Читать книгу Resnick on the Loose - Mike Resnick - Страница 16

The Sun Will Come Up Tomorrow

There was a (brief) time when they closed the Patent Office because there was nothing left to invent. That was not only before the creation of jet planes, polio vaccine, and computers, but before the telephone and the electric light, believe it or not.

Just goes to show that the future has more surprises than most people think.

There was a time when people thought science fiction was all played out, too. When Apollo XI touched down and Neil Armstrong took his one small step for Man, half the talking heads on TV pointed out that now that we had reached the Moon, science fiction writers had run out of stories.

That was before the height of the New Wave (which, like most of the 1960s, took place more in the 1970s), and before cyberpunk, and before slipstream, and before… Well, you get the picture.

Then Dell killed its science fiction line, and so did Playboy Press, and Pyramid vanished, and Fawcett/Gold Medal were no longer players…but lo and behold, along came DAW and Tor and Baen and a host of smaller presses.

Amazing and Galaxy and Marion Zimmer Bradley’s Fantasy Magazine and half a dozen other magazines died, and that was the end of magazines and short stories. Until you activated your computer and found us, and Subterranean, and Clarkesworld, and a dozen more e-zines, all paying competitive rates.

Sound familiar—like you’ve heard or read it all before? Like maybe three paragraphs ago?

Now that Sir Arthur C. Clarke has died, the last of the so-called “Big Three” (Heinlein, Clarke, and Asimov) has gone, and I’m hearing the same pessimism about the future from all the self-appointed experts who are as ignorant of the field as they are of its history.

Just about the time Stanley G. Weinbaum and Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft passed from sight, along came Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov and Theodore Sturgeon and A. E. van Vogt and Leigh Brackett. And when some of them went off to war, or out to Hollywood, here came Jack Vance and Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke. And when some of them went into teaching or Scientology, why, we had Robert Sheckley and Alfred Bester and Cyril Kornbluth in the full flowering of their literary powers. And when some of them deserted us for movies and non-fiction, here came Robert Silverberg and J. G. Ballard and Anne McCaffrey, and when everyone was sure there was no more talent out there, along came Roger Zelazny and Larry Niven and Ursula K. Le Guin…and it’s been like that ever since.

I just came back from Worldcon and DragonCon, and I can tell you that there is still a lot of new talent that just came through the door or is about to start knocking at it. John Scalzi’s only been around three or four years, but he’s already got a Campbell, a Hugo, and a bestseller. Tobias S. Buckell has a Campbell nomination and a Nebula nomination. Naomi Novick, another Campbell winner, was a hit from the start, and the start was only three years ago. And there are a handful of (current) unknowns whose work I’ve seen, here at Jim Baen’s Universe and elsewhere, who are just making their first sales now, and a number of them are going to be major forces in the field a few years up the road.

Just as there’s always a new generation of writers, there’s always a new generation of naysayers. The thing to remember is that history is not on their side.

And who knows more about future history than science fiction people?

* * * *

A little sidenote to those of you who nominate for the Hugos. If you’re reading this, you’re subscribers—and if you’re subscribers, I have to assume you like the job Eric and I are doing with Jim Baen’s Universe.

There are always five nominees in each Hugo category. This year it took 35 nominations to make the ballot for Best Short Fiction Editor.

Eric Flint received 15 nominations. I received 13 nominations. Eric and I as a team received 15 nominations. That’s a total of 43, quite enough to make the ballot, which would have been very nice publicity for a relatively young magazine…but officially, they were totals of 15, 15 and 13. Next year you might nominate the pair of us together. Just a gentle suggestion.