A Century of Science Fiction Read online

  Edited, with an Introduction and

  Notes by Damon Knight

  A DELL BOOK

  FROM THE INTRODUCTION BY DAMON KNIGHT:

  “You will find here samples of the adventure tale, the tale of ratiocination, the poetic tale, the terror tale, the story of ideas. Certain of these stories are meant to make you shiver, others to make you laugh; but all of them, being science fiction, are meant to make you think—and enjoy the act of thinking”

  A CENTURY OF

  SCIENCE FICTION

  HERE ARE TWENTY-SIX LUMINOUS

  STORIES WRITTEN BY STARS OF

  THE FIRST MAGNITUDE IN THE GALAXY OF

  SCIENCE FICTION.

  Published by

  DELL PUBLISHING CO., INC.

  750 Third Avenue, New York 17, N.Y.

  Copyright © 1962 by Damon Knight

  DELL ® TM 681510, Dell Publishing Co., Inc.

  All rights reserved

  Reprinted by arrangement with Simon and Schuster, Inc., New York, N.Y.

  First Dell printing—February, 1963

  Printed in U.S.A.

  DEDICATION:

  to

  CLAYTON RAWSON,

  who should be dedicating it to me

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  “The Ideal ,” by Stanley G. Weinbaum, copyright 1935 by Continental Publications, Inc. Excerpt reprinted by permission of the author’s agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.

  “Reason,” by Isaac Asimov, copyright 1941 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “But Who Can Replace a Man?” by Brian W. Aldiss, copyright 1958 by Royal Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent, John Carnell.

  “Of Time and Third Avenue,” by Alfred Bester, copyright 1951 by Fantasy House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Sail On! Sail On!” by Philip Josi Farmer, copyright 1952 by Better Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Worlds of the Imperium,” by Keith Laumer, copyright 1961 by Ziff-Davis Publishing Co. Excerpt reprinted by permission of the author’s agent, Theron W. Raines.

  “The Business, As Usual,” by Mack Reynolds, copyright 1952 by Fantasy House, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.

  “What’s It Like Out There?” by Edmond Hamilton, copyright 1952 by Better Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “Sky Lift,” by Robert A. Heinlein, copyright 1953 by Greenleaf Publishing Co. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent, Lurton Blassingame.

  “The Star,” by Arthur C. Clarke, copyright 1955 by Royal Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.

  “The Wind People,” by Marion Zimmer Bradley, copyright 1958 by Quinn Publishing Co., Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.

  "Unhuman Sacrifice,” by Katherine MacLean, copyright

  1958 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  “The First Days of May ,” by Claude Veillot, copyright 1961 by Mercury Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Day of Succession ,” by Theodore L. Thomas, copyright

  1959 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  "Angel’s Egg,” by Edgar Pangborn, copyright 1951 by World Editions, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent, Robert P. Mills.

  “Odd John,” by Olaf Stapledon, copyright 1936 by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc. Excerpt reprinted by permission of the publishers.

  “Call Me Joe,” by Poul Anderson, copyright 1957 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agents, Scott Meredith Literary Agency, Inc.

  “You Are With It!” by Will Stanton, copyright 1961 by Mercury Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author’s agent, Rogers Terrill.

  “Cease Fire,” by Frank Herbert, copyright 1958 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  1. ROBOTS

  A selection from - THE IDEAL - BY STANLEY G. WEINBAUM

  MOXON’S MASTER - BY AMBROSE BIERCE

  REASON - BY ISAAC ASIMOV

  BUT WHO CAN REPLACE A MAN? - BY BRIAN W. ALDISS

  2 TIME TRAVEL

  A selection from - THE TIME MACHINE - BY H. G. WELLS

  OF TIME AND THIRD AVENUE - BY ALFRED BESTER

  SAIL ON SAIL ON! - BY PHILIP JOSÉ FARMER

  A selection from - WORLDS OF THE IMPERIUM - BY KEITH LAUMER

  THE BUSINESS, AS USUAL - BY MACK REYNOLDS

  3. SPACE

  WHAT’S IT LIKE OUT THERE? - BY EDMOND HAMILTON

  SKY LIFT - BY ROBERT A. HEINLEIN

  THE STAR - BY ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  4 OTHER WORLDS AND PEOPLE

  THE CRYSTAL EGG - BY H. G. WELLS

  THE WIND PEOPLE - BY MARION ZIMMER BRADLEY

  UNUMAN SACRIFICE - BY KATHERINE MacLEAN

  5. ALIENS AMONG US

  WHAT WAS IT? - BY FITZ-JAMES O’BRIEN

  THE FIRST DAYS OF MAY - BY CLAUDE VEILLOT

  TRANSLATED BY DAMON KNIGHT

  DAY OF SUCCESSION

  BY THEODORE L. THOMAS

  ANGEL’S EGG

  BY EDGAR PANGBORN

  6.- SUPERMAN

  ANOTHER WORLD - BY J.-H. ROSNY AÎNÉ - Translated by Damon Knight

  A selection from - ODD JOHN - BY OLAF STAPLEDON

  CALL ME JOE - BY POUL ANDERSON

  7. - MARVELOUS INVENTIONS

  FROM THE LONDON TIMES OF 1904 - BY MARK TWAIN

  A selection from - TWENTY THOUSAND LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA - BY JULES VERNE

  YOU ARE WITH IT! - BY WILL STANTON

  CEASE FIRE - BY FRANK HERBERT

  SUGGESTED READING

  INTRODUCTION

  “Science fiction” is a term H. G. Wells could not have known until long after his “fantastic and imaginative romances” were published in the 1890s. Jules Verne died without ever having heard it; so did Edgar Allan Poe and Fitz-James O’Brien. The thing we are talking about crystallized out of older forms just about one century ago. The name we call it by did not come into existence until 1929.

  More than a quarter-century ago, when I first began reading stories like these in the old Amazing and Wonder, and in the miraculous volumes of H. G. Wells, I found myself part of a tiny coterie: we called the stories science fiction, but the term was not used or understood by the world at large. When respectable critics took notice of the field occasionally, in order to damn it categorically and without examination, they called it “pseudo science” or “Buck Rogers stuff,” never “science fiction.” Even in the forties, when people asked me what kind of copy I wrote, it was never enough to say, “Science fiction.” They would either look blank or say, “Oh, like in Popular Science?” And I would have to say, “No, like H.

  G. Wells and Jules Verne—you know, rocket ships, robots, things like that.” Whereupon I would get a certain kind of a look.

  Nowadays the term “science fiction” has wide currency, and has even lost most of its raffish connotations. We addicts owe this welcome change partly to the upheaval in the popular mind that came with the atom bomb and the V-2—hardly unmixed blessings—but principally to the growing weight of evidence science fiction writers have piled up in their own favor.

  By and large, the hostile critics have fallen silent. When s.f. is mentioned by a respected literary figure today, his comments are likely to be informed and friendly—an unheard-of thing twenty ye
ars ago. As C. S. Lewis writes in his Experiment in Criticism:

  ... in the good old days I noticed that whenever critics said anything about [science fiction], they betrayed great ignorance. They talked as if it were a homogeneous genre. But it is not, in the literary sense, a genre at all. There is nothing common to all who write ii except the use of a particular “machine.” Some of the writers are of the family of Jules Verne and are primarily interested in technology. Some use the machine simply for literary fantasy and produce what is essentially Marchen or myth. A great many use it for satire; nearly all the most pungent American criticism of the American way of life takes this form, and would at once be denounced as un-American if it ventured into any other. And finally, there is the great mass of hacks who merely “cashed in” on the boom in science fiction and used remote planets or even galaxies as the backcloth for spy-stories or love-stories which might as well or better have been located in Whitechapel or the Bronx. And as the stories differ in kind, so of course do their readers. You can, if you wish, class all science fiction together; but it is about as perceptive as classing the works of Ballantyne, Conrad and W. W. Jacobs together as “the sea-story” and then criticising that

  Meanwhile, many a ponderous essay has been written to show that s.f., far from being a vulgar upstart, really goes back to Homer and Lucian of Samosata. August Derleth actually got into print with a “science fiction” anthology (Beyond Time and Space) which included works by Plato, Lucian, Sir Thomas More, Rabelais, Tommaso Campanella, Bacon, Kepler and Godwin. As Cyril Kombluth wrote, in The Science Fiction Novel, “Some of the amateur scholars of science fiction are veritable Hitlers for aggrandizing their field. If they perceive in, say, a sixteenth-century satire some vaguely speculative element they see it as a trembling and persecuted minority, demand Anschluss, and proceed to annex the satire to science fiction.”

  Well, what is science fiction?

  Theodore Sturgeon, one of the field’s living giants, has said, “A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content.” This definition excludes many stories that are called s.f. by common consent, but never mind; with one niggling change—inserting “speculative” before “scientific”—it cleanly divides true science fiction from even the best imitations.

  “These amazing magazines call themselves ‘science fiction,’ ” wrote Clemence Dane in 1936. “But they are nothing but America’s fairy-tales.” Fairy-tales they are, if you like. Here, in new dress, are the invincible weapon, the perilous journey, the monster in the cavern. Here are all the breathless wonder and the bright, hot colors of the magical tale. Here are the grisly folk—ghouls, vampires, spirits of evil. All these things are here, but all with a difference—and it’s the difference that makes them science fiction.

  The organizing principle of this field since about 1860 has been the idea of science: of knowledge systematically obtained and rationally applied. As we contrast older stories with newer ones in this book, you’ll be able to see how that idea slowly changed the imaginative story into something that had never existed in the world before. This, perhaps, is science fiction’s principal claim to a civilized man’s attention: it is something new under the sun. Overanxious scholars to the contrary, it is a kind of fiction which did not and could not come into existence before the middle of the nineteenth century.

  Science fiction is distinguished by its implicit assumption that man can change himself and his environment. This alone sets it apart from all other literary forms. This is the message that came out of the Intellectual Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that has survived in no other kind of fiction.

  The delights of good s.f. are many; but always chief among them is the pleasure of watching consequences flow logically out of a boldly imaginative premise.

  The thing that makes such imaginations interesting [wrote H. G. Wells] is their translation into commonplace terms and a rigid exclusion of other marvels from the story. Then it becomes human. How would you feel and what might not happen to you, is the typical question, if for instance pigs could fly and one came rocketing over a hedge at you. How would you feel and what might not happen to you if suddenly you were changed into an ass and couldn’t tell anyone about it?* Or if you suddenly became invisible? But no one would think twice about the answer if hedges and houses also began to fly, or if people changed into lions, tigers, cats and dogs left and right, or if anyone could vanish anyhow. Nothing remains interesting where anything may happen.

  *Interestingly enough, there are people in the s.f. field today to whom this misfortune must have happened at an early age.

  Note, please, that a science fiction writer may pick his premise according to taste—that pigs fly, or that Napoleon never became emperor, or that the planets are eggs laid by a giant bird—but he must then, by the rules of the game, develop his story with rigid logic and without violating known fact, “except when the violation itself constitutes the basis of the story and a plausible explanation is furnished.” (Fletcher Pratt, in World of Wonder.) Like any rules, these serve the function of making the game both interesting to play and interesting to watch. Adapting itself to them with zest, science fiction has invaded a field from which mainstream fiction has been hanging back in dismay for over a century.

  In mainstream fiction, even today, machines that do things appear only as mysterious streamlined boxes. Science fiction alone dares to examine the mechanism inside. (It’s true that some modern s.f. writers have used the Mysterious and Patently Empty Box to solve their heroes’ problems, but this is a disease, it’s self-eliminating; for you can pull anything out of an empty box, and “Nothing remains interesting where anything may happen.”)

  I read science fiction for fun, and am glad that it seldom takes itself too seriously. Nevertheless, I’m proud of s.f. for its ability to treat people as reasoning beings, for its courage in dealing with the great human questions—the origin of the universe and of man, the nature of reality, the ethical dilemma—and for its unmistakable benign influence on the mental climate of our world. Robert A. Heinlein, one of the greatest living s.f. writers, said this, in The Science Fiction Novel; and I submit that these two sentences are worth remembering: “I claim one positive triumph for science fiction, totally beyond the scope of so-called mainstream fiction. It has prepared the youth of our time for the coming age of space.” Heinlein, though not egotist enough to say so, has himself done more to this end than any other s.f. writer. His juvenile novels, meticulously researched and written—and read by thousands of young people—have taught a whole generation to think of space travel as something natural and inevitable.

  So many people have written good s.f. during the last century that a book twice this size could not represent them all. I could not even give you a book representative of all the varied flavors and textures of science fiction writing: instead, I’ve picked those I like best myself.

  People who really like whiskey take it straight; people who really like coffee drink it black, hot and strong. You must go elsewhere for bland science fiction or for pablum of any kind; the stories you will find here are the kind I like—strong, rich, sometimes bitter. I like a story that does not come apart as you read. I like a story that leaves some kind of emotional or sensual warmth behind. I like a story that persuades, if at all, without seeming to do so; messianic science fiction is less agreeable to me, and not only because your typical selfappointed messiah can’t write his way out of a paper bag: I don’t like to see science fiction degraded into a vehicle for anything. The story, I think, should always be more important than the idea; when the reverse gets to be true, you want an essay.

  Incidentally, if I have given you the impression that s.f. writers are almost uniformly large-domed, great-souled, brilliantly endowed literary artists, I apologize. We have our fair share of lackwits and mediocrities—ninety per cent. (Sturgeon’s Rule: “Nine tenths o
f everything is crud.”) But you will not find their stories here.

  You will find here samples of the adventure tale, the tale of ratiocination, the poetic tale, the terror tale, the story of ideas. Certain of these stories are meant to make you shiver, others to make you laugh; but all of them, being science fiction, are meant to make you think—and enjoy the act of thinking.

  I owe grateful thanks to James Blish, Howard DeVore, Judith Merril, Barbara Norville and Theodore L. Thomas for help of many kinds; and also to the compilers of the following books, without which this one would have been almost impossible to put together: Checklist of Fantastic Literature, edited by Everett F. Bleiler (Shasta, Chicago, 1948); Index to the Science Fiction Magazines, 1926-1950, compiled by Donald B. Day (Pern, Portland, Oregon, 1952); and A Handbook of Science Fiction and Fantasy, compiled by Donald H. Tuck (published by the author, Hobart, Tasmania, 1959).

  DAMON KNIGHT

  The Anchorage

  Milford, Pike County, Pennsylvania