THE IDEA FACTORY
There are nearly forty-five years' worth of ghosts peering over my shoulder. The complete file of Astounding/Analog issues, starting with the January 1930 Astounding Stories of Super Science, sits on the bookshelves behind my desk.
Since that very first issue, Astounding/Analog has been a magazine of ideas, a meeting ground for new concepts and opinions, a place that both writers and readers turned to when they wanted to sharpen their wits. Certainly, once John W. Campbell hit his stride as Editor, the magazine became a veritable Idea Factory.
In fact, due largely to Campbell's all-pervasive influence, science fiction has generally become known as "the literature of ideas." In a more disparaging tone, critics have pointed out that many science-fiction stories have The Idea as their hero, rather than human characters. In truth, we have all seen plenty of stories that were little more than a clever idea, sketched out in barely fictional form.
Ideas are important. They are not the be-all and end-all of science fiction, but they are a necessary ingredient in any good science-fiction story. Yet many outsiders have asked science-fiction writers, "Now that we've gotten to the Moon, what's left for you to write about?" And at least one prominent writer in this field, who has stopped writing science fiction, has reportedly said that all the good ideas have been used up, and there's nothing left to do but rehash them.
It would be simple to use Isaac Asimov's put-down. When asked what's left to write about, the Good Doctor invariably says, "What's left? Only everything!"
But let's examine the problem a bit more deeply.
Every week, I see dozens of manuscripts that groan under the burden of the same tired old ideas, ideas that were rusted with age twenty and thirty years ago: the last two survivors of a global disaster turn out to be Adam and Eve; the "astronaut" struggling to get out of his "capsule" turns out to be a baby being born; the interstellar explorers find a new planet peopled by strange, barbaric, semi-intelligent creatures—the planet is Earth and the creatures are us. Most times these stories are written in the "tomato surprise" format: that is, the author saves the stunning surprise until the very last line of the story. It wasn't even a good technique when Verdi used it in Il Trovatore.
Then there are the stories that are instant clichés. Stories about the energy crisis or Watergate or campus unrest that would have made good science fiction ten years ago, but are not science fiction today, even though they may be set on Mars or Alpha Centauri. Science fiction is not "with it"; science fiction is—and has to be—ahead of it.
Most of these stories come from new writers who haven't yet learned how to dig deeply into their imaginations and come up with new ideas, original concepts. Still others get started on a good story line, but don't have the skill or courage to follow where the story logically leads. They frequently chicken out of a difficult plot situation by letting the protagonist die or commit suicide. Which is hardly the way to treat an audience of problem-solvers!
Yet there is a steady flow—albeit a slim one—of stunningly good stories by brand-new writers that are original, innovative, thought-provoking. In the twelve most recent issues of Analog, the Analytical Laboratory voting has given first place to two new writers and second place to eight; a remarkable showing when you consider that most of these issues featured serials and lead novelettes by "old pros" such as Gordon R. Dickson, Poul Anderson, Stanley Schmidt, Jerry Pournelle, and William Cochrane.
New writers can and do turn out good stories; stories that are rich in idea content and the special excitement of powerful fiction. And the readers respond to them accordingly.
The greatest disappointment of this Editorship is that some of the older writers, whose names and works we grew up on, have gotten out of the habit of tinkering with new ideas. They plow the same overworked ground in story after story, repeating themselves rather than seeking new territory. These stories don't get into Analog.
These older writers aren't the only ones who cling to the past. Whenever a letter arrives at this desk with the opening, "I've been reading Astounding for more than twenty years . . ."—it's a complaint that the magazine is now featuring stories "that John would never have bought." Of course! John bought stories in the Sixties that he would never have bought in the Forties. Times change, tastes change. There has been a steady evolution. The Editor, the writers, the readers, the world keeps on changing, evolving, moving with the inexorableness of time's arrow.
No Editor would publish stories that are twenty years old in style and subject matter—not if he wanted to keep his audience. The nostalgia trip may be fine for anthologies, but magazines are the cutting edge of the science-fiction field, the place where the newest ideas and newest writers are tested.
Some of our readers are upset about the increasing realism in Analog's stories, especially as regards sex and language. It's interesting to realize that John Campbell was attacked back in the 1930's for shaking the field by insisting on realistic stories. In those days, realism meant stories that had solid scientific backgrounds and believable characters. Some readers couldn't stomach Campbell's "new realism." But very quickly, he built up an audience that would no longer accept the pseudoscience and cardboard characters of the earlier type of science fiction.
The great majority of today's audience also want realism in their science-fiction stories. Good science and good characterizations are taken for granted. The audience has matured to the point where some inclusion of sex in a story no longer sends everyone into a hot sweat. After all, the entire nation's attitude toward sex has liberalized considerably over the past generation. We're almost back to the pre-Victorian attitude, but not yet as far as the Elizabethan.
The same goes for what has euphemistically been called "strong language." Today's readers don't mind seeing in print the words that they hear and speak themselves every day.
This is not to say that Analog will become a porno magazine filled with obscenities. I would not buy a story just because it has sex and street language in it. But neither will I reject a story outright for that reason. The guiding principle is realism. In most science-fiction stories, putting in a sex scene or obscene language is totally unnecessary and detracts from the story. But in some, the characters' sexual behavior is an important part of the story, or the gutter language a character uses is a vital part of the characterization.
We've heard strong opinions from the readers on both sides of this matter. But an analysis of the AnLab voting shows that sex and language problems don't really affect the outcome very much; powerful stories place highly, no matter how much or how little sex and foul language is in them. (Incidentally, it wouldn't hurt if more readers made their feelings known by voting in the monthly Analytical Laboratory poll. All you need to do is send in a postcard with the stories in the current issue listed in your own order of preference. The first-place winner gets an extra cent a word for his story, second-place winner gets a half-cent extra, and the Editor gets to know in some detail just what your tastes really are. So put our money where your mouth is!)
Let's get back to ideas.
We've all seen countless stories featuring an interstellar empire. Has anyone stopped to think of what an interstellar empire would really be like? Because the chances are that the only interstellar empires the human race will ever see will be in science-fiction magazines. All political organizations have a natural limit to their size, placed on them by the speed of communications available to them. In ancient Greece, the limit of political cohesion was set by the distance a man could reasonably walk in a day: city-states. Ancient Rome, with its solid engineering and good roads made an empire that girdled the Mediterranean basin. The Mongols of the Thirteenth Century invented the pony express relay system and built an empire that spanned Eurasia from the Sea of Japan to the Danube.
If the speed of light is a limit on communications, then there can be no interstellar empires. The distances between the stars are so vast that it would take generations to get information from one star system to another. Even if we get around the light-speed limit in some manner, it would appear that starflight would take so much energy—like the energy output of a star itself to propel a modest-sized ship—that interstellar flight would be fantastically expensive and thus very rare. Instead of an empire, there would most likely be a loose confederation of stellar systems, linked tenuously by the occasional visits of prohibitively expensive starships.
Yet we keep seeing stories that blithely assume an interstellar empire with a political structure not too far removed from the Roman and British models. When is a writer going to sit down and figure out how an interstellar community might actually behave? Poul Anderson has come the closest to doing this, but the subject is vast enough for many, many writers to examine all the different permutations.
There's another piece of artistic shortchanging that too many writers pull on themselves. That's the story where the hero never sweats. No matter what heinous trap the villains have dumped him into, no matter how many generators have blown out, no matter that his girl has run off with an android and the extraterrestrials are merrily blowing up every city on Earth, Our Hero smiles grimly and does exactly the right thing. And he wins without even mussing his hair. The problem here is that the writer knew from the beginning that everything was going to work out OK, and he let it show in his hero's behavior.
All the action, suspense, problems are merely plot devices. We all know that the good guy will solve all the problems, conquer the baddies and win the girl. Instead of a story, we have a superman myth that gets more boring each time it's retold.
There are more editorial crotchets that we could examine, but I hope you get the drift of my leanings from these few examples. So much for worn-out ideas. Where are the new ones?
In the minds of the writers and readers, mostly. But here are a few you can mull over.
Science fiction has had its share of pirate stories. John Campbell himself wrote about air pirates, although most SF stories have dealt with piracy in space. Air pirates—hijackers—have become a reality. But modern hijackers don't use the same modus operandi as Cap'n Kidd and his swarthies, nor do they operate for the same motives. The technology and the society have changed; so have the methods and motivations of the pirates. Assuming that there will be some form of piracy once interplanetary commerce becomes fairly commonplace, what will it be like? And why? What will be the pirates' motivations and methods?
Space piracy? Sure—especially if we have a Third Industrial Revolution and begin utilizing the raw materials of the other planets and asteroids, and ship them back to factories in orbit around the Earth. What kind of society will that be? Who will be rich and who will be poor? Which nations will grow stronger; which weaker? How will the oil-rich nations fare when thermonuclear fusion provides our energy and the asteroid belt provides our raw materials?
Staying right here on Earth, how about a society built on individual responsibility? For example, we now have a welfare system that takes tax money from earners whether they like it or not, and provides welfare payments for nonearners. Many taxpayers have complained that they would sooner pay for voluntary charity than have taxes taken from them against their will. Suppose we adopted a system where taxpayers are given individual welfare recipients as their personal wards, and get tax deductions for them? The welfare recipient would go personally to his or her "guardian" for support. There are a million different stories there, and at least one of them should be titled "My Brother's Keeper."
Astrology has turned to modern technology for help; astrological forecasting services use computers to work out their mumbo jumbo (as Robert Heinlein suggested in "Stranger in a Strange Land"). The self-aware computer is a stock character in SF nowadays. But suppose a self-aware computer began making astrological forecasts for itself? And acting on them?
The ideas are there. The subject matter is just as open and wide as Isaac Asimov claimed. There's star-flight, time travel, immortality, genetic manipulation, biofeedback, behavior control, telepathy, interplanetary colonization, the development of a "second generation" technology that turns one industry's pollution products into another industry's raw material.
But the most important thing to write about is people. Think of the stories you remember best, and the chances are you remember a character, a person whose problems and struggles moved you emotionally. To paraphrase Alan Jay Lerner's paraphrasing of George Bernard Shaw, "By and large we are a marvelous race." The human race, that is. And that is what good stories are really about: people. People who face problems and strive to surmount them, who sometimes win and often lose but always strive. They may look decidedly nonhuman, and they may be anywhere and anywhen in the universe. But all good fiction is concerned with people, and the rest—the exotic backgrounds and clever ideas—are merely attempts to place the human spirit in a crucible where we can test its worth.
That's the ultimate idea of the Idea Factory.
THE EDITOR