. “And he was sure nursing a grudge about that land.”
He stood up and put his hat back on. “But like I say, I’ll never prove it. I thought maybe Raymond might have seen or heard something, but I should have known that was too much to hope for.”
He chuckled down deep in his throat. “You know the funny part? He had all that work and risk for nothing. Those two scientists already pulled out.”
“They’re gone?” I said, louder than I meant to.
“Yep,” Sheriff Cowan said. “Drove right through town, late yesterday afternoon, pulling that trailer. So they must have found out there wasn’t anything important there after all. Probably just some old animal bones or something.”
“Probably,” Daddy said. “Bunch of foolishness.”
And that’s about all there is to tell. David and Maddy never came back, and nobody else ever tried to find that cave again. Not that it would have done them any good. I went up into Moonshine Hollow once, a long time later, and the whole place was smashed up so bad you couldn’t even tell where you were.
Mr. Donovan left too, that summer. He went back into the Marines and I heard he got killed in Korea, but I don’t really know.
Wendell’s daddy got caught with a stolen truck, later on that year, and got sent off to the penitentiary, where everybody said he belonged. Sheriff Cowan never did charge him with blowing up the cave, but he didn’t make any secret of believing he did it.
And maybe he was right, but I wasn’t so sure. My cousin Larry was working the evening shift at the Texaco station when David and Maddy stopped for gas on their way out of town, and he said Maddy was crying and it looked like she’d been roughed up some. And Aunt Ethel mentioned to Mama that David had been in the store on Saturday buying an alarm clock. But I never said anything to anybody.
People talked, for a while there, about that strange business in Moonshine Hollow. But it didn’t last long. Everybody’s mind was on the news from Korea, which was mostly bad, and then by next year all anybody wanted to talk about was the election. I guess by now I’m the only one who even remembers.
And sometimes I sure wish I didn’t.
THE MASTERS SPEAK
INTRODUCTION
GARDNER DOZOIS
For the last several years, it’s been customary for the editors of the Nebula Award anthologies to assemble a bunch of hot young Turks to have a symposium about the state of SF at the moment and its future, and that was my first thought as well when I was tapped to edit this year’s volume. But then I remembered all the Nebula banquets I’d been to where I’d suffered through speeches by numbingly inappropriate or irrelevant guest speakers, and I remembered that on each of those occasions, I’d looked around the room and seen writers like Jack Williamson and Frederik Pohl sitting there looking politely bored as well, and that each time I’d thought: Why aren’t we listening to them, instead of to this guy? With writers in the room who had been present at the very beginnings of science fiction as an individual genre, writers who knew what it was like to sell stories to Gernsback or Campbell or H. L. Gold, writers who had survived in a turbulent and changing market for almost the entire length of the twentieth century, why would an organization of professional writers want to listen to Hugh Downs instead?
So this year, I’ve decided to do something different with the symposium feature. Instead of tapping a group of hot young Turks, I decided to get some historical perspective by going to the Grand Masters instead, to see what they had to say about where the field has been, what it was like, what it’s like now, what ground has been gained or lost in the process—and yes, where the genre may be going tomorrow.
So, then, following are a series of essays by a selection of the living Grand Masters: Jack Williamson, Robert Silverberg, Ursula K. Le Guin, Brian W. Aldiss, and Frederik Pohl. Between them, they have 289 years of experience in writing and selling science fiction! Which ought to be enough to earn them a few moments of our attention, eh?
Jack Williamson’s career has stretched over an incredible seventy-seven years, from his first sale in 1928 to the present day. No science fiction writer has ever had a career arc that spanned a greater percentage of science fiction history (when Williamson was making his first sales, John W. Campbell’s famous “Golden Age” at Astounding, now more than sixty years in the past, was still more than a decade in the future!), from the very start of the field’s beginnings as a separate genre all the way through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. During that career, Williamson has produced a steady stream of dozens of novels and hundreds of stories, and has been always in the forefront of the field as one of the genre’s most acclaimed authors. His sequence of novels about the Legion of Space were among the highlights of the “superscience” era of the twenties and thirties just as his story “With Folded Hands” was one of the most famous stories of the Campbellian “Golden Age” mentioned above. His novels include The Humanoids (an expansion of “With Folded Hands”), The Humanoid Touch, Darker Than You Think (almost as important to the evolution of fantasy as The Humanoids was to SF), The Legion of Space,The Legion of Time, The Queen of the Legion, The Black Sun, Demon Moon, The Trial of Terra, Firechild, Seetee Ship, Manseed, Beachhead, and many others, including a long series of collaborative novels written with Frederik Pohl. His short fiction has been collected in The Best of Jack Williamson, People Machines, The Early Williamson, The Pandora Effect, Dreadful Sleep, The Metal Man and Others: The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson,Volume One,Wolves of Darkness:The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume Two, Wizard’s Isle: The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson, Volume Three, and Wizard’s Isle:The Collected Stories of Jack Williamson,Volume Four. He won the Hugo Award in 1985 for his autobiography, Wonder’s Child: My Life in Science Fiction, and both Hugo and Nebula awards for his novella The Ultimate Earth in 2001. His most recent book is a massive retrospective collection Seventy-Five: The Diamond Anniversary of a Science Fiction Pioneer, and coming up is a new novel, The Stonehenge Gate. He was named SFFWA Grand Master in 1976.
Robert Silverberg is one of the most famous SF writers of modern times, with dozens of novels, anthologies, and collections to his credit. As both writer and editor, Silverberg continues to be at the forefront of the field to this very day, having won a total of five Nebula Awards and four Hugo Awards. His novels include the acclaimed Dying Inside, Lord Valentine’s Castle,The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth,Tower of Glass, Son of Man, Nightwings, The World Inside, Born with the Dead, Shadrack in the Furnace, Thorns, Up the Line, The Man in the Maze, Tom O’ Bedlam, Star of Gypsies, At Winter’s End, The Face of the Waters, Kingdoms of the Wall, Hot Sky at Morning, The Alien Years, Lord Prestimion, and Mountains of Majipoor. His collections include Unfamiliar Territory, Capricorn Games, Majipoor Chronicles,The Best of Robert Silverberg, At the Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, Beyond the Safe Zone, and The Secret Sharers. His most recent books are the novel The Long Way Home, the mosaic novel Roma Eterna, and a massive retrospective collection, Phases of the Moon: Stories from Six Decades. He lives with his wife, writer Karen Haber, in Oakland, California. He was named SFFWA Grand Master in 2004.
Ursula K. Le Guin is probably one of the best-known and most universally respected SF writers in the world today. Her famous novel The Left Hand of Darkness may have been the most influential SF novel of its decade, and shows every sign of becoming one of the enduring classics of the genre. (Her 1968 fantasy novel, A Wizard of Earthsea, would be almost as influential on future generations of high fantasy and young adult writers.) The Left Hand of Darkness won both the Hugo and Nebula awards, as did Le Guin’s monumental novel The Dispossessed a few years later. Her novel Tehanu won her another Ne
bula in 1990, and she has also won three other Hugo Awards and a Nebula Award for her short fiction, as well as the National Book Award for Children’s Literature for her novel The Farthest Shore, part of her Earthsea trilogy. Her other novels include Planet of Exile, The Lathe of Heaven, City of Illusions, Rocannon’s World,The Beginning Place, A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, Tehanu, Searoad, Always Coming Home, and The Telling. She has had eight collections: The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, Orsinian Tales, The Compass Rose, Buffalo Gals and Other Animal Presences, A Fisherman of the Inland Sea, Four Ways to Forgiveness, Tales of Earthsea, and The Birthday of the World. Her most recent books are a collection of her critical essays, The Wave in the Mind: Tales and Essays on the Reader, and the Imagination, and a YA novel, Gifts. She lives with her husband in Portland, Oregon. She was named SFFWA Grand Master in 2003.
Brian W. Aldiss is one of the true giants of the field, someone who has been publishing science fiction for more than a quarter of a century, and has more than two dozen books to his credit. The Long Afternoon of Earth won a Hugo Award in 1962. “The Saliva Tree” won a Nebula Award in 1965, and Aldiss’s novel Starship won the Prix Jules Verne in 1977. He took another Hugo Award in 1987 for his critical study of science fiction, Trillion Year Spree, written with David Wingrove. His other books include An Island Called Moreau, Gray-beard, Enemies of the System, A Rude Awakening, Life in the West, Forgotten Life, Dracula Unbound, and Remembrance Day, and a memoir, Bury My Heart at W. H. Smith’s, and an autobiography, The Twinkling of an Eye, or, My Life as an Englishman. His short fiction has been collected in Space, Time, and Nathaniel, Who Can Replace a Man?, New Arrivals, Old Encounters, Galaxies Like Grains of Sand, Seasons in Flight, and Common Clay, and he’s published a collection of poems, Home Life with Cats. His many anthologies include The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus, and, with Harry Harrison, Decade: the 1940s, Decade: the 1950s, and Decade: the 1960s. His latest books are two new novels, Affairs at Hampden Ferrers and Jocasta. Coming up are a new collection, Cultural Breaks, and a new novel, Sanity and the Lady. He lives in Oxford. He was named SFFWA Grand Master in 2000.
Frederik Pohl is a seminal figure whose career spans almost the entire development of modern SF, having been one of the genre’s major shaping forces—as writer, editor, agent, and anthologist—for more than fifty years. He was the founder of the Star series, SF’s first continuing anthology series, and was the editor of the Galaxy group of magazines from 1960 to 1969, during which time Galaxy’s sister magazine, Worlds of If, won three consecutive Best Professional Magazine Hugos. As a writer, he won both Hugo and Nebula awards for his novel Gateway, has also won the Hugo for his stories “The Meeting” (a collaboration with C. M. Kornbluth) and “Fermi and Frost,” and won an additional Nebula for his novel Man Plus ; he has also won the American Book Award and the French Prix Apollo. His many books include several written in collaboration with the late C. M. Kornbluth—including The Space Merchants,Wolfbane, and Gladiator-at-Law —and many solo novels, including the award-winning Gateway and Man Plus, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon,The Coming of the Quantum Cats, Mining the Oort, O Pioneer!,The Siege of Eternity, and The Far Shore of Time. Among his many collections are The Gold at the Star-bow’s End, In the Problem Pit, and The Best of Frederik Pohl. His most recent books are the novel The Boy Who Would Live Forever, and a massive retrospective collection, Platinum Pohl. He lives in Palatine, Illinois, with his wife, writer Elizabeth Ann Hull. He was named SFFWA Grand Master in 1993.
SCIENCE FICTION CENTURY
JACK WILLIAMSON
The 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 pro
gress 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.
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