The Year's Best Science Fiction 10

Yes, but how do you know it when you see it? Or, rather, how do you know it when you see it? Is there any objective means of identifying it? Or is “decadence” one of those things which only afflict other people with different values and standards?

I keep thinking of that sentence in Tom Disch’s autobiographical note: After “Descending,” things picked up. Are evolution and devolution necessary reciprocals, in a closed (or even spiraling) cycle? Then the “decadent” can hardly be distinguished from the “renascent.”

Is E. M. Forster’s The Machine Stops, or H. G. Wells’ Things To Come, a better description of decadence? Is it decadent or efficient to have two cars in a two-driver family? Is it decadence or hardihood to pace city sidewalks in bare sandals and dirty feet?

Is alcohol or marihuana more decadent? Pepsi-Cola or cigarettes? Chewing gum or the electric toothbrush? Is Librium as decadent as opium? Will the true decadent please stand up!

Let me return briefly to Dr. Leary: “The science game, the healing game, the knowledge game are magnificent human structures. They are our proudest game accomplishments. But they are great only so long as they are seen as game. When they go beyond this point, the trouble begins—claims to a nongame reality status: the emergence of experts, professionals, priests, status-favored authorities; claims to power and control and priority. Look at the A.E.C. Look at the A.M.A. And watch out! At this point you will find that games which began with the goal of decreasing human helplessness end up increasing it.”

Is that it? Can we measure it in terms of “human helplessness”?

Fritz Leiber’s 1964 novel, The Wanderer, was a vivid, multi-faceted study of the varieties of human helplessness, and human responses to. helplessness, providing sharp contrasts in “decadent” and “renascent” scene-painting.

In this short story, the helplessness is of a very different sort