"The Worlds of If" theme was in vogue in the early sixties, for John Hersey, who used science fiction in 1960 in The Child Buyer, used it again in White Lotus (1965) to present a world in which atomic energy has never been invented, but in which elements of the American civilization of the 1930's still exist. Hersey is a reporter who writes directly and extremely well. Yet, in this "tale of an old shoe on a new foot," his parallel between the hypothetical world in which Occi-dentals are the inferior race in a world ruled by Orientals and the situation of the whites and Negroes of today is so exaggeratedly obvious and his situations so deliberately con-trived that the book becomes an affront to the intelligence.
"The Story That Shocked the Editors" was what the Saturday evening post called No Blade of Grass by John Christopher as they began its serialization in their April 27, 1957, issue. "This, as my colleagues had warned me, was no mere adventure story," Ben Hibbs, the post editor, wrote, "no epic with a happy ending, no pleasant escape to the world of let's pretend. This was a book unlike any the Saturday evening post had ever published—a story that for violence of deed, for horrible fascination, was unknown to our columns." A virus attacks the basic sources of food supplies: the rices and grains. Once they are depleted, the entire structure of civilization collapses and the "law of the jungle" prevails. John Christopher tells the story of the shocking breakdown in morality of a small group in England, seeking to survive on their way to a valley haven. In the process, the meek become remorseless killers and these conscienceless killers almost emerge as heroes in the fight for survival.
On the strength of the post's buildup, motion picture rights were sold for a figure alleged to be $80,000
and the author, John Christopher, was catapulted overnight into a position of literary prominence. Untold was the fact that No Blade of Grass had been rejected by one-cent-a-word markets only weeks before it was taken by the post. The theme was far too elementary for the regular science-fiction magazines.
Christopher Samuel Youd, the Englishman behind the pen name John Christopher, had gone through life with a position in the diamond-cutting industry, only infrequently selling a short story to some low-paying market. His major influence in style and method was another British author, John Wynd-ham, who had come to renown a few years earlier when collier's made a similar fuss over The Day of the Triffids. If anything, Christopher was even more conservative than Wyndham as he continued to try for that one big novel by taking elementary science-fiction themes to create an abnor-mal situation and throwing the weight of his narrative onto the reaction of human beings under stress. Among the novels that followed were The Long Winter (1962), in which a new ice age drives the whites into Africa for survival and they become the subservient race; The Possessors (1964), in which alien wills assume control of members of a Swiss chalet cut off by a snowslide; and Sweeney's Island (1964), built on the much-abused theme of civilized people reverting to their true natures on a deserted island, but this time on an island in which an atomic experiment has mutated the local vegetation and animals.
A single novel elevated ex-newspaperman and professional photographer Frank Herbert to a position of distinction among science-fiction writers and it was a novel placed in the world just beyond tomorrow. Science fiction had anticipated atomic submarines by employing the precise terminology as far back as Stanton A. Coblentz's The Sunken World (amaz-ing stories quarterly, Summer, 1928). Frank Herbert in his novel Under Pressure (astounding science-fiction, November, 1955 to January, 1956) extrapolates only modest-ly from the atomic fleet that we know today.
A four-man crew on an atomic submarine of the future, one of them a saboteur and another a psychologist intent upon ensuring the mental stability of the captain, set out to capture an undersea oil supply as part of the twenty-first-century war. The tensions and strains of their prolonged living cooped up together, accentuated by a number of brushes with death, lend a realism to the proposed situation that scored impressively with the readers.
Anyone who produces a truly outstanding literary work in any specific field is watched with care to see if he can do it again. Herbert made another bid with Dune World (analog science fact & fiction, December, 1963, to February, 1964), a novel graphically bringing to life the ecology of a world that was virtually bereft of moisture, of the precious spice melange that represents its major source of wealth, and of the structure of the society which rules it. This was followed by a massive sequel, The Prophet of Dune (analog science fact & fiction, January to May, 1965), portraying the struggle for survival and dominance in this grim land. It may be said that, in the sense that the battle for intelligence over alien environment serves as a backdrop, the dune stories bear an affinity to Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity. How-ever, the incorporation of the atmosphere of Earth's medieval political and moral climate make the plot development almost traditional by modern standards. Further, the prominent use of psi phenomenon adds a note of conformity, which, combined with the political climate, robs the effort of realism and transforms it into little more than a well-done adventurous romance.
EPILOGUE
Science fiction of the past quarter century has had a greater impact on world thinking than even most of its enthusiastic devotees claim. People of every nation with a high order of technology, particularly those behind the Iron Curtain, have read it with an intellectual avidity that goes far beyond the relative importance in the literary scene of its leading writers.
The bulk of this science fiction is the work of American writers, the contributors of the next largest segment being British. Science fiction is not carried abroad as part of a cultural exchange program. Officialdom usually does not even consider it in that light. Instead, it is imported by popular demand into Russia, Czechoslovakia, Poland, West Germany, France, Holland, Sweden, Denmark, Italy, Argentina, Mex-ico, and Japan. In all of these countries, and others besides, publishers turn out a stream of books and magazines contain-ing science fiction, most of it reprints or translations of stories published in the United States and Great Britain.
Modern science fiction is a relatively sophisticated product, whose techniques have been polished continually in the United States for over fifty years. During that period we have had a number of specialized publications printing it in substantial quantity. British writers, because they share the same language, have been able to find a ready market in the United States and have been thus enabled to perfect their skills. Countries not having English as their national language developed no such pool of writers and when, after World War II, interest in science fiction began to grow, publishers found it easier and cheaper to buy and translate American authors than to encourage their own. Science-fiction maga-zines published abroad are usually franchised counterparts of American periodicals or sometimes are independent publica-tions containing American stories bought separately and shuffled into an individual selection. So popular are American writers abroad that in Western Germany and Spain native science-fiction writers tend to adopt American pen names to gain readier acceptance.
The Russians have been the one nation earnestly trying to upgrade their native science fiction. They have put back into print everything worthwhile from Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky's 1895 anticipation of an Earth satellite, Dreams of Earth and Sky, through party-line-oriented Professor Ivan Yefremov's The Heart of the Serpent (1959), an ideological reply to American writer Murray Leinster's First Contact, which describes the initial meeting of an Earth spaceship with that of an alien civilization. Soviet Russia, aware that American science fiction, for the most part aimed at a pulp market, is rarely written with political motivation, has been liberal in permitting a wide spectrum of it to be read and reprinted, because
"science fiction helps one peep into the thought and life of Americans." A recent anthology of American science fiction printed in the USSR was Science Fiction Stories by American Writers, edited by Alexander Kazantsev, a leading contemporary So-viet science-fiction writer. Among the selections were works of Robert A. Hein
lein, Ray Bradbury, Murray Leinster, H. Beam Piper, and Tom Godwin.
A surprise speaker at the September 6, 1964, session of The 22nd World Science Fiction Convention in Oakland, California, was Josef Nesvadba, a Czechoslovakian psychia-trist, who is also the leading science-fiction writer of the country. Several of his stories have appeared in America in the magazine of fantasy and science fiction, and eleven of them have been collected under the title of Vampires Ltd. and printed in English in Prague. In his talk, he confirmed that American science-fiction authors were the most popular not only in Russia, but in Czechoslovakia and Poland as well. He brought with him a copy of a handsomely elaborate science-fiction anthology published in Czechoslovakia titled Labyrint. Of the twelve stories in the book, eleven are by modern American authors, among them Ray Bradbury, A. E van Vogt, Robert A. Heinlein, Lewis Padgett (Henry Kutt-ner), Clifford D. Simak, Frank M. Robinson, and Robert Abernathy. The Iron Curtain countries do not have copy-right agreements with the United States, and this anthology stands unique as the first from that part of the world actually to send American authors payment for republished stories.
Within recent years The Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow has translated many Russian science-fiction stories into English and made them available in the West. These include works by Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Count Alexei Tolstoi, Alexander Belyaev, Ivan Yefremov, Alexan-der Kazantsev, Vladimir Obruchev, and Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, among others. Discounting stylistic inadequacies which are possibly attributable to translation, they are, by American standards, elementary in theme and overweighted with infusions of pro-Soviet propaganda.
One explanation of the simple concepts in Russian science fiction was offered by a Russian editor (who preferred to remain anonymous) interviewed at the Frankfort, Germany, Book Fair in 1963. Gamma (No. 3, 1964) reported that he said that Russians preferred the adventurous aspect of science fiction to its psychological and sociological manifesta-tions. He spoke with nostalgia of Edgar Rice Burroughs to underscore his points. In response to the direct question: "Is American science fiction popular in the Soviet Union?" he replied, "Very popular. But even there the stories we like best are the ones that avoid political or sociological consider-ations."
Western Germany, where American science fiction has been received with especial enthusiasm (where today fan conventions are held), has seen scholarly approval of the trend in Die Entdeckung Amerikas und die Sache der Wel-traumliteratur by G. Gunther (1952) and undisguised admi-ration in Dr. Martin Schwonke's Vom Staatsroman zur Science Fiction (1957).
The most telling proof of the acceptance of American science fiction is that the term "science fiction" has sup-planted all other labels for the genre, not only in Germany but in all other foreign countries as well. So American-oriented are the world's science-fiction lovers that special editions of their fan magazines in German, French, Swedish, Japanese, and Spanish are translated by their publishers and sent to American enthusiasts, who thereby can stay in touch with world thinking on the subject. Interest in science fiction is rapidly becoming a more important link to friendship with the United States in many nations than elaborately planned intergovernmental cultural programs.
This mutual affinity resulting from science fiction was expressed most poetically by Takumi Shibano, editor of the International Edition of uchujin, official organ of the Science Fiction Club of Tokyo: "We find innumerable parti-cles of cosmic dust floating in the nothingness, when we turn our eyes to the universe. Some of them may be attracted by gravity to planets or stars and burn up to meteors, others may keep floating indefinitely. And some 'fortunate' ones among them may pull to each other and join together to be concentrated into a large heavenly body. Then it starts to shine brilliantly by itself in the darkness. . . . This is the process that symbolizes 'Uchujin' and its fandom."
The direction of science fiction remains indeterminate. The final chapter of this book must remain an open end. It is impossible to state that the era that we now regard as "modern" in science fiction, which came into full flower under the aegis of John W. Campbell in 1939 and the years that followed, has ended. If so, that something else which is gradually taking its place has not hardened into a definite form. The authors dealt with in this book are uncontestably the great names of today, but we do find that certain of the
"run-of-the-mill" writers who broke in a decade or more ago are developing into late bloomers and are just now beginning to make their mark. New names are appearing regularly and rising to popularity. More chapters remain to be written. The fiction whose main concern has always been the shape of the future incontestably still has a future.
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