"Gordon R. Dickson - Future love" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dickson Gordon R)

The fabric of these three stories is part of the time in which they were written. As
with stories written in any period, however, their threads stretch back to the very
earliest patterns of storytelling. Science fiction, which started out with the
conventions of nineteenth-century fantasy, has in less than a century developed
techniques peculiar to itselfтАФtechniques, however, which are now being
borrowed by the mainstream of fiction.

Many mainstream writers do not realize whom they have to thank for these
techniques. This is not surprising, however, since even many SF writers have no
idea where the roots of their special techniques lie. Besides the old tradition of
fantasy out of which it developed, science fiction itself owes a particular debt of
gratitude to the nineteenth-century storytellersтАФnot only to recognized earlier
writers of the genre, such as H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, but to many of the
other people then writing in Western literature, who wrote either proto-science
fiction or fantasy verging on science fiction, simply as variations of the short-
story forms in which they were accustomed to expressing themselves.

What began to distinguish science fiction from other writing in that early time
was the idea of what might be called technologized fantasy. From this came the

file:///C|/2590%20Sci-Fi%20and%20Fantasy%20....%20Dickson%20(ed)%20-%20Future%20love.html (3 of 169) [12/28/2004 3:51:16 PM]
futurelove


so-called hardware science fiction of the early pulp eraтАФa direct descendant of
the tales of Wells and Verne. This was the science fiction of rockets and robots
and other futuristic machines, and in the nineteen-thirties it achieved its first real
development into something like present-day science fiction in the magazine
Astounding, under its editor, John W. Campbell.

John Campbell took hardware science fiction and insisted that it have something
more to it than technology. What Campbell wanted was to tie all this into what he
called an "idea story," a story that used all the trappings of what was then science
fiction to demonstrate a logical point about Man and his present or future
possibilities.

This "idea story" was really the thematic storyтАФa story built around a theme. Its
roots in the modern era go back to Flaubert's Madame Bovary. Following World
War II, science fiction writing began to expand into this larger area of thematic
story proper; developing ever more depth and breadth in the nineteen-fifties and -
sixties, to emerge in the present decade with its emphasis on "people" stories with
themes growing out of the character and motivation of human beings in a possible
world.

The three stories in this book are excellent illustrations of exactly this
metamorphosis; in a very true sense, evidence of science fiction's coming of age
in twentieth-century literature.

FUTURELOVE
GORDON R. DICKSON