We were outside the front door. I shut it and followed Marion to the car. We were going to be a bit late.
She laughed, knowing by my tone that I was half kidding.
‘Go ahead and put those things into a story,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you can do it. Pile them all in!’
Though she was smiling, it sounded like a challenge.
I put the beer carefully into the back of the car and we drove off down the baking road for our picnic.
All right, I know, times are changing. It’s the great theme of our age. Ever since evolution and all that, the decades have gone hog wild for change; you’d think there was a law about it. Maybe there is a law about it.
Don’t think I’m complaining: I am. Since I was a kid, everything has changed, from the taste of bread to the nature of Africa and China. But at least I thought SF would stay the same.
Instead, what has happened? It’s all different. They don’t write like Heinlein any more – even Heinlein doesn’t. In the old days, you knew exactly where you stood in a story. Take the aliens; back in the Golden Age, when the writers had a bit of a sense of wonder and there were blondes on the covers, you knew the aliens would always be there, endlessly mown down, endlessly picturesque, swarming over endless alien worlds. But nowadays – well, let’s take actual cases, he said, reaching eagerly for the May 1940 copy of Gruelling Science Stories. The Luftwaffe was plastering London at the time, but thank heavens the American SF writers hadn’t got wind of that, and Zago Blinder was still turning out his customary peaceful limpid prose. His May 1940 stint was entitled, with what I’ve always thought showed considerable skill in alliteration, ‘The Devils of Deneb IV’.
You know how this sort of thing goes right from the start. The pleasure lies in its predictability. Scarcely has the whine (whisper, snarl, thunder) of the landing jets died than the hatch opens and three Earthmen jump (crawl, climb, fall) out and stand looking round Deneb IV. They find the air is breathable and quickly hoist the flag (Old Glory, UN banner, Stars and Stripes).
Up to now, we readers have been carried along breathlessly (restlessly, hesitantly, mindlessly) on the flood of the author’s prose, full of admiration for the way in which he has so economically created a situation so distinct from our own humdrum world. More, the old-timers among us are full of gratitude for his dropping the first three (four, six, twelve) chapters describing the construction of the spaceship in someone’s back yard and its long eventful journey to Deneb which were once considered compulsory in this sort of exercise.
Now, however, comes an awkward pause. We have been brought painlessly through what the textbooks call Building Up Atmosphere, Establishing Environment, Creating Character, and so on. The idyllic mood must be shattered. It is time to Introduce the Action.
‘Look!’ gasps (coughs, barks, yells) the captain, pointing with trembling (rigid, scarred, nicotine-stained) finger at the nearby hill (jungle, ocean, ruined temple). His crewmen follow the line of his fingertip, and there approaching them they see an angry group (ugly bunch, slavering horde, slobbering herd) of Denebians who are plainly out for blood as they gallop (surge, slime, esp) towards the spaceship.
You must admit this is value for money, particularly if you only borrowed the magazine. In no time, the three intrepid explorers are back in their ship and the vile Denebians are trying to scratch their way in through the cargo hatch.
What more could you ask for? Personally, I asked for nothing more; I had had enough by the time I came across this situation for the fiftieth time. It was not boredom so much as bravery. The Denebians weren’t what they used to be. However mindless and merciless they got, I was no longer scared. I developed immunity. Yet, for all that, I liked things the way they were. The more unsociably those aliens behaved, the more I realized how superior we Earthmen were.
Then things became less straightforward. I was rifling through Microscopic Sex Wonder during the boom year of 1951 when I realised that Deneb was no longer the same. They’d dared to alter the plot!
This time, the aliens didn’t appear when the flag was hoisted. Everything was peaceful – too peaceful. Our three chums wandered among beautiful trees, or they found charming people like themselves but nicer, with sweet old mums sitting knitting on the porch, and Pa sucking a corn cob and spittin’ to avoid bunches of rosy-cheeked kids, or else they found nothing there at all except the waving grass.
You remember what happened, don’t you? Those beautiful trees, that grand old granny, those cheeky kids, that expanse of nothing, that sneaky grass, was really our old Denebians in disguise. Yes, sir! Freud had hit SF by this date, and the old slobbering hordes were back in full force only nastier, because they could thought-wrap themselves as grannies or grass and get into the ship and cause chaos. That was a terrible era, and I don’t know how I survived it. Story after story, I had to face utter mind-wrenching terror.
I grew to love it.
Then they went and changed the plot again! I knew just how things were going and was all set to relax when the editors or whoever it is that insists on these things – for sure it’s not the writers – altered the orthodoxy.
I can pinpoint the date exactly when I realized something had gone wrong. I had bought the Jannish – sorry, the January issue of The Monthly of Whimsey and Whammo-Science, 1960, and was leafing through this story by Piledriver Jones entitled ‘On Deneb Deep My Pleasure Stalks’. Funny, I thought, the title doesn’t sound right, they’ve started mucking around with the titles now, is nothing sacred? But since I wanted to find out if a pleasure stalk was what I thought it was (it wasn’t), I forced myself to read on.
You can’t fail to recall the story, not only because it has since been anthologised fifty-two times and won a Hank, but because it started a new trend. This is the one where they arrive on Deneb IV all right, in this funny ship that rides solar winds, but some sort of bug gets them and they all grow extra limbs; the captain alone grows twelve big toes, fourteen left arms, a spare pair of buttocks, two girl’s knees, and a horse’s head. And then they sit around and talk philosophy, not minding at all, until in the end it turns out that back on Earth things are even worse because people are terribly short of horse’s heads and buttocks and knee caps and things.
Let’s have no false modesty – I can adjust to anything. But it needs about twenty years to adjust to that sort of plot. And what happened? Already, already, they’ve altered the line again. That’s what I mean about change running hog wild.
Just this year the new orthodoxy has set in. Look at this month’s crop of magazines – it’s not a very big crop these days, because people won’t read unless they know what to expect – look at Monolog, look at Off, look at Odious Fantasy and Lewd Worlds and Gallimaufry, and what do you find? Not a darned one of them has a story set on Deneb IV!
Not a darned one of them has a story set on any alien planet! They’re all Earth stories, everyone, though Monolog has this nine-part serial set in England at the time of the Norman Conquest, with William the Conqueror finding cases of telepathy among the peasants. Otherwise, nothing! Russians, psi powers, medicine, psychology, sociology, politics, traffic problems, robots, nuclear wars, funny little tales about fellows meeting aliens and not realising it, oh yes, no shortage of all that sort of stuff, and, of course, plenty of drowned, crystallised, rainless, bug-ridden, childless, adultless, metal-less, doodless, witless worlds, all of them Earth. But not a single story set on another planet.
I’d chuck in my hand. I would. I’d give up. I’d never bother to try and read another SF story in another magazine in my life. There just happens to be one small thing that gives me grounds for hope.
Lewd Worlds has a little cameo, not more than a thousand words long, about this chap who seduces this girl and then creeps into