 
Reflections on Enchantress from the Stars

## And Other Essays

Collected Essays, Volume 1

### Sylvia Engdahl

Copyright © 2019 by Sylvia Louise Engdahl

(except where earlier publication stated)

All rights reserved. For information, write to sle@sylviaengdahl.com. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only, and may not be resold, given away, or altered.

This ebook edition distributed by Smashwords

Cover photo © by Can Stock Photo / Arrxxx

Author website: www.sylviaengdahl.com

Note: The essays in this book do not need to be read in order; they are independent. You can return to the Table of Contents from the end of each essay.

Table of Contents

Preface

List of Essays

Reflections on Enchantress from the Stars (2017)

The Mythic Role of Space Fiction (1990)

The Changing Role of Science Fiction in Children's Literature (1971)

Perspective on the Future: The Quest of Space Age Young People (1972)

Update on the Critical Stage: The Far Side of Evil's Relevance Today (2017)

Faith as the Focus of Children of the Star (1972, 2017)

The Relevance of Roots (1990)

Why Write for Today's Teenagers? (1972)

Do Teenage Novels Fill A Need? (1975)

A Response to Some Reactions to Journey Between Worlds(2015)

Are My Novels Set in a Distinct Fictional Universe? (2019)

Why My Flame Novels Aren't Suitable for Kids (2017)

The Curse of Categorization (2010, 2011)

What It Takes to Write a Novel (2003)

My Autobiography from Contemporary Authors(1988, 2001)

Looking Back from My Eighties (2017)

Bibliography of My Published Work

About the Author

Preface

This book contains all the essays I have written about my books and about my life. Almost all of them were in an earlier ebook, _Reflections on the Future_ , which with the addition of new essays would have been too long and which has been replaced by separate books on different topics such as space and human mind powers. If you bought that ebook you don't need this one.

Though my best-known book is my young adult novel _Enchantress from the Stars_ , I have written five more YA novels and four science fiction novels for adults, which these essays discuss. I have never written a book for children. _Enchantress_ was originally meant for teens and I don't recommend it to readers under 12 unless they are exceptionally mature and also read other YA books. As it was a Newbery Honor book it is often given children too young to understand much of it, and its publishers have called it "middle grades" because, until recently at least, that's where the largest market was. I'm happy if children enjoy the story, but I hope they will return to it when they are older.

If I could say only one thing in response to comments often made about _Enchantress from the Stars_ it would be that it's not about relationships between cultures on Earth, it's about why reports of UFO landings aren't true and why I don't think SETI is going to receive any messages from extraterrestrial civilizations. Contact among members of the same human species is not the same as contact between peoples who evolved on different worlds, and to assume an analogy implies that I endorse views that were long ago rejected by anthropologists. I can't say this too often, for reasons explained in the title essay of this book.

But of course _Enchantress_ is also about many things that do apply to people on Earth: ideas about respect for diverse viewpoints, about the power of faith, and about love. I believe people, individual people, have the same kinds of feelings everywhere, from place to place and from era to era, even when they have different backgrounds and different ways of seeing things.

Reflections on Enchantress from the Stars

(2017)

This is a more detailed and formal presentation of things I have been saying at my website and elsewhere for many years. I hope that people interested in the book will read it, especially teachers who have discussed the story with young readers.

## *

Authors are not supposed to tell readers how to interpret their books. Ordinarily it should be left to each reader to do so in his or her own way, and if the author fails to convey the intending meaning in the story itself, that is a flaw in the writing of it that no amount of explanation can remove. But in the case of _Enchantress from the Stars_ , there has been confusion arising from its science fiction content that I feel needs clearing up.

_Enchantress from the Stars_ is a book with more than one level and there's much in it that I believe applies to people of our own time in our own world—ideas about the different ways truth can be seen, about the power of faith, and about love. But as I have been saying since its first publication, it dismays me when readers assume it is a wholly allegorical story rather than one literally about relations between species that evolved on separate planets. That was something I didn't anticipate, and I don't quite see why, in an era when respect for all cultures is viewed as important, so few people see the harm in it. Usually it's okay for a book to be interpreted differently by different readers—but not when a common misinterpretation gives the impression that the author endorses a view of cultural relations on Earth that is generally considered not merely mistaken but "politically incorrect."

To assume that the premises of _Enchantress_ apply to relations among groups of the same species is a false analogy, and it leads to the conclusion that I view cultural differences in a way that was rejected by anthropologists long ago. Since I came close to getting a master's degree in anthropology I don't like having it thought, as it is by some critics, that I'm either ignorant or intentionally promoting that view, even apart from the fact that it's not one that young readers should be encouraged to adopt.

It used to be thought that some cultures on Earth were "primitive" while our own culture was "advanced" in a more fundamental sense than its possession of modern technology. Today this idea is looked upon as obsolete and condescending. All independent cultures on this planet have been developing for the same length of time, although some have changed more than others. We are all members of the same human race, the same species. The different peoples in _Enchantress_ , however, are of _different_ species, some of which are biologically older than others and whose civilizations have existed for longer periods of time. The variance in their maturity is evolutionary, not merely cultural. Relations between them cannot be compared to relations among people with the same origin. Moreover, basic to the premise that interstellar contact would be detrimental to young species is the fact that the existence of more mature ones is unknown to them, a situation that cannot exist on any single world.

To be sure, the fundamental idea that it's wrong to treat others as subhuman and seize land that belongs to them does apply to Earth. But when readers carry the analogy further, the story seems to be saying that we should not offer any help to developing nations or to societies on our own world whose members are sick or starving, which I certainly didn't mean to imply. Elana's people hold that it would be harmful to give aid to less mature species because it would interfere with their evolution and prevent them from eventually making a unique contribution to the community of advanced civilizations. (Which is why I believe extraterrestrials will not contact us at our present stage, much as advocates of SETI hope they will). Extragenetic evolution, however, applies to a planetary civilization as a whole; it cannot be said that some groups of the same species are further evolved than others.

Some readers have felt that the Federation in the story is rather high-handed in labeling the inhabitants of some worlds "mature" while others are not, and this would be a valid criticism if they had not been evolving for different lengths of time. In actuality, there is nothing arbitrary about the threshold I envision. The more advanced technology and less inhumane customs of the mature peoples as compared to the "Younglings" are _consequences_ of their species' age, not random characteristics by which they are subjectively judged. It is to be assumed that different cultures exist on all worlds, as they do on ours, though for sake of simplicity the story doesn't show that; yet the civilization of each world _as a whole_ either has reached a level where it can meet other worlds' planetary civilizations as an equal, or it has not. This, of course, is not to say that all individuals of a given species are equally mature. In my novels only the agents of the Service, who are selected according to very high standards, are allowed contact with "Youngling" worlds, so the variations among members of mature civilizations are not mentioned. The level of a species, however, depends on the qualities of the majority of its people, which need not be possessed by all of them.

What defines that level? As I have said in the Afterword to _Defender of the Flame_ and in that book and its sequel, as well as by implication in _Enchantress_ , I believe it is the widespread development of consciously-utilized psi (psychic) powers, especially telepathy. Not only would such powers lead to a greater degree of understanding and empathy than exists among the people of a world at our present stage of evolution, they would be essential to contact with extraterrestrials whose physical appearance would offer none of the clues on which communication has depended since the dawn of history. Without telepathic rapport the gulf between species would be too wide to cross, and hostility or an intent to exploit would be suspected where none existed. Moreover, people who lacked such capability could not function effectively in an interstellar society based on it; they would feel isolated and deficient no matter how much respect they were given.

By telepathy, of course, I do not mean "mind reading"—telepathy as I see it is two-way communication and is voluntary, at least at the unconscious level, on both sides. It is latent in all of us and has influenced history to a far greater extent than is imagined. The degree to which it can come under conscious control is unknown, and the use of it in my fiction does not pretend to be a realistic portrayal of a faculty beyond our present understanding. Undoubtedly it would not take the form of conversation as it has to be presented in writing; I suspect it would be entirely wordless. And a society in which it was common would not be as much like ours as the ones in the stories.

Whether any other psi powers ever approach the level described in my novels is an open question. I have intentionally exaggerated them not just for plot purposes, but to symbolize my belief that evolutionary advancement is not merely cultural but involves factors beyond our ability to truly imagine. I feel sure that we will ultimately develop conscious control of telepathy, but it's unlikely that future evolution will give us the ability to place our hands in fire without being burned, as Elana and the characters in my adult novels do. That is meant simply as an indication that evolving far beyond our present stage would involve developing capabilities that sociocultural change cannot produce.

There is another reason why I'm sorry that so few readers take the relationships between worlds in _Enchantress_ seriously. One of my aims in writing it was to influence young people's attitude toward extraterrestrial aliens. In the movies and in prevalent UFO lore, aliens are generally portrayed as hostile and repellent. On the other hand, some people view extraterrestrials as benevolent "gods from outer space" who would either consider the problems of Earth evidence we are an innately deficient species and a danger to the galaxy, or would tell us how to solve those problems—as in fact some scientists hope they will if radio contact with them can be made. In my opinion none of these ideas are constructive. They don't encourage effort to solve our own problems, and what is worse, they foster a negative view of the wide universe from which Earth cannot remain isolated.

This is not an issue to dismiss as silly or inconsequential. It doesn't matter whether any aliens show up within the lifetime of young people living today (which, for the reasons given in my novels, I personally believe they won't). The view of our place in the universe absorbed by the young will be passed from generation to generation and will shape the future of our civilization. It may even affect the pace of our progress toward becoming a starfaring species, which I consider essential to our long-term survival. And if representatives of advanced extraterrestrial ones ever do appear, we surely don't want assumptions drawn from alien invasion stories to affect our reception of them.

For both these reasons, I have mixed feelings about the commonly-expressed idea that _Enchantress from the Stars_ is "half fantasy and half science fiction." There is no fantasy in it, except in the sense that all science fiction contains material that is purely imaginary. Portions of it are told in the _literary style_ of fantasy, which is something quite different from having elements of fantasy in the story. Insofar as the misconception attracts readers who enjoy fantasy more than typical science fiction, calling it a mixture is a good thing; yet it also leads to the assumption that none of the story is meant to be taken literally. All good fantasy has a level on which the outlook toward life embodied is, in the author's opinion, valid—but on the level of the story's action it is not intended as serious speculation. Even when it is satire on past or present human events, it does not attempt to say more about the future than that mistakes of the past should be avoided. The creator of a fantasy world does not expect readers to wonder whether a comparable world, or situation, really exists somewhere. It is taken for granted that it is imagined simply to highlight thoughts about the here and now.

Science fiction, on the other hand, usually does say something about the future, albeit not at all literally with regard to the details. For example, "space opera" about battles with aliens assumes and instills the idea that because war has been common among humans, war with extraterrestrials is to be expected. Such ideas may not reflect the author's actual views—though often they do—but they affect how readers feel about what lies ahead for humankind. This is particularly true of young readers. They don't necessarily believe the underlying premises of a story consciously, but they absorb them unconsciously and pass them on. If a story is set in the future, it will have an emotional impact on attitudes toward the future, and calling it fantasy will not lessen that impact. And I think that the extent to which this is recognized by classifiers matters.

I would like to believe that my readers' feelings about our place in the larger universe is influenced, to at least a small degree, by imagining what relationships with extraterrestrial species might involve. So it disturbs me when they are led to think that the different peoples in the novel are merely different cultures of our own species in disguise. It is true that in one respect my portrayal of them is indeed a mere reflection of human cultures, since it is based on human mythology—on the comic-book image of space explorers prevalent in the twentieth century as much as on the myth of dragon-slayers derived from fairy tales. This does confuse the issue somewhat, especially since to my surprise many adult readers thought the invaders in the story were stereotyped rather than intentionally depicted in terms of a modern myth comparable to the older one.

Actually, the Imperials were no more meant to be realistic than the medieval characters. Moreover, they are an anachronism; a civilization advanced enough to build starships would not behave as our ancestors did. Even today, no one in a position to form space policy would consider colonizing a planet that has indigenous inhabitants. Yet the basic idea that humans, and presumably extraterrestrial civilizations, do advance—that the invaders were immature rather than collectively evil and could be expected to outgrow their aggressiveness—is, I trust, powerful enough to override such incongruities. It is this concept that should be taken literally, not the details that form the story's plot.

And it is this concept, more even than the novel's premise about relationships between our world and others, that I hope young people will absorb. Few readers have any grasp of the time scales involved in human progress. They are thus apt to think no progress is made, despite the fact that men of the past viewed war as glorious and desirable, and slavery was considered normal even in this country less than two hundred years ago. Obvious though it is that most of us have become a great deal less barbarous than the people of ancient times, all too often today's problems are seen as an indication that human behavior will never be any better—yet lack of change within a few generations means nothing in view of the centuries yet to come. Elana's people judge progress from the perspective of experience with many planetary civilizations over a long period of time. I hope imagining such a perspective will help readers realize that neither our own future actions nor those of any aliens we may meet can be predicted on the basis of our present stage of evolution.

I believe that we have an exciting future ahead among worlds beyond Earth, whether we meet any extraterrestrials or not. And it is not too soon to start caring how that future is envisioned, if only for the effect on the outlook of people today. That is why I write science fiction, and why the way my novels are interpreted matters to me.

Go to the Table of Contents

The Mythic Role of Space Fiction

(1990)

_This essay is based on my Phoenix Award acceptance speech presented at the Children's Literature Association Conference in San Diego, June 1, 1990. It was published in the_ Journal of Social and Biological Structures, _Vol. 13, pp. 289-295 (1990), ©1990 by JAI, Inc. The slightly different original version was published in W_ ork and Play in Children's Literature _, Susan R. Gannon and Ruth Anne Thompson, eds., Children's Literature Association, 1991 and in Th_ e Phoenix Award of the Children's Literature Association 1990-1994, _Alethea Helbig and Agnes Perkins, eds., Scarecrow Press, 1996._

## *

It's always encouraging for an author to find that readers like a book, but especially so to discover that they still like it after the passage of many years—particularly when it has been out of print for a long time, as mine was until shortly before receiving the Phoenix Award. In my case, I had thought my days as a writer of fiction were long behind me, for the period of my life during which I had ideas for fiction was a relatively short one. Learning that I had been chosen for the award, which is given annually by the Children's Literature Association for the best book published twenty years earlier, happened to coincide with major changes in my personal life, and it seemed a fitting symbol for the sense of renewal I had never expected to experience.

I was especially happy to know that _Enchantress from the Stars_ appeals to today's audiences, because that fact is evidence for views I've long held about the cultural significance of space fiction. I have been developing these views in nonfiction, beginning with a course I taught by computer conferencing through Connected Education, an organization that offered graduate courses, open to students in all cities, for credit from New York's New School for Social Research. My course [now online] dealt with the relationship between science fiction and myth. I feel popular-culture science fiction should been seen as an emerging body of mythology for the Space Age, and that's the topic about which I'd like to speak here.

It's a difficult subject to approach because the terminology involved is so ambiguous. It usually took at least a week of discussion with my students to make clear the context in which I use the terms "myth" and "science fiction," so bear with me if I don't wholly succeed in doing it in this short summary. The first crucial thing to emphasize is that I am not talking about science fiction as a literary genre. Though people in the children's literature field usually describe me as a science fiction author, that's not quite accurate according to how people in the science fiction field look at it. In terms of publishing and reviewing categories my books weren't initially issued in that field, and while some of them—especially the _Children of the Star_ trilogy—are enjoyed by adult SF fans, I have always tried to make them intelligible to a general audience rather than just to readers with science fiction background. This, rather than the fact that they were originally published for young people, means that most of them, _Enchantress from the Stars_ in particular, don't fit the category of genre-oriented SF. Similarly, other expressions of Space Age mythology do not, for they also involve concepts already embedded in the public consciousness.

To many science fiction specialists, literary quality lies in the use of new and original concepts that haven't been seen before. I was once advised that to write for the SF market I'd need to slant my books toward people who had read at least 500 science fiction novels previously—and that was over twenty-five years ago. Nowadays, to appeal the hard-core science fiction fans, ideas must be much farther out than that. There's nothing wrong with this goal, but it doesn't happen to be my goal. What I try to do is to use images and metaphors that are familiar and meaningful to everyone in our Space Age culture. One reason I wrote for young people in the first place was that it was, at that time, the only field in which a serious author was permitted to do so.

There is one other area in which these metaphors are used, however, and that's in filmmaking. Films, unlike books, are designed for wide audiences rather than specialized ones. Therefore, in my course about Space Age mythology, we discussed films more than written literature; only a few classic science fiction novels qualify as an expressions of our culture's widespread, popular mythology. Most space films are scorned by fans of the literary science fiction genre, who don't consider them "real" science fiction; George Lucas himself called his _Star Wars_ trilogy "space fantasy" because he knew that. But the general public regards these films as "science fiction." So we can't get away from the term, much as I feel we need a distinct one. I was even forced to include it in my course title, since there's no adequate substitute for it in combination with the words "Space Age"—but I carefully omitted it from the title of my speech.

It's worth noting that the earliest major hits among space films, _Star Wars_ and _E.T._ for example, were considered children's films although they attracted very large adult audiences. In the seventies when I was writing my novels, young people had more of a Space Age outlook than most adults did. That's changing, I think, because the children and teenagers of that era have grown up, and they haven't lost the view of the universe they started out with.

But it's also quite possible that the mythological aspect of space fiction once caused it to be branded as "kid stuff" for the same reason that traditional myths and fairy stories were considered mere children's stories, despite having been meaningful to adults in the cultures that developed them. This too is changing, because interest in the study of myth has greatly increased during the past decade. It has been brought to the attention of the general public, for example by the Joseph Campbell television series, which led to the popularity of his earlier classic work in the field. That, incidentally, was a direct consequence of the impact of _Star Wars_ , in two ways, I think. First, _Star Wars_ was influenced by Campbell's theories, as George Lucas took pains to acknowledge; the Campbell TV series was filmed at his Skywalker Ranch. But even more significant was the fact that _Star Wars_ and other widely-seen space films embodied the emerging mythology of our own era, a body of myth in which not only the timeless underlying ideas, but the imagery and metaphors, speak to Space Age generations.

And that made people realize, if only unconsciously, that myth is not something left over from the childhood of our civilization, now useful only for the entertainment of children. It is a living, vital force that reflects the beliefs, questions and aspirations of the culture from which it arises. This is true, I believe, in a wider sense than the now-popular sense in which myth is viewed as having psychological validity; and it's these other aspects of myth on which my own study is focused.

Because of the new awareness engendered by the work of Campbell and others, I don't need to elaborate as I once would have on the fact that I'm not using the term "myth" in the sense of a synonym for "falsehood." I'm speaking of metaphors, not lies or mistaken beliefs. I must make plain, however, that in referring to space fiction as myth, I do not mean to suggest that any particular author or filmmaker has created a myth, or that a single film or book—least of all my own—in itself constitutes a coherent new mythology. Nor do I mean that science fiction authors have deliberately drawn on traditional myths for themes, although some may indeed do so and identification of these elements is a valid aspect of literary analysis.

To those familiar with the study of literature, these points can be quite confusing. My seminar was a Media Studies course, not one on literature or writing, but students didn't always see the difference in emphasis. They tended to suppose that a new mythology should be based on conscious, skillful use of concepts derived from old mythologies, and that the artistic quality of the new should be higher than that of traditional stories in their original, unpolished form. But that's not the sort of mythology I'm talking about. I'm referring not to purposeful creations, but to the common body of concepts and images on which popularly-accepted space stories now draw.

Here we come to another likely area of misunderstanding, because most mythologists, even—or perhaps especially—today, would say that the only underlying concepts involved are eternal psychological truths that do not change from one body of mythology to another. Followers of Jung, for example, would say that mythological archetypes are a constant. I certainly don't dispute this, because I do believe in the existence of such universal truths, even though I don't wholly agree with any existing theory about what they are. However, I maintain that such truths are not the only element in a mythology. If they were, why would particular mythologies be more meaningful in some cultures than in others? And why would traditional mythologies be losing their power in contemporary culture, as is generally acknowledged to be the case? These are questions to which no psychological theory of myth provides an adequate answer. There is, I think, far more to myth than significance in terms of the psyche, however great that may be.

The usual explanation for traditional mythologies having lost their power, and one about which Campbell wrote a great deal, is that their imagery is based on a pre-Copernican universe and is not relevant to the world we now know. Certainly this is true, though some fail to recognize it. The noted psychologist Bruno Bettleheim (whose work George Lucas also acknowledged as a source of themes) wrote in 1976, "To tell a child that the earth floats in space, attracted by gravity into circling around the sun, but that the earth doesn't fall into the sun as the child falls to the ground, seems very confusing to him. The child knows from his experience that everything has to rest on something, or be held up by something. Only an explanation based on that knowledge can make him feel he understands better about the earth in space. More important, to feel secure on earth, the child needs to believe that this world is held firmly in place. Therefore he finds a better explanation in a myth that tells him that the earth rests on a turtle, or is held up by a giant.... Life on a small planet surrounded by limitless space seems awfully lonely and cold to a child—just the opposite of what he knows life ought to be." ( _The Uses of Enchantment,_ Vintage Books, 1977, p. 48.)

Well, one wonders just who is confused and lonely here; one is in fact reminded of Pascal's well-known comment about the terrifying eternal silence of the infinite spaces! The child of today is more apt to see planets in space as natural, beautiful, and perhaps exciting. But it's no longer necessary to debate about issues like this; we have only to count the children (if any) who prefer myths about the world being held up by turtles or giants to the mythological imagery of Star Trek.

But I have not been quite fair to Bettleheim with these remarks; in reality he was arguing not for a specific myth, but for the value of mythological explanations to children too young to grasp scientific ones. He took it for granted that any description of the earth in space was "scientific"; he was unaware of the emerging Space Age mythology, which even in the mid-seventies, had yet to reach mass audiences. It is quite true that only myth can make the larger environment of our species understandable to most of its members—adults as well as children—and that is precisely the function that space fiction fulfills. Campbell, ironically I think, felt we don't yet have a new mythology and that our culture is seriously lacking in this respect; I believe that we have a developing one, as appropriate to our era as those of earlier cultures were in the eras from which they arose.

Among anthropological theories of myth, the one that strikes me as soundest holds that mythology deals with human relationship to environment. It is an adaptive feature of a culture, in the sense that all cultural phenomena, like biological ones, serve adaptive purposes; it's a way of confronting the environment in which the members of the culture perceive themselves to be living. Melville and Frances Herskovits ( _Dahomean Narrative,_ Northwestern University Press, 1958, p. 81) wrote, "As a point of departure, we may define a myth as a narrative which gives symbolic expression to a system of relationships between man and the universe in which he finds himself." And if mythology is a symbolic expression of relationships between human beings and their environment, then of course, if the environment changes in a fundamental way, the mythology must change. I believe that the Space Age mythology is an instinctive response to the first major change in human environment since prehistoric times.

The natural environments of particular cultures at particular stages of their histories have differed extensively in details, but all have had certain things in common. All have encompassed one earth, however differently its dimensions may have been conceived, and one inaccessible sky containing one sun, one moon, and stars unreachable by mortals. It is no wonder that perception of an environment encompassing many accessible worlds, even many suns, with dark space in between, is a change of sufficient magnitude to evoke a culture-wide mythology with impact unprecedented in the modern age.

To be sure, not everybody agrees that expanding to other worlds is feasible or even desirable, but that is somewhat beside the point. Vast numbers of people in our culture now think in terms of an interplanetary, rather than merely planetary, environment for the species _homo sapiens_ , even if they see no practical means of using the whole environment. It's _there_. Among young people in particular, it is assimilated as an unquestionable fact of nature. This can be declared a mistaken worldview, but it cannot be dismissed as nonexistent, any more than the worldview of any other culture can be so dismissed. And worldview is not an aspect of mythology; it is primary, while the mythology to which it gives rise deals symbolically with ideas about its features. There have been analysts of space myths who've tried to write them off as escapism, assuming they must be based on some unhealthy subconscious motivation; but this is to ignore the undeniable existence of the worldview on which they are founded.

One can look at this two ways: one can observe that the worldview does exist, and see how the new mythology is emerging from it, or, if one is unsure how our culture now views the universe, one can observe the popularity of space fiction and interpret it as evidence for the interplanetary worldview's prevalence. It seems to me very strong evidence indeed, especially considering the fact that far more people respond to space films than are eager to see funds allocated for space exploration. I would even venture to suggest that a good many adults are unaware of their own worldview on the rational level and are so far confronting it only on the mythopoeic one, else why were _Star Wars_ and _E.T._ the highest grossing films ever made?

Mythological space fiction portrays our feelings about the universe we live in. Its does not accurately explain the universe, because by definition, myth deals metaphorically with things of which we have no literal understanding. Space stories that deal with something we really know about (for instance, travel to the moon within our era) are not part of our culture's mythology any more; they're simply fiction, no matter what label is put on them. There are no metaphors involved, at least not apart from those concerned with individual psychology. Metaphors are needed only for things where the reality is likely to be quite different from our current conception.

It's important to understand that though established myths may be used for didactic purposes, at the time of their emergence they have no such function. I surely don't mean to imply that the features of Space Age mythology are what form our culture's views—it is the other way around. Although there's certainly a feedback effect, in the sense that young people reading space fiction are influenced by it, a mythology _reflects_ a culture's underlying views; it does not produce them. A culture adopts metaphors for aspects of the already prevalent outlook that it's not ready to deal with in factual terms. And this is _in addition_ to the very real use of metaphors in myths to represent timeless psychological realities.

Starting from these premises, there is a great deal to be said about various aspects of the Space Age worldview and the ways they are reflected in specific books and films. In a two-month seminar we by no means covered the ground, and so I can barely touch the surface here. What I'd like to do is to give you a few brief examples in terms of _Enchantress from the Stars_. The significance of these lies mainly in the fact that I had no conscious understanding of them at the time I was writing the story in 1968, much less when I first conceived it back in 1957. All this theory has come to me since then, and I have been quite surprised by what I found in my own book.

Some aspects of it were deliberate, of course. Obviously I did write the fairy tale sections in a purposefully mythological form. Not so obviously to some of the reviewers, I also meant the portrayal of the invaders to be recognized as mythic—some called them "stereotyped," which of course they were, but this was comparable to the intentional stereotyping of the fairy tale heroes. Real interstellar explorers aren't going to blast people with comic-book style ray guns any more than real medieval woodcutters attacked dragons with swords, but the mythology of the early Space Age has envisioned them that way.

So what I thought I was writing, and what many readers may still assume I wrote, was a story about two mythic civilizations and one purely fictional civilization—highly oversimplified, to be sure, but nevertheless showing a potentially real future. The extent to which the "realistic" portion of the narrative contains fantastic elements, as opposed to merely imaginary ones, depends on individual opinion concerning the reality of interstellar travel and of controlled psychic powers; personally I take both these possibilities seriously. I naturally don't believe people of other planets look just like us, any more than I believe they speak English; both the physical descriptions and the language were necessary literary devices. But that the very _concepts_ of interplanetary invasions and interstellar federations are metaphors of a newer mythology, no closer to actual fact than the concept of dragon-slaying, was something I didn't recognize until a friend pointed it out to me four years after the book was published.

In actuality, all three viewpoints of the book are equally mythological, equally stylized. I still believe strongly that humankind will expand throughout the universe someday, but it won't happen in any way we can presently envision. Does this invalidate the story if it's taken, as I meant it to be taken, as speculation about the universe rather than allegory about relationships on our own planet? Not at all. I would not write it any differently if I were doing it today. But my not having known what I was doing illustrates the fact that metaphors of a living, growing mythology are absorbed by the writers who make use of them, rather than created. At the time, it never occurred to me to doubt the literal existence of a galactic Federation.

Most contemporary space enthusiasts do believe literally in the Federation, whether or not their guesses about its policies match mine—ask any Star Trek fan, or for that matter, any radio astronomer who supports the SETI project. That's why my story rang true to readers. The fact that in the eyes of the Phoenix Award committee, it still does ring true after passage of time suggests that embodiment of elements from Space Age mythology evokes a deep response from contemporary readers, deeper than if imaginative elements alone were present. My personal imagination, after all, is not really very fertile.

But of course opinions differ about how an advanced galactic Federation must, or ought to, behave, and this was a major theme of the story. I don't believe advanced species interfere with less advanced ones, and my principal conscious aim in _Enchantress_ was to counteract the idea that they do. I feel that how people view the universe, and our future relationship with inhabitants of the universe, is an issue that matters. In particular, it matters whether they believe superior beings from other planets will ultimately solve our problems for us, a hope that is taken seriously not only in space fiction but by many radio astronomers on one hand and by many UFO cultists and New Agers on the other. One of the most prominent features of Space Age mythology is this "Gods from Outer Space" theme. It's good in one way, in that it's a metaphor for the growing conviction that the universe is friendly rather than hostile. But on the whole, its social and religious consequences are somewhat disturbing. I think we can do without the naive notion of alien astronauts in the role of God.

Not everyone notices the extent to which space fiction has religious implications, and yet practically all of it does—this is one of its most striking aspects. Essentially religious premises underlie almost all popularly-successful space films, whether or not they're identified as such. This isn't surprising; myth has always dealt with the same areas religion does, since such issues demand metaphor for expression. To be sure, the attitudes toward these issues in various space stories don't agree. Fortunately, ours is a heterogeneous culture, and thus the tenets of Space Age mythology, in contrast to those of the mythologies of earlier cultures, are not uniform. There is no danger of their turning into dogma. But an author is compelled, more than in most forms of fiction, to deal with the subject implicitly if not explicitly.

At the time I wrote _Enchantress_ , we had seen the film _2001_ , which openly endorsed the "Gods from Outer Space" concept, and the Star Trek television series, which did so more subtly by portraying humans who too often ignored their nominal policy of not playing God on alien worlds. I don't share this view, and I set out to present a different one. I didn't originally think of it as a religious issue. I did not, at first, recognize any of the religious issues in _Enchantress_ , although when I read over the finished book I did grasp the implications of what I'd said about truth in metaphor. Only much later did I see that ESP and other psychic powers pervade space fiction as a metaphor for spiritual reality. This became most specifically apparent, of course, in the film _Star Wars_.

To sum up, space fiction as the mythology of the Space Age does for our culture what earlier mythologies did for theirs—though we can't fully compare them since we are seeing it in an early, undeveloped form rather than one that has stood the test of time. It explores our relation to the universe we inhabit, the sea of space that now confronts us as the seas of Earth once confronted ancient sailors. It explores the larger questions of our place in a cosmos of which Earth is no more the spiritual center than it is the physical one. And above all, it gives us hope for the future. One of the outstanding things about films based upon it is that unlike most others, they are optimistic, often even uplifting. In a world that many people perceive as depressing and/or terrifying, they are an island of light, illuminating our inner conviction that our destiny lies far beyond a single, isolated planet.

This is less noticeable in written space fiction because so many authors try to be "serious," or at least innovatively imaginative, rather than to portray their own real views of life in terms of the current mythology that exists. I prefer to take advantage of that mythology. I believe we should pay heed to what it shows about our instinctively hopeful response to the new environment that awaits our species. If _Enchantress from the Stars_ has enduring value, then I believe it will be because of myths upon which I unconsciously drew. The response to the book sustains my faith in their power, and for this, I am thankful.

Go to the Table of Contents

The Changing Role of Science Fiction in Children's Literature

(1971)

_Reproduced with permission from_ The Horn Book. _© Copyright Library Journals, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of MSI Information Services._

## *

When casual acquaintances learn that I am a writer, they naturally ask what I write; and at my reply, "Science fiction for young people," they are apt to respond with surprise. I know what is going on in their minds. Being somewhat shy and formal, I do not seem the sort who would even read, let alone write, anything matching the average person's conception of science fiction. Those unfamiliar with the field of children's literature envision "teen-age" science fiction in particular as melodrama of the comic book and television variety, and I usually find myself at a loss for words to bridge the gap.

The situation is different when I appear on a panel of local authors, since the people to whom I then speak—both children and the adults who work with them—are aware that modern novels for teen-agers have a serious intent. Still, while a good many of the boys like science fiction, relatively few of the women and girls do. On several occasions I have been approached with the comment, "I didn't have any interest in science fiction until you started to talk about it." Though I am far from an effective speaker and my remarks had not been very inspired, I had aroused such an interest by making a seldom-recognized point: Not only is science fiction's potential appeal not confined to people who enjoy the type of adventure commonly thought of by that name, but neither is it limited to those who are interested in science.

Actually, I do not like the term "science fiction"; I never have—it is, I feel, rather misleading. Yet since no other term is available, I am obliged to use it. To be sure. Enchantress from the Stars (Atheneum) can also be classified as fantasy and may be enjoyed by fantasy enthusiasts who ordinarily would not choose a science fiction book; but it is not fantasy in a strict sense, for it has literal levels as well as symbolic ones. Its speculations about human evolution, like those of its sequel, The Far Side of Evil (Atheneum), are offered in all seriousness as theories that I myself consider tenable.

The line between science fiction and fantasy has always been hard to draw; it is defined in. various ways. My personal view is that while both forms may, through the portrayal of a world other than our real world, express underlying truths about life as we now know it to be, science fiction also expresses ideas about things that are not yet known; and it does so without recourse to supernatural explanations—though it sometimes deals with phenomena normally thought to be "supernatural." The setting of the story plays1 no part in this distinction. C. S. Lewis's adult novels Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra are often called science fiction because they happen to take place on Mars and Venus; yet to me they are no less pure fantasy than his Chronicles of Narnia, for their intent is equally allegorical.[*] They present their author's vision of truth, as does all good fantasy, but it is not the same kind of truth as would be presented had Lewis chosen to portray Mars realistically. In other words, science fiction differs from fantasy not in subject matter but in aim, and its unique aim is to suggest real hypotheses about mankind's future or about the nature of the universe.

There is nothing inherently "scientific" in this aim, at least not unless "science" is defined in the broad but archaic sense of "knowledge." Indeed, like other works of imagination, science fiction is decidedly unscientific in that its hypotheses are based not upon systematic analysis, but upon free speculation. Fiction about the future must necessarily touch upon advances in science because new discoveries cannot fail to affect people's daily lives, but that does not mean that all of it must focus on technology. We read about automobiles without giving a second thought to the technology whereby they are produced; why should the same not be true of spaceships? Science fiction frequently does emphasize the technical aspects of future inventions, and this has great appeal for some children. Yet there are many others, especially girls, who have no interest in details of that kind and who therefore assume that science fiction is not to their taste. There is a feeling even among adults that anything connected with science is cold and inhuman, divorced from the realm of spiritual values—which is so, I think, only when it is so presented. Science fiction's true scope encompasses far more than mere technological progress.

This fact, of course, is not news to dedicated fans, some of whom have been pointing out the social concern of the genre for years. But "fans" are an isolated group of people, for science fiction has been considered a separate genre in a more absolute sense than most other types of fiction, and with good reason. It has not been directed to the general public but has developed conventions and a jargon of its own that seem unreal or esoteric to the non-aficionado; and, in fact, novels with a less specialized appeal, even when set in the future, are sometimes not classed as science fiction at all. How often is Orwell's Nineteen Eighty- four placed in that category?

Nowadays, when so many subjects once wholly within the province of science fiction have emerged into that of everyday reality, it would seem that this separation between the genre and the mainstream of literature might be narrowing; and yet, by and large, this is not the case. Much current science fiction in its search for new themes and in response to the growing sophistication of its fans is becoming increasingly "far-out"—turning, for example, from speculation about human progress to less probable conjectures about the psychologies of nonhuman aliens. This is as it should be for this audience. It is happening in stories for young people as well as in those for adults, and when skillfully done, as in Andre Norton's books, it can greatly enrich the experience of those children with the background to comprehend it. But, at the same time, the advent of the space age has created a whole new audience: one attracted not so much by strange, bizarre, or exotic concepts as by the extension of the familiar and—to employ a much-overworked word—the relevant. With a few exceptions, notably some of Robert Heinlein's teen-age novels published in the fifties, even the best of "genre" science fiction leaves such readers cold.

It is for these people, people who are searching for touchstones in a rapidly changing world, that a different sort of science fiction is needed; and it is to them that I have directed my own books, sometimes to the confusion of the established fans. Journey Between Worlds (Atheneum), for instance, has been criticized by some for not being true "sci-fi"; yet the fact is that it was never intended to be, at least not in the fans' sense of the term. Nor was it aimed toward the readers to whom Enchantress from the Stars is most apt to appeal. Journey Between Worlds was written primarily for girls who like neither science nor fantasy, yet who wonder about what the future is going to bring. In exploring that question I feel there should be a wide variety of approaches; for the future is of interest to us all, whether we look to it with eagerness or with alarm, and whether or not we have any training or enthusiasm for science as such.

Yet, what are we to say of the future, and what, particularly, are we to say to children? We surely cannot provide a definitive description. Science fiction is not prophecy. It does not and cannot attempt to predict the precise form new developments will take. Moreover, like all art, it is selective; to create successfully a world with which readers will identify, the science-fiction writer must often ignore many of the changes that are likely to occur, concentrating on those pertinent to the story's theme while retaining a framework close enough to the reader's own background for him to supply the details that are not given. To be sure, science-fiction writers of the past have made some amazingly accurate forecasts; but stories about the future do not function as forecasts in the specific, literal sense. Rather, they serve to shape attitudes toward the future, and toward some of the possibilities the future may hold, as well as toward the universe that waits to be explored.

Considered in this light, the role of science fiction in children's literature is a significant one indeed. It has become so not because fictional speculations about moon landings have proven less fantastic than was formerly supposed, but because we live in an age when rapid change is both inevitable and, to the young, desirable. Many of today's children feel a closer kinship with the future than with the past; the popularity of historical fiction is declining, while that of science fiction is on the rise. Only through speculation about the future as related to the past can these readers gain the sense of continuity that their elders acquired through the study of history: the steadying realization that there is no jumping-off place, that past, present, and future are all part of one unbroken thread of time. Such a realization is essential if the problems of today are to be seen in any sort of perspective. We cannot tell the next generation what is going to happen; we do not know, and we will not be believed if we pretend otherwise —but we can and should suggest that whatever comes will be linked to some universal pattern, a pattern involving spiritual as well as physical principles into which further insight will someday be achieved.

Obviously, we cannot proffer these theoretical principles authoritatively except within the context of a given story, where the reader will be free to accept or reject them as he wishes. Yet a science-fiction story, by its, very nature, does present theory as fact, implicitly if not explicitly; and if it is well enough written for the action to seem convincing, the theories will be convincing, too. That is why the outlook of such stories is a matter of no small concern. I feel that anyone who writes science fiction for young people has a responsibility to consider carefully whether the outlook of the story is truly one that he wants to foster. An author who speaks to today's youth about the future must say what he believes about the future: not necessarily in regard to specific details (I do not, for example, believe that the peoples of other solar systems are as much like us in the physical and cultural sense as I portray them in my books) but certainly as far as philosophy is concerned. This is not always done in adult science fiction, and caution must therefore be used when that kind of fiction is given to children. Arthur Clarke prefaced his adult novel Childhood's End with the statement, "The opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author"; but even if such disclaimers were included wherever applicable, they would carry little meaning for young readers. The tour de force, the ingenious plot or concept that fascinates adult fans by virtue of its uniqueness and originality but that does not pretend to represent its author's actual opinions, is thus perilous fare in the hands of boys and girls who, consciously or unconsciously, may adopt its outlook as their own.

Perhaps this sounds so self-evident that it should not need to be said; still because comparatively few people draw a distinction between the impact of science fiction and that of other imaginative literature, its importance has rarely been taken into account. For instance, science fiction has traditionally depicted the more highly evolved beings of other planets either as hostile to less advanced peoples or as benevolent but presumptuous meddlers who think it their business to play God—traditions that in Enchantress from the Stars and The Far Side of Evil I have tried very hard to counteract. For is this how we want coming generations to view the hypothetical inhabitants of the universe? What is more, is this the conception of "advancement" we want them to form? We must not forget that what our own generation sees as pure allegory may not be dismissed as such by the young. There was a time when children thought "space people" to be in the same category as witches, fairies, and talking animals; they do not do so now. Today's children take the idea of an inhabited universe seriously, as do an increasing number of reputable scientists. Children know that the extraterrestrial aliens described in the books they read are as imaginary as the goblins in fairy tales, yet underneath they are forming basic attitudes about a topic to which they, or their descendants, may someday be required to give sober attention. Space travel was once imaginary, too.

This is not to say that children should never be exposed to stories that .deal with a future invasion of Earth by hostile aliens; some such books—John Christopher's trilogy The White Mountains, The City of Gold and Lead, and The Pool of Fire (all Macmillan), for example—are of high quality and, on the symbolic level, contain much that is valid and worthwhile. Furthermore, perhaps hostile aliens do in fact exist. But if the theme of aliens as enemies were to predominate in the science fiction read by the first space-age generation, that generation would be bound to grow up with a somewhat different picture of the universe than the human race will eventually need to adopt. Thus, the body of science fiction as a whole must be judged not merely by its entertainment value nor even by its allegorical content, but also by the implications of any concepts that are subject to a literal interpretation. In fantasy we do not need to worry about the overall impression children will form of witches; witches can be presented as embodiments of evil without any effect on the evolving attitudes of mankind. With science fiction, however, the possibility of such an effect cannot be ignored.

Naturally, I am not suggesting that we should give children only science fiction having an outlook with which we as readers happen to agree. Opinions on what the future holds, or should hold, vary widely, and there is as much room for controversy in this area as in any other. The question to be posed is whether an author himself agrees with what his book is saying: not whether he really thinks that there is a planet somewhere inhabited by beings identical to those he has portrayed, for of course he does not; but whether his imaginative portrayal reflects his own real view of the universe. If it does, there will be no conflict between the various levels of the story; the symbolism, the underlying statement about life here and now, will not say one thing while the action, when taken at face value, says another. If, on the other hand, he is merely extrapolating from premises to which he does not subscribe—a common and accepted practice in adult science fiction—he runs the risk of inadvertently telling children something he does not mean to tell them.

All this, perhaps, makes science fiction sound very solemn and ponderous. I can hear people saying, "But shouldn't it be fun? Shouldn't it be read for pleasure instead of for deep, world-shaking philosophical messages?" Of course it should! It should be romantic and exciting and, at times, humorous; and, certainly, philosophy should not outweigh story. But it will shape attitudes anyway. It will do so whether it is intended to or not, simply because children no longer assume that the future will be like the past. Critics sometimes claim that science fiction seeks to provide escape from reality; personally I feel that the reverse is true. I feel that it can offer a wider perspective on reality, leading young people to view the future not with our own era's gloom and despair, but with the broader realism of renewed hope.

* Since this essay was published, I have learned that C. S. Lewis did intend Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra to have a literal level, for he actually believed that the inhabitants of planets in other solar systems are "unfallen" and that we should never go there, as our presence might corrupt them.

Go to the Table of Contents

Perspective on the Future:

### The Quest of Space Age Young People

(1972)

_This essay was adapted from a speech I made to the Washington State Association of School Librarians in March, 1972 and first published in_ School Media Quarterly, _Fall 1972. It was reprinted in_ Only Connect: Readings on Children's Literature, _S. Egoff, G.T. Stubbs & L.F. Ashley, eds., Oxford University Press, 1980._

## *

Those of us who work with literature for youth have many things in common, whether we are writers, librarians, or teachers—and I believe that one of them is a very strong and basic interest in the future. I have been fascinated by ideas about the future, and particularly about space exploration, since I myself was in my teens; all my novels have been focused on it. While educators may not have such specific enthusiasm for the subject of the distant future, all are deeply concerned with preparing young people to live in the world of tomorrow. None of us can predict just what that world is going to be like, but I think there is much we can do to equip the next generation to cope with whatever tomorrow brings.

I suppose every author is asked how he or she came to choose subjects, but I think the question is raised more frequently with authors of science fiction than with others. People are always curious about why anyone would choose to write about imaginary things instead of the things we know. Each author has her own reasons, and mine are not really typical; perhaps an explanation of them will make clear why I feel that stories that deal with the future are important, and are of interest even to those for whom neither science fiction nor science itself has any special appeal.

First of all, I should mention that my books are more for a general audience than for science fiction fans. Although I think science fiction fans will enjoy them, I aim them principally toward people who normally do not read science fiction, and I avoid using esoteric terminology that only established fans can understand. Actually I am not what one would call a fan myself, at least not in the sense of keeping up with the adult science fiction genre. I use the science fiction form simply because my ideas about humankind's place in the universe can best be expressed in the context of future or hypothetical worlds.

This is not to say that my books are wholly allegorical. I have been rather dismayed to find that some people interpret them that way, because although there is indeed a good deal of allegory in them, they also have a literal level. For instance, what is said in _Enchantress from the Stars_ and _The Far Side of Evil_ about how a truly mature civilization would view peoples of lesser advancement is meant to be taken literally; scientists are beginning to ask why, if civilizations more advanced than ours do exist in other solar systems, they haven't contacted us, and that is my answer as to why.

Of course, one of my main reasons for writing science fiction is that I believe very strongly in the importance of space exploration to the survival of our species. I have held this belief since the days when all space travel was considered fantastic, and indeed I developed the theory of the "Critical Stage," on which my book _The Far Side of Evil_ is based, in unpublished work that I did before the first artificial satellite was launched. I am entirely serious about the choice between expansion into space and human self-destruction being a normal and inevitable stage of evolution; the fact that when I came to write the book, our establishment of a space program had made it impossible for the story's setting to be Earth, as it was in my initial draft, was to me the most encouraging sign of our era. In the early fifties I had been afraid that the Space Age would not begin soon enough. [In the 30 years since this was published, the stalling of the space effort has shown more clearly than ever the need for fiction to inspire its progress.]

But apart from my commitment to the cause of space exploration, I think there is good reason to set stories in the future when writing for teenagers. Today's young people identify with the future. Many of them find it a more pertinent concept than that of the past. If we are going to make any generalization about the human condition, any convincing statement that evolution is a continuous process in which the now that seems all-important to them is only a small link, we stand a better chance of communicating when we speak of the future than when we describe past ages that—however mistakenly—the young have dismissed as dead and irrelevant. Teenagers are far more serious-minded than they used to be, yet they don't consider anything worth serious attention unless they see its relationship to problems they have experienced or can envision.

This has become more and more evident during the past few years. It so happened that I began writing in a period when young people's involvement with matters once thought too deep for them was increasing. I was not at all sure that there would be a place for the kind of novels I wanted to write, because they were too optimistic to fit the gloomy mold of contemporary adult fiction, yet too philosophical, I thought, to be published as teen fiction. Fortunately I directed them to young people anyway, and quite a few seem to like them. I don't think this would be the case were it not that the boys and girls now growing up are more mature in their interests than those of former generations.

It is apparent today that the young people of our time are searching desperately for something that they are not getting in the course of a standard education. They are searching in all directions: some through political activism; some through "dropping out"; some through renewed interest in religion in both traditional and novel forms, or even in the occult; and all too many through drugs or violence. Misguided though some of these attempts may be, I feel that they all reflect a genuine and growing concern on the part of our youth for a broader view of the universe than our present society offers them. Some can find meaning in the values of their elders; others cannot. There would seem to be a wide gulf between the two attitudes. There is a great deal of talk about polarization. Yet underneath, whatever their immediate and conscious goals, I believe that all young people are seeking the same thing: they are seeking a perspective on the future.

The need for such perspective is not new. It is a basic and universal human characteristic. What is different now is that the perspective inherent in the culture passed automatically from one generation to the next is no longer enough. Perspective implies a framework, a firm base from which to look ahead, and in this age of rapid change the old framework is not firm. Many of its components are still true and sound, but it has become so complex that as a whole it must necessarily invite question, if only because of the contradictions it contains. Scarcely anyone today is so naive as to suppose that all aspects of our current outlook are valid. There is much controversy, however, as to which are valid and which are not, and among free people the controversy will continue, for we live in an era when our civilization's outlook is constantly shifting and expanding.

Whether this is occurring because—as I believe—the time of our first steps beyond our native planet is the most crucial period in human history, or whether its basic cause is something else, the fact remains that it is happening. It is a confusing time for all of us, but especially for our young people, the members of the first Space Age generations, who are so aware of change and of the need for change that they can find nothing solid to hold to. They haven't the background to know that problems have been solved in the past, that present and future problems will in turn be solved, that the existence of problems is not in itself grounds for bitterness. They hear their disillusioned elders speak of the future with despair and they have no basis for disbelief. Yet instinctively, they do disbelieve—and I wonder if this, as much as the world's obvious lack of perfection, may not be why they find it so hard to believe anything else their elders tell them. They cannot accept the now-fashionable notion that the universe is patternless and absurd; they are looking for answers. Inside, they know that those answers must exist.

Young people cannot be blamed for thinking the answers are simple. Earlier generations have thought the same. But nowadays one's faith in a simple answer cannot survive very long; what Space Age generations need is awareness that one must not expect simple answers, and that humanity's progress toward solutions is a long, slow process that extends not merely over years, but over centuries. Knowledge of past history alone does not give such awareness because most of today's teenagers just don't care about the past. Significance, to them, lies not in what has been, but in what is to come. I believe that only by pointing out relationships between past, present, and future can we help them to gain the perspective that is the true object of their search.

One might wonder how I can consider this need for perspective so fundamental when for years, psychologists have been saying that people's basic need is for security. Yet I think our young people are showing over and over again that they do not want security, at least not security as it has commonly been defined. A great deal of effort has been devoted to making them secure, yet many turn their backs and deliberately seek out something dangerous to do. The security they need cannot come from outside; it must come from within, from experiences through which each person proves that he or she is capable of handling the stresses of an indisputably insecure world. But no one can handle a situation in which he sees no pattern, no meaning. There can be no security without direction. Thus a perspective on the future is implicit in the very concept of inner security.

One's view of the future is, of course, a highly personal thing. Our beliefs can differ greatly as to the direction we are going, or ought to go. In my books I naturally present my own opinions, and I don't expect all readers to agree with them. But I hope that even those who do not agree will gain something by being encouraged to develop their private thoughts about the topics I deal with. I hope that they will be convinced that we are going somewhere, and that this will help to counter the all-too-prevalent feeling that human evolution is over and done with. It is this, more than anything else, that I try to put across: the idea that there is continuity to history, that progress—however slow—does occur, and that whatever happens to us on this planet is part of some overall pattern that encompasses the entire universe. We are not in a position to see the pattern. We can only make guesses about it, and many of those guesses are bound to be wrong. Still, I do not believe that guessing, either in fantasy or in serious speculation, is a futile task; for when we ignore the issue, we are apt to forget that the pattern exists whether we see it or not. That, I think, is the root of many young people's turmoil. They have no conviction that there is any pattern.

A common reaction to the space flights so far undertaken seems to be that we had better appreciate Earth because it's the only good planet there is. It is quite true that it is the only one in this solar system that is suitable for us to live on at present, and that those of this system are the only ones we have any immediate prospect of reaching. But the attitude that no other planet is worth anything strikes me as a new form of provincialism. Our solar system is merely a small part of a vast universe that contains billions upon billions of stars. People sometimes ask me if I really believe that there are habitable planets circling those other stars; the answer is that I do, and that most scientists now do also. Not everyone seems to realize this; several acquaintances told me rather shamefacedly that they themselves thought that there is life in other solar systems, although they were sure that scientists would laugh at them. As a result, I wrote a nonfiction book [ _The Planet-Girded Suns_ , 1974; updated edition published in 2012] that I hoped would explain to young people not only what modern scientists did believe, but what many philosophers of past ages believed about an infinity of worlds. The idea is not new, and it has not been confined to science fiction. Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in the year 1600 for holding it.

Of course, I do not believe that the inhabitants of other solar systems are as much like us in the physical and cultural sense as I have depicted them in my novels. Most serious science fiction does not make them so similar, and I think that many potential readers are thereby turned away. They are put off by the weird element inherent in any attempt to imagine what sentient species other than ours would be like. I feel that this is distracting. Since we don't know what they are like and my aim is to show essentially identical spiritual qualities, it seems to me best to portray them in our terms, just as I have to make them speak in our language. Also, in _Enchantress from the Stars_ , I wanted to leave open the question of which, if any, of the people were from Earth. Only in that way could I make my point about various levels of advancement.

This point, which is further developed in _The Far Side of Evil,_ concerns evolutionary advancement, not mere cultural advancement. My intent was to comment upon relationships between eras of history, and between peoples at different stages of evolution, not relationships between societies here on Earth. We of Earth, whatever our nationality or our color, are all members of the same human race. We are one people, one species. Someday, generations hence, we may encounter other sentient species. It is not too soon for us to begin thinking about our identity as a people, our place in a universe inhabited by many; the young are better aware of that than most adults.

To those who do not believe that there will ever be contact between the stars, I would like to suggest that as far as contemporary youth's perspective is concerned, it makes no difference whether there is or not. The mere idea is, in itself, of consequence. I am troubled by science fiction's usual portrayal of advanced aliens either as hostile, or as presumptuous meddlers who take it upon themselves to interfere with the evolutionary process. The dangers of the first attitude are obvious; those of the second are perhaps less so. Maybe the whole issue seems remote and insignificant when we have so much else to worry about. Yet if young people acquire the idea that some extrasolar civilization could solve our problems for us if its starships happened to come here, or that it would consider our failings evidence that our whole human race is wicked instead of merely immature, will that not add to their already-great sense of futility? Will it not interfere with whatever perspective on human history they have managed to absorb? I think it will; and furthermore, whether there really are any alien civilizations is immaterial. Science fiction may be fantasy, but that young people like it and are affected by it is fact. It is also a fact that the Voyager probe launched by NASA carried a plaque designed to communicate its origin to any intelligent beings who recover it after it passes out of our solar system. It may be that no aliens will ever see that plaque, but our children saw it on television; their attitude toward its hypothetical viewers is bound to influence their attitude toward our own civilization.

Their view of civilization is already confused and inconsistent enough. On one hand, many believe that only scientific knowledge is factual, and that advancement is merely a matter of inventions and technical skill. On the other, during the past few years some people, especially the young, have come to distrust science, to blame it for our problems and even to question the value of technological advance—which, I believe, is the greatest distortion of perspective I have yet seen. Today, in their quest for meaning, young people are challenging the materialistic outlook many scientists have held in the past—and rightly so. At the same time, however, some of them are rejecting not only inadequate theories, but the whole idea of scientific progress. They seem to feel that in so doing they are defending spiritual values against some implacable enemy. They imagine that they seek a wider truth. Yet actually this viewpoint is equally narrow and in fact self-contradictory, for truth is precisely what science seeks, and has always sought from its very beginnings. There has never been any conflict between the real scientific attitude and spiritual values, where there appears to be; the trouble is with the particular theory involved and not with science as such. Truth is truth; science is simply the name given to the part we have attempted to organize and verify.

I think the current misunderstanding is the result of our tendency since the late 19th century to compartmentalize science, to separate it from the rest of life in the same way that some people separate religion. There was a time when the major scientific thought of an era could be understood by every educated person; but for many years now specialization has been necessary, and this has led to an unfortunate conception of what science is. Non-scientists have gotten the idea that it is some kind of esoteric cult that stands apart from other human endeavors, while both they and the scientists themselves have felt that its realms have been charted and need only to be conquered. When young people observe that there are things worth investigating outside these realms, and that some of our current scientific theories are questionable, it often doesn't occur to them that the answer lies not in abandoning science but in expanding it: refuting its dogmatic portions as dogma has been refuted countless times in the past. This, perhaps, is why some of them are turning in desperation to supernaturalism, astrology, and the like. Yet science is distinguished from superstition not by the subject matter with which it deals, but by the maturity of its explanations; it is distinguished from philosophy not by content, but by the availability of data to which objective scientific methods can be applied. All the phenomena now dealt with by science were once explained by superstition and, as an intermediate step, all our sciences were once divisions of philosophy. For that matter, there are advanced theories in all fields that are philosophic in that they are not yet subject to empirical proof. Because nowadays the people who hold such theories are called scientists and not philosophers, we get the impression that the theories are authoritative; but actually some are no more so than theories of the Middle Ages that have been disproven.

The point to be made is that this process of progression is by no means finished or complete. There is no area of truth that is outside the province of science in principle, though there are many that science lacks the practical means to investigate at its present stage of development. It is thus a great mistake to identify science with materialism, and to assume that it inherently deals only with the material aspects of the universe, when the fact is merely that these aspects can be more readily studied than other aspects that we are just beginning to rescue from the realms of the "supernatural." There is no such thing as the supernatural, since "natural," by definition, includes all aspects of reality. But too many of us have shut out parts of reality. We have discarded not only superstition, but also the areas with which superstition presently deals, forgetting that the superstition of today is merely an immature explanation of the science of tomorrow. We have failed to recognize that there are natural laws that cannot be explained in terms of the ones we know because they are, in themselves, equally basic.

Worse, our society has tended to assume that there is a firm line between science and religion. It has outgrown trust in superstition, and many have identified faith with superstition, discarding that also. Yet the fact that the physical aspects of natural law are the most readily analyzed does not mean that there isn't a spiritual reality that is just as real, just as much a part of the universe, as the material reality that science has so far studied objectively. I don't wonder that young people have difficulty in viewing the world with perspective when they have been led to feel that it is necessary to reject one or the other. The young today sense that moral and spiritual values are important, though they will not accept dogma in religion any more than in any other field, and it is understandably hard for them to reconcile their innate idealism with a science that is seemingly opposed.

To me, science itself can never be opposed to truth in any form whatsoever, no matter how many specific theories may be mistaken, and no matter how dogmatic certain scientists may be in support of their own era's beliefs. This is how I have viewed it in _Enchantress from the Stars_ , and I think one of the book's appeals for young people is that it does take seriously certain things outside the traditional bounds of science, such as extrasensory perception, without putting a materialistic interpretation on them. I hope readers notice that nowhere have I suggested that advanced peoples, in progressing beyond a materialistic orientation, would give up any of their technology; because I feel strongly that as they matured, they would improve their technology and learn to put it to better use.

I am convinced, therefore, that the solution to future problems lies not in de-emphasizing science, but in advancing it, as well as in an outlook that recognizes that the science of any given age is imperfect and incomplete. For instance, I believe that while there is much that can and should be done now to slow the rate of population growth, the only permanent answer to overpopulation is the colonization of new worlds. I have been asked how I can approve of our colonizing planets in other solar systems if other sentient species exist. Certainly I don't think we should colonize planets that are already occupied; I trust my books make that very clear. What I do think is that there are many worlds on which no intelligent life has evolved that can be made livable by advanced technology, and that in the normal course of a sentient species' evolution, it expands and utilizes such worlds. There is nothing less natural in that than in our ancestors building the ships and other equipment needed to colonize America. Pioneering is a basic human activity; that's the comparison I tried to draw in _Journey Between Worlds._

This question of what is natural for us seems to need a good deal of examination right now. There is a feeling prevalent today, particularly among young people, that we ought to get "back to nature." Insofar as this means preserving and enjoying the beauties of our world, it is a good thing. But those who say that we as a species should live in a more "natural" way are, I think, overlooking what "natural" means as applied to human beings. It is the nature of animal species to remain the same from generation to generation, evolving only as adaptation to physical environment may demand. It is the nature of our own species, however—and of whatever other sapient races may inhabit this universe—to learn, to change, and to progress. There is no point at which it is "natural" to stop, for to cease changing is contrary to the mental instincts that are uniquely human. If it were not so, all learning, from the discovery of fire to the conquest of disease, would be unnatural, and I don't think anyone believes that—least of all the young, who are more eager for change than their elders. It is the nature of humans to solve problems. It is the nature of humans to grope continuously toward an understanding of truth. There may be disagreement as to means, disagreement as to what is true and what is not, but never on the principle that to search for truth is an inherent attribute of humankind.

In my novels _This Star Shall Abide_ and its sequel _Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains_ [the first two volumes of the Children of the Star trilogy], I said quite a bit about the search for truth, from both the scientific and the religious standpoints; and I also tried to say something about the importance of faith. Yet the people of these stories are stranded in a desperate situation where only advanced technology, and an eventual major advance in scientific theory, can prevent their extinction. To achieve this advance, they are dependent on the kind of creative inspiration that has underlain all human progress since the beginning of time. Their religion is central to their culture, and it is in no way a materialistic religion; but the hope it offers them can be fulfilled only through faith in the ultimate success of their scientific research.

I wrote a description of these two books for Atheneum in which I defined science as the portion of truth that no longer demands faith for acceptance. That's the way I look at science: it is part of a larger truth. I believe that if we can give young people that sort of attitude toward it—if they can be helped to view its failure to provide all the answers overnight with neither hostility nor despair, but with the willingness to keep on searching—we will go a long way toward building their perspective on the future. And I believe that it is such perspective, more than anything else, that will fit them to take their place in tomorrow's world.

Go to the Table of Contents

Update on the Critical Stage:

The Far Side of Evil's Relevance Today

(2017)

_This essay explains why I feel_ The Far Side of Evil _should not be called outdated, as it sometimes has been, and also presents my recent thoughts about the theory of the Critical Stage that underlies that novel._

## *

The central idea of my 1971 novel _The Far Side of Evil_ is one that came to me 1956: my theory of the Critical Stage, the time between a planetary civilization's development of the means to destroy itself and a commitment to expand beyond the single planet where such destruction would wipe it out. The same level of technology that makes one possible also permits the other, and in my view they are mutually exclusive alternatives—a world will remain in the Critical Stage until one or the other happens. This supposition is as valid in my eyes as ever, although my conception of the Critical Stage has changed over time.

It's frustrating to me that many readers feel that the novel is outdated, and that it therefore seems irrelevant to today's world. I addressed this in the Afterword to the 2003 revised edition, but some people say the new version, too, is dated, so evidently I failed to revise the original text successfully. That's too bad, as I feel the book is even more relevant today than at the time of its initial publication.

The political situation in the story was never meant to parallel current events on Earth; it is comparable to our world as it was during the early fifties, not the seventies when the first edition appeared. After all, I wrote an initial draft of portions of it a year before the launch of Sputnik, an event that to my surprise and relief made it impossible for the planet portrayed to be our own. The story is not about politics, although its setting—the conflict between dictatorship and freedom—is universal and applies to all eras. As far as the story is concerned, that conflict is merely a plot device; so the fact that we no longer have two superpowers on the verge of nuclear war in no way dates it. As I said in the Afterword, some readers thought I used space fiction as a vehicle for political commentary when in fact it was the other way around: I used political melodrama to dramatize my ideas about the importance of traveling into space.

When the book was written, I assumed a world's Critical Stage is short. (Yes, I believe the theory applies to worlds other than ours, just as some scientists now believe that one goal of seeking interstellar radio contact is to find out how long an average planetary civilization lasts before self-destruction.) At the time of the Apollo moon landings, most people thought that nuclear war was likely to occur in the near future, but that if it didn't, we would continue to make rapid progress in space exploration. Since personally, I had believed since the early fifties that devoting a society's energy to space travel puts an end to the danger of a catastrophic nuclear war, I described the Critical Stage in those terms. And in fact, some evidence was provided by the space race with the Soviets, which absorbed money and effort that would otherwise have been spent on a more destructive competition.

As time passed, however, it became clear that my theory was a gross oversimplification. I tried to update it in the 2003 edition, pointing out that there are more dangers to a planetary civilization than nuclear war and that mere development of space travel capability, without a major commitment to establish settlements on other worlds, is not enough to eliminate them. But it's a novel, not a philosophic treatise, and it was being issued by the publisher's "children's book" department (although it's inappropriate for readers below high school age), so I wasn't able to elaborate enough to clarify the relevance to today's world.

Readers say to me that we have space travel yet are still in danger, and that's true. But we haven't made use of our space travel capability. Expansion into space prevents a civilization's destruction by two means: first, by constructively channeling the energy that would otherwise have gone into war, and second, by establishing footholds that can survive even if a species' home world is devastated—which in principle can happen through a natural event such as an asteroid strike, as well as through various kinds of human action. We have not taken steps toward either one; for nearly half a century, despite the dedicated effort of a small number of astronauts and space advocates, we have done no more than maintain a limited human presence in low orbit. Society as a whole has made no effort at all.

One reader told me he felt that we should spend no more on space travel until every child on Earth is well fed. That dismays me, as I believe the all-too-common idea that we should solve the problems on Earth before moving outward into space is a self-defeating policy. If we wait until we have eradicated poverty to colonize other worlds, neither will ever happen. Expansion into space is the solution—and in my opinion, the only solution—to Earth's problems. Abolishing hunger and pollution and war depends on the use of extraterrestrial resources. The fact that these problems still exist despite well-intentioned efforts to eliminate them is the result of our confinement to a single planet that we have outgrown, and they will inevitably continue to worsen until we make the effort to expand our civilization beyond it.

Most people assume either that we will someday learn to prevent war, or that human nature will eventually lead to interplanetary wars. In my opinion neither of those things will occur. War cannot be abolished by "learning" to prevent it. Negotiation is meaningless because no matter how many leaders negotiate in good faith, there will be fanatics who ignore treaties, and as long as these fanatics can attract enough followers to launch attacks, a strong defense against them is essential; failure to maintain it would lead to worldwide dictatorship. I believe that in time there will be an end to war, but this cannot happen until it becomes impossible for aggressors to recruit a significant number of supporters, a situation that can be brought about only by eliminating the factors that cause people to support them.

Human nature leads to war for two reasons that can't be merely wished away (although the majority attitude toward war certainly becomes more negative as the centuries pass). In the first place, humans crave challenge and excitement, which is the reason our species has been able to survive and thrive; so when a society is not fully occupied with a constructive challenge, it fulfills this need through a destructive one. In the second place, people fight over land and resources when these are scarce or seem likely to become scarce—again, this is an instinct indispensable to survival.

But once we break free of the confines of our native planet, there will be plenty of constructive challenge in the process of surviving elsewhere, and neither living space nor resources will ever be scarce again. The universe contains sufficient resources to last virtually forever—and making use of them needn't involve stealing them from extraterrestrial races; the discovery of numerous exoplanets indicates that there are more than enough uninhabited worlds to go around.

As long we are bound to a single world with shrinking resources, however, the situation can only get worse. There is nothing surprising in the rise of militant groups and terrorists; how could it be otherwise when it's obvious that Earth's resources can't last indefinitely and some societies either have less than others, or fear that what they do have will be taken away? When the frustration of the have-nots, and their lack of any way of constructively changing their situation, makes them easy prey for fanatics who know all too well how to satisfy their instinctive longing for an exciting challenge? This was always true, but in the past trouble wasn't widespread enough to threaten the existence of Earth's civilization as a whole. With modern technology, it becomes increasingly possible for a small minority to endanger the entire planet, even without the use of nuclear weapons (or with them; it no longer takes a superpower to launch a nuclear attack). Yet with that same level of technology we could extend civilization beyond the planet so that even if the worst should happen here, our species will not be wiped out.

This is what the Critical Stage is, and far from being an outdated concept, it becomes more and more pertinent year by year. I see this as a natural stage of evolution. We don't have wars because we are foolish or morally deficient (although there will always be individual evildoers), and we won't have them when our species is mature enough to take up the challenge of interplanetary expansion. I don't believe there will ever be interplanetary war, as many people think is inevitable in view of past history. Conditions will not be the same as in the past. In the terminology of anthropology, war in the past was adaptive for our species—it led step by step to the development of the technology needed to access the resources of a new ecological niche. It will not be adaptive once we are occupying that niche.

Nor will people's attitudes be the same. Centuries ago, war was considered glorious and men felt deprived of opportunity when no war was in progress. Even as recently as World War I, young Americans who joined up were afraid it would be over before they had a chance to get into the fight. Nobody in our culture feels that way today—it's generally agreed that war is a bad thing to be avoided whenever possible. Progress does occur over time. But it takes time—evolution is not a process that can be speeded up by decree, although it can, unfortunately, be stalled by apathy.

For many years I was increasingly worried, not so much by my awareness of more threats as by the fact that nothing was being done to speed up our progress in space and the general public cared less and less about it. I was afraid that our Critical Stage might be unnaturally prolonged. Then, a few years after the republication of _The Far Side of Evil,_ it dawned on me that the public's decreasing interest in space is due not to apathy, but to fear—not conscious fear, but the stirring of an unconscious recognition that the universe is very much vaster, and more scary, than most people like to think. (See "Achieving Human Commitment to Space Colonization: Is Fear the Answer?" at my website,) At the time of Columbus, many thought venturesome ships would fall off the edge of the world, a prospect they viewed with great dismay; others (according to legend), knowing the world extended beyond their maps, marked the edges with the warning "Here Be Dragons." Figuratively speaking, most people of our time, having been shown that travel between worlds is no mere fantasy, may feel the same way about space exploration.

And so for a while I thought that the alternative fear of such disasters as biological warfare, environmental deterioration, and terrorism might be the spur needed to get the space program moving again—we wouldn't have gotten to moon without the fear that the Soviets would win the Cold War. But in 2012, while revising my nonfiction book _The Planet-Girded Suns_ for republication, I suddenly saw the striking parallel between today's widespread underlying fear of what the universe may hold and the feeling that prevailed in the seventeenth century when the orderly Earth-centered conception of the cosmos was being replaced by realization that the universe has no center and the stars aren't fixed to a solid crystal sphere. The deep feeling of insecurity this new outlook engendered among the majority of educated people lasted for nearly a hundred years. Is there any reason to assume it will take less time for the public to get used to awareness that humankind is not isolated from whatever exists elsewhere? (See "Confronting the Universe in the Twenty-First Century," published as an Afterword to _The Planet-Girded Suns_ and by _The Space Review_.)

And so I now think that a commitment to large-scale space efforts will not come soon, and that far from being a sign that something has gone wrong, this is a normal phase of evolution that should have been predictable. The Critical Stage simply isn't as brief as I once believed. That's an optimistic view, as it means we are still on track. But of course the danger of self-destruction remains, and will last until we do take major steps toward space colonization. There is a longer period of peril than I supposed, and thus greater odds that we won't survive it.

In the novel the Service is searching for "the key to the Critical Stage" that might enable them to save other worlds, and when readers asked why I didn't let them find it, I've replied it was because I didn't know the key myself. I now suspect that I do know, and that the only key is time. Thus there is indeed one unreasonable premise underlying the story—the assumption that the Service wasn't already aware of that, considering that it knew the histories of the many worlds in the Federation it represented. However, I naturally don't pretend to portray the very advanced interstellar civilization in my fiction realistically, so I trust that this newly-discovered plot hole is not too serious a flaw. Certainly their immediate concern is valid, since if no start were made toward developing space technology, a world's Critical Stage would end sooner or later in disaster.

Of course there are many individuals in our society who don't share the prevalent uneasiness about human contact with the universe and are enthusiastic about exploring. There will be small-scale activity in space, including bases on the moon and Mars, long before our Critical Stage is over. We are already beginning to make progress with commercial space ventures, which I have always believed are what are needed to bring about significant development of extraterrestrial resources. But I no longer believe we will see any major effort toward colonization before the end of the twenty-first century.

What will happen when our world's Critical Stage finally ends? By definition, we will have begun to spread into space, and more resources will be available to Earth. But I don't think our world will become the utopia many people hope for until much later; I suspect that for the foreseeable future such a society will be possible only in the colonies. I do believe war will be abandoned, yet there will still be troublemakers and police will be needed to deal with them. There will be hunger and poverty because Earth will be overcrowded for a long time to come, and it won't be possible to import sufficient resources until orbiting colonies—as distinguished from those on other planets—are well established (although implementation of space-based solar power could go a long way toward minimizing these problems). And there will be depression and apathy among the majority of citizens who cannot personally participate in the exploration and settling of the frontier. My novels _Defender of the Flame_ and _Herald of the Flame,_ which are set long after many worlds have been colonized, portray what I think is most likely; they paint a dismal picture of conditions on Earth but offer hope from an unexpected direction at the end of the story.

Today's space enthusiasts naturally resist the idea of there being a natural explanation for the slowness of our movement beyond Earth, one that time alone can overcome. My published essay about it wasn't warmly received. Perhaps I am able to believe it only because now that I'm past eighty I know colonies can't be established in my lifetime anyway, nor will I live to see the worsening conditions on Earth likely to prevail before they are. But if my theory about the delay is true, at least we have no present cause to doubt that, barring catastrophe, we will someday reach that pivotal point in our evolution.

Go to the Table of Contents

Faith as the Focus of Children of the Star

(1972, 2017)

_The first part of this essay was originally a pamphlet distributed by the publisher to librarians at the time_ This Star Shall Abide _first appeared. I have written the rest, portions of which are in the FAQ at my website, to address questions raised by_ The Doors of the Universe. _Be aware that it contains major spoilers._

## *

It is a strange experience for a writer to find more themes inherent in a story than were originally meant to be there. This has happened to me before, but never to the same extent as in _This Star Shall Abide,_ and later in the complete trilogy _Children of the Star._

The ideas for my three previous novels, as well as for this one, came to me some in the late 1950s. I was not free to write the books then, nor would they have been thought timely. When I did write them, it was largely a matter of finding ways to express what I had long wished to say. But the story that became _This Star Shall Abide_ (known in the UK as _Heritage of the Star)_ underwent more change during its development than did the others. I always knew that the subject of space exploration and of humanity's place in the universe would be timely someday; it has been my prime concern for as long as I can remember. That the issue of youthful heresy would become central in our society was less obvious to me. And certainly I did not foresee that the concept of technological innovation as essential to human progress would ever be questioned, as it is questioned by some today, thereby giving the story's setting a thematic importance of its own. Thus what began as a relatively simple story grew into one so involved that its telling demanded not one volume, but two, of which _This Star Shall Abide_ was the first.

_This Star Shall Abide_ is about a boy who rebels (justifiably) against the religious and secular authority of his world; who is convicted of heresy, which in the eyes of his people is a serious crime; who refuses either to recant under pressure or to sell out for personal gain—and who is then confronted with proof that most of his beliefs are mistaken. The people's religion is not mere superstition. Their social system, although condonable only as the lesser of two evils, is not corrupt. Their world is not as it should be; it is not as it will become; but there are valid reasons—unique ones not comparable to any that could arise in our world—why no immediate change is possible, and the goal of change must be pursued by constructive rather than destructive means. Noren, in the story, has the courage to acknowledge this, whereupon he discovers that the heretic's path leads to rewards and burdens beyond any he has ever imagined.

Something that seems false or foolish to a person whose knowledge is limited may turn out to be true . . . it is possible that outward appearances are misleading and that more complete information would give him a different viewpoint . . . it is right to question orthodoxy; truth must not be accepted merely on the grounds of authority or tradition; yet on the other hand, it must not be rejected merely because it _is_ orthodox, since to do so is equally dogmatic. These, among other things, were the intended themes of the story. Initially I considered their religious aspects alone. In taking up the material after a lapse of years, however, I realized that they had acquired wider significance. For many young people heresy had become a way of life: not just the rejection of traditional religious symbols, but outright repudiation of society's established values. I realized that contemporary readers would find Noren's defiance of secular authority even more relevant than his scorn of a seemingly unreasonable faith.

While this fact added pertinence to the story, at the same time it created complications. If the social system that Noren defies were a good one, the book would not say anything to young people who see only the bad features of ours; they would dismiss it as a defense of the system itself. The science fiction form was thus of great advantage to me in that I could devise a system totally unlike ours and wholly indefensible apart from the singular conditions under which it exists. But science fiction, to me, is more than allegory; science fiction must deal not only with what is true for the people of our planet, in our time, but with what I believe about the universe and about underlying truths applicable to whatever sentient races may inhabit it. Having once established a situation in which a human race is faced by disaster so great as to justify an admittedly evil system as the sole alternative to extinction—something I am convinced does not occur on this planet, nor indeed anywhere, in the normal course of evolution—I found that I could not simply stop there. To do so would be to leave readers wondering how such a situation could be reconciled with the optimism I'd expressed in the past.

Moreover, the situation could not in one volume be made entirely clear to readers, for Noren does not learn the full truth about his world until the story's climax. He cannot see why his people have reverted to ways more primitive than those of their ancestors; he cannot understand that their inability to progress is the inevitable result of their being thrust into an alien environment with resources so limited as to make technological advance virtually impossible. Nor can he truly comprehend the hope their religion offers them. He lacks the background to grasp the real nature of the means through which that religion's promises are to be fulfilled.

Hence the second volume, _Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains_. In _This Star Shall Abide_ Noren seeks and eventually finds, but what he finds is not the ultimate truth he assumes it to be. Thus the time comes when he seeks answers that can be found neither in the awesome City of his world nor, for that matter, in any other. It eventually occurs to him to ask _why_ his people suffered a tragic setback that no human wisdom could have prevented, and why anyone who knows the facts should be sure that the setback can be overcome. He then challenges the system anew, unaware that those who have won the right to share its secrets are no less dependent on faith than those who give a literal interpretation to the symbols.

For in the last analysis, faith—or in other words, a positive view of the universe—is essential to all progress. Science is necessary, but one cannot rely solely upon science, which by definition concerns only that portion of truth that no longer demands faith for acceptance. This is something Noren has yet to discover at the conclusion of _This Star Shall Abide,_ and something that our own society too seldom recognizes. It is as basic to this story as to my earlier ones, a part of the universal pattern for which today's young people, like Noren, are desperately searching. I hope that these books offer them encouragement in that search.

## *

I had no plans to write a third volume. I felt that to let Noren discover a way to change his world would weaken the emphasis on faith with which the second one ends. In real life faith in an eventual solution to a major problem is rarely vindicated within a few years, or even within a lifetime. Certainly the problems in our own society cannot be solved quickly—the chief trouble I saw in young people's outlook was that they expected that they could be eliminated if only people would try hard enough. A main point of the story was that one must keep working toward a solution even when there is no hope of finding it in the foreseeable future.

But six years after _Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains_ was published I learned to my dismay that the people of Noren's planet might have been enabled to survive without the drastic system imposed by the Scholars. When I wrote the story, I myself was unaware of any other way they could have been saved. I believed that there was no alternative to what the Scholars did, for of course, I would not have sanctioned their actions on any lesser basis than my conviction that the extinction of their human race would have been worse. I knew nothing about genetics, and when I began to research it for another project, I was appalled, for I feared that informed readers would assume that I had ignored it for plot reasons and had knowingly justified the social evils in the story on false grounds. In any case, the story had to be updated.

And so I wrote _The Doors of the Universe._ The first problem I faced was explaining why the Scholars' knowledge had been incomplete. It was hard to think of a good reason, but at that time there was a lot of public opposition to genetic engineering and many people believed it should never be used on humans, so though I didn't really think a civilization as far advanced as that of the Six Worlds would ban it, I felt the premise that it did would hold water. I trust it still does, now that the public's negative reaction to genetic technology is less strong.

I was also concerned because I felt the new book could not possibly be considered a "children's book" when it not only dealt with Noren's adult life, but would necessarily include discussions of sex and even sexual encounters. Yet it would have to be issued by publisher's children's department because the first two books in the story had been. (At that time no Young Adult category existed.) I was quite surprised when my editor agreed, but found that she was already looking ahead to the publication of books for mature teens. Neither _Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains_ nor _The Doors of the Universe_ is of interest to readers below high school age, and when the trilogy was later published in a single volume by a different publisher it was issued as adult science fiction, which after all is what most mature teens read.

In developing the plot of the third book, I soon that realized that it depended even more on faith than the previous one. At the end of _Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains_ Noren discovers to his surprise that underneath, despite his disillusionment about the failure of the scientific work that would enable his people to survive without the restrictive social system that has been imposed on them, he does have faith in that work's ultimate success. He thus gains understanding of why the Scholars find their religion meaningful even when they know its symbol expressions aren't true in a literal sense. But this faith cannot last. In _The Doors of the Universe,_ his increasing expertise as a scientist shows him that the other scholars' goal of synthesizing metal is unrealistic and that they are counting on him for a breakthrough he can never achieve. Even worse, when he learns that genetic engineering could make survival possible, he knows that it will mean the final abandonment of their hope of fulfilling the Prophecy—a hope on which everything he personally values depends.

Noren alone is willing to abandon it; the others are not, for if they did so, knowing the Prophecy can't come true, they could no longer serve as priests without hypocrisy. Only faith in his ability to succeed in the genetic research—and to somehow gain their support, and later, that of the common people who will resist change—can enable him to do what must be done in the face of the sacrifices it will demand. Yet how can he proceed when he's aware that even if he manages to ensure the survival of many generations, without fulfillment of the Prophecy his human race will eventually be doomed?

He'd once assumed that the faith he found earlier would be permanent. But, he sees suddenly, "That had been faith in which he'd had _no choice_. No choice but to die, anyway, as they'd all have died in the mountains if his subconscious faith had not sustained them. That was one kind, a necessary kind: simply to go on because there was nothing else to do. But it demanded no real action. . . . All at once he perceived what an act of faith involved. There had to be choice in it, a decision that might go either way; one must _choose_ a road that might lead nowhere."

Noren chooses to strive for genetic change without imagining how he can persuade the world to accept it, without conscious faith that it won't prove futile in the long run. One step at a time, through many struggles, he becomes ready to offer it to the people despite opposition from his fellow Scholars. Yet he can do that only as a priest, in violation of his knowledge that even when seen as symbolic, the traditional religious phrases have become hollow. Or have they? Acknowledging that "the Prophecy is a metaphor, not a blueprint," he takes a step more drastic than anything he has foreseen. I myself had no idea how Noren could win the people over until I wrote the last chapter of the book; that was why it took me over a year to finish it. At the point where he finally sees, where **"i** nspiration, when it came, was a flash of light," that was true of me also.

I have found that not all readers realize that the religious aspects of the story are meant to be taken seriously. I have received mail about _This Star Shall Abide_ from people of several different religions, including members of the clergy, who admire it; and it won a Christopher award for "affirmation of the highest values of the human spirit" from a Catholic organization (though I am not Catholic). On the other hand, a few atheists have interpreted it as an endorsement of their views. Surprisingly, however, many people think the trilogy is about "a false religion" with no application at all to real ones.

Individual readers may, of course, consider any religion other than their own "false." But when people speak of a "false religion" in the context of this trilogy, or of any science fiction, they usually mean something more like "fake religion." Does the mere fact that its central symbol, the Mother Star, was purposely chosen by the First Scholar make it fake? Or the fact that the Star doesn't really have supernatural power and that what people say about it isn't literally true? Those are questions readers will have to answer for themselves after reading the second and third novels. Personally I believe that many religious ideas are metaphors that cannot be taken as literal fact, but nevertheless express concepts that we have no better way of expressing. As Noren discovers, they are symbols of "the unknowable." Metaphor often conveys truth, and is in fact the only way of conveying truth beyond our rational understanding. To me, it is what the metaphor stands for that's important.

For the sake of readers who didn't grasp that Noren's people aren't members of our own human race, I should make plain that they are of an entirely different origin. I had assumed that by describing the home civilization in the story as "the Six Worlds" and stating that there were six very similar to each other in that solar system, it would be clear that it wasn't ours; but the reviewers of _This Star Shall Abide,_ some of whom weren't knowledgeable about astronomy, didn't all see that. It's important because I didn't want to imply that the traditional religions of Earth will be forgotten by future colonists. Not only might that offend some readers, but it wouldn't fit the story; a new religion developed by our descendants wouldn't have the same characteristics as the one of Noren's planet.

There are also other reasons, apart from the fact that I wouldn't want to postulate our world's destruction. All my fiction takes place in the same "universe"—ours, as I imagine it may someday be, though of course the details aren't meant as predictions. To picture the events in _Children of the Star_ as happening to our descendants would settle the question of whether Elana's people in _Enchantress from the Stars_ are our descendants or visitors to our ancestors (or neither), which is intended to be an open one. Moreover, it wouldn't be consistent with my later novels, which are about the future of Earth and its many colonies in other solar systems.

Readers may wonder why I brought the Service from the Elana books into the third book of the trilogy when the first two originated as an entirely separate series. It was because I'd done such a good job of establishing that the planet hadn't enough metal to restore technology that no solution other than subtle aid was possible. If the Founders had known what the Service knew about recovering trace metals (which incidentally, is something that has already been done with genetically engineered bacteria here on Earth) they would have used that knowledge in the first place. So to achieve a happy ending, aliens had to help without revealing themselves. Furthermore, having established the presence of an alien artifact in _Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains_ , I had to follow it up. And if there were going to be aliens with the same policy as the Service in the Elana books, making them a separate group would have looked too repetitious.

Incidentally, the finding of that artifact, which one reviewer called "deus ex machina," was not a matter of my being unable to think of a less coincidental way of getting my characters out of a jam. It was meant to imply that coincidences sometimes occur that aren't due to mere chance—cases of the mysterious phenomenon known as synchronicity. Or you can call it divine providence. That was the point, after all. How could the book have ended as it does if the rescue had not been unforeseeable through reason? This was one of the remarkable ways in which the first two novels turned out to contain unplanned preparation for the concluding one, because the arrival of the Service depended on the artifact's discovery, and that, too, needed to be not merely unforeseen but unforeseeable; otherwise the actions of the Scholars would have been unjustified.

Some readers have assumed that the unexpectedly-happy ending in the Epilogue was necessitated by the books having been originally published as Young Adult instead of adult novels. This wasn't the case; I wouldn't write even an adult novel with a tragic outcome for a whole civilization. An open ending, yes, as I did when I planned to conclude with _Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains,_ but not outright disaster. And unlike some readers I've talked to, I believe the permanent loss of high technology would be a disaster that would lead ultimately to the species' extinction, even if its survival had been prolonged. I don't agree with the view that a primitive low-tech lifestyle can be indefinitely sustained, and in any case I believe that no species can last forever if confined to a single planet.

Moreover, mere survival and abandonment of the caste system would not raise the society to the level once attained by its people's ancestors. One theme of the story is that the loss of technology leads to loss of everything else that goes with advancement, including attitudes toward gender equality—a point missed by reviewers who complained about sexism in _This Star Shall Abide_. More is preserved in the City than machines. Women outside necessarily devote most of their time to childrearing since large families are needed to increase the planet's population, so of course the villagers, unlike the City dwellers, have sexist attitudes. I no more advocate this than I advocate their custom of lynching heretics! But that is what would happen in a low-tech society forced to revert to backward ways; survival of their species was not the only thing at stake in the happy ending.

Nevertheless, the main consideration was that restoration of interstellar travel was essential to the long-term survival of Noren's people, just as the development of it prior to the nova proved essential; and it is equally necessary to ours. The story is thus highly relevant to our own world, in view of scientists' current belief that faster-than-light travel will never become possible—a parallel that I intended to be seen in _Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains_ with respect to the goal of synthesizing metal. We too need faith that there will be breakthroughs we cannot foresee.

Does it matter whether a human race survives indefinitely? My characters take it for granted that it does. Extinction of our species (or any comparable one) would in my opinion be an unmitigated evil. But recently I found to my surprise that some people don't think so. In reply to an essay in which I mentioned that almost everyone has a deep, instinctive feeling that our species will continue to exist when we ourselves are gone, one commentator wrote, "I guess you'll have to include me out . . . around the same time I was fascinated with dinosaurs, the idea that homo sapiens could also go extinct didn't seem at all ridiculous to me." Presumably it still doesn't bother him.

We do not know, of course, why our human race or any other exists in the first place, so we have no basis on which to judge whether its survival matters in the long-term scheme of things. Yet to say that it doesn't removes the foundation of all faith beyond faith that we personally will live long enough to see the outcome of our daily activities. Most people do care what happens to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and in fact most now care about the preservation of Earth for our descendants. Is a line to be drawn after which it stops being important?

I think not. The essence of faith is the belief that there is pattern and purpose in the universe. If there is, if there's some point to existence, then the continued existence of our race does matter. And if there isn't, our own personal existence makes no difference either—we might as well all be dead. To be sure, there are a few who take the position that life is meaningless, but it is not a common one, and not one conducive to the accomplishment of anything of value.

The great majority of people, like Noren, have more underlying faith than they realize. Often in defiance of reason they feel, even if not consciously, that in the long run things will turn out well for the human race, whatever happens to them as individuals. Why else do some sacrifice their lives for the benefit of humankind? As to the ultimate fate of the individual, Noren confronts that question and is baffled by it, as most of us are; but in this too he senses that there must be truth beyond anyone's understanding. It is this awareness, the awareness that the universe has inherent pattern that we cannot comprehend, that constitutes faith. And this is what I hope my novels inspire readers to feel.

Go to the Table of Contents

The Relevance of Roots

(1990)

This essay is based on a speech I gave at Parkway School District, St. Louis, May 16, 1990.

## *

I was especially pleased when in 1990 I was asked to participate in a "History: Fact and Fiction" program because it suggested that there was new interest in the relationship between past and future. During the early seventies, when I was writing for young people, my mother was also writing for them. I wrote about the future, whereas she wrote about the past. We thought this was an interesting combination, and we attended some meetings together where we tried to focus on it. But at that time, it was felt that most young people didn't care about history. It reached the point where my mother could no longer get her books published because history wasn't popular. Aside from her personal disappointment, she was sad that so few seemed to see history's relevance. I was, too—I even turned one of her stories into a time travel story for an anthology I edited, hoping it might make the connection plain. But we concluded that on the whole, it was a losing battle.

So I was really delighted when I discovered that interest in history was reviving among young people, and I wished my mother were alive to see it. Also, I was glad that there was enough awareness of connections between eras for someone who writes about the future to have been invited to join a history panel. Too often before, I'd encountered the view that the past is dead, gone and irrelevant to real life—in the late seventies, a brilliant young friend of mine felt that way, and I wasn't able to argue him out of it. His interest was focused on the future, and he believed that's all that matters to younger generations. Yet everything we know about life is based on past experience. When we speculate about the future, we do so only in the light of the past. We can be sure there'll be many changes, but it's not possible to guess changes without knowledge of how things have changed before.

Today, young people have little difficulty thinking of the universe as having a vast space dimension. Paradoxically, however, modern teenagers' conception of time has narrowed as their view of space has widened. Unlike earlier generations who were taught world history, they know nothing of the past, except perhaps that of their own geographical region. Yet the time dimension extends both ways, and I think any book about our place in the universe is incomplete if it fails to acknowledge this. It's impossible to believe in future progress without being aware of past progress; maybe that's why so many people have lost faith in the future these days.

In my own work, I try to show my readers not only that our planet is just one among many worlds, but also that our age is just one among many successive eras. Furthermore, it is not the first era to have had problems, and it will not be the last. I have little sympathy for futurists who claim we're creating worse problems for ourselves with technological advances, much less for those who pronounce us on the verge of inevitable doom. On the other hand, I am not a utopian. Problems are part of life; as we solve them, more advanced ones appear and are solved in turn. This is as true on the cultural level as on the individual one, and it's something I think fiction ought to show.

I am not, here, referring to science fiction in general, for the criteria by which it is usually judged are not the same those relevant to future-fiction intended for audiences without extensive background in that field. A serious science fiction novel, to be issued by the major publishers that specialize in the genre, must contain concepts that strike long-term SF fans as original. This means they must be far-out imaginative concepts, as remote from life as we know it as possible. Usually no actual speculation about the future is intended in such novels. Neither are the familiar metaphors of Space Age myth permitted, as they are in books for young people and in space films for the general public. I consider these meaningful; in fact I've taught a course on space fiction as the emerging mythology of our era. But to some SF fans, they are merely banal.

Actually, this was the main reason why I wrote for young people in the first place. While there's certainly need for novels meant for the science fiction genre audience, I myself prefer to address a wider one. I think there should also be room for novels that happen to be set in the distant future, for one good reason or another, and are intelligible to the public at large. The reason I emphasize this is first, to make plain that in the remarks to follow I'm not trying to attack the literary standards of the science fiction genre, which are appropriate in that specialized field. And second, to suggest that the only fiction about the future suitable for children is that which does not attempt to meet them, that is, to portray newness merely for the sake of newness, deliberately departing from all that has been seen in the past. A reviewer once said something to the effect that he could think of better ways to "turn kids on to SF" than give them such old stuff as the sort of stories I'd chosen for my anthology. This infuriated me, because my aim was not to turn them on to SF, but to show them a future inhabited by people they could think of as real.

Limiting this discussion, then, to fiction that does deal with the future and not merely with hypothetically weird universes, I'd like to say something about various approaches to it. A common one is the use of a future or alien setting for the purpose of satire. This type of story is fine when recognized as satire, but by children, it frequently is not. Children are apt to interpret foolish or evil behavior on the part of the characters as a statement about the future, or as disparagement of alien cultures, rather than as commentary on our own customs of today; they do not view such settings as if they were fantasy like _Gulliver's Travels._ Similarly, moral fable set in the future but without true relevance to the future is apt to be misinterpreted: for example, fiction portraying mechanical robots with human feelings—unless they're as obviously imaginary as R2-D2 and C-3PO—is in my opinion seriously misleading to the young readers to whom it's often offered. I think that unless an author really holds this opinion of artificial life, it's false to foster the notion that there's no underlying difference between a human being and a robot.

Another major approach—common in nonfiction as well as fiction—is projection of some current situation into future years with the idea of pointing out that if the trend isn't reversed, the result will be catastrophe. There's a place for that technique in adult fiction, and I've used it myself in an adult novel ( _Stewards of the Flame_ ) about trends in our society that I find disturbing. But I feel that as far as young people are concerned, such an approach is destructive. Young people don't know enough about the past to see the fallacy inherent in it, and in fact, many older people don't seem to see it either. Yet all the evidence of history—and of evolutionary theory, as far as that goes—shows that change is a law of nature. We don't have to worry about trends continuing to the point of disaster, because factors we can't foresee are bound to enter the picture. The pressures on adolescents today are great enough without adding groundless fears about what would happen if there were no breakthroughs in human advancement. There _will_ be breakthroughs, and to suggest otherwise is to present what in my eyes is a false view of the universe.

A related approach that's often used in space fiction of a less serious type is simply to dress up past situations in futuristic settings. At the lowest level, there are Westerns of the "shoot 'em up" sort transformed into space operas about fights with ray guns. A little higher level, yet based on the same principle, involves interplanetary wars, the decline and fall of future galactic empires, and so forth. This is okay when there are mythological depths to it; it was fine in the film _Star Wars_ , for instance, and also in Star Trek, which is a mythic expression of our era's hopes and fears. And in _Enchantress from the Stars_ I did something similar very deliberately, as a stylistic device. The portions of the story told from the viewpoint of the invaders were stylized myths of the future, just as the fairy-tale portions were stylized myths of the past; the stereotyping was equally purposeful in both cases, though not all reviewers recognized this. (Unfortunately, readers less familiar with space operas than with fairy tales sometimes got the impression that the invaders were stereotyped accidentally—or even that the portrayal of them is a realistic picture of how humans will behave on alien worlds.)

I don't think stories showing civilizations of the future acting just like past civilizations are harmful to young readers in the same way prophecies of doom are. At worst they're entertainment without substance, and at best they are often metaphorically valid. They can be used to illuminate many truths about life here and now. However, unless they contain some other speculative level, as Star Trek does, they cannot be said to have anything to do with the real future—at least not by anyone who believes that humankind will continue to evolve. Whatever the future is like, it won't be mere repetition of the past; and whatever other worlds are like, they are not duplicates of this one.

Still, there are relationships between the past and the future that do hold true, and I feel that it's in ignoring these that genre-oriented science fiction—particularly the serious kind rated highest by critics within that field—fails to meet the needs of a more general audience. Many science fiction writers, recognizing that the future is incomprehensible, feel the best route to "realism" lies in making their stories incomprehensible. There's a place for this approach, I suppose; but whatever that place may be, it is not in books for young people. Young people don't need to be shocked out of complacency by concepts utterly alien to all the concepts of Earth. They don't need to be told that things change from era to era and from world to world; they already know that. They know it better than most adults, often at the price of feeling alienated themselves. What they need is to discover is that some concepts are universal and stay the same.

As I've said, I don't believe that the actions of civilizations are repeated at different levels of evolution (although of course, evolution is a long process; I'm not saying this doesn't occur in the near term). They may be taken by different species at comparable levels, but they can't be extended to ones more highly advanced. The feelings of individual people, on the other hand, do stay the same in different eras. They are modified by culture, as we all are influenced to some degree by the cultures in which we live. But underneath, human values—values concerned with the human spirit—are universal in both time and space.

They are, I believe, universal even with regard to sentient species other than the one that inhabits this particular planet. We aren't in a position to really know that, but in my opinion no good purpose is served by portraying arbitrary differences through sheer invention, thereby implying that even our deepest values are relative. I realize, of course, that many people disagree with me on this point, but I don't believe such values are derived solely from culture, and even if I did, I'd feel that saying so is harmful to the young. Relativism is hardly a firm basis for the establishment of emotional security.

Dogma is also harmful, to be sure. We wouldn't want to impose a view that's controversial in our society by offering only stories about the future that support it. But there's no real danger of this happening as long as we have authors with different views writing about the future. The main thing we have to watch out for in this area is the influence of fashion. Sometimes particular views become so fashionable among writers, editors and educators, and so popular in terms of what will sell, that very little appears to balance them. This is not deliberate censorship, but the effect on young people is the same as if it were. The best remedy, I think, is to get a wider range of writers interested in dealing with the future, which is something that can happen only if the need for stories about it is divorced from the needs of the specialized science fiction category.

Fiction about the future must not be viewed as literal prophecy; neither, however, must it be interpreted as mere allegory about our own world in our own time. In cases where it's made close enough to real life to be credible to non-specialists, these misinterpretations sometimes occur. Adult readers, more than young ones who take concepts such as extraterrestrial life seriously, tend to think that if the characters seem human then the story's action is meant as a parable. _Enchantress from the Stars_ was sometimes seen this way, to my dismay—I never meant it to be applicable to intercultural relationships among members of a single species. It is about relationships between _different_ species, and was intended to counteract the prevalent notion that UFOs will come and solve Earth's problems for us. Yet because none of the beings shown were really alien, some readers were confused.

This, I think, was the lesser of evils compared to the science fiction's field's insistence on distortion for its own sake. In a novel one can't give an exact portrayal of reality—not even of the reality one has experienced. Literature, like other forms of art, must be selective; it must concentrate on basic ideas rather than minor and immaterial details. To me, the true physical shape of alien beings, as well as the specific form of their culture, is not only unknowable but immaterial. Even if I could know anything about them, I'd have to portray them in terms familiar to readers in order to focus on the really important things, the things I believe hold true throughout time and space. It's certainly unrealistic, in one sense, to show peoples of other worlds looking as much like the people of our world as I do—but it's scarcely any less so to make them look like giant reptiles, which is unlikely to be any closer to actual fact. I therefore feel I come nearer to truth by fostering a sense of our kinship with other inhabitants of the universe.

In any case, I think the consequences of portraying aliens this way are preferable to the consequences of portraying them as either godlike or hostile. And this is important not just for the future, but for right now. After all, most of today's young people believe literally in extraterrestrial aliens, and form their attitude toward the universe in terms of how they picture them. Possibly no ETs exist in space; this is debatable—but their existence as a metaphor in our culture is unquestioned fact. Imagining them as gods has more serious implications than are generally recognized; and the emotional result of viewing them as devils is all too obvious.

Above all, what young people need today is faith in the future. This can be gained only through knowledge of how we've progressed in the past, combined with the conviction that it's possible and natural to go on progressing. Most of the time, looking at current news fosters only discouragement. In order to be rationally optimistic, it's necessary to take a long view that includes awareness of our roots and how we've grown from them. And there's just one way for the young to acquire such a view: through fiction that brings to life earlier times, as well as stories about times that are yet to come.

Go to the Table of Contents

Why Write for Today's Teenagers?

(1972)

_Reproduced with permission from_ The Horn Book. _© Copyright Library Journals, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of MSI Information Services._

## *

At first, when I was asked to address a workshop session focused on recent changes in writing for teens, I questioned whether the subject would apply to someone who has been writing as short a time as I have. Yet, on reflection, I realized that it does; for if attitudes about what is suitable for teenagers had not changed, I might never have become a writer.

Until four years ago other work kept me too busy to write; but I have studied the field of children's literature periodically for more than twenty years, and there have indeed been dramatic changes in the past few—even since I began my first book. While I was writing Enchantress from the Stars (Atheneum), I had serious doubts that it would be publishable. I felt that it was halfway between an adult novel and a children's book and was unlikely to fit either the adult or juvenile market. In terms of the usual juvenile[*] I considered it too long, too philosophical, and in some respects far too mature. Still, the story could not have been written in any form other than the one it took, so I decided to try my luck with it. Not only was the book accepted by the first publisher to which it was submitted, but also—to my astonishment—it was a runner-up for the Newbery Medal. I think my experience shows that, although as a matter of professional preparation one should become familiar with what has generally been done in a field, one should not try to force a work of fiction into an established mold. If a writer has something to say, he must say it in the form that seems right to him.

I also think, however, that when a book that does not fit the traditional categories is successful, its reception indicates there are readers looking for something outside those categories and a new category is in the process of being formed. We are seeing evidence of such a situation in many of the recently published books for young people. The change is often spoken of as the new realism, but I believe that the factor of realism is merely one aspect of a wider issue: Young people today are more serious-minded than they used to be. They are interested in exploring questions of values and of philosophy. And, at the same time, adults who have become weary of current trends in fiction are discovering that some of the junior books, being less subject to the dictates of fashion than other novels, are more satisfying to them than a lot of the adult ones. In the artistic sense the distinction between the two is blurring.

It seems to me, therefore, that before a writer considers how to write for teenagers, he must first ask himself why. Why should he direct his books to young people instead of to adults? Writing for the young certainly is not easier; no one who has had contact with the field can remain under the misapprehension that it requires less skill. And there are few, if any, restrictions left on subject matter. Restrictions on style and vocabulary apply only to textbooks and specialized series. So what need is there to have teenage novels at all?

Obviously, if a serious writer chooses to write for teenagers, he feels that he has something important to say to teenagers—but young people do not welcome messages from adults. I myself feel strongly that I have things I want to communicate to the young, but these are not things that apply exclusively to them. To young people, I say the same things I would want to say to people of any age. I think I would be insulting today's youth if I were to do otherwise. So that is not really an answer to the question, especially since publishers are beginning to mark teenage books "ages ten to fourteen" because boys and girls over fourteen read mostly adult books anyway. Therefore, if I wrote adult novels, I could reach the teenage audience and adults, too. I could also reach the advanced readers among the ten- to twelve-year-olds, many of whom already read adult fiction and are the only subteens that do not find my junior books too difficult. From time to time I do consider the possibility.

I doubt that I shall go beyond considering, however. The true reason I direct my books specifically to young people is not that I would be unable to reach them through adult books, but that in the publishing field today I see more restrictions on what I can do in adult books than in so-called juveniles. That sounds like a strange statement; one might think that in the adult market there are no restrictions whatsoever any more. Yet actually, when the old taboos disappeared, new and different varieties took their place. Every era has its conventions, and I happen to be guilty of two of the most scorned heresies of ours: I have an optimistic view of the universe, and I just do not believe that sex is the most significant thing in life. These days, a novelist who concentrates neither on gloom-and-despair nor on sex has little chance of being taken seriously by the critics. Since I would rather be known as an author of ''adult" juveniles than of "juvenile" adult novels, I therefore think writing for teenagers offers me the best opportunity to express my ideas.

An optimistic outlook is frequently cited as one of the few remaining differences between children's literature and adult literature. It is all too true that such an outlook is no longer thought appropriate for grownups. This, I think, is a sad commentary on the predominant viewpoint of our age. Moreover, I am troubled because it is sometimes implied that the optimism in junior books is inserted as a concession to the young: almost as if writers for young people were suspected of saying, "We will be realistic, but only to a certain extent; while we may depict life as it is, we will not go so far as to point out that its evils are futile and meaningless." I trust that most authors do not feel this way. I believe a writer has as much obligation to be honest with young people as with adults, and if optimism is a concession for him, he has no business putting himself in a position where he has to make it.

For me, it is not a concession. I consider today's tendency to equate realism with pessimism wholly invalid. In the climate of current opinion this viewpoint is, as I have said, very heretical indeed. Nevertheless, I feel that although some junior fiction may be unduly optimistic, our contemporary adult fiction is equally unrealistic and one-sided since it so often makes the assumption that all optimism is blind.

Let me emphasize that by optimism, I am referring not to the outmoded, sugar-sweet happy ending, but to the portrayal of whatever ordeals a story's characters have undergone, whatever griefs they are left with, as being in some way purposeful—as leading somewhere. Today's teenagers are well aware that reality' is apt to prove unpleasant and that problems are not always resolved happily for everyone; they will not listen to us if we ignore these facts. They hear about the grimmer aspects of the human condition all the time through current events, if not through personal experience. What they do not hear is any suggestion that there may be grounds for hope. In making such a suggestion, I feel that it is necessary to take full account of the dark side in order to be believed. To call that side "real" and the concept of underlying purpose "unreal," however, is something else again, and the trend toward doing so, unfortunately, seems to be spreading even into the children's book field.

The only way I can see to counter this trend is to take grim reality and show it to be less grim than is commonly supposed. The Far Side of Evil (Atheneum), for example, deals with some of the grimmest topics that could be chosen: brain-washing, imminent nuclear war, and the sacrifice of innocent lives. At first, I feared it might be entirely too grim for a junior novel, but nobody seems to have been bothered on that score. Its view of the perils of our time is rather more hopeful than what one generally finds in adult books, but I am completely serious about that view; I did not make the book hopeful because I was writing for young people. On the contrary, I wrote it for young people because the theory I wanted to present was hopeful.

That theory happens to be concerned with the importance of space exploration to the survival of mankind, something about which I have felt very strongly since long before the first space satellites were launched. As a matter of fact, all four of the books I have written grew from unpublished stories that I wrote in 1956, when my theory was developed. I first conceived them as adult short stories, but their themes were far too complex for anything short of novel length and too optimistic—even then—for the adult market. Yet, at that time, they would have been considered too mature for juveniles. Now, since we are in the Space Age when anything connected with space is popular with the young, I am able to publish books that I doubt would have sold fifteen years ago even if I had been free to write them. To be sure, their subject matter has some bearing on this; today's young people have a sincere interest in the universe as a whole and in man's relationship to it, and I believe that they are a long way ahead of most adults in this respect. The implications of the shift in publishing trends, however, are equally applicable to other subjects.

Since I have said that I find fewer restrictions in writing for teenagers than I would encounter in writing for adults, there may be some question as to whether the field demands any compromises at all. Actually, I can think of only one necessary conclusion—aside from the exclusion of sensational sex, which I do not consider a handicap—and it pertains principally to the particular kind of story I write: I do have to oversimplify my theories somewhat. It would be impossible to explain all facets of them without slowing down the action too much, and even the essential aspects are too abstract and complex to suit everyone's taste. Still, adult tastes also differ. Modern teenagers, having a broader background than that of former generations, are as diverse in their preferences as their elders; a writer can no more expect to please all of them than he can expect to produce an adult novel with universal appeal.

I try, of course, to direct my work to young people of various tastes. Apart from the complexity inherent in stories concerning future or hypothetical worlds, my books are quite different from each other. Though many readers like them all, each story seems to have found an additional, and more or less separate, audience. On the whole, for instance, readers who are particularly impressed by Enchantress from the Stars don't like Journey Between Worlds (Atheneum) as well, and vice versa. I know a number of people, both teenagers and adults, who like Journey Between Worlds best because it seems more real and immediate to them and is less complicated, although from a literary standpoint it is not so unique. It was not meant to be; T wrote it in order to say something about space to readers who are "turned off" by fantasy, and I think I achieved my purpose, for several older women with no prior interest in other planets have told me it made them believe that the colonization of Mars is possible.

This response illustrates why I feel a new category is emerging in fiction. On the one hand, young people are demanding more mature books than they once did; on the other, adults are beginning to realize that these books have something to offer that is rarely found in the standard contemporary novel. I have been told by librarians that Enchantress from the Stars is checked out by adults before the children can get hold of it, and I have had letters from strangers who were apparently unaware that it was published as a juvenile. The Far Side of Evil, like a good many recent teenage books, has been placed in the adult collection of some libraries as well as in the children's room. More and more junior novels are being reissued in paperback with no indication that they were originally written for young people, and they are finding readers of all ages. The official spokesmen of our time might call this escapism, but I sometimes wonder if it may not be a sign that adults know underneath that a positive outlook is, in fact, a truer representation of reality than the now-fashionable negative one.

As a writer for today's teenagers, then, I think the best approach one can take is to forget that one is writing for teenagers and to speak to them on one's own level. For the truth is that there is no unique teenage audience any more. Either a book appeals only to children under fourteen, or it must have enough substance to appeal not just to older teens but to adults; because the young people who read at all are too sophisticated to read anything that lacks adult interest. Through the changes of the past few years, the juvenile publishing field has given authors new freedom to be honest with young people. Consequently, it has developed into a field where a writer can express what seems true to him when his opinions are not in accord with the cynical bias of our era. He is free not only of the old requirement that he ignore aspects of life, but of the adult market's demand that he view those aspects in a sordid and sensational way — and to me, both of these freedoms are vital.

* I am jarred by my use of the obsolete term "juvenile" in this article, which at the time it was written was the current term for a book intended for children or teens, but which is now frowned upon by editors, reviewers, and authors. (It has been retained by wholesale marketers and by library catalogs that can't be changed.) The term "young adult," first applied only to exceptionally realistic novels, was not widely used for all teenage books until the late 1970s.

Go to the Table of Contents

Do Teenage Novels Fill a Need?

(1975)

This article was published in English Journal, © 1975 by the National Council of Teachers of English, and reprinted in Young Adult Literature in the Seventies, Jana Varlejs, ed., Scarecrow Press, 1978. In some respects it is a bit dated because teenage novels—now generally called Young Adult (YA) novels—are no longer marketed exclusively to libraries, as was the case when it was written, but are also sold to the general public and are widely read not only by teens but by many adults. Thus some are more commercially oriented than those that appeared before the immense popularity of the Twilight and Hunger Games series. But most of what I have said here about the difference between YA and adult novels is still applicable.

## *

The question of whether teenage fiction is needed has received a good deal of attention during the past few years, primarily in journals read by librarians. Yet it seems to me that the controversy has been centered on side issues: issues that often obscure an information gap of which many teachers and librarians are unaware. Discussion about what is wrong with contemporary teenage fiction—and what is right with it—cannot be meaningful apart from clear understanding of what it is; and I find that people unfamiliar with publishing procedures have no such understanding. In debating the value of fiction for teens, most fail to define the category to which they are referring.

Just what is a teenage novel? The simplistic answer is obvious: a teenage novel is one intended for adolescent readers. To many people, however, the very words of this statement have connotations that exclude the better teenage novels of today. No truly adequate definition can be given except in terms of factors distinguishing teenage novels from adult ones. And when considering these, it is important to recognize that only one factor has bearing on the designation "teenage" (or "junior" or "young adult") as applied to a novel by the book trade and review media. That designation is determined solely by the structure of the publishing business. A novel suitable for adolescents is "teenage" if it is issued by the children's book department of a publishing house, and "adult" if it is issued by the adult department.* From an organizational standpoint, these departments are wholly separate; and although many criteria may affect the initial decision as to which will handle a given novel, once that decision is made the book is permanently categorized. The book's maturity, as judged by readers after publication, has nothing whatsoever to do with its classification, which is based mainly on marketing considerations.

This separation at the publishing level is more significant than it may seem, for it has far-reaching effects—some good, some bad—on the nature of novels made available to adolescents. Moreover, it is highly pertinent to the debate concerning whether or not a "teenage" category is worthwhile. The raison d'etre of that category is not literary, but commercial. No one doubts that there is a need for books appropriate for teenagers to read. The real, underlying question is whether we need books to be read only by teenagers. And surely we do not. I cannot imagine writing a novel that I felt was of interest only to people within some particular age range; my books are enjoyed by ten- to twelve-year-olds of advanced reading ability, and also by quite a few grownups. But I direct them most specifically to readers of high school age, since they have characteristics which, in the climate of today's publishing field, mean that if they were not issued by children's book departments they would not be published at all.

I cannot deny that I say this with a tinge of regret, not because I see anything preferable about being an "adult" novelist, but because the outlook of modem teenagers seems to me in many respects healthier than that of their elders. Authors often find the children's book field less restrictive than the adult market in that it is less subject to the dictates of current fashion. As C. S. Lewis said, "They label their books 'For Children' because children are the only market now recognized for the books they, anyway, want to write."[1] The statement is perhaps even more applicable to teenagers; teenagers, having little regard for what is fashionable among adults, do not care that an optimistic view of the universe is not now in vogue. Their conception of "realism" is uncolored by the pronouncements of cynical critics—an issue that I have discussed in greater detail elsewhere.[2]

However, whether or not one shares my personal reasons for favoring a youthful audience (and many writers do not), it is indisputably true that adolescent readers need novels of a kind not presently being produced by publishers' adult departments. Natalie Babbitt writes, "Teenagers do not need a fiction of their own: They are quite ready to move into the world of adult fiction."[3] This might well be the case if contemporary adult fiction were more representative of the range of literate tastes than it has become; but the fact is that it does not even meet the needs of all older adult readers, let alone the youngest. Though worthwhile novels of past decades retain their value, suitable new ones are rare. Ms. Babbitt, wondering "if there is such a category as a teenage audience," cites partial reading lists for her sons' high school English classes consisting entirely of adult books—not one of which, I notice, was published within the last ten years [as of 1975].

Publishing trends have undergone drastic upheavals during that period. The present adult market demands fiction of a kind that adolescents lack the experience and emotional maturity to cope with. Critically-acclaimed novels frequently treat themes in which adolescents are not even interested. But the nature of junior books has also been radically altered, a situation of which not all high school teachers are yet aware. Times have changed since publishers labeled insipid mysteries and school romances "ages 13 up"; both the old triviality and the old taboos are disappearing. Some of the books being issued by children's departments would have been published as adult a decade or two ago.

By no means do all such books qualify as literature. As Ms. Babbitt points out, they frequently suffer from deficiencies that would prevent their being considered true literature no matter what audience they were meant for. But hasn't it always been necessary to evaluate novels individually? The lowering of their age designation carries no implication that one should lower one's standards of judgment; nor, despite contentions of people who rate value in terms of "relevance," does increased maturity of adolescent fiction's subject matter necessarily imply sufficient maturity of presentation. Many teenage books that have appeared in the wave of enthusiasm for the "new realism" have been justly criticized for superficiality. One cannot argue with the reviewer who wrote, "You can't turn a bad novel into a good one by filling it with pregnancy, pot and the pill."[4]

Yet neither can one say that the existence of bad teenage novels tells against the need for good ones. In recognizing that shallow and superficial books are to be found among the newest fiction for adolescents, one must remember that shallow and superficial adult fiction also appears rather frequently. One might remember, too, C. S. Lewis's well-known statement: "No book is really worth reading at the age of ten which is not equally (and often far more) worth reading at the age of fifty.... The only imaginative works we ought to grow out of are those which it would have been better not to have read at all."[5]

Though Lewis was referring to books for preadolescents, the same principle applies to those directed toward adolescents. And it should be noted, before attempting to define adolescent fiction more fully, that there is no way to determine a particular novel's intended audience except through evaluation of the book itself or its reviews. Seekers of teenage fiction must bear in mind that for their purposes, any age or grade levels stated in the publisher's announcements, on the dust jacket, or at the heads of reviews are meaningless. These estimates apply only at the elementary school level, and even then they are inconsistent, since every publishing house has its own policy and the policies change from year to year according to sales experience. Thus one book's "10 to 14" designation may be the equivalent of another's "12 up," and the former may sometimes be given to a more difficult book by the same author.

This is a reflection of the uncertain status of teenage fiction at present. There was a time when most publishers set age level designations unrealistically high. Unfortunately, some overcorrected at the same time they were introducing books of increased maturity, and the result has been general confusion. Children's librarians are becoming wary of books marked "13 up", which may indeed be filled with pregnancy, pot and the pill; while high school librarians who stopped buying—and reading—the output of children's departments before mature books began to appear retain the no longer reliable habit of automatically subtracting two or three years from the figures given. It is an ironic fact that some of the best new books for adolescents reach their intended audience mainly in public libraries large enough to have internal reviewing systems through which recommendations can be made to buyers for the adult collection; the more mature teens rarely visit children's rooms.

These novels are unheard of outside the specialized field of children's literature (though the new paperback trend may help the situation if current distribution problems can be solved). The hardcover editions of modem books for young people are sold almost exclusively to libraries. No attempt is made to market them to the general public, and few bookstores stock any but major award winners and the work of local authors. This, in fact, is the basis of the strict separation between fields in the publishing world, and its impact is great. It means that young people's books are advertised and reviewed primarily in publications read by librarians. It affects timing: books are not published intermittently throughout the year, but are grouped into spring and fall lists for compatibility with school and public library ordering practices; children's editorial departments are organized around this schedule. Moreover, there is no expectation of producing instant best-sellers—the review procedures employed by libraries cause long delays between publication and shelving of teenage novels, which, unlike most adult ones, are kept in print for many years.

In most respects, this library orientation is a good thing for children's literature; it tends to preclude publication of books that will not remain valuable long past the current season. Furthermore, librarians are more discriminating buyers than the public at large, and they need not purchase young people's books merely to meet public demand, since the public does not even hear the titles of such books prior to seeing them—although this consideration is at times overridden by demand for novels of current topical interest. (Too often, these days, mere topical interest is confused with contemporary theme, as in the case where an author was advised by a librarian that young readers needed a novel about "a black adolescent unwed father on a Honda."[6] On the whole, because the market is composed of professionals, editorial standards are apt to be higher in children's departments than in the adult departments where the prime aim is large, quick sales.

This is increasingly true now that funding problems are causing libraries to become more and more selective. And the more selective they are from the literary standpoint, the better off young readers will be—we do not need any more mediocre books. However, there is some danger that selectivity based upon insufficient funds will eliminate not only books of comparatively low quality, but also those of comparatively low readership. No one can afford to purchase—or to publish—novels that will not be widely read. Under present conditions, the best teenage novels will be the first to disappear, since they are not as widely read as those that can be appreciated by children of lesser maturity. Publishers have made an effort to bring out books appropriate for high school age readers of today, yet it is through the large public libraries, not the high schools, that they are being circulated. Though high school librarians often know of them, their funds are limited, too; they must give first priority to books requested by teachers.

It should therefore be asked whether teenage novels are worth teachers' attention, and if so, why. In defining what they have to offer, I can best begin by stating what they do not offer, for there are a number of prevalent misconceptions concerning their purpose.

First, few if any of the good ones are easier reading than the average adult novel considered suitable for younger high school students. Writers for teenagers do not limit vocabulary, nor do they use a less complex style than they would in. fiction for adults (except in the case of stories specifically produced for "slow readers," which are not really "novels" in the literary sense). Some teenage novels are relatively short, but others—most of my own, for instance—exceed many adult novels in length. A serious novel for adolescents is distinguished from adult material by its conceptual and emotional levels, not by its reading level.

Second, novels of quality for teenagers do not preach. A writer who approaches young people in a condescending way receives short shrift from today's editors and reviewers. One can use a story to reflect one's views, just as an author of adult fiction can—but they must be views about life, not about how young people, as distinguished from other people, ought to look at it.

Third, teenage novels, if good, are not devoid of concepts worth pondering and worth discussing. Although fiction for the young ordinarily stays within the bounds of good taste, its themes are confined neither to traditional ideas nor to fashionable new ones. Thus it can hardly be called uncontroversial. An author cannot present honest opinions without evoking disagreement from some proportion of readers, and teenagers scorn books that are not honest.

A fourth thing novels for adolescents do not offer is shelter from the world as it is. Because of their honesty, such books cannot ignore the grimmer aspects of life any more than they can ignore aspects some adults consider shocking. The young do not want shelter. They know that people rarely live happily ever after; it is worse than useless for fiction to pretend otherwise. At the same time, however—and again for the sake of honesty—teenage books with true depth do not foster the notion that reality is uniformly grim. Even readers who have found it so are entitled to know that a bright side does exist.

Finally, contemporary teenage novels are not mere vehicles to provide reluctant readers with a fictional reflection of their own lifestyle and their own specific problems. It is true that many deal with settings and incidents familiar to the present teen generation; as Richard Peck says, young people "are liable to choose books as they choose friends, more as mirrors than as windows."[7] But he goes on to say: "Still, the best youth novels portray adolescence as a maturing process. Though the focus may be upon being young, there is a sense of the future—a sense of becoming, as well as being." Relevance—real relevance—lies in this, not in a mirror image.

What, then, does distinguish teenage fiction from adult fiction, if not shallowness of a sort properly considered obsolete? It is largely a matter of two things, I think: complexity and viewpoint. These, at any rate, are the only allowances I make in my own writing for the youth of my intended audience.

Obviously, adolescents cannot absorb ideas of as great complexity as more experienced readers. They cannot follow as many interwoven threads, or perceive such involved interrelationships; nor do they possess the knowledge to make sense of allusions. This is not because they are "too young" for adult material; it is because they have had too little time to develop background. If a book is to be meaningful to them, it must be clearly focused. When it is based on complex ideas—as mine, which are set in hypothetical future worlds, usually are—the discussion of those ideas must be to some extent oversimplified. Lack of complexity, however, should not be confused with lack of profundity. In the words of one noted editor, "A book with good unity can have limitless depth. Only the circumference need be limited."[8] A teenage novel can and should have more than one level, and the deeper ones will be noticed by the most mature readers alone.

The other crucial factor that determines whether a book is meaningful to adolescents is viewpoint. This is more than a question of the age of the protagonist, though normally, the principal viewpoint character should be young. The real issue is the book's outlook. As everyone knows, teenagers neither share nor understand the outlook of adults with whom they are in actual contact; they cannot be expected to fathom the view of those for whom most contemporary adult novelists write. It is not merely that there is much in modem adult fiction the young do not comprehend—the reverse is also true. Fiction for teenagers is more than a watered-down version of adult literature with excess complexity screened out. I do not mean that it portrays the "youth subculture," although some of it may. In essence, outlook is independent of culture. Adolescents, not knowing this, tend to like adult books that reject our culture and dislike those that accept it. They need novels with a fresh outlook on all cultures: ours, theirs, others of this planet, and those of hypothetical worlds. Viewpoint concerns perspective on the universe and on the future, which is what I believe today's young people are seeking.[9] Too many adults have given up the search.

There are, of course, some fine adult novels with viewpoint and level of complexity suitable for today's high school students, novels that English teachers know well. These will be read for many years to come, and their worth will not diminish. But each year they become further removed from our time, and the supply of new material to supplement them is not growing noticeably larger—at least it does not appear to be if one discounts the publishing trend toward issuing books of substance as teenage books. As a result, adolescents are sometimes urged to attempt books beyond their understanding; from a real-life world that is complex and confusing enough, they are plunged hopelessly out of their depth into a fictional world of mature concepts and emotions. This is not a "realistic" world to the young—it is simply an incomprehensible one. It is unlike theirs, and asking them to enter it serves only to increase their alienation.

Lest teachers who agree immediately rush to the library with hope of finding a whole new body of literature appropriate for reading lists, it must again be emphasized that outstanding novels are the exception rather than the rule in the teenage field, just as they are in the adult field. Moreover, books of high quality for young adolescents are more plentiful than comparable ones for older adolescents. There is a good reason for this. Since the major market of children's book departments consists of children's librarians, publishers are understandably reluctant to bring out books that are too mature for sixth and seventh graders. Authors are therefore under pressure to oversimplify somewhat more than would be necessary if there were a large acknowledged high school market. Although many preadolescents have adult reading skills, their viewpoint and the level of complexity that meets their needs cannot also meet the needs of high school juniors and seniors. Until the status of teenage fiction is established, there must be a certain amount of compromise.

In the case of my own novels, this has not been as serious a problem as with some, since their interplanetary setting interests children who might otherwise find them difficult; furthermore, they can be read on several levels. They have been widely circulated among preadolescents, and I am very happy that this is so. Yet I would like them to reach the readers for whom they were intended, too. The most recent, Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains, is centered upon problems of deep concern to introspective older adolescents, but beyond the comprehension of most twelve-year-olds. It thus strikes some people as a bit heavy. Reviewers whose aim is to evaluate usefulness in the upper elementary grades often either ignore aspects of a book perceptible only to more mature readers, or feel that they slow its pace—which for younger boys and girls is indeed true. Where fast action is sought, this is legitimately considered a defect; still it is my belief that today's teenagers want and need fiction that emphasizes the inner events of its characters' lives more than the outward ones.

Increasingly, the adolescents of our time are interested in questions: questions about life and its meaning, about the future of civilization, about man's place in the universe. No author can give them answers. But I feel that books directed toward the young can encourage them to go on looking for answers—which, surely, is one of the major goals of education. And if they can, teenage novels do fill a need.

NOTE (added in 2017)

* The permanent classification that distinguishes a Young Adult book from an adult book applies only to editions issued by traditional publishers, and later editions from different publishers may be reclassified, as happened when my YA trilogy was issued in a single volume as adult science fiction. Also, indie (self-published) YA novels are merely placed in that category by their authors; their classification is not frozen unless the book has received an official library cataloging number.

REFERENCES

1. C. S. Lewis, "On Juvenile Tastes," in Of Other Worlds (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), p. 41.

2. Sylvia Louise Engdahl, "Why Write for Today's Teenagers?" The Horn Book Magazine, XLVIII (June, 1972), pp. 249-254.

3. Natalie Babbitt, "Between Innocence and Maturity," The Horn Book Magazine, XLVIII (February, 1972), p. 36.

4. John Rowe Townsend, "It Takes More Than Pot and the Pill," New York Times Book Review, LXXIV (November 9, 1969, Part II), p. 2.

5. C. S. Lewis, "On Stories," in Of Other Worlds (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), p. 15.

6. Richard Peck, "In the Country of Teenage Fiction," American Libraries, 4 (April, 1973), p. 204.

7. Ibid., p. 205.

8. Jean Karl, From Childhood to Childhood: Children's Books and Their Creators (New York: John Day Company, 1970), p. 67.

9. See my article "Perspective on the Future: The Quest of Space Age Young People," School Media Quarterly, 1 (Fall, 1972), pp. 27-35.

Go to the Table of Contents

A Response to Some Reactions to Journey Between Worlds

(2015)

_In 2015 I got the rights to_ Journey Between Worlds _back from the publisher of the 2007 paperback edition and issued ebook editions to replace theirs, which were overpriced. I hoped that at last it would reach the audience for which it was intended, but so far that hasn't happened; there just doesn't seem to be any way to make the readers most likely to enjoy it aware that it exists. Moreover, no one who has read it seems to have noticed the symbolism in the characterization of the story's heroine._

## *

My Young Adult novel _Journey Between Worlds_ , a realistic story about the colonization of Mars, is about ordinary people living on that world. It's enjoyed more by young women who like romance than by avid sci-fi fans—while classed as "science fiction" because of its interplanetary setting, it's not about technology or exotic adventure. It's mainly a story about human aspirations and human love.

_Journey Between Worlds_ was my first book, written before _Enchantress from the Stars_ although published later. Admirers of _Enchantress_ looking for something comparable tend to be disappointed in it, because it's not at all similar; but why should it be? A writer is not obligated to direct all his or her work to the same people. I aim to express my ideas in a variety of ways, not to meet the public's expectations. In theory, this should give me a wider audience. In practice, few of the readers for whom they were intended discover my lesser-known novels.

_Journey_ has had two hardcover editions and a paperback issued by major publishers, yet despite good reviews it has never reached the audience it was meant for. The publishers marketed it exclusively as science fiction rather than romance, yet science fiction fans aren't likely to sympathize with a heroine who doesn't want to go to Mars. And they aren't the readers who need to be convinced that colonizing Mars is worthwhile. My aim was to appeal to romance readers who may or may not be in favor of space travel, and who wonder whether in a changing world, there's hope for their descendants to find happiness. And in fact, the 2006 hardcover edition was well received by the romance websites to which I personally arranged for it to be sent; some reviewers said they enjoyed it as adults as well as recommending it for teens, and even that it made them think.

Of course space enthusiasts interested in Martian colonies also like the book. The National Space Society review of the 2006 hardcover edition called it "A must-read for all future space pioneers who wish to persuade their friends to join them in making that future journey between the worlds of the known and the unknown." But it has remained largely invisible to the non-pioneers to whom I believe it would most appeal.

Comments at Amazon, Goodreads, and Facebook show that many readers who did find the book loved it and remember it as one of their favorites. Naturally there are critical comments, too, and where these concern the reader's personal lack of sympathy for the heroine, that's okay. If a character is portrayed as anything but perfect, not everybody will like her (and after all, if she were perfect, the book would be criticized as unrealistic). In this case, some found her particularly unlikable because her attitudes were different from their own and from those most prevalent in today's society.

But though I don't usually comment on negative reviews, there were several criticisms to which I feel compelled to reply. In the first place, many readers said that the heroine doesn't seem like a modern woman and that her outlook is sexist and obsolete. In the 1970 edition, this is certainly true. I wrote the book in the late sixties, and it did indeed reflect the views still common in that era—girls wanted mainly to get married and weren't very ambitious with regard to their careers. A lot of revision was done for the 2006 edition to eliminate dated phrasing and assumptions, as well as to update the description of the Martian landscape and some minor references to pre-computer technology that is now obsolete.

Yet despite the elimination of sexist attitudes, a number of reviewers complained that in the 2006 edition Melinda still doesn't seem like a modern woman, let alone like a woman of the future—and though this too is true, it's not a matter of when the book was written. It is an intentional portrayal of her individual personality. She is shy and dependent (although it's _not_ true as some asserted that she lets her boyfriend control her; on the contrary, her rebellion against his attempt to tell her she can't go to Mars is the deciding factor in her decision to go). If she were typical of her generation she'd be eager for a trip to Mars! Moreover, there would be no plot conflict, no room for the growth and change that's the main point of the story. Apparently some of these readers never finished the book (a few stated that they didn't) because by the end of it, her views have changed. Her basic personality hasn't. She still wants marriage and a home—as most women do today, even when it's not their prime objective. She is still somewhat homesick for Earth, as the average person would be. But she's looking forward, not back, and her career plans have become more ambitious and more important to her.

If I were writing the book today I would not change Melinda's personality. It is, or is supposed to be, more significant than a mere plot device—it's basic to the book's theme. There is symbolism that my readers, even those who praised the book, seem to have missed. (I'm sometimes accused of spelling ideas out too much, but when I don't make them explicit, they don't get across. I guess I don't know how to be successfully subtle.) Melinda initially clings to what previous generations considered normal and natural, what she has always believed she wants, and sees no need to move beyond the confines of her past experience. So too do most people today cling to the idea that confinement to Earth is "natural" and see no necessity for the human race to go beyond the limits of the world where our ancestors evolved. I doubt if any such people grasped this parallel, or even that space supporters who didn't like Melinda did; but it is, in my opinion, quite exact. In both cases the underlying factor is a deep-seated longing for stability and fear of the unknown.

This bring me to the other criticism of the book that I want to comment on. One reviewer said, "The author has a definite bias in favor of space colonization." Well, if this is bias I plead guilty. But "bias" is not the right word. We don't normally call deeply held convictions "bias." We wouldn't say authors of anti-war novels are biased against war, or that advocates of banning industrial pollution are biased in favor of protecting the environment. Open supporters of a cause don't claim to be impartial, and no book other than a nonfiction survey of an issue should be expected to give weight to views unlike its author's. I make no secret of the fact that I believe space colonization is essential to the long-term survival of the human race. I recognize that not all readers share my opinion, and it's their right to disagree with it. But to imply that I ought to present both sides objectively in a novel is to ignore the difference between educational material and literature.

Today, in 2017 when there is more public interest in Mars than in the past and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk is actually planning to send people there, _Journey Between Worlds_ is more relevant than ever. Do I believe Martian colonies will be anything like the one in the story? Of course not—not in this century and perhaps not in the next. Early colonies will be small and the residents will undergo great hardship; by the time larger ones are established, lifestyles even on Earth will be very different from what I have described. But I believe the underlying feelings of my characters are a valid portrayal of how colonists will view their society. Like pioneers of every past era, they will think of their lives as normal, however unnatural their goals may seem to others. They will be ordinary people, doing what humans have always done to build a better future for themselves and those who come after them.

Go to the Table of Contents

Are My Novels Set in a Distinct Fictional Universe?

(2019)

A fictional universe and a series are not the same thing. While many series can be set in the same universe, a mere common factor between series is not enough to create a distinct universe, let alone combine them into a single series on that basis.

## *

I was dismayed recently when I discovered that in ISFDB, Wikipedia and elsewhere, five of my YA novels were being called "The Anthropological Service Universe series." Apart from the fact that this had caused some confusion in regard to the availability of rights to specific titles, by no possible logic could these books be considered a series. The Children of the Star trilogy is completely separate from the two Elana books; it is about different characters on a different world having no connection to any other. Yes, the Anthropological Service appears in its concluding volume (though not its first two). But it also appears in two of my four Flame novels, an entirely independent series for adults. Are all of my novels to be viewed as one series merely because an aspect of my view of the universe is explicitly dealt with in some? Science fiction and fantasy series are generally characterized by being set in distinct fictional universes with unique histories and locales that set them apart. This single factor in my books is surely not enough to establish such a universe.

A fictional universe is normally a setting distinguished from others by features that are not merely unlike the real world, but sufficiently unlike the premises of other fiction—whether the author's own or that of other writers—to be inconsistent with it. Moreover, the author or publisher usually has an exclusive right to use this setting. The Star Trek universe, the Star Wars universe, and the Battlestar Galactica universe have irreconcilable differences, and enough details about them are known for stories set in them to be immediately recognized as taking place in that universe and no other. Readers return to them because of familiarity with those details. Yet though there are FTL starships in all of them, no one would say that this groups them into a single series simply because there is other science fiction in which FTL starships don't exist.

To be sure, FTL starships appear in so many science fiction universes that they are obviously not a distinguishing characteristic. Similarly, the mere inclusion of hostile aliens in an SF story could hardly be called defining, although aliens with a specific form and history would be. Advanced aliens with the attitude toward younger species exemplified by my Anthropological Service are not so common. Why, then, does their presence not constitute a distinct universe? Because the concept underlying them is too broad for it to do so. They are a feature not merely of my stories but of my actual beliefs about advanced aliens.

Just as space travel is a fundamental premise of my outlook toward the real universe, the policies of advanced aliens as I have described them are fundamental. In a story I have to depict such aliens in a specific way, just as I have to depict future humans--the details in both cases are imaginary. To make these imaginary details about the aliens different in different books would look like repetition of the idea out of laziness rather than conviction. But the need to describe them does not mean that the universe in which they live is a separate one, any more than the fact that in most of my books humans have latent psi powers does. Neither of these premises sets them apart from whatever else, fiction or nonfiction, that I or others with similar views might write about the future. I certainly don't have any exclusive claim to these ideas.

I do not create fictional universes. I write about only one universe--ours, as I envision it is or will someday become. The details are of course fictional, but there are no inconsistencies between my novels, though my three separate series are about different imaginary worlds. The Flame novels deal with future Earth and its colonies; this does not conflict with the premise of the Children of the Star trilogy that the world of the characters' ancestors had been destroyed by a nova (a point missed by readers who overlooked the clear indications that those ancestors didn't come from Earth's solar system). Nor does it conflict with the deliberate ambiguity of Elana's origin in _Enchantress from the Stars._ She could be either a visitor to Earth in medieval times or a descendent of Terrans in the distant future, or for that matter, someone with no connection to Earth at all. The universe encompasses vast distances in space and time, and I don't believe the Service is confined to any particular region of it.

My novel _Journey Between Worlds_ is a special case; it is not now inconsistent with anything else I have written, but because it is a relatively near-term story it will become inconsistent with reality as soon as a major colony on Mars is established (not a mere base, as the book gives no details about how its Martian colony was founded). Does the Anthropological Service exist in the same universe as _Journey Between Worlds_? Certainly--there is nothing said anywhere to suggest that it doesn't. In my opinion it exists in our own universe, which is why reports of contact with UFOs aren't true and why SETI will produce no results. It is undoubtedly very different from the way I've portrayed it and far beyond our present ability to comprehend, but some conceptually equivalent policy on part of mature species in relation to younger ones is a necessity if the younger ones are presumed to evolve.

There is just one case in my books where for literary reasons I departed from a consistent expression of my beliefs about the real universe. The invaders in _Enchantress from the Stars_ are an anachronism. They are deliberately patterned after modern myths about space invaders, just as the people of Andrecia are patterned after traditional myths about dragon-slayers; one is no less mythological than the other. In reality, no species advanced enough to have developed interstellar travel would invade an inhabited world. Even now, no one in a position to form space policy would do such a thing, and hundreds of years from now the very idea would be no more tenable than that of practicing human sacrifice. Humans, of whatever species, progress as they evolve. People of the 22nd century will not behave like those of the 19th. Normally I dislike science fiction that ignores this fact, but _Enchantress,_ being mythological in form, does not pretend to be realistic.

This alone sets it apart from my other books in which the Anthropological Service appears and precludes viewing it as part of a series, (Except in connection with _The Far Side of Evil,_ which is not mythological, is for a different audience, and should never have had the same heroine--using her in it was a mistake I have always regretted. The two can be read in either order by teens and I try to promote them as stand-alone books.) In any case, the rest of them are no more a single series than any other collection of diverse science novels that's not so labeled by its author.

Go to the Table of Contents

Why My Flame Novels Aren't Suitable for Kids

(2017)

_Many adult readers of my Young Adult novels are unaware that I have written four novels for adults, since these are print-on-demand books that are in few if any libraries and are most accessible in their much-less-expensive ebook editions. They include the Hidden Flame duology (_ Stewards of the Flame _and_ Promise of the Flame _) and the Rising Flame duology (_ Defender of the Flame _and_ Herald of the Flame _). They are science fiction dealing with many of the same themes as my YA novels and are in some ways closely tied, so it might be thought that they could be given to advanced readers among kids who like my others. This essay explains why they shouldn't be._

## *

Because I'm known as a Young Adult author, I realized when I published my first adult novel _Stewards of the Flame_ that some people might erroneously assume that it was suitable for teens. After all, YA books are more mature than they used to be. I've been saying for years that _Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains_ and _The Doors of the Univers_ e—and for that matter, _The Far Side of Evil_ —aren't of interest to as young children as are often encouraged to read them; most kids below high school age are confused or bored by them, and the omnibus _Children of the Star_ was issued as adult SF. Yet parents and librarians keep suggesting them to children and very exceptional ones do enjoy them. There is nothing in them that might be considered objectionable. And so I've taken care to make plain in announcements that the situation with the two Flame duologies is different.

In the first place, it's unlikely that even high school age readers would be interested in _Stewards of the Flame_ , as there are no young people in it—the protagonist and all the main characters are in their forties or older. And they are concerned, among other things, with adult problems such as death in old age. Older teens who read other adult science fiction might like the three later books, especially _Defender of the Flame_ , whose hero is in his twenties at its beginning; and if they want to read them, that's all right. But I can't say so in publicity, because my experience has been that if I tell people that a book is appropriate for older teens, they will offer it to middle-school kids anyway. And I do not believe these novels should be given to children of that age, however advanced their reading ability.

For one thing, they contain some sex and profanity, mild by the standards of adult fiction but more than is expected from me on the basis of my YA novels. One adult reader told me he was surprised to find sex in _Stewards_ , and then realized he shouldn't have been; but this confirms my suspicion that others, including librarians, might assume that anything by the author of _Enchantress from the Stars_ will be okay for all ages. The sex scenes in the Flame novels are brief and not very explicit; the issue isn't so much that some parents might object to them as that kids might be misled by the view of sex they express. I feel that the discussions in all four books about how, in my imagined future, sex enhances telepathic sensitivity and vice versa would confuse those too young to know much about the reality of ordinary sex today. I believe that unconscious telepathy does indeed enhance it and that this makes the difference between real love and a mere union of bodies, but I certainly wouldn't want to encourage teens to experiment.

Incidentally, I've found that I need to be careful about calling these books "adult novels" in contexts not clearly comparing them with YA novels. Some software has rejected my descriptions because it interpreted "adult" as "X-rated." (This why in some places you may see them called "novels for grown-ups.") And I've wondered if perhaps some of the many adult admirers of my YA novels who haven't read any of my others misinterpreted their descriptions in the same way. If so, rest assured that there's nothing in them that an adult would find too graphic.

A further issue with sex in _Promise of the Flame_ is that it advocates sex among thirteen-year-olds, albeit in a society where population increase is vital to a colony's survival and the children are emotionally more mature than in ours because of their telepathic sensitivity and the nature of their rearing. Moreover, the plot resolution hinges on the pregnancy of a fourteen-year-old girl. There is also an incident involving the unavoidable execution of a thirteen-year-old boy who killed a younger child. I have seen reviews stating that this book should not have been issued as YA, when I have done everything within my power to publicize the fact that it was not. I have contacted two libraries among the very few that have it, telling them to take it out of the YA collection where their catalogs said it was shelved. What more can I do?

The final and perhaps most significant reason I feel _Stewards of the Flame_ is unsuitable for children is that it's strongly critical of today's medical dogma and advocates ignoring government health advice, including much that is taught in today's schools. And it presents medical care as unpleasant and even frightening. To be sure, it deals with a future society, and I hope makes plain to adults that today it would not be possible to reject orthodox medical care to the extent the characters do, since we lack the means to implement their alternative. But young readers might not make the distinction. To them the story would say "Avoid doctors, if necessary by hiding your symptoms." And a lot of parents and schools would object if they thought a noted YA author was trying to undermine the official view on this subject in the minds of kids. I don't want to damage my reputation in the YA field by upsetting parents or teachers, and I don't want to mislead kids by presenting them with material that they haven't the maturity to interpret.

There are no issues in the second duology, which includes _Defender of the Flame_ and _Herald of the Flame_ , other than their portrayal of the relation between sex and telepathy. If high school age teens want to read them, that's fine—but I think it's important to make clear that librarians shouldn't order even these two for the YA collection. Also, if I didn't emphasize that they are not YA novels, people who've seen my name mentioned as a Young Adult author might erroneously assume that they're for kids and therefore not of interest to adults

The difficulty that arises when writing for separate audiences is a common problem for authors; some even write under different pen names for readers of different genres, often because publishers demand it for marketing reasons. In some ways I wish I had done that. Yet many well-known authors have written both adult novels and children's books under their own names. Perhaps theirs were more clearly distinguishable from each other than mine—mine are not really "children's books," after all, despite having been issued by that department of their original publishers. Even _Enchantress from the Stars_ was intended for teens, and happy though I am that it became a Newbery Honor Book, it's frustrating to have it given so often to kids as young as the fifth grade, who are not old enough to understand much of what it's about. The others are enjoyed mainly by high school age readers and adults, who naturally think whatever else I write is going to be comparable. So I do see a need to clarify the reasons why they're not.

Go to the Table of Contents

The Curse of Categorization

(2010, 2011)

My greatest handicap in finding readers for my work is that it generally appeals more to those who don't usually read science fiction than to fans of that genre. The following two short essays are samples of what I've written in protest against the restrictive categorization that prevails in the world of publishing, bookselling, and reviewing.

## *

The Trouble with Genre Labeling

(Published online in Night Owl Reviews, February 2010)

I have always been frustrated by the labeling of novels by genre. I don't mean "genre" in the sense of attempts to distinguish science fiction from fantasy, or either of them from horror. I'm referring to the unbridgeable division between all three and mainstream fiction. In many respects this is disastrous in terms of getting fiction into the hands of the readers who would most enjoy it.

Think about it. Are historical novels arbitrarily separated from the mainstream in such a way? I've had people tell me that yes, historical fiction is a genre; but from the editorial and marketing standpoint it is not. Bookstores and websites rarely have separate sections labeled "Historical Fiction," set apart where general readers never browse. Even more significantly, historical fiction is not issued by separate editorial departments—or by specialized publishers—as science fiction is. Yet just as portrayal of the past is of interest to a wide variety of readers, so is speculation about the future. At least in principle it is, provided it's written in such as way as to be intelligible to the average educated person.

I'm not saying there isn't a place for science fiction that's directed to a more specialized audience—of course there is. I was once told that I would have to slant my work toward people who have read at least five hundred science fiction novels previously in order to succeed in the field, and I'm sure that's true. The needs of people who have read five hundred science fiction novels are obviously different from those of readers who read only an occasional one. What I object to is the rule whereby any story set on another planet is automatically classed as science fiction and judged by the standards of specialists, regardless of its potential appeal to the general public. This prevents books not written specifically for fans of the genre from being widely read, and prevents others from being published at all. It also prevents the majority of readers from encountering any fiction about the future apart from Star Trek.

For a writer who wants to reach the people who aren't already thinking about the future, there is no satisfactory solution to this problem. What I initially chose to do was write Young Adult novels, a field within which genres are not separated—at least for editing and marketing they are not, although unfortunately the separation often occurs on library shelves. (For example, the latest edition of my YA novel _Journey Between Worlds_ , which is a romance for teens about the colonization of Mars, got enthusiastic reviews at romance websites, but libraries labeled it science fiction and so the girls most apt to like it didn't find it.) My novel _Enchantress from the Stars_ became a Newbery Honor Book, has won others awards, and is quite well known; but it's often viewed as fantasy—although there's no fantasy in it apart from the style in which some of it's told—and so its speculation about relationships between extraterrestrial cultures is not taken seriously. Moreover, unlike most other YA science fiction successful in hardcover, none of mine was picked up for mass-market paperback reprint; it was not "far-out" enough to please the majority of science fiction fans. This was intentional. It was meant to interest people who don't read other science fiction, many of whom told me that to their surprise, they liked mine. It was not meant to "turn kids on to SF" with the expectation that they would graduate to more esoteric material, as some commentators assumed.

The time came when I got tired of oversimplifying my ideas to the extent of making them understandable to young teens (though I never fully succeeded in that respect, and many adults enjoy my YA books). But for a novel about the future on another world to be published in the traditional way as adult SF, it must by definition fit the requirements of the specialized science fiction publishers. It must either be action/adventure fiction, or be far enough from reality in terms of the culture and concepts portrayed to strike people with extensive science fiction background as innovative. And this is where I part company with everybody else who writes about the future. I'm not willing to limit my audience in that way—though by refusing to do so, I unavoidably limit it by market considerations.

My only recourse was to publish _Stewards of the Flame_ and its sequel _Promise of the Flame_ myself. The prejudice against self-published novels, even when written by authors who have formerly been published traditionally, is a topic I won't deal with here—I was aware of it, of course, but I am not young and I wanted these books to be read within my lifetime; waiting for the market to change was not an option for me. I happen to have desktop publishing skills and to have worked as a professional copyeditor, so I personally produced the files from which the books were printed. But has _Stewards of the Flame_ reached the people I hoped to reach? No, because despite the timely issue it deals with, it's categorized as science fiction and its reviews appear under that heading—and thus other readers don't know it exists.

If it hadn't gotten good reviews, I wouldn't complain about its small audience. The frustrating thing is that _Stewards of the Flame_ has received excellent reviews, albeit mainly online because most print media won't review self-published books. On the whole, it gets better reviews from the non-specialists it was meant for than from science fiction fans, although it's had some favorable ones from SF reviewers, too. Yet a review does little to increase awareness of a book if it's posted where few members of the intended audience will see it. This is why genre labeling is so troublesome—not only to cross-genre authors, but to readers who fail to discover some of the books they would enjoy.

## *

Not All Stories About the Future Should Be Called Science Fiction

(Introduction to the 2011 ebook edition of Anywhere, Anywhen)

The anthology _Anywhere, Anywhen_ (which I edited) is a book for teens about the future—or at least, about things that _might_ happen in the future. Usually, all such stories are called "science fiction." But that is often a misleading label, not only because some science fiction has nothing about science in it, but because different readers have different ideas of what science fiction is. Even experts in the field of SF do not agree in their definitions of it. I myself would prefer not to categorize the book as "science fiction." I feel that to do so gives the impression that it is a book meant for a special group of readers with special background, when actually it is intended for readers who usually avoid that genre.

Personally, I do not believe that the future is something that should be set apart and mentioned only in literature of one particular type, directed to one specific audience. To me, past, present and future are all parts of an unbroken thread, the thread of human experience. Almost everybody is interested in the future. All of the authors represented in the book are interested in it, although most of them had not happened to write about it before. When I asked them to contribute, I did not ask them to adopt the traditions of the SF genre; instead, I asked for stories that readers of their previously published fiction would enjoy.

I do not mean to imply that I don't admire good science fiction or that I question its literary value. But tastes differ, and books published in that genre simply do not appeal to everybody, because to please that audience they must take into account what its fans have read before, as well as their interest in ideas far removed from everyday life. There are many other people with the opposite preference—and those people don't even look at books on the "science fiction" shelves of libraries or bookstores.

However, the original publisher of the book, under the theory that "science fiction sells," did call it science fiction and gave it a jacket designed to attract SF fans, thereby ensuring that it would fall into the hands of the readers least apt to enjoy it and be passed over by those for whom it was meant. It was generally given to science fiction specialists for review, and not surprisingly, most of them didn't like it. A major journal remarked on "overused themes" without considering that these themes have not been overused—or in most cases used at all—in fiction for the intended audience. The person who said he could think of better anthologies to "turn kids on to SF" was right, but that was never the aim of this one. It is not an "introduction" to more sophisticated material; it's supposed to stand on its own.

Librarians not familiar with science fiction praised the book, and each of the stories—they are all quite different from each other—was singled out as the favorite of different reviewers. Unfortunately, since these were internal reviews from separate schools and library systems, they were not seen elsewhere and couldn't be quoted in blurbs. As a result, _Anywhere, Anywhen_ was the only book of mine that didn't earn its initial advance. I hoped that the ebook edition would be found by the sort of readers that the authors had in mind; but it was by necessity categorized in online catalogs and since there is no suitable category available, that didn't happen.

In one sense the stories included in the book are about future or imaginary worlds, yet in another sense, no story is really about the world in which its action takes place. Authors write not about worlds, but about people. The people in a story are more important than where—or when—they live. Of course, the ways people live in the future will not be like the ways they live now, and the differences will be greater than the obvious ones like development of interplanetary travel and new inventions. If authors could actually foresee the future, they would see much that would seem strange. Science fiction is made to seem as strange as possible for that reason; some readers feel that to show tomorrow's ways as similar to today's is unrealistic. But for many others, strangeness serves to separate SF from real life. I believe that stories for the mainstream readers of today should seem "real" today, even when they are about people of tomorrow. Strange accounts of strange, imaginary ways are not pictures of real life, alter all. Differences between present and future imagined merely for the sake of strangeness are no closer to tomorrow's reality than similarities that aren't apt to exist.

Furthermore, some similarities _will_ exist. Despite the passage of time, certain things never change. Customs vary from place to place and from era to era, yet human feelings stay the same. The importance of human beings remains the same, even on different worlds, and even, perhaps, among human races different from the human race of planet Earth.

The stories in Anywhere, Anywhen are not meant to be "true" in the sense of being predictions. Nevertheless, I think that they do have truth in them. No author can predict what the future is going to bring. Realizing that, we who contributed to the book chose not to speculate too much about the details of what we don't know, and to focus instead on what we do know, what we believe has lasting significance: the unchanging truths about how people feel and what they value. Truth of this kind applies, and will always apply, anywhere and anywhen.

Go to the Table of Contents

What It Takes to Write a Novel

(2003)

_This essay was an invited contribution to_ On Writing III, _published by the online magazine_ Critique, _which appeared in 2003 during the long period between my YA and adult novels. It was originally untitled._

## *

It's commonly believed that once a person has written a successful novel—or perhaps several novels—then he or she "is" a writer, in the same sense that someone who has passed the bar exam is a lawyer, and that failure to produce more books is a sign of something having gone wrong. The writing of fiction is not that kind of occupation. Producing a novel demands more than the ability to write well; more than the understanding of human nature needed to portray believable characters; more than the compelling desire to express a view of life through the experiences of those characters. It requires having a story to tell. Theme alone does not constitute story, or even the material from which to construct a story; and while construction techniques can be learned, no amount of learning, practice, or effort can lead to creation of a plot where no underlying story exists. The seminal idea of a story (though not, of course, the detail) comes unsummoned into an author's mind if it comes at all. Writing may be one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration, as the saying goes—but that one percent is indispensable.

Most authors of fiction are natural storytellers. They have no occasion to consider this issue, since plenty of story material emerges into their minds and they have only to learn what to do with it. I was never so blessed. It's not a matter of "writer's block"—writer's block is a situation in which someone who normally has ideas for stories is unable to think of a good one, or has trouble putting it into words. The creation of stories isn't normal for me; I didn't make up any as a child, and everyone who knew me was astonished when in my thirties, after years of working as a computer programmer, I began to write novels. The mystery is not why I haven't been able to do so lately, but why I was able to during the short period of time when the cores of those novels were conceived.

People often say—mostly in connection with _Enchantress from the Stars_ —that I must be a very creative person. I'm not, really. Basically I'm an exceptionally analytical person, which is the opposite. Unlike most authors, I have few so-called "right brain" talents. Putting thoughts into words is a "left brain" activity, for which I have natural aptitude. So is determining the structure of a novel and planning the features of its setting. And the view of humankind's future that impels me to write comes not from any imaginative faculty, but from conviction and rational speculation. Thus it didn't require creativity for me to write, given story situations through which to transform my thoughts on issues into fiction. Issues aren't enough to make a novel; in a novel, something central has to happen. In one year, out of the blue so to speak, the inspirations for those key happenings came to me—I remember the actual days on which it occurred, long before the books were written—but the fact that I got several such ideas nearly fifty years ago does not magically endow me with the power to summon more.

To be sure, I'm restricted in the kinds of happenings I personally can make into stories. For instance, I cannot write action fiction—fights, battles, escapes, etc.—because I don't envision such action well enough to describe it. One can't put into words what isn't vividly real in one's mind. It might be thought that the adage "write about what you know" doesn't apply to authors of science fiction, but the essence of it holds true: a writer must "know" inwardly the details of what's going on, whether or not this knowledge is based on personal experience. I can write about characters' reactions to all sort of events, but there are inherent limits on the events in which I can give them active roles. Another adage for authors is that one must write the kinds of stories one enjoys reading, that to do otherwise is to ensure failure; and I've never been fond of action stories even in the SF and fantasy genres. Perhaps if I were able to write them, I wouldn't be dependent on inner flashes lighting the way toward drama of a less obvious kind—but then I might never have written the introspective novels that are my natural forte.

All this has been a roundabout approach to the question every writer hears, and most hate: "How do you get your ideas?" Some consider it a foolish question—everybody has ideas, they feel, and the only difference between a writer and other people is that the writer has a gift for expressing them and has mastered the craft of doing so in the form of fiction. This assumption merely avoids the question. Most people don't have ideas with potential to blossom into stories; that is why they ask. And the answer is that not only do I not know where I got mine, I suspect that no writer knows—except in the sense of awareness that they arise from the unconscious mind. For some, this is so frequent an occurrence that it's perceived to be an ordinary aspect of living and thinking. For others, like me, it is rare. And I don't think this is a failing on my part, any more than I consider it a failing for creatively-gifted authors to have less aptitude for computer work than I.

Nevertheless, it has been deeply frustrating to me, both because I hate disappointing readers who urge me to write more novels—and who, ironically, assume that I could do so if only I wanted to—and because I long to be writing. I am enlivened by the process of writing fiction; as with more prolific authors, it fulfills an inner need. When I do have a story to tell, I cannot pull myself away from it for even a few hours at a time. Moreover, I have many thoughts about the future I want desperately to express in story form. It's not lack of desire that has kept me from it, though I long ago learned that it's counterproductive to go on beating against my inborn barrier between the analytical and creative modes of thought.

Will I ever get another story idea? Quite possibly—since I don't know why it happened before, I still hope that it will someday happen again. I haven't "lost" any creativity; one can't lose what was never within one's power to call upon at will. If the essential spark of a story comes to me, a book will soon follow; the skills needed to develop and convey ideas, I still possess.

Unwelcome news though it may be to those who would like to write, but have not done so; who have studied techniques yet are searching in vain for the secret of how to come up with a novel, I must say: When you have a story to tell, you will know.

## *

POSTSCRIPT

Several years after the online publication of this essay, it happened to me again, after I had given up all hope of ever getting another story idea. I was cleaning up my hard disk and came across a draft of the opening chapters of a novel I had tried to write many years before, but had abandoned because it had no action, no key events, and was not heading toward any sort of conclusion. I had several themes I wanted to deal with in fiction and had designed the dystopian society about which I wanted to write; I had even created the main characters. But I'd come up with no _story_ , so after much struggle I had put it aside. Then, seeing the draft after passage of time, it suddenly struck me what would happen at the end, and what would be needed to lead up to that. After that I was able to write it in just a few months of what time I could spare from paid work. It became my adult novel _Stewards of the Flame_ , and the climactic event for the sequel _Promise of the Flame_ came to me soon afterward.

Only a few years later, to my great surprise, it happened yet another time—I suddenly got the idea for the crucial events for a related novel, _Defender of the Flame,_ and wrote it much more quickly than my others. I did not expect it to have a sequel; when it was published I considered it complete in itself and called the three books a trilogy. But again to my own astonishment, one night the culmination of the hero's life occurred to me, and I went on to write _Herald of the Flame._

I don't know if another story will ever rise from my unconscious mind. I do know that I cannot force it, any more than I could force myself to come up with action for a novel during all the past years I tried. I can only be thankful that it did happen, unexpectedly, during several rare periods of my life.

Go to the Table of Contents

My Autobiography from Contemporary Authors

(1988, 2001)

_This autobiography was published, with some pictures, in_ Contemporary Authors, _Volume 195. Copyright 1988, 2001 by Gale Group, Inc. The first part of it was originally published in_ Something About the Author, _Volume 5, 1988. It is also online at my website._

## *

As far back as I can remember I felt different from people around me. Perhaps that was one reason I chose to write about other worlds. It was not the main one—mainly I write about them because I believe the humanization of space is vitally important to the future of our species. But before talking about my books, I should tell something about my life.

I was born and grew up in Los Angeles, California, which is a place I never have liked and do not recall with nostalgia. My father, born in 1881, came to America from Sweden as a small child, but he had forgotten his Swedish heritage at the time I knew him and had no living relatives except a grown son and granddaughter from a previous marriage. He was a real estate salesman, only occasionally successful. My mother came from New England, and my grandmother, her mother, lived with us during most of my youth. I had no brothers or sisters other than my half brother, whom I seldom saw and thought of as an uncle. A second cousin, ten years older than I, was the one relative outside my immediate family that I knew well.

On my tenth birthday, 1943

I never had anything in common with other children and didn't enjoy playing with them. My mother tells me I was a happy child so I must have seemed outwardly content, but I don't remember being happy often. On the other hand, I was rarely especially unhappy, either. I simply waited, in a sort of resigned way, to grow up, assuming that in the adult world life would really begin. It didn't turn out like that, of course, but I have done quite a few interesting things as an adult, whereas not much of interest happened during my school years.

I was bored by school. What I learned, I learned at home from my mother and from reading; school was mainly hours to live through, punctuated by moments of fierce anger at teachers who wanted me to participate in active games not only during Phys Ed periods, which I despised, but during recess. This I considered (and still consider, despite today's faddish idolization of "fitness") an intolerable injustice—I can remember hiding in the girls' room to get out of it. At that time it was thought very important to keep children who were poor readers and yet manually skilled from feeling inferior. The reverse, alas, was not true. I got no recognition for superior reading and writing ability, but all too much for my deficiency of physical coordination (I was the only child in kindergarten who couldn't skip) and my total lack of interest in physical activities, which arose in part from an inborn lack of energy that made all such activities exhausting for me. I did not feel inferior on this account, but I was given the impression that I ought to, and perhaps as a result learned very early to ignore the opinions of so-called authorities in other areas, too. I was never openly rebellious except in refusing to play ball games and to socialize with my peers; certainly I never told teachers or classmates that my views on most subjects didn't match those of society. But my inner convictions were always my own.

Outside school I had little companionship apart from that of my mother, who was, and remains, the chief personal influence on my life. Our tastes were similar, though as I grew up my specific interests became very different from hers. Mother, who had been an English teacher and a little theater director, fostered my innate enthusiasm for reading, writing, and the world of ideas. Her marriage was an unhappy one, for my father liked none of these things (I cannot remember his ever opening a book or magazine) and she thus turned to me, much as I turned to her because I found no friends of my own age with compatible interests. Neither of us had any domestic inclinations; Mother kept house only because at the time she had no alternative. Had she told me when I was small that she disliked it, I would have helped more with the housework, but she made the mistake trying to persuade me to learn such skills for my own future good, and I reacted against that right from the beginning. I had no desire to marry, raise children, or be a homemaker, though in those days it was assumed that a girl "naturally" would—and unlike my mother, I didn't believe one should do things merely because they were expected. When I was older I envisioned someday marrying for love, but the sad example of my parents' marriage had put me on guard against falling in love with anyone who did not share my intellectual interests and who had none of his own that I could admire. This, I believe, was fortunate, since I might otherwise have plunged rashly into a conventional life for which I was not at all suited.

The highlights of my younger years were our short summer vacations at Bass Lake, north of Los Angeles in the Sierra Nevada. We went there for the first time when I was ten, and ever since I've dated the beginning of my life from that trip; no earlier memory has any meaning for me. When I saw Bass Lake, I realized what was missing in Southern California, which I'd hitherto taken for granted. At Bass Lake trees cloaked the mountains and shoreline—forest trees, in this case Ponderosa pines, very unlike the cultivated trees found in Los Angeles. There was green forest undergrowth and clear, fresh air. And of course, there was the water. We rented a boat that first year; later on my father bought one, the only thing he ever did that I found enjoyable. I counted the days between our trips to Bass Lake, and during my teen years I was convinced that nothing could make me happier than to live there permanently. I even hoped I might someday get a job teaching the one-room school there.

With my parents and cousin at Bass Lake, 1946

I planned from earliest childhood to be a teacher. Even when I was so young as to enjoy dolls, I always imagined myself as "teacher" rather than "mother," and by the time I was eleven I was running a Saturday morning "nursery school" for neighborhood children. During my early teens I organized summer arts and craft classes through which I earned some spending money. What I really enjoyed was planning and being in charge, not the actual contact with children; but I was too young to realize that. Anyway, I preferred it to social contact with my agemates, of which I had little because I could not share the interests of other teens.

If I were a teenager today, it would be different. Today many teenagers are interested in computers, and I often think of what a social life I'd have had if I had grown up in such an era. When I phone electronic bulletin boards used largely by teens, I am reminded that had these existed during my own youth I would not have been isolated and lonely. In addition to having a natural bent for programming, I communicate better via a keyboard than in person, and would have done so even in adolescence. At that time it was assumed, even by me, that I could not talk because I was shy; but now I know that it was the other way around. I was shy because I could not talk easily, and I could not do so because I need visual feedback rather than audible feedback when expressing my ideas. I am a natural writer, and today natural writers are coming into their own socially via electronic mail and interactive computer conferencing. But of course, when I was in my teens, no one had heard of computers at all, let alone home computers.

So high school, like the earlier period, was merely a time of waiting for me. I kept busy with my own pursuits but had as little to do with school as possible. I didn't get particularly high grades because the classes didn't seem worth bothering with, and also because teachers often marked down students who didn't talk effectively, however well they did on written work. Still I met the requirements for graduation easily enough, and in fact met them in time to graduate a semester ahead of schedule—but the counselor wouldn't let me do it because I was "too young" and not "socially mature," by which she meant she thought I ought to participate in class activities. As usual, I was silently resentful, and not as assertive in fighting that decision as I now feel I should have been. I was indeed young, barely sixteen, but ironically most of my few friends happened to be in the class ahead. They graduated, while I was forced to remain without any classes of substance left to take (I hadn't been permitted to enroll in physics because I didn't plan a science major in college). I repeated Library Practice, which I enjoyed, and signed up for the class that produced the yearbook, ending up as Assistant Editor; I suppose this looked good on my record but it did not really involve much editing work.

With my grandmother, 1948

The one school incident with lasting influence on my life happened when I was twelve, in a ninth-grade science class. It was there that I first heard about space. We were studying astronomy, which for a while captured my imagination; but more significantly, one day the teacher read aloud a short description of what it might be like to travel in space, and for some reason it excited me in a way nothing else ever had. I had not read any science fiction, and had never talked to anyone who knew of it; and of course this was in 1946, before space travel was widely discussed. Yet I went home that day and began drawing pictures of rockets on the way to Mars. A friend happened to be with me; I said to her—on the basis of no information or reading whatsoever—that I was willing to bet a spaceship would reach the moon within twenty-five years. As it turned out, I was just two years off, on the conservative side, in my wild estimate. I will never know what prompted it.

From then on I read whatever I could find about space, though I did not care for much of the science fiction I encountered. I was interested in what space travel and colonization of other planets might actually be like, not in wild adventure tales or stories designed to be as exotic and far-removed from real life as possible—and for this reason, I still don't consider myself a "science fiction fan." I honestly don't know why space fascinated me in those early years. It was before I had developed the convictions about its importance that have been so central to me since, and though it may seem as if, being a social misfit, I might understandably have daydreamed about some better world, that was not what happened. I didn't imagine alien societies. I simply thought about man's coming exploration of nearby planets. It never occurred to me to doubt that space travel would come.

## *

The year I was sixteen, my life changed radically. My parents finally separated, and after I graduated from high school our house was sold; I moved with my mother and grandmother into an apartment while waiting for college to start in the fall. All these events were welcome. I had everything I thought I wanted—I had been accepted by Pomona College in Claremont, California, which I'd long planned to attend, deliberately avoiding the large universities to which other members of my class applied. I hated big cities, and Pomona seemed ideal. When I got there, however, I met exactly the same problems I'd had in high school: classes that were uninspiring and no social life of a kind that appealed to me. Furthermore, I found the company of dorm residents less congenial than that of my mother and the lack of privacy burdensome. I don't know what would have happened if I'd stayed. A further change, however, drove any thought of staying from my mind. My mother decided to get a master's degree in drama at the University of Oregon in Eugene. We went for a preliminary visit there during Christmas vacation, and after one look at Oregon I knew that under no circumstances would I be willing to be left behind in Southern California.

Age sixteen, at Lake Tahoe, 1950

It seems strange to me now that I did not immediately enroll in the University of Oregon myself; but we still felt—probably because Mother was a Wellesley graduate—that a small private college would have advantages, and though we didn't have much money, my grandmother had planned to pay my tuition. So I transferred to Reed College in Portland for the spring semester of my freshman year. When I didn't fit in there, either, we belatedly realized that for both financial and personal reasons I would be better off in Eugene. My sophomore year, I did attend the U of O. We lived in a small old-fashioned rented house on a tree-lined street near the campus; I still think of it with longing, though we have had many nicer homes since. It was different from anything I'd known in California, and in my eyes much to be preferred. I loved Oregon; I loved the tall firs and the greenness and the change of seasons, and even the steady soft rain. Then too, I was seventeen, and had left childhood and its scenes behind without yet having met any disillusionments of maturity.

This interlude couldn't last. Mother's degree program took only a year and a half, and there was nothing for her to do in Eugene afterwards. I didn't want to live in a dormitory despite my liking for the campus—which had turned out to be the best thing about the U of O from my standpoint. Then too, at that time no elementary teaching certificate was offered there, and I still believed I wanted to teach; so it was necessary to transfer again for my junior and senior years in any case. Mother planned to return to Los Angeles with my grandmother (who remained with us through all our moves until she died in 1965 at the age of 101). I was unwilling to go there, so I chose the nearby University of California at Santa Barbara, in part because it was the only place I could get a B.A. without foreign language courses, and whereas I'd been good at reading and writing languages in high school, my strongly visual mode of expression made me incapable of learning to speak them.

When at the beginning of my junior year we got back from a summer in the East, my father having died in the meantime, Mother decided to come to Santa Barbara too and start a theater group for children. We lived there two years. But after all my transfers I needed longer than that to get the required credits for a degree and teaching certificate. Mother was offered a directing job at the Portland Civic Theater—which, incidentally, she had directed long before in 1927–29—and I could not escape staying behind to finish up. I roomed off-campus, counting the days till I'd be in Oregon again. Fortunately I was able to visit during the winter to interview for teaching jobs, and managed to obtain one in the Portland area for the following fall.

On canoe trip, Coeur d'Alene Lake, 1954

All this time, I had remained firm in my conviction that teaching was the career I wanted, perhaps because I could think of no other, and also because I wanted the summers free for camp work. Summers had been the high spot of my college years, just as Bass Lake had highlighted the earlier era; I had worked as a camp counselor my first year in Oregon, and later in New York State, California, and best of all at Camp Sweyolakan on Coeur d'Alene Lake in Idaho, where I was a Unit Director during the summers of 1954 and 1955. Aside from its beauty, Sweyolakan was particularly enjoyable because I had opportunity to go on canoe trips—though my lack of physical energy kept me from doing much hiking at any of the camps and I spent my time teaching handcrafts and planning campfire programs, I found that paddling was far less tiring for me than walking. I will always cherish the memory of those trips on the water. Also, I liked organizing camp life, and dreamed of someday directing a camp of my own. The fact that being with children was becoming more and more nerve-wearing somehow escaped my attention.

When I found myself at last a fourth-grade teacher in a Portland suburb, however, my temperamental unfitness for the job became all too apparent. It was a disaster. I could tutor the children effectively on an individual basis, but I could not cope with them as a group, nor could I handle classroom discipline. As a matter of fact, I was asked to resign after the first year; but nothing could have induced me to continue in any case. I discovered that I really didn't like young children, even apart from the fact that I violently disagreed with the theories of education and psychology then in vogue: a fact that had made my college training merely something to be endured for the sake of the required certificate.

So I didn't know what to do. We had acquired a lovely old house on a hilltop in Portland where I was determined to remain, yet I had to earn a living, and I was not qualified for any job outside the field of education. I knew I could never teach at the high school or college level because I could not express ideas effectively aloud, and anyway I didn't want to specialize in a particular subject. I would have liked to be a librarian, but that would have meant two more years of expensive college training outside the state of Oregon, which did not offer a librarianship program. I couldn't do clerical work since my poor physical coordination made it impossible for me to type by the touch system (I still, after many years as a writer, use only two fingers on each hand in typing, which does not bother me but means I can't attain a typist's speed). By default, therefore—after a summer as Resident Camp Director at a Camp Fire Girls camp nearby—I began to work toward a Master of Education degree through night courses available in Portland, thinking this would enable me to become a school counselor.

Strangely, the year I spent on that graduate work proved one of the most fruitful of my life. The courses, which demanded little study, were even less inspiring than undergraduate Education courses; but they left me with a great many free hours at home, and for the first time I devoted deep thought to my ideas about space. Furthermore, I began to write them down. Unlike most authors, I had never written stories during my youth, other than a few unpublishable pieces of children's fiction about such things as Bass Lake and camp life. My creative ideas were abstract intellectual ones, not incidents for stories. It had never occurred to me to become a writer because I knew people didn't want to read philosophical tracts. But that one year, for reasons I still haven't been able to decipher, I did get ideas for stories, albeit stories of a quite offbeat sort that were not then marketable. Partial drafts of those that ultimately became my novels were all written then—and I haven't had an idea for a real story since! I only hope it will someday happen again.

Also during that year, I developed my beliefs about the importance of space to human survival; and that, of course, is something I've had a great many more ideas about since. I am by nature more of an analytical person than a storyteller. I can write endlessly about speculations concerning not only space but other subjects; but to express these in story form requires more than writing skill. It demands ideas not just about truths but about happenings. It demands not merely portrayal of characters, but the ability to visualize action in which those characters are involved—and that type of creativeness is not something that can be learned. Most writers have plenty of it; it's a faculty they start out with and must learn to channel. I, as in so many areas of life, am the opposite of most others; the analytical skills, those taught in writing courses, came naturally to me, but the story-creation faculty has arisen in me rarely.

I did try to put some of my ideas into short-story form that year of 1956–57, but they were not suitable for short stories and were of course rejected by the magazines to which I sent them. I never thought of making novels of them then. At that time such novels would not have been publishable; space was not yet a topic of general interest.

With our cat Butterscotch, 1956

Among these stories was the one that later became _The Far Side of Evil,_ based on the concept of the Critical Stage about which I was (and still am) entirely serious. Young people today may believe that worry about nuclear war is new, but it isn't—in 1956 it was a major concern. I thought to myself then, and attempted to say in the story, that planet Earth was indeed in a Critical Stage, that if we didn't turn our attention to space soon we would very likely be wiped out by a nuclear war. I saw no signs, unfortunately, that we were making any attempt to get into space. One of the most encouraging experiences I've ever had was hearing the very next year that Sputnik had been launched into orbit, making it impossible, I believed, for the setting of my story to be Earth. I still believed this when the novel was published in 1971; I assumed after the Apollo moon landing that Earth was fully committed and thus safely past the crisis. Now I am not so sure. Now I am nervous again when I see cutbacks in the space program, since evidently a planet can stay in the Critical Stage much longer than I first thought.

## *

In the spring of 1957, nearing the end of my graduate work and without hope of earning money through writing, I came to another turning point. I did not really want to be a school counselor, but I'd been putting off thinking about that problem. I had to go to summer school in Eugene in order to qualify for the degree. One day in May—the most fateful day of my life—I drove down to Eugene from Portland to make the arrangements. I talked to one of the professors there. And some casual remark I made suddenly opened my eyes to the futility of the whole plan. I was, I saw, a hypocrite! I was pretending to believe the officially-approved theories of Educational Psychology when I privately thought they were rubbish, and sooner or later I would be found out. Even if I went on pretending long enough to receive a degree in the field, I would despise working in it. To continue would be intolerable.

I barely managed to conclude the conversation with the professor, then, without registering for summer school, I numbly drove the 125 miles back to Portland. At home, not knowing what to do next, I picked up the nearest magazine and glanced through it; it was Mother's Wellesley alumnae magazine, something I never read. In it was an article about a young woman who was learning to program computers, which I skimmed with some interest, but did not connect in any way with everyday life—I'd heard of computers, I suppose, in science fiction, but didn't imagine that people not trained as scientists could experiment with them. Next, I picked up the want-ad section of the newspaper. I'd never looked at that before either, since jobs in the education field aren't listed in classified ads. To my amazement, there was a box ad there for people to join the same computer programming project mentioned in the magazine article.

The project was the SAGE Air Defense System, then a new and unique concept, which was being developed by the Rand Corporation. Its recruiter was touring the country, stopping in Portland just that one day. The ad appeared in the paper that day only; I will never stop marveling at the uncanny series of coincidences that caused me to see it.

The qualifications mentioned in the ad were not too far from mine; more math courses than I'd taken were specified, but I had done well in math and thought it might be possible to catch up on my own. The listing appeared under "Help Wanted—Men" (in those days newspapers separated jobs by sex) but the magazine article had told me women were included. So I called the recruiter. They did hire women, he said, but his interview schedule was filled; I would have to go to see him late that night at his hotel. Dubious as this might otherwise have sounded, having read about the work in the Wellesley Magazine convinced me that it was legitimate, and so I went. When I got there, he gave me a written aptitude test, then asked me to return for a second interview the next morning. And that morning I was hired on the spot. He told me he'd have accepted me the night before except that it was so obviously a sudden move on my part that he wanted me to think it over.

I didn't have to think long; I was twenty-three years old with no other prospect of employment, and though I had little idea what computer programming was, it sounded interesting. To be sure, it meant leaving Oregon, but my sorrow over that was overshadowed by the excitement of doing something entirely new. Also the salary offered me was astonishing—$400 a month, which in that era, by my standards, seemed like a fortune; it was far more than I had earned as a teacher. I later learned that many of the people hired for the project were former teachers. Now, computer programmers are trained in college; but there was no such thing as a college Computer Science department then. There were no programmers at all except a few mathematicians doing developmental work. SAGE was a large project and its staff had to be found among men and women with degrees in other fields. Our training was provided on the job.

At the end of June, 1957, I reported for work at Rand's SAGE headquarters in Lexington, Massachusetts. Since this was to be a temporary location and I had no idea where I'd be sent next—we were to be moved around the country to install the system at different Air Force bases—I rented a room in a private home; the most convenient location proved to be in Wellesley Hills, where Mother had lived many years before. The initial phase of training, to my surprise, was a formal course given by IBM on the MIT campus in Cambridge. I was nervous the first day, since I didn't have all the math prerequisites I'd been told would be expected, but it turned out that no math at all was needed. (Most kinds of programming do not involve mathematics; they'd specified math background only because people with math aptitude are likely to also have programming aptitude.) I found programming easy and loved it right from the start. How strange it seemed to be paid a salary for attending a class much more interesting than any I'd had in college! My free time was filled with more activities than in the past, too, since I had a car, a whole new region of the country to explore, and classmates to take trips with on weekends. That summer was one of the happiest of my life.

I'll never forget my first look at the computer. Computers in those days were not at all like what they are today—the one used for SAGE, the IBM ANFS-Q7 (called simply the Q7 for short) filled several rooms. In Lexington we had access only to an experimental prototype located at MIT's Lincoln Laboratory. Since a great many people had to share it besides trainees, our brief computer time during the course was scheduled at three o'clock in the morning. Our government security clearances hadn't come through yet, so we had to wait in a locked classroom while pairs of students were escorted to the computer room to try out short programs. These programs were of course written in assembly language, the only computer language that yet existed for non-mathematical applications (besides binary machine language, which we also learned). The Q7 didn't have a keyboard as personal computers now do; to communicate with it, you had to put a deck of punched cards into the card reader. Then, after the program was assembled, you got a deck of binary cards out of the automatic punch machine and put them into the card reader in turn. In later years these operations became very familiar to me, though later, we used magnetic tape rather than cards for most program assemblies. But that first night it all seemed mysterious and exciting.

To modern computer users it might seem mysterious still, for the Q7 had a room-wide "front panel" of flashing lights. If you knew machine language, you could read the contents of CPU and memory registers in these lights; that's how debugging was done. The computer room was dimly lit so the lights could be easily seen; the adjacent room containing consoles with air defense displays was called the Blue Room because its dim light was blue. There were still more rooms filled with frames of vacuum tubes. Yet despite its immense array of hardware, the Q7 had only an 8K memory! It seemed ample to us, and several years later, when it was expanded to 64K, we thought that was phenomenal. Now [1987] the computer on my own desk, on which I'm writing this article, has a memory ten times that large (though it's not quite a fair comparison because it stores less information per address than the Q7 did). There has been a lot of progress in the past thirty years. Yet I still feel affection for the old Q7 and in some ways I rather miss it. It did its job well; the reason it could handle air defense surveillance with so little memory was that in those days we used programming techniques more efficient, from the machine language standpoint, than those now commonly employed.

Front panel of the SAGE computer

When my training was finished, I was sent, somewhat ironically, to Santa Monica, California, a part of greater Los Angeles near where I'd grown up; but since that too was to be temporary, I didn't object. In the summer of 1958 I was transferred to Madison, Wisconsin, and in 1959 to Tacoma, Washington. I had my own apartment in each of these places and enjoyed the variety of moving to different areas, but my life centered on my job.

Most of my work was not with the air defense program itself, but with programs of the type now called systems software. SAGE was a real-time system, the most advanced of its era. At the field locations, I had a lot of time to operate the computer personally, since there were only a few programmers at each Air Force base and the computers (which we weren't allowed to touch except for their front panel switches) needed to be kept busy continuously to break them in. So I became an expert on systems software of the sort—primitive by today's standards—that existed then, and had a chance to develop some of what was used. In 1960 I was transferred back to Santa Monica on a permanent basis; that was the home office of SDC, for which I had worked since it separated from its parent company Rand. It was the place where I would have the most opportunity to do developmental programming, so I wanted to be there; moreover, Mother had left Portland and was living in Santa Barbara again. It did not seem that I would ever have an opportunity to return to Oregon.

I sometimes see it said, even today, that there is prejudice against women in technical fields like computer science. That strikes me as strange, since I never encountered any, and if it is now true, then SDC must have been an exception. There were relatively few women among the SAGE programmers, but I certainly received raises and promotions as fast as the men did, and I never went out of my way to seek them. I was the first female Unit Head in my group, but nobody seemed to think that was any big deal. By 1965 I ranked as a Computer Systems Specialist. I didn't want to get away from programming into a wholly supervisory job, for which I wasn't temperamentally fitted; so in lieu of line promotion I became a Technical Assistant to the Group Head and was Project Head for design and development of a major experimental change in the program organization of SAGE. Also, I did more and more technical writing—I liked it and was good at it, which is the exception rather than the rule among programmers. Though the normal procedure was to use a secretary, I convinced my boss that I could neither write drafts by hand nor dictate, and was thus entitled to have a typewriter in my own office. How much more I could have produced with a word processor, something then not even dreamed of!

There were problems with this situation, though. In the first place, writing began to take me away from programming. Furthermore, what I wrote was either classified (secret) or proprietary, so that I couldn't show it to anybody outside the company. And I began to feel that if I was going to write most of the time I would like to do it in a form that would appear publicly under my name. I did not have energy to do writing of my own in my off-hours, as many authors do; one full-time job was all I could manage without collapsing from fatigue. In the evenings I could do no more than read. Strangely, I didn't even think much about space during those years, pleased though I was by the manned missions of the early sixties. I suppose underneath I avoided it because I wasn't personally involved in the space effort. Many programmers worked on Gemini and Apollo, but I was neither energetic nor assertive enough to seek a new job and in any case, neither Florida nor Houston was a place we wanted to live.

By this time, Mother and I were sharing a home; for a while we'd had a very pleasant one with a swimming pool in the San Fernando Valley, but after my grandmother's death we moved closer to Santa Monica because we preferred its climate and because commuting in rush hour traffic, which took longer and longer, tired me too much. Despite our new home's high-priced locale and ocean view, I wasn't happy there. I didn't mind my lack of social life, since that of my office acquaintances appeared to revolve around sports and/or drinking, neither of which was my idea of fun; still my days seemed increasingly monotonous. My salary had enabled us to take wonderful vacations, including two to Europe—but these were somewhat shadowed by the fact that I was no better able to stay on my feet in Europe than anywhere else. I wanted freedom to travel at a more leisurely pace. Mother, for her part, was nearing seventy and found she didn't want to be home alone all day while I worked, whereas I didn't want to share our home with a housekeeper as had been necessary during the many years when my grandmother couldn't be left alone.

On Lake Lucerne, Switzerland, 1964

Above all, I was homesick for Oregon; yet I had too much seniority to switch to the type of programming job then available in Portland. For the first time I seriously considered trying to write professionally. Mother's income, we thought, had become more than ample for us to live on indefinitely (we didn't foresee what inflation would do to it). Although once I'd have been unwilling to give up programming, my job didn't involve much actual programming any more. Among the other difficulties I was being sent on business trips—for example, to talk with some Air Force officers at an underground installation in North Bay, Canada—and I found such assignments physically exhausting; yet I felt that to refuse them would mean the loss of my program design responsibilities. All in all, it seemed the time for another change was at hand.

## *

I had worked as a programmer for almost exactly ten years when, in May of 1967, I came back to Oregon to stay. We bought another house in Portland—the first of several homes we've since had here—and I began to write novels. I didn't look on writing as a career in the income-production sense, for I knew that very few authors earn a living from their books (and as it turned out, even the most successful of mine never brought in enough money for me to do that). It's important to make this plain, because I wouldn't want aspiring writers to assume that one can quit a job thinking that publication of books like mine will provide support. I had no such illusions; I simply wanted to share some of my ideas. One reason I'd begun to feel I could publish in the young adult field was that Mother had recently begun to write for young people herself. Her second and best-known book, _Twice Queen of France,_ was published that same spring (under her maiden name, Mildred Allen Butler). I thought that if she could do it, then, maybe, so could I.

I wrote _Journey Between Worlds_ first. I felt it would appeal to readers of romances for girls, and I wanted very much to make teenage girls aware of how important the colonization of space is to mankind's future. I deliberately did _not_ direct the book to science fiction fans. One such person wrote to me once, saying rather indignantly that I should have known no science fiction enthusiast could sympathize with a young woman who _did not want_ to go to Mars—and of course I did know that! The idea was to reach girls who don't ordinarily like science fiction. Unfortunately, in many places the book never did reach them because librarians put it on the "science fiction" shelf instead of the "romance" shelf. (I'd be happy if any librarians reading this would please go and move it right now.) Where it got into the hands of its intended audience, however, it was well liked. One of my happiest experiences as a writer was having a librarian tell me my book had convinced her that the space program really is worthwhile.

All this was quite a bit later, though. I submitted _Journey Between Worlds_ to several publishers, all of which rejected it, and in the meantime I wrote _Enchantress from the Stars._ I didn't feel _Enchantress_ would ever be publishable—it wasn't the sort of book that could appear as an adult novel (though I felt some adults would like it) yet it was over the heads of most readers below teenage and seemed far too long and complex to be called a children's book, at least by the standards of the fifties and sixties. But the story took hold of me and I simply couldn't leave it alone. I would forget all the rules, I decided, and amuse myself with something that didn't fit any market while I waited for _Journey Between Worlds_ to find a publisher; I couldn't submit a new manuscript while that was unsettled in any case.

When _Enchantress from the Stars_ was finished, though, I found I couldn't bear not to have it read by anyone. I put _Journey_ away and submitted _Enchantress_ instead, after learning that at least a few publishers of junior books would consider manuscripts of its length. I sent it to Atheneum because they had published the longest children's book I could find in the library, and also because the editor's taste appeared compatible with mine. This proved to be a good guess; the book was accepted, after some revision, and went on to be a Junior Literary Guild selection and a Newbery Honor Book. I was fortunate in having written it just at a time when a trend toward issuing more mature fiction as "young adult" was beginning. For of course, _Enchantress_ was never intended for preadolescent children, and its Newbery Honor status was therefore somewhat misleading.

With mother reading galley proofs, 1969

I have never written a novel for children—unless one considers teenagers "children," which personally I don't—and it bothers me somewhat to be known as a writer of children's books. This doesn't mean I don't admire the gift of people who are able to work in that field; I'd be much better off professionally if I possessed it. But I, after all, didn't identify with children even while I was a child myself, and have never understood them or their activities well enough to write about them. The characters in my novels are all in late adolescence or older.

The reason I mind being classed with children's authors is that it tends to prevent my books from being found by the majority of readers most apt to like them. Teenagers do not consider _themselves_ children, after all. Comparatively few of them visit the children's rooms of libraries. The larger libraries shelve extra copies of my novels in their young adult or adult collections; that's where teenagers are most likely to come across them. There are, to be sure, a few teen library users who know not all books in the children's room are beneath them, and a few advanced readers below teenage for whom my books aren't too mature. By and large, however, the "junior" label limits my audience, especially by keeping my books out of high school libraries, where I feel they'd reach more young people.

This labeling of books by age group does a great deal of damage, I think, except in the case of those meant for preadolescent readers. The reason for it is solely commercial; it arises from the structure of the publishing business. The "children's book" departments of publishers issue young adult novels because of the way books are marketed, not because there's any good reason for fiction directed toward older teens to be branded as different from adult fiction. This is not to say that editors of children's books, such as my own editor, Jean Karl, have not done a fine job with novels appropriate for high school age or that they shouldn't be the ones to edit them—but they should be allowed, I feel, to do so without having such novels categorized as being on the "juvenile" side of a firm dividing line in literature. Even Library of Congress catalog numbering marks this division! Worse yet, because children's libraries are patronized mainly by children, books for younger readers usually sell better than those that demand more maturity; and consequently publishers' sales departments often list a novel as being for a lower age group than the author had in mind. This can backfire. Some of my novels were criticized by reviewers for being "too difficult for ages 10–14," a judgment with which I wholeheartedly agreed.

With _Enchantress from the Stars_ this problem was not as serious as with my later novels, since it could indeed be enjoyed by many readers of junior-high age. But _Enchantress_ was given by teachers even to fifth and sixth graders; I was often asked to talk to those grades, and got letters from children who'd evidently read the book as a school assignment without having the slightest notion of what it was all about. I found this very frustrating. To me, a story's plot incidents are not what matter; they were what I always found hardest to think of, and such action scenes as I managed to put in (usually long after the first draft of the rest) were a real struggle to write. The ideas in the story, plus the thoughts and feelings of the characters, were what inspired me, and in most cases these could be absorbed only by introspective older teens.

Adult readers, on the other hand—having less of a Space Age outlook than teenagers—didn't all grasp what _Enchantress_ was about either. To my dismay, some of them didn't realize it dealt literally with relationships between peoples of different worlds. They assumed it was an allegory about our own world not merely in its portrayal of human feelings, but in a specific political sense; they thought that in saying an advanced interstellar civilization shouldn't try to help less advanced ones, I was saying Americans shouldn't give technological aid to undeveloped nations. I never meant that at all; people of different nations on this planet are all members of the same human race, the same species. Whether highly evolved species can help those younger than themselves is another issue entirely. _Enchantress from the Stars_ was intended to counter the "Gods from Outer Space" concept, the growing idea, especially prevalent among young people, that UFOs may come here and solve all Earth's problems for us. I simply don't believe that's how advanced interstellar civilizations act; I feel, as my novels explain, that it would be harmful to young species and that they know that. As I recall, I got tired of seeing Captain Kirk violate his Federation's nominal noninterference policy in Star Trek, and that was what prompted me to create a Federation that lived up to its own code.

Mother, Mildred Butler Engdahl, 1969

It's tempting, of course, to hope that one will be contacted by people from the stars, especially if one doesn't quite fit into society on this planet—and I suspect that dream is more common among the young than adults suppose. In my own late teens I indulged in it at times, very secretly, because there was no Star Trek or _Close Encounters_ then and no one I knew was interested in space and I thought the wish for contact must be unique to my special form of imagination. A few years ago I heard a rock singer express the same wish in lyrics about a girl in a bar who longed to be taken aboard the "silvery ship" she was sure must be overhead. Evidently it is a universal longing. But I don't think we should let it shape our view of the universe, because it's a lot more constructive to assume we of Earth are going to have to solve our own world's problems.

Do I really believe interstellar civilizations exist? I've often been asked that, and the answer is that I do, though I don't believe we are going to have any proof of it before we build starships of our own to explore with. But of course I don't think inhabitants of other solar systems are as much like our species as they are shown to be in my fiction. Actually I rarely describe what they look like—partly because I'm not good at physical descriptions, but partly, too, because I want to leave readers free to imagine the characters as being like themselves. (In _Enchantress from the Stars,_ for instance, I hoped black readers would picture Elana as black, and I've often wondered if any of them did.) This, I think, is just as accurate as making up weird descriptions for them would be; we haven't the faintest idea what alien races look like, so why not portray them in a way that makes them easy to identify with? To me it's the same form of literary license as writing the dialogue in English when we know that alien beings don't speak English: it's necessary for the sake of the audience. Few science fiction fans agree with me about this, but many people who don't like other science fiction say they like mine, and I feel this is one reason why.

Alien cultures aren't as much like ours as those in my books, either. And in fact, all the cultures in _Enchantress from the Stars_ were purposely portrayed in an unrealistic, stylized way. This was something else a lot of adult readers didn't understand. They saw that part of the book was told in fairy-tale style, and though they knew medieval cultures were not just like those in fairy tales, they recognized this as a literary device—which, if they were folklore enthusiasts, they enjoyed. Surprisingly, a lot of the same people said the culture of the invaders in the book was "stereotyped!" Indeed it was, deliberately so; real interstellar invaders would no more behave like comic-book villains with ray guns than real medieval heroes went around looking for dragons to slay. (This might have been clearer if my original Foreword had been printed intact, but that, like a number of other passages in _Enchantress_ and a good deal of the punctuation, was altered by Atheneum without my knowledge, and it wasn't possible to fix everything after the book was in galleys—something I've always regretted. Though I'm glad to revise my work repeatedly, I do not believe any author's wording should be changed without his or her approval.)

Even the very advanced culture in _Enchantress from the Stars_ , the Federation, was not shown realistically. How could it have been? I don't know what the day-to-day life of people belonging to interstellar civilizations is like, but I'm fairly sure it's not like Elana's—in particular, a society composed of people possessing spectacular psychic powers would have to be very different and, from our standpoint, incomprehensible. Yet I believe that species more advanced than our own do possess such powers, and perhaps could awaken them in exceptional individuals of younger worlds. That, in fact, was the portion of the story I started with, the part conceived in 1957. Though its premise is classed with "magic" by today's science, the book wasn't meant to be fantasy in the sense that tales of magical worlds are fantasy. Rather, it was based on mythology (which is something quite different from fantasy)—not just traditional mythology, but that of our own age. At the time I wrote it, I didn't fully appreciate the extent to which interstellar travelers with telepathic and psychokinetic powers are a contemporary myth; I was inclined to believe in their literal existence. Now I recognize that our current conceptions of advanced civilizations are much further from reality than fairy tales are from history. Nevertheless, I think the underlying ideas of the book, and of my subsequent ones, are valid.

When I finished writing _Enchantress from the Stars_ (and had revised _Journey Between Worlds_ , by then also accepted by Atheneum) I went ahead with _The Far Side of Evil_. It fit naturally into the same Federation setting as _Enchantress_ , though my original story about the Critical Stage, which involved only Randil's role, was set on Earth. I've sometimes been asked why the book's conclusion didn't reveal the key to the Critical Stage for which the Federation was searching: the reason why some worlds conquer space while others fail to, and blow themselves up in a nuclear war. My reply has always been that if I _knew_ the key, I'd tell the President of the United States instead of putting it in a novel! For some reason this seems to surprise people; they don't realize that I believe the Critical Stage is real. More disturbingly, some, again, thought the book was about politics instead of about space; they assumed I used a space story as a vehicle for political statements when in fact, it was the other way around: I used political melodrama as a vehicle for ideas about the importance of space exploration. I would like to think that readers of the book have found these ideas convincing, because they become more and more relevant to our world's situation with each passing year. It frightens me when I hear people say we should solve the problems on Earth before we devote money and effort to leaving it. I do not believe they _can_ be solved as long as our species is confined to a single planet. The natural course of evolution is for all successful species to expand to new ecological niches, and space is the one awaiting us. Attempts to postpone that destiny can lead only to disaster, for us and for all other life here on our home world.

## *

My last remaining story draft was the one that became the foundation for _This Star Shall Abide,_ which eventually turned into a trilogy. My previous novels had been written mainly from young women's viewpoints, and had been praised for that reason by people who'd noticed the lack of space stories for girls. (Though there are quite a few of these now, _Enchantress from the Stars_ was the first science fiction novel with a female protagonist to be issued as young adult.) But I wanted to try something different, and in any case, the society in which the new novel was to be set was not one in which an adolescent girl would act as the plot required. It was a society that had regressed from its former state; the very sexism of its people was typical of their backward attitudes about a lot of other things—a point that somehow escaped feminists who later criticized the book and its sequel for portraying a sexist culture. So my main character was necessarily a boy, and he became very real to me, which was not surprising since Noren, more than any of my other characters, had a personality like mine. He viewed life as I had always viewed it: as a loner and a heretic. In my own case this had never been a very dramatic stance, but our society is not as bad as Noren's, and I had not been forced to choose, as he was, between unjustifiable conformity and persecution. I can't be sure that I would have acted as Noren did if I'd been born into his world, but I know I would have wanted to.

At my desk, 1972

At the time _This Star Shall Abide_ was written, the issue of youthful heresy was a major one in America, so I believed teenage readers would sympathize with him. Young people seemed a great deal more serious-minded than they had been during my own youth. To be sure, I felt that many of the causes to which they were devoting themselves were misguided, and that their methods of protest were often neither justified nor effective—I would not have felt at home in the counterculture of the sixties. Still, the young had begun to _care_ about the world, and that in itself was progress. It's better to care and make mistakes than not to care; both _The Far Side of Evil_ and _This Star Shall Abide_ dealt with that theme. In both there was real evil to fight, and in both, a young man's sincere effort to oppose it turned out to be based on false premises: the point being that it's right to defy authority for the sake of one's conscience, yet necessary to take responsibility if one's view of the situation proves inaccurate. But in Noren's case deeper issues were involved. The original theme of the story concerned heresy not in the political but in the religious sense, and this facet of it became more and more central to me as the books developed.

I had never been an overtly religious person; my parents were not churchgoers, and though I'd taught Sunday School for a while during my high school years, I'd given it up because it made me feel hypocritical. I didn't believe the teachings of any church literally, and at that time I knew of no other way to view them. That myth _is_ true—that the underlying idea is more significant than the words and imagery through which it's expressed—was something I came to understand slowly over a long period of years. I didn't connect it specifically with religion at first. Even when I based _Enchantress from the Stars_ on that theme, I wasn't conscious of the fact that I was saying something about religious symbolism. Then, later, when I read _Enchantress_ over after publication, it dawned on me that I had unknowingly written a strong defense of religious views I'd long rejected. To this day I don't know if anybody else interpreted the book that way.

At that time, I had been ill for some months and was very depressed. Though my condition was not medically serious, I was not only too lacking in physical energy to do even what little had previously been possible for me, but had lost all desire and enthusiasm for such things as travel. I could write—and often did write ten hours a day—but leaving the house for more than brief errands brought on nervous exhaustion. Intellectually I was thrilled by the publication of my books, but emotionally I could feel no joy in that or anything else; my optimistic view of the universe did not extend to my private life. In desperation, I began to attend church, looking for some anchor in the dark sea that was engulfing me. For the first time I found the ritual meaningful—not because my beliefs had changed, but because I now recognized it as an expression of what I'd believed all along.

This was the period from which _This Star Shall Abide_ and its sequel _Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains_ emerged. Originally, I tried to tell the story in just one volume, but its structure was all wrong. When my editor didn't find it convincing, I soon realized why: a lot of important things were still in my mind instead of on paper. So I expanded it to two and received a contract for both before the second was even partially written. Revising the first volume was merely a matter of removing an anticlimactic chapter from the end and adding a lot more detail in the portrayal of the planet's society; that completed the novel as I'd first conceived it, the part I already had a plot for. But it didn't finish Noren's story, not even the love story to which readers would naturally want a conclusion, and my editor felt that it didn't make the reasons for the inescapably bad situation on the planet clear enough. I agreed; moreover, by this time some of Noren's later conflicts had become more crucial to me than his initial rebellion.

Presenting these conflicts in a way meaningful to young readers—or for that matter, to any readers at all—proved tremendously difficult. I didn't yet have a plot, at least not in the sense of the action. I knew how Noren's outlook would change but I hadn't any idea what events would bring this about; thinking of them was a year-long struggle. Furthermore, _Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains_ dealt more explicitly with religion than was customary in the young adult field. The old taboos concerning sex and politics had fallen, but judging from the books I saw, I feared religion might still be off-limits, if not to my publisher, then perhaps to reviewers and book-buyers. I thought I might offend some readers by suggesting that a religion unlike any on this planet could be valid to its adherents, and went out of my way in an Author's Note to make plain that the colonists in the story were not descendants of Earth people. To my surprise, I later encountered adults who did not realize that the novel was really about religion! It didn't mention God by name, so they apparently went on thinking of the faith depicted in the way Noren did initially, as no more than a feat of social engineering. But in my eyes, his ultimate commitment to a priest's role was genuine.

_This Star Shall Abide_ was well received, and won a Christopher Award for "affirmation of the highest values of the human spirit." Despite good reviews _Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains_ was less successful; the majority of those who evaluated it by young-adult criteria considered it too heavy and slow-moving, and my British publisher refused to accept it. (They had not liked the religious aspect of even the first volume and had insisted on changing its title to remove any suggestion of religious content—not because of a taboo, but because they felt, probably with justification, that religion doesn't appeal to average science fiction fans.) Then too, some reviewers objected to the plot climax, calling it _deus ex machina_ as if I'd been unable to think of any better way to save Noren than to drag in an improbable coincidence. There was much irony in this, since though I do indeed have trouble thinking up plot incidents, in this case the unforeseeable nature of Noren's rescue was entirely deliberate. That was the _point_ —sometimes one must have faith in an improbable outcome. That was what awakened Noren's faith in the still more improbable salvation of his endangered people. But the book was not an action-adventure story, and those looking for excitement didn't like its departures from action-adventure story rules.

_Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains_ was primarily a psychological story. The younger readers had no comprehension of Noren's emotions, especially during his period of what one reviewer aptly called "existential anxiety"—still I remained firm in my conviction that older adolescents would identify with them. I got confirmation that some did when one day a teenage girl approached me in a library and remarked appreciatively, "Noren really tripped out, didn't he?" So much for the prevalent theory that action-adventure is what science fiction for young people has to focus on.

Cover art by Richard Cuffari for Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains

After publication of the second volume, some people felt the story still wasn't complete; they told me I should write another sequel in which Noren succeeded in saving his people. I resisted this idea, since only in action-adventure fiction is it credible for a hero to single-handedly save the world. The book was about faith in the face of impossible odds, and that theme would be overridden if I altered the odds to the extent of saying that even during Noren's lifetime, they hadn't been so impossible after all. Besides, I'd done such a thorough job of making them impossible that I couldn't think of a way out myself—and knew that even if I could, that would weaken the justification for the planet's social system, which was an evil defensible only on the basis of its offering the sole means of temporary survival.

Years later, however, something happened that changed my mind. I got interested in the new field of genetic engineering, and learned to my dismay that the system on Noren's world really _wasn't_ the sole means of survival! I'd honestly believed it was, since I'd been ignorant of genetics, but I was ignorant no longer and had just published a nonfiction book on the subject; what if people thought I'd known all along? I couldn't let them assume I had let Noren endorse a morally objectionable system on false grounds. And so I wrote _The Doors of the Universe,_ and once I got into it, I could scarcely believe that I hadn't envisioned Noren's story as a trilogy in the first place.

It was truly uncanny the way things fit together. Details that just happened to have been mentioned in the earlier volumes looked like "plants" for essential premises of the new book. Moreover, in the new volume I had a chance to emphasize the theme, implicit in the earlier ones, of the tragedy that can result if a civilization turns its back on a promising technology—something I feel very strongly about. And I brought in connections with the themes of my books about the Federation. All this came easily (though as usual, I had trouble thinking of events through which Noren actually _could_ reach his goal and was stalled in the middle for over a year without any more notion of the solution than he had). So now, the conclusion of _Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains_ does indeed seem incomplete to me, which for a middle volume of a trilogy is entirely proper. I hope that young people who grew up during the interval between publication of the second and third volumes have found that the third exists, though in most cases this is unlikely; the story really is much better when read as a whole.

_The Doors of the Universe_ got excellent reviews but was not widely distributed because by then the library market was diminishing, and, dealing as it did with Noren as an adult, it was much too heavy for average readers of young people's fiction. Genetic engineering being a timely topic, I hoped it would go into paperback even if the whole trilogy did not, but Atheneum did not succeed in selling the reprint rights.

My greatest disappointment as a writer has been the lack of mass-market paperback editions of my novels. This is a matter not so much of money (though by now I surely need the money) but of the fact that many teenagers prefer paperbacks. Science fiction readers in particular don't all have access to, or opportunity to use, public libraries; I've talked to some on electronic bulletin boards who'd like to read my books, yet cannot get copies. I would have a far larger audience, particularly for the trilogy—which unlike some of my books, did not appear even in children's paperback form—if it were available on racks where science fiction is sold. Yet according to Atheneum, my novels were repeatedly offered to reprint houses and turned down. It was not because they were originally issued as young adult novels—I think I'm the only author of teenage science fiction whose books had success in hardcover and yet were not picked up for mass-market reprint. I was told it was because they hadn't enough action, that they were considered "too difficult" even for average adults. Possibly so; but I think a larger factor was the restrictive categorization of the paperback field.

Under the current marketing system, a mass-market paperback line must be labeled either "general audience" or "science fiction"—there is no common ground between the two. Books about other worlds are not issued in "general audience" lines. Yet my novels don't appeal to typical SF fans; I don't slant them that way. A science fiction writer once told me that in order to do so I would have to direct them to people who have read at least 500 other science fiction novels previously! Such readers are looking for far-out material that I wouldn't be able to imagine even if I wanted to, and I don't want to. I write for those, adults as well as teens, who care about the real world and its relation to the rest of the universe.

## *

Once _Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains_ had gone to the typesetter, I had no other story idea. But I did have something else in mind. I wanted to try nonfiction. Especially, I wanted to write about what people have thought in the past about other worlds: not science fiction authors, but scientists, philosophers, and average citizens. Radio astronomers were then implying, and in some cases saying, that their belief in the existence of other inhabited solar systems was something new; but I was aware that this view of history was a limited one. The philosopher Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in the year 1600 for holding to such ideas. And if a conviction that we're not alone in the universe goes back that far—if it's not an invention of science fiction at all—then surely that is an important fact. Perhaps it reveals something of what people instinctively sense to be true.

With my mother and our cat Pussywillow, 1975

Ordinary history books don't tell the facts about things like views of extrasolar worlds; only a few specialized scholars know them. None of these scholars had written about the subject in detail—the information was to be found only in actual writings of the past. I had never done scholarly research before, but I soon became fascinated with it. I ended up spending an entire year searching the writings of well-known people who lived in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, plus a lot of magazines printed in those centuries. Portland's libraries didn't have all I wanted to see, and I thought with regret of the lost years in Southern California, where I'd lived near many great libraries without ever using them for research purposes. I sent for a few crucial books via interlibrary loan, obtaining them from cities in the East as well as California, often finding them so frail from disuse that they fell apart in my hands. And what I learned was that the educated people of those centuries almost _all_ believed that other inhabited solar systems exist. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson did. The majority of clergymen did. In the nineteenth century, the few writers who argued against the idea were considered dissenters.

These facts are still not generally known. My collection of Xeroxed sources on the subject provided material not merely for a young people's book, but for a long scholarly one—which I still intend to write when I have opportunity. I have found that both my writing style and my approach to ideas are far better suited to scholarly writing than to anything else, and that that's the type of work I normally find most fulfilling. I've since gathered material for a number of other scholarly books on different subjects, and have enough more ideas to last for the rest of my life. Scholarly writing, however, is not usually publishable unless it's the work of a college professor or other recognized authority. It remains to be seen whether any of the projects I'm working on will ever appear in print.

During 1973, I wrote _The Planet-Girded Suns: Man's View of Other Solar Systems,_ which was publishable when a scholarly book would not have been. I did my best to make it understandable to young readers; it was revised many times at the request of Atheneum, and was eventually accepted and well reviewed. However, it was actually neither one thing nor the other—not scholarly, though it presented material that popular-level adult books don't include, and yet much too difficult reading for average teens. It was interesting to some because the subject of other worlds is interesting, but on the whole I am unable to explain complicated ideas in a way that appeals to large audiences. I hoped, because adult books about extraterrestrial intelligence were then popular, that _The Planet-Girded Suns_ would have a better chance than the novels at paperback publication, but paperback houses showed no interest in it. Perhaps this was because, in the section about modern scientific beliefs, I didn't endorse the existence of UFOs.

There followed a period of years during which I tried desperately to write yet could not produce any fiction. Several times I thought I had the basis for a new novel, but despite interesting themes and settings I proved unable to think of events. Unlike the situation of authors who experience "writer's block," this was not a matter of having trouble putting words on paper, or of producing things that weren't good. I couldn't write narrative at all because I had no incidents or images in mind to describe, but I wrote thousands of words, constantly, about abstract ideas, often in long letters to friends. At the time I felt I _should_ write more novels because I'd assumed I would keep on doing so, and Atheneum was waiting for one; it seemed terrible not to take advantage of that opportunity. Apart from liking to publish I was beginning to need income; Mother's no longer went so far because of inflation, yet I couldn't work outside my home because her health was poor and she needed me. So for a long time I kept struggling. But I've since come to realize that the mystery is not why I could no longer write fiction, but why I'd ever been able to do it in the first place. Most people with analytical minds (the kind now called "left-brain dominant") never can.

One of the friends I wrote long letters to was a young man named Rick Roberson, who lived in Tennessee. He'd first written to me when he was sixteen, and just the type of teen reader toward whom I'd directed my books—he grasped what was in them and identified with the characters more than anyone else I knew. Rick and I went on corresponding because we were both seriously interested in space and the future, and neither of us had other friends who were. Also, he had writing talent. The year he entered college and I had no book ready to publish, science fiction anthologies for young people were needed, and it occurred to me that between us we could produce one. I had little background even as a reader in the SF short-story field, but Rick did, and he knew what young people liked. We mailed stories we found back and forth to each other and enjoyed discussing them; then Rick wrote the introductions and I handled the business of obtaining permission to reprint them. This became the anthology _Universe Ahead_. Rick wrote a story for the book, and when we became desperate to fill a remaining "slot" I produced one myself, which I was able to write only because I based it on his ideas and which therefore appeared under both our names.

Rick Roberson with advance copy of Anywhere, Anywhen

I found I liked editing. The next year Rick wrote another story and I asked some of my other friends, all published authors, to do so also for a new anthology, _Anywhere, Anywhen_ , which contained only fiction that hadn't been printed before. Again, I co-authored a story, this time with my mother. Sadly, Mother's career in writing for young people had come to an abrupt end when book markets changed so that her special interest—history—was no longer an acceptable topic; it was felt that teenagers weren't interested in history. (After four books for Funk & Wagnalls she had had a new one accepted by Harcourt Brace, only to have the new management there decide not to issue it despite their loss of the advance already paid.) Finding it hard to believe young people couldn't see the relevance in history, I adapted one of Mother's historical narratives into a time-travel story that we felt made that relevance plain. I don't know if readers of _Anywhere, Anywhen_ agreed or not. In any case the book was not successful, largely because it was usually passed to science fiction specialists for review. Naturally, such specialists didn't like it; everything in it was "old hat" to them, since it had been deliberately designed to appeal to people in the children's literature field who don't care for typical science fiction anthologies. Hardly anyone, though, recognizes the wide gap in taste that exists between genre-oriented SF fans and other readers, or that efforts to bridge that gap are not welcomed by the specialists.

## *

In the summer of 1976 Rick Roberson came to Portland and stayed with us while attending summer school at Portland State University. His college major was physics, and I felt that there would be interest in a children's book about the exciting new discoveries being made in high-energy physics. I wouldn't have ventured to write nonfiction on such a subject alone, since I knew nothing whatsoever about it; but together we produced _The Subnuclear Zoo._ Then the next year, Rick started to write a similar book about genetic engineering, a subject in which he was also knowledgeable—but as it turned out, he didn't have time to finish it, so we co-authored that one also: _Tool for Tomorrow_. Atheneum wanted these books to be for younger readers than my previous ones, and I tried very hard to comply. Nevertheless, I wasn't able to achieve a style appropriate for sixth graders. That being where the major market was, neither book did well, though they both got some good reviews.

I tried a picture book. While working as a science consultant for a textbook literature series, I discovered that there weren't any picture books about space, and I felt that even very young children were aware of space from television and movies. So I wrote _Our World is Earth._ Ironically, that book was assumed by reviewers to be for _older_ readers than I intended! (Some of them said it was too elementary to appeal to the first and second grades, which of course it was; I'd meant it to be read aloud to preschoolers.) I tried other nonfiction that I never submitted; though my major interest had come to be in the promise of orbiting colonies, which I now feel are the solution to Earth's long-term problems, I was unable to express my thoughts about them in words concrete enough for children. This is an insurmountable problem for me—once I wrote a controlled-vocabulary piece about Skylab for a reading series, and was told that the editor had to rewrite it because despite my accurate vocabulary/sentence structure calculations, my approach was "too abstract" for the intended audience. This is the underlying difference between my view and other people's, and it bars me not only from writing children's nonfiction, but from the popular-level adult science field.

But working on _The Subnuclear Zoo_ and _Tool for Tomorrow_ had opened new doors for me. Though originally, I had assumed Rick would provide all the technical information, I found myself inwardly compelled to absorb it myself before I could express any ideas on paper. Furthermore, I found it wasn't as obscure as I'd been expecting. One day, coming back from a summer school class to find me reading a technical article about physics in _Scientific American,_ Rick said, "Oh, Sylvia, you can't understand that!" And I reacted indignantly—I felt challenged, and became aware that there really was no subject I couldn't comprehend if I made the effort. To be sure, I couldn't understand the mathematical equations, not having nearly as much math background as Rick did; but contrary to what's often asserted, math is not necessary to the understanding of concepts, indispensable though it is for practical or experimental work. My lack of college training in science did not limit the subjects I could deal with as a writer.

So while I was working on the genetic engineering book, I got very deeply involved in the source material. That was when I saw its application to Noren's situation, and started _The Doors of the Universe_ (an exception to my inability to think of stories because it was a continuation of the original story). But besides that, I wanted to learn more about the relation of genetics to human evolution. I visited Rick's home in Tennessee to put the finishing touches on _Tool for Tomorrow;_ he was then making plans to enter graduate school. I realized that soon he would have a master's degree, while I had none. My mother and most of my friends had master's degrees in one subject or another, though they knew far less about scholarly research than I. Also I felt that perhaps a master's degree would enable me to publish adult nonfiction about other worlds without its getting classed with the sensational variety—I'd gotten tired of hearing "Oh, you mean like _Chariots of the Gods?"_ when trying to tell people about my research for _The Planet-Girded Suns._

Our cats Sunny and Hesper

In 1978 I had a contract with Atheneum for a book about future human evolution. I knew little about past evolution, but instead of learning from books alone I decided to try taking a class. I had never been fond of the Academic Establishment or in agreement with its accepted theories, but the appeal of a master's degree was at that time motivating me; I found out that it would be possible for me to get one in anthropology at Portland State University. The professor for the evolution class in which I enrolled turned out to be excellent, and, by coincidence, interested both in genetics and in philosophy of science—both fields in which I'd developed background. He encouraged me to apply for admission to the graduate program, and I was accepted. For the next two years I attended part-time and met all the M.A. requirements, receiving almost straight A's because I found researching and writing term papers easy. The book for young people on future evolution, however, was never written. My views on that subject proved to be at odds with those of anthropologists, and I could scarcely express them in print while a candidate for a degree; moreover, to do so wouldn't have been fair to Atheneum. Nonfiction published for young people (as opposed to fiction) is supposed to reflect the current views of authorities, not the heretical ones of its author. I transferred the contract to _The Doors of the Universe_ and abandoned children's nonfiction with little regret.

I never did get the master's degree. I had to stop work on my thesis temporarily for personal reasons, and then wasn't able to go back; it had become too expensive to have someone stay with Mother during my hours on campus. I wasn't too disappointed, for by then, I realized that the degree would not really enable me to publish nonfiction for adults. The scholarly book field was in a depressed state and it was unlikely that I could get the thesis accepted by a university press, as I'd first hoped. Without that prospect, I didn't want to write it under Academic Establishment guidance—term papers are one thing, but an original book-length manuscript containing controversial ideas is something else! I would rather use my material for something wholly my own, far longer than a master's thesis is allowed to be. I do plan to finish that book whether or not it proves publishable; it's about the significance of space colonization to human evolution.

## *

Going to graduate school was largely a matter of pride with me, and though I gained confidence from it, with hindsight it appears to have been the most expensive mistake I ever made. Those two years were when personal computers first came on the market. I avoided looking at the ads because I longed to program again and yet saw no way I could ever afford such an expensive luxury; but if I had put the money I spent on graduate courses into a computer, I undoubtedly could have sold software profitably. Although my programming experience was by then too outdated to be applicable to large business computers, I had just the kind of systems software knowledge that was needed for programming early microcomputers in assembly language. But I didn't realize people were selling programs by mail from their homes. I assumed one would have to work in an office, which I wasn't free to do.

When in 1981 my electric typewriter gave out, and I'd developed a vision problem that made it difficult for me to use a typewriter anyway, I did get a computer for word processing. I couldn't afford to buy software but I enjoyed writing my own. By that time I'd become aware of what was going on and tried to market what I wrote, but it was already too late. Advertising rates were by then geared to the price of products for business customers rather than home users. Though my software was bug-free and my few customers were pleased with it, there wasn't any way to publicize it—and furthermore, my computer soon became too obsolete to use for commercial software development. It was a cassette-based TRS-80, which like the old Q7 did its job well, but was scorned by people interested in having the latest and most efficient equipment. Personally, I liked it, and did all sorts of things with it that are supposedly impractical with cassette text storage.

My desk and TRS-80 computer

The attempt to market my software, like so many other things I've done, had serendipitous results. That was what got me into telecommunications and computer conferencing, a fascinating new field in which I'm now active. I hope that ultimately it, or the contacts I make through it, will offer me ways to earn money at home, for I no longer foresee any writing income; my talents don't fit present markets. I will write in the future as I did at the first, for the satisfaction it brings to me and to prospective readers. But even if I were to get an idea for a novel like my others, it's unlikely that it would be published. Libraries are low on funds these days and books for advanced readers, long and costly to print yet without appeal for typical younger teens, are no longer salable. The seventies were really the only time during which they were; I was very lucky to go through my story-creation period in the right decade.

Mother is over ninety now. Though her mind is sharp and she does a lot of reading, she's very weak physically due to medical problems; I can't leave her alone at any time. During my grandmother's lifetime we could get someone to live with us for little more than room and board, but that's no longer possible, so except for taking her to the doctor I'm virtually homebound. We live very quietly with two beloved cats, Hesper and Phoebus (called Sunny), who are the center of our household. Recently we sold the house we'd owned for thirteen years—far longer than either of us had lived in one place before—and moved into a mobile home west of Portland. It's in a beautiful park surrounded by tall firs, with a view of tree-rimmed fields and a red barn from my bedroom window.

I don't mind this lifestyle, except for its financial drawbacks—after all, I stayed home by choice before it became necessary. I have always been an observer of this planet more than a participant in its affairs. All writers are good observers; the difference between me and most others is that I tend to observe in terms of long-range things, like the evolution of space-faring species, rather than nearby specific ones.

It has been ten years since I've traveled anywhere and I see few people, yet I am not isolated. My computer is my link to the world, not only because I write with it, but because of computer conferencing. At present I am on the staff of Connected Education, an organization headed by Dr. Paul Levinson that offers graduate courses for credit from the New School for Social Research in New York City. Every night I connect my computer by phone to a central computer in New Jersey, where Connect Ed's "electronic campus" is located. Though I haven't met Dr. Levinson in person and I have never seen the New School itself, I've team-taught a class there, and will be teaching more courses as the program grows. Connect Ed has students and faculty all over the world—Japan, South America and England, among other places. These people are as easy to "talk" to as they would be if they lived in my own city. In my case, because writing's easier for me than speaking, it's far better than attending face-to-face conferences. Long ago I assumed that because I couldn't lecture I would never be able to teach in college, yet now technology has found a way to break down barriers not only of distance, but of individual differences in skills. In computer conferencing, people's minds and personalities are all that matter. Irrelevant things like foreign accents or physical handicaps aren't even visible; we all meet on equal ground. This is truly the medium of the future, I believe.

Of course computer conferencing isn't just for people who can't meet otherwise; most Connect Ed students live ordinary lives and choose online courses for scheduling convenience. Because it's an expensive medium at present, the majority of them are business people, though other adults such as teachers are certainly welcome. But I foresee a day when young people will be involved, as they now are with free electronic conferencing on local BBS systems. National recreational computer conferencing has great appeal for teens. In 1985 I was a Helper and volunteer writer for the Participate® conferencing system on The Source, which I learned about while participating in Paul Levinson's public "electure" conference about Space Humanization there. We had enthusiastic teen users as well as adults, though there too, the expense barred all but those from affluent families. I'm hoping for a time when all young people will have access to such systems. There may even be a time when young readers can exchange ideas with their favorite authors via a computer conference.

In any case, computer conferencing is an exciting field to pioneer in. It's something I'll be doing for many years to come. I have a brand new computer now (this article is the first thing I've written with it) and many hundreds of thousands of words will scroll across its screen. Some won't ever be printed on paper; I send words to readers nowadays merely by pressing a few keys. But there's still an important place for books—unlike some of my fellow electronic text enthusiasts, I don't believe books will ever become obsolete. I hope to write more of them someday.

## *

POSTSCRIPT (SUMMER OF 2001)

What a difference a few more years made in computer technology! The desktop PC that was new in 1987 when I wrote my original essay, primitive by today's standards, is long gone; I've just acquired my third successive improved model. I said then that online communication was expensive (which it was, in the days when we paid by the minute for connections to host conferencing systems) but that I hoped someday all teenagers would have access to it. Now they can contact people all over the world, from schools and libraries if they lack computers at home, via the Internet—a development I then hadn't imagined.

There might even be a time, I said, when readers could exchange ideas with authors online; but I pictured that as a quite futuristic possibility. Only ten years later I opened my own Web site and began corresponding by e-mail with fans of my books in many regions of the United States, as well in other nations. As a direct result of this, I've at last been able to get most of my novels back into print.

But before that, there were other major changes in my life.

In the fall of 1987, shortly after my autobiographical essay went to press, my mother died. This loss was crushing for a while, although it was scarcely unexpected, since she was ninety years old and had serious medical problems. We had lived together all my life, except for a few years during the 1950s, and for most of that time she'd been more like a sister to me than a parent. I will never stop missing her company.

And there was another problem. I had chosen to share a home with my mother not only because of our closeness, but because she wanted a full-time companion and, ultimately, caregiver. Had I not been present she would have hired someone; thus I didn't object to the arrangement whereby her modest income—inherited from my grandmother, for whom she had cared in turn—supported both of us. After all, I had never craved a high-powered career or upscale lifestyle. Our assumption was that after she was gone I could live comfortably on my own inheritance. We didn't anticipate the extent to which it would be depleted by inflation.

It's just as well that we didn't, I suppose, because there was nothing different I could have done. After I stopped publishing I tried—and have since tried—to earn money at home; but the amounts have been small, and though I would have been free to take a job in the years immediately following Mother's death, there was no position for which I was qualified. My programming knowledge was by that time far too outdated to have value in the marketplace, and because of my lifelong typing-speed limitation I could not do office work. Moreover, I didn't have the physical stamina for a regular job; I'd always found commuting exhausting, and by this time there were often days when I hadn't the energy to go out—though I am always able to work at home at my desk.

So the immediate question was where I was going to spend the rest of my life. I owned the mobile home we'd been living in, but it was sited in a park where there was rent to pay; I knew that I must own my land, too, in order to make ends meet in the future. I couldn't afford property in the Portland area—and found that I didn't want to stay there in any case. For years I'd been virtually homebound, and had few local contacts; now I discovered that the distances I had to drive through traffic in order to get anywhere, even the main public library, were too great to make the effort seem worthwhile. Portland had changed. It wasn't the same place I'd so eagerly moved to, twenty years before. I felt I must make a new beginning.

My mobile home in Eugene

At this point came another of the astonishing coincidences that have shaped my life, and which, along with several other instances of fortunate timing, have made me wonder whether such synchronicities may be more than mere chance. Strangely, a trip from Portland to Eugene triggered both of them. Since the spring day in 1957 when I went to Eugene and made a sudden decision resulting in my coincidental entry into the computer programming field, I had been there only three times. But in April of 1988, I decided to drive down to Eugene again. I wasn't really sure it was where I wanted to live, although I had loved it during my brief stay in the early 1950s—and when I arrived, mobile home lots proved scarce and costly. I was about to give up the search. Then, through a casual inquiry, I discovered a subdivision of such lots involved in a bank foreclosure, the prices of which had been drastically reduced the day before. Realizing I must act fast, I bought one of them. By the next weekend they were all gone; if I had not picked that particular time to visit, I would never have found land within my means.

So all my early contacts with Eugene proved fateful—not to mention the fact that I've settled permanently here, and thus may, in due course, come to the end of my life in the hospital less than a block from where I lived that magical year when I was seventeen. How surprised I'd have been then to know that Eugene is where I'll grow old! Going through boxes of papers not long ago, I came across a house plan I drew in a high school homemaking class. We were required to design our dream homes. I labeled mine "Engdahl Home, Eugene, Oregon" although at that time I had never been to Oregon and had no reason to expect that I'd ever have occasion to see this particular city. I just picked it from a map. Prescience? Who can say?

Having my mobile home moved from Portland to Eugene proved to be quite an adventure. Actually it was easier (for me, anyway) than a regular move, since all the furniture moved with the house; I didn't have to pack anything that wasn't fragile. The double-wide home was split in two; though I moved the books from shelves to the floor, I have such a lot of them that their weight caused one half's hitch to break, and it got stuck overnight on the highway. I was already in Eugene by that time, wondering why only the bedroom side of my house had arrived. Eventually it was all put together, the only other snag being the requirement of Eugene's building inspectors that my sloping carport be built with strong enough timbers to support four feet of snow, although it rarely snows more than a few inches here and some years get none at all. The expense of this proved so great that I'd have been better off building a garage, which, if I'd realized I would be keeping my 1978 Chevrolet—now approaching "classic" status—for the rest of my life, I would have done. There were a few other lot-development choices I now regret, but on the whole, the move was a big success.

My cats, Hesper and Sunny, moved with me, of course. Hesper lived to be nearly nineteen, which for a cat is very old indeed. Sunny died much earlier, and I got Marigold, an orange tabby who now rules the house. Cats have always been important to me; I could never be happy without feline companionship.

With my cat Marigold, 1992

I love this place, although the site isn't as pleasant as when I first came. Then, wild geese flew low overhead, and over the back fence I saw trees between here and the river; I often sat in my screen porch and watched the sunset. Now those trees are gone and they have built a rock quarry bordered by huge berms of dirt that block the western view, and fill the porch with dust every time the wind blows. They are planning to widen the highway in back, which I don't welcome since it's only a short distance from my bedroom and is bound to create more dust and noise. But the trees in my yard have grown tall, and I can still see forested hills from my living room windows.

Eugene is just the right size city for me. It has everything, including a major university, yet it takes me only ten minutes to get downtown from the outskirts where I live—even less time to reach the main shopping mall. It has retained the natural beauty of its setting. And I'm active in community organizations in which, in a large metropolitan area, I could never have become involved. I've been on the board of the Friends of the Eugene Public Library since a few months after I arrived, and as a volunteer, I desktop-publish the Library's newsletter at home on my computer. I also produce a newsletter for the Alzheimer's Association, and I'm on the advisory council of the local RSVP (Retired Senior Volunteer Program), for which I've done various computer tasks.

Nevertheless, I live quietly, and am home most of the time, usually with the computer on (my latest enthusiasm is for selling things I no longer need on eBay and Half.com). It's the way of life that best suits me. I no longer drive to the nearby mountains or coast as I sometimes used to, partly because of my car's aging condition and partly because of my own. I have no specific medical problems, just ongoing depletion of my already-low energy level and, in recent years, chronic muscle pain. I lack both the funds and the stamina for travel, and were I to be miraculously provided with one, I would still be held back by the absence of the other. It's been nearly a decade since I even visited Portland.

Yet sitting at my computer, I come alive! I will never tire of the various pursuits it makes possible for me.

In 1989, to my great surprise, I was informed that I would receive the 1990 Phoenix Award for _Enchantress from the Stars._ This award is given annually by the Children's Literature Association, a national organization of scholars in the field, "from the perspective of time" to a book published twenty years prior to the award date. I received an expense-paid trip to San Diego to accept the award and speak at the organization's 1990 conference. Also in 1989, rack-size trade paperback editions of _Enchantress_ and _The Far Side of Evil_ were issued, which stayed in print for a while; but their covers didn't attract the right audience and they weren't widely distributed where teens would find them. It seemed that although my novels were still valued by critics, they were destined to remain inaccessible outside of children's rooms of public libraries.

Accepting the Phoenix Award in San Diego, 1990

In the late eighties and early nineties I was still doing the part-time online work for Connected Education that I described in my original essay; but the cost of that program—the same as on-campus tuition at New York's New School for Social Research—put it out of the reach of all but the most affluent students, and enrollment was never large. I did teach an online graduate course titled "Science Fiction and Space Age Mythology" in 1989, 1994, and 1995, which I greatly enjoyed; I wish there had been enough students for it to run every year that it was offered. The course dealt with popular culture science fiction, not the literary kind, and was focused largely on films. (An idea of its content is given in my Phoenix Award acceptance speech, "The Mythic Role of Space Fiction," a slightly revised version of which is now at my Web site.) In my opinion this new mythology is an extremely significant reflection of our culture's outlook on the universe. I have worked, off and on, on a nonfiction book on the subject, the scope of which keeps growing; but because it's not suitable for publication in today's commercial market, and I would not have the academic credentials to publish scholarly books even if there were a bigger demand for them, I have not given it high priority.

Connected Education was conducted via private text-based online conferencing systems rather than on the Internet, which in those days was just getting started. In 1996, when the public was becoming aware of the Web, I was asked to develop a site publicizing Connect Ed's offerings, and was provided with access to the Net. This was all new to me. I had been online for more than a decade but had never seen a Web page; I didn't even have Windows on my computer, and didn't have memory enough to run it—they also paid for me to install more memory and get a faster modem. But when I started to learn HTML, I found it fascinating. This is a wonderful new career! I thought. It's something I'm naturally fitted for!

Alas, it has not turned out that way. Web design is a highly competitive field in which a freelancer cannot find work without contacts or money for advertising. I haven't been able to get much, though I did create, and continue to maintain, one site for another author. By now, of course, there are thousands of Web designers looking for freelance jobs and plenty of high school and college students with as much capability as I have—and besides, today's software enables people to produce their own Web pages.

So as in the case of all my ventures, the financial return was not large. But the rewards of developing my personal Web site were another matter.

## *

Early in 1997, Connect Ed's program came to an end, and I was faced with having to pay for my own Internet account, an ongoing expense I could not justify unless it brought me income. I had some extra copies of my novels left, and since I saw that a few people had been searching for them through Usenet groups, it occurred to me that it might be possible to sell them. I didn't think many Internet users would have heard of them; still, I placed a notice saying they were available, and also opened a Web site where they were offered. As their original prices were out of line with current ones, I thought it would be legitimate to charge what a new book of equivalent format would cost—even a few dollars more, in the case of those that were scarce and had never been issued in paperback.

The response was overwhelming. It seemed I was better known than I thought, although often viewed as a bygone author (comments appeared in a couple of places expressing surprise that I was not dead!) I sold all the hardcovers—of which I had only a few—within a week or so, and the paperbacks in about three months. I could have charged much more; I later found that used book dealers were getting well over $100 apiece for some of the hardcover titles. If only I had bought more while they were still in print! I hadn't dreamed then, of course, that there might someday be a way to contact potential buyers.

My Internet presence was paying off, but more than that, I began to wonder if it might not lead to new hope of attracting reprint publishers. For much more gratifying than the sale of copies was the e-mail I received. I'd had no idea that my novels were so widely remembered.

Nothing in my experience, at any time in my life, has pleased (or astonished) me more than the discovery of how many adults had read my books during their childhood or teen years and felt that they had been influenced by them. Not only did people send e-mail, but in searching the Web for ways to publicize my site I came across comments made previously in public forums. In former years, I had received praise from reviewers and librarians, and had sometimes gotten letters from children assigned to write to authors in school, but only on rare occasions had I heard from readers who reacted personally to the novels. I was, and still am, deeply touched to know they've had lasting impact.

After I suggested at my site that Guest Book comments might help to get the books back in print, many were made. Then in 1998, Meisha Merlin—at that time a brand new press—stated at their own Web site that they would welcome e-mail about books people would like to see reprinted. I asked the people who had written to me to respond, and a lot of them did. Subsequently Meisha Merlin offered me a contract, and in 2000 my trilogy— _This Star Shall Abide, Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains,_ and _The Doors of the Universe—_ was published, with minor updating and a new Afterword, in an omnibus edition under the title _Children of the Star._ It was issued as adult science fiction. The Web has created a whole new way of reaching people who like books of a kind not interesting to large mass-market audiences.

Cover art by Tom Kidd for Meisha Merlin edition of Children of the Star

All that I said in 1987 about publishing categories is still true, and furthermore, large publishers have become increasingly oriented toward commercial success. Meisha Merlin specializes in reprinting science fiction and fantasy with good reviews and an established following, but not enough mass appeal to be wanted by those publishers. It has issued the work of many authors whose books had gone out of print. Without the Web and its new outlets, such as online bookseller, publisher and author sites, the marketing of such novels would not be possible; small presses cannot get books into many local stores, and there would be no way to publicize them sufficiently for conventional distribution. The wide reach of the Web is now changing the rules of the game.

Unlike some traditional publishers, small presses don't object to authors selling copies of their own books, and—since I get a bookseller's share of the cover price—I have earned far more per copy from offering _Children of the Star_ at my Web site than I earn in royalties. The book, which has stunning cover art by noted fantasy artist Tom Kidd, had a limited print-to-order hardcover edition for which both the publisher and I took advance orders, followed by a high-quality trade softcover edition that's available through normal book trade channels. The only problem is that few people discover it unless they're already familiar either with my books or with Meisha Merlin's. Catch-22: science fiction media didn't review the original editions because they were YA books, and now that it has been issued as adult, they won't review it because it's a reprint. There have been some enthusiastic reader reviews at Amazon.com, though (which unfortunately are seen only by people who search for me there). And I do what I can to publicize it myself via the Internet, something many authors are now doing; the days of expecting even a major publisher to handle all publicity are past. I hope that in time it will reach new readers, both older teens and adults besides those who've read it previously.

An even more exciting development is the publication of a new hardcover edition of _Enchantress from the Stars_ this spring by Walker and Company, with an introduction by Lois Lowry and a striking new jacket plus interior vignettes by artists Leo and Diane Dillon, who have won top awards in both the children's and the science fiction fields. Walker, which has a large and successful children's book department, contacted me last year about obtaining the rights to it for their Newbery Honor Roll series. Whether this resulted from the revival of interest in my work brought about by my Web presence, I don't know. But I'm delighted that _Enchantress_ is available to a new generation, and furthermore, I am glad it's been issued by a different publisher than the trilogy. They will both benefit from separate marketing; having my books side by side in the same catalog often misled people as to their intended readership.

This limited not only the trilogy's original audience, but that of _The Far Side of Evil,_ which in some ways I regret having made a sequel to _Enchantress from the Stars._ I wish I had used a different protagonist, for the two books, despite being set in the same SF "universe," are quite different from each other and don't always appeal to the same people. The younger fans of _Enchantress_ are often disappointed or even depressed by _Far Side,_ which is a darker story demanding greater maturity on the part of both heroine and reader. Of course, when I wrote _Far Side,_ I had no idea that _Enchantress_ would become a Newbery Honor Book and be given to as many pre-teen readers as it was, so I didn't foresee that problem. Nor did I realize under the marketing conditions prevailing at the time of its original publication, few of the older teen readers for whom _Far Side_ was intended would discover a sequel to a children's book. There have been recent changes in those conditions, however, and I am delighted that it, too, is to be published by Walker (in 2003) as a book for teens rather than children.

I still feel strongly about the theme of _Far Side._ I still believe that expansion into space is essential to our species' survival, and have a page at my Web site discussing my ideas about this in detail (which, I'm happy to see, gets even more visitors than my home page; there are links to it from many other space sites). The original edition of _Far Side_ is somewhat dated: not by the political situation it portrays, as some people assume—the setting was never current, since the planet in the story resembles Earth of the fifties rather than the seventies—but by the fact that it's now obvious that merely developing space travel capability does not necessarily cause a world to use that capability. And it's also obvious that nuclear war is not the only peril that exists during the Critical Stage. Thus in addition to the oversimplification of the book due to its having been written as young adult, some of its statements turned out to be oversimplified in terms of what we now know after thirty years of neglecting the space program. I've therefore done some minor revision in the new edition. All it says about the need to colonize space is, in my opinion, true— although there is a good deal more that needs saying about why a species able to expand beyond its home world fails to do so, and what its fate is likely to be if it continues to cling solely to that world. I suspect that an advanced interstellar civilization would know these things, and that Elana too would know them later in her life.

Unfortunately, I myself do not know the solution to such a species' apathy. I would like to write a sequel in which Elana visits a world where it's almost too late; but I haven't yet come up with an idea of how her people could save its inhabitants—any more than I know what will ultimately save our own world. Will Mars be a sufficient impetus for us? I thought so when I wrote _Journey Between Worlds,_ and I hope that book, which I've revised to fix portions that today seem sexist, will eventually be reprinted. It has new relevance now that there's public interest in Mars missions and active Mars enthusiasts are on the Web. For a while in the eighties I believed orbiting colonies would come sooner than the colonization of Mars; but despite their practicality, the concept has failed to win wide support. Mars inspires more emotion ... if traces of life were found there, might that not prove the crucial factor in getting us back on track? I pray that it will, and that it will happen soon.

Publicity photo, 1998

Space is not the only topic of interest to me. More and more, in recent years, I've turned to ideas about human potential, especially in the area of "paranormal" capacities such as those portrayed in _Enchantress from the Stars._ Unlike most people as strongly science-oriented as I am, I have always believed that ESP is real, and that it's been a much larger factor in human history than is recognized. I have never had psychic experiences myself; I'm much too "left-brained" for that—but I don't doubt that other people do, and that in the future we'll learn to control such powers. (Some of what I "made up" about them for _Enchantress_ has been validated by recent nonfiction.) And we'll also learn more about the relationship between mind and body. Human beings are far more than biological machines.

In this connection, and in accord with my usual tendency toward heretical views, I deplore the attitude fostered by our society's medical philosophy, which I believe is based on false premises. I've devoted a good deal of thought and research to this issue; I once taught a Connect Ed media studies course on "Technology and 21st Century Medicine," dealing with assumptions I feel will be abandoned. Not that I favor "natural" or "alternative" healing methods, with which I don't agree either—unlike some today, I have no doubts about the benefits of high technology. Twice since moving to Eugene I have had major surgery for life-threatening conditions (which were quickly and completely cured) and I am thankful that this was available; modern medicine is very good at essential surgical repairs. But in most other respects, it's apt to cause more problems than it solves, and worse, its conception of health has become a virtual religion to many, overshadowing all other scales of value. Some years ago I began an adult novel about a planet where the Medical Establishment had acquired dictatorial political power, which I still believe is a valid theme; but it lacked the key incidents needed to make a story. [Later on I did think of story events, and it became _Stewards of the Flame_.]

It was the same old stumbling block—I'm no more action-oriented in my imagination than in real life. I can write about thoughts and feelings of characters, but I don't visualize scenes in my mind as do most authors. Though I may know a desired plot outcome, I can't think of events to bring it about. And I can no more _force_ such material into consciousness than I could when I stopped producing fiction for Atheneum, despite my longing to do so and my enjoyment of the actual writing process. This is my greatest regret, and it is intensified by the frequent e-mails I receive that urge me to write another novel. People naturally believe that if I wanted to, I could. As if all I needed was encouragement! As if I hadn't been frustrated for the past twenty years and more, wishing that it would again become possible for me!

To be sure, novels like mine, with the possible exception of more about Elana, would probably not be publishable today even if I could write them. Meisha Merlin publishes reprints and continuations of series; traditional publishers of adult fiction want books with bestseller potential, a situation affecting many authors with far greater past success than I. And "young adult" in recent years has meant books suitable for average middle school kids, not advanced readers or older teens (although there are signs that the pendulum is swinging back again). But if I had an idea for a _story_ rather than a mere philosophical treatise—for readers of any age—I would not let lack of a publisher for it hold me back. I might even investigate electronic publishing, as I may in time for nonfiction; that's a growing technology that may transform the way writers' work is disseminated.

It's not my lack of energy that has kept me from writing more books. And it certainly isn't lack of motivation. In the past, I resigned myself to the fact that except during one mysteriously atypical long-ago period, the creation of fiction was just not among my talents. But now, I feel I'm letting down the fans I've so recently discovered I have—and there's no way to explain in a short e-mail reply that it isn't by choice. People assume that proven writing ability is all it takes to produce a novel. If only that were true!

Lately, I've begun to be aware that I have less time ahead than I used to have for future work. Since I never had much youthful vigor at any age—at least not in the physical sense—growing older hasn't changed my lifestyle; so it's a bit startling to realize that now, I really am well along in years. Perhaps this will produce the urgency needed to bring my nonfiction projects to fruition. But it can't change anything as far as new fiction is concerned. For that, I can only hope that someday the door to imaginative realms may once more open for me. It surprised me (and everyone who knew me) when it happened before . . . might I not, without warning, be surprised again?

Meanwhile, most of my past novels are back in print, in beautiful new editions. I know from the many e-mails I treasure that they've affected readers' lives. And that's much more enduring success than I ever anticipated.

Go to the Table of Contents

Looking Back from My Eighties

(2017)

This is a more detailed and in some respects more personal autobiography than the one that appears in Contemporary Authors, and in addition it tells what have done since the publication of that book in 2001. It does not, however repeat what I said there about the period covered by the earlier one, which focused on my work and what led to the writing of my Young Adult novels. That included little about my parents and childhood, and since I have no relatives to pass such information on to, if I don't record it now, when I am gone all record of my family background will be lost. And it seems to me that something about my parents' lives, unhappy though they often were, should be preserved, as well as the significant things about my own.

Important things have happened in my life since I wrote the earlier autobiography, some of them involving yet more of the remarkable coincidences that have shaped it during the past sixty years. Among other achievements, I have written four more novels. It is commonly said of older people that "life begins at forty," but in my case, not counting the accomplishments of my youth, my productive life began—or at any rate, resumed after a long pause—at seventy.

## *

I was born in Los Angeles on November 24, 1933, the only child of Amandus and Mildred Engdahl. During my childhood I did not realize how sadly mismatched they were, or how different our family was from that of most people. I knew I myself was different, as I didn't enjoy many of the things my age-mates did and never felt as if I belonged with them, in part—but only in part—because of my innate lack of physical energy. This, however, had nothing to do with my parents, who loved me more than they loved each other and did their best to provide a happy home. I never considered myself unhappy. My unwillingness to conform socially was simply part of my inborn personality.

Father, Amandus J. Engdahl, at age 6 and at age 50

I know very little about my father's background. He was born in Sundsvall, Sweden on May 26, 1881, and christened Heldor Amandus Emanuel. (He never used his first or third name and for some reason, as an adult, took the middle name Julian, so he was formally known as Amandus J. Engdahl—yet he was always called Jack.) At the time I knew him he remembered little or nothing about Sweden and never spoke of his childhood or his Swedish heritage. I learned my paternal grandparents' full names and dates only as an adult, from their grave marker and from records found on the Internet: John (Johan) Engdahl, 1858–1916, who was a tailor; and Emma Christina Petersson Engdahl, 1862–1931. They brought their family to America in 1888 and settled in Aberdeen, South Dakota.

My father had no education beyond grammar school and left home in his late teens. He remained in South Dakota at least until 1910, when according to census records he was living in Rapid City and selling pianos; sometime before 1920 he and his first wife moved to Seattle, where he sold automobiles. After relocating to Los Angeles he sold furniture and oil stocks, and by 1930 he had become a real estate salesman. He was a widower with an adult son when he met my mother. (Since this son was nearly thirty when I was born and had a daughter older than I was, I thought of him as an uncle rather than as a half-brother. I had little or no contact with him after 1950, and he died in 1978.) Ironically in view of my later choice of Oregon as a home, my father's parents had moved to a fruit farm near Salem before 1910, and were buried there; his sister was in Salem during my childhood, although I wasn't aware that she was still living when I myself came. Also, I learned recently from census records that he had a brother in the Portland area who was evidently estranged from the family, as my father always believed that he'd died in youth.

Grandfather, Charles Clifford Butler, 1903 and grandmother, Sarah Louise Butler, 1933

I know far more about my maternal grandparents, from my mother; although my grandmother lived with us most of the time until her death in 1965, she never talked to me about her past. She and my grandfather, Charles Clifford Butler (1863–1938), separated—but did not divorce—when my mother graduated from high school. He was born in Pelham, New Hampshire, a descendant of the town's first settler who built there in 1720. He became a hotel manager, for some years in Auburndale, Massachusetts, a suburb of Boston, where he managed the exclusive Woodland Park Hotel; and later as manager of several major hotels including the American and then the Chase in St. Louis, the William Penn in Pittsburgh, and the Langham in Los Angeles.

In his old age my grandfather was literally a miser; though he was wealthy, he lived alone in a hotel room and sent my grandmother barely enough to survive on. Shortly before his death, hearing that he was in poor health, his Eastern banker traveled to Los Angeles and got him to put his money into a trust with the income to go to my grandmother and the principal to be divided among their children upon her death. He died when I was four years old and my mother as well as my grandmother—and some of the time, my father—lived frugally on this money thereafter. I continued to live on it, except during the ten years I worked as a programmer, until 2002 when I began earning significant income from self-employment.

Very recently, through tracing my maternal grandmother's forebears at Ancestry.com, I discovered to my surprise that she was directly descended from two of the families who came to Plymouth on the Mayflower—James Chilton and his wife on her father's side, William and Susanna White on her mother's. She was born Sarah Louise Boutwell in Montague, Massachusetts, on July 30, 1963 and married my grandfather in 1885. Though she had no formal education, she did bookkeeping for the hotel he managed in Auburndale and she managed a summer hotel he leased on Heron Island in Maine; later in her life she worked in the Wellesley College library cataloging books. She moved to Los Angeles in 1928, living with—and financially supporting—my parents much of the time in the thirties and forties.

My grandmother was a reserved person and, according to my mother, formerly less sweet-tempered than she became after she developed dementia, which happened gradually during my teens. Mother, who continued to live on Grandma's income after divorcing my father, was her primary caregiver until she died at the age of 101; during her last years we also had a live-in housekeeper/companion (which was inexpensive in those days) as we never left her at home alone. She didn't require physical care beyond help in walking and bathing, and though totally confused in her mind about people, events and passage of time, she conversed normally and spent much of her time doing jigsaw puzzles.

Mother, Mildred Allen Butler, at age 13 and at age 29

My mother was born in Newton, Massachusetts **,** on May 23, 1897. She attended Soldan High School in St. Louis, then of high reputation, and Wellesley College; after graduation in 1918 she taught high school English in several small New England towns. In her late twenties, while a teacher in Marblehead, Massachusetts, she became ill with what was then called "nervous prostration" although there may be a less vague medical explanation today—she literally collapsed and was bedridden for some time, cared for by the woman in whose home she had been living. Upon recovery she left teaching, and following a year of graduate work at Columbia University, was hired as a Little Theater director, first in Richmond, Virginia and later in Portland, Oregon. Tragically, despite her highly successful theater productions she lost both jobs through no fault of her own and could find no work during the depression. She had no secretarial skills, nor could she teach again, having joined my grandmother in California, where college courses in Education were required for certification. I have often wondered what would have happened to her in midlife if it had not been for my grandfather's money.

Her marriage to my father—which took place on April 2, 1932—was also a tragedy. As he was much older than she and had physical problems, they did not share a bedroom except during a brief period near its beginning. As I child I was told this was because "Daddy snores," which was true, but not the whole story; and it didn't occur to me that it was an unusual arrangement (in that era movies were not allowed to portray even married couples in the same bed!) There had never been stronger emotion than affection between them—as it turned out, all he'd wanted was a homemaker. She married him because he'd shown the best of himself while courting her, and seemed to offer her security; she stayed because they became financially dependent on her mother and she was unwilling to leave him destitute. But in addition to their total lack of common interests, he was an embarrassment to her, not only because of his poor education, but because from the mid-1930s on he was an alcoholic: a tendency she had not previously suspected because he was a law-abiding man who did not buy liquor while Prohibition was in force.

I will say this for my father: he was honest, good-natured, and generous on the occasions when he had money (though too much of his earnings went toward liquor and cigarettes). An excellent salesman in some ways, he was limited by unwillingness to talk customers into purchases they couldn't afford. He successfully sold real estate when times were good, working on commission for a builder of tract homes, but often his drinking interfered. Eventually he obtained a broker's license; at that time independent real estate brokers often occupied small free-standing offices and for a while he had one, with his name painted on the exterior wall, a neon sign, and a chalkboard outside on which listings were posted. The trouble with such an office is that one can sit there alone all day without the appearance of a single customer. When this happened, it led to more drinking—he carried a flask—so it was a vicious circle. In the forties DUI laws were less strict than they are now and apparently he saw nothing wrong in driving after drinking; miraculously, he never had an accident.

My relationship with my father was an unhappy one for us both, though it wasn't something I gave much thought to during my childhood. Since he turned sixty when I was seven and did not have an intimate relationship with my mother, he seemed more like a grandfather than a father—someone present but not vital to the household. As a child I wasn't aware that it should be otherwise. My father would allow no mention of his drinking, and incredibly, I did not even know of it until I was fourteen years old, at which time my mother privately explained it to me. In our presence he drank only beer. He wasn't loud or violent when he came home drunk; he either went to sleep in his chair with the radio on full blast, or got silly. Previously, not knowing the cause of his dulled mentality in the evenings, I'd assumed that was just the way he was. I disliked his maudlin displays of fatherly affection for me—which ended once he realized that I wouldn't respond—and since I was a child who had no patience with anyone who appeared stupid, I had little with him. But he did not make any of the decisions that affected me; my mother was my sole source of parental guidance, so my inability to look up to him didn't seem to matter.

During my teen years, we had some open conflicts. Once I knew about his drinking I was more disturbed by his behavior; impaired mental functioning of any kind has always made me extremely nervous. Moreover, even when sober he understood nothing about me; he could not see why I wanted to go to college and become a teacher, as he thought being a secretary would be more sensible. He laughed at my interest in astronomy, telling me he didn't believe anything, such as scientific facts about distant stars, that couldn't be seen firsthand. (This may have been why, despite the latent intelligence he must have possessed, he had no interest in education and did not read.) He was disappointed that I couldn't play the piano well—lessons during my childhood were the one thing I undertook at his insistence—but placed no value on the skills in which I excelled. We had nothing to talk about and for the most part I avoided him, except during the brief lake vacations when I enjoyed the small boat he bought. There was also a short period when he got interested in photography and set up a darkroom in which I enthusiastically helped; since he had little aptitude for this, I now wonder if he did it in an attempt to spend time with me.

## *

Despite the fact that my father never earned much money, poverty was not among our family's problems, for I don't remember my earliest years, when my parents barely made ends meet, and later Grandma's trust income filled the gaps. When I was five, during one of his short successful periods, we moved to the Cheviot Hills area of West Los Angeles, where we lived comfortably, sometimes in a style that would now be considered affluent. It's hard to believe how inexpensive things were in those days. In 1940 we had a large home designed by my mother custom-built, its cost minimized by my father's contacts in the construction industry. (We were able to keep it less than two years, as my grandmother, who occupied the master suite and whose rent covered the mortgage, decided she wanted her own apartment.) There, until the start of World War II, we even had a live-in Japanese maid. Some years later my mother was dismayed to learn that this house, which we had sold for under $20,000, was by that time valued at $100,000—and now, according to estimates that can be found on the Web by googling specific addresses, it is currently worth over three million.

Portrait, age ten, 1943

During and after the war, we lived in a much smaller house, which my mother wasn't fond of but which I loved. (I've often wished I could go back and see it, but it was torn down in the early fifties to make way for the Santa Monica Freeway.) It had been built in the thirties by an architect who had put in what were then ultramodern features—it had a kitchen with red rubberized counter tops and two small built-in refrigerators; grass-cloth wallpaper in the living room; cork-covered walls in the den; and in my bedroom, twin beds with satin-upholstered head and side walls, plus a built-in art deco chest and dressing table. The garage in back had a large attached room, at first my playroom but later occupied by a cousin nine years older than I who lived with us for several years, followed by my grandmother when she became unable to live alone. There was a yard behind where during the war we had a vegetable garden and raised chickens, plus a large landscaped side yard overlooking the Pacific Electric railway ravine and Cheviot Hills beyond. Because the house was not actually in Cheviot Hills, my mother was denied the presidency of the Cheviot Hills Garden Club for which she had been slated, and this colored her attitude toward living literally on the other side of the tracks. I myself liked the open view and enjoyed hearing the occasional trains go by.

From this house I walked, crossing the tracks, to Overland Avenue Elementary School, which I had attended since kindergarten; once I'd finished there I was taken to and from school (even high school) in carpools, as there was no nearby public transportation. I was sent to a private school, the Westlake School for Girls, for the seventh and eighth grades, at my grandmother's expense, of course. She and my mother felt that I would adjust better socially there than at a large junior high, but it didn't work out. For the first time I was with classmates who could afford things I could not; we wore uniforms so clothes weren't a concern, but I remember in particular a zippered leather three-ring binder—then an expensive innovation—that I wanted badly. Some of these girls were the daughters of movie stars and I didn't find them congenial. Social events outside school would have been out of the question even if I had an interest in them, which I did not. My mother failed to foresee this, for she was unknowledgeable about the circles in which such people moved and had been impressed by the academic standing of the school, the small classes, and the beautiful campus.

After ninth grade at Emerson Junior High—the school where I took the science class that aroused my interest in space—I attended University High School in West Los Angeles. I don't recall feeling deprived during my high school years, though my best friend's father was a Studebaker dealer and I envied her the new car her family got every year and the steaks they often had for dinner (steak, then, was a luxury; our family ate roasts, which were cheap by comparison). But there weren't so many consumer goods to covet as there are now. Our furniture and household goods had been brought from the big house and we never needed more. We had a large console radio, and television was so new that it didn't occur to me to want a TV set, though I did want a portable radio for my room and was thrilled when I received one. I got most of the books I read from the library; paperbacks were just beginning to appear. I didn't have a lot of clothes, but in those days not many appropriate ones were made in my size. There were no shopping malls. We lacked nothing that I might have truly cared about.

## *

The end of my parents' marriage came several months before I graduated from high school. The previous year, my mother—knowing she would have neither a satisfactory home life nor any social life after I left for college—had started a community theater group. If my father objected initially, I never heard him say so; but he became deeply jealous of her new associations with people. Already feeling inadequate because of his personal and financial failures, he was faced with the fact that he could not meet her need for companionship and intellectual stimulation—a need that was incomprehensible to him since he had never experienced it himself. I don't know if he was consciously aware of this or not. In any case, he developed a notion that she was involved with someone, which was of course untrue; I suppose he was unable to conceive of friendship based solely on shared interests. I was in a position to know that there was no romance between my mother and the man he named—I'd often been present when they were doing theater work—and I tried to explain this to my father; but he said I was just a little girl who didn't know about such things. (This infuriated me, as I was sixteen and not so ignorant as he thought.) One night when drunk he became for the first time enraged and perhaps potentially violent. My mother had put up with a lot over the years, but she would not stand for that; the next morning she asked him to move out.

Portrait, age sixteen, 1950

Fortunately, this was one of his rare periods of financial success, so he was able to rent an apartment. I saw him only a few times afterward. The next year my mother got a temporary job directing a Little Theater production in Reno and used the opportunity for a quick divorce, after which she and my grandmother moved to Oregon, where she enrolled in the university to obtain a master's degree in Theater Arts. As it turned out, my father lived only a year longer, so people she met later probably assumed she was a widow. She never again spoke of her marriage except to me.

I was glad when my parents separated—I would have welcomed it sooner, and my father's groundless accusation against my mother, after all she had done for him, was the last straw. I never forgave him. During my first two years of college he wrote to me monthly (as he was past retirement age he received small Social Security checks for me until I was eighteen) and I dutifully, but not warmly, answered his letters, thankful when my own move to Oregon made it impossible for me to visit him. I cannot say that I grieved when, during the summer of 1952 while I was on the East Coast, he died.

Are these painful memories? Not really. They've been of no importance in my life, for I rarely thought about my father after he was gone. The only thing that saddens me is that in recent years I've become aware that I treated him badly; he desperately wanted me to love him, yet I didn't even pretend to. I don't agree with psychological theories that claim all children love both their parents and are hurt by estrangement; it simply wasn't true of me. But _he_ was hurt, and I'm less unbending than I was in youth and middle age. Moreover, speculation about my genetic inheritance suggests to me now that he was unfulfilled rather than lacking in innate capacity. So his life, no less than my mother's, was tragic; and I feel compassion for him that I now wish I'd felt earlier.

Readers may wonder whether my lack of an adequate father influenced my portrayal of the strong father figures in my novels. Perhaps it did to some extent, though the plots of the novels required such characters, apart from any personal impetus I may have had. But if there was compensation involved, it was only because by the time I wrote the novels in my thirties, I had read enough to imagine what a father should be. When I was young I didn't know what I'd lacked.

## *

It might naturally be assumed that the bad example of my parents' marriage was the reason why I myself never married, but that wasn't the case—though it did make me sure at an early age that I could not love anyone I didn't admire and with whom I shared no interests. Although in my _Contemporary Authors_ autobiography, I said this was fortunate because I might otherwise have plunged into a conventional life for which I wasn't suited, as a practical matter no occasion for that arose, as I never met any eligible men who might have attracted me. Unlike most girls of my generation I had no desire to marry just to _be_ married, and this would have been true even if my parents' marriage had been happy, since I hated housework and didn't find babies appealing. In my youth I occasionally daydreamed of someday falling in love—but when those daydreams included marriage the man I envisioned was affluent enough to pay for household help, and already had children of school age!

College graduation portrait, 1954

In real life, I never even dated. I wasn't interested in boys during my adolescence because they all seemed very immature and I had nothing in common with them (it would have been different if teenagers had had computers then). Nor did they ever show any interest in me, as I was both tall and heavy, bookish, and too reserved to mix easily. I suppose no one will believe that I didn't have at least an unconscious wish to be socially active, but I did not, even in college, where the situation proved to be similar. I had no desire to "fit in." What I'd have liked was a group of friends who sat around singing folk songs and discussing philosophy, but this being the 1950s, I never encountered anything of that sort, nor would I have shared the views common among young people a decade later.

When at twenty-three I began working as a programmer, my male co-workers—some of whom I did find attractive—were older and already married. In any case, the kind of social life they had, focused on sports, parties and drinking, was repellent to me. I was never fortunate enough to meet people with tastes compatible with mine. For this reason I've had no close women friends either except through correspondence. My mother was my best friend; once I was out of my teens we were more like sisters than mother and daughter, and I had no desire to spend time with anyone less congenial.

Not until middle age did I begin to feel sorry about what I had missed; by then I'd begun to wish for love and male companionship, though still not for an active social life or children. (Though it might be nice now to have adult children, assuming their lifestyle was compatible with mine.) But it wasn't a matter of regretting past choices. There had been no options open to me that would have made a difference.

## *

Since in my _Contemporary Authors_ autobiography I have described my early career in some detail, I won't repeat it here. My years of employment, first as a fourth-grade teacher and then much more successfully as a computer programmer and ultimately computer systems specialist, are far behind me now. I find it hard to believe that I was once an expert on the systems software of the SAGE Air Defense System and made trips to various locales to explain a modification of its design to Air Force officers; that seems to have happened in some other life—especially now that computer programming techniques are very different from those I knew. I recall it with nostalgia, for I loved programming and was considered exceptionally good at it. But when SAGE began to be phased out, I was ready to move on.

A friend once said, on hearing that I lived with my mother most of my adult life and eventually gave up my job to stay with her full time, that it was unfair of her to be so possessive—so I guess this needs clarification. My mother was not in the least possessive, nor was she in any way domineering; I lived with her by choice. I had my own apartment for a few years and found I didn't enjoy it—I not only missed her companionship, but disliked the smaller quarters and the housework involved—yet I wanted privacy and would not have been willing to share a home with anyone to whom I wasn't close. Living together when I was working, we could afford a better house and more household help than either of us could have alone. In fact, I bought the first house we owned after I became a programmer, which even had its own swimming pool; the deed was in my name, not hers, though several of our subsequent homes were owned jointly.

Mother, Mildred Butler Engdahl, 1972

Giving up my job to serve as her companion was entirely my idea. When upon my grandmother's death Mother received her inheritance, she decided to engage a live-in housekeeper who would be there while I was at work, for the one trace left of the nervous illness she'd had in youth was a phobia about being alone in a house. (She was aware that it wasn't rational; she told me that she didn't mind being by herself with me as an infant or with my grandmother who was senile, but she could not be comfortable totally alone at home for even a few hours.) She was then still physically well and active in the community although no longer doing little theater work, and I did not want a hired helper sharing our home and meals after it became unnecessary to have one for my grandmother. Moreover, I longed to move back to Oregon, where at that time there were no jobs for people with my then-advanced programming experience; and I was physically exhausted by full workdays in any case. I felt I'd rather have my mother support me than pay somebody else to be with her—and of course, it gave me time to write, which I wouldn't have had the energy to do while employed.

This proved to be one of the most fortunate decisions I ever made. As it turned out I would have lost my job anyway within a couple of years, for the company changed hands and senior programmers working on discontinued projects were laid off. I couldn't have found a position for which I was suited in an area I liked, and later I became physically unable to hold any outside job. One thing that really irritates me is when people who hear that I was homebound for years by responsibility to my mother say, or silently assume, that I "sacrificed so much" to stay with her. I didn't sacrifice anything; after all, she paid most of our household expenses for twenty years and I lived most of the years thereafter on the money she left me, much of which she would otherwise have spent on hiring someone. I was able to write my novels only because of the free time the arrangement gave me. And it was the lifestyle I preferred in any case.

Though it may seem odd that I was content with being so confined for twenty years in midlife, I really didn't mind it. I was fully occupied with writing, and later with programming my first home computer, and for awhile my mother, too, was writing books for teens; we didn't lack things to do. But we couldn't do all we had originally planned—first my illness, and then hers, prevented us from taking the trips we would have enjoyed. The long-term freedom to travel we'd anticipated didn't materialize.

Also, in the eighties I became increasingly concerned about money. Contrary to a common misconception, authors of books like mine do not receive much income from them; and in any case I was no longer publishing. I couldn't make the small mortgage payments I had while getting royalties from my books, yet at the same time, due to inflation, mother's income was no longer as ample as we'd expected it to be. We had a part-time housekeeper fewer and fewer mornings, and I couldn't leave the house alone even briefly except when someone was there; Mother was afraid that in an emergency—either hers, for she now had medical problems, or car trouble on my part—she'd be unable to contact me and would be left stranded (cell phones didn't exist in those days). There was no one else on whom she could call.

Moreover, I worried about Mother's health—she had cancer, fortunately painless but somewhat debilitating, for the last fourteen years of her life—and the possibility that she might eventually need nursing care I was physically unable to provide. I felt I should be earning income, yet there was no way to do it. Though I had hopes for profits from my first computer and was as skilled a programmer as ever, I began too late to succeed in marketing software for home users. Yet, despite much effort and frustration, I got no story ideas for more novels, and my style was unsuitable for the types of nonfiction that might have been salable.

Worst of all, to a greater extent than I admitted to myself at the time, I feared that Mother might ultimately suffer dementia as my grandmother had. I could not have endured that (nor could she; mental activity had always been of central importance to her, and her only recreation was reading). I don't know how we could have coped had it occurred.

## *

After her death my lifestyle didn't change, as I rarely had enough physical energy to leave the house for longer than it took to shop. My innate lack of energy has always been a problem. It's not the result of a diagnosed medical condition, though for several years in my thirties I was ill from malnutrition resulting from ill-advised weight loss. I was simply born with lower-than-normal energy, which has gradually decreased throughout my life. Even as a child I tired easily; I despised all active games because I couldn't conceive of not finding them pointlessly exhausting. I can remember how worn out I got doing simple things, such as climbing the hill to our cabin at my beloved Bass Lake. At age thirty I was depleted by sightseeing in Europe, to the point of collapsing on my bed in the early evening in tears arising from nervous exhaustion. And the programming job I enjoyed, combined with the necessary commuting, was so physically tiring that I could do nothing more than light reading after work. By middle age I couldn't go out for more than a few hours, and had a hard time explaining to publishers why I couldn't travel.

In Switzerland, 1964

I have always believed that this deficiency of energy is the result of something genetic that's not yet understood. I know what it is _not_. It is not low thyroid; I was tested for that repeatedly beginning in childhood. It is not because I'm heavy; losing weight, which I tried in my mid-thirties, was a disastrous mistake, as it left me with far less energy than before and I was forced to regain much of the weight deliberately to become functional again. It is not just psychological stress, although stress from time to time has made it worse, for my periods of contentment do not bring me physical stamina. People aren't all alike! Just as athletes have above-average energy, there are individuals at the opposite end of the curve—mere individual variation is not a disease.

In the summer of 2015 it was announced that research has identified a gene that causes food to be converted to fat rather than energy even when the body's need for energy has not been fully met—something scientists had "not suspected" previously. If I'd been asked I could have suggested this to them, as it has been precisely my own theory for the past fifty years. Unfortunately the discovery comes too late to do me any good, as it will be years before it leads to medical applications, and the search for them is focused on preventing obesity per se rather than on the more rationally-motivated goal of enabling people with low energy to function normally.

Conventional dogma would suggest that being heavy must have been a problem with major impact on my youth. On the contrary, my weight has not been troubling and I don't consider myself "overweight," a term implying deviation from some universal "correct" weight to which individual genetic factors aren't relevant. As is emphasized by the size-acceptance movement, "fat," "obese," and "heavy" are preferable words because they are descriptive rather than judgmental, although unfortunately our culture views them as derogatory. I have been fat since early childhood, though until my sixties I was well-proportioned. I'm discussing this issue here not because it was important to me, but because it wasn't, and I don't want people interested in my work to form a stereotypical picture of a "lonely frustrated fat person" in whom there was "a thin person wanting to come out." I have never wished to be thin, any more than I have wished to be blonde, athletic, musically talented, or anything else contrary to my inborn nature—except, of course, to be able to summon sufficient energy for a normal level of activity. For this alone I regret my genetic makeup, not for any effect it has had on my size.

Didn't the prejudice against fat people influence me? It would have, if I'd wanted the sort of social life most young people do; but since I did not, it wasn't relevant. Nor did it affect my career; though there is an appalling bias against hiring and/or promoting fat people in some fields, that wasn't true in programming. The only influence my weight had on me was positive: it caused me to distrust doctors' pronouncements as a child, so that I later perceived other fallacies of modern medicine that most people are emotionally incapable of recognizing. Also, it may have contributed to my general hatred of pressure to conform. I think I'd have had this anyway—I'm more of an intellectual rebel than a social one—but for a writer, from the literary if not the commercial standpoint, the more motivation leading to nonconformity the better.

But, readers will say, being fat is unhealthy! Yes and no. It's unhealthy if it results from overeating, but there are many fat people like myself who are not big eaters and whose size is genetically determined. It outrages me that medical studies purporting to prove that being fat is in itself unhealthy fail to isolate the variables, a basic requirement of science to which mere lip service is given. There has never been any evidence that fat causes poor health, only that it is statistically—but not invariably—associated with it; in some cases it may be an effect rather than the cause. And in at least a few of the others, failure to maintain one's allegedly-excess normal weight leads to ruinous health problems, as my own experience attests.

As I've said above, I tried losing weight—to my everlasting regret, in my mid-thirties I went against my better judgment and gave in to convention. This was the biggest mistake of my life. It required a near-starvation diet for me to lose even gradually; so my already-low energy decreased, half my hair fell out, and worst of all, my nervous system was damaged. I developed not only exhaustion, but spells of groundless panic that prevented me from leaving the house alone, a problem from which it took years to recover. The doctor I went to first was worse than useless; he thought I was lying about how little I ate and said I should lose fifty more pounds despite the destructive effects of losing the first fifty. I didn't return to him, but foolishly I went on losing because I didn't want it assumed that I couldn't stick to a diet. Some time later another doctor made the first intelligent remark I'd ever heard from the medical profession; he said, "You might live a few years longer if you lost more weight, but you're not living now."

That about sums it up. Since I'm well past eighty, it has been proven that being fat does not inevitably lead to early death; but even if it did, I would gladly give years off the end of my life to have had what should have been several of my prime years. I'm bitter about it because the illness began just at the time my first book was accepted and I was in no condition to enjoy its publication. What's more, those were the last years in which my mother was well enough to take the trips we had planned, and I wasn't able to; she had to stay home and put up with my physical debilitation and my uncharacteristic dependence on her. Thus I feel not only regret, but guilt, because I had known underneath that losing weight would be harmful to me. I'd had a similar but short illness nine years earlier, and had written it off as unrelated to a preceding minor weight loss when I should have taken the warning. Yet I'd ignored this experience and told myself that maybe the "health authorities" were right and my own instinct was wrong. It is never wise to disregard inner promptings about the needs of one's body.

Now that it's known that a specific gene causes food to be stored as fat instead of being used for energy, it should be obvious that in some people lack of sufficient food to maintain their natural weight will produce debilitating exhaustion; but I doubt that the medical establishment will put two and two together. Too much status—and too much weight-loss industry money—is invested in the doctrine that weight loss is universally desirable.

## *

Far more significant in my life than my physical condition have been the beliefs that are part of my overall orientation to the world, without which I would not be the person I am. Always, and especially since my thirties, I've lived a somewhat schizophrenic life (in the figurative sense of that term). To people I meet in person, I am seen as a rather standoffish middle-aged—and now elderly—spinster of unremarkable appearance who happens to have written some books for children. To fans of my novels, I am a Distinguished Author erroneously assumed to _look_ distinguished and to have a busy and fulfilling life among like-minded associates. Actually, I'm neither of these things; rather, I am torn between the stress of meeting the demands of daily living without sufficient physical energy to cope easily, and my absorption in the speculative ideas and opinions—especially, but by no means entirely, those connected with space—which have always been of primary importance to me.

At my desk, 1974

I don't know why I have always viewed the world from an outsider's perspective and have been more interested in humankind's long-term future than in current affairs. It's just the way I see things, as if I were an alien observer—perhaps because in youth I felt alienated from the typical concerns of my peers. In any case, the issues I care about are those that involve either timeless aspects of the human spirit, or human capabilities and technologies yet to be developed.

This includes powers of the mind now considered "paranormal" as well as technological advances. I have never doubted that humans have innate psi ability that is now operative mainly on an unconscious level, and this is strange considering that I have never seen any first-hand evidence that they do and my views were well-established before I knew of the scientific evidence obtained by parapsychologists. I certainly wasn't influenced by popular conceptions of the paranormal involving not only ESP, but communication with departed spirits—something for which there is no evidence that can't be explained by unconscious telepathy. These are two entirely separate issues that for some reason are conflated in the public mind. Belief in one does not mean belief in the other, and personally I can't conceive of any form of afterlife that involves contact with the one small planet on which a person's physical self once existed—nonphysical existence, in my opinion, implies unrestricted access to the larger universe.

In past centuries, long before physical space travel was considered possible, many people did believe that their spirits would observe the planets of other stars after death, a fact that has been almost forgotten. And even in modern times, some without any interest in the occult have believed they would be reincarnated on another planet. I believe this is an example of the inborn longing to reach other worlds that has been felt by humans throughout the ages and is shared by many individuals today. In my opinion it is an adaptive characteristic, one necessary to our species' future survival.

Readers may wonder how I happened to develop such strong convictions about the importance of space colonization. I have never known anyone personally who shared my interest in space—except my friend Rick Roberson, during our correspondence in the seventies while he was in high school and college—let alone my belief about its vital role in the future of humankind. I don't know how or why I developed this belief; it is a mystery to me. I didn't get it from reading, for I had it long before any books that I was aware of expressed similar ideas. In my published autobiography I told how I first became interested in space travel at the age of twelve and how, on the same day, I guessed fairly accurately that we would get to the moon within twenty-five years. Uncanny though that is, it's still more uncanny that I came to believe in the early fifties that human survival depends on continuous progress toward expansion of our civilization beyond our home world. This is a deep, almost spiritual, conviction for which I cannot account. There are many strong arguments for space colonization, but I encountered them only later, as corroboration of what I already felt sure of.

I can't remember the exact occasion on which I became aware of that belief. It must have been when I was about twenty, for I remember attempting to write a story about the settlement of Mars in 1953 or '54 (which, since it had no plot, never got beyond a few pages). I had read very little science fiction at that time, and though some portrayed colonies on the moon and planets, it did not suggest that space colonization is essential to the preservation of Earth. Yet I was fully convinced that it is by the fall of 1956, when I wrote the draft story around which I later built _The Far Side of Evil._ I suppose I was influenced by the general fears of atomic war that prevailed during the fifties; still, other people who worried about catastrophic war didn't believe that putting our energy into space expansion would prevent it. The space race with the Russians was yet to come, and I didn't foresee that. Even then, I looked at the issue from "outside in," from the viewpoint of hypothetical alien anthropologists, and perceived it as a universal principle. I still do. I feel like Cassandra when people argue that we should solve Earth's problems before moving into space, since to me that attitude seems tragically self-defeating.

In my opinion, there is a form of intuition, not yet understood—or by science, even suspected—whereby some individuals simply sense what is true about the universe. (This has long been acknowledged in the religious metaphor of "inspiration by God.") It seems to me that it is one aspect of "paranormal" perception and that all human knowledge, though developed and substantiated only through reason and scientific investigation, initially arises from this source in the same way that all genuine moral principles, as distinguished from cultural standards, are intuitively grasped. I have no way of determining whether my beliefs, or anyone's, come from such intuition. Certainly some are drawn from the collective unconscious, in the case of ideas already familiar to others. But I do know that what I believe about the need for space colonization was not derived from anything I read or was told.

Strangely, I have never had any desire to go into space myself, even apart from the fact that at no age would I have met the physical requirements. I have wished I could do something toward getting humankind established in space, but unlike most space enthusiasts, I have no personal interest in being there—or on any planet other than Earth. It's ironic that I feel this way, considering how I deplore the views of those who say Earth is enough for our species as a whole. Of course, if there were a situation where my going into space would help humankind to become established there, and I were physically able, I would be willing to do it; but it's inconceivable that there could be. There are more than enough well-qualified people who long to go.

Historian Roger Launius has suggested that space advocacy is a religion. In his paper he focuses mainly on comparisons to religion's outward expressions, but points out that "Like those espousing the immortality of the human soul among the world's great religions . . . statements of humanity's salvation through spaceflight are fundamentally statements of faith predicated on no knowledge whatsoever," as if this were a bad thing. He fails to recognize that religious faith of some kind is the sole alternative to despair (which is the theme of my novel _Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains_ ). I have faith that there's some sort of pattern in the universe that assures a future in space for at least some of our descendants, for I just can't believe humankind is doomed to extinction. If this is religion, then certainly it's basic to mine.

## *

Unlike Noren in _Children of the Star_ , I have never been without faith in truth beyond the scope of science. It may be asked, however, whether I too abandoned the religious teachings of my childhood. In a strange sense, perhaps I might be said to have done so, since I'm more "spiritual" by nature than my parents were. They did not adhere to any religion. My father was an adamant atheist who never entered a church except for weddings and funerals, a reaction against his strict Lutheran upbringing; my mother was an agnostic who attended Congregational churches occasionally with my grandmother, taking me along without suggesting that I should believe what I heard literally. It never occurred to me to do so. I felt instinctively that it must mean something my parents were missing, but not what churchgoers seemed to believe. From early childhood I conceived of God as a non-personal spirit rather than as a Being. (Readers of this autobiography will probably observe that I had no basis on which to imagine the highest power in the universe as a Father, a metaphor that could hardly have failed to strike me as inappropriate.) As I said in my _Contemporary Authors_ autobiography, in my teens I taught Sunday School in a neighborhood church for teaching experience, and gave it up when made me feel like a hypocrite.

But I was deeply drawn to religious ritual—during my Sunday School teaching period I sang in the choir—and as an adult, I kept wishing I could find a church with views in line with mine. (The Unitarian church, which I investigated, did not qualify because of its involvement in political action with which I disagreed.) During my illness, this impulse became stronger, and I began attending the Episcopal church, which had a tradition of intellectual tolerance and—at least at that time—a formal, poetic liturgy more obviously symbolic than the folksy way in which most denominations now attempt to address God. My _Contemporary Authors_ autobiography describes the reason for my sudden release from fear of hypocrisy: it dawned on me that I had made a good case in _Enchantress from the Stars_ for the view that metaphors are not "untrue." In all the hundreds of comments I have received on that book over the years, and all the praise that has been bestowed on it, I've never once seen any indication that its unplanned applicability to religion has been recognized—not even after I pointed it out in the essay.

With my mother, 1981

It has been frustrating to me that people don't grasp the validity of metaphor. My own mother didn't; it was the one area in which we couldn't communicate, a gulf that troubled me more and more as time went on. I joined the church, and she joined with me; only later did I learn that she did it entirely for my sake during my illness and had not been convinced by my explanation of why I could stand up and say the Creed. To her, as to most people, a thing was either literally true or it was false. She wasn't willing to discuss religion in her old age, even when she was dying, nor did she believe in any form of afterlife; she was astonished when I tried to tell her that I did. She couldn't see on what grounds I could base such a belief. To me it was, and is, merely a matter of its being obvious that the struggle of living would be wasted effort if it led nowhere—a fact that has nothing to do either with the traditional concept of "heaven" or with fear of extinction. I don't pretend to know what comes after death, but I don't doubt that something does. Since we can't know, we create metaphors, for this and other deep truths—that is why they exist. It's more realistic, I think, than blind denial of everything beyond human understanding.

I attended church for only a few years in midlife, and have never felt any moral obligation to do so; religion, for me, is not about morality. I view its ritual as no more—and no less—than a connection to the Unknowable. I said all this in _Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains_ and _The Doors of the Universe,_ and I think it came across to some people, as I've received email about the trilogy from clergy and seminary students of several faiths. But the average reader thinks the story is about "a false religion" and doesn't take it seriously.

Since I'm being frank about my religion, perhaps I should comment on my political views. I have never been very interested in politics because I take a long view of human history rather than focusing on immediate details. I do think it matters who wins elections; one side is always the lesser of evils, and I vote accordingly—without enthusiasm, since I generally agree with part of a party's platform and dislike the rest of it. I refrain from public political statements because I don't want to antagonize readers who disagree with my views and who might therefore be distracted from what I say about space. In my opinion, expansion into space is the only issue of the twenty-first century with long-range importance to humankind—if we make a major commitment to it, we will thereby eliminate Earth's other pressing problems, and if we don't, no amount of political action can do so. I feel rage and frustration whenever I hear the assertion that we should solve our problems on this planet before trying to go beyond, since I believe they're inherently impossible to solve while we're confined to a world we've outgrown.

That said, there are things to which I'm obviously opposed, such as all forms of dictatorship, both of the left and of the right; and I believe a free society is worth fighting for when its existence or its people's safety is threatened. I support the freedom of individuals to make personal decisions, including those concerning control over their own bodies. I oppose government restriction of scientific research, in principle as well as for practical reasons; but I also oppose the adoption of official views on scientific or medical issues—that is no more justifiable than the adoption of an official religion. And it is a matter of increasing concern today, when both these fields rely heavily, too heavily, on government money.

Most significantly, I strongly disagree with radical environmentalism, because I believe that for the short term, environmental problems can be solved by science without reducing humankind's standard of living, and for the long term, there is no solution to them other than space colonization. I feel that the environmentalist agenda may do damage by creating the false impression that we can preserve the environment on Earth indefinitely without expanding into space. Precisely because keeping Earth livable is important, I oppose any measure that would lead to delay in the development of extraterrestrial resources.

## *

If I could go back and change just one past decision, my intentional loss of weight in my thirties would be what I'd choose to undo. Apart from that, my decisions have proved fortunate even when at the time, some of them didn't seem to work out well. Most turning points in my life, however, have been brought about not by major decisions but by the strange coincidences—synchronicities, I should say—that have shaped it. The first of these, described in my _Contemporary Authors_ autobiography, was the chain of events on a single day that resulted in my switch from the education field to computer programming. The second major one, my coincidental opportunity to purchase the property in Eugene where I lived for nearly thirty years, is explained in the Postscript section of that autobiography. But there have been others less dramatic that have had an equally significant impact.

One of these was that the daughter of my mother's brother died shortly before my grandmother did, rather than shortly after; if it had been the other way around, a third of my grandfather's money would have gone to this unmarried young cousin's estate and my mother's share wouldn't have been sufficient to outlast her lifetime. Another was that I developed an illness requiring major surgery six months after becoming eligible for Medicare rather than half a year earlier, saving me from the loss of so much money that I wouldn't have had enough left to live on for more than a few years. Still another was the fact that Walker approached me about obtaining the rights to _Enchantress from the Stars_ , then long out of print, just a few weeks before I was contacted by a paperback publisher to which I would surely have sold them; had I done so, its republication wouldn't have provided the respite from financial problems that I gained from its 2001 hardcover and subsidiary rights sales. Fate is very strange.

My most recent cats Gandalf the White and Dumbledore, 2002

The year I was seventy fate favored me even more significantly, for I obtained freelance work lasting for a decade that transformed the latter part of my life. And like so many previous events that proved vital to my financial survival, that came about by chance. There is not enough freelance editing work that can be done entirely via the Internet to be found by applying for it; one must have contacts. (At least that was true until very recently, when the advent of independent publishing technology created a need for editors by indie authors.) I had no idea that any such work existed. But when in 2001 Gale asked me to update my autobiography and I scanned the original version for republication, it developed that they had a need for scanning—then a manual process—and proofreading of other authors' autobiographies. Though this was a small amount of work, it put me in a position to be called upon in 2004 when they needed freelance copyeditors for several special-topic encyclopedias. And it placed my name in the database used by Greenhaven Press to find editors for its nonfiction anthology series.

To begin with I worked on encyclopedia projects as well as on the selection of material for anthologies intended for high schools. Later I edited only anthologies, sometimes eight or more per year. For the first time since leaving my programming job I was earning enough to live on—and more, as it enabled me to have needed improvements made to my house and save what I then believed would be sufficient to support me in old age.

Furthermore, it was interesting work; I greatly enjoyed searching for articles suitable to reprint and organizing them into books that presented both sides of the controversial issues I was assigned to cover. During the ten years I did this, I produced fifty-nine such books. They are listed at Amazon under my name, but readers should be aware that I wrote only their introductions and they do not reveal my own opinions about the subjects with which they deal—the aim of the various series was to be impartial.

Unfortunately, in 2014 most of these series were discontinued and I have edited no more since then. But the income I earned between the ages of seventy and eighty made a huge difference in my financial well-being.

## *

Much more than the opportunity to earn money happened during my seventies. Ironically, after twenty-five years of failing to produce a new novel, I began writing fiction again. Just when I was fully occupied with the freelance editing work, I got a story idea that enabled me to do so, and I found myself having to split my attention between them.

As I have often said, it's a mystery where my story ideas come from—I know only that I can't generate them intentionally. I had written the initial chapters of _Stewards of the Flame_ in 1989–1990, inspired by my strong feelings about the fallacies underlying today's medical policies; but as with all my abortive attempts to produce another novel, I was stymied by inability to think of events for a plot. I realized that the characters might need to establish a new colony, but I couldn't figure out a way for them to get aboard a starship and in any case, I knew escape from their world would be a mere narrative rather than a story with dramatic structure. A story has to build up to something unanticipated, some change in what its characters expect from the beginning. I definitely did not want them to bring down the government they opposed, not only because it would impossible under the premise I'd established, but because that would destroy the point I was trying to make—that the tyrannical policies of the medical authorities were solidly supported by the voters who had been indoctrinated with their views, something that I fear is well on the way to happening in our own society.

Moreover, it began to dawn on me that the protagonists' horror at the prospect of eventually being placed in stasis after death, though emotionally valid in terms of what it symbolized, was not really reasonable in the sense of a personal fear—since they knew the bodies in stasis were dead, why should they fear it more than any other form of burial? And if they weren't afraid of it, there wouldn't be any ongoing suspense. So with regret, I put the draft chapters away and forgot about them. Then, fifteen years later, I came across them one day while reorganizing my hard disk, and I was suddenly struck with the idea of the characters having to go into stasis to save themselves when the starship ran low on life support. That was the climax I had tried in vain to imagine. That's how it always is with me; my stories have taken years to emerge, except in the case of additional novels about the same characters and/or world. And always I start with the ending, becoming able to think of most earlier incidents only through leading up to it.

I have found, both in discussing _Stewards_ with people and from reviews, that not everyone considers its ending ironic. Comments have ranged from "a flat ending" to "the best ending I've ever read." This seems to depend on whether or not a reader views the concept of putting dead bodies in stasis as horrible. To me, it is so horrifying that I was amazed to discover that not everyone feels that way. About half the book's readers share my feeling. The other half react with "So what?" and of course to them, the idea that the people aboard the ship would resist going into stasis isn't believable; there are even some who think permanent stasis is a good idea. (After all, there are people today who arrange for their bodies to be frozen after death under the impression—in my opinion, sadly mistaken—that a human being is no more than a potentially-repairable biological machine.) Such readers don't grasp the extent to which the characters' overcoming of their fear crystallizes the story's theme. So _Stewards_ is controversial not only in the sense that many readers disagree with its view of medical care, which I expected, but because some don't feel its conclusion is dramatic. A novelist who doesn't write formula fiction cannot please everyone.

My desk and computers, 2005

I suppose a major factor in the emergence of my unconscious inspiration for this book and those that followed was that I had given up trying to write a novel and had no current financial need, so I was no longer under pressure to come up with one. Significantly, I started writing _Stewards_ just a few months after producing my first anthology, while I was busy with copyediting work; it was written in my spare time. For years I'd had nothing but spare time, and then everything came at once, perhaps because I'd stopped feeling that I ought to be more productive.

Another factor in the long lapse between my YA novels and the Flame duologies was that after the first few years when Atheneum was eager for another from me, I knew that nothing I could write would be publishable. The YA market had changed; books for older, "special" readers were no longer selling because libraries were short of funds, and I had never been able to write stories that could be enjoyed by average middle-school kids. Nor had my books ever fit the adult science fiction market. Being neither action/adventure fiction nor "far out" in terms of the culture and concepts portrayed, my novels generally appeal more to people who don't normally read science fiction than to avid sci-fi fans. Yet outside the YA field, fiction about the future on other worlds cannot be published as mainstream.

I knew while writing _Stewards of the Flame_ that it would not meet the requirements of any major science fiction publisher. It didn't contain enough fast action to have mass-market potential. I thought it might be acceptable to the small press Meisha Merlin, which had just published _Children of the Star,_ and in fact Meisha Merlin considered it for over a year, leading me to believe that they did want it. But then they went out of business, and though I had originally been inspired to write the book without hope of publication, I found that I couldn't bear not to see it in print. And so I decided to publish it myself.

At that time, self-publication was just becoming respectable and distinguishable from vanity publication. I now had professional copyediting experience and had done desktop publishing as a volunteer for several organizations, so I was able produce the files to be printed, including the cover, myself. It cost me only a license fee for the stock art and a small setup fee to the print-on-demand company (plus the much larger expense of review copies and advertising). And it was far more enjoyable for me than having to argue with an editor over wording and wait the year or more that normally passes between acceptance by a publisher and a book's appearance.

While writing _Stewards of the Flame_ I didn't plan to write a sequel. Though I later discovered that its ending is generally viewed as a cliff-hanger, to me it was an open one on which elaboration would be anticlimactic. I thought most readers would assume the starship got to the new world, and that any who didn't would still feel the point had been made and the story was over (although now that I know not everyone got the point, I see why the book seems incomplete). By the time it was finished, however, I was absorbed with the characters and wanted to know what happened to them in the new colony. As _Promise of the Flame_ was a continuation I was able to write a good deal of it without knowing how it would end, which I cannot do with a new situation. And because I always get my inspiration for the details of the action while writing rather than ahead of time, the incident with which _Promise_ ends came to me soon enough so that I didn't get stalled. The book was well underway before _Stewards_ was published.

Once the founding of Maclairn was complete I assumed there was nothing left to say. I added the Epilogue because I realized that readers would wonder whether the colony was ever discovered, but I didn't expect to write a novel about that era. I sometimes thought about how Earth would respond to the discovery, though, and the character of Terry Radnor began to form in my mind. And suddenly, one night nearly three years after publication of _Promise_ , the idea of his encountering a Service ship hit me, and I knew that would make a new story. It's the main events a novel requires that I can't produce by trying; they rise unbidden from my unconscious mind when I least expect them.

Although one of my main goals in writing _Stewards of the Flame_ had been to explore how humankind might begin to acquire the psi powers possessed by Elana and her people, I'd had no intention of ever including the Service and Earth in the same book—after all, one of the main features of _Enchantress_ is that it doesn't say in what era of our history Elana lives. But bringing the Service into a series specifically about our future does not affect that; I envision the Service as virtually eternal, observing countless new civilizations and bringing them into the Federation as they mature, so whether Elana herself met our ancestors or our descendants is irrelevant to the issue of our first contact with it. I believe, as I've said in the Afterword to _Defender of the Flame_ and elsewhere, that the criterion for maturity, in the sense of a world's eligibility for contact, is its people's acquisition of the psi powers essential to meeting more advanced species as equals. So it was obvious to me that the Service would view Maclairn as the key to Earth's readiness, and I wondered why it had taken so long for that to occur to me.

It was also obvious that it would be crucial for them to hide their existence from the Maclairnans until the time was ripe, and that an accidental meeting with Terry would thus put him in a very difficult position. Writing the part of the book leading up to that meeting, and the meeting itself, went quickly. But though I knew they would send him to Ciencia, I had little idea of what would happen to him there until I'd reached that point. I did know how the book would end, however, and wrote the last chapter long before the middle; it served as my inspiration to press ahead when I was having trouble filling in what preceded it.

Surprisingly, one of the main themes of the story—the unfathomable process of fate, of synchronicity—was not clear in my conscious mind until it was finished. I'm aware that some readers assume the providential "coincidences" in my novels, such as the finding of the alien sphere in _Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains_ , are merely deus ex machina events I put in because I couldn't think of any other way to get my characters out of trouble—especially considering my admitted difficulty in thinking up action. But in reality, these are deliberate. Even when not consciously planned, they are a reflection of my underlying belief. One of the greatest mysteries of life is that significant occurrences often do involve synchronicity. Its role in individual destiny, and in the course of events that depend on an individual being at the right place at the right time to change history, is the focus of the Rising Flame duology whether or not any readers consider that aspect of the plot valid.

Again, when I published _Defender_ I had no thought of writing another book. I felt Terry's later life of travel between the stars could be left to readers' imagination. But my own belief that something like the Service exists in the universe made me speculate on how extraterrestrials would—will—go about contacting Earth once we develop sufficient psi capability. They certainly won't appear in UFOs and announce themselves. I realized that if there were a colony like Maclairn it would be an ideal site for the initial contact, and the aliens' existence would be kept secret until such time as Maclairn's other secrets could be safely revealed. They had told Terry that first contact was several generations away, and it dawned on me that assuming he lived as long as the Maclairnans did, he would still be alive by then. What irony, when he'd been exiled to prevent disclosure of the secret, for him to live into the era when keeping it wouldn't have been necessary—he was born just a little too soon. Or was he? It struck me that since Terry already knew about them, he would be by far the best person to take part in the revelation. He could be allowed and even encouraged to return to Maclairn, which neither he or I had thought could ever happen. Once I saw that, all of _Herald of the Flame_ grew from it; I could hardly wait to let readers know that Terry got back to Maclairn.

As usual, I wrote a draft of the last chapters before the rest of the book, and more than in any of the others, I made up earlier events as I went along—yet it took less time to write than the others. The one incident I had trouble thinking of was the climactic encounter with Quaid. I knew there would have to be one, that it would result in Jon's death and Terry's imprisonment, and that it must in some way bring about a conclusive defeat of Maclairn's enemies; but I had no more notion of what could accomplish this than he did. The entire book on both sides of those two middle chapters was finished before I figured it out.

Readers may wonder why, having always said I write about space because I want to express ideas about its importance, I chose to write four novels in a row that focus on psi instead. Well, I had been writing about space for nearly forty years and had reached the age where I was increasingly aware that I don't have a great deal of time left to present my thoughts about other issues I feel are significant. Moreover, space colonization is a premise of the two Flame duologies in a larger sense than the plot preventing them from being set on Earth. To turn to "inner space" before making sufficient effort to spread into outer space, as some people advocate, would be self-defeating, since colonization of space is vital to our long-term survival. Thus at the stage where advanced psi powers become widespread, there will necessarily be many colonized worlds; the mere assumption that the two developments are inseparable is in line with what I've been saying all along.

Will I ever write another novel? Probably not; I have no ideas for a new story at present and since I'm already over eighty and all my past ones (apart from the continuation of existing series) have taken many years to incubate, there really isn't enough time left to be inspired for another. Still, I have surprised myself before, and the question of whether there is a market for it no longer matters.

Today, of course, self-publishing—now known as indie publishing—is common, and is sometimes chosen even by authors of traditionally-published bestsellers. At the time _Stewards_ came out there wasn't any way independent authors could sell ebook editions other than at personal websites; now there are distributors, and hundreds of thousands of indie ebooks are offered by major retailers. I do not expect to make any significant amount of money from my indie books, even though I have also produced indie ebook editions—and some paperback editions—of my out-of-print YA novels. Unlike indie romance novels, they sell very few copies, and since every year there are thousands more indie books for readers to choose from, the potential readership of any particular one can only decline. I publish not as a business, but because I want my books to be accessible.

## *

Accessibility, however, does not mean that a book will become known to people likely to enjoy it; there are far too many now for anyone to browse through listings or online ads. So it's almost impossible to find new readers, especially for books that are not typical of their genre and appeal more to those who aren't looking for that genre than to those that are. Since indie editions are rarely bought by libraries, they are most likely to be discovered through searching online for the author by name, and I suppose few search for me when it's assumed that I stopped writing decades ago. Yet as time goes on I am more and more frustrated by the fact that comparatively few adult fans of _Enchantress from the Stars_ , or even of _Children of the Star_ , have read my adult novels. Before I wrote those novels, I often received email from admirers of my previous books begging me to write another, but when I did, I received little feedback; and not enough copies, even of the inexpensive ebook editions, have been sold to account for more than a fraction of the people who praised my earlier ones. If the Flame duologies hadn't gotten good reviews I'd assume they simply aren't praiseworthy, but many reviewers' enthusiastic comments suggest otherwise.

Original cover of Stewards of the Flame

To be sure, _Stewards of the Flame i_ s controversial and deals with issues that make some readers uncomfortable; I never expected everyone to like it. But enough reviewers did to make me wonder why it's had so little notice from my existing fans. It saddens me that so few have read the later books, since many people like, or would like, the later ones better. It's common for indie authors to make the ebook edition of the first novel in a series free, once sequels have appeared, in order to attract readers to them; but in my case this strategy has backfired—evidently the majority of those who downloaded _Stewards_ were turned away by it. Yet the three later books don't deal with the medical issues, and they also have more action of the kind expected in science fiction. They don't depend on having read the first book, and in fact I now refer to the Flame novels as two duologies rather than a series because the third and fourth books are an entirely separate story with different characters, set two centuries later than the first two. Moreover, as they deal with several of the main themes of _Enchantress from the Stars_ and _The Far Side of Evil_ —not only with the development of psi powers, but with our world's place in the universe—adults who liked the ideas expressed in those books would therefore find them interesting. But so far, my efforts to get readers to start with the second duology haven't been successful.

A major advantage of indie publication is that once included in an online ebook and/or print-on-demand catalog, a book will stay there permanently, even after the author's death, whereas traditionally-published books go out of print, sometimes after mere months of availability. This is important to me, especially since few if any libraries buy indie books. I like to think that although few people find mine in any given year, over time their audience will grow. Still, it will never approach that of _Enchantress from the Stars_ , and though I'm pleased, of course, by the praise _Enchantress_ has received, no author wants to be known chiefly for his or her first novel, let alone for a children's book to the exclusion of books directed to mature readers.

In this case, my regret is complicated by the common misinterpretation of the story (see my essay "Reflections on _Enchantress from the Stars_ " ). I wish I had foreseen it and had done more to counteract it in the book itself. This is the main reason why I'm not entirely comfortable with its being better known than my other novels, but there are others. For one, it's the only book of mine that contains some wording that I wish I could revise. It was the first to be published, and I was inexperienced; I would phrase a few things differently today. Moreover, quite a bit of awkward wording was introduced by the copyeditor. When I got the galleys I was dismayed by the amount of changing that had been done; there were even cuts that lacked smooth transitions in the surrounding text. I insisted that some of the altered wording be restored, but in those days manuscripts weren't edited electronically and the resetting of type was expensive, so many changes that bothered me remained—although in the 2018 Bloomsbury edition I've been able to make some minor wording revisions, in addition to replacing outdated generic masculine nouns and pronouns with gender-neutral language.

This was an ongoing battle with Atheneum. I was always happy to revise if asked to, but I don't believe that a publisher has any right to make changes in a manuscript, other than correction of errors, without the author's approval prior to typesetting. Finally, with _This Star Shall Abide,_ I declined to sign the contract for weeks until they agreed to a clause giving me such approval, which I couldn't have gotten if _Enchantress_ hadn't won the Newbery Honor. Even after that I often had to argue over changes; if my original wording wasn't clear, they would fix it according to what they guessed I'd meant to say instead of asking me, and the guess wasn't always right. It's a relief to be free of such problems with indie publishing.

The ability to publish independently would, in principle, give me the opportunity to write more nonfiction. For some years I intended to write a book on Space Age Mythology, more comprehensive than my online series on that subject; but I didn't have the energy to work much on something never likely to be seen. The chances of my being able to get a scholarly nonfiction book into print were then virtually nil. Selling adult nonfiction to a publisher requires professional credentials and/or advanced academic degrees, and I am nobody as far as academia is concerned. Neither good writing nor worthwhile content is sufficient for acceptance of such a book. Even popular nonfiction is usually impossible for someone without impressive background (i.e. something that can be said in a jacket blurb other than "science fiction author") to publish traditionally, and unfortunately that applies to the marketing of indie nonfiction as well. Very few copies of my updated edition of _The Planet-Girded Suns_ have been sold despite my having changed the subtitle to include the word "exoplanets," which is now a hot topic.

Moreover, anything not written by a scientist that's connected to the subject of interstellar travel and/or extraterrestrial life is put in the sensational category; it's expected to be about UFOs. And in fact, there is a good deal I'd need to say about what attitudes toward UFOs signify, which would please neither believers nor skeptics; thus the potential market for such a book is small. Then too, I lack the ability to present ideas in a way appealing to mass audiences; my style is generally considered "too abstract."

However, the overriding reason why I haven't written the book I once planned is that to do so, I'd have to include my ideas on the role of so-called "paranormal" communication in the development and dissemination of mythology (all mythology, not just Space Age mythology), which aren't in accord with the views of professional mythologists. I am unwilling to publish these ideas apart from my informal essays unless they are going to be taken seriously, not classed with pseudoscience and relegated to the New Age Metaphysics section of catalogs—and given my lack of scientific standing, that is beyond the realm of possibility. I had hoped that before I got to old to write, parapsychology would gain more respect than it has acquired so far; but time is running out and despite the strong experimental evidence for ESP obtained in the past few decades, most professionals outside the field remain unwilling to accept its reality.

## *

Looking back on my life, I don't see much that could have been different, unsatisfactory as it may seem by the standard of what most people want from theirs. A lot of my time was wasted, but there wasn't much more I could have accomplished if it hadn't been. I wish I'd been able to write more books. I wish more people had read those I did write after _Enchantress from the Stars_. When I began publishing I imagined that my novels might have some influence on young people's view of space policy, but that, of course, was too much to hope for. All in all, though, I have no significant regrets.

P   
ublicity photo, 2007

But recently there has been still another unanticipated change in my life, this one unwelcome. I had expected to stay in my home indefinitely, except perhaps for a short final illness. My mother took care of my grandmother in old age, and I took care of my mother in turn; she worried about what I'd do when my time came to need care. I didn't anticipate needing it. A friend lived with me for several years to help out; it was difficult when she died, but although by that time I was using a walker, I thought I could get along with no more aid than someone to do the cleaning and run errands. I did not expect to become totally disabled.

Then in the fall of 2016, around the time of my eighty-third birthday, I began feeling weaker and realized that I might soon have to use a wheelchair most of the time rather than just on the rare occasions when I left the house. But a wheelchair large enough for me would not go through the narrow interior doors of my mobile home. Moreover, managing there by myself had become just too tiring, considering my lifelong lack of energy, and I began to rethink my intention to stay in it. Reluctantly I decided to sell it and move to a small retirement apartment where I would have independence, yet be provided with meals and housekeeping services.

During the last two weeks before the planned move, I became progressively weaker, to a much greater extent than could be explained by my age alone. I could barely get around even with my walker; I felt as if my legs would collapse. And finally one night they did collapse—I had to call the paramedics to pick me up off the floor and take me to the hospital. I have not stood up since, except for a few seconds at a time, with help, to transfer between my bed and a wheelchair. It took three months in rehab to gain even that much mobility.

The cause of the sudden weakness of my legs remains unknown. It was expected that I would improve with physical therapy; when I didn't, I was sent to a neurologist who found simply that the nerve conduction in my legs is not presently normal. When it became apparent that I wasn't going to recover I changed my reservation from independent living to assisted living at the facility where I originally planned to go, for once again, chance had aided me—through a casual conversation with a neighbor about his own family months before, I had heard of one that's not only attractive and well-run, but less expensive than the others in my area. Thus my savings will last longer than they otherwise would; nevertheless, if I live as long as my mother did I'll run out of money after all. My brief period of apparent financial security was too good to last.

My home, which I left unexpectedly and never returned to, was a mess for months after my departure. I had to hire strangers to locate and pack what I could little keep, attempting to describe it all by email (I'm hard of hearing and use my phone only for texting). Since this was a small fraction of what was in the house and I couldn't remember where I'd put every single item, some things I didn't want were brought to me and some I did want were given away. I expected to sell most of my belongings, as I had vintage hardwood furniture and many other nice things, but there proved to be no way to do that in my absence; there wasn't enough of high value to attract an estate sale organizer. Eventually I donated everything, mostly to the thrift shop run by the cat rescue organization that has given a good home to the aging cat I got from them fifteen years ago. My large collection of books went to the Friends of the Library, for which I'd done volunteer work in the past—this wasn't as great a loss as it might seem, as print has become too hard on my eyes and I've been reading only on my computer and Kindle for several years.

After long delays getting the house cleaned out so that it could be put on the market, and more delays finding a buyer, it was finally sold. I now live in a single room in a residential care facility, leaving it only via a wheelchair for meals, showers, and occasional medical appointments. While it's a nice room with a view of trees from the window, I admit that the prospect of spending the rest of my life in it seems rather daunting.

But I still have my desktop computer, with which I spent most of my time at home anyway, and the small laptop I use when reclining. And I still have access to the Internet. So I'm in as close touch with the world as I ever was. That is the miracle of computer technology—no one today need be isolated, regardless of physical disability. Computers have been my salvation from youth, when by chance I was hired as a programmer, until old age, when without them my productive life would end. What has happened to me is not the disaster it would have been a generation ago. I was born in the right era, and in that, as with so many of my life's turning points, I have been favored by fate.

Go to the Table of Contents

Bibliography of My Published Writing

Note: Ad Stellae Books is my personal imprint, not a publishing company.

YOUNG ADULT NOVELS

_Enchantress from the Stars_. Atheneum, 1970 (hc); Aladdin, 1972 (pb); Gollancz, 1974 (UK hc); Collier, 1989 (pb); Troll, 1993 (book club pb); Walker, 2001 (hc); Scholastic, 2002 (book club pb); Firebird, 2003 (pb); Bloomsbury, 2018 (pb). Translations: Hayakawa, 1981 (Japanese pb); Arena, 2002 (German hc); Diagonal del Grupo 62, 2002 (Spanish hc); Editorial Empuries, 2002 (Catalan hc); Cite, 2003 (Chinese pb); Circulo de Leitores. 2003 (Portuguese hc); Tammi 2003 (Finnish hc); CBT, 2006 (German pb); Yanshuf, 2007 (Hebrew hc); BIR, 2008 (Korean pb). Ebook: Walker, 2001 (pdf, pdb); Bloomsbury, 2018 (mobi, epub). Audiobook: Recorded Books, 2006.

_Journey Between Worlds_. Atheneum, 1970, (hc); Putnam (updated edition), 2006 (hc); Firebird, 2007 (pb); SRA/McGraw Hill, 2008 (book club pb). Ebooks: Firebird, 2009 (mobi, epub); Ad Stellae Books, 2015 (mobi, epub, pdf).

_The Far Side of Evil._ Atheneum, 1971 (hc); Aladdin, 1973 (pb); Gollancz , 1975 (UK hc); Collier, 1989 (pb); Walker (updated edition), 2003 (hc); Firebird, 2005 (pb). Ebook: Ad Stellae Books, 2011 (mobi, epub, pdf).

_This Star Shall Abide_. Atheneum, 1972 (hc); Aladdin, 1979 (pb); Gollancz, 1973 (UK hc, as Heritage of the Star), 1973; Puffin, 1976 (UK pb, as Heritage of the Star); Ad Stellae Books, 2010 (pb) Ebook: Ad Stellae Books, 2008 (mobi); 2010 (epub, pdf). Audiobook: ACX, 2013.

_Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains_. Hardcover: Atheneum, 1973 (hc). Ebook: Ad Stellae Books, 2008 (mobi); 2010 (epub, pdf).

_The Doors of the Universe_. Hardcover: Atheneum, 1981 (hc). Ebook: Ad Stellae Books, 2008 (mobi); 2010 (epub, pdf).

ADULT NOVELS

_Children of the Star_ (omnibus edition of _This Star Shall Abide, Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains_ , and T _he Doors of the Universe_ , which were previously published as YA). Meisha Merlin, 2000 (hc and pb); Ad Stellae Books, 2012 (pb). Ebook: Ad Stellae Books, 2013 (mobi, epub, pdf).

_Stewards of the Flame_. BookSurge, 2007 (pb); Ad Stellae Books, 2009 (pb). Ebook: Ad Stellae Books, 2008 (mobi); 2010 (epub, pdf).

_Promise of the Flame._ Ad Stellae Books, 2009 (pb). Ebook: Ad Stellae Books, 2008 (mobi); 2010 (epub, pdf).

_Defender of the Flame._ Ad Stellae Books, 2013 pb). Ebook: Ad Stellae Books, 2013 (mobi, epub, pdf).

_Herald of the Flame_. Ad Stellae Books, 2014 (pb). Ebook: Ad Stellae Books, 2014 (mobi, epub, pdf).

_The Hidden Flame_. (omnibus edition of _Stewards of the Flame_ and _Promise of the Flame._ ) Ad Stellae Books, 2016. Ebook: Ad Stellae Books, 2015 (mobi); 2017 (epub, pdf).

_The Rising Flame_. (omnibus edition of _Defender of the Flame_ and _Herald of the Flame.)_ Ad Stellae Books, 2016. Ebook: Ad Stellae Books, 2015 (mobi, epub, pdf).

NONFICTION

_The Planet-Girded Suns: Man's View of Other Solar System_ s. Atheneum, 1974 (hc); Ad Stellae Books (updated edition with subtitle T _he History of Human Thought About Extrasolar Worlds_ ), 2012; with subtitle _The Long History of Belief in Exoplanets_ , 2016. Ebook: Ad Stellae Books, 2012, 2016 (mobi, epub, pdf).

_Reflections on Enchantress from the Stars and Other Essays_. Ebook: Ad Stellae Books, 2019 (mobi, epub, pdf).

_From This Green Earth: Essays on Looking Outward_. Ebook: Ad Stellae Books, 2019 (mobi, epub, pdf).

_The Future of Being Human and Other Essays._ Ebook: Ad Stellae Books, 2020 (mobi, epub, pdf).

_Reflections on the Future: Collected Essays_. Ebook: Ad Stellae Books, 2017 (Original combined version of most essays in the above three essay collections, which replace it.)

_The Subnuclear Zoo: New Discoveries in High Energy Physics_ (with Rick Roberson). Atheneum, 1977 (hc).

_Tool for Tomorrow: New Knowledge About Genes_ (with Rick Roberson). Atheneum, 1979 (hc).

_Our World is Earth_ (picture book). Atheneum, 1979 (hc).

ANTHOLOGIES EDITED

_Universe Ahead: Stories of the Future_ (with Rick Roberson). Atheneum, 1975 (hc).

_Anywhere, Anywhen: Stories of Tomorrow._ Atheneum, 1976 (hc). Ebook: Ad Stellae Books (expanded edition), 2011 (mobi, epub, pdf).

SHORT STORIES

"The Beckoning Trail" (with Rick Roberson). In _Universe Ahead_ , 1975 and _Anywhere, Anywhen_ (expanded edition), 2011.

"Timescape" (with my mother Mildred Butler). In _Anywhere, Anywhen_ , 1976 and _Anywhere, Anywhen_ (expanded edition), 2011.

"Tranquility" (written in 1957). In _Anywhere, Anywhen_ (expanded edition), 2011.

PREVIOUSLY PUBLISHED ESSAYS

"The Changing Role of Science Fiction in Children's Literature," _Horn Book,_ October 1971, pp. 449-455. Reprinted in _Children and Literature_ , Virginia Haviland, ed., Lothrop, Lee & Shepard, 1973.

"Why Write for Today's Teenagers," Horn Book, June 1972, pp. 249-254. Reprinted in _Crosscurrents of Criticism_ , Paul Heins, ed., The Horn Book, 1977.

"Perspective on the Future: The Quest of Space Age Young People," _School Media Quarterly_ , Fall 1972, pp. 27-35. Reprinted in Only Connect: Readings on Children's Literature, S. Egoff, G.T. Stubbs & L.F. Ashley, eds., Oxford University Press, 1980.

"Do Teenage Novels Fill a Need?," English Journal, February 1975, pp. 48-52. Reprinted in _Young Adult Literature in the Seventies,_ Jana Varlejs, ed., Scarecrow Press, 1978.

"An Observer of Planet Earth," in _Something About the Author Autobiography Series_ , Vol. 5, Gale Publishing, 1988. pp. 89-110.

"The Mythic Role of Space Fiction," in _The Phoenix Award of the Children's Literature Association 1990-1994_ , Alethea Helbig and Agnes Perkins, eds., Scarecrow Press, 1996. Also in _Work and Play in Children's Literature,_ Susan R. Gannon and Ruth Anne Thompson, eds., Children's Literature Association, 1991 and in J _ournal of Social and Biological Structures_ , Vol. 13 (1990), pp. 289-295.

"The Evolutionary Significance of the Metanormal" (book review essay), _Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems_ , Vol. 16 (1993), pp. 503-513.

"Autobiography: Sylvia Louise Engdahl," in _Something About the Author,_ Vol. 122, Gale, 2001, pp. 35-54. Also in Contemporary Authors, Vol. 195, Gale, 2002, pp. 82-105. (An updated version of "An Observer of Planet Earth," listed above.)

"Space Race," in _Americans at War: Society, Culture and the Homefront,_ John P. Resch, ed., Vol. 4, Macmillan Reference, 2004, pp. 180-183.

Foreword to ebook edition of _Twice Queen of France: Anne of Brittany_ by Mildred Allen Butler, Ad Stellae Books, 2011.

"Confronting the Universe in the Twenty-First Century," in _The Planet-Girded Suns_ (updated edition), Ad Stellae Books, 2012 and in _The Space Review_ , July 23, 2012.

"Space Colonization, Faith, and Pascal's Wager," in _The Space Review_ , July 3, 2017.

ANTHOLOGIES PRODUCED AS A FREELANCE EDITOR

The following anthologies of articles from various sources were textbooks sold to school and libraries, which I compiled to the publisher's specifications. I wrote only their introductory essays. The aim was to offer an unbiased presentation of both sides of controversial issues, so they do not reveal my own views on these subjects.

Perspectives on Modern World History series:

_The John F. Kennedy Assassination._ Greenhaven, 2010.

_The Apollo 11 Moon Landing._ Greenhaven, 2011.

_The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki._ Greenhaven, 2011.

_The Women's Liberation Movement. Greenhaven,_ 2012.

T _he Building of the Panama Canal._ Greenhaven, 2012.

_Prohibition_. Greenhaven, 2012.

_The Challenger Disaster._ Greenhaven, 2013.

_The Bolshevik Revolution._ Greenhaven, 2013.

Issues on Trial series:

_Religious Liberty._ Greenhaven, 2007.

_Free Speech._ Greenhaven, 2007.

_Medical Rights._ Greenhaven, 2008.

_Right to Private Property_. Greenhaven, 2009.

_War on Drugs_. Greenhaven, 2009.

_Intellectual Property Rights_. Greenhaven, 2009.

_Cybercrime_. Greenhaven, 2009.

_Animal Welfare_. Greenhaven, 2010.

_Mental Health_. Greenhaven, 2010.

_War_. Greenhaven, 2010.

_Taxation_. Greenhaven, 2010.

_Welfare._ Greenhaven, 2011.

Constitutional Amendments series:

_Amendment XIV: Equal Protection_. Greenhaven, 2009.

_Amendments XVIII and XXI: Prohibition and Repeal_. Greenhaven, 2009.

_Amendment XXVI: Lowering the Voting Age._ Greenhaven, 2009.

_Amendment XXV: Presidential Disability and Succession._ Greenhaven, 2010.

Current Controversies series:

_Online Social Networking_. Greenhaven, 2007.

_Blogs._ Greenhaven, 2008.

_Domestic Wiretapping._ Greenhaven, 2008.

_Prescription Drugs_. Greenhaven, 2008.

_Vaccines._ Greenhaven, 2008.

_Assisted Suicide._ Greenhaven, 2008.

_Prisons._ Greenhaven, 2009.

_Forensic Technology._ Greenhaven, 2010.

_The Elderly_. Greenhaven, 2011.

_Patriotism._ Greenhaven, 2011.

_Espionage and Intelligence._ Greenhaven, 2012.

_Alternative Therapies_. Greenhaven, 2012.

_Internet Activism_. Greenhaven, 2013. .

_Mobile Apps_. Greenhaven, 2014.

_Military Families._ Greenhaven, 2014.

_Prescription Drugs_ (revised). Greenhaven, 2014.

Contemporary Issues Companion series:

_Extraterrestrial Life._ Greenhaven, 2005.

_Genetic Engineering_. Greenhaven, 2006.

_Cloning._ Greenhaven, 2006.

_Euthanasia._ Greenhaven, 2006.

_Artificial Intelligence_. Greenhaven, 2007.

Perspectives on Diseases and Disorders series:

_Meningitis._ Greenhaven, 2010.

_Fibromyalgia._ Greenhaven, 2010.

_Sleep Disorders._ Greenhaven, 2011.

_Chronic Fatigue Syndrome._ Greenhaven, 2011.

_Lou Gehrig's Disease._ Greenhaven, 2012.

_Dissociative Disorders_. Greenhaven, 2012.

_Neurodegenerative Disorders._ Greenhaven, 2013.

_Dementia_. Greenhaven, 2013.

Teen Rights and Freedoms series:

_Free Press._ Greenhaven, 2011.

_Electronic Devices_. Greenhaven, 2012.

_Driving_. Greenhaven, 2014.

Opposing Viewpoints series:

_Obesity._ Greenhaven, 2014.

_Scientific Research._ Greenhaven, 2015.

_Energy Alternatives_. Greenhaven, 2015.

About the Author

Sylvia Engdahl is the author of ten science fiction novels. Six of them are Young Adult books that are also enjoyed by adults, all of which were originally published by Atheneum and have been republished, in both hardcover and paperback, by different publishers in the twenty-first century. The one for which she is best known, Enchantress from the Stars, was a Newbery Honor book in 1971, winner of the 1990 Phoenix Award of the Children's Literature Association, and a finalist for the 2002 Book Sense Book of the Year in the Rediscovery category. The omnibus edition of her trilogy Children of the Star was issued as adult science fiction.

Her four most recent novels, the Hidden Flame duology and the Rising Flame duology, are not YA books and are not appropriate for middle-school readers, but will be enjoyed by the many adult fans of her work. In addition, she has issued an updated and expanded edition of her nonfiction book The Planet-Girded Suns: The Long History of Belief in Exoplanets (first published by Atheneum in 1974 with a different subtitle) as well as several ebooks of her essays.

Between 1957 and 1967 Engdahl was a computer programmer and Computer Systems Specialist for the SAGE Air Defense System. From her home in Eugene, Oregon, she has recently worked as a freelance editor of nonfiction anthologies for high schools. Now retired, she welcomes visitors to her website www.sylviaengdahl.com, which contains many of her essays and other commentary.

CURRENTLY AVAILABLE EDITIONS OF SYLVIA ENGDAHL'S BOOKS

Click on the title to see the book description, reviews, and purchase links. All are available in inexpensive ebook editions. Starred titles have no paperback editions.

YOUNG ADULT NOVELS

Enchantress from the Stars

Journey Between Worlds

The Far Side of Evil

CHILDREN OF THE STAR TRILOGY

(YA, reissued as adult)

This Star Shall Abide (Book 1)

Beyond the Tomorrow Mountains (Book 2) *

The Doors of the Universe (Book 3) *

Children of the Star (Omnibus)

HIDDEN FLAME DUOLOGY

Stewards of the Flame (Book 1)

Promise of the Flame (Book 2)

The Hidden Flame (Omnibus)

RISING FLAME DUOLOGY

Defender of the Flame (Book 1)

Herald of the Flame (Book 2)

The Rising Flame (Omnibus)

YA ANTHOLOGY (editor)

Anywhere, Anywhen: Stories of Tomorrow *

NONFICTION

The Planet-Girded Suns: The Long History of Belief in Exoplanets

Reflections on Enchantress from the Stars and Other Essays (Collected Essays Vol. 1) *

From This Green Earth: Essays on Looking Outward (Collected Essays Vol. 2) *

The Future of Being Human and Other Essays (Collected Essays Vol. 3) *

