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gibbering paranoiacally in the background, but he's now more a fossil than a force. Speculative fiction has been found, has been turned to good use by the mainstream, and is now in the process of being assimilated. Burgess' A Clockwork Orange , Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater , and Cat's Cradle , Hersey's The Child Buyer , Wallis' Only Lovers Left Alive and Vercors' You Shall Know Them (to name only a recent scattering) are top-flight speculative novels, employing many of the tools honed by science fiction writers in their own little backwash eddy of a genre. Not an issue of a major slick magazine passes without some recognition of speculative fiction, either by reference to its having foretold some now commonplace item of scientific curiosity, or by openly currying favor with the leading names in the field via the inclusion of their work alongside the John Cheevers, the John Updikes, the Bernard Malamuds, the Saul Bellows.
    We have arrived, is the inescapable conclusion.
    And yet that highly vocal fan, and all the myriad writers, critics and editors who have developed tunnel vision through years of feeling themselves ghettoized, persist in their antediluvian lament, holding back the very recognition for which they weep and moan. This is what Charles Fort called "steam engine time." When it is time for the steam engine to be invented, even if James Watt doesn't do it, someone will.
    It is "steam engine time" for the writers of speculative fiction. The millennium is at hand. We are what's happening.
    And most of those wailing-wall aficionados of fantasy fiction hate it a lot. Because allofasudden even the bus driver and the dental technician and the beach bum and the grocery bag-boy are reading his stories; and what's worse, those johnny-come-latelies may not show the proper deference to the Grand Old Masters of the field, they may not think the Skylark stories are brilliant and mature and compelling; they may not care to be confused by terminology that has been accepted in s-f for thirty years, they may want to understand what's going on; they may not fall in line with the old order. They may prefer Star Trek and Kubrick to Barsoom and Ray Cummings. And thus they are the recipients of the fan-sneer, a curling of the lips that closely resembles the crumbling of an old pulp edition of Famous Fantastic Mysteries .
    But even more heinous is the entrance on the scene of writers who won't accept the old ways. The smartass kids who write "all that literary stuff," who take the accepted and hoary ideas of the speculative arena and stand them right on their noses. Them guys are blasphemers. God will send down lightning to strike them in their spleens.
    Yet speculative fiction (notice how I cleverly avoid using the misnomer "science fiction"? getting the message, friends? you've bought one of those s—e f—n anthologies and didn't even know it! well, you've blown your bread, so you might as well hang around and get educated) is the most fertile ground for the growth of a writing talent without boundaries, with horizons that seem never to get any closer. And all them smartass punks keep emerging, driving the old guard out of their jugs with frenzy. And lord! how the mighty have fallen; for most of the "big names" in the field, who dominated the covers and top rates of the magazines for more years than they deserved, can no longer cut it, they no longer produce. Or they have moved on to other fields. Leaving it to the newer, brighter ones, and the ones who were new and bright once, and were passed by because they weren't "big names."
    But despite the new interest in speculative fiction by the mainstream, despite the enlarged and variant styles of the new writers, despite the enormity and expansion of topics open to these writers, despite what is outwardly a booming, healthy market . . .there is a constricting narrowness of mind on the part of many editors in the field. Because many of the editors were once simply fans, and