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be applied to more serious problems. And programmers who whet their mathematical fangs on chess will find them all the sharper in other directions.
    Horse-racing “improves the breed,” they say. Game-programming will improve the breed of computer and programmers alike.
    But even the computer is an artifact. What about man’s mind itself?
    It may even be that the actual powers of the human mind itself will be intensified (with or without any enhancement by mechanical device) so that men may finally learn to be telepaths. Some more so than others, of course.
    Who can imagine what fun it might be to think to one another rather than to talk? What wonders of the human spirit may emerge when each individual is no longer imprisoned by a wall of flesh, but can commune directly with others?
    It may be, in fact, that this is the ultimate pleasure and recreation, the purpose toward which all of intelligent life has been tending since the beginning. The delight of direct communion may be such as to sink all other pleasures to nothing.
    It may even be that, just as I sit here now trying to imagine the pleasures of the future, some centuries hence another man may sit and try to reconstruct, in sorrow and sympathy, the miseries of a past in which billions of human beings wandered lonely, seeking in the wildest physical and mental activities that pleasure which could only be obtained through the touch of the mental tendrils of a loved one.

• • •

    It may be . . . but many things may be. I’ve tried to give some ideas of what the pleasures of tomorrow may be. In the following pages, my fellow compatriots examine other aspects of the future. For the future at present belongs to the realm of science fiction. And until the marvels of tomorrow actually arrive, we’ll have to settle for a vicarious look at possible and probable futures.
    Telepathy may be for the future; science fiction is for today.

A WORD FROM THE EDITOR

    Sixty years ago, Hugo Gernsback coined the word television in his novel, Ralph 124C41+.
    Forty years ago, the first experiments in the transmission of television pictures were carried out. There were less than fifty receiving sets in existence.
    Thirty years ago, the first commercial broadcasts were made, during the New York World’s Fair of 1939; programming was limited to two hours a day, and there were several thousand receivers in the New York area.
    Twenty-two years ago, the first inter-city network was formed when stations in New York and Washington, D.C. were joined together.
    1969 saw the first live transmission from the Moon!
    From fictional conception to experiment to commercial realization took less than forty years; from coinage as a word to today less than the lifespan of a man. Hugo Gemsback died just a few years ago; he lived to see a world that depended on the living horse break into the age of space. Gemsback’s novel, unreadable by today’s standards, was a utopian story of the far future, several hundred years hence, when man’s problems were solved through the miracle of science. Yet even in his wildest dreaming, he failed to realize the immediate effect science would have on his own century.
    Still, even considering his failures in societal and gadgetry extrapolation, Gernsback opened a window to the future, encouraged a generation of readers to think beyond today and the possible, to tomorrow and the improbable. And this is the role that science fiction still plays today. In Gemsback’s time, and during the next forty years, s-f was considered the poor relation of adventure fiction, the province of the wild-eyed and wooly-headed dreamer. Today, the genre has proven itself, and earned a place of respect. Tomorrow ... no matter what the general view of it as genre: category, science fiction will still be the opener of the door to the future for another generation. And from that generation will come the men who will invent...
    What strange and wondrous devices will they invent? I don’t