A writer contemplates posterity

When I was a teenager living in a rural part of Florida, I used to listen to the local Bible experts explain why certain passages in the Book of Revelation proved the world was going to end in ten years. They would sit on their porches on balmy Florida nights, with fireflies playing on the lawn, and you could hear the pleasure in their voices as they described the events that would destroy that comfortable, agreeable scene.

Why do so many people like to contemplate a final cataclysm? We all love melodrama, for one thing. And who can resist the soul-satisfying knowledge that we possess the inside information that the ignorant masses have failed to grasp?

As I grew older and encountered non-Biblical prophets of doom, I found a deeper reason why so many people want to think they're living at the end of human history: They're terrified by the knowledge that they're going to end and the world will roll on without them, century after century, millennium after millennium.

So when they go, everybody has to go.

Some of us, on the other hand, take comfort from the thought that life will go on after we're gone. We reject the more dismal visions of the future because we like to think that our contributions will have some meaning as long as human society exists.

Joyce Carol Oates's ambition

In her comparison of Emily Dickinson and Joyce Carol Oates, Carol Rocamora quotes Oates's assertion that she writes for posterity. (To read Rocamora's essay, click here.) But personally, I've never been attracted by the conventional version of that writerly ambition.

I've never envisioned a future in which readers absorb my words (and my byline) long after I've slipped into the Great Dark. I renounced that fantasy when I decided to write science fiction.

Science fiction can survive for a few decades. True, I still receive requests to autograph books and stories that I wrote 40 years ago. But sooner or later it dates. Inevitably there comes a day when younger readers pick up a story you wrote in your youth and wonder why the super geniuses of the 23rd Century are calculating with slide rules and fretting over problems that could be resolved by a single call on a cell phone.

Links in a chain

The rest of my literary output doesn't give me much hope for immortality, either. It falls into two categories: journalism (including reviews) and commercial items, like brochures and handbooks, commissioned by businesses and institutions. The life expectancy of both categories can be measured in years, at best, and much of the time in days.

When I ponder my relationship to the future, I don't think about survival. I think about connection. I think of links in a chain, runners in a relay race, a few bricks added to the grand edifice we call civilization. My personal contribution will maintain its value as long as the chain remains unbroken, the race continues and the edifice stands.

Many of the science fiction writers I read when I was a teenager have already faded into obscurity. But the effect of their work still echoes through the years. They developed techniques and explored subjects that contemporary science fiction writers continue to exploit.

Bits of them live in every line that writers in my age group write. Those bits, along with bits of us, will live on in the works younger writers produce.

And science fiction is only a segment of a larger literary culture, which is, in turn, part of a great intellectual and cultural epic that began when the first sparks of intelligence lit the brains of the first proto-humans.

Fooling Franco

A few years ago, a reader in Argentina posted a note about Spanish literary history on the online forum supported by Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. During the Franco dictatorship of1939-75, it seems, the Spanish censors ignored science fiction. They didn't realize that the American books translated into Spanish included political satires, speculations about alternate forms of society, and sagas about heroic rebels overthrowing future dictatorships.

"Of course, only dumb nerdy kids read science fiction," the reader wrote. "It's just that dumb nerdy kids have this weird habit of becoming lawyers and scientists and politicians and teachers and writers in their own right. If there's one country where you can truly say that SF made a difference, it's Spain."

And once those books were translated into Spanish, they could be exported to the dictatorships that infested South America.

New Jersey politics (in Spanish)

For me, that post added an extra fillip to a pleasant personal memory. In 1965, I received a small (very small) check for my share of the Spanish rights to a best-of-the-year science fiction anthology. My story, which led off the anthology, dealt with politicians using computer models and advanced psychological techniques to manipulate the electorate in a New Jersey Congressional district.

At the time, my wife and I felt the sale was a career milestone. It was my first foreign rights sale. But we also felt it should be greeted with a smile, given the minuscule size of the check. We celebrated by spending the entire sum on an inexpensive (very inexpensive) bottle of Spanish wine.

But thanks to the reader from Argentina, I now know the event had a larger significance. I had made a small contribution to a literary phenomenon that helped prepare the Spanish people for the revival of parliamentary democracy.

To me, that's a lot more satisfying than the hope that some kid may be forced to read one of my stories in an English class 90 years after I'm dead.♦


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