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Give Me That Old-Time Religion

Science fiction does not—perhaps it cannot—depict the future. What it does, as A. J. Budrys pointed out back in 1969, is to offer sentimentalized versions of the past or brutalized versions of the present transmuted into a template of the familiar. The future cannot by definition be portrayed; it will require a terminology and ethos which do not exist. Perhaps true science fiction, an accurate foreshadowing of the future if such a thing were at all possible, would be incomprehensible. It is important to point out, however, that as futurologists not only our devices but our credentials are miserable.

It is true—a notorious example—that as late as 1967, no science fiction writer had understood that the landing on the moon would be tied into the media and that it would be observed by several hundred million people including that long-distance station-to-station caller, Richard M. Nixon. None of us. The closest any came was Richard Wilson in a short-short story, "Harry Protagonist, Brain-Drainer," in a 1965 issue of Galaxy, which speculated that the first landing on Mars, witnessed by most of the population of this planet on Intermedia, would expose the astronauts to the hypnotic and mind-shattering powers of the Secret Martians, who would turn the minds of most of us to jelly.

Not such bad thinking for fifteen hundred words, this story, and handled with Wilson's customary lucidity and elan (he is a charter member of the science fiction club larger than Hydra and even more filled with bitterness: Underrated Writers, Inc.), but it had very little to do with the conditions that NASA and the networks were jointly evolving, and the question of mass audience was strictly for the subplot, a means of setting up the satiric point. Wilson takes the NASA-CBS I Saw It Coming Award but only by default, and since the award pays only in honor (of which NASA and CBS have offered us little), Wilson will have to be content with his membership in the club and 1969 Nebula for "Mother to the World."

For the rest of us—Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Anderson, and the sixties visionaries too, the movers and shakers who were attempting to write Street (as opposed to Street & Smith) Science Fiction—no honor whatsoever and no excuse. That a genre built upon visionary format whose claim to public attention through the early decades had been based upon its precognitive value should have utterly failed to glimpse the second or third most significant social event of the decade is—one puts on one's tattered prophet's robes—quite disgraceful.

Pointless to blame the readership. The readership may not be interested in the visionary, the dangerous, the threatening, or the difficult, that is true, but their expectations have been formed by what has been given them. Great writers make great audiences. The solemn truth is that as NASA and the networks conspired to reduce the most awesome events of the twentieth century to pap between advertisements and other divertissements, most of us were in the boondocks, slaving away on our portions and outlines and our little short stories, trying to figure out what new variation of Eric Frank Russell we could sneak by Campbell, what turn on a 1947 plot by van Vogt out of a 1956 novel by Phil Dick might work this one last time for Fred Pohl's Galaxy. While we slogged on through the mud of the sixties, bombs bursting in air, recycling the recyclable for one thousand dollars in front money, the liars and technicians were working ably to convert the holy into garbage and a damned good job they (and we) made of it too. The liars and the technicians put the space program out of business by the mid-seventies. Perhaps it might have been different if we had stayed on the job . . . but then again we all know that science fiction has almost nothing to do with the future so why feel guilty? I don't. And "Harry Protagonist, Brain-Drainer" is still around somewhere for proof that we had a handle on it, so there.

No guilt at all. I was just one of the boys.

 

—1980: New Jersey

 

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