attitudes of the man who wrote them.) But they don't work well as predicting machines, because the world is changing too rapidly.

The world today, for instance, needs engineers desperately. There a lot of jobs that the Nation would like to get done that can't even be started; not enough engineers available.

Fifty years ago the engineering student was a sort of Second Class Citizen of the college campus. Today the Liberal Arts are fighting for a come-back, the pendulum having swung considerably too far in the other direction.

So science-fiction has a very real function to the teen-agers; it presents varying ideas of what the world in which he will live his adult life will be interested in.

This is 1953. My son will graduate in 1955. The period of his peak earning power should be when he's about forty to sixty—about 1970, say, to 1990. With the progress being made in understanding of health and physical vigor, it's apt to run beyond 2000 A.D., however.

Anyone want to bet that people will be living in [Pg. 10]the same general circumstances then? That the same general social and cultural and material standards will apply?

[Pg. 10]

I have a hunch that the history books are a poor way of planning a life today—and that science-fiction comes a lot closer.

There's another thing about science-fiction yarns that is quite conspicuous; it's so difficult to pick out the villains. It might have made quite a change in history if the ballads and tales of the old days had been a little less sure of who the villains were. Read the standard boy's literature of forty years ago; tales of Crusaders who were always right, and Saracens who were always wrong. (The same Saracens who taught the Christians to respect the philosophy of the Greeks, and introduced them to the basic ideas of straight, self-disciplined thinking!)

Life's much simpler in a thatched cottage than in a dome on the airless Moon, easier to understand when the Villains are all pure black-hearted villains, and the Heroes are all pure White Souled Heroes. Just look how simple history is compared with science-fiction! It's simple—but is it good?

These early science-fiction tales explored the Universe; they were probings, speculations, as to where we could go. What we could do.

They had a sweep and reach and exuberance 

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