The Event Horizon

3. Voices From the Edge

3.1 Space, The Necessary and Unlimited Frontier by Jorge Codina

A little over 100 years ago Frederick Jackson Turner expounded his theory on the source of the American character. It was not legal theories, precedents, traditions, national or racial stock that was the source of the egalitarian democracy, individualists, and spirit of innovation that characterised America, it was the existence of the Frontier.

Turner and his followers developed elaborate social theories as to why this was so, but they could all be reduced to one simple fact: The frontier provided a safety valve for America's and Europe's social pressures. People could escape poverty, poor wages, oppressive governments and intolerance in general by fleeing to the frontier and making a new life for themselves. Anti-social elements of the society could direct their energies towards building new settlements as opposed to causing damage. The frontier was a rough place that forced innovation, self-reliance, co-operation and tolerance on its inhabitants if they were to survive. People had to do without the help or hindrance of the state. Government, if it existed at all, was spread very thin. People had to fend for themselves.

Turner went on to predict that as the frontier closed America would succumb to the same statist pressures that held Europe and that the American character would fade.

All frontiers on Earth are closed. There are still large areas of land that are unsettled and the oceans do present us with a lot of space along with a technical challenge. But these do not qualify as frontiers in the traditional sense. They are all within the grasp of government. Even if someone were to build a large floating platform on the oceans existing International Law would require it to be under the authority of a government or be considered a pirate. And the authority would be real, not a thin veneer.

The only place to escape the state, to open the safety valve, is space.

Space is, for all practical purposes, infinite. The frontier will never close! When the Moon becomes crowded the ``brave souls`` will head for Mars and the Asteroid Belt. As these places become ``respectable``, the disreputable, the adventures, and other anti-social types will head for the outer systems. And when the technology becomes available for other solar systems.

Most people will not go into space. Most Europeans did not leave their homes for the New World, even for the promises of riches, indeed even when life was very difficult for them. People don't like to move. But the minority that did developed a new culture and thousands of innovations to help them cope with their new, hostile surroundings. Those that move into space will do the same. Their inventions will help all of humanity.

Space is necessary for the race to grow.

3.2 O.O.P.S! Out Of Print Scifi by Nigel Tan

In a letter to the Science Fiction Writers of America in June 1996, Gardner Dozois lamented:

``This is a field with a very short memory, and getting shorter all the time..... I've been brooding on and off about the dwindling historical memory of the field, something I'm reminded of every time some bright young kid who considers himself to be a core SF reader -- even writers, even SFWA members -- says that he's never heard of Cordwainer Smith, or Alfred Bester, or Theordore Sturgeon, or James Blish, or, in some cases, even writers who are still working, such as Jack Vance or Poul Anderson.''

Dozois has hit the nail on the head. SF has been with us for more than a century, and it's been 60 years since the Golden Age. Yet there are people out there who fail to perceive the history of SF. They may think that SF started with Star Wars or worse, Battlestar Galactica (cringe!). The younger SF readers may fail to realise just what a rich and varied history SF has as a genre.

And I think one major contributor to this collective amnesia is the lack of reprints of classic SF titles. It often is rather difficult to get hold of old copies of well-known books as publishers do not seem to want to reprint them due to low demand, and readers just don't see them on the shelves, thus readers don't know about them, and thus there's no demand, and the vicious cycle goes on.

If the outlook for novels is poor, then the prognosis for short stories and novellas is dismal at best. SF is a field in which the short story is as important as the novel in defining the genre, and yet once the story is printed in a magazine, it becomes near impossible to find it again unless it’s been anthologized. And after a couple of years, even the anthology goes out of print, and the story vanishes back into obscurity.

Happily, there has been an attempt in recent years to reverse this trend. Salvation comes in the form of small presses. Small presses such as Arkham House, White Wolf and NESFA Press have come up with small print runs, usually anthologies of authors from the early days of SF. NESFA has been one of the most consistent in recent years, collecting all the Cordwainer Smith stories into one monster volume for example, and all the Zenna Henderson stories into another. Their latest is an anthology of C.M. Kornbluth (author of ``The Little Black Bag'' - one of SF's all time classics and one of my favourite stories, being in my profession), who is another neglected early practitioner of the field. Dark Harvest has issued an omnibus edition of Fritz Leiber stories, and Arkham has one for James Tiptree.

But small presses have their limitations. Ultimately, the number of copies is limited. Finding them in mainstream bookstores may also prove difficult. But at a time when I feel that the big publishers (Tor, Bantam Doubleday Dell etc) are not doing their part in reviving SF classics, small presses remain a flicker of light in the general gloom.

Ah, but deliverance also comes in the form of used books. Used bookstores and lately the Internet have proven to be fertile hunting grounds for those searching for rare and out-of-print books. Used bookstores elsewhere in the USA or in the UK are just great, as many of us can attest to. Our used bookstores in Singapore, however, are not quite so great, being more parallel-importers of books. To put it simply, the books aren't used enough. They're too new. It's near impossible to find anything SF printed in the 70's and earlier - the only older titles there are 80's or 90's reprints of popular titles such as Dune. And there just aren't enough hardcovers.

So where does that leave us? The Internet then. Websites such as Advanced Book Exchange and Bibliofind have searchable online catalogues and specialise in out-of-print books. Most of the time, somewhere someplace has the book you've always been searching for. Shipping may cost you an arm and a leg sometimes (or just an arm most other times), but remains generally tolerable.

As more and more SF giants pop off into the Great-Nebula-In-The-Sky, much of the major SF work of the 50's and 60's is fading into the sunset. The real tragedy would be not be their passing, but the inability of the genre to remember what their contribution to SF was.

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