Magic, page 20
Can you imagine how much confidence this instills in any child reading the story? Thereafter, he keeps a sharp eye on the refrigerator and the pantry to see if the food is running short, for he knows who’s going to be taken out to the garbage dump and left there in case the family runs short.
But that’s not the worst. In the forest, Hansel and Gretel come across a gingerbread house owned by a witch, who promptly imprisons Hansel and starts fattening him up for a feast, with him as main course. Cannibalism—just in case the kid reader didn’t get enough kicks out of abandonment and starvation. Of course, it ends happily because the kids get away from the witch (killing her by burning her in an oven, of course) and come home to their loving father. Their mother (hurray, hurray) has died.
Can you imagine mothers wanting their children to read stuff like this, instead of good, wholesome science fiction? Why if we printed stories à la Grimm (grim, indeed) in our magazine, we’d be harried out of town by hordes of indignant citizenry.
Think of that when next you feel moved to complain about the “violence” in some of our stories. Why, they’re mother’s milk compared to the stuff you expect your eight-year-olds to read.
Of course, fairy tales reflect the times in which they were told. Those were hard times. Poor woodcutters were really poor and there was no welfare roll they could get onto. Famines were really famines. What’s more, mothers frequently died in childbirth, and fathers had to marry again to have someone take care of the youngster. Naturally, the new wife promptly had children of her own (or had them already by an earlier husband) and any woman would favor her own children over some stranger. And fathers did die young and leave their property to an infant child and appoint a brother the guardian of both child and property. Naturally, the brother, knowing that once the child grows up and takes over the property in his own right, he himself is out on his ear, is tempted to prevent that dire possibility from coming to pass.
Nowadays with children less likely to be orphaned before they have reached the age of self-care, those plots are passé and seem needlessly sadistic. They were realistic in their own times, however.
Nevertheless, if some of the problems of the past have been ameliorated, others have cropped up. Parents are less likely to die while their children are infants; but are more likely to get divorced.
If wicked uncles are passé, wicked landlords are not. If wolves don’t roam the suburbs much anymore, drug pushers do.
Some define science fiction as “today’s fairy tales.” If so, you have to expect them to deal with the realistic dangers of today, but we at Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine will try to keep them from falling into the depths of depravity of yesterday’s fairy tales.
DEAR JUDY-LYNN
Judy-Lynn del Rey was, with her husband Lester del Rey, the guiding genius of Del Rey Books, the outstanding personality in the science fiction publishing world, and a dear friend of mine of seventeen years standing. She will never read this letter, but I must now write it. She was also the person most responsible for the rise of modern fantasy in the book publishing field.
DEAR JUDY-LYNN: You were born some forty years ago with a genetic deficiency that meant you would be unusually short all your life. Fortunately, you were born to loving and supportive parents, who were determined to treat you as though you were a perfectly normal child in every way.
The result was that you never asked for sympathy or expected to be treated in any favored way. You met the world on its own terms, completed college brilliantly, made your mark afterward as well, and won the admiration of all who knew you.
In this you were helped, of course, by the fact that your intelligence was far above average. Of all the women I have ever met you were the keenest, the quickest, the most brilliant. All it needed was a little time and that characteristic of yours drowned out everything else in anyone’s estimation.
You were also a happy person, an uncomplaining one, and a loving and giving one. I never heard you whine or grouse. And you had a sense of humor—but I’ll get to that.
I met you at a science-fiction convention in April 1968. I was delighted with you and, for the next few years, we were inseparable at conventions. It was a pleasure to be able to extend myself in bantering conversation, knowing that you could take care of yourself perfectly well. In fact, only once did I really manage to get past your guard.
As you well know—as everyone knows—I myself have a peculiar deficiency. It consists of a total lack of common sense; a dreadful propensity to believe people. In fact, I am what is commonly known as a “jerk,” or, in the nonsexual sense, a “prick,” and I have been frequently told so by any number of dear friends who felt I ought to learn to be worldly-wise.
In any case, I was sitting next to you at a convention dinner and you said to me, sardonically, “You’re all heart, Asimov.” To this, I replied, just as your napkin happened to slip from your lap to the floor, “No, I’m not. I’m part prick.”
You bent to retrieve the napkin and as you straightened up again, I said, innocently, “Were you checking to see if I was correct?”
You turned a very pretty magenta and said, “Damn it, Asimov, you’ve made me blush,” which was something, apparently, you hadn’t done since you were fourteen.
It may have been that which caused you to embark on a campaign designed to prove I was indeed what I had called myself. At that time you were working at Galaxy and you used its facilities to plague me.
You sent me the proofs of a cover of an issue in which I was to have a story, and you made sure that my name was horrendously misspelled. Naturally, I was on the phone in half a second in a fever of concern, and you promised to correct the situation.
On another occasion, you sent me a review of a television special I had written, a review that had been printed up in such a way as to appear to be a newspaper clipping. The review was incredibly insulting in a dozen different ways, for it was written by Lester del Rey, who aided and abetted you in your design to teach me a lesson and who (devil that he is) knew all my buttons. I was again on the phone demanding to know the name of the newspaper so that I could write them a nasty letter. It took a little while to calm me down.
Each time you pulled one of these tricks, someone in your vicinity would warn you that I would never fall for it. You would bet a dinner that I would and later on you would go out for a meal at the doubter’s expense. I don’t know how you managed to get anyone to bet on my worldly wisdom twice. In any case, you had lots of free meals.
Once I got a letter telling me that you had been fired. It was signed by Fritzi Vogelgesang, who introduced herself as your successor. I was dreadfully upset but Fritzi was so pleasant and so innocently flirtatious that a correspondence was quickly set up and in no time at all I was being suave all over the place. And then, when Fritzi had me jumping through hoops, she disappeared forever, for she had been you all the time. “So, Asimov,” you wrote, “how quickly you forgot all about me.”
But your most elaborate trick came on April 1, 1970, when I got a call from the secretary of Larry Ashmead, my editor at Doubleday. The news I got was that Larry had eloped with you and that the two of you were married. I was certain that that couldn’t be, but when I called you, you weren’t at work. I couldn’t locate anyone who could give me information. I was on the phone all day, calling different people without satisfaction (you had everyone properly primed), and the fact that it was April 1 made no impression on me.
You felt it to be your masterpiece, I think. On April 15, 1985, I took you out, along with Lester, and Larry, in order to celebrate the fifteenth anniversary of that “wedding.” We had a wonderful time rehashing all those old tricks.
Lester’s wife had died in January 1970, and you, who were a dear friend of both, made sure that Lester bore up under the strain. The two of you grew closer with time and (with my enthusiastic encouragement) were married in March of 1971. I was at the wedding grinning all over the place, quite triumphantly convinced it was all my doing.
Long afterward, you said that when the ceremony reached its climax, you had the impulse to turn to me and say, “Fooled you again, Asimov. This whole thing is just a setup.”
You said you wanted to watch me turn green and faint. I said, “But Judy-Lynn, I might have had a heart attack.”
You said, “I was willing to chance that. The only trouble was that my mother might have had a heart attack, too, and I didn’t want to chance that.”
I suppose you always regretted your inability to pull off that perfect practical joke on your favorite patsy.
That marriage was the best thing that ever happened to you, Judy-Lynn, and it was also the best thing that ever happened to Lester. The two of you were perfectly matched. Lester had his encyclopedic knowledge of science fiction and fantasy and his unparalleled editorial ability; you had your drive, your genius for spotting worthwhile material, and your sure touch at promotion.
You were working with Ballantine Books at the time, which had been bought by Random House. You were promoted steadily by people who understood your worth, you were given your own imprint, Del Rey Books, and you became a vice president. And you were worth every penny to Random House. There was scarcely a moment when the New York Times didn’t have at least one Del Rey Book on the hardcover best-seller list and another on the softcover best-seller list.
It is impossible these days for any one editor to dominate the field in the way that John Campbell did in the 1940s; however, you came the closest to doing so, and it may be that no one will ever come so close again.
On the personal side, you bought reprint rights to my new generation of science fiction novels, beginning with Foundation’s Edge, and when Ballantine Books took over Fawcett, you put out new editions of all my Fawcett paperbacks. It was such a pleasure to find myself side by side with you again, looking at possible covers, writing up new introductions, going over old books to correct old typographical errors.
All this time, too, we had been socializing. On my fiftieth birthday, you had arranged a surprise party for me with the help of Austin Olney, my editor at Houghton Mifflin. Ever since, it became traditional that on my birthday Janet and I would host a dinner out with you and Lester. Even on January 2, 1984, when I was two days out of the hospital after my triple bypass, I managed to make it to the nearest restaurant to celebrate my sixty-fourth, and you were there.
You were also at the publication party for my latest novel Robots and Empire on September 18, 1985. Then, on October 4, the four of us had dinner and we talked about the series of paperbacks you were publishing that would contain all the old Barnaby comic strips by Crockett Johnson.
But that was the last. On October 16, you suffered a sudden brain hemorrhage and passed into a coma. On February 20, you passed from us forever. It is a dreadful loss to Lester, and to me, and to everyone who knew you.
Most of all it is a dreadful loss to science fiction, none greater since the death of Campbell. Campbell had, it seemed, passed his peak at the time of his death, but you were still on your way up. So for many, many reasons, the parting is a very painful one, dear Judy-Lynn.
FANTASY
SOME READERS HAVE BEEN OBJECTING to a few stories we have published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine as being “fantasy.” We printed one or two of these letters and promptly (and predictably) got a rash of letters objecting to the objection and urging us to include fantasy, if we wished.
This is part of the difference between what I might term the “exclusionists” and “inclusionists” among ourselves. Exclusionists are those people who have firm definitions of what science fiction is and who resent the inclusion of any story that doesn’t meet that definition. They would, in other words, exclude the marginal stories. Once you know that, you automatically know what an inclusionist is, don’t you? Inclusionists either lack a firm definition, or have one but aren’t wedded to it. Either way, they would include all sorts of things.
I, myself, am an exclusionist, in my capacity as a writer and, to a certain extent, as a reader. The science fiction I write is generally “hard,” deals with science and scientists, and eschews undue violence, unnecessary vulgarity, and unpleasant themes. There is no philosophic reason for that; it merely happens to fit my way of thought. And, as a reader, I tend to enjoy the kind of science fiction I write, and to give but brief attention to other kinds.
As editorial directors, however, Shawna McCarthy (1983-1985) and I are inclusionists, and we must be. We can’t rely on all readers having our tastes exactly, and if we insisted on catering only to those who did, we would narrow the basis of support of the magazine to less than might suffice to support it. Rather than pleasing x people 100 percent of the time, it would be safer to please 10x people 90 percent of the time.
Therefore, if we were to come across a good and thought-provoking story that might be considered a fantasy by the exclusionists, we would be strongly tempted to publish it—especially if we were short on good thought-provoking “straight” science fiction.
(At this point, I might point out—and not for the first time—that we are at the mercy of authors and of circumstance in designing the makeup of the magazine. Readers sometimes seem to have the notion that we are, for some mysterious reason of our own, deliberately filling the magazine with novelettes and skimping on the short stories, or having too many downbeat stories in one particular issue, or too many first-person stories. The trouble is that if we have a several-months stretch in which very few lighthearted—or third-person—or very brief—stories reach us that are good, we can’t avoid running short on them. We can’t print bad stories just because we need one that’s funny, or short, or whatever. This also goes for readers who berate us at times for not including stories by so-and-so in the magazine. We would love to include such stories, but the author in question has to send them to us first. Please keep that in mind.)
But back to fantasy. Fantasy is from the Greek phantasia, which refers to the faculty of imagination. The word is sometimes spelled “phantasy” in homage to Greek, but I find that foolish. (In fact, I find the Greek “ph” foolish altogether and think it would be delightful if we spoke of fotografs and filosofy, as the Italians do.) A contracted form of fantasy, with a similar meaning, is “fancy.”
In a very broad sense, all fiction (and a great deal of nonfiction) is fantasy, in that it is drawn from the imagination. In our group, however, we give the word a special meaning. It is not the plot of a story that makes it a fantasy, however imaginative that plot might be. It is the background against which the plot is played out that counts.
The plot of Nicholas Nickleby, for instance, is entirely imaginative. The characters and events existed entirely in Charles Dickens’s imagination but the background is the England of the 1830s exactly as it was (allowing for a bit of amiable, and in some cases, unamiable satire). This is realistic fiction. (We can even use the term where the background is made artificially pretty. Surely, the cowboys of real life must have been pretty dirty and smelly, but you’d never think it to look at Gene Autry or Randolph Scott.)
If, on the other hand, the background does not describe any actual background as it is (or once was) then we have “imaginative fiction.” Science fiction and fantasy are each an example of imaginative fiction.
If the nonexistent background is one that might conceivably exist someday, given appropriate changes in the level of science and technology, or given certain assumptions that do not conflict with science and technology as we know it today, then we have science fiction.
If the nonexistent background cannot ever exist no matter what reasonable changes or assumptions we postulate, then it is fantasy.
To give specific examples, the Foundation series is science fiction, and The Lord of the Rings is fantasy. To be more general about it, spaceships and robots are science fiction, while elves and magic are fantasy.
But there are all kinds of fantasy. There is “heroic fantasy,” in which the characters are larger than life. In this case, the outsize nature of the characters may be so enormous as to verge on the grotesque, as in the case of Superman or the other superheroes; or may be so human in many ways that we find ourselves accepting them as real, as in the case of the elves and hobbits of Tolkien’s masterpiece. The so-called “sword-and-sorcery” tale, of which Robert E. Howard’s Conan saga is the progenitor, is a sub-division of this.
There is “legendary fantasy,” which deliberately mimics the myth-making activities of an earlier age. We can have modern retellings of the Trojan War, or the voyage of the Argonauts, or the saga of the Ring of the Nibelungen, or of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. A marvelous recent example of this last is Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon.
There is “children’s fantasy,” of which the well-known “fairy tales” are the best example, though these were definitely adult folk tales to begin with. Modern examples can stretch from the inspired madness of Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland to the realism of Hugh Lofting’s Dr. Dolittle tales (so realistic we almost forget that animals which talk and think in human fashion are actually fantasy).
There is “horror fantasy,” in which tales of ghosts and malign beings such as devils and ghouls and monsters are used to thrill and frighten us. The motion pictures are rich in this type, from the satisfying greatness of King Kong and Frankenstein to the good-natured foolishness of Godzilla.
And there is “satirical fantasy,” such as the marvellous tales of John Collier (did you ever read “The Devil, George, and Rosie”?)—and this, frankly, is my favorite type of fantasy.
