Alien Monsters

Good morning – or rather, good afternoon, everybody. I'm very glad to be here and very glad to be speaking to you. In asking me here to speak, you know, Tom Purdom really paid me a tremendous compliment. After all sorts of things about how intelligent I was, and how he was sure I'd be so interesting and give such an interesting talk on a fascinating subject, he paid the ultimate compliment: He said, “And most of all we want you to be first on the program because you're a teacher.” (I thought he was going to say, you know how to talk, you'll be fascinating, fluent and so on, but this wasn't it.) No, he said, “You're a teacher and you have a regular job and you're the only one we can depend on to get up early enough in the morning.” Little does he know!

I am glad to see, looking around, that this is not true. I'm not the only one. Thank you all. It was heroic. It was heroic for me, anyway.

Now I'm going to try, today, to talk about something that people will disagree with – some people, anyway – and some of you may get pretty mad at me before I am finished. But I think it's worth it, anyway. I'm trying to operate on the old Leninist principle of presenting a united front to outsiders but being perfectly free to quarrel among ourselves. I think this is something science fiction ought to do – I mean the quarreling among ourselves. And if we're going to indulge in it, we had better do so pretty quickly; there isn't much time left. The days of our privacy are numbered. Really, the academicians are after us, and there is going to be an invasion of outside people into this field of the kind none of us has ever seen before – all sorts of goggle-eyed, clump-footed types who will be bringing in all sorts of outside standards (good or bad), outside experience, outside contexts, outside remarks, naïveté in some things, great sophistication in other things, all sorts of oddities, all sorts of irrelevancies – well, Heaven only knows what. I don't even know if it'll be good or bad or how good or how bad. But it is going to happen.