More than half a century ago, I sat in the large overstuffed armchair in our living room captivated by Lester Del Rey's "Helen O'Loy." I was twelve years old, in grade school, home for lunch, and still in my Lone Ranger phase. I'd discovered science fiction eight years earlier, watching stunned as Flash Gordon piloted his magnificent rocket ship in circles above the sterile landscapes of Mongo. So I was already a lifelong fan, captivated by John Carter and Dejah Thoris, by Conan and the Legion of Space. But "Helen O'Loy" packed a different kind of punch from anything I'd seen earlier. Not that it was necessarily better. Just different. A man in love with a beautiful robot. (I don't think the term 'android' was in use yet.) Ultimately, we learn that, after a glorious lifetime, the husband dies, as humans inevitably do. And Helen's note to a friend arrives, of course, at the climax: "He died in my arms just before sunrise. . . .Don't grieve too much for us, for we have had a happy life together. . . ." She will turn herself off and be buried with him. No one is ever to know the truth. It was the first time I can recall reading a story of any kind with tears running down my cheeks. Certainly nothing we were looking at over in the seventh grade ever had that sort of effect. I can't imagine I was worth much that afternoon while we talked about geography and who imported what from whom. (We always did our geography in the afternoon, and there was, for reasons I never understood, a great deal of fuss about imports.) On an early summer evening a few years later, I sat outside in a rocking chair—we lived in a row home in South Philadelphia and everything around me was made out of brick or concrete—caught up in Ray Bradbury's "Mars Is Heaven." The rocket from Earth had landed on Martian soil and discovered a small town with picket fences and two-story houses that would not have been out of place in South Jersey. There are hedges and lawns and driveways. And a church.
The crew waits as the captain checks his instruments and finally walks over to the hatch and opens it. Music drifts in.
Somebody is playing a piano.
It's "Beautiful Dreamer."
* * *
Maybe those early jolts are so unforgettable precisely because they are early. But I think there's more to it than that.
It's been impossible to forget the kid created so many years ago by Jerome Bixby in "It's a Good Life." I think that was my first encounter --more like a collision-- with irony operating at anything like that level. I can still see that crowd of local residents, local victims, gathered in a living room, with one of their number dead on the floor, and snow coming down out of season to ruin the crops, and they're going on in nervous, terrified voices about what a good life it is because the little boy who mindlessly wields such lethal power wants them to be happy. Will kill them if they aren't.
And who could come away from Damon Knight's aliens, with their manual titled To Serve Man, not marked for life? The manual, of course, is written in their own language. And they're playing the role of benefactors, friends of the human race. Inviting people to ride their ships, to head off to a better world, until one of the characters learns to read the language. "It's a cookbook," he says.
I went to a school where they thought Edgar Allen Poe was scary.
I ran into my first fictional ethical dilemma in Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations," when a star pilot confronts a terrible choice: Stand by while a young woman ejects herself through an airlock, or allow her extra weight to destroy them both.
* * *
There were other riveting moments: a basketball that gained energy from friction rather than losing it, a subway that got lost beneath the streets of Boston, a poet stranded in space writing about the cool green hills of Earth. And a super dense moon, previously unknown, orbiting Mars three feet off the ground, drilling holes through any elevations in the landscape. "Look out, Harry, here it comes again."
Murder by black hole. The Jesuit navigator who confronts the painful truth about the star of Bethlehem. And Charlie, who evades retardation just long enough to find out what he is about to lose.
And Asimov's "Nightfall."
What a treasure. If anyone would like a story idea, how about having aliens come in after we're gone, and discover a volume of, say, the fifty best science fiction stories of all time. It's all they have of us. Except for a few scattered ruins, Bradbury and the others are all that remain. What would they think of us?
* * *
Science fiction, ultimately, is about what might happen, in Heinlein's classic phrase, "if this goes on." What are the consequences for us if we learn how to reverse the aging process? If we discover how to double our IQ's? If we can track down a happiness gene and thereby guarantee a pleasant, untroubled existence to our children? Would we want that? Years ago I visited the Page School at the Capitol and we talked about whether unlimited happiness is a good idea. The kids, always ahead of the rest of us, had some doubts. People who can be happy in the face of serious setbacks would probably make pretty good slaves.
And maybe there's something to be said for being unhappy in the face of loss. Who could really stand being around people who were tirelessly, relentlessly, happy?
The happiness gene shows up in "Tweak."
Science fiction seems to be most effective in its shorter form. Maybe that's because it's generally aimed at making a single point—What if this goes on? Or what if something had happened differently? Or what if we were able to get a breakthrough in, say, transportation? Inevitably, the issue is What if? Rather than commenting on the impositions of society, or the vagaries of human nature, we tinker with technology.
* * *
After I came out of the Navy, I spent ten years as an English teacher and theater director. It became obvious very quickly that my original idea about how to conduct a high school class, which was that all I needed to do was to mention Charles Lamb, and maybe do it with a little showbiz, was in error. My students did not scramble, as I was sure they would, to read his comments on life, death, and winning the love of beautiful women. Toward the end of the first year, while I watched eyes roll anytime I mentioned King Lear, I figured out that I had the wrong approach. (I've never been a quick study.) I needed something to ignite a fire. It was not my job, despite what I'd understood, to warp my kids' brains with classics they weren't, with a few exceptions, ready to read. What I decided would be most useful, what would be most valuable for them, was to demonstrate how much fun books could be. To pass on the passion.
Some experiments went wrong. Even Sherlock Holmes couldn't cut it. Eventually I decided to go back to what had turned on the lights for me. I tried The Martian Chronicles and Heinlein's Future History. We staged stories in the classroom and cut off at the critical moment. When the hatch opens and they hear "Beautiful Dreamer." Read the rest tonight.
Was it successful? Eventually, we had to establish a bookstore in the school.
Once they get started, kids become eclectic readers. At Mt. St. Charles Academy in Woonsocket, RI, I encountered students who tried their hand at Plato simply because the subject had come up in class. Somebody would comment that Plato thought democracy was more or less mob rule. And next day there would be a general debate. It was the sort of experience, as much as anything else in my life, that left me with a sense that the human race, despite everything, is worth saving.
* * *
My first published story was "A Pound of Cure." And yes, I was never very good at titles. It won the Freshman Short Story contest at LaSalle in 1954, and they printed it in the school's literary magazine, Four Quarters. It was science fiction, and I thought I was on my way.
Shortly afterward, I read David Copperfield, saw how accomplished Dickens was, decided it was not a field for somebody with my limited talents, and wrote nothing else for a quarter century.
Eventually my wife Maureen persuaded me to try again, since I was always saying how someday I wanted to write SF, having failed in my other very early ambition, which was to play short for the Phillies.
To me, it was a pointless exercise. But more or less to keep Maureen happy I put together a story, "Zip Code," about a guy who worked in a post office, and who was in love with one of the other clerks. But he could not bring himself to make a move because he thought the young lady was too daunting. Eventually, a letter from Ralph Waldo Emerson, mailed over a century earlier, shows up, containing some lines from one of the essays. The letter, apparently part of an ongoing correspondence, assures the recipient that "you can do virtually anything if you believe in yourself." But of course you have to take the plunge. You have to be willing to commit.
I don't think that, at the time, I saw the irony in my adopting that particular theme. But it made the point I'd long before urged on my students. Believe in yourself. Don't leave anything undone simply because you're afraid of failure.
T.E.D. Klein shocked me when he bought it for The Twilight Zone Magazine. He changed the title to "The Emerson Effect," and promptly sent me a check. I spent the next few months expecting to hear that the publishing house had burned down.
* * *
I discovered I loved writing. And the conviction that I could sell what I wrote made a task that had once seemed insurmountable, suddenly appear routine. Not that I didn't bounce a few stories during those early years. There was something about an alien pizza place. And another written around a combination pool table/time machine.
Kids in any society are always being told by authority figures to keep their hands off something so they don't break it. At school, teachers show them what they've gotten wrong. It took me awhile to realize that the best way to teach composition is to show a student what he's doing well. The short compact sentence that makes its point with a minimum of verbiage. This is the way to do it, Sally. Give me more like this.
But we don't. We tell them they'll break something, and after a while the kids come to believe it. The result is that most of us underestimate what we can do.
* * *
Two of the stories in this collection, "Lighthouse" and "Cool Neighbor," were written in collaboration with Michael Shara, the head of the astrophysics department at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. I'd be less than honest if I didn't admit that the concepts were his.
"Welcome to Valhalla" was written with Katheryn Lance. I'd had the basic idea for years, but I kept trying to drag a time traveler into it. And it didn't work. Kathryn, who shares my taste for Richard Wagner, suggested Brunnhilde, and effectively wrote the story.
Two other stories each inspired a series of novels: The Academy, with Priscilla Hutchins, was born in the sands of one of Saturn's larger moons, in "Melville on Iapetus." And the Alex Benedict novels, of which there are now four, got their start in "Dutchman." Curiously, neither Alex nor Hutch appears in either story, though "Melville on Iapetus"—there's another one of those great titles—was eventually adapted and used as the prologue for the Academy debut novel, The Engines of God.
* * *
When I was in graduate school, at Wesleyan University, one of the instructors routinely held lunches for his classes at his home. One afternoon, several of us were sitting around out back, sipping Cokes and putting away donuts, when someone began describing an incident from the Renaissance. An Italian scholar, visiting Athens, had opened a trunk and found a trove of manuscripts from the classical age.
Several days later the scholar loaded the manuscripts and the trunk onto a ship headed back to Venice. But on the way home, a storm blew up. The ship went down, and the trunk went with it. The scholar, fortunately, survived. But what had been in the trunk?
It got me thinking about transience, about the things we lose as we travel through our lives. On a personal scale, friends and loved ones. On a larger scale, the Hanging Gardens and the Lighthouse at Alexandria. The Great Library. Several Homeric epics. Most of Sophocles' plays. And, on still a third scale, countless individual acts of courage and compassion.
I've never been able to get the scholar and his trunk out of my mind. There are echoes of it through all the stories in Part II, "Lost Treasures."
"Report from the Rear" is based on an actual event, as reported by H.
L. Mencken, dating back to the Russo-Japanese War. "Black To Move" is a chess story, of course. (It's my favorite game.) "The Far Shore," set in an interstellar future, was my second professional story. The alert reader will easily conclude that the author grew up during the 1940's radio age. "Sunrise" eventually became part of A Talent for War. And "Kaminsky At War" is set in the Academy universe. I couldn't help suspecting that the bureaucrat that Kaminsky gets so angry with is Priscilla Hutchins.
I've always been fascinated by the possibilities raised by artificial intelligence. That's probably left over from "Helen O'Loy." "Gus" was my first attempt at an AI with a mind of its own. In this case, an AI portraying St. Augustine decides it's a Catholic and demands access to the sacraments.
There are two other AI stories in Part V. And a novella, "Time Travellers Never Die," which was as much pure joy to write as anything I've ever gone near.
Now that I think of it, though, they all set off a charge of one kind or another. So I'm going to let you in on a secret: Writers are always going on about how difficult the work is, bottle of whiskey in the top drawer, writer's block, and all that sort of thing. In fact none of it's true. I've never had a job that provided such pure pleasure. We put that other stuff out there to keep the competition down.
* * *