1981 and Counting Algis Budrys Some people say Algis Budrys is the only real science fiction critic in America, where there are a lot of book reviewers. He is the son of diplomats who were unable to return home after World War II, and he has lived here ever since. Budrys is best known for his novel Rogue Moon, though the recent Michael mas was also well received. His most recent book is Some Will Not Die (Star blaze), a revised version of the earlier False Night. He reviews books for the Washington Post and other newspapers, and his criticism appears regularly in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Many of the major novels of 1981 were stages id larger works-Julian May's The Many-Colored Land, Gene Wolfe's The Claw of the Conciliator, to name two that we may be sure have been taken permanently into the SF literature. 1981 was the year in which it was announced that Arthur C. Clarke had not, after all, retired, and that Isaac Asimov was working on another book in the Foundation series. Frank Herbert produced another Dune book, not quite a sequel to its predecessors, yet what else but a sequel? In the fantasy domain of SF, there was the announcement of Terry Brooks's sequel to The Sword of Shanarra, and the news of more volumes in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. In a literature that is increasingly discussed as if it contained, nothing but novels, 1981 will undoubtedly be looked back on as a year indissolubly tied to other years. May's novel is a major event; inventive, rich, the work of an author so long absent from the field that she was little more than a legend to the present generation. But it won't be 1981 that's recalled in connection with this occurrence; the Saga of the Pliocene Exile will be said to have appeared "in the early 1980s," as will Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun. What we have here is a year that for one reason or another will not carve its particular niche in the traditions of our field, despite the fact that a great deal of good and sometimes superb work appeared in it. Or so it might be said. But we haven't talked about the short stories, of which this anthology will give you what I think is the best possible sampling. I commend them to you without much further comment; you'll see for yourself that inventiveness and freshness have not vanished from the field, and that the media for shorter work are obviously alive and well. What I would like to talk to you about is this instance of the difference between what is perceived and what happened. I think this is a difference that has been widening. Not dangerously, alas for dramatic propositions. But enough so that we might do well to consider it, and rein it in a little. One can hardly blame publishers of novels for pretending that novels are all that are important. And since it's largely the book publishers who command the advertising and public relations means to communicate the sense of what's going on in the field, the reader even of many magazines is apt to feel that anything not a novel is somehow less considerable. Again, that's not hard to understand-the magazines carry the ads and the book review columns that subtly reinforce this impression. And should a magazine carry a biographical sketch of, or an interview with an author, what is usually mentioned is the work published in books. Some of the fiction in the magazines is labeled part of "a novel in progress," or an excerpt from "a forthcoming novel." It all goes to make the freestanding short story, novelette, or novella appear to be some sort of by-the-way thing. And yet the major influential works in American SF have almost always been of less than novel length; most of them have been outright short stories, little packages of utter revolution. This is not invariably true. But this would be an utterly different field without John Campbell's "Twilight," Fritz Leiber's "Coming Attraction," Cordwainer Smith's "Scanners Live in Vain," Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s "A Canticle for Leibowitz," or James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Houston, Houston, Do You Read?" It would be different as well without Stranger in a Strange Land, The Space Merchants, or The Left Hand of Darkness, but again and again it has been the short work that left ripples spreading through the field in general, whereas even the greatest novels-the aforementioned three, plus The Demolished Man, Slan, Dune, Childhood's End, to add some others-have signaled not so much a general change as a milestone in a particular writer's career. And no career, no matter how mighty, is ultimately as important as a shift in the direction of an entire literature. How can a short story do this, when a novel has so much more scope? Well, a novel-particularly the recent SF novel, where the fashion is for the epic-is about many things, for all that it may have a strong unifying theme. A short story-an ideal short story-is about some one thing, and in the right hands can be about some one thing that doesn't ordinarily occur but occurs with great force. And it occurs in one swift moment of crystallization, with an almost audible pang, whereas the usual novel grows and flowers in a more majestic manner. The truly effective short story is harder to write than a novel of equivalent worth. This is a fact that professionals have long recognized, and for that reason, when they instituted the Nebula Awards, they were careful to see to it that short work would be properly rewarded. And whereas the novel Nebula is usually won by an established name in the field, the short-work Nebulas have been quick to recognize the uncommon newcomer. In a sense, this is a reflection of the fact that the major novelists come from the ingenious young short-story writers, by and large. By and large, there would be a natural tendency to seek out the newer names, to let the established writer wait for his novel Nebula or to rest content in Nebulas past, although that tendency does not express itself as clearly when one looks down the lists over the years. But whatever the actual factors are, the short-work awards represent a consciousness for the future, while the novel Nebulas honor the present. And so I've verged on giving the impression that the short work is, after all, recognized as much for what it promises as for what it is. But this is not true in any common manner. It is possible to believe, when a new writer appears with short work of Nebula quality, that he or she will probably be a major novelist of the future. In that sense, there is a promise. But it is a promise that exists in addition to the independent merit of the work. If it is not fulfilled, if the author never does produce a major novel, he or she may still have a great influence on the field. As "Don A. Stuart," author of "Twilight" and usherer-in of the Golden Age of 1940s SF, John Campbell never wrote a novel. Ray Bradbury's "novels" of the 1950s are short-story collections gathered from the 1940s. Theodore Sturgeon's reputation rests not so much on his novels, proficient as they are, as on works such as "Microcosmic God," "Killdozer," and countless other novelettes and novellas, including "Baby Is Three," the core of his best-known novel, More Than Human. The novel of A Canticle for Leibowitz is not as important as the original short story. The novel of Lester del Rey's "Nerves" or of James Blish's "A Case of Conscience" did not strike with the impact of the original novellas. And this pattern, laid down in a time that may be little more than misty legend for most of today's readers, persists. If Damon Knight, for all his good books, is still a man remembered almost exclusively for his short stories, and if few recall that Fahrenheit 451 was originally "The Fireman" but quite properly consider Bradbury essentially a writer in short forms, there is still Harlan Ellison, and there is still the fact that John Varley, James Tiptree/Alice Sheldon, George R. R. Martin, Lisa Tuttle, Tom Reamy, and, yes, even Joe Haldeman and Joanna Russ, would occupy almost precisely the same places in this field if they had never written a novel. And their names form only part of what could easily be a much longer list. We want to remember that the new Foundation novel is the first Foundation novel Asimov ever wrote: the longest previous piece was a two-part serial, and even so was unique for length. The fact is that the history of this field would be much what it actually is if all its books were dovetailed short stories or expanded shorter works; although the percentage of freestanding novels has risen sharply over the past twenty and particularly the last ten years, still a large proportion of what we see in the libraries and on the "new books" table at the store continues the historic tendency to assembled work. It is not possible to go on from this to a statement that people buy these books out of a nostalgia for the original short stories; that wouldn't account for the multigenerational popularity of the Foundation series or The Martian Chronicles. No, the conclusion one comes to is that SF readers, unlike the readers of general fiction or of any of the "category" fictions of which SF is mistakenly adduced to be one. on some 5 level recognize that the short-story form is the essential SF form. We like our books with multiple climaxes, casts of characters who may come and go in midstream, events that come in series rather than develop in parallel. We don't like them to the exclusion of all other possible forms available in long formats, but we do like them, very much, and in that way we differ from most other readers. What this seems to reflect is some version of the old saw that in SF; the idea is the hero. I would rather argue that in SF a demonstration of what can be done with the idea is the hero-i.e., the thing to which the reader thrills. But however complex you want to make the concept, it remains true that in a literature of ideas, the tendency would...
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