The purpose of this volume has been to display both by word and example what the editor means when he uses the term 'sense of wonder' in relationship to science fiction. In the process, three truly marvelous short novels have been rescued from pulp oblivion. . . . Beyond the considerable entertainment quotient of these stories, it is hoped that their examples may, make a significant enough impression so as to bring about not a substitution of this type of story for what is being written today, but an incorporation of the elements they contain into the mainstream body of modern science fiction.

The volume in question is THREE STORIES, (by Leinster, Williamson and Wyndham in his John Beynon Harris incarnation, Doubleday, $3.95). The editor, and author of the didactic seventeen-page introduction, is of course Sam Moskowitz (known through science fiction fandom as just SaM).

I have read SaM's commentary, though I confess to skipping his synopses of Gulliver, The Odyssey, and The Time Machine, and just skimming some pages of history of "The Golden Age of the Scientific Romance" (as represented primarily in Argosy and All-Story Weekly, 1906-1919), and I am not much clearer about what he means when he says Sense of Wonder; but I have pretty well decided that my own problem is not so much atrophied SoW as undeveloped SoN.

N is for Nostalgia, and on this SaM is an expert, even by the standards of Pop Culture. I don't know if it came out of a surfeit of newness and change, or perversely just that nothing really new has happened lately. (I mean, it's ten years now since the last Real Breakthru—and no men on the moon yet, no cancer cure, no global war, time travel, anti-gravity, immortality pill.) Whatever the reason, the big N is in, and anything from Aubrey Beardsley through left-wing Americana of the thirties will put you with it.

And of course, science fiction is ahead of the field; the program Inside S-f has been underway for years. We have ERB cults and Conan clubs and EESmith concordances, but most of all, we have SaM.

From the horse's mouth:

We see on every side nostalgia becoming the secret ingredient that today moves the more mature adults to experience again some of the exhilaration associated with their youth. [Using dime-novel Collectors as an example, SaM explains that rereading an old book] became a trigger for nostalgic remembrance, in detail, of the innocence and bittersweet of their youth. It was a literary windshield wiper which cleared the mist from memory, enabling the mature mind to view with understanding the wonder of a youthful day forever past. . . .

The child or teenager who originally read the dime-novel truly had that sense of wonder within himself. The child grown old restored the memory of those feelings.

It is legitimate to ask, can the author induce a sense of wonder in the reader without the existence of a special mental receptivity and appropriate subjective conditions of age and timing?

Before I give you his answer, I must pause to assure anyone unfamiliar with SaM's work that he is in deadly earnest: SaM is perhaps the only American writing critical copy today who has less understanding of camp than Susan Sontag. And he makes that clear:

The sad part about the revival of "comic" hero characters is that they are making their way with the adults as satirization of themselves.

Two Broadway musicals supplied SaM with the answer to his troubling question: Superman and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. He says:

It never was the intent of the creators of Superman to convince anyone above the age of twelve of the reality of their character. No adult could hope to retain an interest in so far-fetched a character except as a satire. [But] A Sherlock Holmes story, read for the first time, holds the same sway over the imagination of an adult as it does for a child.

And so:

The answer is in the positive if he [the author] combines sincerity with his relation and creates a mood that will engage the emotion as well as the intellect of his reader.

How does all this apply to science fiction? It seems there was a survey in the Science Fiction Yearbook for 1957 which showed that only 12 1/2 % of the readers of s-f were over 40. Allowing for the probability that what this actually means is that 12 1/2 % of science fiction fan club and convention members ten years ago were over 40, it is as recent as most census figures, and as representative as most polls: at least 1% and possibly 2% of the total readership.

In any case, SaM wants to know why more of his (and my) generation are not interested in his (and my) favorite reading matter. Is science fiction "less necessary" as one grows older?

. . . Has a man or woman after forty either relaxed in the attainment of an acceptable degree of creature comforts and economic security, or resigned him- or herself to distinct limitations and, in either case, found that science fiction is no longer a bright road-map of the future and that it offers no escape from the reality of their situations?

This should be true only if the sense of wonder is generated only in the individual with the content of science fiction merely a source of ignition. However, if a sense of wonder can be made an ingredient of the story . . . it should be possible to revive the feeling, no matter what the age of the individual.

I have quoted all this because after reading it myself I am not honestly sure whether I am arguing with SaM or agreeing with him, when I say: although I will be 45 on my next birthday, and that birthday is not very far away, I guess I am one of the less mature adults, because I haven't yet started getting my biggest charges out of remembering my biggest charges. Nostalgia, for me, is a sleepy sort of thing—maybe maudlin at a beery 3 a.m.—perhaps more sentimental in a lingering summer twilight—but either way associated with a low pulse-rate. It certainly is not what makes me read science fiction.

It all makes me wonder if maybe my SoW hasn't been operating all this time after all? I've been sitting around with the rest of the gang all these years while SaM gave us hell for losing our SoW's, and I kept thinking I had no business arguing back, because I have this sort of guilty thing, see? about being the only one in my age bracket (apparently) who didn't start reading the stuff when Air Wonder began. (I mean, I was three in 1926, and perfectly able to read—well, all right, not perfectly—and I sat around spelling out Kipling and Carroll and Milne when everyone else was already digging those truly marvelous stories. I could plead financial incapacity; I didn't have my own allowance yet. But when I did get it, I blew it on stuff like Keats and Housman and Whitman. Anyhow—) I didn't actually come to s-f till the ripe age of 18: the 1938-42 magazines. (Ragged starting dates due to financial problems again—no more allowance; I started in the 2nd hand magazine stores.)

I have gone back since then, and read some earlier work. And at least one thing SaM said, I know I do agree with—his comment on Sherlock Homes. Believe it or not, I never read a Holmes story until 1949, and then I read every one I could get my hands on. The same thing was true for some science fiction (I'll get down to some specifics later): but one thing I know I don't agree with SaM about, is his choice of examples to demonstrate whatever he was saying.

I gave all three of these "truly wonderful" stories an honest try, and I even got all the way through one of them.

Leinster's (1934) "Mole Pirates" I almost managed to finish. After the first third, I skimmed my way through to the end, because no matter how absurd his story, Leinster has the basic storytelling gift. I had to know how it came out—but I didn't really care why; and it was too tedious following the twists and turns on the way. The story is about this Desperate Scientist Criminal who steals Jack Armstrong's—I'm sorry, Jack Hill's —Wonderful Invention, a machine that can travel through solid matter, and uses it to satisfy his psychotic need to Rob, Rape, Loot, Steal, Despoil, and Slaughter, It is full of stuff like this:

He flung a switch and vacuum tubes glowed. A curious, ghostly light appeared above the white-painted sheet of metal on the table. . . . "I am going to coordinate all the atom poles in this piece of brass," he observed. "Around the shop, here, the men say that a thing treated in this way is dematerialized. Watch!" [The block is exposed to 'the field', and--] Instead of a solid cube of polished brass, there was the tenuous, misty outline of a cube. . . He swept his hand through the misty block. . . . A skeptical silence hung among the reporters. . .

"If that brass was still there, an' it would pass through anything else, it'd slide right through the sheet metal an' drop through the floor!"

"Radio-activity," said Jack. "The only exception. When coordinated matter is bombarded by radio-active particles, some of the atoms arc knocked halfway back to normal. This paint has thorium oxide in it. . . ."

This must have been exciting speculation in 1934. For that matter, the basic idea remains speculatively interesting: people are still writing science fiction about aligning atoms to make matter interpenetrative. But the newer stories are easier to read (even when they are no better or more enduring than this one) just because they are in the idiom and use the storytelling conventions of the sixties. (Leinster's story starts out vaguely wrong for today's reader, because an invention of this sort is being developed privately and displayed to the press with no security protection. Perhaps the editors were wise to maintain the period-piece effect by keeping the original spellings of words like coordinate and radio-active. It helps hype up the necessary SoN.)

As for the Williamson, I cannot tell you of my own knowledge what it is about, except that an anti-gravity machine turns out to be a time machine instead, and (according to SaM's careful introductory description) the plot derives from S. Fowler Wright's THE WORLD BELOW, in which a man disembarking from his time machine, saves a female-like creature from death ... At times when his energies are depleted, she is able to impart to him, with a touch, some of her own, to enable him to carry forth an urgent venture. Though there can never be anything physical between them, a strong emotional tie does develop.

This identical situation is taken by Williamson and in ‘The Moon Era’ developed into a relationship between alien and human in mutual peril of such delicacy and feeling that the story becomes a complete success in the tradition of A. Merritt, conveying the elements of constantly new wonder and mystery…

Here is how it is conveyed by Williamson:

He rose, agilely enough for one of his seventy years, and led the way from the long room. Through several magnificent rooms of the big house. Out into the wide, landscaped grounds, beautiful and still in the moonlight.

I followed silently. My brain was confusion. A whirl of mad thought. All this wealth whose evidence surrounded me might be my own! I cared nothing for luxury, for money itself. But the fortune would mean freedom from the thankless toil of pedagogy. Books. Travel. Why I could see with my own eyes the scenes of history's dramatic moments! . . .

I have enjoyed Jack Williamson's later work too much, and I have too much respect for the ability he has since developed, to be willing to go on reading that—particularly after learning from SaM that the story itself is directly derivative from Merritt and Wright, two writers I did not find still-viable when I went back to try them out.

The one I did get all the way through was the Harris/Wyndham: it is even possible that I might have read this story on my own if I'd come across it on the sort of idle day I used to have when there was nothing I had to read. It is written in English, with no offensive stylistic mannerisms; it has a solid hook at the beginning; the viewpoint character is tolerably convincing (and must have been overwhelmingly so in 1933). Even the bat-like aliens living in caves on an asteroid, enslaving captive humans, provide a couple of scenes the first time they appeared that will stick with me. I can see why this one would have stuck in SaM's memory; on two counts at least (besides the literary quality) it would have been an extraordinary story in the thirties. The aliens are neither gods nor devils, but simply castaways, surviving the only way they can. (They even let the surplus, non-useful human leave peaceably.) But what must have provided the greatest impact—in 1933—was the use of the dramatic new brainwashing discoveries of the Behaviorists. The aliens use infant conditioning techniques to accomplish the enslavement of their victims to the total satisfaction of the slaves themselves.

Which brings us to the core of the matter. Harris (Wyndham) wrote his story at just about the same time that another British writer, Aldous Huxley, wrote a book with the same gimmick—probably inspired by the same recent work in psychology—but where "Exiles of Asperus" can still claim to be readable, Brave New World is a major contemporary novel, as vital today as when it was published.

It is too easy to say: Huxley was a better writer. I am not at all sure he was that much better, or that (beyond a certain level which Wyndham automatically attains) prose and rhetoric are that important in the durability of a novel. The essential difference, I believe, is that "Exiles" is, like the other two stories in the Moskowitz collection, nothing more than a plot wrapped around a gimmick; Brave New World used the gimmick to construct a statement of significance about the world we live in.

I have never heard a word from SaM about the Sense of Wonder in Brave New World. Perhaps if I ever do find out what he does mean when he says it, I'll decide that—by his standards—I have gone and lost mine after all?

As I said, nostalgia is trendy, and the trend is not all bad; along with art nouveau and Victorian bead curtains, we are getting some first-rate reprints. One of these I had the opportunity to test for SoW-versus-SoN: Dover has just brought out a handsome large-size paperback of John Taine's SEEDS OF LIFE, a novel I read breathlessly 25 years ago in a tattered copy of somebody's 1931 Amazing Quarterly. I opened the book with nostalgic delight, turned to the first page, started riffling, and realized that although I remember it still, vividly, the memory will have to suffice. I am—I thought—no longer capable of reading that kind of prose. Wrong again: I turned to WHITE LILY, in the same volume, which I had never read—and within two pages stopped noticing the stiff and stilted language at all. For me there is no pleasure to be had rereading a work of such clumsy prose, but what has kept other Taine novels fresh in my mind through the years was not the words but the content. If either of these novels is new to you, it's a bargain two-dollars'-worth.

Also from Dover comes a new assortment of H. G. Wells' science fiction (BEST SCIENCE FICTION STORIES OF H. G. WELLS, $2.00), including "The Invisible Man" and a selection of 17 shorter pieces from the early collections (The Stolen Bacillus, The Plattner Story, Tales of Space and Time, and Twelve Stories and a Dream —oddly, nothing from The Time Machine . . .) Berkley has also done a new edition of THE FIRST MEN IN THE MOON, for 50¢—although they have put their reissue of Capek's WAR WITH THE NEWTS up to 75¢. (My 1955 Bantam edition is still in good condition; it was 35¢. Can costs really have gone up enough to warrant the difference?)

Probably the best buy of the new crop of classy-classic reprints is E. R. Ecidison's long-unavailable WORM OUROBOROS, from Ballantine, at 95¢ for a fat 520-page volume with an introduction by Orville Prescott and six excellent illustrations by Keith Henderson. (But Ballantine's latest issue of Ray Bradbury's FAHRENHEIT 451 is less generous: in 1953, the hook contained two other stories, "The Playground" and "And the Rock Cried Out," all for 35¢; "Fahrenheit #451" alone is now 60¢.)

Back to nostalgia, pure and pleasant: the ERB people.

I mentioned earlier my delighted late discovery of Sherlock Holmes. While not sharing their degree of enthusiasm, I can easily understand why the Baker Street Irregulars construct their elaborate games around the mythical body of Holmes. With only a little less empathy, I can accept the buffishness of the ERB fans.

Burroughs' science fantasy did not hit me when I was a kid, but Tarzan walloped me. I tried rereading one a few years ago, and will never do it again, but I don't need to, after all. I still have a fat bag full of Tarzan memories from way back, and as I said, my own kind of nostalgia is passive: I don't want to see the words again, because their banality will only spoil the magic for me.

I found, however, that photographs of the long line of movie Tamils spoiled nothing, and delighted me: as did much of the scatter of information and reminiscence in Robert Fenton's THE BIG SWINGERS (Prentice-Hall, $6.95), which is a sort of double-image biography of Burroughs-and-Tarzan. It is a ridiculous book: I can hardly say whether the physical appearance of it or the writing is lets attractive; but it is crammed with tidbits—the membership card of the first "Tarzan Tribe" club, Burroughs' ardent appeal to the US Government in 1917 to set up a national reserve army, a news account of FRB's 99-day cross-country trip (1916) with rigged-out-truck-and-trailer serving as an early version of today's camper-trailer, Burroughs' statement on the Scopes Trial, or the photographs of the movie Tarzans already mentioned—so full of tidbits about two essentially fascinating characters (or rather, author-and-character) that it does not need a specialized fan interest to enjoy it.

I don't mean I'd have gone out and bought the book: I do mean I'm glad I have it.

Tarzan, like Sherlock Holmes, has a viability beyond the fame or literary capacities of his author; both figures have, in half a century, worked their way into the pantheon of contemporary mythology. Not so the Gray Lensman. THE UNIVERSES OF E. E. SMITH (Ron Ellik and Bill Evans, Advent, $6.00) is an enthusiastically introduced, handsomely produced, painstakingly prefaced, indexed, appendixed, and bibliographed volume which, after all, contains nothing but introductions, prefaces, indexes, appendices, bibliographies, and 225 pages of concordances (sic) relating to a series of stories of very specifically limited fan interest. One can only say, a bit weakly, that it is certainly the handsomest, and probably the most expensive fan publication going.

Also from Advent (at the same price!) is the long-awaited second edition of Damon Knight's collection of reviews and critical writings, IN SEARCH OF WONDER almost twice as long as the 1956 edition, and fascinating, if frequently infuriating, reading. I cannot comment at any length on this book, because I find myself (except on the topic of my own work) almost as much in agreement with Knight's views as I am in disagreement with his (often unnecessarily) vitriolic manner of presenting them. This is an intelligent, literate, knowledgeable, instructive book; if it is also highly opinionated, often arrogant, and sometimes vicious—why, better Knight's vinegar than SaM's treacle.

A vital addition to any reference shelf.

—JUDITH MERRIL