If anything, assuming he is going to write and sell, he will be looked down on; people will say, “But are you doing any serious writing?,” meaning, of course, that they do not share this mystique, this understanding and conviction of what SF is. He actually risks losing status rather than gaining it. Not, of course, by his colleagues, but by those people who think SF consists of George Pal budget films about the Anchovie That Ate New York, such as one sees on TV late at night; he knows that this is not what SF is, really. Even if he can’t come through with massive talent, the attitude is still there: SF is an accretional field, built up layer by layer, year by year with constant reference to all that has come before. Unlike the Western story writer, you do not sell the same story twice, with new character names and a new title; each time you must produce something genuinely new. The SF reader — all exceptions granted — insists on one thing before all else: The new stories and novels must not duplicate those that came before, and woe unto the novice writer who does not know all the SF classics back to 1930; he must — and almost certainly did — absorb them before he began writing himself. What he did, what I did back in 1951 when I sold my first story, was to go on to the next step in structure of fictionalized thought that is the growing public property of all SF readers and writers. In this sense SF must be avant-garde. And so it is. And the motivation I think that underlies many of us — certainly it did me — was to add one more bit of stone to a mosaic whose pattern, whose final gestalt, has not been explicated or frozen yet on the printed page. It is as if an SF writer is created when he reads a story by a previous writer and then says, “Next it could be that. . .” meaning this book, this story, this underlying theme should be carried on. Heinlein has written what he calls “future history,” and much of SF is. And much of the motivation that drives the SF writer is the motivation to “make” history — contribute what he sees, his perception of “. . . and then what happened?” to what all the rest of us have already done. It is a great colloquy among all of us, writers and fans and editors alike. Somewhere back in the past (I would say about 1900) this colloquy began, and voice after voice has joined in, little frogs and big in little puddles and big, but all croaking their sublime song. . . because they sense a continuity and the possibility, the opportunity, the ethical need, if you will, for them to add onto this growing “future history.”
I’ve watched high school kids grow from an avid reading appreciation of SF to their first hesitant submission, their first sale — they may disappear soon, or become only one of many, or become like Ted Sturgeon a unique and powerfully lovely contributor. . . in any case there is a tremendous motivation to make the statement, the written submission. “Nobody has thought yet of this,” the SF writer says when an idea comes to him, but it is not merely an outre idea that he senses germinating in his head; it is an addition and a contribution to a vast, extant body. In the sciences proper, when experimental work reveals some law or principle previously unknown, the researcher knows he must publish his results; why determine that such-and-such is a universal scientific principle and then say nothing about it? This shows the affinity between the SF writer and the true scientist; having discovered something new, it is incumbent on him — morally incumbent — to publish a little piece in print about it, whether that publishing will make him immortal or rich — the ethic is the same. In fact it would be purposeless, for example, to determine in scrupulous laboratory conditions that mice fed on nothing but canned mackerel live twice as long as the control group and then, the experiment having been conducted and the results obtained, never mention it to anybody. So, I think, we in our field have that grand great drive of the true research scientist, to acquaint people with something heretofore overlooked. All other factors — the need to earn a living, to impress people, to be “immortal” — those are secondary; spin-offs, so to speak, if they do occur.
Probably what we see in an SF writer (I will use myself as an example) is a boy growing up and originally wanting to be a scientist (I wanted to be a paleontologist, for example). But science does not leave room for a factor vital to us: speculation. For example, an anthropologist finds a humanoid skull in Africa almost 3 million years old. He looks at it, subjects it to tests, and then in his article in Nature or Scientific American tells us what he actually found. But I can see myself there with Leakey finding those incredibly ancient humanoid skulls with an 800 cc brain skull, back at the 2.8-million-year striation, and as I see it, wild speculations that I cannot prove would come to my mind. If X, then Y. If true, humans lived that long ago — and I would imagine a whole culture, and speculate as in a voluntary dream, what that person’s world might have been like. I do not mean his diet or how fast he could run or if he walked upright; this is legitimate for the hard sciences to deal with. What I see is what I suppose I would have to call a “fictional” environment that that skull tells me of. A story that that skull might wish to say. “Might” is the crucial word, because we don’t know, we don’t have the artifacts, and yet I see more than I hold in my hand. Each object is a clue, a key, to an entire world unlike our own — past, present, or future, it is not this immediate world, and this skull tells me of this other world, and this I must dream up myself. I have passed out of the domain of true science. If I wish to write about that (“What if these ancient humanoids had developed a method of controlling their environment by” — etc.) then I must write what we call science fiction. It is first of all the true scientific curiosity, in fact, true wondering, dreaming curiosity in general, that motivates us, plus a desire to fill in the missing pieces in the most startling or unusual way. To add to what is actually there, the concrete reality that can only say so much and no more, my own “glimpse” of another world. A world I will never see fully or even to a great extent, but toward which this one object has pointed.
It is not, however, that the SF writer is a thwarted scientist who couldn’t make it legitimately and so turned to fantasy fiction, to dreams; it is more that this person is impatient to see all the rest not visible in the actual skull, and inventive enough to spin such a myth, a tale about “that other world” that touches ours only here and there. We as SF writers see many objects again and again as clues to other universes, other societies. We sense the rest, and this sensing can’t be separated from literary, artistic imagination. “This rock,” the phrase goes, “could tell many stories, of battles fought here, of deeds done and now forgotten; if only it could talk.” The SF writer senses that story, or many stories from the clues of tangible reality around him, and does the rest; he talks for the objects, the clues. He is driven to. He knows there is more, and he knows that he will not live long enough to see all the scientific data actually brought forth. . . they may never be. The writer, then, begins to sing about those battles and those deeds. He places them in the future only for convenience; it is the placing of the story mostly in an imaginary world, but bound by small actual clues to this world, that drives him into expression. It might be said that where Homer sang about Troy after those events, the SF writer wishes to sing about events ahead because he feels that this is really the only reasonable place where those events could occur. It is as if Homer wrote the Iliad before those events, and had he done so it would be authentic speculative or science fiction.
This shows, I think, the affinity between the SF writer and the scientist as such: But his impatience, his inventiveness, his discovery that the pieces and bits around him (and they can be in our present actual world or in other SF) tell stories not yet told and that without him might never get told — this is one facet characteristic of the SF writer’s mind and shows why the term “science fiction” still lingers to describe what we do, even if we write about a purely religious society set not even in the future but in a parallel Earth. It is not that the stories are about science; it is that the writer is motivated along parallel lines motivating research scientists. But he is not content. He is stuck with a discontent; he must improve or change what he sees, not by going out and politically agitating but by looking deep into other possibilities and alternatives manufactured within his own head. He does not say, “We should pass laws regarding air pollution” and hence join ecology groups; his wish is the same — he detests righteously what he sees of decay and corruption in our society as much as anyone — but his manner of approaching the problem is acutely different.