In a sense, the job of the science fiction writer in continuing to write pessimistically if he feels pessimistic, is a worsening of the spot every one of us is in; the SF writer will be cooked no deader than anybody else. But the SF writer has all day to brood; brooding, or at least thinking, is his job. If the SF writer is requested not to think about doom, if it's immoral to write about an approaching war, then it certainly is an evil thing to worry about it.

The only really legitimate complaint that can be raised against doom stories (outside of the complaint that they are all the same and hence only one really adequate doom story is required) is that there have always been war and danger, and that the sense of doom may be misplaced. This is a good argument, and I am beginning to believe it. A doom story never offers a solution to the problem: It merely utters the problem over and over again. Well, assuming we accept the existence of the problem (the approaching war), perhaps a more realistic or at least more valuable function would be to seek, in our science fiction stories, partial solutions to the menace. How are we going to survive? What will our world be like after a few (or a lot) of us have survived?

Rather than writing stories about doom, perhaps we should take the doom for granted and go on from there. Make the ruined world of ash a premise: State it in paragraph one, and get it over with, rather than winding up with it at the very end. And make the central theme or idea of the story an attempt by the characters to solve the problem of postwar survival.

At worst, we can suppose that nobody will survive. But this is like taking pictures of coal bins at midnight: It can be done, but if there is nothing there, then what the hell. It is quite possible that a few dozen and even a very large number of people may survive the war, in which case a story dealing with various attempts at setting up societies can be developed. Of course, we want to avoid the English doom novel: the struggling primitive colony of the postmachine type, the "back to nature" thing. Let's bypass that, and presume basic technology; maybe not atomic-powered rocket ships, but at least gasoline combustion engines and telephones.

However, I can't seriously believe that much of our cultural pattern or physical assets will survive the next fifty years. Our present social continuum is disintegrating rapidly; if war doesn't burst it apart, it obviously will corrode away. At the very best, at the most optimistic, there won't be any death and destruction. I'll assume the brighter side, the possibility of a limited war and only partial retrogression -- Bradbury is perhaps too pessimistic -- but to avoid the topic of war and cultural retrogression, as some schools of science fiction writers and editors have done, is unrealistic and downright irresponsible.

Such pollyanna noises are designed to increase circulation. They shouldn't fool anybody who reads newspapers.

Recently I took yet another dose of LSD-25, and as a result certain dull but persistent thoughts have come creeping into my head. I will herein retail [sic; retell] a few of them, in chaotic form. If you find them all false, good for you. If you find them all true, good for you likewise.

The real origin of science fiction lay in the seventeenth-century novels of exploration in fabulous lands. Therefore Jules Verne's story of travel to the moon is not SF because they go by rocket but because of where they go. It would be as much SF if they went by rubber band.

Very few SF stories come true. Fortunately. Those such as Waldo are freaks and prove nothing.

Because of a present-day rocket travel to Mars et al., the general public is at last willing to accept SF as reasonable. They have stopped laughing, but they have not started reading. They probably never will, because reading is too hard for them. But now we know that we were right. (Of course, we knew that all along. But it's nice to see it proved.)

No one makes any real money off good -- I repeat, good -- SF. This probably indicates that it has artistic worth. If Lorenzo de Medici were alive he would pick up the tab for A. E. van Vogt, not for John Updike.

The best SF novel I have read is Vonnegut's Player Piano, because it actually deals with men-women relationships (Paul Proteus and his bitch of a wife). In this matter the book is unique in the field. Brave New World only seems to do this; 1984 in this regard is awful.

If I were to dredge up one SF novel that, more than any others, would cause me to abandon SF entirely, it is Robert Heinlein's Gulf. It strikes me as fascism pure and simple, and -- what is worse -- put forth unattractively. Bleh.

Heinlein has done more to harm SF than has any other writer, I think -- with the possible exception of George O. Smith. The dialogue in Stranger in a Strange Land has to be read to be believed. "Give the little lady a box of cigars!" a character cries, meaning that the girl has said something that is correct. One wonders what the rejoinder would be if a truly inspired remark had to be answered, rather than a routine statement; it would probably burst the book's gizzard.

Once I read a terrific short story in If by an unknown writer named Robert Gilbert. It was poetry, beauty, love, perfection, and I wrote him and told him so. He wrote back and said he'd written the story while listening to Harry James records.

I started reading SF in 1941. I'm old.

There is one accurate way -- and only one -- by which you can tell you are growing old. It is when the SF magazines that you bought new on the stand at the time they came out have begun to turn the same yellow color as the ones you picked up as collectors' items from specialty dealers... i.e., already ancient.

Is it possible that Lovecraft saw the truth? That realms and wickedness such as he describes, for example in The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward, actually exist? Imagine taking a dose of LSD and finding yourself in Salem. You would go mad.

Religion ought never to show up in SF except from a sociological standpoint, as in Gather, Darkness [a novel by Fritz Leiber]. God per se, as a character, ruins a good SF story; and this is as true of my own stuff as anyone else's. Therefore I deplore my Palmer Eldritch book in that regard. But people who are a bit mystically inclined like it. I don't. I wish I had never written it; there are too many horrid forces loose in it. When I wrote it I had been taking certain chemicals and I could see the awful landscape that I depicted. But not now. Thank God. Agnus Dei qui tollis peccata mundi [Lamb of God who lifts the sins of the world].

Avram Davidson [an SF writer] fascinates me -- as a person, I mean. He is a mixture of a little boy and a very wise old man, and his eyes always twinkle as if he were a defrocked Santa Claus. With beard dyed black.

I'll give anyone fifteen cents who can imagine [SF editor] Tony Boucher as a small boy. Obviously, Tony was always as he is now. But even more difficult to imagine is the strange truth that once there was no Tony Boucher at all. This is clearly impossible. I think there must always have been a Tony Boucher; if not the one we know, then some other, very much like him.