You would do the same, would you not, with a novel based on the life of Simon Bolivar?

Of course, there is the alternate, equivalent method of testing the authenticity of any book by checking on the author. If the Simon Bolivar novel was written by a distinguished scholar of South American history, you need concern yourself only with the literary merit of the book. If a book about space travel is written by a world - famous astronomer (as in the case of the one who writes under the pen name of "Philip Latham"), you can put your mind at rest about the correctness of the science therein. In many cases science - fiction writers have more than adequate professional background in the sciences they use as background material and their publishers are careful to let you know this through catalog and dust jacket blurb. I happen to be personally aware of and can vouch for the scientific training of Sprague de Camp, George 0. Smith, "John Tame," John W. Campbell, Jr., "Philip Latham," Will Jenkins, Jack Williamson, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, E. E. Smith, Philip Wylie, Olaf Stapledon, H. G. Wells, Damon Knight, Harry Stine, and "J. J. Coupling." This listing refers to qualifications in science only and is necessarily incomplete, nor do I mean to slight the many fine writers without formal scientific training who are well read in science and most careful in their research.

But some means of checking on a writer of alleged science fiction is desirable. Most writers of historical fiction appear to go to quite a lot of trouble to get the facts of their historical scenes correct, but some people seem to feel that all that is necessary to write science fiction is an unashamed imagination and a sprinkling of words like "ray gun," "rocket tube," "mutant," and "space warp." In some cases the offense is as blatant as it would be in the case of an author of alleged historical fiction who founded a book on the premise that Simon Bolivar was a Chinese monk! It follows that, in order to spot these literary fakers it is necessary to know that Bolivar was not a Chinese monk - know something of the sciences yourself or enlist competent advisers.

AFTERWORD

Writers talking about writing are about as bad as parents boasting about their children. I have not done much of it; the few times that I have been guilty, I did not instigate the project, and in almost all cases (all, I think) my arm was twisted.

I promise to avoid it in the future.

The item above, however, I consider worthy of publication (even though my arm was twisted) because there really are many librarians who earnestly wish to buy good science fiction... but don't know how to do it. In this short article I tried very hard to define clearly and simply how to avoid the perils of Sturgeon's Law in buying science fiction.

Part way through you will notice the origin of the last name of the STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND.

"It is far, far better to have a bastard in the family than an unemployed son - in - law."

- Jubal Harshaw

FOREWORD

Superficially this looks like the same sort of article as PANDORA'S BOX; it is not, it is fiction - written by request to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Amazing Stories. In PANDORA'S BOX I was trying hard to extrapolate rationally to most probable answers 50 years in the future (and in November1979 I gave myself a score of66% - anybody want to buy a used crystal ball with a crack in it?).

But in this short - short I wrote as if I were alive in 2001 and writing a retrospective of the 20th century. Of course everyone knows what happened in 2001; they found a big black monolith on Luna - but in 19561 didn't know that. So I wrote as far out as I thought I could get away with (to be entertaining) while trying to make the items sound plausible and possible if not likely.

Figures in parentheses refer to notes at the end.

"Has it ever occurred to you

that God might be a committee?"

- Jubal Harshaw

THE THIRD MILLENNIUM OPENS

Now, at the beginning of the year 2001, it is time to see where we have been and guess at where we are going. A thousand years ago Otto III ruled the Holy Roman Empire, William the Conqueror was not yet born, and the Discovery of America was almost five hundred years in the future. The condition of mankind had not changed in most important respects since the dawn of history. Aside from language and local custom a peasant of 1000 B.C. would have been right at home in a village of 1001 A.D.

He would not be so today!

The major changes took place in the last two centuries, but the most significant change of all occurred in the last fifty years, during the lifetimes of many of us. In 1950 six out of ten persons could neither read nor write; today an illiterate person is a freak.(1)

More people have learned to read and write in the past fifty years than in all the thousands of years preceding 1950.

This one change is more world-shaking than the establishment this last year of the laboratory outpost on Pluto. We think of this century just closed as the one in which mankind conquered space; it would be more appropriate to think of it as the century in which the human race finally learned to read and write.

(Let's give the Devil his due; the contagious insanities of the past century - communism, xenophobia, aggressive nationalism, the explosions of the formerly colonial peoples - have done more to spread literacy than the efforts of all the do - gooders in history. The Three R's suddenly became indispensable weapons in mankind's bloodiest struggles - learn to read, or die. Out of bad has come good; a man who can read and write is nine - tenths free even in chains.)

But something else has happened as important as the ABC's. The big - muscled accomplishments of the past fifty years - like sea - farming, the fantastic multiplication of horsepower, and spaceships, pantographic factories, the Sahara Sea, reflexive automation, tapping the Sun - overshadow the most radical advance, i.e., the first fumbling steps in founding a science of the human mind.

Fifty years ago hypnotism was a parlor trick, clairvoyance was superstition, telepathy was almost unknown, and parapsychology was on a par with phrenology and not as respectable as the most popular nonsense called astrology.

Do we have a "science of the mind" today? Far from it. But we do have - A Certainty of Survival after Death, proved with scientific rigor more complete than that which we apply to heat engines. It is hard to believe that it was only in 1952 that Morey Bernstein, using hypnotic regression, established the personal survival of Bridget Murphy - and thereby turned the western world to a research that Asia and Africa had always taken for granted.(2)

Telepathy and Clairvoyance for Military Purposes. The obvious effect was the changing of war from a "closed" game to an "open" game in the mathematical sense, with the consequence that assassination is now more important than mass weapons. It may well be that no fusion bomb or plague weapon will ever again be used - it would take a foolhardy dictator even to consider such when he knows that his thoughts are being monitored ... and that assassination is so much harder to stop than a rocket bomb. He is bound to remember that Tchaka the Ruthless was killed by one of his own bodyguard.

But the less obvious effect has been to take "secrecy" wraps off scientific research. It is hard to recall that there was once a time when scientific facts could not be freely published, just as it is hard to believe that our grandfathers used to wear things called "swimming suits" - secrecy in science and swimming with clothes on are almost equally preposterous to the modern mind. Yet clothing never hampered a swimmer as much as "classification" hampered science. Most happily, controlled telepathy made secrecy first futile, then obsolete.(3)