Acknowledgments

The editor of an anthology always owes a good deal to many people, and I perhaps more than most, since this is my first. My thanks then to Donna and Bert Emerson, who did so much of the real work; to Lloyd Biggle for always being there with advice when called upon; to Vonda N. McIntyre and Alan Dean Foster, for answering when I called. And thanks to Victoria Schochet, for letting me do it, and to Damon Knight, because he was there if I needed him.

K.W.
Introduction

Conventional wisdom tells us fiction is dying, the short story is dead. Like the statisticians who lop off the extremes that tend to unduly influence results, conventional wisdom chooses to ignore the entire field of science fiction. The fact is science fiction is in a period of exuberant sprawl, appearing in unpredictable places, virtually creating its own markets as it sweeps along. Short science fiction stories are reprinted over and over before the ink on the original has had time to set up permanently. Conventional wisdom says the youth of America doesn't read; our own experience tells us in college after college, when science fiction appears in the catalogue in any form-appreciation courses, overviews, how-to, whatever-the young people rush to fill those classes, and those students have read, and are still reading. Often they are better informed in this area than the teachers. These students are physics majors, sociology majors, anthropology students, mathematicians, English literature majors, musicians, artists .... Every field seems represented.
	Inevitably one must ask why this surge of interest in a field that has been ghettoized for so long. It may be the answers will vary as much as the definitions of science fiction . do, that no simple reason can ever be found, but rather there will be a mosaic of causes inseparably bound together.
Usually a science fiction reader will say he became interested in this field because of its ideas. But the word "ideas" must then be defined before the answer becomes meaningful. When Plato spoke of ideas he meant those things that are real, in fact, the only things that are real, not mere shadows of things. Scientists are concerned with phenomena, again from the Greeks, meaning "things that seem," or "present themselves to our senses."

When a reader says, "I read science fiction for the ideas," t believe he is talking about the ideas in a Platonic sense. And what are the ideas of science fiction? The future. Space travel, or cosmology. Alternate universes. Time travel: Robots. Marvelous inventions. Immortality. Catastrophes. Aliens. Superman. Other dimensions. Inner space, or the psyche.

These are the ideas that are essential to science fiction. The phenomena change, the basic ideas do not. These ideas are the same philosophical concepts that have intrigued mankind throughout history.

With Francis Bacon's formulation of the scientific method, the separation of science from philosophy began; by now there is little, if any, connection between them. Immortality, as idea, is not investigable by microscope and statistical data analysis; the phenomena of aging, of bacterial disease, of cardiac disease, of modern genetics research are immensely rewarding fields of study. In the process of scientific discovery, the philosophical questions regarding immortality itself were put aside.

One by one the sciences became specialized, became more involved with phenomena that could be tested in the laboratory and, as they developed into the different and separate disciplines that we know today, they left philosophy with little to debate except ethics and morality, which have proven inaccessible to rigorous scientific study. Ethics and morality were not to be debated for long, however, because the school arose, elegantly explicated by Bertrand Russell., that turned

philosophy inward to examine the words and syntax it used and had always used. This was the final turn from the great ideas that had stirred men's passions over the ages. It is hard to become passionately involved with the logical analysis of syllogisms.

	Ideas that are archetypal in their universality, that
arouse passions, that inspire people to write dense,
eight-hundred-page books, and other people to read
them, don't die; and the concepts of Plato, Kant,
Descartes, Schopenhauer, Bergson are alive and ex
citing for this simple reason: the questions they raised
are still waiting answers. And this is what science fic-
tion is about. 		I

In our fiction where the story is about the future, and doesn't simply use the future as background, whether utopia or dystopia is described, we are faced instantly with the problem of determinism and free will; the necessity or randomness of historical change; the opposing propositions concerning the perfectibility of man or fallen man, whose institutions only can be perfected. From Plato's Republic to More's Utopia to Butler's Erewhon, to Spencer's utopia that will arise from an industrial state with free trade, to the utopias we create, we all see the future, through the spectacles provided by our own culture Our reasoning is filtered through the things we hate about our culture, and the things we approve, and Ghost of other things we accept as given without question.

The ideas in Plato's Republic so permeate our thinking that nearly all the others that have followed seemed designed to refute, or accept and modify, his basic premises. We build our utopias on a future Earth, or on other planets, but the standard by which we judge them was written over two thousand years ago, and to date has not been surpassed in its thoughtfulness and its comprehensiveness.

In the alternate universe story we are trying to cope: with the concept of infinity. No one can really conceive
of infinity any more than he can grasp figures in the billions, or even millions. When we are provided aids, such as, so many cars bumper to bumper from here to the moon, that, too, is meaningless. How far is the moon? How fast is twenty-five thousand miles an hour, the escape velocity? What we can understand is a personal experience of distance expressed as time. Twenty-four hours to drive to New York. Twenty minutes to fly to Miami. We count on our fingers and for really tough problems we might use our toes, even our teeth. The macroscopic and the microscopic are beyond our ability to comprehend. Infinity is merely a word. Alternate universe stories attempt to understand. For example, every universal instant (that is, each instant for each person) a new universe comes into being. If a choice is negative here, in another universe it is positive. The changes can be very great or, in another universe born only minutes ago, very slight. It is a way of exploring what would have been if . . . whatever if stands for. It is a way of trying to grasp infinity.

Alternative universe stories offer a rationalization for immortality, because every time we escape death in this universe, in another we die, and conversely, when we finally succumb, there is a universe in which we do not.

The eighteenth-century poet Blake wrote: "To see a world in a grain of sand . . . Hold infinity in the palm of your hand/ And eternity in an hour."

The microscopic world of intelligent beings has passed out of fashion; now we have the alternate universe instead. The phenomena, the tools we use, change; the idea persists.

Kant reasoned time and space out of existence: they are modes of perceiving, or innate characteristics only. There has always been a problem of defining what we mean by "now." As soon. as I speak of it, it is gone. If I anticipate it, it is not yet. Bergson said this moment is the culmination of the past becoming the future;

time means duration; now is the sum of everything past.

In our dreams and trance states we experience other times, sometimes future times. This led J. S. Dunne to postulate his serial time theory. Priestley put it this way: events are in pigeon holes that can be entered and left again-the events will be there forever, have always been there.

Or is time simply a symbol, a word we use to mean the process of change? Aging: nonrecurring change; progression of seasons: recurring change. Relativity of time says a space traveler approaching the speed of light will age much less than one remaining on a stationary object-Earth. Are there different rates of time, pockets where time is slower, even flowing backward? In this context we should consider the definition provided by an anonymous writer: "Time is an illusion perpetrated by the manufacturers of space."

Aristotle believed everything is cyclical-we exist in a tape loop that will replay itself endlessly. Asimov's story "Nightfall" explores this theory. Surely this is the most fatalistic philosophical construct of all. Schopenhauer carried it further than Aristotle and was reduced to absolute pessimism.

I will be here at this table drinking from this glass over and over again, he said, and there will be the same suffering, the same injustices in the world . . . . The only way to escape, he wrote, was through suicide. And this, too, would recur endlessly.

Theories about time are practically inexhaustible in the literature of philosophy. And science fiction writers come back to them again and again.

Robot stories have religious overtones; they touch on the problems of ethics and morals. From the Golem of Prague, to the Sorcerer's Apprentice, to Frankenstein, to modern Colossus, the machine doesn't perform as expected. It is flawed by the mistakes of its creator. As the dangers of the world increase, the power of the machine to bring about complete destruction grows more evident. The monster in Frankenstein simply wanted a mate and a place to live in peace in the wilderness. It threatened few people, and only after being denied this basic existence. Colossus has the power of life and death over the entire world. What this fiction asks is: is the thing created responsible for its flaws? In human terms, is man responsible? Why does man have to suffer because of flaws he cannot prevent?

These stories say man is not capable of becoming the Creator-at least not yet-and both man and his creation are doomed in the attempt. Alfred Bester's "Fondly Fahrenheit" demonstrates this inescapably in having master and robot share a psychosis. This line runs through many of the stories: the creator is insane, his creation is insane. Harlan Ellison's "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" is another example. There are many.

Side by side with robot stories are those about marvelous inventions, amazing discoveries, spectacular breakthroughs. They examine the same philosophical problems. .

They reflect the attitudes that man, in his imperfect state, will build a better mousetrap that will swiftly catch him. Creator and victim of his creation: that is how science fiction looks at man and his wonderful new toys. These stories are concerned with the problem of good and evil, and the impossibility of separating one from the other. Serious writers have been struggling with the problem of good and evil for thousands of years, and there is no solution yet that satisfies everyone. Voltaire created his most memorable comic character, Pangloss, to satirize the then prevalent attitude that everything created by God of necessity must be good, that man is simply too limited in his vision to achieve understanding of the ultimate good that must be derived from that which is only apparently evil.

A modern example of the impossibility of knowing [ --V in advance if a product is good or evil is DDT. No

one alive today can truly balance the good it has done against the great evils that followed and continue to follow.

So these stories keep alive this cautionary note: man's vision is too narrow to judge. the good and evil he is capable of doing, and the best intentions in the world can't insure good results.

Immortality again goes to the heart of philosophy and religion. Man has been proving or disproving immortality for centuries. Kant reasoned that mart, has an innate morality, a priori knowledge of right and wrong. From this he went on to reason that since man's choice of good over evil is seldom sufficiently rewarded, and indeed often brings him injury, it follows that he must be rewarded in an afterlife. Compensation or, in psychological terms, reinforcement is necessary or the trait or action will be extinguished, but morality continues , to be practiced. A being capable of fulfilling this reward in an afterlife must exist, and that being, of necessity, is God. This is arguing for immortality in an afterlife, with assumptions of an eschatological design for human beings, a divine goal.

In science fiction the immortality is assumed for this ` earthly body, and the weight of centuries of belief in ` the mortality of man comes into question. Is there a divine plan? Is death a long sleep, eternal oblivion? Is there a purpose in the development of intelligence? ` Immortality stories are elitist by nature. The Greeks believed only their heroes could achieve immortality. We have carried this forward and broadened the definition of hero to include ourselves. The maids and the garbagemen and the elevator operators are not immortal. Would this thwart evolution of the species, and is there such a thing? Is man destined to become godlike in the fullness of time? Are we the bridge to superman?

The immortals of fiction are created with the same flaws that show up in marvelous inventions and robots. Eventually they become bored, or they have a fatal '
defect after all. Man has a finite capacity for pleasure or pain, for adventure, for anything that might lure one to wish for immortality, and very quickly, measured on the clock of eternity, he would become sated with living: He is forced to reexamine his attitudes and fundamental beliefs.

If intelligence is accidental, and evolution blind, if there is no divine plan after all, then the hedonists' view of man becomes more acceptable, and immortality no longer seems a sin against our own progeny.

This raises another no less grave problem: can intelligence survive without sufficient purpose? And what is sufficient purpose?

No one has to consider this seriously today, but tomorrow we might, or the day after that.

Granting man has evolved, have the changes been gradual, or is man changed abruptly by an outside force, as in 2001, or by something he does himself? In Darwin's time there was a raging battle between the catastrophists and the gradualists, or evolutionists. The biblical flood was accepted as the first recorded catastrophe that changed mankind. Before the flood man's life-span was measured in hundreds of years; after the flood his life-span was that of modern man. The adherents of catastrophism asked many questions that are still to be answered. Why did the dinosaurs die out? There are theories, but no hard facts. Why did the mammoths stand and freeze to death, with fresh grass in their mouths? Why didn't they try to flee south? What was that cold wind that froze everything in seconds?

The latest battle was fought this century, only twenty years ago, between Velikovsky and his critics who, no matter how they refuted him, could not deny the evidence of worldwide catastrophes: terrible floods, widespread droughts, lands sinking, others rising.,

It has been suggested that Darwin's theory of natural selection, expressed by Spencer in the phrase, "survival of the fittest," was eagerly accepted by the rising

industrialists who saw in it the perfect justification for their own emerging philosophy of economics.

Nietzsche said if man's destiny is manipulable by man himself, then it is man's duty to prepare for superman through selective breeding. And this thought, taken out of context, without the later disclaimers, culminated in the Nazi pogroms of eradication of the Jews, and the eugenics plan designed to bring forth a thousand years of Aryan supermen. Evolution speeded up through man's intervention.

There are people who today believe eugenics is the answer to many, perhaps even most, of the ills that plague mankind-inferior intelligence, hereditary diseases, and so on.

A new catastrophic ice age could accomplish much the same goal: only the cleverest, strongest, most adaptable, most courageous, most life-oriented would survive, and they would breed a new generation in, their image.

William James tells a charming story. A white traveler-explorer in Africa received a newspaper, the first he had seen in months, and he read it word for word, column after column, and even reread parts of it. The puzzled natives watched silently, and when the explorer finally had exhausted the paper and was ready to discard it, the natives asked if they could buy it. He wanted to know what possible use they had for it. And they said it must be powerful eye medicine, or why would he have bathed his eyes in it for so long?

We are all aliens to someone. Even among ourselves, in familiar groups, no one of us can know what another is experiencing, what he thinks, the depth of his sadness, the intensity of his pain, the height of his joy. We are all aliens to each other. We simply are more or less used to the strange behavior of others and try to put up with it with as little friction as possible.

In dealing with extraterrestrial aliens we are not so kind. There are three ways of treating aliens in fiction that seem to repeat endlessly. First, we treat them as
cuddly animals, larger-than-life kittens, or koala bears, and feel superior to them. Or we treat them as gods, and fear them, because they might, after all, judge us. Or we treat them as enemies who will get us if we don't get them first. And one wonders, is our xenophobia inherent, or learned? The recent experience with the Tasaday people seems to disprove it is innate. History shows good cause to fear outsiders, strangers. Too many instances of friendly natives being slaughtered by explorers and exploiters have left their imprint. We have all been taught to fear the stranger, the alien. Our treatment of aliens in our fiction seems then to be a justification of an acquired human trait that we recognize as unworthy. Perhaps what the stranger is doing is not mysterious and threatening at all; perhaps he is merely reading the latest news from home because he is lonely.

Of course, our xenophobia also goes back to the belief in a geocentric universe. We are the chosen people, and from biblical days to Descartes, we have known it is not only our right but our duty to master and rule over everything lesser than we. Any nation at war tends to treat the enemy this way, and to reinforce their subhuman status, the enemy is called slopes, gooks, krauts, big nose, redskin ....

The geocentric universe theory is dead. The belief that God created man in his image has no scientific basis. The idea that was made not only possible but necessary by these two beliefs, that man is the chosen creature of the universe, lives on, and is examined again and again by writers today.

In fiction superman is doomed. Nietzsche decided the time is not yet right for his appearance. I suspect it never will be right for a solitary superman. He is incontrollable, unpredictable, and a threat, regardless of his intentions. Superman shakes our faith in the laws of nature, and if this goes, it takes everything else with it. It is much easier for primitive people to accept the idea of superman, because they don't believe in the

orderliness of nature anyway. Except in the most ephemeral fiction, we create a superman and then damn him for being different and destroy him, or more often, have him destroy himself. We will trim the hair of every Samson we create.

We have to because a technological civilization is grounded in the logic of cause and effect, of order and predictability, and of stability, which can bend a little, but absolutely must not break.

It can be argued if God created man in his image, then superman must have been created by Satanic powers, and it is man's duty to destroy this manifestation of evil. Or, if man evolved from the lesser creatures, and now presumes to create superman, his creation must be flawed, because man is himself imperfect. The creature must be destroyed. Also, it is vastly reassuring to believe all men are created equal, except for those who are naturally inferior to us.

Nowhere on the bell-shaped curve that represents mankind is there room for superman.

In space travel stories we are competing with the astronomers with the two-hundred-inch Palomar telescope, the giant radio telescopes, computers, records that go back thousands of years, and predictions for thousands of years to come. The Incas were astronomers, the Babylonians, some say the Druids, but in spite of the equipment, the respectable age of science, and all the money and man-hours devoted to it, no one knows today how the universe began, how it will end, even if it began and is destined to end. There are theories that come and go like the seasons-the Big Bang, all matter was condensed into one mass that exploded, or was exploded, and ever since has been rushing from the scene of the original Big Bang. There is the steady-state theory-nothing has changed or will change. It didn't begin, won't end. The universe has been described as a perfect piece of clockwork, a mechanism wound up by God to tick forever. There is the oscillating-universe theory that says it expands,
then contracts, and does this forever. There is the expanding universe theory that says matter is forever being created and the universe is forever growing larger. Every mythology attempts to explain the creation of Earth, if not the universe. Astronomy was one of the dead sciences for a long time. Everything had been learned that could be, but today it is tumultuous. There are new discoveries that are not understood-quasars, pulsars, black holes, white holes. Space travel stories are exciting news stories, complete with photographs. As news or fiction, space travel brings some of this excitement to the reader, probably more to the writer. The universe is mysterious, awesome, beautiful, and we know practically nothing about it.

Probably a caveman looking at the sky was the first philosopher. There have been flat-earthers, hollowearthers, the geocentric universe, the heliocentric universe. Slowly we have found our place in the universe, but the questions remain, even as they must have occurred to that first aware caveman. What is it? Why is it?

Historically the psyche has been the battleground of the materialists and the metaphysicians. Is the mind a tabula rasa, a blank slate on which can be written what man is to be? Or does the mind contain a system of a priori knowledge? Kant said the ultimate nature of reality is conceivable but not knowable. Modern physiological psychologists say there is nothing except the chemical-electrical activities of the physical brain: what we call consciousness is a byproduct. Bergson wrote that consciousness is apart from the brain, arising from it, but not necessarily dependent on it. His analogy was this: a coat on a peg is linked to it, and if the peg falls, the coat goes with it, but the coat is not the peg. It exists as a separate thing in itself. It is not an epiphenomenon of the peg. Metaphysics attempts to discover the ultimate nature of reality, and in this sense the innerspace of science fiction is metaphysical fiction.

This isn't a dead issue dragged from the eighteenth century to our contemporary scene. It is very much alive; adherents from the opposing views are still active. The battleground changes, the weapons bear new names. The war is the same. B. F. Skinner, the best known of a host of behaviorists, is persuasive as he demonstrates his results of operant conditioning, and hypothesizes a future in which man can be trained to become whatever the conditioners decide is best for mankind. Not merely become that, but be happy in that role. Noam Chomsky, also active, well known, gathering disciples all the while, seems able to prove, also decisively, the innate structure of the mind with an inherent grasp of language and its grammar. Jean Piaget, working with children, takes this even further, and is able to demonstrate that certain recognizable human characteristics are physiologically determined, among them empathy (which becomes possible no earlier than eight or nine), deductive reasoning, generalizing, and others. No system of rewards and punishment (conditioning) can hasten these developments, if Piaget's theory is correct; moreover, when the child is ready, the latent (innate) ability automatically becomes operational. Potentiality becomes actuality, and each generation spontaneously rediscovers the mental activities that separate Homo sapiens from the rest of the animal kingdom.

This is not merely an idle speculation, material for armchair philosophers. Today the biochemists, the psychologists, the behavior modifiers, the neurophysiologists, the analysts, those in ESP research, even nutritionists are all staking out claims in this area.

How much of man in innate, how much is learned behavior? Children's art from around the world reinforces the validity of Jungian archetypes that affect everyone. The way we see our world is innate, and only with training can we view it with the spectacles provided by our separate cultures. That man can be conditioned is a reality also. The battlegrounds have
been chosen, the lines drawn, the antagonists are in place. This could well be the fiercest battle of all, involving every one of us.
	Lost in the exciting phenomena of discoveries, there remains the basic idea, the basic question: What is man?
	These are some of the ideas of science fiction. They aren't new. They have been debated over the centuries, and there have been few enduring answers to the imponderable problems raised by these ideas. No one can be disinterested in them because a new discovery in any of these areas would drastically influence everyone alive today, everyone who will live in the future. An immortality serum discovered tomorrow would alter the lives of everyone on earth. There would be a shift in everything we believe in, and nothing would ever be the same again.
	Ask the general public what science fiction is all about and the answer will probably be, the future. In a sense this is correct, but only in that science fiction uses and will continue to use the phenomena of the future, its hardware, its extrapolations, its changing cultures, in order to explore ever again the ideas that have always intrigued mankind. And in this lies its strength. In this lies its appeal to a whole new generation of readers who seem to grasp intuitively that these ideas must be kept alive and that somehow science fiction has found this need and is satisfying it.

	KATE WILHELM
Madeira Beach, Florida
February, 1974