Authors: Ben Bova
Much of what those outsiders have created is unpalatable to the majority of us who have spent our lives in science fiction.
Frankly, I am appalled to see motion picture producers sinking twenty, thirty, forty million dollars into tripe such as
Close Encounters of the Third Kind,
or
Alien.
The motion picture version of
Star Trek
was not as good as the average segment of the TV series, despite the money and talent that was lavished on it. And Disney’s
Black Hole
was an exercise in frustration for all concerned, especially the audience.
In the world of the printed word, we have seen the mainstream picking up a number of science fiction ideas and themes, and using them in mainstream novels that have little to do with science fiction.
Try reading a Robert Ludlum novel, or any of a dozen books that have been on the best seller lists this year, such as
The Third World War.
The scenarios, the plot techniques, the trick of presenting future events as past history, all these have been lifted bodily from science fiction.
Most of these books would not have been published at all five or ten years ago, because the publishers would have considered them too “far out.” Or, if they were published, they would have been labeled Science Fiction and sold to us in the ghetto, while the multi-million-dollar mainstream market totally ignored them.
The only thing that the mainstream has not lifted from science fiction has been the science fiction writers. With the exception of Frank Herbert’s
Dune
novels and Robert Heinlein’s newest work, no science fiction writer has ever received the backing from a publisher that is necessary to reach the exalted level of Best Sellerdom.
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Happily, this situation has improved greatly since 1980.
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Of course, Heinlein’s
Stranger in a Strange Land
has sold millions of copies. So have several other science fiction novels. But only over a period of many years. Movie tie-ins sell fast and furiously, but it is difficult to rank them as science fiction novels.
On the magazine front, there is good news and bad news.
The good news, I say unabashedly, is
Omni.
For some strange reason, I’m rather partial to that magazine.
Omni
is selling close to one million copies per month. It has nearly 200,000 paid subscriptions. Readership surveys by independent organizations such as Yankelovich, Skelley, and White report that
Omni
has at least four million readers each month.
In short,
Omni
is doing quite well, despite the persistent rumors of catastrophe that I hear at science fiction conventions. Two months after the magazine started, some fans were claiming that it was going to fold up. Two weeks after I became the Executive Editor, I heard a rumor that I had walked off the job. It’s as if some fans
want Omni
to fail, because they cannot stand the idea of a magazine that contains science fiction making a major success out there in the real world.
Less good is the situation with the other science fiction magazines.
Analog
has been sold to Davis Publications. While this is probably a good thing for
Analog
in the long run, because Davis is much more interested in the magazine than Conde Nast ever was, it is a disappointment because it means that one of the most powerful magazine publishers in the nation still cannot see the value of science fiction.
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
is doing very well, and George Scithers picked up his second well-earned Hugo in three years at Noreascon II. But frankly, the magazine is aimed at such a juvenile audience that an old-timer like me finds it rather uninteresting most of the time.
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction
seems to be going along its literate way, still the darling of Charlie Brown’s readers, but virtually unchanging, year by year.
Galaxy
and
Amazing
have been in deep trouble for years, and
Galileo—
the most interesting of the newcomers—has also run into serious financial problems.
If history has taught us anything, it is that magazines must grow or die. Inflation is constantly driving costs upward. If a magazine that depends almost entirely on its cover price is to stay in business, it must either bring in more customers or raise its cover price. No magazine can continue escalating its price indefinitely, so the long-range goal must be to increase circulation.
Yet the science fiction magazines have been singularly unable to accomplish that task.
I must point out that
Omni—
because it is sold to a much larger readership than the science fiction audience, and because it is heavy with advertising—does not fall into the same category as the “hard-core” science fiction magazines.
Grow or die. The hard-core science fiction magazines are not growing.
Is science fiction itself growing or dying? Most outward signs point toward growth. There are more people attending science fiction conventions than ever before, and more conventions being held. Noreascon II was a well-managed mob scene, with nearly six thousand people in attendance. In fact, the WorldCon now ranks among the top annual conventions held within the United States, which explains why the hotel chains treat fandom with some respect.
Most colleges and universities regularly schedule classes in science fiction. And (God help us all) there are now professorships in science fiction. No one has been able to count the thousands of high schools and junior highs that hold science fiction classes.
Yet, how many of these convention attendees and students and—yes, even
Omni
readers—are truly science fiction fans? Only a small percentage, apparently. The true test of fandom’s strength lies in the circulation of the hard-core science fiction magazines and in the sales of science fiction paperbacks. Magazine circulation has grown very little, if any, over the past decade. And paperback book sales have dropped so steeply that heads are rolling all through the book publishing industry.
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This too has changed for the better.
^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~^
More alarming—to me, at least—is that the mental attitude of fandom has not seemed to grow much over the past ten years. Or twenty, for that matter.
I attend conventions year after year and see the same people saying the same things to each other. Some of the faces change, from time to time, but the
ideas,
the
mindset,
remains the same.
You don’t think so? Take a look at the most popular science fiction books of 1980 and compare that list with the best-read books of 1970, or 1960, or even earlier. The same themes, the same characters, with only minor variations.
We pride ourselves on being “the literature of ideas.” But too many of us are locked into the past: the future we dream about is a juvenile’s dream—a juvenile of 1945, at that.
Instead of stepping into the real world and taking charge of it, as we should be doing, we sit back with still-yet-another version of a Doc Smith epic, or the latest heroic spasms of Conan the Kumquat.
And don’t you women snicker at the phallic fantasies of the men. Neither as writers nor as readers have you raised the level of science fiction a notch. Women have written a lot of books about dragons and unicorns, but damned few about future worlds in which adult problems are addressed.
Fandom stays firmly in the vanished remains of the old ghetto, like a tribe that clings to the ruins of an ancient city. We revel over the nonsense regurgitated in fan magazines when we should be pondering the ideas of Rene Dubos or Hans Bethe.
Now, all of this is fine, if that’s what you like. I’d be an ungrateful sonofabitch to insist that you
must
take your heads out of those yellowing pages and assume your rightful place in the real world.
The trouble is, you are bright, intelligent, vigorous, capable men and women. The real world needs you, needs your intelligence and dedication, and needs it
now.
There are not many like you. As Cyril Kombluth pointed out in “The Marching Morons,” there are more idiots out there than genuises. By far.
I can’t force you to become active in the world beyond the science fiction ghetto, so I’ve got to convince you that you should. The place where you are most needed, where you can make the most important contribution, is in the space program.
In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was Arthur C. Clarke’s... and Robert A. Heinlein’s... and Willy Ley’s... and the words of many other writers.
When I first started reading science fiction, “flying to the Moon” was a popular way of saying that something is impossible. “Harry Truman has as much chance of beating Tom Dewey as he has of flying to the Moon.” Hearty laugh.
But the poets of that era—the science fiction writers— dreamed of going to the Moon. Writers such as Ley, and Heinlein, and Clarke showed that it could be done. They convinced the American people that it should be done.
By 1961 we had a President who accepted the challenge and led the American people to the Moon. Some of you may be old enough to remember that in 1961 we were far behind the Russians in space efforts. By 1969, a scant eight years later, we had raced ahead so far, so fast, that the Russians pretended they had never been interested in the Moon at all.
And we believed them! Our space technology reached the Moon so easily that many Americans fell for the delusion that it was all a big public relations stunt.
Even science fiction writers (some of them) thought that the space program had somehow lost its excitement, its romance, its poetry.
What had happened, of course, was that the poets had been shouldered aside by the engineers. Science fiction writers had helped to get the program started, but they could not do the actual technical work. I certainly would not want to ride in a rocket engineered by me! Getting to the Moon required engineers and astronauts, administrators and bureaucrats. Not poets.
So the science fiction writers stood on the sidelines and watched. Some refused to watch. Some became antagonistic. Brian Aldiss complained bitterly that American science fiction writers were “sucking up to NASA” and that this was ruining American science fiction. Barry Malzberg, on hearing that Spiro Agnew was in favor of going on to Mars, castigated the whole space program and everyone in it as tools of repression.
These were foolish statements, made under the passions of the moment. There is an old Russian story about a fox and a sparrow and a pile of manure that ends with the moral: It’s not always your enemies who put you in it, and it isn’t always your friends who get you out of it, but if you’re in it up to your neck the least you can do is keep your big mouth shut!
Because of the general backlash against space—a punishment, mind you, for being successful—the Nixon Administration was able to slice away at NASA’s funding. While Nixon himself smilingly greeted the first astronauts to return from the Moon, his White House aides were cutting the throat of the Apollo program. Apollo did not die; it was foully murdered.
If we had used our space capabilities through the decade of the 1970s as we had originally planned to, we would today be beaming energy from space to the Earth. We would be preparing to mine the Moon and the asteroids for the megatonnages of natural resources that have been waiting there untouched for four and a half billion years.
Instead, we have allowed our ambitions in space to dwindle to almost nothing. And our national economy, our prestige, our power, our standard of living, our own selfrespect, have all dwindled equally over the past decade.
Enemies of the space program say we should not spend so much money on space, as if we take cartloads of greenbacks up in rockets and leave them on the Moon. We do not spend a lot of money on the space program. I know that NASA’s budget of $5 billion per year looks huge. But consider the job that needs to be done.
Consider the fact that the Department of Defense spends $5 billion every two weeks. And the Department of Health and Human Services spends that much every nine days. Consider the fact that we, you and I, spend $7.5 billion per year on pizza, $18 billion on cigarettes, $40 billion on booze, and God knows how much on pot.
During the course of the Apollo program we spent $23 billion to reach the Moon. We got in return, not merely a few hundred pounds of rocks, but the team and the technology that can take us anywhere in the solar system that we wish to travel. During those same years the Federal government spent more than $500 billion on programs to help the poor. Who has been helped? There are more poor today than there were when those programs began. And the gap between rich and poor has widened, not narrowed.
Make no mistake about it. We need the energy and the natural resources that exist in space. Today, the world’s population is almost 4.5 billion. By the end of this century it will be at least 6 or 7 billion. Can you imagine the social turmoil, the political conflicts, the terrorism and wars of a world twice as crowded as we are today? A world with fewer natural resources, less food, less energy?
We must reach out to the wealth that waits in space and bring it safely here to Earth, to make everyone richer. Not a welfare system, where we slice a finite-sized pie of resources into smaller and constantly-smaller pieces until everyone starves. That is the politics of scarcity. It leads only to doom.
We have at our fingertips a new bonanza that will give us a hugely larger pie, so that everyone can share in abundance.
And that is why you are needed.
Science fiction fans can see the future more clearly than politicians and businessmen. It is up to you to convince them that our future lies in space.
“Ye are the light of the world... but men do not light a candle and put it under a bushel... let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works...”