Authentic Science Fiction Monthly No. 44 — page 95: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

AUTHENTIC SCIENCE FICTION technology, picking out the worst, most totalitarian as- pects and writing them up with fine fanatic fervour. In doing it this way, he has done his own cause irreparable harm because the bias and prejudice are so very blatant. There is no doubt that Jungk has something; we ail feel at times that maybe we are moving too far away from the natural scheme of things; we all feel that the past was perhaps rather better than the present and that the future is something of an enigma. And we have been doing it for centuries. There is nothing fundamentally new in the technological picture today. And we know that we cannot go back; that if we did go back, we would not find what we wanted until we had got back to the caves—and then we probably would not want it after all. Jungk shows us the people who live under close security at Las Alamos; he paints us a picture of the men who are trying to grasp heaven by sending up machines and men, and trying to change the limitations of the body in order that the men might survive with the machines; he derives an indictment of humanity out of the fact that 94 men in Texas are making rain fall when they want it; he points pathetically to a church in New York that is being scrapped to make way for an office block. And so on. He slips into his book photo- graphs of men in _ plastic protective clothing, of a man in a centrifuge, of hydro- ponic experiments on apple trees, of New York at night with all the lights blazing. And he sends out the pathetic heartcry: Where are we going? The answer, of course, is to a new and better world. The answer is that new worlds always have dark corners and you have to accept the fact. The answer is that it is nO worse to wear ‘protective clothing and handle acids than it is to be stripped to the waist and chip coal under- ground; that it is no worse to grow apples in sand with — chemicals than to have mil- lions dying of a potato famine in Ireland; that it is no worse to strap a man into a centri- fuge than it is to have him black out and crash in the Battle of Britain; that it is no worse to have millions of lights in a city than to have half-starved youngsters run- ning around with burning torches. Indeed, it might be better. comicloooks.corn