Breaking Point

Contents

Introduction

1. Breaking Point

2. A Monster Named Smith

3. Cinderella Story

4. Teddy Bear

5. The Man Who Owned Tomorrow

6. Green Thumb

7. The Power and the Glory

8. The Listeners

Translations

Introduction

For nearly two hundred years--since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-eighteenth century--science fiction was a part of the spectrum of general literature. It was so much a part of the rest of fiction that there wasn't even a name for it: the man who proved that science fiction could be popular, Jules Verne, called his novels "voyages extraordinaires"; the man who proved that science fiction could be art, H. G. Wells, found his earliest, most successful novels labeled "scientific romances.

Then in 1926 the German immigrant inventor, science enthusiast, and publishing entrepreneur, Hugo Gernsback, created the first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories. He also invented a word to describe the kind of stories he was going to publish, "scientifiction"; it wasn't until 1929, when he had lost control of Amazing Stories and started a competing publication, Wonder Stories, that he created the phrase "science fiction." The creation of a science fiction magazine, then two, then a handful, affected science fiction like the invention of an impenetrable protective barrier; it created a golden ghetto in which science fiction could grow, buffered from contact with general literature and its critical demands, nourished by the enthusiasm and loyalty of its readers (only science fiction developed "fans," fan magazines, and conventions), and stimulated by the missionary spirit, the intellectual curiosity, and evolutionary development of its writers.

The first generation of science fiction writers learned their trade in the pulps; they wrote other kinds of category fiction--westerns, mysteries, war stories, sea stories, adventure stories--and they knew how to construct a plot full of action, suspense, and adventure, which would grab and hold a reader.

The second generation of science fiction writers were engineers and scientists; what they knew about characterization and plot they had learned from their predecessors, but their chief interest was the interrelationship between humanity and the universe, as it was and as it might be.

The third generation of science fiction writers became concerned with sociological questions and the impact of technological change on the average individual.

Meanwhile, the mainstream seemed to be writing itself into a corner where its concern for technique left it nothing to write about except the nature of language. Gradually, almost independent of other literary influences, science fiction evolved through a process of self-criticism, self-development, and natural selection into the only field of fiction dealing seriously, either on a conscious or mythic level, with the issues of our times: change, the future, the machine, the city, pollution, overpopulation, space exploration, cataclysm, human survival, and all the rest of today's problems.

Eventually science fiction and general literature had to come together again, just as the detective story and the western, also brought to maturity in the pulp magazines, became acceptable general literary forms. Science fiction took a different route. The pulp magazines did not die like their brothers and sisters in other categories (indeed, they may have become the last refuge of the popular American short story). Mainstream writers began to adopt science fiction themes for their work: Barth, Boulle, Burroughs, Burgess, Golding, Hersey, Lessing, Nabakov, Rand, John Williams, Wouk, Vercors, Vonnegut, Voznesensky.... And the fourth generation of science fiction writers entered the field. They had grown up reading science fiction, but they also knew literature and the humanities and they wanted to write stories and novels which met the critical standards of the mainstream.

Writers of science fiction seem to be created in their youth when they encounter science fiction for the first time, are captured by its concepts, enraptured by its visions, stimulated by its intellectual conflicts. The new generation of writers, however, also are part of the alienated generation, and they have rejected much of the ethics and philosophy of the scientific culture in favor of the suspicions and anti-scientific viewpoint of the literary culture.

All of these generalizations are subject to many exceptions: adventure stories still form a significant part of science fiction, and hard science stories are written by younger writers. Similarly a concern for technique was exhibited by writers throughout the history of magazine science fiction, in the forties and fifties by writers like Ted Sturgeon, Alfred Bester, Ray Bradbury, James Blish, Damon Knight, William Tenn, Gordon Dickson, and others. Their approach was evolutionary; they tried to do better what science fiction has always done--tell a good story, dramatize possibilities, discuss alternatives, entertain with a conflict of ideas. When they were successful their stories helped to bridge the gap between science fiction and the mainstream, between the ghetto and the larger world outside, between C.P. Snow's two cultures.

The stories contained in this collection were intended as part of that effort. I called them then my "serious stories"; I look back upon them now as my attempts to bring to the task of telling a science fiction story everything I knew about setting and symbol, theme and character. Not all science fiction stories lend themselves to this approach; in many, the hero is society--or even an idea. These are stories about character--about beings in unusual circumstances facing difficult choices, pushed to the point where they must bend or break. Most of all, I hope they are stories that will involve and entertain. Interested readers may note the evolution of a writer.

The process of reunion continues, impelled by the pressure of the mainstream toward science fiction and the pressure of literarily oriented science fiction writers toward the mainstream. The future, even to the most farsighted science fiction writer, is obscure, but I have a feeling that both the mainstream and science fiction will be better for it, if, indeed, they are not once more one.

Lawrence, Kansas

Nov. 8, 1971