"Introduction to Nebula Award Stories 12" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Awards)

To Clifford D. Simak, Grand Master,
by Award of the Science Fiction Writers
of America, April 30, 1977



Introduction

This is the twelfth annual edition of the Nebula Awards winners, a volume containing the winning novella, novelette, and short story, and some of the runners-up for the Nebula Awards in 1977. The stories published here, as with those in the anthologies of previous years, are remarkable for their quality; and the question arises, as it has before, how long such a standard can be maintained. Regarded with a slightly pessimistic eye, this string of winners and runners-up over the twelve-year period since the Awards were begun could look to be a result of a series of favorable accidents-accidents so favorable, in fact, that it would seem to be frying in the face of statistics to expect they would continue.
Well, is this twelve-year list of Award winners and nominees indeed the result of a series of lucky accidents? Or is it perhaps the result of factors that may provide for such a list to continue, supplying more good writers and more good stories in the future?
There are at least some specific factors that not only tend to explain the long line of worthy pieces of writing we have had in the past, but indicate their probable continuance into the future. These factors have their roots in the very nature of, twentieth-century science fiction itself. First, and most important, of these is the
fact that the field of science fiction has always had one outstanding characteristic. That is that its readers have always welcomed; an unusual amount of freedom on the part of its writers, freedom from any single idea, pattern, attitude, or style. The result has been that traditionally science fiction has tended to produce writers who were unique and experimental-in a word, pioneers.

This is the more remarkable in that the field originally emerged from a tight classification which imprisoned it along with the mystery story, the western, and even the historical and adventure stories, back in the days of pulp fiction. All the factors were in existence at that time which could have been expected to keep science fiction permanently in a literary straitjacket. Instead, it has spent the last forty years gaining and maintaining its independence from just that sort of restriction; and it has been able to succeed in this primarily because it has developed not merely its own writers, but its own editors and finally, now-its own publishers, people who grew up in the field and are today in a position to see published what they know from experience the readers will want to read.

In point of fact, the urge to break loose from artificial restrictions on story and substance showed up in science fiction writers very early. The trend to plow new territory appeared in the magazines of the late, thirties and the early forties. Science fiction, by definition, was always future-conscious-sometimes even future-self-conscious. There is no point here in rehearsing once more what John Wood Campbell did for the independence of the field in those early years. There were other editors as well, also with the courage to publish what they liked, even though it did not conform to the category pattern that was then being impressed on pulp fiction generally.

Literally, from the beginning, this field broke taboos. Literally, even from the beginning, it produced writers who created the field by what they wrote. One of the most stubborn misconceptions about this area of fiction on the part of those who do not read it has always been the notion that there was a particular, describable literary animal known as science fiction, and what did not fit the description, was not.

Of course, there was and is no such description. In-
stead, there is a growing collection of works by a num-
ber of authors over a period of nearly fifty years which
by its existence has defined the term "science fiction."
Every successful writer who emerges in this area clears
new territory out of the virgin literary wilderness and
adds it to the territory already recognized to lie under
the flag of the genre. Until the new lands are laid open
to view, their possible existence is unimagined. Who,
for example, could have foreseen the stories Frederik
Pohl, James Tiptree, Jr., Isaac Asimov, and Charles
Grant would create to win the awards they have won
this year?

The answer is that none of these writers or the kinds of writing they do could have been predicted before they had made their appearance. Looking at the four Award winners mentioned above, we can recognize at least four types of science fiction. But what have even these four authors in common that makes what they all write science fiction? This is the hardest question in the world to answer; and writers and publishers within the field have struggled with it for many years without coming up with a really workable definition. Damon Knight's "science fiction is what I point at" remains about the only unassailable-if not very helpful-yardstick that the field has produced for defining itself. We tend to recognize science fiction, as we recognize genius, only after it has made its appearance. Nonetheless, freedom remains an essential element of it, whatever form it takes-freedom from previously , recognized patterns, even from the pattern of current literary fashion.

It seems, then, that if we must have a hallmark for the field, we will have to return to the image of the science fiction writer as a literary pioneer. Literature by pioneers tends to appeal to other pioneers-and science fiction does tend to appeal to research scientists, to futurists, to readers at odds with or in revolt against
some establishment of the present. It appeals because in literature, as in history, a pioneer needs and is necessarily concerned with courage, determination, and a great desire for freedom and independence, and whatever the form or style of the science fiction concerned, it tends to deal with such things.

In a literary sense, these elements translate into the work of a writer who has something for his or her own to say unlike anything that has ever been said before; and who wishes to say it not only in his or her own way, but in his or her own voice and words. Work of such kind is difficult to censor or regiment; and this difficulty has made it a practical impossibility for a common and inhibiting form to develop in science fiction. That there is no such common form has sometimes been very difficult for some observers outside the professional boundaries of the field to believe. It is human nature for the individual to think that good literature is what that particular individual approves of, and all else should be outside the canon. Unfortunately, this aspect of human nature has shown itself to tend toward a blindness to the virtues of what is not approved, and a tendency to condemn what it does not understand, or finds too different for comfort. Consequently, science fiction, as a self defining genre, has had to resist the impulses of some of its best friends to put it into different bags at different times in its history, right down to the present one-bags which in every case would have excluded work that properly belonged within its canon. The efforts continue; not merely on the part of some publishers and booksellers, but on the part of some scholars, academics, critics, and others without and within the field itself. Human nature being what it is, they can be expected to so continue into the future.

Still, so far, all such assaults upon the essential and necessary freedom of the field have been defeated. Pioneers, historically, are not easy to conquer. Because this is so, and the freedom remains, there is every reason to expect that the field will go on, as it has, to attract more and more new writers of merit and in

dependence. So that what we have enjoyed for nearly half a century we may continue to enjoy in continually new and different forms, as new and different authors emerge to comment upon the unrolling page of time, running ahead without fear of being shut out from their readers, to point out the hills and valleys, the mountains and caverns-indeed, the worlds-that lie ahead.

GORDON R. DICKSON

Twin City Airport, Minnesota
July, 1977