PROLOGUE

 

My first science fiction story was published twenty-five years ago in Astounding (now Analog) — a rather unpleasant story called That Only a Mother . . . , concerned with the effects, on one small ordinary family, of life during a comparatively "clean" atomic war in (what was then) the near future.

In 1948, a lot of us were very worried about the imminence of that hypothetical war: not just about death and injury, injustice and destruction; and hardly at all about "winning" or "losing"; but mostly about the insidious aftereffects — cancers and leukemias that might follow years later for apparently untouched survivors — and the effects of sterility and mutations on plants, animals, and human beings for generations to come.

In 1946, 1947, 1948, a great deal was being published about these things. One read the Smythe Report and No Place to Hide and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the publications of the World Federalists and the daily newspapers. If one also read the science fiction magazines, the information total was staggering, unarguable, and terrifying.

There has been very little change in that total in this quarter-century. We have, of course, learned a great deal meanwhile about bacteriological and chemical warfare, both in theory and in practice. But so far as strictly atomic doom is concerned, the most significant differences are that the more powerful bombs and swifter delivery systems which were then predicted have been realized; and that the global holocaust which was then widely anticipated has not occurred.

I think it has not occurred because it took such a short time — perhaps five or six years — for the information that was fully available in 1948 to be disseminated, absorbed, and understood by many people, including small ordinary families, and even heads of governments. I like to think this rapid understanding came at least in part from the fervent dramatizing efforts of science fiction writers.

"Where do you get those crazy ideas?" This is the question S-F writers hear most often. Well, for instance:

That Only a Mother . . . dealt with radiation-caused mutation, not in broad statistical terms, or among bomb-victims, but as a side-effect due to casual exposure in one family on the "winning" side. Its specific sources were two: one, a tiny back-page newspaper article saying that the U.S. Army of Occupation in Japan had definitely established that the "rumors" of wide-spread infanticides in the areas of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were unfounded (even in those days some of us automatically read certain kinds of official U.S. releases backwards); the other, a domestic incident which brought sharply home to me how easily a mother (this one, for instance) can fail/refuse to notice a child's imperfections. The result was a story whose horror was rooted in a familiar domestic truism applied to readily-available public information which most people had simply not yet assimilated.

"Where do you get those crazy ideas?" From the same daily experiences and communications, books, newspapers, broadcasts, we all share. It's not the ingredients that are so strange, but the unexpected juxtapositions: the trick of looking at something familiar against an alien background, or examining the new and different against a familiar setting.

Science fiction is not so much prophecy as "probability." If you put this and this and that together in a certain way, here's what might happen. Sometimes the writer hits frighteningly close to what will happen, though not always for the right reasons: when I wrote that story about the armless-legless baby in 1947, I was thinking about radioactivity, not thalidomide.

"Realistic" fiction is about things that have happened. "Fantasy" is about things (we are fairly sure) don't happen. "Science fiction" is about things that could happen.