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view’ and occasionally criticize fiction.

It comes down to this: fiction is people.

Good fiction cannot be wrought from ideas. Idea pieces can be fascinating and important and moving and provocative, but they can also be (and often are) tracts, fulminations, pedantries and muddy blaster pieces. Fiction (in my very personal operating definition) is people; the action and reaction and interaction of people on people, of ideas and events and growth and change on people. People read fiction, and fiction is at its most successful when the reader identifies with someone or some-several in the narrative, so that the narrative happens to the reader and is recalled as his own experience.

Good science fiction is perforce good fiction … and at the risk of colliding with a man I respect most highly, I shall swerve into the “science” area just this much: “Science,” in its most radical etymological significance, does not mean “method” or “technology” or “discipline” or anything else remotely like these. It means knowledge. Science fiction is knowledge fiction, and a murrain on those who would exclude from it stories of the inner spaces, of mind and its convolutions, and feelings, and permutations in and around the spectra of “soul,” for all these are legitimate areas of extant and extrapolated knowledge. If ever the emphasis turns on self-knowledge, this should not disqualify it-most especially if in other ways the fiction achieves that sharing, that participative quality of “it happened to me. “

Too much-painfully and infuriatingly too much-is made of the game of categorization. It is, I think, the intrusion of what I refuse to call the scientific method, saying rather the technological method, into art. Categorization has its uses, of course. When analyzing an amorphous mass, it can be helpful to break it into parts so the parts can be examined separately. We have, however, nearly reached a point at which it is impossible to think, to rather

(*The author regularly reviews science fiction in Galaxy. National Review and The New York Times Book Review.)

lyze, even to enjoy unless and until the right-sounding categorization has been made. Mostly we don’t read anything-perhaps even can’t read it-unless we are told beforehand what it’s about! What ever happened to a reader who could say to a closed book: “Tell me a story!”-not caring what the story was about? He’s gone the way of the general fiction magazine, and all we have left are specialists. A writer makes a new phrase, a new way, and the response is immediate: “This is New Wave.” Thereupon the prejudices assert themselves and the category of reader in which I have placed myself immediately reacts (pro or con) to the category to which I have assigned “New Wave.”

On careful examination, New Wave shows itself to be no one thing. It is many things; at its worst a self-conscious, infantile defiance of the rules by a writer who has never properly learned them, like an artist who is nonobjective because he has never learned to draw, or a second semester student of music who arduously goes through a composition removing harmonies and inserting discords. At its best, the so-called New Wave is the expression of growth and change, and that is no less than the expression of life itself. Your hard-core purist is anything but life-oriented; heaven preserve us from those who would devitalize science fiction, who would keep it from maturing and evolving.

Increasingly, the Nebula Award stories are good-really good fiction. They have to be, for they are chosen by the people who know the field best and love it most. No one can ever know how much envy, how much rue, how much agonizing honesty goes into those votes, for the voters, each one of them, had reason to hope (he is, way down deep, sure) that his work would be selected. No one can know how often a writer with a good chance of winning the honor cast his vote for someone else when sheer honesty demanded it, only to see that other win by that one vote. It is a fine thing to win a “Hugo”-but the qualification to vote for a Hugo is to buy a ticket to the annual World Convention, and (it’s been done) a man can buy ten votes by buying ten memberships. To qualify for the Nebula voting, you have to be a working writer,

and the winners have been selected by their peers.

Increasingly, too, the distaff shows its strength. Women were libbed in science fiction a long time ago, and are judged now as writers-just that.

It was my plan to climax this effusion with a list of my favorites, with a word about how far so-and-so has come, and how close what’s-his name has come so many times, and how sure I am he’ll make it within the year. And to do this I shall reveal to you that I have spent a lot of hours with all the Nebula collections. A heady experience.

And in its way a frightening one too. I have had the horrid thought that perhaps the Hugo, essentially a reader’s award, is after all more significant than a writer’s one like this. How close can a professional get to being boxed in by his own professionalism? And really, can one be coldly separate from the fact that one knows some of these people, and that A’s story is after all better than B’s, but then B is such an incredibly wonderful person and A is such a nothing ….

No, I won’t chance it. You decide. If these stories move you, write to those authors and tell them so. You bear more weight with them than I do … you can, perhaps, react more fairly.

I’ll settle for this: from where I sit, this is the most remarkable and informative series in the field.

THEODORE STURGEON

Los Angeles

In Memoriam

This information has been compiled from several sources, among them two science fiction news publications, Luna Monthly (655 Orchard Street, Oradell, New Jersey) and Locus (3400 Ulloa Street, San Francisco, California). The major source was The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy, by Donald H. Tuck. The 1959 version of this truly monumental reference work will soon be replaced by a three-volume revised, expanded and updated edition, to be published by Advent: Publishers (P.O. Box 9228, Chicago, Illinois) beginning in 1973. With the kind cooperation of Advent: Publishers I was able to consult the unpublished 1973 edition.

-Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

ROBERT ARTHUR (November 1, 1909-April 28, 1969)

1 Born Robert Arthur Feder, he worked as an oil operator before he

joined MGM as a screenwriter in 1937. He became a prominent

Hollywood writer and subsequently produced radio and TV pro

grams. He wrote a number of science fiction stories for the magazines of the early 1940s, and his series about Murchison Morks was

later featured in Argosy. He published a collection of stories for

juveniles, Ghosts and More Ghosts (1963), and two anthologies,

Davy Jones’ Haunted Locker (1965) and Monster Mix (1968).

His wife was Joan Vatsek (b. 1916), likewise an author of science

fiction.