The Playboy Panel: 1984 and Beyond

Panelists

Poul Anderson, who abandoned a promising career in physics to become a science-fiction writer of wry humor and incisive intellect, has authored some 20 books (including two prize winners: a mystery novel, Perish by the Sword, and an s-f novelette, The Longest Voyage), and 200 shorter works of literary criticism, criminology, science fact and fiction.

Isaac Asimov, ranked among the doyens of science fiction for 25 years, divides his considerable energies between an associate professorship in biochemistry at Boston University and prolific authorship of s-f novels and definitive texts on mathematics, astronomy, anatomy, geography, mythology, biology, chemistry, theology and nuclear physics.

James Blish, a Manhattan public-relations counselor with a scholarly knowledge of music, medicine and zoology, is the multifacile author of whodunits, westerns, historical novels, literary criticism, poetry, TV scripts and some 90 science-fiction works, including A Case of Conscience, named the best s-f novel of 1958.

Ray Bradbury has received wider public and critical acclaim than any other writer of science fiction. A weaver of poetic parables (The Martian Chronicles) and grotesque fantasy (The Illustrated Man,) he has also authored screenplays (Moby Dick) and evocative nostalgia (Dandelion Wine). One celebrated novel (Fahrenheit 451) and 11 of his haunting short stories have appeared in Playboy.

Algis Budrys, at 32, is already considered one of the most skillful stylists in the science-fiction genre. He has been nominated for six national s-f awards while pursuing parallel careers as editor-in-chief of Regency Books, a paperback publisher, and as a free-lance writer on popular science, cars and political PR.

Arthur C. Clarke is a prophetic pioneer in the exploration of space as a subject for imaginative fiction (Earthlight) and knowledgeable nonfiction (Prelude to Space.) He is also chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, and the author of a provocative Playboy series on the future of science and society.

Robert A. Heinlein, widely esteemed as the dean of American science fiction, has amassed many awards in 20 years of visionary voyages into man's future (The Green Hills of Earth, The Puppet Masters). He has also authored movie, radio and TV scripts, and writes prolifically in the popular-science, mystery, editorial and technical fields.

Frederik Pohl, a former meteorologist, authors' agent and advertising copywriter, was the long-time collaborator of the late C. M. Kornbluth, with whom he wrote The Space Merchants, an acknowledged classic of prophetic satire. He is the editor of Galaxy magazine and solo author of many short stories, including the eerie Punch (Playboy, June 1961) and 46 books on s-f, history and biography.

Rod Serling is the gifted creator, executive producer and occasional writer of The Twilight Zone, CBS' long-running series of imaginative excursions into the world of fantasy and science fiction. He is also the Emmy-winning playwright of Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight, and has participated in a previous Playboy Panel, "TV's Problems and Prospects."

Theodore Sturgeon, a sometime bulldozer driver, hotel manager and promotion writer, has devoted most of his professional career to first-rate fantasy and science fiction. The sensitive scrutiny of love, profane and perverse -- explored in such tales as Some of Your Blood and Venus Plus X, on themes ranging from vampirism to bisexuality -- is his literary forte.

William Tenn has earned his living as a TV actor, market researcher, croupier and tropical-fish pathologist; but his principal rewards have accrued from his skill as an s-f satirist of lethal wit and ironic iconoclasm. Among his many sardonic stories of future refinements in man's inhumanity to man: Null-P, Child's Play.

A. E. Van Vogt is the Canadian-born creator of Slan, a recognized s-f classic on the theme of Homo superior; and a veteran specialist in epic melodramas of intergalactic adventure undertoned with political satire. He is also a lay psychologist and the author of The Violent Man, a non-s-f novel exploring the origins of Red China's warmongering psychology.

[Q] Playboy: When man took his first step into space on October 4, 1957 -- a date which future encyclopedists may well rank above October 12, 1492 in the history of the Earth -- there were perhaps four groups of people who were not astonished: the Russian scientists who launched Sputnik I, their chagrined counterparts at Cape Canaveral, their respective governments, and some quarter-million regular readers of science fiction. To the practitioners of this longmaligned literary form -- traditionally dismissed as pulp fiction and juvenile-escapist literature -- this epochal event came as a vindication of their life's work and vision, which, in the tradition of the remarkable science fantasies of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, had already prophesied a startling number of the major and minor facts of modern life. While these facts, along with public recognition, have since caught up with these visions of things to come -- from Moon shots and communications satellites to color television and the electric toothbrush -- these "wizards of a small planet," as one writer called them, have kept their prophetic gaze fixed on the horizon, and today ponder the possibilities and probabilities of George Orwell's 1984, of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and of still other worlds and times as yet unrealized. The general public, meanwhile, as s-f writer-editor Anthony Boucher wrote in an article for Playboy in May 1958, "is beginning to look at us and wonder how much else we may know" about the world of the future. Astronaut John Glenn observed recently that "if we use our opportunity wisely, another decade of progress will produce a civilization so far beyond our present experience that it cannot yet be conceived in detail even by the most visionary minds." Well, gentlemen, you have all been eminent visionaries by profession for a number of years; and your collective dreams and nightmares have proven prophetic to a degree which testifies to your qualifications for challenging Colonel Glenn with a symposium of prognostications about the world of 1984 and beyond. Perhaps science fiction's most significant prophecy for the immediate future, Boucher suggested in his Playboy article, is that "a species which has attained atomic power and space flight can no longer afford the luxury of national and racial rivalries, but must unite or perish." In 1951, Panelist Arthur C. Clarke wrote, "There will be no nationalities beyond the stratosphere." In view of subsequent events, do you agree with Boucher that "this may well prove to be the most tragically incorrect of all science fiction's prophecies"?

[A] Budrys: The human race is apparently frontier-prone. There's no escaping it. I think it is part of the human mechanism that you think in terms of "This is mine, this is what I will defend," and "That is beyond me, that belongs to somebody else." We always assume a "mine" and a "theirs." Even if we do venture into space as a group, even if we have no intramural frontiers, there will always be a frontier between us and anybody else who tries to stake out a claim from some other direction. I think this is necessary to the function of the human being. I think the Russians will reach the Moon ahead of us -- and soon, if everything else remains equal. And once there, they will claim the entire orb, and declare any landing by any other nation's hardware, manned or not, an invasion of territorial rights.

[A] Anderson: Well, I think it's a tossup whether we or the Russians will get there first. But whoever it is, I don't believe it will be possible for any country to claim the Moon, or an entire planet, merely because one of its ships gets there first. Territorial claims will probably have to be restricted to those areas which are actually occupied and exploited. The Moon or Mars could be parceled out among several countries.

[A] Clarke: I agree. It is sheer megalomania for any single nation to imagine that it can dominate a land area 250 times as big as Earth -- just taking this Solar System for a start. When I wrote Prelude to Space in 1947, I described a joint British-American lunar project. I stressed the necessity of international cooperation with the deliberate, if optimistic, intent of influencing events that way. In view of continuing attempts in the UN to denationalize space, I think that such an effort is still quite valid.

[A] Sturgeon: It looks to me as if we'll have to go along with the famous remark Wernher von Braun made years ago when asked what we'll find when we get to the Moon. "Russians," he said. But this cloud has its silver lining. It would be difficult to imagine humanity escaping into space at all without this friction.

[A] Clarke: Precisely, Ted. I raised this point when I was moderator of the A.R.S. Space Flight Report to the Nation at the New York Coliseum in October of 1962. I asked General Shriever, Von Braun and Dr. Hugh Dryden just how soon the U.S. and U.S.S.R. space programs could be effectively integrated. Their feeling, needless to say, was that this would be quite a long time, but Von Braun said that situations would arise which would compel cooperation to some extent -- breakdowns, emergencies in space, etc. But they also recognized, as you suggest, that a certain amount of competition is desirable.

[A] Blish: The present competition to put a man on the Moon -- which I, too, incidentally, think the U.S.S.R. is likely to win -- is simply a question of higher boosts at the moment. But this is a very short-term contest, and it seems to me that no matter who wins, it is a clear case of putting last things first. What we need now on the Moon is instruments, not human observers plus the tons of life-supporting supplies and equipment that they will need to take with them. For this reason, I can't rid myself of the suspicion that the nation landing the first man has really lost the competition, or at least has lost a substantial advantage.

[A] Asimov: At the time the Americas were being colonized, the main squabble in Europe was not between the English or French or Dutch or Spanish; it was Catholicism us. Protestantism. Today this great battle of ideologies, which cost many millions of lives, is forgotten. To see the future solely in terms of a capitalist-Communist fight to the death is being parochial in outlook. We will be taking frontiers into space, but who, at this point, can predict which frontiers?

[A] Pohl: At the present time it doesn't much matter who gets there first any more than it mattered what whaling ship first saw Antarctica. Consider the United States: America was discovered and explored independently by the French, the Spanish, the Italians, the Norse, the Dutch, perhaps even the Chinese. The English were quite late on the scene, but they were the ones to establish successful colonies. However, the English held America only briefly, and it was held finally by a new nationality who called themselves Americans. I don't know what nation will first colonize the Moon, but I know what nationality will hold it: It will be the Lunarians.

[A] Bradbury: I agree. If you'll forgive a reference to one of my own stories, I act out this point at the end of my Million-Year Picnic in The Martian Chronicles. Two Earth boys, stranded on Mars, keep pestering their father to show them the Martians. Finally the father takes them down to a canal and points down, saying, "There are the Martians." The boys look -- and see their own reflections in the shimmering waters.

[A] Playboy: How soon do you estimate that manned bases -- Russian or American -- will be established on the Moon? And how long afterward on Mars and Venus?

[A] Clarke: The generally accepted time scale is: Moon, 1970; Mars and Venus by 1980. I'll be very much surprised if these figures are more than five years off. We'll be establishing temporary scientific bases on the Moon around 1975 for astronomical, geophysical and all sorts of other observations. I think we can visualize permanent bases around 1980. These will lead to permanent colonies as soon as we've perfected techniques for extracting air and water and possibly other essentials from the lunar rocks. As our techniques of planetary engineering with nuclear power improve, we may ultimately modify the entire Moon to make it habitable by unprotected humans -- depending, of course, on the resources and opportunities we find there. I suggested in my book, Prelude to Space, that the low lunar gravity may be invaluable for many forms of therapy -- for heart trouble, muscular diseases and such. It may even be that men will live much longer under low gravity. If so, one can foresee quite a rush to the Moon.

[A] Playboy: How much will it cost to finance a lunar or interplanetary voyage?

[A] Clarke: Billions at first, while we continue to rely on liquid-propellant rockets using chemical fuels. It will drop to millions when nuclear-propulsion systems and ion or plasma jets are perfected.

[A] Heinlein: The time will come when we can put a pound into orbit for 10 cents -- by using cheap fuels like kerosene. We are going to be able to put people on the Moon so cheaply that it will presently cost less to rocket to the Moon than it is now to fly to Australia. It's a simpler engineering problem.

[A] Budrys: Our children will doubtless be able to buy a ticket to the Moon on a civilian ship, and it's quite likely that before too long the process will be as simple and free of red tape as buying an airline seat today. The per-mile cost will likely be a fraction of present airline fares. Right now we're all very impressed with the hardware and the investment involved in extending our concept of what belongs to man, as if the Moon were the Seven Cities of Cibola rather than just another chunk of real estate. This awe will pass -- at about the same time the lunar communities acquire tax assessors.

[A] Pohl: Whatever it will cost to get there, only one thing will be found on the Moon or anywhere else in space that is truly valuable in an exploitive sense. That commodity is knowledge, and this is valuable forever. It doesn't matter if you get it first or second; it still retains its value.

[A] Heinlein: I don't disagree with you on finding knowledge there, but we are going to find something else that is more immediately important to the human race: We're going to find a lot of real estate -- not very good real estate, the way it looks to us now, but nevertheless with approximately one horsepower of free power for every square meter, even with fairly inefficient devices for extracting it. And we're going to find an awful lot of raw materials. The human animal can live and create a high standard of living anyplace where he's got power and mass.

[A] Tenn: Well, with all that real estate and all that knowledge, another factor will come into human affairs which has been out of it for some time: Any outlawed sect or political minority, any discontented group which doesn't like the way things are done, will be able to pick itself up and go elsewhere in the Universe like the Mormons did in our West.

[A] Heinlein: I would like to amplify that. The human race is going to split off into a minority who travel into space -- people who are smart, able, healthy and fast on their feet. The ordinary run of Joes will just stay where they are. And the human race is going to spread out through space with this Darwinian elite -- a type of human being who probably won't even interbreed with those back on Earth.

[A] Budrys: As has always been the case in the past, those who feel restricted and repressed within their cultures, those who find no peace at home will be those who go faring outward. For them, there is nothing to love at home, there is nothing to desire at home; what is at home has been found to be at best only tolerable, and most of the time intolerable. And so they go out. Yesterday they became seafarers; today they become spacefarers; tomorrow, starfarers. What will stay behind, as always, is the happy remnant, those who will be content to put their life cards in a slot and have their homes, jobs, mates and offspring delivered to them in a polystyrene package. In their little colonies of contentment, those back on Earth will cultivate the static arts. They will bring a great many crafts and entertainments to a high point of refinement. Those who leave, meanwhile, will have no victory except the contemplation of their next defeat -- but they will be the winners. The contented ones -- those who stay behind -- will be the losers. We Earthbound men have had it. The next century belongs to the spacefarers.

[Q] Playboy: Though the possibility of encountering intelligent life within our Solar System is considered slim, most scientists concede the probability, if not the inevitability, of its existence elsewhere throughout the Universe. As mankind moves deeper and deeper into space, do you foresee the likelihood of contact with such alien races?

[A] Clarke: We may not need to venture beyond our own Solar System. Although -- with the exception of Earth -- it would seem to be inhospitable to all the forms of life that we can imagine, we shouldn't be too ready to write off even cold, giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn. Are they really cold, as a matter of fact? It's much more probable that, owing to strong gravitational pressure, there is some level in their atmospheres where it is hot enough for water to exist, and for the complex chemical reactions which animate life. Sheer pressure itself is no obstacle to life, as our own oceans demonstrate prolifically. The facts of astronomy have always turned out to be more surprising than anyone could have dreamed. So let's not sell the Solar System short. I don't think we can rule out the possibility of life -- even intelligent life -- on any of the planets, from Mercury to Pluto.

[A] Tenn: Well, suppose, while cruising out toward Mercury or Pluto, we actually do bump into some alien civilization or other. Suddenly we'll find out for certain what we've been dreading and hoping and suspecting and speculating about for thousands of years: that we're not alone in the universe. Only then will governments begin to wonder frantically, "How are we going to handle this? What are they like? Get the sociologists, psychologists, anthropologists; now they're almost as important as nuclear physicists." So all these social scientists will be brought down to Washington with Top Secret stamped on their foreheads. And then, possibly, since they won't know too much about these aliens either, the Government may dig up a couple of grubby science-fiction writers and ask them, "How strange can these characters be?" At that point, we will run through the multitudinous permutations which science fiction has presented. We will suggest, "Well, whether they are collectivists or individualists may not be nearly as important as whether they are asexual, bisexual, trisexual or products of precision manufacture."

[A] Heinlein:Any condition in chemistry, whether it's within our present scope or not, which allows the building of large molecules, provides a situation where life can exist -- and inevitably will, I think.

[A] Sturgeon: Well, I operate on two adages. One of them is Sturgeon's Law, which says: Nothing is always absolutely so. The other adage states: Nature tries everything. I go further: Nature tries everything everywhere. And modify that to: Nature tries everything everywhere -- where it is possible.

[A] Anderson: Yes, but let's modify that just a little further down to: Nature tries everything that the laws of physics permit -- which in turn includes just about everything we can imagine.

[A] Pohl: I think perhaps the laws of physics may subsume things we can't imagine.

[A] Sturgeon: That's a chilling thought when you think of some of the things we have been able to imagine. Bob Heinlein's Titans for example, in The Puppet Masters -- intelligent slugs which could fasten on your back and thereafter control your thoughts and actions; or the creature in Hal Clement's Needle, which could ooze into and through your tissues and live there. And Stanley Weinbaum's silicon beast in Martian Odyssey -- a creature which absorbed sand, grain by grain, very slowly extracting what it needed, and every year or so, laid a brick and then moved on a few inches. But I wouldn't doubt for a moment that nature can outimagine these trifles.

[A] Heinlein: Writers like Jack Williamson and Fred Hoyle and Olaf Stapledon have suggested that stars and nebulae might themselves be forms of life.

[A] Asimov: Or one might imagine organisms comprised of huge, fatlike molecules on very cold planets where the solvent would be methane or liquid hydrogen. Or there might be huge silicon-based molecules on very hot planets where the solvent might be liquid silicones. One could also devise theoretical schemes in which fluorine, chlorine or sulphur vapors might take the place of oxygen; in which ammonia, sulphur dioxide, or even hydrogen cyanide might take the place of water. If and when we finally come across truly alien life, I suspect we will have a great deal of difficulty in recognizing it as living, and we will find that its chemical system is not one of those any science-fiction writer has ever speculated upon. Once we find out what it is, of course, everyone will say, "Of course. It's obvious."

[A] Pohl: We're not even sure that life has to be based on large-molecule chemistry, or even on chemistry, for that matter. Right now, if we choose to spend the time and money, we could build a machine which would be "alive," that is, capable of reproducing itself and indeed -- with some added refinements -- of evolving into a higher order of machine. This isn't a science-fiction dream. Such machines have been designed, at least in principle, and they could function out in space among the asteroids as well as on the surface of the Earth. These can exist; therefore, as Ted Sturgeon says, they probably do exist somewhere.

[A] Budrys: We are certainly going to run into life as we don't know it -- but we may even have run into it 3000 or 30,000 years ago and -- as Dr. Asimov suggests -- not recognized it as alive. We may be living with it at this moment and not know it. The obvious point being, you can't know what you don't know. Maybe it's totally neutral toward us, and so doesn't have to be accounted for. Maybe it's benign, and protects us from something which would otherwise be killing us off in our 30s, or maybe it's inimical and is all that stands between us and immortality. How can we know? Maybe the Rocky Mountains are alive -- on some extremely long time scale. Maybe the Earth is inhabited by some life form so unlike ourselves that we don't recognize it as anything but a rock, a tree or a cloud; and so we formulate "Laws of Physics" to account for physical properties which may actually be behavior patterns.

[A] Tenn: Well, for the sake of such creatures as yet undiscovered, going about their inscrutable activities here on Earth or on worlds unknown, I find myself hoping that they will be so unlike life as we know it that we will ignore them completely. If they are life as we know it, if they can't hide in the shadow of our ignorance, then I say, on the basis of our record on this planet, Heaven help them. If there is a particle of the familiar about them, if they make even slightly intelligible cries when they are hurt by us, we will certainly destroy them utterly. We may find that they make excellent domestic animals when spayed and castrated or that their flesh can be chopped up fine and allowed to ferment into a delicious condiment, or simply that it's glorious fun to hunt them down in great, bloody infernos of competitive sport.

[A] Van Vogt: I'm inclined to agree. In science fiction we have dabbled harmlessly with countless alien characterizations, but when you consider that a standard novel about a Gentile marrying a Jew or a Negro sleeping with a white is still considered an inflammatory subject, you can gauge how far we've come in our social development.

[A] Bradbury: The study of aesthetics, I think, will be essential to the task of comprehending the bizarre life forms we are going to be encountering -- just as aesthetics has a lot to do with the problem of assimilating the various colored races here on Earth, because we are not accustomed to them. We don't want to accommodate ourselves to new art forms. Hence the violent reactions of critics to new techniques, new uses of color. Every artist with any individuality has done things with color and shape that we can learn from. These are the lessons we can teach those who will be going into space, along with the lessons of psychology, sociology and all the other fields they are going to require in coping with alien contacts. We must say to them: Because a living thing looks horrid, because it has an unfamiliar color, because you do not like its odor or its texture, do not be afraid of it, do not lash out instinctively to destroy that thing; quite possibly it will find us no less repellent to behold.

[A] Blish: When you consider the vast variation in human behavior that we already know about, I think that any alien we might imagine would be far less likely to horrify humanity -- or even surprise an anthropologist -- than my confreres seem to assume. Bob Heinlein wrote Stranger in a Strange Land, in which the Martians practice ritual cannibalism, since they live in a desert climate and want to keep the organic compounds in circulation as much as possible. Now this is a rash and rather startling notion for a story, but that kind of practice actually prevails in many parts of Africa today, and I can think of rites even more startling. Among some of the Andean Indians, for example, when a child dies, the mothers of the tribe ritually cook and eat it as their from of mourning. It's not a question of their being short of protein -- it's a religious ceremony. What I'm trying to say is that few aliens are apt to be more startling than man himself.

[A] Anderson: This is true. The human race runs practically the entire spectrum of conceivable psychologies, say from St. Francis at one end of the spectrum to Hitler at the other. It seems to me that any reasonably imaginable nonhuman race would have no less individual diversity than man himself, and that even though the curve was skewed so that the normal distribution of their psychology had a median lying to one side of ours, there would be a great deal of overlap. There would always be a lot of things we had in common -- conceivably even more than the things that set us apart.

[A] Tenn: No matter how far out in space they live, no matter what social system they or we are living under at the time, I think we will find that these civilized aliens will have one characteristic -- however different they may be -- in common with us humans. I don't think it will be our kind of intelligence -- though intelligence of some sort will inevitably be present, of course. It will be imagination, the essential ingredient of culture. And as creatures with imagination, these aliens, like men, will dream of angels and daydream of devils. And as a result, they, like men, will probably have a core of essential decency -- buried beneath a substantial insulating wad of utter nastiness. The higher the culture, the larger the core and the denser the wad.

[A] Sturgeon: Well, not long ago I got a letter from a profoundly irritating friend of mine by the name of Robert Heinlein, in which he expressed a monstrous discontent with stories which said that the "intra-galactic confederation" will not accept humanity unless it turns out to be pacifist, or that we are too primitive to be accepted among these high-level people. Just suppose the aliens are truly alien -- "unadulterated bastards," I recall he said. Supposing they kill all our women and children. What are we going to say then? That all races in the universe are created equal -- except humanity, which is less?

[A] Asimov: It's great fun speculating about whether these alien races will be benign or hostile, aesthetically pleasing or revolting, etc. But I suspect that's all it will ever be -- speculation. I don't think there's any chance of running into another intelligent race -- hostile or otherwise -- in the foreseeable future. Oh, I grant there are other intelligences in the Galaxy, maybe even many. I have read estimates that one out of a million stars may have intelligent races in their planetary systems. But on the one planet whose life forms we've studied -- our own -- life continued for at least a billion years, possibly two, before a reasonable intelligence was formed. So although life formation may be inevitable on any planet with a suitable chemistry, intelligence formation isn't in the least inevitable. I don't think it has much survival value, in fact, or it would have been tried more often. Wings were developed four times independently, our type of eyes three times at least. But big brains were tried only twice, in us and the cetaceans. And in only one case, us, has the brain become big enough in relation to the body and to environment to allow the development of a culture. And then it took a million years of culture formation to develop a science that could radically alter the environment. We've been sending out radio signals only 50 years, and if we have a nuclear war, any day now we may quit doing so forever. Now even if the universe were full of intelligences, what's the chance of reaching them -- or them reaching us -- just in the 50-year period when they and we happen to be at the radio-signal stage?

[A] Heinlein: I am not saying that any one of these fictions of ours is true -- science fiction is rarely accurate prophecy in detail -- but I suggest that the more wildly imaginative a writer is on this point the more likely he is to be right. The Creator -- if you will pardon an undefined word -- is not limited by the local conditions you describe. We're not even certain that our "natural laws" are invariant throughout space-time; the idea is merely a convenient assumption for Earth-bound scientists.

[A] Serling: I, for one, would have to become a bit more theological than scientific here. My very uneducated guess would be that there must be many forms of intelligent extraterrestrial life, but my equally uneducated hope is that they would not be dissimilar to us beyond those differences dictated by the special conditions of their existence. I'm a subscriber to the mystique of man created in God's image, and somehow I always make an assumption that the people awaiting us out there will be not too unlike Homo sapiens of the biped variety. Considering our anthropocentric religions and our propensity for conformity and the status quo, God help us if they aren't.

[Q] Playboy: Theologians have been pondering the spiritual implications of possible alien life for almost 500 years. What do you foresee would be the impact of extraterrestrial contact on such religious tenets as the belief in an anthropomorphic God and such concepts as the Soul, Salvation, Heaven and Hell?

[A] Clarke: I don't think that any existing religions will survive the impact of extraterrestrial contact in a form which we would recognize today. Some time ago I wrote that "The rash assertion that God made man in his own image is ticking like a time bomb at the foundations of Christianity." If you think over this statement -- remembering that "image" has a spiritual rather than a physical meaning -- -- you may agree with me. For what sort of God would an intelligent snake or insect conceive of? And these are our close relatives, compared to the entities we may encounter in space.

[A] Pohl: I don't take so melodramatic a view. If we were to be threatened with a Martian invasion, would people really flood into the churches and pray, like they do in movies? It seems more likely that they would flood into their bomb shelters and huddle prayerfully near their television sets for the latest bulletins. I rather think that religion will continue to become more and more bland and generalized as we move out into space -- until we reach a point where religious precepts will be so benignly all-encompassing that we'll be able to reconcile ourselves spiritually to the idea of co-existence in the universe with almost any extraterrestrial civilization -- and without much more shock, soul-searching or agonizing reappraisal than that with which we now greet the possible prospect of a merger of all the Christian sects. I think the time is coming when individual preferences in religion -- whether for Methodism or Zoroastrianism -- will become a matter of no more special interest or comment than individual tastes in diet. And if our diets eventually boil down to mixtures of synthetics -- which may well turn out to be the case -- so may our religions; though I grant that there will always be a few sincere and devout practitioners of all faiths.

[A] Budrys: Well, when we encounter our first intelligent aliens, I think orthodox religion will suffer -- but among the agnostics, not among either true believers or nonbelievers. And as soon as orthodox doctrines are re-interpreted to fit newly observed facts, even the wavering agnostics will return to their traditional posture. Even if the Martians had a Messiah, this wouldn't really have much effect on Christians, who already have a perfectly fine Messiah of their own and are showing no signs of abandoning him for Mohammed. Or suppose the Martians happen to look like what we today accept as representations of angels -- complete with flowing robes, harps, wings and immortality. There might well be quite a few cases of mistaken identity, and it would be quite a while before the furor died down, but this description of angels is not firmly rooted in any clear description given in the Bible, and in any case is not crucial to Christian belief. So that an angelic Martian, finally, would become more of a biological curiosity than a theological issue.

[A] Pohl: Imagine a race of aliens living on a watery planet somewhere off toward Tau Ceti. They hatch from eggs. Perhaps they reproduce like the sea slug, which lays hundreds of millions of eggs and then abandons them. If we established contact with such a totally alien race, I am sure there are humans who would immediately adopt their creeds. I can easily imagine a string of temples rising all through Southern California dedicated to "the Divine Sea-Slime," and practicing the ethic of "Sit still and stay covered up; let the other fellow get eaten."

[A] Anderson: That fantasy may not be as farfetched as you intended it to be, Fred. When we encounter other forms of intelligence -- which may be quite soon -- in our Solar System, or else further in the future around some other star, we may find ourselves completely transformed, not by any military conflicts or anything of that nature, but through a fascination with something in the cultural, philosophic or aesthetic line that we haven't thought of.

[Q] Playboy: Some writers have suggested that such speculation about man's destiny in space is purely academic, since the human race, they are convinced, is likely to destroy itself before it reaches the Moon, let alone the other planets or the stars. At this stage of the Cold War, what do you feel is the likelihood of a nuclear holocaust?

[A] Heinlein: World War III is going on now and has been for some time. It simply is not going to take the large, dramatic form of thermonuclear explosions and enormous bloodshed. Our opponents have an understandable preference for cheap victories. Their creed tells them that we will destroy ourselves internally, so they can afford to wait. I'm not saying that humans will not use H-bombs and worse on each other at some time in the future. They undoubtedly will. But not soon, and not under conditions in which winning is almost as disastrous as losing.

[A] Pohl: I'd like to think that's an accurate prediction of the future, but I have my doubts. If it turns out to be true, it will be no thanks to generals, admirals and Congressmen -- most of whom seem to think of space as a kind of economy-size playground for ballistic missiles.

[A] Van Vogt: The violent type of male, as I observed and analyzed him in my book, The Violent Man, can and will justify nuclear war, because he has a death philosophy for himself which he can almost casually project outside of his skin as being what the world needs for its own good. We had no business dropping the atom bomb on Hiroshima, but since we did it without a visible qualm, except in remorseful retrospect, we can be sure that some future patriot -- Russian, American, or perhaps Chinese -- will manage to come up with enough rationalizations to persuade himself, and those in charge of the red button, that initiating a "preventive-defensive" attack with multimegaton H- or N-bombs is not merely unavoidable but also morally justifiable and somehow even humanitarian.

[A] Anderson: All the evidence, however, is that the Soviet leaders themselves don't want this spectacular event to happen in the foreseeable future -- unless, of course, they make some extraordinary breakthrough, perhaps in the development of either infallibly accurate long-range antimissile missiles or antimissile-missileproof ICBMs. But the balance of terror is getting more and more complex, unstable and unmanageable, and my personal prediction is that one of these days it will literally blow up in our faces, with nobody really wanting it that way. I think, however, that civilization as we know it will survive, though recovery might take a long time. Of course, if the showdown is greatly prolonged, so that an enormous number of the most horrific weapons is widely distributed among different governments, then the effects will be correspondingly worse and survival will be less likely.

[A] Tenn: Lenin said somewhere that no ruling class has ever laid down power of its own free will, whether it be a managerial elite, a political clique, or a military junta. I'm afraid I foresee the day -- and I name no names, I point no fingers -- when X country and Y country, both of them incredibly decent and peace-loving, will have reached the point in a cold war or hot war or several different guerrilla wars where one is about to triumph completely over the other. At such a point, both countries will be represented by what remains of their ruling class in two deeply buried concrete bunkers. I cannot quite see the weaker of these ruling groups -- knowing that the end of its world has come, that its power, its status and its ideology are about to be wiped out forever -- I can't see it refraining from pushing the button which will destroy the world, along with what it regards as the most important segment of the human race: itself. And when that day comes, I hope to hell that there's a guerrilla war being fought on Mars, with a couple of human beings of reproductive capacity.

[A] Budrys: After such a war, contrary to reassuring Civil Defense brochures, human civilization would never return to its prewar level. Human civilization never returns -- it advances in a slightly different direction. The Renaissance did not bring back the Caesars. But I don't think we're going to have such a war. Hitler, you'll remember, tried pushing the button; he named a successor and ordered his armies to fight on. But the armies were too busy surrendering to listen. Second only to stupidity, the outstanding characteristic of any society, fortunately, is the survival drive. If only because nuclear warfare is so overwhelming a horror that even societies as a whole can grasp its potentialities, I'm convinced that nuclear war will not occur in this or the next century. We may have a largescale nuclear accident, but we'll have sense enough to treat it as such. We may then have a conventional-weapons war to determine whose fault the nuclear accident was -- but as wars go, it will be markedly polite. It will be fought with clean, precise weapons whose effects will be limited to military and industrial targets. This view may be less melodramatic than that popular nightmare fantasy wherein Mr. Khrushchev gets angry one night and presses the nuclear button in momentary rage; but a fantasy is still a fantasy no matter how many people believe in it.

[A] Bradbury: Against our own dark natures, it would seem that the specter of holocaust will drive us into fitful seizures of peace. In comparison to other ages, where one provocation on the scale of a Cuba or a Suez would have foundered the world, we live in a golden age of peace. And so, today, with profit rapidly vanishing from war, one can only hope that man will at last begin to seek the secondary if less exciting profits of peace.

[Q] Playboy: In pursuing these secondary profits, the Russians have served notice that they intend to continue their non-violent ideological and economic competition with the West until they "bury" us. Do you think they will?

[A] Heinlein: Well, the mystique of collectivism has seized upon the world. I'm not pointing with pride and I'm not viewing with alarm; I'm just trying to be realistic. Whether its nearly universal magnetism will endure and prevail, we just can't estimate now. I hope not -- and I think not, in the long run.

[A] Budrys: I feel there is a chance that if collectivization fails in the Soviet Union -- which, after all, is not a country but a union of countries, of races and nations, many of which do not even speak the language spoken in Moscow, hate Moscow, as a matter of fact -- if the cohesiveness dissipates, it is just possible that the space race, for a beginning, will slacken. But this competition is just one of a series of tactical maneuvers in what Mao Tse-tung calls a "protracted war" between the "People's Democracies" and Western "imperialism." What is far more important and immediate is the bloodless, or proportionately bloodless, struggle for power which might be called a Hundred Years' War between the Asian Communists and the European Communists, who have chosen to make America their bounty -- and possibly their battleground. It seems to me that we ought to consider the possibility of our being caught in the middle of a war between Russia and China -- a war that's been going on since the Khans -- and not allow ourselves to be misled by preoccupation with short-term actualities like the space race.

[A] Blish: I don't think that's the real issue. I think the real issue for us is the doubtful and apparently diminishing hope of individual freedom in a high-energy society, which both the U. S. and the U. S. S. R. are presently trying to promulgate. Both are societies in which everything has to go higher and faster; otherwise they feel they're not getting anywhere. More and more energy has to be expended, which means that society constantly becomes more complicated. We are getting ourselves involved more and more in projects which demand high expenditures of energy and money -- as are the Russians -- and I think it's an irreversible process at this juncture. The more intricately involved these crucial national decisions become in Russia or America, the less amenable they are to evaluation and judgment by a majority vote of laymen, no matter how well-educated and well-intentioned those laymen are. Now it seems to me that Russian communism accepts this condition of diminishing freedom -- as the energy level of society rises -- and tries to make a virtue of it. But in the United States our present political dilemma, especially on the far right, is that we're denying the danger exists at all. One can only hope that we undergo some sort of reappraisal -- perhaps catalyzed by the excesses of a demagogue like McCarthy -- which forces us to acknowledge the condition while we still possess the freedom of choice to do something about it.

[A] Serling: I couldn't agree more. One of the built-in tragedies of cold wars and hot wars is the fact that, historically, we find democracy tending to assume the very trappings of the enemy it engages. We conjure up all kinds of polemics to describe how much better freedom is than the Soviets' intellectual slavery -- but in the same process we begin to peck away at out own freedoms. We seem to function out of fear. Even on college campuses -- traditional bastions of thought, dissent and debate -- we deny lecterns to people with unpopular beliefs. Why? Quite implicit in the denial of a public hearing to a Communist is the suggestion that there is something in his arguments which we cannot rebut, some point of view more desirable than our own. I can see censorship in the Soviet Union as a functional instrument of the monolithic Communist state, but since when is a democracy grudging of its freedoms? One chuckles at the childishness of the Russians' constant bleating about their firsts in every area of science, engineering and chemistry. But our own inferiority complex shows through most revealingly in our protestations of subversion in high places as the American response to Soviet space and technological victories. I can only hope that the insidious drift toward emulation of the enemy is arrested before our national neurosis deepens into psychosis.

[A] Sturgeon: By "the enemy," Rod, do you mean Russia in particular or communism in general? I agree with you in either case, of course; but I think we may be in danger of equating one with the other in our conversation -- and possibly in our thinking -- as if they were ideological synonyms. If you will, go along with me in a fantasy about ourselves and the Soviet Union in the hypothetical future. Once upon a time, Nikita Khrushchev or one of his immediate successors wakes up and says to himself, "You know, this collective stuff makes good propaganda; the only thing is that people don't seem to be getting fed because the farmers won't go along with it. So I'll tell you what we're going to do. The Americans seem to feed their people pretty well; let's try giving private ownership back to the farmers." Well, the rest of the population doesn't hold still for that and they all start petitioning right away for their own shoe shops, hardware stores, factories, etc. -- until Khrushchev has to give in completely. He says, "I guess you Americans have something there after all. At least you're living better than we've been living; we'll try it your way whole hog." Now the Soviet Union is a monstrous country with enormous resources, many of them untapped. So with all these resources it suddenly blossoms out into a full capitalist society and collectivization disappears. Do you think for one moment that we would be any safer in terms of world peace? Do you think that there would be any less of a space race or economic race than we have now? Do you think -- along with our archconservative brethren -- that Russia is our number-one enemy only because it's communistic?

[A] Clarke: I agree with the moral of your fantasy, Ted; but I can't see U. S. democratic capitalism lasting any longer than U.S.S.R. state socialism. They'll pass each other about 1980, heading in opposite directions.

[A] Budrys: If I understand you correctly, you see us getting more socialistic while the U.S.S.R. becomes less so, to the point where we become redder than they are. Well, I don't think we will. It seems to be a fact of human nature that "planning" cannot win in the face of accumulated resistance by individual human beings. And this resistance usually accumulates to the point of stalemate within one or two generations. If the U. S. Government is finally compelled to abandon the entire concept of assistance to farmers, for example, it will be administering to the population at large a sizable dose of propaganda for individual enterprise in every area of the economy. Our Government will then find itself in exactly the same situation as the Soviet Premier of Ted's not-very-fantastic fantasy. Thus I think we may well pass each other around 1980, but I rather think we'll be going in the same direction. And when we do, we'll be talking about winning or losing the Individual Freedom Race.

[Q] Playboy: Even if the threat of nuclear war were to be alleviated by a Russian- American rapprochement, the world will still be confronted by a peril which many economists regard as no less ominous a threat to the survival of civilization: the population explosion. Will our planet be capable of accommodating -- let alone feeding, educating and employing -- the global population of 6,000,000,000 recently prophesied for the year 2000 by the National Academy of Sciences?

[A] Heinlein: For the past 10 years, I have been clipping every item I could find on population appreciation. All the experts use different formulas and different curves, but it comes out to about the same answer anyway. When I first started, the worldwide appreciation was 70,000 per day; four years ago, the daily appreciation had reached 135,000. Most of the curves call for doubling the population every 50 years -- wars or not. The most conservative projection I have seen for this planet calls for 4,000,000,000 people by the end of this century, which is only 37 years away -- and I can almost hold my breath that long. Today, as Ray Bradbury said, we're living in a golden age: We've got nothing to worry about but Cuba, hydrogen bombs, Billie Sol Estes, and things like that. But 50 years from now, 100 years from now, 200 years from now, we're going to be starving to death standing on each other's shoulders.

[A] Pohl: I recently did the arithmetic on what a population gain per annum similar to the present rate in Brazil or one of the new African countries might mean if protracted over a period of time. I found that if the population had begun to double at the time of the birth of Christ, by this year we would have a planet composed exclusively of human flesh. I don't mean just the surface; I mean every atom of the Earth, including the core, transformed into human bodies. There are something like 80 or 100 billion stars in our Galaxy, many of which have potentially colonizable planets, but there is a finite time in which the whole Galaxy would have to be composed of human flesh. And a further finite time in which the whole known or unknown universe would also be composed of human flesh. So at some point there has got to be a stop.

[A] Anderson: I am not particularly optimistic, but I think we may be in some danger of taking this one conspicuous peril of the present time and extrapolating it further than it's actually going to go. There will be new economic and biological factors coming in as history moves on. A number of studies, for example, on the breeding habits of rats under highly crowded conditions indicate that there are natural forces which provide a certain check, that some kind of balance will be struck by nature. I don't think it necessarily has to be a balance of starvation; it might, but it doesn't have to be.

[A] Pohl: You're right, Poul: population doesn't multiply itself indefinitely, because natural checks do come into play eventually. But meanwhile we may find our grandchildren all going as loopy as the undoubtedly claustrophobic rats in that experiment you mentioned. Or we might find the population decimated by war, famine or pestilence. The point is that all these natural checks are decidedly unpleasant. Tiffany Thayer wrote a sort of science-fiction story in which the population just continued to increase -- bodies slipping and sliding and crawling over each other, stacked 10 deep, all over the world; huge, floating islands of semiconscious men and women entwined together all over the land and in the oceans. To me this is a truly revolting thought; yet I don't know that it is really much worse than the natural preventives for this situation, such as seeing the bodies of starved infants along the streets in India, or living among whole populations which never have enough to eat and thus succumb to disease early in life. But all may not be lost: John Campbell, the editor of Analog, once proposed an artificial preventive which would provide a delightful alternative to all these problems: a contraceptive drug which would be both euphoric and mildly habitforming.

[A] Clarke: This is surely the greatest problem of the near future, but I predict that birth control -- though not, perhaps, via euphoric contraceptives -- will undoubtedly be universal within a generation. Religious opposition will cease to exist, as it always has in the past to any necessary social development, usually after a bitter rear-guard action. Male sterilization, probably chemical, will become more and more common, after the present Indian pattern. Most men would probably be glad to be sterilized after they'd had the number of children they wanted, provided they could first make a deposit in the sperm bank in case they changed their minds later.

[A] Blish: Oral contraceptives have been widely hailed as an all-but-ideal solution to the birth-control problem. But I'm afraid I have my doubts. It seems to me that any drug which simply inhibits ovulation or spermatogenesis is not likely to remain effective for more than a few generations. If bacteria can find a way to neutralize a cell-wall-dissolving antibiotic like penicillin, it won't be too many generations before the human organism can immunize itself against any fertility-suppressant drug. I hope, therefore, that Arthur is right about our adopting sterilization as a social custom, because I don't see any prospect of a less-drastic solution.

[A] Asimov: Everybody here is concerned about the population explosion and is full of proposals to circumvent it -- and reasons why those proposals can't possibly work. To the various contraceptive techniques suggested -- mechanical, chemical and surgical -- you might have added continence; but I suppose I may as well dismiss that quaint notion without inviting rebuttal. It strikes me, however, that not all forms of sexual activity necessarily lead to conception. As a matter of fact, there are a number of erotic practices which cannot possibly lead to conception. Under the pressures of geometric population growth, it may well be that such modes of sexual expression will actually be encouraged and come to be considered moral in a society which finds them useful, if not inescapable, as a solution. The so-called "unnatural" sex practices, both hetero- and homosexual, may perforce become legal, ethical -- and who knows, even patriotic in years to come.

[Q] Playboy: Mr. Clarke, you devoted a novel. The Deep Range, to the problem of feeding our mushrooming world population. Your solution was to extract food from the sea by plankton farming and whale ranching. Do you think this will ever be done on a worldwide scale?

[A] Clarke: Undoubtedly -- especially the plankton. But beyond this there will come a time when chemical techniques are so perfected that food can be manufactured directly from the basic raw materials of air, soil and water, without the intervention of plants or animals.

[A] Pohl: I'll have to challenge your first suggestion. There simply isn't an unlimited resource of food in the sea. Although there are many fish in the sea uncaught, I doubt even if they were all caught that they could support more than double or triple the present population. As for marine plants, they are inherently less efficient than land plants as chemical factories.

[A] Clarke: On the contrary, marine plants are more efficient than the land variety, since they don't have to waste half their material for structural purposes; gravity doesn't bother them, so they can be almost 100-percent utilized as food.

[A] Pohl: And thus return little or nothing to enrich either the soil or the sea. What you are offering us, it seems to me, is a one-generation postponement of disaster, two generations at best.

[A] Anderson: Theoretically at least, given hydrogen fusion as an energy source and given efficient chemosynthesis, I agree with Arthur that it should be possible to make food from rock, from almost anything, in fact. So the agricultural problems of providing for a large population may prove to be a completely unnecessary worry on our part. But of course a very dense population would have psychological effects as well. I like to get off into the mountains and away from people every now and then, and I would hate to live on a planet where you couldn't do this. I think the loss of privacy might well result in a variety of claustrophobic neuroses, as Fred Pohl suggested a while ago.

[A] Tenn: You are all making it clear that my descendants, packed cheek-by-jowl in one vast coast-to-coast metropolis, will have the choice of growing baleenlike whales and dining on strained plankton, or of living in some sort of national vivarium and waiting for everybody else to digest his food so that the waste products can be reconstituted into edible form. In either case, I wish my descendants a heartier appetite than I enjoy.

[A] Anderson: We will undoubtedly see increasing misery in many parts of the world, as populations multiply, but this doesn't mean we will necessarily have it at home. It is possible to envision a prolongation of what we have right now, where highly developed countries like the U.S., with a stable and balanced ratio between their rates of population growth and increase in food production, will remain on top simply because no high-density, underdeveloped nation will be able to get off the ground. On another aspect of the same subject, the Nobel Prize winner, Wendell Stanley, has recently been publicly concerned about the social effects of something Robert Heinlein wrote about 20 years ago: namely, genetic control and manipulation -- not merely breeding people like cattle, but being able to select the very genes you want. Stanley now feels that this is definitely coming. We'd better start thinking right now about exactly what we want to do with it and about its implications -- of which the public is still largely unaware -- for the future of the human race and human society. Otherwise we may discover 50 years from now, to our great misfortune, that we were worrying about the wrong things back in 1963.

[Q] Playboy: If and when it becomes possible to practice selective genetic control and manipulation on a worldwide basis, by what criteria do you anticipate the selections will be made, and who will be empowered to decide what individuals will be allowed to breed?

[A] Sturgeon: Mister Interlocutor, there's only one answer that makes sense to anyone on that subject: "Select me." I can suggest a step toward a better answer, though; and it may be the furthest step possible to us as a species. That is to turn the problem of overpopulation over to a computer. If the black box told us that so many, and no more, babies could be born in the next year -- living space, food and deaths having been projected and computed -- then it would be up to the law, that is, to mankind, to see to it that no more were born. If an excess seemed inevitable, abortions or even infanticide would have to be the answer. This is a horrible thought, but so is famine.

[A] Tenn: Assuming hopefully for the moment that no dictator, self-righteous planning board or omnipotent black box is going to make genetic selections for the coming generation, then who or what is? Not parents, certainly. By the time genetic selection becomes a reality, any intelligent and well-read parent will know how foolish it is for a layman to tamper with such complex matters. Even if the parents are free to make their own choice, they won't dare make it; they'll take the problem to their friendly neighborhood Certified Gene Architect. It seems inevitable to me that there will also be competitive schools of genetic architecture, by which I mean not places to learn, but opposing bodies of opinion. From time to time, one or the other will become dominant: the Functionalists will persuade parents to produce babies fitted for the present needs of society; the Futurists will suggest children who will have a niche in the culture as it will have evolved in 20 years; the Romantics will insist that each child be bred with at least one outstanding talent; and the Naturalists will advise the production of individuals so balanced genetically as to be in almost perfect equilibrium. As a consequence of all this, people will discover that human body styles, like human clothing styles, will become outrè or alamode as the genetic couturiers who designed them come into and out of vogue.

[A] Pohl: If all this were to come up as a practical problem today, we could only give the same fallible, error-prone answer we give to such other large questions as who decides whether a murderer should be executed, or which young men should be put into uniform and sent off to die, and which left at home in peace. We turn the first question over to a jury, the second to a draft board, knowing that there will inevitably be mistakes. We do what we can to keep error to a minimum by framing rules under which the juries and draft boards operate, and that is what we would have to do in the case of genetic selection.

[A] Blish: I would say that the Government is going to have to pass enabling legislation for this kind of thing. Those who would administer such laws -- as they do already to some extent -- would be largely members of the medical profession, which in most countries is self-policing.

[A] Asimov: The geneticists themselves are the only ones who will conceivably know enough about the whole subject to be placed in control of its application; if even they don't know enough to bear that responsibility with intelligence, then certainly, a fortiori, nobody else will.

[A] Bradbury: I think it will have to be a combination of scientific and religious control. Many Scientists are discovering that it is not enough to know the facts, that they need the moral judgment of a new ethic in order to make scientific judgments predicated on religious convictions, and spiritual judgments validated by scientific fact. What I foresee, then, is a communion between the hitherto alien philosophies of fact and faith -- which together may justifiably presume to undertake the awesome responsibility of molding from the stuff of life the man-made destiny of the race.

[Q] Playboy: Whatever supervisory agency is burdened with this responsibility, what qualities and characteristics do you foresee will be bred into and out of the race?

[A] Blish: I think one likely aim of genetic manipulation in coming years will be the elimination of diabetes. Now I'd hate to try to breed against this trait, since there is always the possibility that in doing so, I would be denying existence to a man like LaGuardia, who was a diabetic. Or take another example: the number of great men who have been epileptics is pretty startling; if some of our state laws specifying sterilization or nonmarriage for epileptics had been enforced worldwide, we'd all be a lot poorer for it. But if we could find the single gene which carries such a defect and then remove it either chemically or by microsurgery, then we might get a Dostoievsky without epilepsy.

[A] Asimov: Another promising line of research would be to try to alter the genes that control the synthesis of amino acids or other substances in order to enable us to manufacture more of them from extremely simple foodstuffs; we would then be less dependent on balanced diets and rich, expensive foods; we could eat inferior proteins, subsist on a monotonous fare that is low in vitamins -- only if necessary, of course. If the Russians, for example, could breed a race of human beings, not of astounding brains or muscles, but simply able to subsist on cabbage soup as their sole source of protein, the world would be theirs. Another line we might pursue, carrying on what Jim Blish suggested, would be to breed for natural resistance to disease, for the ability to form your own antibodies quickly and to retain them for a long time. We might begin by trying to breed out the tendency to cancer. Or here's another thought, for whatever it's worth: We might try to tone down the sex drive.

[A] Tenn: Speaking of the sex drive. Charles Galton Darwin, in his book, The Next Million Years, examines why contraception is practiced usually among people of high intellectual attainment and ignored by those who just swarm and fornicate because it feels good. To date, he points out, this has resulted in a population derived almost entirely from the second group. But he suggests that the time may come when the first group -- the important achievers and major thinkers -- will develop a procreative drive rather than a merely sexual urge. This would bring into being a superior type capable of reproducing itself; thus the best part of humanity would at last have acquired breeding responsibility. Either we are going to overpopulate the planet, Darwin believes, spill over the edges, stamp on our own flesh, do this over and over again; or we will eventually develop a human being who will breed for quality rather than quantity, who will breed deliberately and selectively and not accidentally.

[A] Van Vogt: The whole notion of breeding for quality, in my opinion, is based on a fallacy, because the so-called differentiation between people in terms of quality simply does not exist. The mind is a social phenomenon, and statistically, the members of any group that's provided with an advanced social environment will, in a generation or two, live up to it, become well-mannered and sensitive. The Chinese Reds probably executed millions of the "best" people in China, but as many great men will presently emerge in that country as ever lived there in the past. In any event, the science of biology is in too primitive a stage to do anything about genetic advancement. Until we transcend this state, we couldn't tell a genuinely valuable genetic characteristic from a hole in the ground. Our problem isn't to improve the race; it's to employ more meaningfully the qualities and attributes that we already have.

[A] HeinLein: It seems to me that any system, no matter how objectively supervised and scientifically operated, that sets out to breed men the way we breed show dogs or mutated corn will inevitably produce slaves who are bred to suit their masters -- masters who go right on breeding to suit themselves. Quite apart from my personal preferences -- and I am against it whole hog -- I think that control of genetics will be achieved, but I strongly doubt whether we have the wisdom to know what to select for. I think we'd be much better off taking our chances with the vagaries of natural selection than with the test-tube certainties of prefabricated genes.

[Q] Playboy: If it is likely, as most of you seem to agree, that the regulation of family size and genetic traits will be denied to parents and entrusted to computing machines or supervisory agencies, what changes do you envision in the function and status of the family in the society of 1984?

[A] Pohl: The institution of marriage, which fulfills the function of providing a place for children to be raised, may no longer be necessary in concrete terms and therefore may no longer be a phenomenon of our lives in social terms. We will very likely find that it is unnecessary to have a mother and father in a household to raise the children. The Russians are now in a position where children are not raised by parents but in State homes. So that marriage may no longer matter by 1984; it may no longer exist.

[A] Bradbury: Fred, you talk as if the institution of marriage was somehow forced on us. It seems to me that the nature of the creature, not of society, calls for the more or less permanent pairing off of man and woman, and for the raising of a family. With the cities and their machines fragmenting us so completely, the need is not for further fragmentation but for a renaissance of meaningful human relationships. While marriage may no longer be needed for religious, moral, social or economic reasons, I'm convinced that for reasons of sanity alone, we may even demand its continuance.

[A] Anderson: I completely agree. Marriage fulfills a great many more needs than sex and reproduction. The majority of men and women get not only security but growth from such a prolonged and intimate partnership. A world without stable marriages would be a world of pretty shallow and lonely people.

[A] Pohl: I'm perfectly willing to grant that for those to whom marriage offers enduring satisfactions, the institution will probably survive. But let's not pretend that all marriages are enriching relationships. Many, I'm afraid, perform no constructive function at all, except perhaps to provide shelter for the young. When this function begins to lose its importance -- and it soon will -- such marriages will become as unnecessary, and therefore infrequent, as they are undesirable.

[Q] Playboy: Do you foresee any significant changes -- apart from matrimonial -- in the relationship between the sexes?

[A] Budrys: I think each of us will be permitted to go to hell pretty much in his own hand-basket. The concept of a social or sexual norm will become nearly meaningless, but if we must think in this context, the norm will be one of total chaos from the viewpoint of anyone who tries to look for one; he will find straitlaced puritanism side by side with dedicated hedonism -- often in the same person. Public morality will always differ sharply from private, but exactly what constitutes each will be very different for one social class as compared to another. Stag movies may well be publicly acceptable for one segment of the public. The "Feelies" -- Huxley's tactile sensory communications medium, and it will be developed -- may become a voluptuous diversion among the more privileged peer groups. In short, it will no longer be possible to characterize anyone or anything as jaded, decadent or immoral.

This is the first half of a two-part Playboy Panel on "1984 and Beyond." The conclusion will appear next month.