6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction

INTRODUCTION

MORE YEARS AGO than I care to count, an uncle of mine who had a propensity for picking up books on second-hand counters presented me with a badly dogeared volume, The Time Machine. The author’s name was Wells—H. G. Wells. I had never heard of him nor had I ever dreamed of time machines; but I sat down to look the book over, and before I knew it it was three hours later and I had had my first experience with science fiction. Literally, it was like travel through time itself, so imperceptibly did the hours pass.

Two things about this book have stayed with me through the years. I admired, first, the brilliant sweep of its imagination, and, second, its odd length. The Time Machine is longer than a short story—even a “long” one —and considerably shorter than a regular novel. Detective stories I was reading in those days were usually at least twice as long as Mr. Wells’ masterpiece and generally about half as exciting. This seemed, even then, to point a moral: there are not many tales that need more than novelette treatment for satisfactory development, just as there are not many really meaningful, idea-rich stories that can be told in less than novelette length.

It seems to me that science fiction, perhaps more than any other type of fiction, has found the novelette well suited to its needs. The reason is simple. In a story about a fisherman and his vacation, or a commuter and his marital difficulties, or a schoolboy and his games, or even an explorer in far-off Africa, every element in the back ground and many in the characterizations need only be hinted at by the author. The reader will come up with clear mental pictures of what he is intended to see. He has his own mental image of what is meant by “a country lane,” “the steep canyons of New York’s financial district,” “the wide, cactus-dotted desert.”

But the problem is entirely different when the author has to make his concept of life on far planets or in other dimensions real and colorful. It is a difficult thing to do; it takes skill in writing—and it takes words. Similarly, it is hard to “make real” the nature of our own world in a far-distant future, when unimaginable things may have occurred to make our current concepts of earth obsolete.

When the science fiction author has to work within the limits of the short story, he only too often has to assume certain preconceptions on the part of his readers, thus limiting his audience to a relatively small group of “fans” who have read so much science fiction that they accept the improbable as commonplace. This is what has led many critics to dismiss science fiction as narrow in scope and limited in appeal.

But the short novel, or novelette, gives the writer room enough to make his new ideas circumstantially real, and a great many stories of this length are printed by the science fiction magazines. While the short story of 3,000 to 6,000 words is splendid for everyday plots and backgrounds, the short novel, running from 15,000 to 40,000 words, is much preferred by writers describing the wholly imaginary backgrounds and characters that are common to science fiction. It is only when given that much leg-room that they can make their unusual backgrounds and concepts convincing.

Since the novelette is a form particularly suited to science fiction, it’s only natural that there should be many good ones floating around. And “floating around” is the correct way of putting it, as far as book publication goes, for most science fiction anthologists can print very few stories which might consume as much as a quarter of the total wordage allowed them. Consequently, there are dozens of high quality novelettes that have been published in the science fiction magazines and left there to molder.

This is really not the place to outline the history, development and accomplishments of modern science fiction, or even to try and define it. You are supposed to enjoy this book, not be educated or edified by it. You are now reading for fun and not for profit, or you never would have picked this book up in the first place. Science fiction is said by some enthusiasts to be today’s literature of ideas —scientific, psychological, sociological, political, metaphysical, philosophic, even theological. My feeling is that this point has been rather overemphasized, for it is important to remember that these imaginative tales, whatever their scientific base or their idea content, are written primarily for entertainment, and if they do not entertain they fail. Indeed, they do not ordinarily get published.

Still, bearing in mind that science fiction must first of all be fun to read, it can be said that its greatest claim to permanent value is its use of imaginative ideas to stir up the mind and make the reader think a bit about the nature of the world he lives in and its problems.

Let’s take a brief look at the tales included and see how satisfactorily they exemplify modern science fiction. Stuart Cloete’s The Blast is the story of a man-made catastrophe as seen through the eyes of a New Yorker. Here is one of the most vivid reconstructions—or pre-constructions—of world-wide ruin that has ever been written, all the more vivid for its intimate detail and its sense of immediacy. The story is not merely hair-raising adventure; it is packed with ideas, with social criticism. Stuart Cloete is not primarily known as a science fiction writer but as the author of numerous books and stories laid in Africa, such as The Turning Wheels.

Robert Heinlein’s Coventry, an imaginative view of tomorrow’s methods of correcting emotional instability, is full of entertaining possibilities for the future of our own psychological sciences. Who knows? Perhaps we should set aside a state in the Union solely for the use of psychological misfits, one where they can give full play to their primitive, “abnormal” bent for blood-and-thunder adventure in an untamed underworld of their own!

The same is true to an even greater degree of the time-travel story, Barrier, by the noted editor, critic and author, Anthony Boucher. Here the idea is even more overt. We know very well that the author is advocating American democracy through the device of an enthralling plot about an anti-democratic society of tomorrow.

Catastrophes, time travel, worlds of tomorrow: these only suggest the richness of modern science fiction. There are straight science-imagination stories, compounded of literally fantastic possibilities in tomorrow’s science and of fine, colorful, suspenseful conflict. Such is the essence of James Blish’s Surface Tension, the story of a painfully struggling new society created by man to work out its destinies beneath the surface of the water on a planet somewhere far in the depths of the Galaxy.

Or take Murray Leinster’s hair-raising kidnap-adventure novel, -The Other World, about a primitive civilization paralleling our own. Here the excitement is that of savage warfare with a society that is dangerously interpenetrating ours—a story full of magic and strangeness and an uncomfortable explanation for the existence of missing persons bureaus!

Of all the stories in this collection, only one has a really familiar environment. Theodore Sturgeon’s Maturity is about our own world. It could never have been written so effectively if it were about other times or other worlds; it is one of those tales of events that might actually be happening right now. In the editor’s opinion, this is one of the most poignantly real stories about the tragedy of a superman in our midst that has ever been written.

While the present volume is the first collection of science fiction novelettes to appear as a paper-bound original book, it is to be hoped that it is far from the last. For here is a format and a price which is eminently suitable for novelette collections. We present you here with a set of six novelettes that have passed the tests of time and of enthusiastic reader evaluation. These are not just the “best” of the current month or even the current year; they are among the best science fiction novelettes ever published.

- GROFF CONKLIN