Dangerous Visions Read Free

REVOLUTION
by Isaac Asimov
     
    Today—on the very day that I write this—I received a phone call from the New York Times . They are taking an article I mailed them three days ago. Subject: the colonization of the Moon.
    And they thanked me!
    Leaping Luna, how times have changed!
    Thirty years ago, when I started writing science fiction (I was very young at the time), the colonization of the Moon was strictly a subject for pulp magazines with garish covers. It was don't-tell-me-you-believe-all-that-junk literature. It was don't-fill-your-mind-with-all-that-mush literature. Most of all, it was escape literature!
    Sometimes I think about that with a kind of disbelief. Science fiction was escape literature. We were escaping . We were turning from such practical problems as stickball and homework and fist fights in order to enter a never-never land of population explosions, rocket ships, lunar exploration, atomic bombs, radiation sickness and polluted atmosphere.
    Wasn't that great? Isn't it delightful the way we young escapers received our just reward? All the great, mind-cracking, hopeless problems of today, we worried about twenty full years before anyone else did. How's that for escaping?
    But now you can colonize the Moon inside the good, gray pages of the New York Times ; and not as a piece of science fiction at all, but as a sober analysis of a hardheaded situation.
    This represents an important change, and one which has an immediate relationship to the book you now hold in your hand. Let me explain!
    I became a science fiction writer in 1938 just at the time John W. Campbell, Jr., was revolutionizing the field with the simple requirement that science fiction writers stand firmly on the borderline between science and literature.
    Pre-Campbell science fiction all too often fell into one of two classes. They were either no-science or they were all-science. The no-science stories were adventure stories in which a periodic word of Western jargon was erased and replaced with an equivalent word of space jargon. The writer could be innocent of scientific knowledge, for all he needed was a vocabulary of technical jargon which he could throw in indiscriminately.
    The all-science stories were, on the other hand, populated exclusively by scientist-caricatures. Some were mad scientists, some were absent-minded scientists, some were noble scientists. The only thing they had in common was their penchant for expounding their theories. The mad ones screeched them, the absent-minded ones mumbled them, the noble ones declaimed them, but all lectured at insufferable length. The story was a thin cement caked about the long monologues in an attempt to give the illusion that those long monologues had some point.
    To be sure, there were exceptions. Let me mention, for instance, "A Martian Odyssey" by Stanley G. Weinbaum (who, tragically, died of cancer at the age of thirty-six). It appeared in the July 1934 issue of Wonder Stories —a perfect Campbellesque story four years before Campbell introduced his revolution.
    Campbell's contribution was that he insisted that the exception become the rule. There had to be real science and real story, with neither one dominating the other. He didn't always get what he wanted, but he got it often enough to initiate what old-timers think of as the Golden Age of Science Fiction.
    To be sure, each generation has its own Golden Age—but the Campbellesque Golden Age happens to be mine, and when I say "Golden Age" I mean that one. Thank goodness, I managed to get into the field just in time to have my stories contribute in their way (and a pretty good way it was too, and the heck with false modesty) to that Golden Age.
    Yet all Golden Ages carry within themselves the seeds of their own destruction and after it is over you can look back and unerringly locate those seeds. (Lovely, lovely hindsight! How sweet it is to prophesy what has already happened. You're never wrong!)
    In this case, Campbell's requirement