GUEST EDITORIAL

By Sam Merwin Jr.

AFTER seven months of mulling over a recently-concluded and intense seven-year course in science fiction during which we sought to serve the field both as author and editor, we have finally reached a single definite conclusion as to the most important single element in the field. Our conclusion itself is not especially novel. Many times, in various versions, we have given it editorial stress. But never before have we viewed it so clearly, so fully realized just how important it is.

We feel that no premise adopted by an author and on which he chooses to build a story, can be laughed off either by editor or reader as impossible. This holds in our estimation., no matter how impossibly or unlikely such a premise may appear at first glance.

The majority of letter-writing fans are loudly articulate about stories which contain elements they find personally unacceptable. And it is highly probable that the vast plurality of non-letter-writing men and women who keep science fiction magazines in business also have their pet peeves where stf stories are concerned. Hell, we have a few of our own.

The elements in such stories that seem to bring down the most widespread condemnation when they appear in print are, not necessarily in the order of their appearance, mad doctors and scientists, Bug-Eyed Monsters (BEMs), tales whose raison d'être consists of turning upside down the currently accepted bases of science and time-travel stories.

We have even known a number of editors who have drawn hard-and-fast lines against these and other tried-and-occasionally-true components of science fiction and automatically relegated to the rejection-slip category all tales containing their pet-peeves, no matter how originally or how plausibly they were presented, no matter how subsidiary a part they might have played in the actual unfolding of the story. Fortunately without exception the careers of such closed-gate editors have been without exception brief.

The events of real life, of course, show up such restrictions for the absurdities they are. For just about everything, implausible or otherwise, not only can happen but has an annoying way of happening—and happening more than once.

ALL professonal authors and editors, we hope, are well aware of the truism that truth is not only stranger than fiction but usually makes mighty poor fiction. For good fiction is a distillation of truth or its reverse adroitly fitted into the demands of plot and characterization. But the fact that something has actually occurred and may occur again implies that it can be so distilled and fitted without making undue demands upon reader credulity.

Let's look at the four pet peeves we have just listed. If mad doctors and/or scientists are to be considered impossible, how then can we explain the murderous Dr. Crippen or the definitely unbalanced and brilliant Alexis Carrel?

And if BEMs are held to be ridiculous in the alien environments of other worlds, how are we going to explain some of the millions of species of bug and stalk-eyed insects that outnumber man so frighteningly on this one? A look at any of the numerous albums of insect photographs will reveal that no stf author has had the imagination to conceive a beast even fractionally as frightening.

As for stories which turn accepted scientific theory upside down—well, science is continually doing the same for itself. By way of recent example the multi-degree lads have just succeeded in inverting their own long-accepted theory that overpopulation is the prime, breeder of famine, especially in China and the Deccan Peninsula.

Studies inaugurated in 1928 and only recently received with open scientific arms make it clear that the process works the other way. Famine ups the birth-rate, thanks to malnutrition causing the liver to produce insufficient quantities of estrogen, which weakens the chief brake on the reproductive urge. It is just another of nature's safe, guards to ensure continuance of the species.

The chief objection to time travel is that if it is ever going to be achieved, why haven't we cases on record? Yet certainly it does not take much study of history to uncover numerous cases of men and women whose strange talents could conceivably be the result of some superior technology of the future.

O NE minor sample appeared last year in a weekly news magazine, citing an odd legend from Bessand, a French Alpine village, famed for its legend of Duvallon, a local 14th century lumberjack, who was able "to tote huge pine trees about on his shoulders and to float up and down the River Arc in a magic unsinkable jacket."

The authorities explained this by saying Duvallon had sold his soul to the devil and received his strange gifts in payment. But to us it seems more logical that he came from the future equipped with a jacket that was in some way powered not only to keep him afloat and in motion but with some antigravity device that enabled him to lift the heavy logs as if they were made of cork or balsa.

As, we say, the past is littered with such oddities.

So it seems incredibly foolish to decry any premise in science fiction merely because it is at variance with accepted and current theory. The only condition the reader should insist upon is that the author's premise is used as the basis for a story in which characters and events and the problems they face are sufficiently "real" to give the story the impact needed to trap him in its mood.

For implausibility, no matter what the premise, is the worst fault from which a story can suffer. Triteness of premise and plot is the second worse—but this one is up to author and editor to avoid. The author must be able to present his old ideas (there are no new ones) in new variations and settings to give the semblance of freshness. And the editor must be sufficiently astute and knowing to prevent the author from foisting off old-hat treatments as something new.

However, the final verdict is always with the reader. He is the bloke who buys the magazine—and if he doesn't buy often enough or in sufficient quantity no magazine is going to survive long. He's the real, the ultimate boss.

HENCE it is all-important that he keep his mind open to well-written stories, no matter how unreal their premises may seem to him in his wisdom. Let him land on poor quality, shoddy presentation, any of the lesser sins of publishing. But not on ideas and premises per se. If he does he will ultimately be depriving himself of any stf reading at all.

Some years back we were shocked when, after explaining that, after experimenting on fruit flies to determine the possible mutational effects of A-bomb radiations, scientists stated it would take a least a thousand generations to determine whether such results could be expected. At which some of our more excitable readers wrote in to this effect—"Gee Whizz—a thousand generations! Then we're going to miss all the fun."

We aren't shocked any more. Their reaction may have been a trifle callous from the humanitarian viewpoint. But it certainly revealed that they had wide-open minds. And we remain open on the question of which is more important.