The keynote of SFWA's ninth annual Nebula Awards banquet was "Where do we go from here?" Addressing themselves to this ponderous question were superstar writers Ray Bradbury, Robert A. Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon; astronauts Alfred Worden and Edgar Mitchell; and scientists Bruce Murray and Harrison Brown.

The Science Fiction Writers of America presented their annual Nebula Awards in posh style this year, in fabulous Hollywood. The Nebulas went to:

Best Novel: "Rendezvous with Rama," by Arthur C. Clarke

Best Novella: "The Death of Dr. Island," by Gene Wolfe

Best Novelette: "Of Mist, and Grass, and Sand," by Vonda McIntyre

Best Short Story: "Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death," by James Tiptree, Jr.

Best Movie: "Soylent Green," from Harry Harrison's novel "Make Room, Make Room"

Vonda McIntyre's novelette was, of course, published in Analog. Other Analog stories that were nominated, but failed to win the Nebula, were Poul Anderson's novel "The People of the Wind," plus "A Thing of Beauty," by Norman Spinrad, "With Morning Comes Mistfall," by George R. R. Martin, and "How I Lost the Second World War and Helped Turn Back the German Invasion," by Gene Wolfe—all short stories. (For more details, see The Reference Library.)

The keynote speeches were mercifully brief, but those given by the honored guests were particularly depressing.

Ray Bradbury ignored the keynote theme and read a poem of his, about how the development of large-sized type allowed myopic Herman Melville to read the works of William Shakespeare—which opened a new world for Melville and led to his writing "Moby Dick." There was a subtle message in Bradbury's poem, dealing with the usually-ignored effects that technological innovations can have on the soul of an artist.

Colonel Worden, Command Pilot of the Apollo 15 mission, read a couple of his own poems, which dealt much more straightforwardly with humankind's need to explore. There was a wistful, vanished-Camelot resonance to his poems. Apollo is dead; whence comes the next great wave of exploration? Too late for Worden to participate in it; too late for many of the people in the sumptuous banquet room.

Ted Sturgeon, Dr. Murray (Cal Tech planetary scientist), and Dr. Brown (Director of Population Studies at Cal Tech) struck the gloomiest notes of all. We must stop using fossil fuels. The world is dividing into rich and poor nations, with the poor growing more openly hostile while the rich grow richer.

Population burdens threaten to bury civilization under an avalanche of starving human flesh.

The only optimistic note came from Robert Heinlein, who—with characteristic forthrightness—said that man was not only going to solve the problems we face today, but will thrive and enter a glorious new era of interplanetary and interstellar exploration and colonization. With technology as its spearhead, he said, the human race will not only survive, it will prosper and populate the stars.

Captain Mitchell, the sixth man to walk on the Moon, spoke of the need to go beyond technology and develop new ways of thinking, new forms of consciousness. He is now president and founder of the Institute of Noetic Sciences, which is devoted to examining the psionic (or psychic) forces of the human mind. Mitchell feels that the human mind has untapped powers, and the only solution to our present impending catastrophe is to go beyond technology, beyond our present ways of perceiving the world.

It was a long evening, as most awards banquets are. Thinking back on all that was said—and left unsaid—two main points emerge:

1. The speakers, and most of the audience, agreed that the human race faces a terribly critical, perhaps decisive, moment of history. Population pressure is at the heart of it, leading to worldwide hunger, pollution, political unrest, and war. Modern technology has lowered the death rate, created polluting industries, developed worldwide communications and nuclear weapons; all of these were considered by most of the speakers to be the main causes of our problems. If they didn't view technology as inherently evil, they insisted that technology by itself cannot solve our problems.

2. None of the speakers had anything really new to say about the possible solutions to these problems. In fact, instead of telling the audience what they perceive for the future, they mainly recited the woes of the present. With the exception of Heinlein's youthful optimism and some gloomy extrapolations of the recent Arab oil embargo, the speeches concentrated on the disease and ignored the possible cures.

And technology was identified as the disease, either by name or by implication.

If there's one thing that science fiction is good for, it is to give us the long view of human history. Science fiction requires a mind-set that encompasses millennia and parsecs, not merely weeks and nose-lengths. So it was rather surprising that, at a gathering of the nation's science-fiction writers, the speeches were so shortsighted.

Where do we go from here? Is technology the villain? Must we search "beyond" technology to find another way of life?

The answer to those questions lies in another question: Where do we go from? In other words, what are the origins of our present situation? How and why did technology become such a powerful force in human life?

Before there was man there was technology.

Fossil remains of our predecessors dating from more than a million years ago show that our remote ancestors made tools out of pebbles and animal bones. And that's what technology is: toolmaking. The human animal doesn't have the speed of a horse, the fighting teeth of a chimpanzee, the wings of an eagle, the claws of a tiger, or the protective fleece of a sheep. But we have discovered (or invented) technology. We make tools, where other species make physiological adaptations. We have fire and all the energy-producing engines stemming from it. We travel faster than the horse, fly higher than the eagle, fight much more devastatingly than any predator, and protect our bodies with not only sheep's wool, but artificial fabrics as well.

One man alone can't kill a mammoth. But a handful of men, armed with nothing more sophisticated than stone-tipped spears and fire, apparently drove the mammoths into extinction. By the time the last glaciation of the Pleistocene dwindled, humankind was the supreme ruler of every land mass on Earth, except isolated Antarctica. And we ruled with fire, spear, awl, scraper: technology.

Instead of adapting physiologically to solve our survival problems, we have adapted psychologically and sociologically. In the great glaciations we now call the Ice Age, we didn't grow long shaggy coats of fur, as did the mammoth. We invented culture, the adaptation of individuals that allows them to share their abilities and knowledge while minimizing their weaknesses. The price we paid was to give up some measure of our individuality.

But how much? We are mammals. We aren't hatched from untended eggs, as the dinosaurs were. No human being can survive without the company and care of another human being. Solitary adults are so rare among us that hermits are an object of curiosity and humor.

The invention of culture depended on another human invention, the greatest one of all history: speech. Other animals communicate over limited ranges of data-sharing. A chimp, in the wild, can warn of danger or give a show of friendship. Only humans—and perhaps dolphins—can discuss what communication is all about. Perhaps those who are looking for a human development that goes beyond technology—as Captain Mitchell is—are actually seeking a new and more effective means of communication.

The means is here today.

It is not telepathy, nor any other psionic or psychic technique. Those abilities may be present as latent forces in all human minds. Some people can apparently use them, but on a very random, "wild card" basis. Psionic communications may be a future possibility, but today it has still not left the laboratory (or circus tent).

The "new" form of communication we have today is technological in nature. It consists of a complex of electronic links, including satellites, and computers that can assimilate and handle more information than a campus full of scholars could, over the course of centuries.

Back in the Ice Age, we did not grow fur pelts or dagger-sharp fangs. Instead of trying to imitate the musculature of the cave bear we used our heads—and our tools—to take possession of the caves for ourselves.

In the Nuclear-Space-Electronics Age, we have not yet developed a brain capable of thinking in a fundamentally different way from the thought-modes of our Ice Age ancestors. We have not developed psionic abilities. But we have developed tools that communicate immensely more data than our human brains could handle, unassisted.

Is data equivalent to information? Is the vigorous and growing network of computerized machinery that surrounds us a force for human advancement and freedom, or a force for human misery and slavery? Again, a look at where we go from will help to show us where we can go from here.

Technology is part and parcel of the human experience. To envision a human being without technology is to envision a dead naked ape, not a happy noble savage. Anti-technologists have pointed out that the powerful men of society have always used technology as a tool for keeping their power and dominating the poor and the weak. Yes, just as they have used superstition and sheer physical force. Over the long run, however, technology has led to a broadening of human freedom, a sharing of wealth and power among the common people, a leavening of the power of the elite.

All the other forces in human society—religion, tradition, politics, law—are essentially conservative. They are backward-looking. They seek to maintain the Establishment, the status quo, the same situation today as prevailed yesterday. Technology, by its nature, is dynamic, forward-looking. Every development, every invention, every improvement upsets the status quo, changes the people and society, threatens the Establishment.

Certainly a man who belongs to a primitive hunting clan is not as free to do what he wishes as he would be if he were a solitary hunter. Yet solitary hunters die much more quickly than those who hunt in groups. And a solitary human being misses many of the kinds of experience that make life worth living. We are mammals; we thrive in the company of our fellow humans. There must be a balance, though: every human psyche needs a degree of privacy, as well as companionship.

Modern technology is threatening our need for privacy. It can dehumanize us, reduce us to statistics. But this is merely a short-range problem. The long-range effect of modern technology will be to liberate us, allow us to be freer, more fully human. This is what technology has always done for us; there's no reason to suspect that it won't continue this millennia-long trend.

Without technology, we would not have survived the Ice Age. If technology had been stopped before the invention of steam power, slavery would still be a major institution in all human societies. If technology had been stopped before the invention of the internal combustion engine, most of us would be working on farms from predawn to dusk, and wondering if we'd survive through the next winter.

If technology is stopped now, most human beings will die. They are already dying in gruesome famines in Africa, mainly because our social institutions can't distribute food properly, and partly because our technology cannot yet control geophysical forces such as climate.

We will never go "beyond" technology. We may develop technologies that are nonpolluting, nonobtrusive, clean and quiet and completely reliable. But we will no more forsake technology than we could grow the fangs of a rattlesnake.

With technology, we are producing a true revolution in our ability to communicate. Modern computers and electronics are producing a new human freedom: the freedom from repetitive tasks. This is merely the beginning of the so-called Second Industrial Revolution. The day will come when people will be hard-pressed to believe that humankind ever existed without automated machinery and computer-powered information systems to assist us.

And much, much more.

Carl Jung, the eminent psychologist, once mused that we will never be able to truly understand how our minds work until we have another species of mind to work against, to serve as a mirror for our own thought processes. The long-awaited (and feared) self-aware computer might be that reflecting mirror.

Technology is where we are going from. Intelligent technology is where we are heading.

THE EDITOR