to your hats!
I shot an error into the air.
It’s still going.. . everywhere.
LLong
THE HAPPY DAYS AHEAD
“It does not pay a prophet to be too specific.”
Page 210
-L. Sprague de Camp
“You never get rich peddling gloom.”
-William Lindsay Gresham
The late Bill Gresham was, before consumption forced him into fiction
writing, a carnie mentalist of great skill. He could give a cold reading that would
scare the pants off a marble statue. In six words he summarized the secret of
success as a fortuneteller. Always tell the mark what he wants to hear. He will love
you for it, happily pay you, then forgive and forget when your cheerful prediction
fails to come true-and always come back for more.
Stockbrokers stay in business this way; their tips are no better than
guesses but they are not peddling dividends; they are peddling happiness. Millions
of priests and preachers have used this formula, promising eternal bliss in exchange
for following, or at least giving lip service to, some short and tolerable rules,
plus a variable cash fee not too steep for the customer’s purse .. . and have
continued to make this formula work without ever in all the years producing even one
client who had actually received the promised prize.
Then how do churches stay in business? Because, in talking about “Pie in the
Sky, By and By,” they offer happiness and peace of mind right here on Earth. When
Karl Marx said, “Religion is the opium of the people,” he was not being cynical or
sarcastic; he was being correctly descriptive. In the middle nineteenth century
opium was the only relief from intolerable pain; Karl Marx was stating that faith in
a happy religion made the lives of the people of the abyss tolerable.
Sprague de Camp is Grand Master of practically everything and probably the
most learned of all living practitioners of science fiction and fantasy. I heard
those words of wisdom from him before I wrote the 1950 version of PANDORA’S BOX. So
why didn’t Illsten? Three reasons: 1) money; 2) money; and 3) I thought I could get
away with it during my lifetime for predictions attributed to 2000 A.D. I never
expected to live that long; I had strong reasons to expect to die young. But I seem
to have more lives than a cat; it may be necessary to kill me by driving a steak
through my heart (sirloin by choice), then bury me at a crossroads.
Still, I could have gotten away with it if I had stuck to predictions that
could not mature before 2000 A.D. Take the two where I really flopped, #5 and #16.
In both cases I named a specific year short of 2000 A.D. Had I not ignored Mr. de
Camp’s warning, I could look bland and murmur, “Wait and see. Don’t be impatient,”
on all in which the prediction does not look as promising in 1980 as it did in 1950.
Had I heeded a wise man on 2 out of 191 could today, by sheer brass, claim
to be batting a thousand.
I have made some successful predictions. One is
“The Crazy Years.” (Take a look out your window. Or at your morning paper.) Another
is the water bed. Some joker tried to patent the water bed to shut out competition,
and discovered that he could not because it was in the public domain, having been
described in detail in STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND. It had been mentioned in stories
of mine as far back as 1941 and several times after that, but not until STRANGER
did the mechanics of a scene requirc describing how it worked.
It was not the first man to build water beds who tried to patent it. The
first man in the field knew where it came from; he sent me one, free and freight
prepaid, with a telegram naming his firm as the “Share-Water Bed Company.” Q.E.D.
Our house has no place to set up a water bed. None. So that bed is still in
storage a couple of hundred yards from our main house. I’ve owned a water bed from
the time they first came on market-but have never slept in one.