Seekers of Tomorrow

by Sam Moskowitz

  Ross Rocklynne was also a successful exponent of telling the story from the viewpoint of the alien, as in his fantasy masterpiece of the intelligent spiral nebula "Darkness," who began his cosmic career in Into the Darkness (astounding science-fiction, June, 1940).

  Editor Campbell of astounding science-fiction favored the scientific problem story, encouraging the radio engineer George O. Smith to present and solve a number of technical dilemmas in interplanetary communications with a group of stories beginning with QRM— Interplanetary (astounding science-fiction, October, 1942), which were later collected as Venus Equilateral (Prime Press, 1947). Jack Williamson's contraterrene matter series, written under the pen name Will Stewart, were basically scientific problem stories.

  An extremely capable author whose versatility has acted to minimize his reputation is Poul Anderson. He began writing in 1947 as an alternative to entering industry as a physicist. With the expanding science-fiction market he found little difficulty in selling all he could write, for he could write whatever the market demanded, and moreover he was able to do considerable work outside the field, in nonfiction, mys-tery, and historical sagas.

  As the years passed and his skills sharpened, there were probably few authors in the field who did better financially. There were many outstanding stories, scattered among a large body of work, but it was not until the appearance of The High Crusade, a novel serialized in astounding science-fiction*, July to September, 1960, that he began to come into his own. This novel tends to contradict the thesis advanced by Mark Twain in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, that a man possessed of modern science would neces-sarily have been at an advantage in an encounter with the ancients. Poul Anderson's view is that the noblemen and knights of fourteenth-century England may have been igno-rant but they were not stupid. How they cope with the crew of a spaceship that lands in England during their period makes for a highly original and outstanding novel.

  The year of The High Crusade's appearance Anderson was beaten out for the Hugo by A Canticle for Leibowitz, but received the award for the best short story of the year for The Longest Voyage (analog science fact & fiction, December, 1960). For this, Anderson hypothesized a seafar-ing civilization, developed along the lines of the Norsemen, and their proposal to reactivate an old spaceship and their reasons for changing their minds. He again won the Hugo for

  *Later known as analog science fact & fiction.

  a shorter work for No Truce with Kings (the magazine of fantasy and science fiction, June, 1963), a story that also incorporated elements of the action and philosophies of past cultures in the hackneyed setting of a post-nuclear-war America, reemerging and reuniting. Anderson's interest in using historical cultures as the background for his science fiction has given him the stature in the field that his previous diversity of effort did not bring him.

  One of the most renowned teams in literary history was that of Erckmann-Chatrian, French authors of the past cen-tury, noted for an impressive list of novels and plays, as well as their excellent short science-fiction stories, including The Inventor and Hans Schnap's Spy-Glass. Few collaborations have proved as successful as that team, for, in most partner-ships, dissident elements tend to creep in and disrupt the harmony. In recent times, one noteworthy short-term collab-oration was that of Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth in science fiction. Both had significant literary accomplishments to their credit, but their united effort in Gravy Planet (gal-axy science fiction, June to August, 1952), represent-ing the America of the future as completely dominated by the advertising agencies, seemed to strike a responsive chord in readers and critics alike. It was in part due to the times, when "Madison Avenue" had become both a symbol and a theme on the American scene. The science-fiction format, an excellent medium for satire, was especially well adapted to exaggerating the long-range effects of advertising's influence. Elements of the baronial business arrangement of the future presented in Gravy Planet (published in hard cover and paperback as The Space Merchants), particularly the legali-zation of feuds, owes some debt to L. Sprague de Camp's The Stolen Dormouse.

  It is claimed that the story was jointly plotted and then written in relays by Pohl and Kornbluth. At the time of the collaboration Kornbluth was by far the more prominent literary personality. He was born talent, displaying an ad-vanced stylistic and storytelling instinct even in his early teens. With Frederik Pohl and Donald A. Wollheim, he was a member of The Futurian Literary Society in the late thirties, a group that had as one of its major tenets that its members assist one another to literary advancement. When both Woll-heim and Pohl became editors of low-budget magazines, Kornbluth became one of their mainstays, contributing scores of stories under a variety of pen names to their various publications. After active service as a machine gunner in Europe in World War II, Kornbluth did not return to science fiction until 1949, although he wrote and sold many detective sto-ries. When he resumed writing for the science-fiction maga-zines, his short stories showed a snideness, an irreverence, a trace of a sneer, and a hint of blackness that clearly labeled them as coming from his typewriter. Blackness had frequent-ly been Kornbluth's mood even as a teenager, though the cause of his bitterness was not readily apparent. It intensified when both of his children were born mentally retarded.

  Collaborations with Judith Merril under the pen name Cyril Judd resulted in the novels Mars Child and Gunner Cade, which appeared in galaxy science fiction (May to July, 1951) and astounding science-fiction (March to May, 1952) then quickly as books. When he teamed up with Fred Pohl, Gravy Planet followed quickly and reestablished him solidly.

  Fred Pohl had collaborated with Kornbluth twelve years earlier when the two of them wrote stories for stirring science stories and astonishing stories, both now defunct, under the pen name S. D. Gottesman. Pohl was the first editor of the latter magazine, beginning in February, 1940, and also of a companion, super science stories from its first issue, March, 1940. He contributed stories to the maga-zine under the pseudonym James MacCreigh.

  Suave and urbane, Pohl was an effective businessman and he entered a literary agency after World War II, building an impressive roster of leading science-fiction authors whose careers he guided into the early fifties. The success of Gravy Planet encouraged him to continue in a series of further joint efforts with Kornbluth, which, while well starred, did not again score as strongly as with Gravy Planet. Most readers had credited Kornbluth as the big talent in the collaboration and presumed that Pohl would be ineffec-tive on his own. Pohl had been in advertising agency work and had shown outstanding competence in putting together a number of science-fiction anthologies, the most impressive being a series of collections of original stories for Ballantine Books called Star Science Fiction Stories. Solo novelettes and short stories, predominantly for galaxy science fiction, began to appear. The most revealing was Tunnel Under the World (galaxy science fiction, January, 1955), in which researchers for advertising agencies have reproduced the brain patterns of an entire town of 21,000 people to market-research their techniques. Pohl's style in that story alternated between slick "savvy" and unabashed forthrightness. He wrote like a man who knew just what should be done and how to go about doing it. Tunnel Under the World strongly suggests that if Fred Pohl, with his own advertising back-ground, did not indeed provide the plot framework for Gravy Planet, he certainly could have done so. Cyril Kornbluth, in his other major books Takeoff (Dou-bleday, 1952), Syndic (Doubleday, 1953), and Not This August (Doubleday, 1955), employs overdone, even trite themes for his frameworks, and while he, like the Danes, may serve mashed potatoes with fringed edges, they remain mashed potatoes with no steak in sight. His novels tell of getting the first space rocket up; of a bizarre "Utopian" future menaced by a gangster-operated culture; and of conquered Americans who overthrow the yoke of the conquering Rus-sians.

  Pohl was well on his way to greater recognition as a writer, especially of novels, when he was seduced by the challenge of editing galaxy science fiction and its prolifer-ation of c
ompanions (if, worlds of tomorrow, and maga-book) after H. L. Gold suffered an illness which made him unable to continue. This was something he had always wanted to do, and he did it well. It became rapidly apparent that he soon would have to make a choice between continu-ing as an editor or returning to writing, in either of which pursuits he could be a success.

  There comes a time when a magazine's policy and an author's direction seem to coalesce, when a writer is discov-ered who in style and subject matter epitomizes everything a publication stands for. That happy situation occurred when H. L. Gold finally coaxed Alfred Bester into writing a novel published as The Demolished Man, which Gold triumphantly ran in galaxy science fiction (January-March, 1953). Bes-ter was in no way a Gold discovery, having first appeared as the winner of an amateur story contest in thrilling wonder stories (April, 1939), with The Broken Axiom, but he had previously never rated even as high as an

  "also ran" in the roster. His climb from the ranks of pulp writers had led him into the anonymous oblivion but better-paid role of comic-strip continuity writer, then into radio, and finally into televi-sion. In television he did well enough so that science fiction was to him, at best, an avocation. The world of The Demolished Man is run by a new elite, a guild of ESPers (telepathic mind readers, practitioners of Extra-Sensory Perception), whose involvement in business, psychiatry, crime detection, and other pursuits revolutionized society. The difficulties of planning, committing, and keeping secret a murder in such a world provide the essence of the plot. There is a great amount of ingenuity displayed in describing a semitelepathic society, but the wholly unfair advantage of a detective who can read minds inveighs against the effectiveness of The Demolished Man as a mystery story. Its impact rests principally upon the dazzling narrative tech-nique of the author, whose ability to convey sight and sound, and to create special effects with words on the printed page, far transcends that of virtually all of his contemporaries. Laced through the entire fabric of the novel is an insight into the employment of psychoanalysis which gave the partially deserved designation to galaxy science fiction as "the magazine of psychiatric fiction." While Alfred Bester stylistically awed most of his fellow science-fiction writers, his view of himself was not as ele-vated. When The Demolished Man was issued in hard cover by Shasta Publishers, Chicago, in 1953, the biographical sketch on the book jacket stated: "Alfred Bester, the author of The Demolished Man, is a successful writer for radio and television. . ... He is married to a well-known radio and television actress." The same year, the early paragraphs of his book "Who He?" (Dial) seemed frankly autobiographical, read-ing: "I'm a scriptwriter by trade, specializing in mystery shows. I'm married to an actress. We're both of us second-raters in the entertainment business . . . mostly anonymous to the public, fairly well-known to our colleagues. Between us we make from ten to twenty thousand dollars a year, depend-ing on the breaks. This is only fair money in our business.

  "It seems like a fortune to our families, and we dazzle them with our glamour. . . . We realize that people want their friends to be glamorous, so we've stopped trying to avoid undeserved admiration." The science-fiction world has, since 1953, understandably expected Bester at any moment to become the frontrunner of the field. One other novel, and a scattering of short stories that followed, neither advanced his standing nor diminished his promise. But to become the leading science-fiction writer is not a prize to which Bester can economically afford to aspire; he probably will remain an admired dilettante. Before the Hugos became part of the science-fiction scene, the most respected presentations in the field were The Inter-national Fantasy Awards, originated by a group of British science-fiction fans in 1951 and presented annually (except for 1956) through 1957. The selections were made by a committee of science-fiction book reviewers for the leading magazines and newspapers and so excellent were their choices that there was rarely a murmur of protest. When Edgar Pangborn's A Mirror for Observers was selected as the best fantasy novel of 1954, it did raise questions because it had appeared only in book form (Doubleday), and few had read it. It beat out so illustrious a contender as Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement, but its choice was deserved. Two segments of a Martian culture who have lived secretly on Earth for many centuries wage a battle for the mind of the youthful genius, Angelo Pontevecchio. In the process, the author carries on a running commentary concerning mankind and civilization, which, despite its pedestrian pace, proves utterly fascinating. This book, which could not enjoy wide appeal, reads like something written by a leisurely Olaf Sta-pledon with limited ambitions. It is, nevertheless, extremely rewarding.

  Pangborn first came to the attention of the science-fiction world when his short story Angel's Egg appeared in the June, 1951, issue of galaxy science fiction. His 1964 novel, Davy, received so widespread a positive reaction from science-fiction readers that it may eventually eclipse A Mir-ror for Observers as his chef-d'oeuvre. Here with more stress on adventure and less on philosophy, in a story of a post-atomic-war world, the elements of realism combine with fine characterization to redeem an overworked plot. The original concept of the American paperback book was to offer the public a volume (for only 25

  cents) that in hard covers might cost up to $5. For some time, paperback publishers would have little to do with originals, feeling, among other things, that this would destroy the bargain-base-ment image and put them in the class with the dime novels. As the years progressed, certain paperback publishers occa-sionally subsidized a very limited hard-cover edition and used the same plates for a paperback. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., author of The Sirens of Titan, an original paperback published by Dell in 1959, helped break precedent by selling that novel for a subsequent hard-cover edition.

  Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, picked up The Sirens of Titan, originally sold for 35 cents by Dell, and issued it in cloth binding at $3.50 in 1961. The novel rated it. A wildly imaginative extravaganza of the future, involving many of the planets of the solar system, it was in every sense an avant-garde fantasy. It may seem tiresome to the reader to have everything compared to something by Olaf Stapledon, but he is clearly the source of the plot embellishments of The Sirens of Titan. What belongs to Vonnegut is an air of flippancy, cynicism and irreverence, enough to give him an edge in novelty over many other hard-working writers.

  Vonnegut possesses a better scientific background than most science-fiction authors, particularly in the areas of bio-chemistry and anthropology. His science fiction began to appear frequently in collier's in 1950

  and was sometimes inept—as typified by Thanasphere (September 2, 1950), in which a rocket test pilot, 2,000 miles above the earth, finds the spirits of the dead revolving around like a legion of satellites —or strictly cornball—like Epicac (November 25, 1950), in which a computer falls in love with a girl. A first novel, Player Piano (1953), an anti-Electronic Age Utopia was well received despite a lack of originality. Vonnegut is excellent raw material unfortunate enough to get started in the better magazines instead of learning his trade in the pulps. He needs discipline, practice, and consid-erably less smugness. He increasingly strikes notes of freshness which promise much, but he doesn't often deliver. It would help him to know not only what concepts have been done to death, but also what it was that finished them off. The great boom in science-fiction magazines that started in 1949, reaching its peak in 1953, provided a golden opportu-nity for new talent. A score of young science-fiction writers found they could sell almost everything they wrote as fast as they could write it. Some of them had little difficulty in selling forty or fifty stories a year. Among such recruits was Philip K. Dick, who prolifically filled the pages of science-fiction magazines, gaining more positive than negative reac-tion but no special recognition. That was the way it continued through 1962, when his novel The Man in the High Castle was issued by Putnam. It hypothesized a world in which the Berlin-Tokyo axis had won World War II, partitioned the United States and the world between them.

  The idea had been done before by no less distinguished an author tha
n William L. Shirer; look (December 19, 1961) devoted 13 illustrated pages to his feature, If Hitler Had Won World War II. Shirer's effort was the framework upon which The Man in the High Castle was built, and Dick did a great deal with what he borrowed. Most of the story is set in the western United States, dominated by the Japanese through a white puppet government. The Japanese are humane, de-cent, and to a degree democratic. The Japanese craze for collecting such Americana as old comic books, election post-ers, and bottle caps lends a note of originality and authentic-ity to the work. The "Man" in the High Castle is an author who has written a book telling what would have happened if the United States had won the war. All these elements gave the novel a difference which helped win the Hugo as the best novel of 1962 and lifted Dick a substantial notch upward in general regard.

  The "Worlds of If" theme had long been a popular one in science fiction and Dick's novel proved that it could produce fiction good enough to outrank the entire year's production. Working on what would have happened if the South had won the Civil War, an all-but-unknown author, Ward Moore, sprang to prominence with a single short novel, Bring the Jubilee (the magazine of fantasy and science fiction, November, 1952). Moore's previous novel, published by William Sloane Associates in 1947, told of a chemical that causes a special variety of grass to grow with such uncon-trolled vigor that it crowds out the crops of the world. Told with broad catastrophic sweep, Moore's Greener Than You Think went all but unnoticed.

  The resourceful inventiveness of Bring the Jubilee, project-ing the possible difference in technology as well as politics of today's world if the South had won the war, helped win it recognition. A man living in that hypothetical world goes back in time to a pivotal action at the battle of Gettysburg, to deliberately swing the battle in favor of the North to secure what he feels must inevitably be a better future. To appreciate how exceptionally difficult was Moore's job and how fine his achievement, one need only compare it with a similar attempt made by MacKinlay Kantor, in look, November 22, 1960, called If the South Had Won the Civil War. Kantor, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Andersonville, displayed a lack of imagination and a paucity of convincing detail which stand in sharp contrast to the achievement that is Bring the Jubilee.