The professional futurists labor under this enormous handicap; they are not allowed to consider the “wild cards,” the crazy things that can and usually do happen. They are restricted to making more-or-less straight-line extrapolations of the facts as we know them today. Science fiction writers have the freedom to use more than the facts. They can use their imaginations. They can ask themselves, “What would happen if…?” and then set out to write a story that answers the question. They can use their knowledge of the human soul—for that is what fiction is all about—not merely to describe the marvelous invention or the strange discovery, but to portray how real people—you or I—might react to these new things.
That is science fiction’s great advantage, the freedom to employ human imagination to its fullest. The science fiction writer is not required to be accurate, merely entertaining. Although the writer need not have a professional knowledge of science, he or she should understand the basics well enough to know what is impossible—and how to move at least one step beyond that limit. The rule of thumb in good science fiction is that you are free to invent anything you like, providing no one else can prove that it could never be. Even though physicists are certain that nothing in the universe travels faster than the speed of light, they cannot prove that it is utterly impossible for a starship to circumvent that speed limit; therefore science fiction writers can create interstellar dramas, with merely a slight bow to acknowledge that their faster-than-light starships are using principles that were unknown in the 20th century. In creating such stories about some future times and places, the writer often creates an inner reality that eventually comes true.
You don’t need a million-dollar computer program or a team of Pentagon scientists. All you need is that strange and elusive quality called talent, plus the fortitude to work long and lonely hours, together with the freedom to let your imagination roam where it will.
The stories in this collection are examples of how my imagination and creative freedom has led me to build worlds that do not exist—yet. From an electronically guarded prison that could be built today to the farthest ultimate reaches of interstellar space, these stories present eleven different answers to eleven different phrasings of that question, “What would happen if…?” One of these tales, The Next Logical Step, deals with the kind of computer that the Joint Chiefs of Staff might find themselves facing soon. Another, A Long Way Back, was my very first published short story; it dealt, in a way, with the basic factors of both the energy crisis that erupted a dozen years after the story was published and the aftermath of a nuclear war—a subject very much in the forefront of everyone’s thinking even today, a quarter-century after the story was written.
Two of these tales are not really science fiction. One of them is a fantasy about a dragon, and the other is a “straight” story about my favorite sport, fencing. Both of them come directly from experiences in my younger years in South Philadelphia, that heartland of pop singers, steak sandwiches, and Rocky Balboa.
None of these tales has “come true” as yet, but that is not important. Each of them examines a reality of its own. Each of them places real people in strange and challenging situations. Each of them tests the human spirit in one way or another. Each of them presents a “world model” that forecasts a future that might come to pass.
Ben Bova
West Hartford, Connecticut
ESCAPE!
We tell ourselves a lot of lies about prisons. The biggest lie is calling it “the criminal justice system;” it is not a system, it has nothing to do with justice, and if there is anything criminal about it, it’s the fact that jails tend to make their inmates lifelong antisocial animals.
I started my writing career on newspapers, and spent a lot of those early years covering the police beat in an upper-middle-class suburban area outside my native Philadelphia. As an investigative reporter (we didn’t know that term back in the Fifties, we just called it legwork) I spent a summer probing into the problem of juvenile crime. The eventual result was Escape!, which was published originally as a short novel.