went to visit Mount Rushmore last week--metaphorically speaking, of course. For Jack Williamson, with whom I am pictured at right, is the Mount Rushmore of science fiction. With a writing career that has lasted 73 years--so far--and allowed him to publish in nine different decades, he is a monument as much as a man. As with Mount Rushmore, it seems to the rest of us in the SF genre as if he's been here forever, an imposing physical, spiritual and literary presence. And the same way that the faces on Mount Rushmore serve as a challenge to any president to think of the great men who have come before and to attempt to be that worthy, his existence is a challenge to all science fiction writers. His literary output is a great dare, both in its quality and it scope.
We'd all like to be present at the creation, to witness a new art form being made. Jack Williamson was there, and not just as a witness, but as a participant. He was there when science fiction was born, back before it was even called science fiction. Back when it had the unwieldy name of "scientifiction," given it by Hugo Gernsback, who in 1926 started publishing Amazing Stories Quarterly, the first magazine devoted to such a literature. Gernsback was a businessman and educator, not so much trying to spawn a new art form as much as teach about science and have a platform from which to sell his crystal radio kits. But create a new art form he did, and Jack was there to help shepherd it along. That was but one of the many reasons I felt honored to join with Dean Wesley Smith, Kristine Kathryn Rusch and surprise guest Connie Willis--and, of course, Jack himself--on the campus of Eastern New Mexico University to take part in the 25th annual Jack Williamson Lectureship.
In a more just culture, Jack Williamson would be treated as the Japanese treat their elders who are masters of a given art--painters, calligraphers, writers. He would be officially named as a "living national treasure." Jack certainly qualifies as that, which is, I think, a more comfortable thing to be after all than Mount Rushmore. Jack Williamson deserves that honor not just because he has taught me how to create compelling
science fiction, but also because Jack has taught me--with his honesty, his endless wonder and curiosity at the universe, his rare ability to continue to grow and change with each passing year where others would have petrified, and his graciousness for the generations of SF writers and editors who have followed him--how best to live a life.
Science fiction must narrow the gap
Our stated topic for the 25th annual lectureship was "New Science for a New Century." I thought that I'd end up talking about all the gleaming toys we'd have to play with in the coming centuries, all the planets we've yet to visit, all the miracles that science was going to grant us.
But I discovered that when I meditated on the topic at hand, what my thoughts strayed to was--some of us will get there, and some of us won't. The gap between the haves and the have-nots will increase.
As we learn ways to prevent the degradation of the teleomeres, those ends of our chromosomes that affect gene reproduction, some of us will achieve previously undreamed-of lifespans. Others will die young just as the poor have always done.
Some of us of us will be eating genetically enhanced food that will act like medicine, curing our diseases with medicinal wheat, or milk made from altered cows. Others will continue to be outside the reach of such advances.
Some of us, when our hearts grow feeble or our lungs give out, will be given new ones grown in vats. Others less fortunate will continue to sell their kidneys to buy a better life for their families.
Some of us will be popping pills that modify our intelligence, ratcheting up our IQs like Charly from Daniel Keyes' "Flowers for Algernon." Most will be stuck with the minds with which they were born.
Some of us will be able to choose perfect children. It won't be a matter of choosing male versus female. Our mastery of DNA will be so great that we'll be snipping out leukemia, anemia, tendencies toward cancer. Most will have to roll the dice.
Soon it won't just be that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer--soon the rich will get healthier and smarter and longer-lived as well. And the poor will not be happy about that. What will become of this misery and frustration I leave to your imagination. I am convinced that these social implications of the coming advances in science and technology are where the real story lies. It is odd that this is where my meditation on the subject has left me. This realization surprises me, because it is not what I had expected to be talking about. Until we really figure out how to deal with that, science fiction's dreams--Jack Williamson's dreams--will not yet have come true.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science
Fiction Weekly back in 1974, when he began working as an assistant editor at
Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in
the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the
award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, and also edited SCI
FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel, in addition to
Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit.
