6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction Read online

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  6 Great Short Novels

  of Science Fiction

  Ed. by Groff Conklin

  No copyright 2013 by MadMaxAU eBooks

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION, by Groff Conklin

  THE BLAST, by Stuart Cloete

  Copyright, 1947, by Stuart Cloete. Original version published in COLLIER’S, April, 1946.

  COVENTRY, by Robert A. Heinlein

  Copyright, 1940, by Street and Smith Publications, Inc. Original version published in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION, July, 1940. By arrangement with the author and Lurton Blassingame.

  THE OTHER WORLD, by Murray Leinster

  Copyright, 1949, by Better Publications, Inc. Original version published in STARTLING STORIES, November, 1949. By arrangement with the author and Oscar J. Friend.

  BARRIER, by Anthony Boucher

  Copyright 1942, by Street and Smith Publications, Inc. Original version published in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION, September, 1942. By arrangement with the author and Willis Kingsley Wing.

  SURFACE TENSION, by James Blish

  Copyright, 1952, by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Original version published in GALAXY SCIENCE FICTION, August, 1952. By arrangement with the author and Frederik Pohl.

  MATURITY, by Theodore Sturgeon

  Copyright, 1947, by Street and Smith Publications, Inc.; 1948, by Theodore Sturgeon. Original version published in ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION, February, 1947. By arrangement with the author.

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  INTRODUCTION

  MORE YEARS AGO than I care to count, an uncle of mine who had a propensity for picking up books on second-hand counters presented me with a badly dogeared volume, The Time Machine. The author’s name was Wells—H. G. Wells. I had never heard of him nor had I ever dreamed of time machines; but I sat down to look the book over, and before I knew it it was three hours later and I had had my first experience with science fiction. Literally, it was like travel through time itself, so imperceptibly did the hours pass.

  Two things about this book have stayed with me through the years. I admired, first, the brilliant sweep of its imagination, and, second, its odd length. The Time Machine is longer than a short story—even a “long” one —and considerably shorter than a regular novel. Detective stories I was reading in those days were usually at least twice as long as Mr. Wells’ masterpiece and generally about half as exciting. This seemed, even then, to point a moral: there are not many tales that need more than novelette treatment for satisfactory development, just as there are not many really meaningful, idea-rich stories that can be told in less than novelette length.

  It seems to me that science fiction, perhaps more than any other type of fiction, has found the novelette well suited to its needs. The reason is simple. In a story about a fisherman and his vacation, or a commuter and his marital difficulties, or a schoolboy and his games, or even an explorer in far-off Africa, every element in the back ground and many in the characterizations need only be hinted at by the author. The reader will come up with clear mental pictures of what he is intended to see. He has his own mental image of what is meant by “a country lane,” “the steep canyons of New York’s financial district,” “the wide, cactus-dotted desert.”

  But the problem is entirely different when the author has to make his concept of life on far planets or in other dimensions real and colorful. It is a difficult thing to do; it takes skill in writing—and it takes words. Similarly, it is hard to “make real” the nature of our own world in a far-distant future, when unimaginable things may have occurred to make our current concepts of earth obsolete.

  When the science fiction author has to work within the limits of the short story, he only too often has to assume certain preconceptions on the part of his readers, thus limiting his audience to a relatively small group of “fans” who have read so much science fiction that they accept the improbable as commonplace. This is what has led many critics to dismiss science fiction as narrow in scope and limited in appeal.

  But the short novel, or novelette, gives the writer room enough to make his new ideas circumstantially real, and a great many stories of this length are printed by the science fiction magazines. While the short story of 3,000 to 6,000 words is splendid for everyday plots and backgrounds, the short novel, running from 15,000 to 40,000 words, is much preferred by writers describing the wholly imaginary backgrounds and characters that are common to science fiction. It is only when given that much leg-room that they can make their unusual backgrounds and concepts convincing.

  Since the novelette is a form particularly suited to science fiction, it’s only natural that there should be many good ones floating around. And “floating around” is the correct way of putting it, as far as book publication goes, for most science fiction anthologists can print very few stories which might consume as much as a quarter of the total wordage allowed them. Consequently, there are dozens of high quality novelettes that have been published in the science fiction magazines and left there to molder.

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  This is really not the place to outline the history, development and accomplishments of modern science fiction, or even to try and define it. You are supposed to enjoy this book, not be educated or edified by it. You are now reading for fun and not for profit, or you never would have picked this book up in the first place. Science fiction is said by some enthusiasts to be today’s literature of ideas —scientific, psychological, sociological, political, metaphysical, philosophic, even theological. My feeling is that this point has been rather overemphasized, for it is important to remember that these imaginative tales, whatever their scientific base or their idea content, are written primarily for entertainment, and if they do not entertain they fail. Indeed, they do not ordinarily get published.

  Still, bearing in mind that science fiction must first of all be fun to read, it can be said that its greatest claim to permanent value is its use of imaginative ideas to stir up the mind and make the reader think a bit about the nature of the world he lives in and its problems.

  Let’s take a brief look at the tales included and see how satisfactorily they exemplify modern science fiction. Stuart Cloete’s The Blast is the story of a man-made catastrophe as seen through the eyes of a New Yorker. Here is one of the most vivid reconstructions—or pre-constructions—of world-wide ruin that has ever been written, all the more vivid for its intimate detail and its sense of immediacy. The story is not merely hair-raising adventure; it is packed with ideas, with social criticism. Stuart Cloete is not primarily known as a science fiction writer but as the author of numerous books and stories laid in Africa, such as The Turning Wheels.

  Robert Heinlein’s Coventry, an imaginative view of tomorrow’s methods of correcting emotional instability, is full of entertaining possibilities for the future of our own psychological sciences. Who knows? Perhaps we should set aside a state in the Union solely for the use of psychological misfits, one where they can give full play to their primitive, “abnormal” bent for blood-and-thunder adventure in an untamed underworld of their own!

  The same is true to an even greater degree of the time-travel story, Barrier, by the noted editor, critic and author, Anthony Boucher. Here the idea is even more overt. We know very well that the author is advocating American democracy through the device of an enthralling plot about an anti-democratic society of tomorrow.

  Catastrophes, time travel, worlds of tomorrow: these only suggest the richness of modern science fiction. There are straight science-imagination stories, compounded of literally fantastic possibilities in tomorrow’s science and of fine, colorful, suspenseful conflic
t. Such is the essence of James Blish’s Surface Tension, the story of a painfully struggling new society created by man to work out its destinies beneath the surface of the water on a planet somewhere far in the depths of the Galaxy.

  Or take Murray Leinster’s hair-raising kidnap-adventure novel, -The Other World, about a primitive civilization paralleling our own. Here the excitement is that of savage warfare with a society that is dangerously interpenetrating ours—a story full of magic and strangeness and an uncomfortable explanation for the existence of missing persons bureaus!

  Of all the stories in this collection, only one has a really familiar environment. Theodore Sturgeon’s Maturity is about our own world. It could never have been written so effectively if it were about other times or other worlds; it is one of those tales of events that might actually be happening right now. In the editor’s opinion, this is one of the most poignantly real stories about the tragedy of a superman in our midst that has ever been written.

  While the present volume is the first collection of science fiction novelettes to appear as a paper-bound original book, it is to be hoped that it is far from the last. For here is a format and a price which is eminently suitable for novelette collections. We present you here with a set of six novelettes that have passed the tests of time and of enthusiastic reader evaluation. These are not just the “best” of the current month or even the current year; they are among the best science fiction novelettes ever published.

  - GROFF CONKLIN

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  THE BLAST......By Stuart Cloete

  I AM WRITING this because today I saw two girls. It was very odd after twenty years. I do not know if anyone—the word anyone looks funny—will ever find this, or be able to read it, or even if it will last, because it is written in pencil. Naturally there is no ink. It all dried up long ago, but there are plenty of pencils, thousands of them, pencils by the hundred thousand gross—all the best kinds, just for the picking up.

  It’s difficult to know where to begin. It all happened so long ago that some of the details are fogged and I’m even doubtful of the chronology. The big thing, of course, the real beginning, was the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—the atomic bomb and the bungling that followed it after the war: fear of Russia, fear of free enterprise, fear of communism, of Fascism—fear, in fact. I remember one thing in ‘46, and that was a senator from Florida saying that we should destroy every facility we possessed capable of producing only destructive forms of atomic energy. This made a great impression on me, just as Roosevelt’s saying, “All we have to fear is fear itself,” had done. But, of course, we did not pay any more attention to this senator than we had to the late President. We entered into a kind of armament race. Strength was the thing, power politics; and atoms were power. The common man didn’t really believe in it, but what could he do? When had he ever been able to prevent wars? All he did was fight them. Anyway, there was no war. There was only a state of fear. There were only rumors—stories that Russia and Spain were only a year behind us in the atomic race.

  These two countries were, of course, at opposite ideological poles and were a constant threat not only to each other, but to the world. Then there was the rumor that no one believed, but which nevertheless had the psychological effect of adding to the general fear and uncertainty of mankind. It was that a group of Germans in South America had discovered new fissionable material and that the process of refining it was so simple that bombs could be made in any garage—or if not quite in a garage, in almost any small machine shop. This, if it were true, naturally would render the inspection measures discussed by the United Nations completely ineffective because, quite obviously, all small plants all over the world could not be kept under supervision.

  Then came a new rumor—only it was a little more than a rumor because the same story came from several accredited sources—that the new bombs were minuscule, no bigger than a fountain pen, and could be taken anywhere and planted with impunity. This probably was untrue, but certainly the underlying principle was true. Bombs were being made that were both smaller and more powerful. We had been making them ourselves, ever since the very first ones we’d used in the New Mexico test and in Japan. We knew that there were many Germans in South America. We knew that many war criminals had escaped there, by various subterfuges and in various disguises. We knew that young Norwegian Nazis had been invited over as colonists. We knew that Russia was courting the all but openly Fascist southern republics—and knowing all this we discounted it all.

  What happened next is history. I never bothered writing about it till today, because, thinking myself the only survivor, I could see little point in recording the events of the last twenty years. It is, I think, the year 1972 now; and the month—I am less certain of the months—is probably May. I deduce this from the flowering shrubs, the state of the foliage, and the fact that most of the young birds have flown from their nests.

  Perhaps, too, I have avoided writing, though writing comes easily to me (it used to be my profession; I was a novelist, because of the terror of those days, which I wish to forget if possible. Even now, though the pain has been softened slightly by the passage of time, it will be difficult for me to write of the death of my wife, who, having survived the first blasts and succeeded in living with me almost a year, finally died in my arms of the Red Death, as it came to be called.

  None of this, of course, is the true reason for having either not written before or for writing now. The real reason is that previously there was no one to write for; but now there is, because I have seen people. People are an audience, and some old reflex in me has been activated.

  I thought I was over it all. Just as I had thought I was over women—girls. But I see that I have deceived myself and that this manuscript, this record, may be of some historic value. That is the true reason for this work that I am writing in a mixture of hope and fear.

  At the time of the blast—before it, that is—I was well known as the author of several South African novels. I am of South African descent and, at that time, still had a farm in the Transvaal. I suppose I have it still—even now. This is probably what saved my life, for in the beginning, though there were others who came through the plague, most people were apparently unable to stand the conditions of life when all meat had to be hunted and savage animals roamed through the piled canyons of what had been the greatest city in the world, New York, where I lived before the blast, and still live. Of course, there were great quantities of canned goods, but fresh meat, fuel and water were difficult to obtain for those who were unaccustomed to dealing with life in the raw.

  I had better go back to the blast. It was what might be called the last real event in history. I seem to be in the interesting position of having survived history, of being history itself—a kind of lonely Adam in a jungle where terror stalked by day and night.

  The Adam idea is now suddenly particularly apt because of the Eves that I have seen. I wonder what Adam would have done with two Eves. Anyway, I am glad I have hidden from them, because if they have survived, others must have. It has always seemed possible to me that in remote parts of the world some groups of those people we used to call savages might have survived, saved by their isolation from the diseases set up by radioactivity and immune or partially immune, because of their diet and the lives they led, to the Red Death which spread over the North. I have evidently been right, for the two girls—they are in their early twenties from the look of them—could not have raised themselves; which again brings up the question: are those with them friends or enemies, and what is my position? Do I wish to be a friend to these strangers after twenty years alone?

  The thing to do now is to continue my narrative and to describe what was certainly the end of our civilization and might have been the end of mankind—though of course man might have reappeared again by a process of natural selection in a few million years; unless this time the new animals, such as the giant wolves that stand as high as a horse, and the imm
ense brown and white minks that attack cattle and suck their blood in a few minutes, and the many other strange beasts and birds should prove to be too much for such primitive types of man as might arise. This, at any rate, had been my opinion until I saw the two girls. It is now subject to modification.

  That I have succeeded in my fight against such wild beasts as I have described is due to my possession of modern weapons. These animals, however, are quite natural-phenomena that science once predicted might arise through the effect of atomic fission on the genes and chromosomes of the embryos extant at the time of the explosion. Or at least that is the way I remember it, though at the time—that is, before it happened—I did not pay much attention to the details about the atom in the magazines and papers, because I had no inclinations toward nuclear physics.

  The center of the blast was said to have been Gramercy Park, probably the Players Club. It was estimated that three hundred thousand people were killed. Another half-million people were wounded by flying debris or burned in varying degrees. A tiny blister, however, proved as bad as a serious burn: There was no case of recovery from a burn of any size. The patient simply appeared to dissolve slowly from the nucleus of the wound. The deaths were extremely painful, and since there were neither sufficient hospital facilities nor enough drugs of any kind to stifle pain, thousands committed suicide, while others were killed by their friends in mercy killings.