"01 - Introduction by Kate Wilhelm" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Awards)

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."