May Day, 1968: Yesterday, I was rushing to finish a column, already overdue, when I was interrupted by the telephone. I heard the news, no more credible for being not entirely unexpected than was the assassination of Martin Luther King a few weeks earlier. On that earlier occasion, there was the radio to listen to through the night, and by morning I had heard the words often enough to understand that the inevitable had occurred: that a man of larger-than-life love, anger, faith and endurance had ceased to endure: that his plans and passions were now and evermore stopped, with only framed and dated stop-action records of the past to guide the hundreds of thousands hoping to follow him out of the wilderness of now, into a future whose promise no longer shines so bright.

Yesterday, in my less public incredulity, there was only the telephone to force belief, but after one has said often enough to the shared friends and fellow-losers, He is dead! the statement, willy-nilly, gains some meaning—and deadline be damned.

Today, almost convinced, I approach (what I still tend to think of as) "Tony's column" almost-understanding—and later than ever. ("We never seem to communicate except by Special Delivery," he wrote one time, late to answer a query I had been late to send.) But of course there will be no fast-finish now. In a way, I have to learn how to write all over again.

For almost twenty years, every word I have written for publication has been addressed in part at least to Anthony Boucher. These columns, above all, have been done with an awareness of audience so acute he might have been looking over my shoulder as I wrote. (We never did find time to write those letters we both kept promising each other: these last few years—he was not well, and I was travelling —we had almost no correspondence. But there was at least this quasi-monthly "letter home," to try to show that I was working, learning, that I cared.)

I think most writers have some such single-person audience, one ideally-understanding-and-ultimately-critical reader—a teacher, fellow writer, editor, friend, to whom specifically they address themselves. Now (as soon as complete conviction comes—right now I still feel Tony up behind my shoulder—probably snickering some at my refusal to look around and notice him and stop this morbid mawkishness) I suppose I shall have to learn to write broadcast.

Well, for this time at least it will be more like a collaboration. It is an appropriate one for the purpose: the column I was working on yesterday borrowed its theme from an extraordinary book, DYNAMICS OF CHANGE (of which more below); perhaps the dynamic will be seen more clearly by going a bit farther back to look at it.

For some time after his retirement from F&SF, Tony continued to do an occasional s-f review column for the Times Book Review, and an annual review of publications for my YEAR'S BEST SF anthologies. His review of 1962, in the 7th Annual—about the time his column stopped appearing in the Times—began:

"I have been trying for some time to discover why I, as a reviewer, am so much more resentful of uninspired routine books in science fiction than I am of similar publications in the mystery-suspense field. . . .

"I see now that it is because s-f is a form which, more than almost any other, by its very nature demands creative originality. The detective story and even the more modern psychological crime novel are—like the western, the love story, the historical romance—fixed forms, in which the creative challenge lies largely in seeing what the author can do within established boundaries. S-f is—or perhaps better, should and must be—a literature of stimulus and fresh horizons.

"Put it this way: You are not going to complain if a large number of sonnets sound, superficially, a good deal alike; you are fascinated by what each poet manages to do within the sonnet. But if all the free verse you read, from countless diverse hands, sounds pretty much the same, you are justified in thinking that poetry is in a hell of a state.

"A conventional, competent, uninspired murder novel or western is a perfectly reasonable commercial commodity. Conventional, competent, uninspired s-f has no reason for existing."

There was no reason—or at least very little. But nowadays—

Making money may not be a good reason for writing conventional, competent, uninspired s-f, but it is a very potent one. Science fiction is "in": or I should say, "science fiction," because it is the label and not the substance that sells. There is an enormous, and growing, audience of both readers and viewers who will buy anything with the label provided it is conventional, competent, and uninspired: provided, that is, that it does not dangerously overstimulate virgin mentalities. Publishers and producers have discovered that they can sell, and sell well, anything with a spacecraft, giant computer, mysterious alien, strange, large, monster, or anything else sufficiently incredible and incomprehensible to these spinster imaginations. And the producers and publishers are now prepared to pay, and pay well, those authors who can wrap up sci-fi idioms and images in glossy packages guaranteed to blow no minds.

In 1952, Boucher (who, was first president of the Mystery Writers of America, and an ardent supporter of the early abortive efforts to establish the SFWA) said in his article in Bretnor's MODERN SCIENCE FICTION, "I know a man who has been turning out a steady 30,000 words a month and selling all of it—the equivalent of five or six book-length novels a year. His annual income from writing has been $3600. There must be some way of being just as poor with less effort." Things were not very much better when he wrote his tirade in the 7th Annual—so it is hardly surprising to find so many of the suddenly big Names of s-f willing to swap their second-class literary and financial citizenship for wall-to-wall installations of Formula Imagination. The surprise, if anything, is that a handful of the established people still saw no good reason to stop thinking with their mouths open—and that some of the others (perhaps having caught up on their bills and maybe having had a short holiday) are now backsliding again into intellectual doorbusting, riskily speculative literary ventures, and general imaginative excess.

Whatever the reasons, the Dynamics of Change are clearly in operation, and writers who have been purring along smoothly on their Own Thing tracks, lavishing spit-and-polish on the brassworks of some favorite Fantasticke Engine (or else streaking by so fast in a cloud of technosociogobbldelogical steam that no one could notice there was no engine at all) are suddenly turning up grappling with new raw clumsy genuine home-made concepts. Some of them are too big to handle easily, or too balky to handle convincingly. And some of the handlers are a bit out of practice. But it doesn't really matter if they're wrong or right: they're right where they belong. I mean—

Science fiction is not science: its job is not getting the answers, but asking the questions. It doesn't have to turn out to be "right"—just turn up what's wrong"; and, maybe most of all, question the meaning of both words. (". . . if it has a more serious function, it is less that of pin-pointed prophecy than that of creating in its readers a climate of acceptance of new wonders and a willingness to think at least one step ahead. . . ." From "Science Fiction Still Leads Science Fiction Fact," N .Y Times Magazine, 1957.)

So it's getting better (she said sourly), getting really better all the time.

The way you can tell is the way it's getting worse: I mean the way it's getting worse. The Dynamics of Change are more dialectical than Euclidean, and when you get the swing of it, you can almost compute the progress vector by the force of the accompanying reaction blast. Remember—the pubescent child is pimply, clumsy, and gawky, an obvious loser in the Natural Selection biz; the fiercest riots are not in Alabama or Mississippi, but in Newark and Detroit; just before the divorce is when the sweet-talk is stickiest; pollen makes flowers and hay-fever both. And if some of the more thoughtful new books are lumpier in texture, uglier in flavor, gloomier in color, or cruder in shape—well, there's lots of the familiar predigested stuff around, if you prefer it.

"You will be required to do wrong no matter where you go. It is the basic condition of life, to be required to violate your own identity."

"We're all someone's tool. That's what society means."

The first quote is from Philip K. Dick's DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? (Doubleday, $3.95). The second is from Brian W. Aldiss's CRYPTOZOIC (Doubleday, $4.50). Both lines are delivered by sages; both times the protagonist accepts the dictum with a sense of enlightenment and release. Although their speculative contents and story structures are very different, both books seem to me to be concerned fundamentally with the interface between institution and intuition, and any discussion of this duality today is in some respect an investigation into definitions of morality and of sanity. John Brunner's QUICKSAND (Doubleday, $4.50) and Alan E. Nourse's THE MERCY MEN (McKay, $3.95) are less complex books, in which the same duality, essentially, is exposed in—again—two radically different narratives of overt individual madness.

Brunner and Aldiss both conclude with split-level endings: In QUICKSAND, the choice is between "realistic" and "science-fictional" explanations of the ultimate tragedy; in CRYPTOZOIC, the alternatives are simple personal tragedy, or an individual transcendence which will serve in time to mitigate the collective doom of which it is a part. ANDROIDS, like MERCY MEN, has a "happy" ending—for the protagonist, if not the reader. Although Brunner's is the only story set in present time, all four books deal in some depth with overlapping aspects of the psychotigenic factors most apparent in contemporary western civilization, particularly as they affect the capacity, and the need, for human communication.

QUICKSAND gives us a psychiatrist working in a mental hospital, maintaining a precarious personality balance in the face of corrosive authoritarian pressures, status-structure stresses, professional and social hypocrisies, and domestic hostility and deceit. When the encapsulated idealism-fantasies which have provided his only internal support are attacked and exposed by a seductively defenseless patient (alien or alienated—the reader is left to take his choice), the disintegration of the doctor's personality is complete.

In an insidiously quiet, indeed quite/rather British/polite manner (very different from Brunner's usual tone) the book poses one vital question after another: Who are the really insane? Who arc the controllers, and who the controlled? What do you mean, "freedom"? That sort of thing. But it only poses, never probes—out of politeness, one almost feels, or would, if one had never read Brunner before. The hero, or antihero, is a Mitty without the courage of his own daydreams, a man whose very fantasies are grey-on-grey, and whose fears are a virtual catalogue of neurotica (his mother, society, his boss, an unknown God, his body, and of course his own emotions). A man, in short, grimly over-representative of our culture and, more prototypically than ironically, a psychiatrist: the purblind leading the purblind.

Even this might have made for a fable of power, if the environment from which the little man flees were equally apropos. But I had a bit of the feeling I get when Playboy lectures on the New Morality or Betty Friedan on the Feminine Mystique—a sort of displacement-in-time which might be as gently nostalgic as a Jack Finney story if it were less earnest. Women's rights were fought and won many years ago; I know there are millions of women living underprivileged existences today and projecting their frustrations on a delusion of A Man's World—but the battle they have to fight is with their own infant conditioning, not with their husbands. I know there are millions of American boys who persist (in the face of high school pregnancy statistics) in believing that The American Girl must be tricked, lured, or bribed into bed, but the "sexual revolution" of the sixties (as distinct from the twenties) starts with full knowledge that sex is popular with women too, and concerns itself more with the varieties of sexual experience than with its outworn proprieties. Brunner's Paul Fidler, similarly, seems to drive himself to his destruction in a Model-A, the victim of an early-Freudian culture of the sort in which—I know—millions of people still live, but which, as setting for a contemporary novel, provides little opportunity to do more than peer through keyholes at the most central problems.

Nevertheless, this is one of Brunner's best books to date: solidly constructed, strongly corn-posed, and vividly successful in the effectiveness of those keyhole-glimpses.

Nourse’s MERCY MEN is a deceptively simple, action-packed story which approaches many of the same problems from just about every possible opposite direction. The view is from the future, and an ugly one it is, nothing relieved by its moments of utter plausibility. Here, a volunteer subject in a giant research foundation is "cured" (of the trauma earlier induced in him by the same medical-elite powers) by a sort of homeopathic application of carefully controlled dosages of physical and emotional violence, structured falsehood, and personality invasion; the result seems' to make him as acceptable to his nightmarishly deranged world as it has become to him. I should like to think that the author's intent was ironic—but his approval or disapproval of the world he has shown is irrelevant beside the fact that so much of what he shows has a brutally authentic and convincing ring. In fact, the book is in many ways an illustration of my earlier comments on concepts and crudities: only superficially "conventional," it is certainly not "uninspired," and it departs from Nourse's usual pleasant competence in two directions at once: the writing is rougher and the thinking is tougher.

Aldiss's CRYPTOZOIC also concerns itself with power structures on several levels, including the psychiatric and political; but its main speculative preoccupation is with man's orientation in time. The concept presented here is one I do not believe has been treated before in fiction except in miniature, in carefully localized short-term situations in short-length stories. I am not going to try to describe it. Aldiss needs the whole book to depict it; I think I should need one at least twice as long. And any attempt to describe rather than to depict would be doomed: on the rational level, the concept is clear enough—but quite irrational. The book is full of petty inconsistencies and internal contradictions. And yet—

There were moments, over and over, when (in "bellyfeel," not words) I knew what he meant. What he has hold of, I think, is a poetic concept so right intuitionally that the very attempt at analysis on the surface level of verbal consciousness shatters it unrecognizably. And considering the flaws in the rationale the author provides, it does not much matter whether that "rightness" is purely symbolic or prophetically "scientific." What does matter is the excitement, long gone from most of the genre, of snatching at, and sometimes seizing on, a strange, alluring, and frightening avatar of Truth, most maddeningly out of reach in a nonetheless rock-sure sur-reality. (Quick note—no, no! I do not mean it is a "surrealist novel"! ) Read it.

DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC SHEEP? does not suffer from any of the assortment of novelistic shortcomings which qualify my admiration for the other three books: Dick has apparently worked his way through to a methodology that gives him much more control, and makes his ideas much more accessible to the reader. In a review of his work some months ago, I compared his techniques to those of the comic strip, and I understand there were readers who took this as denigration. If it seemed so, it was probably because the comic strip itself is simply not a congenial form to me: I don't like the flat bright colors, and stylized images. But I recognize that in this particularity I am stranded almost alone on the far side of a generation gap (with people twice my age, since it is my own generation that first took the comic book to heart) —and it has never stopped me from reading (well, some) comics, or from recognizing the value of the form as a message-medium.

In any case, I have read, I think, every one of Dick's books from cover to cover, even when he infuriated, frustrated, or baffled me (as for a while he was doing regularly): at the least there was always the same sort of thing I found in the Aldiss novel—flashes of awareness of a concept entirely outside my own bag, and not successfully communicated, to me, by the author—but clearly worth reaching for, and coming back to.

Whether I have acquired skill at reading Dick, or he has, as it seems to me, begun to organize his material more successfully, this time I experienced none of the jump-frame confusion I have suffered from in the past. This is a rich book, which deals with aspects of the whole range of conflicts, dualities, dichotomies, and interchanges approached in all three of the others described here—and is nothing like any of them. Some of the elements will be familiar to regular readers of Dick's; others are new. This is a world of falling population and sublethal fallout dust, of Wilbur Mercer and the black empathy box, of religious devotion to living animals and merciless extermination of androids, of "specials" and bounty hunters, mood consoles and the inescapable Buster Friendly. Every one of these things is meaningful in context, and the context is constructed to contain all the meanings and multiply them.

Perhaps the best thing I can say is that there were still some ideas I'm not sure I know whether I liked, or agreed with, or fully understood —but I assume I will see them from some other angle the next time around.

And I can say with some certainty that the Happy Ending is supposed to make you weep.

With which, we come back at last to THE DYNAMICS OF CHANGE (which, of course, has been the topic all along) and to Tony Boucher (who, of course, has been there all the time).

Many years ago, when F&SF was new, the Atom Age little older, and the Love Generation not quite old enough to pick its first flowers . . . when there were only about 200,000 s-f readers and perhaps 200 scientists who knew that space travel was just around the solar corner, and a few foresighted young editors at half a dozen publishing houses were beginning to wonder if those 200,000 could get the book habit . . . when the Reader's Guide still listed the occasional science fiction piece in its careful lists (mostly from Colliers; or by Heinlein in the Saturday Evening Post) under the fastidious heading, pseudo-science . . . back in that oddly innocent time of two decades gone, there was organized in the Bay Area a group called the Elves', Gnomes' and Little Men's Chowder and Marching Society. Among its early members were Anthony Boucher and a young man named Don Fabun, whom Tony first called to my attention when he became one of the first fairly regular reviewers of s-f on any major newspaper —the San Francisco Chronical.

Fabun was also editor, for too short a time, of what I still think was the all-time best s-f "fanzine," The Rhodomagnetic Digest (unless you include in the category the, alas!, also defunct Publication of the Institute of Twenty-First Century Studies—whose acronym Boucher taught us all how to pronounce). I had heard nothing of Fabun for many years, and had vaguely assumed that like many other bright young fans, he had straightened up, sold his mimeo (actually, RD was offset) and disappeared into the great world of wall-to-wall Reality, when I discovered—via DYNAMICS—that s-f's loss was aluminum's gain, and that Fabun had obviously lost nothing himself in the process.

This extraordinary book* (* THE DYNAMICS OF CHANGE, edited by Don Fabun, Prentice-Hall for the Kaiser Aluminum Corporation, 1967, $6.95) is composed of a series of six articles originally published in the Kaiser Aluminum News, of which Don Fabun is editor. In its present form it consists of about 150 (8.5 x 11) pages of text, quotations, charts, and diagrams, and almost 60 more of full-page photographs and art reproductions, mostly in quite unbelievable color, and all of a quality rarely to be found in "art books," and almost never in a "commercial" publication.

It is no more possible to convey adequately the range and quality of this book in a paragraph—or a page —of itemized listings than it would be to represent a Philip Dick novel by an outline of the same length. It is not just the parts, but the larger whole of the sum, and the several ways it adds up, that are significant. The best I can do is suggest the scope by mentioning that among the painters and sculptors included are Tchelitchew, Giacometti, Kienholz (the first photograph of The Beanery that has given me an understanding of its fame), Mike Anderson, John Larrecq, Robert Alexander, Ma Yuan, Dali, and Masami Miyamoto. Many of the works were prepared especially for the book and photographed for it by Bob Fraser, Herbert Mattar, Jan Mar, William Jackson, and Robert Isaacs, and they bear about the same relationship to the usual "industrial art" as Ed Emshwiller's industrially commissioned short films do to the usual PR screen job.

The text pages are glossed with short quotations from—at random —Hans Christian Andersen, Harper's, John von Neumann, Sherlock Holmes, What Is Information by Gilbert W. King of IBM, Associated Press, Youths and Motorcycles by Henry S. Stone, Jr., J. Bronowski, The Tin Woodman Of Oz, Norbert Wiener, Algernon Charles Swinburne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Loren Eiseley, Lewis Mumford.

The first five sections deal with topics whose headings look familiar (Telemobility, The Leisure Masses, Automation, etc.) but whose content keeps saying something. The last part, Foreseeing the Unseeable would make the book worth getting all by itself: in part because it comprehends and conveys what so many science fiction writers have yet to understand:

"The science of tomorrow or the day after will, unquestionably, outrun the science fiction of today ... But as creative, imaginative minds keep thinking ahead to the step beyond the next, it is exceedingly unlikely that tomorrow's science will outrun the science fiction of tomorrow. . . .

"What prophet can dare to prophesy the utterance of a prophet yet to come?" ("Science Fiction Still Leads Science Fact" )

Tony never said Goodbye; he always said God bless. When he said it, I always thought it quite possible that God really would.

Goodbye, Tony, God bless.

—JUDITH MERRIL