The Race's View of Science Fiction

Excerpted from Worldwar: Upsetting the Balance

ne of Turtledove's characters, a career minor-league baseball player named Sam Yeager, was also a regular reader of Astounding Stories before the war. When his platoon captures two of the Race's soldiers in the first book, he requests the assignment to be their guard. He explains that his experience with science fiction would be useful in that role, and gets the assignment. In the third volume, he meets Straha and his shuttle pilot Vesstil in the hall as he is about to leave to inspect the remains of the shuttle.

"A question, if I may," Vesstil said. "How does your English have a word for spaceship and the idea of a spaceship without having the spaceship itself? Does not the word follow the thing it describes?"

"Not always, with us," Yeager answered with a certain amount of pride. "We have something called science fiction. That means stories that imagine what we'll be able to build when we know more than we do now. People who write those stories sometimes have to invent new words or use old ones in new ways to get across the new things or ideas they're talking about."

"You Tosevites, you imagine too much and you move too fast to make what you imagine real - so the Race would say," Vesstil answered with a sniffy hiss. "Change needs study, not - stories." He hissed again.

ack to Off the Shelf.