Magic, page 19
How well I remember the day that first issue arrived in my father’s candy store. (Good heavens, it was almost half a century ago—and it seems like yesterday.) I devoured the issue. “Sinister Barrier” was absolutely absorbing and the short stories that filled out the issue were like nothing I had ever seen before. One of them was Horace Gold’s “Trouble With Water,” a very funny story about an offended water spirit.
The issues kept coming. The second issue featured L. Ron Hubbard’s “The Ultimate Adventure,” an Arabian Nights story of a kind Scheherazade might have told if she had had a better imagination. It also had the first part of L. Sprague de Camp’s “Divide and Rule” a story of modern knights that put Morte d’Arthur way in the shade. Later issues contained de Camp’s “Lest Darkness Fall,” “The Mathematics of Magic,” “The Roaring Trumpet,” and “The Wheels of If”; Horace Gold’s “None But Lucifer”; John MacCormac’s “Enchanted Weekend”; Hubbard’s “Slaves of Sleep,” “Fear,” and “Typewriter in the Sky”; Jack Williamson’s “Darker Than You Think”; Fritz Leiber’s “Conjure Wife”; Theodore Sturgeon’s “It,” “Shottle Bop,” and “Yesterday was Monday” and so on, and so on.
The magazine continued for twenty-six glorious monthly issues but by the August 1941 issue the war in Europe was coming ever closer to the United States and the price of paper was going up. Unknown’s circulation did not match that of Astounding and what paper could be obtained had to be reserved for the latter. Unknown therefore went bimonthly but moved to a larger size in an attempt to make up for it. It changed its name to Unknown Worlds, too. With the June 1943 issue it was back to a smaller size, and the October 1943 issue was its last. After thirty-nine issues, it died a war casualty.
Nor could it ever be revived. After the war, in 1948, Campbell edited a one-shot issue called From Unknown Worlds, containing a selection of reprints from the magazine, but it apparently didn’t do well enough to warrant a revival, especially since Street & Smith, which had published the magazine, was about to put an end to all its pulp magazines, with the single exception of Astounding.
In 1939, the year of Unknown’s birth, I was desperately trying to sell stories of my own and, indeed, I had sold two stories before ever Unknown appeared, and two more in the month of its appearance. Naturally, considering my extravagant admiration for the magazine, I was bound to try to place a story in its pages.
Believe me, I hesitated. The writing that appeared in the magazine seemed to me to be so skilled that I despaired of equaling it. Nevertheless, shamefaced bashfulness is no part of my nature, and I tried. In July, 1939, I made my first attempt to penetrate the magazine’s sinister barrier with my seventeenth story, “Life Before Birth.” The next month, I tried my twenty-second story, “The Oak.” In January, 1941, I sent in my twenty-seventh story, “Little Man on the Subway,” in February, 1941, my twenty-ninth story, “Masks,” and in June, 1941, my thirty-fourth, “Legal Rites.”
All five stories were rejected at once and deservedly, since all five stories were simply terrible. (And this despite the fact that, in the months in which these stinkers had been turned out, I also wrote such well-regarded stories as “Reason,” “Liar,” and even “Nightfall.”)
Two of those five stories, “Little Man on the Subway” and “Legal Rites” eventually appeared elsewhere, but I attribute this to the fact that Fred Pohl collaborated with me on them—the only times he and I ever collaborated. The other stories never appeared anywhere and the manuscripts (thank goodness) are now lost.
On December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor was bombed and in April 1942, I departed for Philadelphia to work at the U.S. Navy Yard there. What’s more, in July 1942, I got married. Between my new job and my new wife, I did no writing for eleven months. (There were sizable gaps also when I finally found myself in the army, and when I was deeply engaged in my Ph.D. research, but in the last forty years, I am glad to say, I have never been completely away from my typewriter for more than a few days at a time.)
In January 1943, I finally felt the urge to write again, and, once again, I decided to attempt an Unknown story. Why not try again? It took me a while, for a six-day-a-week job and a seven-day-a-week wife cut into my time somewhat, but in April 1943, I sent off my forty-third story, “Author! Author!” And it was at once accepted. At last, at last, I was an Unknown author.
It takes roughly six to nine months to get a story into print after acceptance, so I didn’t expect to see myself an Unknown author until early 1944, but it was never to be. I told you earlier that the October 1943 issue of the magazine was its last, and I got the news of the forthcoming shutdown on August 2, 1943. My story would not appear.
It was a terrible shock, and it might well have turned me off writing for an indefinite period to come, had I not, in the euphoria of the “Author! Author!” sale, promptly written my forty-fourth story, a science fiction story, “Death Sentence” and sold it. It appeared in the November 1943 Astounding. That was the first month in which Astounding appeared in “digest-size,” which is now the common size for science fiction magazines. That second sale kept me going.
There is an odd epilogue to the saga of my never getting to be an Unknown author.
In 1963, twenty years after the demise of Unknown, the writer Don Bensen was putting out a paperback collection of five stories from that magazine. He asked me to write the introduction and, of course, I did—and I was pleased at the chance of doing it, too.
In the course of the introduction, I told the sad tale of how I had tried to be an Unknown author, and had failed, and had continued to fail even though I finally sold a story to the magazine.
Bensen accepted the introduction, and sent me an excited letter. He had not known that I had had a story accepted by Unknown. Had he but known, he would have tried to include it in the collection. Since he now knew, he was going to arrange a second collection of stories that would include “Author! Author!” I was certainly willing, but I pointed out that the story was twenty years old and contained topical references that now dated it badly. Also, I said, Astounding controlled the reprint rights. Bensen dismissed the outdatedness with a shrug and negotiated a release from Astounding.
In 1964, then, the paperback anthology, The Unknown Five (Pyramid), appeared, with “Author! Author!” as the lead story.
I was an Unknown author at last, and the interval of twenty-two years between acceptance and publication is the longest such interval I ever suffered or am ever likely to suffer.
EXTRAORDINARY VOYAGES
ONE OF THE PET PARLOR GAMES PLAYED by those interested in science fiction—writers, editors, fans, readers—is to define science fiction. What the devil is it? How do you differentiate it from fantasy? From general fiction?
There are probably as many definitions as there are definers; and the definitions range from those of the extreme exclusionists, who want their science fiction pure and hard, to those of the extreme inclusionists who want their science fiction to embrace everything in sight.
Here is an extreme exclusionist definition of my own: “Science fiction deals with scientists working at science in the future.”
Here is an extreme inclusionist definition of John Campbell’s: “Science-fiction stories are whatever science-fiction editors buy.”
A moderate definition (again mine) is: “Science fiction is that branch of literature that deals with human responses to changes in the level of science and technology.” This leaves it open as to whether the changes are advances or retrogressions, and whether, with the accent on “human response,” one need do more than refer glancingly and without detail to those changes.
To some writers, in fact, the necessity for discussing science seems so minimal that they object to the use of the word in the name of the genre. They prefer to call whatever it is they write “speculative fiction,” thus keeping the abbreviation “sf.”[1]
Occasionally, I feel the need to think it all out afresh and so why not approach the definition historically. For instance—
What is the first product of western literature, which we have intact, and which could be considered by inclusionists to be science fiction?
How about Homer’s Odyssey? It doesn’t deal with science in a world which had not yet invented it; but it does deal with the equivalent of extraterrestrial monsters, like Polyphemus, and with people disposing of the equivalent of an advanced science, like Circe.
Yet most people would think of the Odyssey as a “travel tale.”
But that’s all right. The two views are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The “travel tale,” after all, was the original fantasy, the natural fantasy. Why not? Until contemporary times, travel was the arduous luxury of the very few, who alone could see what the vast hordes of humanity could not.
Most people, till lately, lived and died in the same town, the same valley, the same patch of earth, in which they were born. To them, whatever lay beyond the horizon was fantasy. It could be anything—and anything told of that distant wonderland fifty miles away could be believed. Pliny was not too sophisticated to believe the fantasies he was told of distant lands, and a thousand years of readers believed Pliny. Sir John Mandeville had no trouble passing off his fictional travel tales as the real thing.
And for twenty-five centuries after Homer, when anyone wanted to write a fantasy, he wrote a travel tale.
Imagine someone who goes to sea, lands upon an unknown island, and finds wonders. Isn’t that Sinbad the Sailor and his tales of the Rukh and of the Old Man of the Sea? Isn’t that Lemuel Gulliver and his encounters with Lilliputians and Brobdingnagians? As a matter of fact, isn’t that King Kong?
The Lord of the Rings, together with what promises to be a vast horde of slavish imitations, are travel tales, too.
Yet are not these travel tales fantasies, rather than science fiction? Where does “real” science fiction come in?
Consider the first professional science fiction writer; the first writer who made his living out of undoubted science fiction—Jules Verne. He didn’t think of himself as writing science fiction, for the term had not yet been invented.
For a dozen years he wrote for the French stage with indifferent success. But he was a frustrated traveler and explorer and in 1863, he suddenly hit pay dirt with his book Five Weeks in a Balloon. He thought of the book as a travel tale, but an unusual one since it made use of a device made possible by scientific advance.
Verne followed up his success by using other scientific devices, of the present and possible future, to carry his heroes farther and farther afield in other voyages extraordinaires—to the polar regions, to the sea bottom, to the Earth’s center, to the Moon.
The Moon had been a staple of the tellers of travel tales ever since Lucian of Samosata in the 1st century A.D. It was thought of as just another distant land, but what made it different in Verne’s case was that he made the effort to get his heroes there by scientific principles that had not yet been applied in real life (though his method was unworkable as described).
After him, other writers took men on longer voyages to Mars and to other planets; and finally, in 1928, E. E. Smith, in his The Skylark of Space, broke all bonds with his “inertialess drive” and carried humanity out to the distant stars.
So science fiction began as an outgrowth of the travel tale, differing chiefly in that the conveyances used do not yet exist but might exist if the level of science and technology is extrapolated to greater heights in the future.
But surely not all science fiction can be viewed as travel tales. What of stories that remain right here on Earth but deal with robots, or with nuclear or ecological disaster, or with new interpretations of the distant past for that matter?
None of that, however, is “right here” on Earth. Following Verne’s lead, whatever happens on Earth is made possible by continuing changes (usually advances) in the level of science and technology so that the story must take place “right there” on future Earth.
What, then, do you think of this definition: “Science fiction stories are extraordinary voyages into any of the infinite supply of conceivable futures”?
FAIRY TALES
WHAT ARE “FAIRY TALES”?
The easiest definition is, of course, that they are tales about fairies where a fairy is a kind of imaginary being possessing many supernatural powers.
We most commonly picture fairies, in these Disneyish degenerate times of ours, as being cute little beings with butterfly wings, whose chief amusement is nestling in flowers. That, however, is a foolish narrowing of the notion. Properly fairies are any imaginary beings possessing many supernatural powers. Some are large and grotesque.
Therefore, stories dealing with witches, wizards, giants, ogres, jinn, afrits, baba-yagas, and many of the other creatures of legend may fairly be considered to be “fairy tales.” Since the powers of such “fairies” include the granting of wishes, the casting of spells, the conversion of men into other creatures or vice-versa, fairy tales are obviously a kind of fantasy, and some might even consider them one of the strands that went into the making of modern science fiction.
Because many fairy tales have unknown authors and were transmitted in oral form for many generations before they were written down by students of such things, and because, as a result, they lack polished literary form, they have been called “folktales.” But then some of our most beloved fairy tales have been written by known authors in comparatively modern times (for instance, Cinderella and The Ugly Duckling), so I think we had better stick to “fairy tales.”
Fairy tales have always been considered suitable reading for youngsters. Adults who have forgotten them, or who have never read them in the first place, seem to think of them as charming little stories full of sweetness and light. After all, don’t they all end, “And they all lived happily ever after”? So we all say, “Oh, my, wouldn’t it be great if our lives were just like a fairy tale.”
And we sing songs that include lines like, “Fairy tales can come true / It can happen to you …”
That’s all nonsense, of course, for, you see, not all “fairies” are benevolent. Some are mischievous, some are spiteful, and some are downright wicked, so that some of the fairy tales are rough going.
This all hit home once, about a quarter of a century ago, when I was even younger than I am now. At that time, I had two young children and I was wondering what I ought to do with them, so I attended some sort of parents/teachers meeting at the local school. At that meeting, a woman rose and said, “Is there some way we can keep children from reading the awful science fiction things they put out these days? They’re so frightening. Why can’t they read the delightful fairy tales that we read when we were young?”
Of course, I wasn’t as well known in those days as I am now, so I’m sure she didn’t mean it as a personal blow at me, but I reacted very promptly just the same, as you can well imagine.
I got up as though someone had shoved a long pin up through the seat of my chair and began to recite some of the plots of those delightful fairy tales.
How about Snow White. She’s a nice little girl, whose mother had died and whose father has married a beautiful woman as a second wife. The new stepmother doesn’t like Snow White, and the more good and beautiful the girl comes to be, the more her stepmother doesn’t like her. So stepmother orders an underling to take Snow White into the woods and kill her and, just as a little added attraction, she orders him to cut out her heart (after she is dead, I hope, though the stepmother doesn’t specify) and bring it back to her as evidence.
Talk about child abuse!
The wicked stepmother theme is a common one in fairy tales. Cinderella had one also, and two wicked stepsisters to boot, and she was mistreated by them all constantly—ill-fed, ill-dressed, ill-housed—and forced to watch those who abused her swimming in cream while she slaved away for them.
Sure both stories end happily but how many children are scarred forever by these horribly sadistic passages. How many women, innocent and good, who marry a man with children and are prepared to love and care for those children, are met with undying suspicion and hostility by those children because of the delightful fairy tales they’ve read.
There are wicked uncles, too. The Babes in the Wood is a short, all-time favorite. They are driven into the woods by their wicked uncle and starve to death there. Of course, the robins cover them with leaves, if you want to consider that a happy ending.
Wicked uncles were so popularized by fairy tales that they are to be found in formal literature. They make excellent villains in Stevenson’s Kidnapped, and in Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby. If you have read fairy tales and are young, I wonder if you don’t view some perfectly pleasant uncle of yours with careful wariness.
Or how about Little Red Riding Hood, in which an innocent little girl and her grandmother are swallowed by a wolf. Permanently, too, because if you’ve ever watched a wolf eat a little girl, you know that she gets torn apart. So don’t believe that bit about the hunters coming and cutting open the wolf, in order to allow the kid and her grandmother to jump out alive. That was made up afterward by people who had watched kids going into convulsions after reading that delightful fairy tale in its original form.
My favorite, though, is Hansel and Gretel. Here are two perfectly charming little children who have the misfortune to have a father who is a poor woodcutter. There happens to be a famine and they run out of food. What happens? The children’s mother (not their stepmother, but their very own mother) suggests they be taken deep into the woods and left there. In that way, there will be two less mouths to feed. Fortunately, they found their way back, to the disappointment and chagrin of their mother. Consequently, when famine struck again, the mother was right on the ball with her insistence that a second attempt be made to get rid of those little pests. This time the device is successful.
