And that is how it was with me and science fiction. When I first fell in love, I did not know that the creature sweated and snored. I just loved, and dreamed.
It is now clear that that first infatuated fantasy was very wrong in detail. I had the magnolious notion that there was some secret skill to writing science fiction. All sf writers had learned it, I supposed. Once I had acquired it, it would always be there, like riding a bicycle, so that writing the second story would be easier than the first, and the third easier than the second…It isn’t that way at all. Barring a few monkey tricks, some of which I learned with great effort and then had to unteach myself with even more, it is as hard for me to write today as it was when I was twelve. I would like to think that the end product is by some standard better, but the act of producing it has not become effortless with time. There is more drudgery than I had expected. There is a hell of a lot more frustrating boredom. But there is something else that I had not anticipated, and that is that I need it. This drudgery, this frustration, this tedium of staring at a typewriter and wishing I knew which key to hit next—this miraculous, liberating sensation of lightness and joy, when, once in a great while, it comes out almost as it should—I need it to live on.
Is spending one’s life writing science fiction rewarding?
Why, sure. In all the ways I have said and many more. But that doesn’t have much to do with it. You don’t love a person just because she rewards you. The person is rewarding because you love her. So it is with me and science fiction. For the gifts she has given me I am truly grateful. But I loved her on sight, giftless, and it looks as if I’ll go on doing it as long as I live.
Red Bank, New Jersey
1977
75 Who, as it happens, had also followed me as editor of Super Science Stories twenty-five years earlier.
76 That year I wrote “The Gold at the Starbow’s End,” “Shaffery Among the Immortals,” a large part of Man Plus, and about a dozen smaller pieces…very close to the best year’s production I had ever had in my life.