entertaining as a story, else it would not be here; I have a business
reputation to protect and wish to continue making money. Nor am I ashamed
of this motivation. Very little of the great literature of our heritage
arose solely from a wish to “create art”; most writing, both great and
not-so-great, has as its proximate cause a need for money combined with an
aversion to, or an inability to perform, hard writing offers a legal and
reasonably honest way out of this dilemma.
A science fiction author may have, and often does have, other motivations
in addition to pursuit of profit. He may wish to create “art for art’s
sake,” he may want to warn the world against a course he feels to be
disastrous (Orwell’s 1984, Huxley’s Brave New World — but please note that
each is intensely entertaining, and that each made stacks of money), he may
wish to urge the human race toward a course which he considers desirable
(Bellamy’s Looking Backwards, Wells’ Men Like Gods), he may wish to
instruct, or uplift, or even to dazzle. But the science fiction writer —
any fiction writer — must keep entertainment consciously in mind as his
prime purpose . . . or he may find himself back dragging that old cotton
sack.
If he succeeds in this purpose, his story is likely to remain gripping
entertainment long years after it has turned out to be false “prophecy.” H.
G. Wells is perhaps the greatest science fiction author of all time — and
his greatest science fiction stories were written around sixty years ago .
. . under the whip. Bedfast with consumption, unable to hold a job, flat
broke, paying alimony — he had to make money somehow, and writing was the
heaviest work he could manage. He was clearly aware (see his autobiography)
that to stay alive he must be entertaining. The result was a flood of some
of the most brilliant speculative stories about the future ever written. As
prophecy they are all hopelessly dated . . .
which matters not at all; they are as spellbinding now as they were in the
Gay ‘Nineties and the Mauve Decade.
Try to lay hands on his The Sleeper Awakes. The gadgetry in it is ingenious
— and all wrong. The projected future in it is brilliant — and did not
happen. All of which does not sully the story; it is a great story of love
and sacrifice and blood-chilling adventure set in a matrix of
mind-stretching speculation about the nature of Man and his Destiny. I read
it first forty-five years ago, plus perhaps a dozen times since . . . and
still reread it whenever I get to feeling uncertain about just how one does
go about the unlikely process of writing fiction for entertainment of
strangers — and again finding myself caught up in the sheer excitement of
Wells’ story.
“Solution Unsatisfactory” herein is a consciously Wellsian story. No, no,
I’m not claiming that it is of H. G. Wells’ quality — its quality is for
you to judge, not me. But it was written by the method which Wells spelled
out for the speculative story: Take one, just one, basic new assumption,
then examine all its consequences — but express those consequences in terms
of human beings. The assumption I chose was the “Absolute Weapon”; the
speculation concerns what changes this forces on mankind. But the “history”
the story describes simply did not happen.
However the problems discussed in this story are as fresh today, the issues
just as poignant, for the grim reason that we have not reached even an
“unsatisfactory” solution to the problem of the Absolute Weapon; we have
reached no solution.
In the twenty-five years that have passed since I wrote that story the
world situation has grown much worse. Instead of one Absolute Weapon there
are now at least five distinct types — an “Absolute Weapon” being defined
as one against which there is no effective defense and which kills
indiscriminately over a very wide area. The earliest of the five types, the
A-bomb, is now known to be possessed by at least five nations, at least