Catastrophes!

Foreword

It is quite customary for a piece of fiction to contain at least the threat of disaster. It is the threat, the menace, the apprehension of something one desperately does not want to take place that creates the suspense, and that rouses the interest of the reader.

To be sure, the disaster may be a very slight and personal one-the youngster who may fail the test, or lose the game, or be turned down for a date-but it is there. To be equally sure, the story may be a lighthearted one with a happy ending, but the disaster, however slight, must be there in the mid-course for the ending to shine happily against.

This is not to say that a story cannot be written without a disaster, but what a dull story it would be and how little worth the reading.

And, as in so many other respects, science fiction manages to outshine other types of fiction. Where but in science fiction can real disasters be found?

Take the most elaborate of realistic suspense and what can you have? The loss of a war? The enslavement of a nation?

In science fiction, the destruction of civilization is the least one might expect as the threat of disaster, or its actual accomplishment, is represented to the reader.

In this collection of twenty stories, we have four stories dealing with each of five different levels of disaster, organized according to a scheme I devised in my nonfiction discussion entitled A Choice of Catastrophes (Simon and Schuster, 1979; Fawcett Columbine, 1981),

The movement is from the most all-encompassing catastrophes toward progressively narrower ones. If this sounds to you like a journey into anticlimax, you are wrong, for as the catastrophes become narrower, they also become more probable. In short, in this book you may be steadily decreasing the scope but you are as steadily increasing the danger.

Why bother? Why scare yourself?

For one thing, these are memorable stories you will enjoy and won't easily forget. For another, humanity does face catastrophes of various levels of scope and various gradations of likelihood, and if there is any chance at all of evading them or blunting them, that chance will be heightened if we know what the dangers may be and consider in advance how to prevent or ameliorate them.

Staring at danger may not be pleasant-but closing your eyes will not make the danger go away, and with closed eyes you will surely be destroyed by it.

Isaac Asimov