We have a round of stories for you this issue with a similar outlook, and you (the reader) might wonder if this outlook indicates the policy this magazine might have.

     As the title of the editorial indicates, our chief policy is keeping the magazine in orbit, but I suppose we do have an outlook too.  Considering that we are, in fact, in orbit, that might be even considered a higher perspective.

     You'll note that the stories in this issue all take a look at established facts and ways of doing things and question whether they have any validity at all outside of the custom that has established them.  (Of course, the way they're looking at the established order is the way the established order looks at sf.)  Modern science fiction is doing this a lot, and here in Surprising Stories we are highlighting the trend. 

     Why the big break with Things As They Are?  Things as they are are awful!  Everybody is totally, inherently and existentially stuck in them!  And so we are favoring things as they could be, or things as they might become, or things as they are otherwise.

     For instance, predestination.  We here assume that nothing is predestined, predetermined, or preordained essentially.  If anything were predestined (following Greek logic) it would also not be predestined, because the existence of the one attitude implies the existence of the other.  Predestination, you know, asserts that its opposite does not exist, within its field of reference.  Being aimed outward rather randomly, the idea of predestination violates its source as well as its objective.  When it states that its opposite does not exist, it exerts its own nonexistence by implication, whereby it exists only in the sense of having made an assertion.  Most modern science fiction, which struggles with destiny, has been finding this to be true—that although predestination may have been forming or be infused with the conditions of existence, it has no validity from the time it is asserted as material fact.  In other words, an attitude (predestination) has been trying to pass itself off as matter.

     If you want an illustrative example, look at Sisko on DEEP SPACE NINE.  The man is an Africanic.  Is there a single television SF show that doesn't have Africanics in lead roles?  There are usually Orientals, too.  What are they doing there?   It's existential.  Sisko has said that he doesn't regard his people as ordained to lives of manual labor. Some of them play jazz, and he can dig baseball.  There are racial intermarriages, and that's putting it mildly, on the series, and considerable discussion, nth power light years from Earth, of racial problems.  Women's rights are in dispute in these programs too,   and all of it involves people not being ordained to certain roles or behavior by predestination.  (Besides, preordination carries a philosophy that pre-ordinators don't exist because they are not found within the perspective of preordination. If they don't exist, that's another reason preordination is not for real.)  Predestination is in a nebulous form, like continuity and spontaneity.  Predestination refers to destiny, which in turn refers to destination, which suggests travelers, in case you are wondering about the terms I'm using.  The SF on TV is about a travel culture.  They are told what to do (preordination), but their motive is escape from the established and regulated.

     Well, the reader shouts, this predestination derives its form from the ongoing development of life, which proceeds directly out of tradition, which proceeds from fixed standards of living and reality.  Deviation from it leaves all history behind and in the lurch.  Things As They Are prevails against speculation.  Is that so?  The reader speaks from his parking orbit and assumes his words are sound.  They might be, in fact, just that, a lot of sound, unless he is experimenting with un-sound.  I would ask, is the spirit history?  We have a situation where the spirit is being locked into history, while that history is in high dispute.  Is history anything real?  Or is it an interpretation of events, always debatable?  It is being imposed on people as a blockade to progress and to novelty, felt most acutely by the imaginative.  The imagination is not very charmed by a description of the Boer Wars.

     Some further remarks can be made about predestination—why would you have to catch on to it if it represents fixed facts?  It's considered non-debatable.  But there are some other attitudes around that we also find questionable, so let's leave the predestined to their recreations of the Napoleonic Wars and proceed to the matter of the life cycle of the human species.  This is being debated hotly by televised SF.  A man has seventy-two years, the average mortal lifespan, to repair a computer system when he hasn't had time to find out why a computer exists.  If he gets it repaired he hasn't done anything except get things back the way they were, but, as a goad, history tells him that there haven't always been computers, and he dreams of his heroes, the inventors of computers, who did something different during one of those epochs of change. Since he's on a spaceship, he's involved in change, but not in its ends, which occur after his lifetime has ended.  He'll keep the Federation going and laugh off his own death, wondering whether he'll continue to have life in an alternate reality where all this doesn't have the same significance.  Q scoffs at concepts of time, but gets laid low by mortals periodically.  The characters don't know if there's any life after death, but they know one thing, there wasn't any life before birth.  If there had been they'd remember it.  They go from zero thought and knowledge (babies) to repairing computer systems as they cross the universe at the speed of light, an ability they come by from speed-learning of priorly-accumulated knowledge.  The rest of it comes from racial instincts, which Jung has proved exist.  It seems, though, that if an individual doesn't exist for a long time, he doesn't exist at all—only what's there exists.  How long would you have to exist in order to count?  As long as Q?  He's said how long he's been around.  Matter, though, seems to have the ultimate say-so on this.  So is matter a form of life?  In order to find the slightest assurance that you won't cease to exist forever you have to assume that matter is declared and follows the physical laws of its declaration, whereby an afterlife would be an alternate reality, especially since the Big Push is on against ghosts intruding here again.  So there's a total loss of here in death imposed by scientific and materialistic bigotry.  But here vanishes eventually, if all its denizens cease to exist—whereby here has not been all that real, but only thought of as real.  Nothing objects to that reasoning so much as the human body, which is inherently a part of what is here.

     We live in a “here” which decrees death to all entities and offers no afterlife, which is offered only by those opposed to Things As They Are. A reaction against death arising in the individual suggests that this decree is not in accordance with nature, to which suggestion the answer arises that nature itself is perishable—but that doesn't change the fact that not everyone will agree with this edict; and I suggest that the edict requires agreement—that's part and parcel of its own existence.  We watch people perish, proof of the validity of this edict—but the fact that we are watching this spectacle, in accordance with such tenets, demonstrates that we are living in unreality.

     Now, this brings up the matter of existence, which may be distinguished from life in observing that matter is considered to exist, but is not considered to be alive. (Data on STAR TREK's “Next Generation” has made that a matter for his own consideration.) Especially around fantasy, we witness a lot of people saying that this and that does not exist.  With the backing of science, which at least ignores everything not found in its established frame of reference, and might be said to be uncertain of whether anything not studied actually exists, a state of imposed nonexistence arises which is uncomfortable to certain people. In fact, science fiction is a reaction to this tendency of science, and it re-establishes the possible reality of things not within the direct area of scientific observation.

      But the existential debate remains rather intense.

     The statement that a thing does not exist implies that it DOES exist, or how can it be identified enough to be said not to exist?  In fact, things thought up exist because they have been thought up; they just might lack material existence. If existence is being there at all, everything a person might mention exists. If the person is there, so is what he has mentioned.  But can what he has mentioned be utilized? That is not a condition of existence, but debates about existence assert that it is.

     The term “existence” suggests that there is “non-existence” which would mean that something is not there—but it would not go on to mean that it isn't ANYWHERE, or that it could not exist.  However, people are being rather forcefully exclusive of things which they do not care to see (which suggests that those things are there, whether they should be or not).  The condition I am referring to, which is involving all of us, is the conception that things of the mind, spirit and imagination do not exist, but a lug-wrench and a crowbar do exist because they are both matter and utile. The ultimate sufferer from this is the person without much imagination, spirit or mentality, who resembles the imposers of the attitude and cannot easily escape from its contentions even if he is trying to. Perhaps the truly imaginative have GONE elsewhere and do not need to be worried about—but there is the latent imagination of the materialist, and that not only becomes worried but needs to be worried about.  Part of the materialist is being said not to exist—and that part is a function of his spirit.  A body without spirit dies. If the body does not wish to die (and it doesn't), it needs to be a part of the spirit, and not forced into isolation from the spirit.  People have ignored their bodies for far too long.

     Gods are considered not to exist.  That would be hard on one, if he or she craved existence.  But that would be craving infusion into the material realms, where that consideration exists.

     Surprising Stories assumes that things exist which are invisible and their existence is implied by what is visible, and that these things are a conspicuous absence from the visible when assumed not to exist. (Hence there is a lot of sound and fury about them.)  Rather like fantasies, the reason ghosts are never seen is that they can't approach matter, which is beneath the spirit, whereby one is immolated in matter and dominated by one's physical being unless there is some infusion of the spiritual world into the material one and some manifestation of it, which people frequently cry out for, in this realm.  In other words, the nature of the material realm must be changed or we are in a perpetual holocaust, which, according to voluminous evidence, is what we are in.  But the policy of this magazine is to get away from holocaust and destruction, by progress or other means.

     Yes, you'll find that in the stories in this issue.  Jerry Baker's Narkhopolis, as its name suggests, is a dream realm whose reality is malleable; it's reshaped from story to story.  In this issue's story we see a dream fate come over it from another dream.  In McCrady's story, present reality is coalescing and vanishing.  Mr. White has a closeup perspective on the temporal in his story, Jones studies the effect of literature on reality (could we be trapped in a book rather than life?) and Ray Reents portrays the ultimate outcomes of materialism in isolation.

     So that's where it's at right here at Surprising Stories.  We can't go with the world just exactly the way it is, as it exists around us or in the media.  We'd like to see things a little bit different.  Not much, just enough to be something of a surprise.