The JUDGMENT OF HARRIS
Walter Willis
In the February 1953 Startling Ken Crossen bemoans the fact that the much-heralded boom in sf has turned out to be nothing more than a dull pop, and suggests as a remedy for this sad state of affairs that we "throw the science out of science f
iction." Well, of course this is one solution, just as one way to make your girl happy is to marry her off to another man. But assuming for the moment that we all
want sf to become popular with the masses, a better way is to make the public like it as we like it. I take it that this is the general idea behind the International Fantasy Award, not mere egoboo for authors. As I see it, every year we pundits are
to select one book and brandish it before the multitude shouting "Look, now this is science fiction! Try just this one, pretty please?" Now if this is going to do any good we'd better pick a book the man-in-the-street is going to like.
It's no use giving him one full of taken-for-granted time paradoxes, semantics, space warps, parapsychology, psychohistory, ftl spaceships and similar third-order flights of fancy. This is the sort of thing I meant by 'futurist fantasies'. I love them
myself, but lets face it, they aren't extrapolations of current science-which indeed declares most of them to be impossible-but extrapolations of the science fiction we've been reading for the last 25 years. Just us, mind you. The man in the street stil
l thinks a flight to the moon is pretty fantastic. We've got to start him on the ground floor...and that isn't necessarily the top story.
Not that Sands Of Mars needs any apology. It was a good story with the warmth, humanity and optimism that is the very spirit of science fiction. It may not have been as great a literary masterpiece as Fancies And Goodnights, but then...par
don me if I'm wrong...isn't this primarily a science fiction award If not, just exactly what is a 'nonfiction' fantasy? And since when has fantasy needed our encouragement? Are we going to exhibit our silver space-ship in London shop-windows on
top of a new edition of The Odyssey or a collection of ghost stories?
Data entry and page scans provided by Judy Bemis
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