Nebula Awards Showcase 2010 (24 page)

All that changed in the fifties. The mighty house of Doubleday began to publish hardcover science-fiction novels steadily, soon joined by Ballantine Books, an innovative new company that brought its books out in simultaneous hardcover and paperback editions. The sudden existence of willing publishers was all the encouragement the new writers needed: and suddenly we had dozens of splendid novels in print in book form, among them Arthur Clarke’s
Childhood’s End
, Ward Moore’s
Bring the Jubilee
, Bradbury’s
Fahrenheit 451
, Sturgeon’s
More Than Human
, and Asimov’s
Pebble in the Sky
, along with hardcover reprints of recent magazine serials by Heinlein, Asimov, Leiber, and others.

A golden age, yes. Most of the classic anthologies of science fiction stories are heavily stocked with fifties stories. Any basic library of science fiction novels would have to include a solid nucleus of fifties books. And today’s science fiction writers are deeply indebted to the dominant fifties writers—Bester and Sturgeon and Dick and Sheckley and Pohl and Blish and the rest—for the fundamental body of ideas and technique with which they work today.

I know. I was there—very young, but with my eyes wide open—and I was savoring it as it happened.

Most of the new writers who made the decade of the fifties what it was in the history of science fiction were on the scene already as functional professional writers as the decade opened, or else were only a year or two away from launching their careers; but there were a few who were still only readers of science fiction then, and would not see print regularly with their own stories until middecade. I was one of those; so were Harlan Ellison, and John Brunner. (Our generation was a sparse one.) Though I was only an onlooker at first, and then just the youngest and greenest of the new writers of the era, I can testify to the crackling excitement of the period, the enormous creative ferment.

I don’t think it’s mere nostalgia that leads me to the view of the importance of that era. The stories in this book, surely, support my feeling that the fifties were a time of powerful growth and evolution in science fiction.

Would that evolution ran in a straight upward line. But, alas, there are periods of retrogression in every trend. The glories of the fifties were short-lived. By 1959, nearly all of the magazines that had been begun with such high hopes a few years before had vanished, the book market had been severely cut back, and many of the writers central to the decade had had to turn to other fields of enterprise. As the fifties approached their end, Campbell and his
Astounding
still labored on, now into the third decade of his editorship, and despite the inroads of his new competitors he continued to publish some of the best science fiction. But his increasing preoccupation with pseudo-scientific fads had alienated many writers who had previously remained loyal to him, and the magazine grew steadily weaker all throughout the decade.

For the other surviving magazines, things were no better. Though the potent new magazines
Galaxy
and
F&SF
were among those that lasted, their editors did not; Anthony Boucher had resigned his editorial post in 1958; Horace Gold’s continuing medical problems forced him to step down a year later. Without those two pivotal figures, and with Campbell increasingly remote and problematical, the spark seemed to go out of the science-fiction field, and the fireworks and grand visionary dreams of 1951 and 1952 and 1953 gave way to the dull and gray late-fifties doldrums of science fiction, a somber period destined to last seven or eight years. The golden age of the fifties was over. Science fiction fans dreamed of a renaissance to come. And it would eventually arrive, bringing with it another rush of new writers, new literary glories, and a vast new audience whose conflicting preferences would transform the once insular little world of science fiction beyond all recognition.

T
he Solstice Award is given for exceptional contributions to SF publishing. This year three winners all well deserved this and many other honors for all they have given the field. There are few SF magazine editors, except perhaps the legendary John Campbell, that were as effective and well spoken as Algis Budrys. His insight when working with authors often resulted in amazing stories and novels. We are lucky here to have reprints from a few of his many columns written as an editor and reviewer. Some are forty years old but the advice and analysis are still completely relevant. A few years ago I was celebrating with Martin H. Greenberg the publication of the thousandth anthology his company, Tekno Books, had packaged. That’s one thousand books, perhaps twenty thousand short stories that exist or were reprinted because Martin Greenberg helped to make them happen. Marty has been generous enough to share with us how he got started in becoming unquestionably the world’s top SF anthologist. Finally, the Solstice Award has been given to Kate Wilhelm. The names of the authors this generous and creative woman has mentored reads like a who’s who of science fiction. She has taught, inspired, and guided many of those you enjoy reading today. Along the way she has been a successful mystery author along with writing science fiction works. She has won three Nebulas and a Hugo. Ms. Wilhelm has been generous enough to allow us to reprint one of her stories that combines her writing both mystery and SF styles.

A
s you know, the essential conflict is between comfortable ignorance and pitiless intelligence. But it ramifies, and there are days when a man hardly knows how much of himself is on which side. Complicating the whole thing is this Heaven-sent gift of self-consciousness which distinguishes Man from the major life-forms so that a man may sit behind a machine writing words which are either pro- or anti-machine, realize what he is doing, and sit there blushing. And, being reasonable, we also realize that the truth is almost certainly staked out somewhere between the fortress of reaction spangled with the latest technological gimcrackery, and the shabby haven of the thinking wanderer whose favorite victim is himself.

In that No Man’s Land, science fiction writers of both sides meet in dim grapple without friend or foe. And if you think there is poetry in that, friend, then you have your first affair with Truth yet before you.

Read any good books lately?

By and large, the first objective of fiction is to establish contact between the writer and the widest possible audience. Whether he writes to get something out of his system, to communicate something, or simply because there is money in it, the writer hopes in his heart of hearts to strike a response from the whole world. In those terms, the three outstanding writers of our immediate time are Erle Stanley Gardner, Mickey Spillane and Ian Fleming. Probably the most successful writer the English language has ever known is Edgar Rice Burroughs. None of these gentlemen can write his way out of a paper bag, as writing is understood by three main types of literary specialists—teachers of composition, literary critics and the other working professional writers who provide the day-in, day-out reading matter for the fiction audience.

Now, whether the fault is with the understanding, or is in fact with the culprits named in the indictment, it still follows, on the basis of evidence observed over a long period of time, that any writer who attempts what is commonly called good prose, or who attempts a seriously intended comment on the human condition, or tries to plot and characterize with some attention to verisimilitude, is deliberately restricting his audience. This is self-destructive madness.

But madness is the common human condition and we have all learned to live with scores of diametrically opposed compulsions. The word is “compromise,” or, if you don’t care for those connotations, “balance” or “maturity.” Somehow, most of us work it out; almost any day, one can meet working writers who are neither Gardner, Spillane, Fleming, Burroughs nor institutionalized.

Any sign of the commonly understood excellences in a piece of fiction therefore indicates one of two things. Most commonly, it indicates a craftsman consciously doing something difficult, for reasons which are not immediately explicable, are not simply logical, and are the result of some often troublesome growth and change within an intelligent human being. More rarely, it indicates a man doing something he can’t help, largely because it has never occurred to him to do anything that is not creative. In other words, an artist. A genius. The craftsman may produce a “better” variation on a given theme than the genius. Neither of them may produce anything anywhere near as “good” as the next genius, or craftsman. That is beside the point. The point is there are three kinds of writers: those who can’t do much right except to overwhelmingly satisfy the audience, those who seriously study their trade and may very well have excellent technical justifications for what appear to be mistakes, and those who are a law unto themselves because they are extending the limits of the possible in literature. And since there are compromises in all personalities, almost all writers combine some of these aspects—they are only more or less craftsmen, geniuses and what psychological phenomenology calls
idiots savants.
Furthermore, no writer sells a product which can be definitively test-run against another similar product. He sells a service—a subjective experience—to each individual reader.

Problem: Where is there an objective basis for determining whether a piece of fiction is “bad” or “good”?

The hardcover science fiction books of today are of course published by the same people who publish the straight fiction and mysteries and westerns—Doubleday, Simon & Schuster and so forth. This wasn’t always so; it didn’t begin to be so until about the time, fifteen years ago, when this magazine’s first issue began a similarly meaningful revolution on the newsstands. In 1950, the biggest names in SF books—almost the only names—were Arkham House, Fantasy Press, F.P.C.I., Gnome Press, Hadley, Prime Press and Shasta. Some of them were on their way out, but these were isolated infirmities; a commercially foolish editorial policy in one instance, the publisher’s personal circumstances in another. As a group they were promising, though they were essentially one-man operations started by people who had scraped together a little capital or credit. In some hope of profit, they were in the business of reprinting what each personally considered the best magazine science fiction published to that date.

What they produced was various. It varied from one company’s systematic resurrection of every big name undermined by the new techniques of the 1940s
Astounding
, through Hadley’s editions of such interesting but idiosyncratic pieces as L. Ron Hubbard’s
Final Blackout,
to Arkham House’s beautifully made volumes not only of Howard Phillips Lovecraft but of A. E. van Vogt’s
Slan
and Ray Bradbury’s first and best collection,
Dark Carnival.

They did most of their business by mail order; their ads were column inches in the prozines, mimeographed pages in the fanzines. But in any largish city you could usually find one bookstore which was not above stocking one copy each for the nut trade, and here and there you could find booksellers who boasted that they specialized in it.

1950 was about the time when book review columns became regular features in the prozines. Before that, reviews, like books, had been occasional pieces. They had run as fillers at the bottoms of pages short on story text, and they were often obviously too thrilled at the thought that anything at all had found its way into boards. By 1950, the volume had not only gotten high enough to justify regular columns, it had gotten high enough to justify a nice cathartic bent of expression when a bad one came in, because the bad ones were in hopeless contrast to the good ones.

 

God grant that such a luxuriant time will never again come to science fiction book publishing. The great hoard of top-rank material waiting to be put into books was the bittersweet result of persistent neglect. Writers had lived, written and died without ever seeing permanent publication. Most of them were not specially conscious of great deprivation in this area, however—not very many people knew the area existed. It was entirely possible to be a science fiction fan in 1945 and not realize that there had been a Golden Age just before World War II; it was only when these books began coming out that the shape and nature of that work became fully apparent.