Seekers of Tomorrow (25 page)

Pohl was also engaged in editing a series of science-fiction anthologies for Ballantine Books made up entirely of origi-nal stories. He commissioned del Rey to write a novelette for
Star Short Novels,
a paperback issued in 1954. Del Rey's contribution was a shocker,
For I Am a Jealous People,
in which earth is attacked by aliens, who have the might of "Our God," the God of Abraham and Moses, behind them, for He has rejected man. Though the story depends too much on action in conveying its spiritual and philosophical content, the closing lines are memorably sacrilegious: " 'God has ended the ancient covenants and declared an enemy of all mankind,' Amos said, and the chapel seemed to roll with his voice. 'I say this to you: He has found a worthy opponent.'"

This was the cynical, hard line that people now began to associate with del Rey. It had been increasingly reflected in his fiction since
Nerves.
It was even more evident in his public-speaking appearances, beginning at The Eastern Science Fiction Association (Newark, New Jersey) meeting of February, 1948, when he revealed a strong speaking voice and a rare ability to organize and expound his arguments extemporaneously. This talent eventually made him a regular guest on The Long John Nebel Show, a radio

"Talk" pro-gram over WOR, New York, which ran nightly for five hours from midnight to 5:00 a.m. In over 300 appearances from the late fifties through 1967 del Rey incisively lampooned flying saucers, Shaverism, Dianetics, abominable snowmen, telepathy, and psionics, as well as the broader spectrum of the many superstitions and misconceptions to which the hu-man race is heir.

This created the image of Lester del Rey the rebel, re-former, and iconoclast, an illusion which his actions encour-aged but which the facts refused to support. Del Rey's stories rarely involved social protest and, particularly in the begin-ning, were repeated pleas for society to make a place for the independent spirit. They are pilgrimages of loneliness. The characters do not ask for reform and do not ask for favor. They ask only for acceptance.

Del Rey never blames society for his problems, rather he blames the limitations of his physical equipment. "The Small-est God," though superior in intelligence, chafes at his size and works toward and achieves his goal transference into the body of a six-foot artificial man; Dave Mannen, in
Over the Top,
when stranded on Mars with seemingly no hope of rescue, bitterly reflects: "With a Grade-A brain and a mat-inee idol's face, he'd been given a three-foot body and the brilliant future of a circus freak. It had looked like the big chance, then. Fame and statues they could keep, but the book and the endorsement rights would have put him where he could look down and laugh at the six-footers. And the guys with the electronic brains had cheated him out of it."

Yet essentially his works reflect optimism. Like those of another major science-fiction writer born and raised on a farm, Clifford D. Simak, Lester del Rey's stories hold forth hope for the individual and hope for man. His personal hardships appear to have stirred in him deep feeling for, not hatred or resentment toward, the human race. Most of his endings are "happy" ones, though they frequently are the result of extraordinary compromises on the part of the characters.

His rages are directed at patterns of thought which he feels threaten the progress of mankind, but not at individuals or institutions. Even his novel
The Eleventh Commandment
(Regency Books, 1962), which appears to be a no-quarter-given attack on the Catholic Church's birth control policy, turns out to be sleight-of-hand misdirection, since it ends with the policy proven right in the hypothetical future situa-tion created in the book.

His work has exhibited elements that have influenced the course of science-fiction and gained him a personal following and a certain respect from his contemporaries. His greatest drawback is that he has been unable to acquire self-discipline. When confronted with a difficult problem, whether personal or occupational, he has tended to retreat to the quiet of a photographic darkroom or its equivalent. The facade of toughness appears to have been fabricated more to maintain his own self-estimation than as a defense against the world. Nevertheless, its manifestation in his writ-ing represents a psychological conflict that wells up in a spring of compassion that makes a certain part of his earlier work memorable. 

On October 23, 1960, an event of special significance for the literary acceptance of science fiction occurred. Marion Shelby's weekly program, "Young Book Reviewers," broad-cast by radio station WMCA, New York City, carried a half-hour panel discussion on a book about interstellar war-fare, Robert A. Heinlein's
Starship Troopers.
The panelists were all students of Teaneck, New Jersey, High School and the moderator was Alice Kelleher of Jersey City State Col-lege.

Considering that mankind was about to enter what is romantically called "The Space Age," it seemed entirely in order that an educational program, customarily devoted to discussions of important or timely books, should permit teen-agers to enjoy an enthusiastic appraisal of the world of the future, space exploration, and exciting adventure, except those subjects weren't what they were talking about. If a listener had tuned in in the middle of the program he might understandably have thought that the topic was "The Philosophy of Government." The students were evaluating Heinlein's proposal that the professional soldier become the basis of government. The discussion picked up Heinlein's premise that citizens should be made to earn the right to vote by serving their country for two years in the armed services. Some way would be found for everyone who volunteered to serve, no matter how disabled. Heinlein projected the thesis that since the armed forces taught that the individual should place the group above self, the discipline-trained citizen would tend to display that same selflessness in his voting decisions, for the betterment of all.

Beyond that, Heinlein urged that we dispense with roman-ticism and base our morality upon the fact that we are fundamentally "wild beasts" driven by the need for survival. The morality of the lion, by its very nature, must differ from that of sheep. It cannot be immoral for the lion to kill for food or he would starve. Something new was happening here. For years, it was the vogue to show what those mainstream writers who had worked in science fiction had contributed to the art as it is practiced today. Now, a product of the science-fiction pulp magazines, Robert A. Heinlein, by his unique talents, was influencing the thinking of the mainstream.

True, in this instance it was on the teen-age level, but a few years earlier, through his stories of science fiction in the Saturday evening post and the motion picture based on one of his works,
Destination Moon,
he had demonstrated to adults that the themes of science fiction were their problems in a world only as far away as tomorrow.

Among the writers and devotees of science fiction, Hein-lein frequently was envied and admired as being on the top rung in ability and influence among writers of "modern" science fiction, "modern" being used as a term to designate those writers and methods in science fiction that had reached their greatest vogue since 1940. This same inner circle now presented a paradox. In dozens of the mimeographed jour-nals that are known as "science-fiction fan magazines," and on the platforms of regional science-fiction conventions, the controversy raged as to whether Heinlein's philosophy in
Starship Troopers
was "evil," or valid, or merely an author's device to spur reader interest. The majority seemed to regard the philosophy of
Starship Troopers
as Heinlein's personal belief and condemned it. On the other hand, despite the furious disputes, they joined ranks on the question of Heinlein's literary artistry. In a poll of the members of the 18th World Science Fiction Convention, Pittsburgh, 1960, for the best science-fiction novel of 1959,
Starship Troopers
(Putnam) obtained a decisive plural-ity and its author, for the second time in his writing career, received the coveted Hugo. Four years earlier, Robert Hein-lein's novel
Double Star
(Doubleday, 1955) also copped a Hugo at the 14th Annual Convention of the World Science Fiction Society, Inc., in 1956. He was to receive still another for
Stranger in a Strange Land
(Putnam, 1961) at the 20th World Science Fiction Convention in 1962.

Robert A. Heinlein is an author who for twenty-five years has held major status as a writer of science fiction. His views are frequently berated, but as a major shaper of the direc-tion of science fiction he is also beloved. The three Hugos, in a very real sense like the coveted Nobel Prize, were given, him in consideration of past as well as current performance.

Robert Anson Heinlein was born July 7, 1907, in Butler, Missouri, the son of Rex Ivar Heinlein and Bam Lyle Hein-lein. As one of seven children, there were distinct checks and balances on his ego as a result of the type of discipline that children in large families impose on one another. His elementary education was in the public schools of Kansas City, Missouri, and he graduated from Central High School there in 1924.

A major if not pivotal influence on his thinking was his naval career. He graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1929 and served on aircraft carriers when they were still science fiction as far as proving themselves in actual combat was concerned. A crack gunnery officer, he ignored a severe illness while on active duty in 1934 and ended the season with a superb record but with his health so undermined that he was retired that year as permanently disabled.

The second most important influence on his writing was his continuous and generous reading of science fiction from his earliest days, starting with second-hand copies of frank reade weekly, a dime-novel paper devoted to a young inven-tor similar to Tom Swift, as well as Tom Swift himself and everything purchasable from the stands from 1916 on. To a "classic" background in Wells, Verne, Haggard, and Burroughs he added regular purchase of argosy all-story and Hugo Gernsback's electrical experimenter. When science-fiction magazines appeared, he bought and read them all. He was literally saturated in the popular periodical back-ground of American science fiction. This broad knowledge of his medium was later reflected in the familiarity with which he combined and refined the diverse and intricate themes of magazine science fiction into his own work.

Heinlein did not have to surmise when he struck a new chord in science fiction; he positively knew. Echoes of dozens of popular pulp science fiction writers sounded in his work but no single note called his direction. His role was to lead, not to follow.

The only mainstream writer to whom Heinlein acknowl-edges a debt is Sinclair Lewis, and it is not for literary style. Lewis laid out extensive backgrounds for his work which did not directly appear in the story. That way he understood how his characters should react in a given situation, since he knew more about them than the reader did. In Heinlein, this ultimately grew beyond the bounds intended by Sinclair Lew-is, whose characters performed against a setting with which the reader might be familiar. The Sinclair Lewis method couldn't work for science fiction unless an entire history of the future was projected; then individual stories and charac-ters in that series could at least be consistent within the framework of that imaginary never-never land.

In following just this procedure, Robert A. Heinlein inad-vertently struck upon the formula that had proved so success-ful for Edgar Rice Burroughs, L. Frank Baum, and, more recently, J. R. R. Tolkien. He created a reasonably consistent dream world and permitted the reader to enter it. Heinlein's Future History has, of course, a stronger scientific base than Burroughs' Mars, Baum's Oz, or Tolkien's land of the "Rings," but it is fundamentally the same device.

A retired naval officer at 27, disabled or not, Heinlein could not simply sit and vegetate, so he enrolled at U.C.L.A. graduate school in California to study mathematics and physics. His health failed again before he could complete his studies, but the time spent there gave him an insight into the sciences which were to give his work an added note of verisimilitude.

In the next few years he tried his hand at many things: politics, real estate, architecture, and mining; regardless of his personal success at any of them, elements of each are reflected in his stories. We find Heinlein speaking with a note of authority on the nature of politics in
"If This Goes On ..
."; the art of selling real estate and architecture both figure in "...
And He Built a Crooked House";
only mining, of all his background, seems conspicuously absent from his works.

John W. Campbell, Jr., editor of astounding science-fiction, used to say that the best way to get Heinlein writing was to interest him in something that cost money. The year that Robert Heinlein first appeared as a professional writer was a depression year, 1939. He needed money to pay the mortgage on his home. Carefully nursing his delicate health, he decided to investigate writing as a method of making money. And as an unrepentant lifelong reader of science fiction, for him to write in science fiction was a logical step. In 1939 the genre was on the upward swing of the pendu-lum. The boom started in mid-1938 when Red Circle Publi-cations experimentally issued marvel science stories, which, powered by
Survival,
a remarkable novel by Arthur J. Burks of the remnants of a defeated America tunneling into the Rockies to escape their Asiatic conquerors, immediately made money. The revival accelerated by the purchase of radio news by Ziff-Davis Publications from Teck Publica-tions, who required that Ziff-Davis take the failing amazing stories as part of the deal. Under the new ownership, amaz-ing stories climbed quickly in circulation.

Ziff-Davis soon issued a companion to amazing stories entitled fantastic adventures; Standard Magazines offered a running mate to the long-established thrilling wonder stories under the title of startling stories; Street & Smith's astounding science-fiction announced a brother to be titled simply unknown; Blue Ribbon Publications decided to call the genre by its first name and began publishing a magazine identified as science fiction; Frank A. Munsey, publisher of argosy, evaluating the situation, concluded it was time to offer classics from its files going back nearly fifty years in a reprint periodical, famous fantastic mysteries. And that was only the beginning!