A lot of your bad science fiction is written by boys who… they were just bad the whole track, but they weren’t very bad. The guys who really write the good stuff, and so forth, boy were they horrible!
What are you laughing about?
Yeah-yeah. I never wrote any science fiction myself. People think I’ve written it. That’s right. It doesn’t classify as science fiction.
There’s ‘One Was Stubborn’. There’s a story which you would be vastly amused about in this class. It appeared in Astounding Stories, many years ago – probably 1940. ‘One Was Stubborn’. It is a civilization which was… it isn’t space opera, see? It’s usually about civilizations, things like that. It was a story about a civilization which was buckling under the terrific agreement on the subject of Christian Science. It was just caving in on it. But there was one guy who didn’t believe in Christian Science. And it’s his fate at the end of the story. It’s called ‘One Was Stubborn’ – a terrific application of what we’re doing right this minute.
It’s fascinating.
And uh… there was a story called ‘Final Blackout’. Actually it was a political commentary and a character study of an officer, that’s all it was. It’s laid right here on Earth, and a very short time into the future. A lot of these other things.
Once in a great while I’d write something that had to do with that. You take the UMS stories, the Ole Doc Methuselah stories and so forth – straight off the record. No fiction to them really. They’re hopped up; that’s about all.