This is the second opening for this essay. The first, a discarded draft which now reposes on grey carpeting somewhere to the near left, went like this:
"First person, the protagonist (or involved principal) as narrator, should be the ideal form for science fiction—since it would impart an effect of naturalness and immediacy to the alien landscape, inner and outer, which is the premise of the form—but oddly it is not, although exceptional stories written in the first person, many of which are in this book, grace the category, the main thrust of science fiction through its fifty-four years as a discrete subgenre of American literature has been carried in the more conventional third person which—"
Which what? This might play in the provinces but it will not play in this book. For the fact is that the discarded opening is a false premise; a great deal of important work, perhaps even a disproportionate amount, has been done in American science fiction in the first person. Isaac Asimov notes in his introduction that he has almost never worked in the form; "The Red Queen's Race" (his best story of the forties, for my money, just as The Dead Past—a novella—was his best of the fifties) is his only published exhibit in the form, but Isaac is the exception and an inordinate number of examples-in-proof abound of which I would cite only a few and in somewhat random order: Robert Heinlein's last three novels have been first-person, Theodore Sturgeon's Baby Is Three (the brilliant novella centering More Than Human) is first-person, Tom Sherred's "E for Effort," surely the finest story to appear in 1947, was first-person. So is Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside (1972) and Shadrach in the Furnace, my own Beyond Apollo (1972), Arthur C. Clarke's Hugo Award-winning "The Star," Lester del Rey's "Helen O'Loy," Mark Clifton's "What Have I done?" Thomas M. Disch's novel Camp Concentration (1967), Samuel R. Delany's famous short story "Aye and Gomorrah" . . .
It is an imposing list. Proportionate to the body of first-rate work in the genre, science fiction has probably employed the first person more successfully than the American literary novel or any branch of American commercial fiction. With all due respect to Isaac Asimov—who is one of the five living writers who center this form—he is the exception; his reluctance to use or struggle with the first-person format is atypical, and this afterword cannot deplore underutilization but only celebrate plenitude . . . and venture, cautiously, into personal terrain.
I have written a great deal in the first person. The bibliographers are welcome to take a look at this, I cannot, but at a fast estimate close to fifty percent of my twenty-five science fiction novels and approximately two hundred short stories have been written in that fashion. First person has always come easily to me; my first published science fiction story ("We're Coming Through the Windows," 1967) used it (in epistolary format) and Beyond Apollo, my best-known if not best novel, is written in alternate first- and third-person by its schizoid protagonist. Tactics of Conquest (the novel which was inflated madly from the short story "Closed Sicilian") and The Men Inside are first-person; so is Revelations and my own favorite novel, Underlay. I like the form; as a failed playwright (Schubert Foundation Fellow, Syracuse University 1964/5, you could look it up) I enjoy the way it can burrow into a protagonist, get inside him, adapt his voice, work against authorial weaknesses or pomposity.
First person has another valuable function, at least, to a writer like myself, and I am about, for any would-be novelists in the gallery, to reveal for the first time ever a Trade Secret: first person enables a writer to disguise gaps in research, knowledge, experience or apprehension because he can build his own limitations into the voice of the character and make them an essential part of that persona. Never knowing a hell of a lot about hard technology, the actual appearance of the surface of Mercury, or the intricacies of the three-stage rocket, I used over and over again characters who were either similarly unfamiliar with the material or who once having been familiar were losing control, going over the edge, and their ignorance thus became—witness Beyond Apollo—a metaphor for their psychic breakdown and that of their culture. First person is a technique surely created for old maneuverers like your faithful undersigned: applied skillfully, it can convert weaknesses to strengths. Don't blame me, folks, the captain was the one going insane. I may know a hydraulic valve from a hole in the ground but the captain has gone over the edge; he can barely segregate the hawks from the handsaws. All a narrative device: take it up with the captain. (I feel safe in disclosing my trade secret now; it is many years since my period of peak efficiency, in the first place, and in the second, too many people have Caught On. I think my own major contribution to science fiction may have been to teach a flock of new writers that you can write science fiction not only without technological knowledge, but without even deference to it . . . one can wallow in one's own ignorance. Several critics have raised this point about my own work, and they may even be right. Still, it is better to wallow in ignorance than to shadow-box with knowledge, as the bishop said to the widow.)
First person—to continue this technical discussion a little—has certain built-in traps, to be sure. The voice can become too idiosyncratic; circling in upon itself, it can lose account of extrinsic circumstance or relationships (Ring Lardner, a magnificent writer, was not magnificent all of the time, and many of his first-person stories show this weakness). Characterization, particularly of the narrator, cannot be trusted because of the idiosyncratic voice; physical description of the narrator—barring the Mirror Device and similar scams—is impossible. And the fact that the narrator is himself alive to tell the tale makes the use of the first person almost impossible in a suspense format where the very life of the narrator is suggested to hang in balance. Furthermore, unless one is using a diary format (such as in Camp Concentration or the famous Daniel Keyes Flowers for Algernon), which is a tricky technique for all but the most sophisticated of us, true characteriological change is impossible to depict in the first person; the narrator is fully developed at the outset of the story as the result of the events of the story; he cannot be perceived to be changing during the narrative span itself, and since change is one of the key aspects of fiction the first-person writer is stripping himself of advantage at the outset.
(It is this absence of change which so many reviewers through the years have pointed out is the one flaw in the Pohl/Kornbluth Space Merchants—the narrator has presumably matured as the result of the events of the story, yet the callow fool who narrates the opening half must have that voice or there is no credible conflict-and-development.)
Still. There are two more masterpieces or near-masterpieces for the roster: The Space Merchants and Flowers for Algernon. No, science fiction has had no paucity of important material in the form. And as technology becomes more confusing, misunderstandings more complex, the failure of resolution more characteristic of the last years of this century, the first person is likely to remain a central facet of the genre, if not to literally overtake third person for those works written at the diving, at the cutting edge.
I hope to play some small part in those works and years which lie ahead, and I point out to readers faithful and unfaithful alike my sullen and stolid consistence and discipline: this afterword is itself in the first-person. Even though, more and more, ah doctor!, my own life seems to be lived in the third.