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I can think, offhand, of nine writers who fulfill these qualifications, and here they are:
1) Jack Williamson. His first story was published in 1928, when he was twenty years old. He has been writing steadily for fifty-nine years, and he is now eighty years old. To me, he is the undoubted and wellbeloved dean of science fiction. His “The Legion of Space, “ which bounced me off the wall when I was a teenager, appeared fifty-three years ago.
2) Clifford D. Simak. His first story was published in 1931, when he was twenty-seven years old. He has been writing steadily for fifty-six years and he is now eighty-two years old. His “City” appeared forty-three years ago, and “Cosmic Engineers” forty-eight years ago.
3) L. Sprague de Camp. His first story was published in 1937, when he was thirty years old. He has been writing steadily for forty-nine years and is now seventy-nine years old. His “Lest Darkness Fall” which I read in preference to studying for an all-important test in physical chemistry (without ever regretting it) appeared forty-eight years ago.
4) Isaac Asimov. (You didn’t think I’d leave myself out through some perverted notion of modesty, did you?) My first story was published in March, 1939, when I was nineteen. I have been writing steadily for forty-eight years, and I am now sixty-seven years old. My story “Nightfall” appeared forty-six years ago.
5) Robert Heinlein. His first story was published in August, 1939, when he was thirty-two. He has been writing steadily for forty-eight years and he is now eighty years old. His “Blowups Happen “ appeared forty-seven years ago.
6) Fritz Leiber. His first story was published in August, 1939, when he was twenty-nine. He has been writing steadily for forty-eight years and he is now seventy-six years old. His “Conjure Wife” appeared forty-four years ago.
7) Frederik Pohl. It’s hard to say because so much of his early stuff appeared under pseudonyms of one sort or another, but an undoubted story of his appeared in 1941 when he was twenty-one. He has been writing steadily for forty-six years, and he is now sixty-seven years old. His “Gravy Planet” (“Space Merchants”) appeared thirty-five years ago.
8) Arthur C. Clarke. His first story appeared in 1946, when he was twenty-nine. He has been writing steadily for forty-one years, and he is now seventy years old. His “Rescue Party” appeared forty-one years ago.
9) Poul Anderson. His first story appeared in 1947, when he was twenty-one. He has been writing steadily for forty years, and is now sixty-one years old. His “The Helping Hand” appeared thirty-seven years ago.
I don’t pretend that this list is necessarily definitive. Offhand, I can think of three other possible survivors. Lester del Rey’s first story was published in 1938, while A. E. Van Vogt and Alfred Bester were each first published in 1939. In recent decades, however, they have not published much, so I can’t honestly deny burnout in their cases.
If we look at the list, we can come to some conclusions, I think. In the first place the survivors were all science fiction fans from a very early age, and gained a life-long fascination with the field. That must be so.
Secondly, each must be a nonsuffering writer. Lots of good writers, even great writes, don’t necessarily like to write, and must force themselves to do so. This doesn’t prevent them from writing well, you understand, but it does prevent them from writing a lot, and my qualification for being a survivor is that one writes steadily and prolifically.
Thirdly, each resists the notion of abandoning science fiction. It is not likely that survivors can write only SF and nothing else. To my knowledge, Simak, Pohl, and Anderson have written good nonfiction; Clarke and de Camp have written quite a bit of good nonfiction; and I have written a thundering lot of it. In addition, Pohl has written mainstream fiction (he has a new novel entitled Chernobyl that’s coming out-very unusual and not science fiction). De Camp has written excellent historical novels. As for me, I have written a great deal of mystery fiction. In every case, however, no matter how they stray, these survivors always return to science fiction.
There you are. “Dinosaurs”? I think not. I think the survivors (even I) are the great pillars of science fiction. I wonder how many more of them will appear in the future.
Nowhere!
In 1516, the english scholar Thomas More (1478-1535) published a book (in Latin), with a long title-as was the fashion in those days-that was also in Latin. When it finally appeared in its first English edition in 1551, the title was given as “ A fruteful and pleasant Worke of the beste State of a publyque
Weale, and of the newe yle, called Utopia.” We refer to the book simply as Utopia.
In the book, More described the workings of what he considered an ideal human society, as found on the island nation of Utopia, one that was governed entirely by the dictates of reason. His description of such a society is so noble and rational that it would seem enviable even today.
More was under no illusions as to the real world, however. The word “utopia” is from the Greek “ou” (“not”) and “topos” (“place”) so that it means “nowhere.” More realized, in other words, that his ideal existed nowhere on Earth (and still doesn’t). In fact, his book, in describing his ideal society, served also by clear contrast to excoriate the actual governments of his day, particularly that of his native England which, of course, he knew the best.
An easy mistake was made, however. Since Utopia, as described, was such a wonderful place, it could easily be imagined that the first syllable was from the Greek prefix “eu-” meaning “good” so that Utopia became not “nowhere” but the “good place.”
The word “utopia “ entered the English language, and the other European languages as well, as meaning an ideal society. The adjective “utopian “ refers to any scheme that has what seems a good end in view, but that is not practical, and ca
We might speak of utopian literature-written accounts in which ideal societies are described, with More’s as the classic, but not the earliest, example. Plato’s R epublic was a description, nineteen centuries earlier than Utopia, of an ideal state dependent upon reason. Earlier still, were accounts of ideal states in mythological or religious literature, in the form of past golden ages or of future messianic ones. The Garden of Eden is a well-known example of the former, and the eleventh chapter of Isaiah of the latter.
The production of utopian accounts has not fallen off since the time of More, either. The most influential recent examples have been L ooking Backward, published in 1888 by Edward Bellamy (1850-1898), which described the United States of 2000 under an ideal Socialist government, and Walden Two, published in 1948 by B. F. Ski
All such utopias are not convincing, however. Unless one accepts the conventions of religion, it is difficult to believe in golden or messianic ages. Nor can one easily suppose that sweet reason will at any time dominate humanity.
In the course of the nineteenth century, however, something new entered the field of utopianism. The possibility arose that scientific and technological advance might impose a utopia from without, so to speak. In other words, while human beings remained as irrational and imperfect as ever, the advance of science might supply plenty of food, cure disease and mental ailments, track down and abort irrational impulses, and so on. A perfect technology would cancel out an imperfect humanity. The tendency to take this attitude and to paint the future in glowing technological colors reached the point where what we call science fiction is called, in Germany, “utopian stories.”
As a matter of fact, however, it isn’t at all likely that the average writer is going to try to write a truly utopian story. There’s no percentage in it. All you can do is describe such a society and explain, at great length, how good it is, and how well it works, and how it manages not to break down. There can’t be any drama in it, no problems, no risks, no threat of catastrophe, no pulling through by the merest squeak.
Clearly, if such things were possible, the utopia would be no utopia. It follows that utopian stories are, by their very nature, dreadfully dull. The one utopian novel I’ve actually managed to read was Looking Backward, and although it was a best-seller in its times and still has its enthusiasts, I tell you right now that if dullness could kill, reading it would be a death sentence.
So dull are utopian books that they fail to fulfill their function of pointing out the errors and faults of the societies that really exist. You can’t grow indignant over these faults if you fall asleep in the process.
There developed, therefore, the habit of attacking societies in a more direct fashion. Instead of describing the good opposite, one described the evil reality, but exaggerated it past bearing. Instead of a society in which everything was ideally good, one described a society in which everything was ideally bad.
The word coined for a totally bad society is “dystopia,” where the first syllable is from the Greek prefix “dys-” meaning “abnormal” or “defective.” Dystopia is the “bad place.” Thus, you can figure out what “dystopian literature” would be.
Dystopias are intrinsically more interesting than utopias. Milton’s description of his dystopian Hell in the first two books of Paradise Lost is far more interesting than his description of utopian Hell in the third book. And in The Lord of the Rings, not much can be told about the stay of the Fellowship in the utopian elfland of Lorien, but how the story intensifies and grows more interesting as we approach the dystopian Morder.
But can there be dystopias today with science and technology advancing as they do?
Certainly! You need only view science and technology as contributing to the evil (which is not difficult to do).
And yet pure dystopian tales are as dull and as unbearable as pure utopian ones. Consider the most famous pure dystopian tale of modern times, 1984 by George Orwell (1903-1950), published in 1948 (the same year in which Walden Two was published). I consider it an abominably poor book. It made a big hit (in my opinion) only because it rode the tidal wave of cold war sentiment in the United States.