Beyond Tomorrow: An Anthology Of Modern Science Fiction PDF
Preview Beyond Tomorrow: An Anthology Of Modern Science Fiction
BEYOND TOMORROW Beyond Tomorrovv An Anthology of Modern Science Fiction Edited by LEE HARDING Foreword by ISAAC ASIMOV NEW ENGLISH UBRARY TIMU MIRRGll Johnson For Robin who moves mountains. First publishienAd us tralia by Wren Publishing Pty Ltd in 1976t oco mmemorate the 33rWdo rldSci ence Fiction Conventiheonld in Melbourne, August 1975 <C This anthology, Lee l_larding 1976 • FIRST NEL PAPERBACK EDITION JULY 1m • Ooadltlons of sale: This book is solsdu bjectto the conditithaton itahal l not, byway oftra de oro therwise, be lent,re-so ldhired, outo,r o therwise circulated without the publisher'sp riorc onsenint any form ofb inding orco ver·o thethanr that in which it ia publishedan d without a similar condition including this condition being impoeed OD the subsequent purchaser. NEL Books an publish«l by NtJW English Library Limitedfrom Bamard'1 Inn, Holbom, London EC1N a}R. MtJ/k and printed in Great Britain by Hunt BamalYl Printing Ltd., AYiesbury, Budu. 45003191 8 Contents BAD NEWS GOOD Foreword THE AND THE 7 Isaac Asimov IDIOT STICK Damon Knight 11 Ursula NINE LIVES Le Guin 24 THE CO:MRMUTE Philip K. Dick 47 THE OATH James Blish 59 BID John Baxter 7 TAKEOVER 7 CO:MES NOW POWER Roger Zelazny THE 94 Ll UG Tony Morphett 100 'ITERB MO HITION'S KITIONS 117 TIIER. LI'l*l'UL Cordwainer Smith SONG BEFORE SUNSET David Grigg 138 A S ANCE Robert Silverberg 149 UND JOSE Brian 163 THE OH IN Aldiss THE MAN WHO CAME EARLY Poul Anderson 172 HIM LORD Gordon Dickson 194 CALL J. THE GARDEN OF TI:ME G. BaJJard 213 Acknowledgements 221 The Bad News and the Good A foreword by Isaac Asimov I have some bad news for you and some good news. The bad news is You may have missed the Golden Age this. of Science Fiction during all the twenty years that it was b g wnin up the news-stands in the United States. The good news You can start having it now. is this. If any of you who are reading these words happened to have died during the Forties and Fifties (I suppose not many of you have) then the bad news is permanent. You've missed the Golden Age forever. For most of you readers, who are still alive, or have been born since, the good news is permanent. Just gobble up the Golden Age till your reading capacity is full the stuff starts so leaking out at the medulla oblongata. Here's what happened - Back in 1926, a magazine called Amazing Stories appeared. It was the first periodical ever to be devoted exclusively to science fiction. There had been plenty of science fiction before, even highly regarded science fiction (think of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne), but they had been written by a relatively few authors at irregular intervals. With the coming of Amazing Stories and, after a few years, two or three more such magazines, it became necessary to find enough science fiction each month to fill them. 7 There just ugh wam't nearly eno really well-written science fiction produced to fill those magazines and that was the luckiest thing in the world - for the magazines were forced to accept whatever they could get. This meant that yowigstcrs, fiendishly the field, had a chance sell lame in interested in to their and experienced writings, and that odd literary creature, 'the science fiction writer', into b�ing. came Very of ten were not 'authors' in the literary they sense, didn't t be, couldn't ever be. Th only to e wan to ey wanted be scienc fiction writers. If their stories lacked stylistic polish, they possesdse the crude vigour of unbridled and undisciplined imaginations. That a fascinating time to live in. I old was was nine years when, in 1929, I discovered the field myself. Yet, however lusty the childhood of field time came the was, a when it had to mature, and for that a master was needed, strong enough and fervent enough to see that this would t pass. come o That master was John W. Campbell, Jr, who had, himseH, throughout the early 1930s, been one of the giants of i magaz ne science fiction, writing stories of vast la adventure, in a style ga ctic as un lish vigour as an imagination po ed a crude, as unbridled and , in could be found anywhere else field. undisciplined, as the But, largely unknown to the fans, he had been quietly chang ing. ll had a capacity for for or Campbe development and two three years he had been publishfug thought-provoking mood pieces under the pseudonym of Don Stuart, lim g with A. c axin the novella Who Goes There? may very which well be the best science fiction story ever written. Then in 1938 Campbell b e to ecam edi r of Astounding Stories� which he promptly renamed Astounding Science Fiction. It was his intention to make the field grow t He was going to wi h him. W. force science fiction writers to cease being John Campbells and to begin to Don A. Stuarts. be Out would go the cliches of science fiction, all the world stale of mad scientists and cl gly murderous robots and ankin card board monsters from outer space and stultifying lectures on distorted science. In would come scientists and engineers who talked like scientists and engineers, encountering dangers that might just take place in the real world and finding solutions that showed a respect for real science. Campbell was ruthless. He would not accept the stories of the old sort by had succeaful, of men who hitherto been and many the big-name writers of the 1930s had to leave the field. He would, on other hand, accept stories from unkn writers the own who seemed to be on the right track even if, at first, only distantly and haltingly. 8
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