ABSTRACT
When the subject for this symposium was announced, I realized that I had been thinking about this matter for much of my adult life: the two poles of human existence, the emotional and the rational, and how they can reinforce each other but often come into conflict. So when Adrian Melott suggested that I might want to read something from my science-fiction writing, I thought of two pieces that framed much of my writing career: “Witches Must Burn,” which I wrote back in the early 1950s, used the McCarthy attacks upon academia as the point of departure for a story about the way in which science has replaced witchcraft without providing the same kind of tribal security, and about the basic anti-intellectualism of American culture. The story begins with the burning of the (unnamed) University of Kansas. Eventually I continued the story with “Trial by Fire” and “Witch Hunt,” and brought them together in the novel The Burning.
