Vanguard of the Lost

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A few hundred thousand people in New York saw the early video-news and thus immediately set themselves up as experts, having seen the New Delhi shots of the vast, hoary, slab-sided ships that floated like so many ridiculous balloons over the brown circus-ground landscape of India.

The early editions carried the telephotos and the newspapers were not at all reticent in their surmises. NEW RUSSIAN WEAPON said one. INVADERS FROM SPACE said another. MARTIANS ARRIVE, screamed the News.

It was a situation so altogether trite to the vast international clique of science fiction fandom, remembered from the opening paragraphs of half a thousand stories, that it gave most of them the feeling that they were reliving a dream.

And it gave fandom a chance to check reality against the surmises of the unhappy writers who had been forced to proceed entirely on assumptions.

But this was reality. Even as the atomic bomb had outlawed cataclysm in science fiction, this invasion from space threatened the demise of the space opera, since the more accurately fantasy anticipates actuality, the more carefully it signs its eventual death warrant.

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