The Astral Mirror

by Ben Bova

  Clearly it is not literary excellence, in the academician’s sense, that has propelled science fiction onto the hardcover best seller lists. Nor do many best sellers of any kind rely on literary excellence for their popularity. It takes two things to make a best seller: the publisher’s decision to invest the effort and money that will allow the book to sell at least forty to fifty thousand copies in hardcover, and the public’s acceptance of the book.

  Why is the hardcover book buyer turning to science fiction?

  Anthropologist Helen E. Fisher, of the New School for Social Research and co-chairman of the New York Academy of Science’s anthropology department, sees the popularity of science fiction as part of the American public’s new-found interest in science itself.

  “All of science is finding an audience,” says Dr. Fisher. Speaking of the boom in science-oriented magazines such as Omni, Science Digest, Discover and others that have appeared on the newsstands since 1978, she explained, “Suddenly we have... new magazines in popular science... several TV specials and series such as Nova... perhaps science fiction is a good gauge for an entire industry that’s doing well.”

  When asked if she thought that science fiction helped readers to understand the possibilities and limitations of modern science, Dr. Fisher replied, “Totally. It’s like lateral thinking: if you can get out of your mind-set long enough to see other possibilities, then perhaps when you get back into the problems you’re trying to solve, you’ll be able to see new solutions.”

  The nonfiction best seller lists support Dr. Fisher’s surmise. Books such as The Soul of a New Machine and Megatrends have surprised their publishers with their strong sales. Earlier, Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff showed that there was an audience among book buyers who were eager to read about heroes—men who dare to accept challenges such as space flight, and succeed. And Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and earlier books about the wonders of science were staples on all the best seller nonfiction lists.

  Physicist Heinz R. Pagels, executive director of the New York Academy of Sciences, recalled that the Nobel Laureate physicist I. I. Rabi once scolded a gathering of his colleagues for their lack of interest in writing books about science for the general public. Rabi said that the general public owed more of its sense of excitement about science to science fiction writers than it did to scientists.

  But in Dr. Pagels’ view, science fiction often distracts the reader from a realistic assessment of the future. While it is filled both with apocalyptic visions and the sense of progress—stemming from science and technology—he finds much of science fiction “shallow and inept,” filled with cardboard characters and shopworn ideas.

  “I’ve always felt that science fiction writers are the moralists of our times, in a way,” says Dr. Pagels. “But they simplify the moral situation, a simplification that is so rudimentary it allows the reader to decide which are the good guys and the bad guys, and in fact most of our lives today are far more ambiguous and complex than you’ll find in the science fiction literature or any of the popular literature of today.”

  The late Derek de Solla Price, Avalon Professor of the History of Science at Yale University, was one of the few academics to teach science fiction who thoroughly understood the field. A science fiction reader since he was seven, Professor Price was a classmate of Arthur C. Clarke’s at the University of London in the 1930s.

  “I was intrigued as to why I liked what was then obviously such poor writing and literary style,” Professor Price said of his early science fiction reading, “and why I found it so important to me.... I think the secret of ‘hard core’ science fiction, what intrigued me... [was] that science fiction models the process of scientific discovery. The successful ‘hard core’ science fiction story enables the reader to experience, albeit vicariously, the thrill of scientific discovery.”

  Even though science fiction “contains a lot of demonstrably poor writing,” Professor Price said that science fiction’s strength lies in “the intellectual style of the ideas” that form the backbone of the best science fiction. He saw science fiction as no more “escapist” than Moby Dick or any other literary endeavor.

  Professor Price said that his class in science fiction was “the best sugar-coated pill that I have for creative talking about science and technology and preparing the [students] for the future.” Most of his students worked harder, he believed, at the science fiction course “in terms of writing and arguing ideas” than for any other class they took.

  Professor Price saw no conflict between teaching science fiction and the history of science, “which is what I get paid for teaching,” although much of the Yale faculty still tends to regard science fiction poorly. In his view, science fiction helps to communicate “the great intellectual adventure of science,” the thrill of challenging the universe, the excitement of discovery, of blazing a trail into unknown intellectual territory, whether it is astronauts landing on a distant planet or laboratory researchers producing a cure for cancer.

  “People are now realizing that science and technology are the ‘hard core’ of civilization,” said Professor Price. “There is a large and growing part of the population who accept high technology... it is part of their everyday lives.”

  The audience for science fiction, then, has been growing. Since the mid-1970s, science fiction titles have accounted for roughly ten percent of all the new fiction published in the U.S. each year. But until recent years science fiction has been a market for paperback books, not hardcover. It was not until Herbert’s third Dune book that a “hard core” science fiction novel spent a few weeks on the hardcover best seller lists. Robert A. Heinlein, the acknowledged dean of American science fiction writers, did not crack the hardcover list until his forty-third book, Friday, was published in 1982.

  To reach the best seller lists, a book must have the unstinting support of its publisher. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, publisher of Del Rey Books and a vice president of its parent Ballantine Books, paid Clarke a $1,000,000 advance for 2010: Odyssey Two, according to Locus, the science fiction newsmagazine.

  “There was no doubt in my mind that this would be a big best-seller,” Mrs. Del Rey states. “There is a whole generation who grew up and turned on and remembers the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey... a whole generation who are waiting to find out [about] HAL, the monolith, and all.”

  Among that “whole generation” she includes many book sellers, and particularly many of the buyers for the major national chains of book stores. “They grew up with science fiction,” she says. Buyers who have read science fiction paperbacks and watched science fiction movies since childhood have helped to create today’s market. “Book sellers want to make money,” and the success of science fiction is making the entire industry realize that there are profits to be gained from the prophets.

  Hugh O’Neill, the editor at Doubleday who shepherded Asimov’s Foundation’s Edge to the best seller lists, agrees that the field’s growth is “generational.” Since the 1950s, Asimov’s prodigious output of books have been bought faithfully by an avid and growing audience of readers. Foundation’s Edge is the fourth novel in a series that began in the 1940s. The third novel in the series was published in 1953. For thirty years, readers waited for the next book.

  “We knew from the time we signed the contract on this book that we had a very big seller on our hands.... Simply, in part, because of all the people—literally generations of people—who have been waiting all these years for it.”

  O’Neill, like others, sees books about science and the future as part of a general trend of public concern about the future, “and in some way that concern makes its way across to fiction, specifically to science fiction.”

  Doubleday’s initial faith in Foundation’s Edge led them to commit a large budget to advertising the book, and “we got all kinds of ‘word of mouth’ going about the book, literally from the time we signed the contract for it, which got people throughout the industry excited about it.” The sales force saw to it that the books were i
n the stores in large numbers, and the sale of various subsidiary rights— paperback rights to Del Rey, book club and foreign rights— helped to keep the publicity pot boiling.

  The result: a quarter-million hardcover books sold within the first few months of publication.

  O’Neill points out that the “mega-movies” such as Star Wars and E.T. had a powerful impact on readers, particularly younger readers. Novelist Herbert agrees that motion picture and television taught an audience of many millions to understand science fiction’s basic vocabulary of ideas and techniques. A major factor in this process of familiarization has been the TV series Star Trek. Although the series was cancelled in 1969 after three seasons of primetime broadcast, it has been rerun daily in almost every major TV market in the nation ever since.

  Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, points out that when he was trying to sell his series to television, network executives “considered science fiction as something a small group of sort-of ‘cuckoo’ people read and talked about.” His own father, Roddenberry says, was so ashamed of his son’s resorting to science fiction that he apologized to his neighbors when the first Star Trek episode was aired, in 1966.

  Roddenberry sees science fiction as a means of commenting on society despite the restrictions of censorship. He had been writing television scripts for many years, and invented Star Trek so that he could “talk about sex, war, religion... and get it by the [network] censors.” He points out that Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift, Moliere and many other writers throughout history have used fantasy and science fiction as a means of satirizing their society without “having their heads chopped off.”

  Entertainment, escapism, interest in the future, the ability to make social commentary—are these the only reasons for science fiction’s growing popularity? There may be a deeper reason, one that is rooted in the nature of modern civilization.

  “Science fiction has taken the place of the old mythologies,” says Bruno Bettelheim, Distinguished Professor of Education and Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Chicago.

  “People used to believe in gods and demigods; now they have invented extraterrestrial intelligences so that they don’t feel so lonely.”

  The author of Children of the Dream and The Uses of Enchantment, Professor Bettelheim sees science fiction as an attempt to create a modern mythology, a set of beliefs fitted to the needs of a society that is based on science and technology.

  Joseph Campbell, Professor of Literature at Sarah Lawrence College, has made mythology his special field of study, in books such as Hero with a Thousand Faces and the four-volume The Masks of God. He has pointed out that modern man has no mythology; the old myths are dead, but no new mythology has been raised in their place.

  Is science fiction serving as a mythology for modern times? Campbell insists that all human societies need a mythology to give emotional meaning to the world in which their people live. A mythology is a sort of codification on the emotional level of people’s attitudes toward life, death, and the entire vast, mysterious universe.

  Professor Campbell has shown that there are at least four major functions that a mythology must accomplish.

  1. A mythology must induce a feeling of awe and majesty in the people. In science fiction, this is called “a sense of wonder,” the almost child-like thrill of discovering new worlds, new ideas. This “sense of wonder” is the driving spirit behind science fiction; it is what brought tens of millions of viewers into movie theaters to see Star Wars and E.T. Classic science fiction novels such as Asimov’s Foundation series and Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles impart this sense of awe and majesty when they are read for the first time.

  2. A mythology must define and uphold a system of the universe, a self-consistent explanation for the phenomena of the world around us. Science fiction’s “system” is, of course, the continuously-expanding body of knowledge we call science. At heart, science is the bedrock of faith on which our society is built. And science fiction is the one field of literature that consistently deals with science and its offspring technology.

  Much of science fiction warns against the consequences of allowing technology to run amok. But even in a tale as darkly dystopian as C.M. Kombluth and Frederik Pohl’s The Space Merchants, where advertising agencies rule the world, it is not technology that is seen as the danger, but the people who use technology as a weapon against human freedom.

  3. A mythology usually supports the establishment. For example, the mythology of ancient Greece apparently originated with the Achaean conquerors of the earlier Mycenaean civilization. When Theseus slew the Minotaur, it represented the triumph of the Achaeans over the Mycenaeans. Science fiction stories steadfastly support the basic established line of Western civilization, the concept that the individual human being is more valuable than the state or the organization. Even in Soviet and Eastern European science fiction, the individual is the focus of the story, and he or she is often in conflict with “the organization.” Behind the Iron Curtain, science fiction is one of the few avenues for social criticism available to writers—and readers.

  Science fiction writers tend to project their society’s political systems into their future scenarios. Robert A. Heinlein writes invariably about the plucky, bright, industrious entrepreneur making his fortune despite the bureaucracies of tomorrow. Stanislaw Lem sees a socialist future, but one with room enough for his hero Pirx to exert his individuality.

  4. A mythology serves as a crutch to help the individual member of a society through the emotional crises of life, such as the transition from childhood into adulthood, and the inevitability of death. It is difficult to tell if science fiction qualifies on this point, although it may be significant that science fiction has always had its largest readership among the young, the adolescents who are trying to determine just where they fit into our complex society. Critics such as Klein may have missed the point entirely when they castigate science fiction for its “adolescent” point of view. And are not all those stories of superheroes and time-travel and immortality nothing less than an attempt to grapple with the inevitability of death?

  In a society where science and technology are such obviously dominant factors, it is natural for a literature that deals with science and technology to be widely read. The future is becoming an obsession with us, largely because we now understand that the problems which beset us can only be solved in the future. The past is gone, the present is but a dimensionless moment; the future is all we have to work with.

  Science fiction enthusiasts claim that science fiction is the only form of literature that attempts to examine the future; all other forms are backward-looking. They attempt to examine yesterday, not tomorrow.

  Be that as it may, science fiction looks to me like a sort of Horatio Alger story: born in the poverty of the pulp magazines, through hard work and sheer drive Our Hero has not only risen to the top, but is now influencing the entire American industry of fiction and entertainment.

  No one typifies the Horatio Alger aspect of the field better than Isaac Asimov. Born in Russia, brought to Brooklyn as an infant, raised in a succession of family-owned candy stores, Dr. Asimov has worked hard and steadily, turning out book after book, until now, after more than forty years of effort, he is a Best Selling Author. How does he feel about that?

  A bit worried. “Now Doubleday probably thinks my next novel is going to sell 250,000 copies. I don’t know if I can stand this kind of pressure,” says the usually ebullient Dr. Asimov.

  But there’s a grin lurking beneath his troubled frown. Above all else, science fiction tends to be optimistic.

  Love Calls

  The following three short stores are science fiction tales which deal with the here-and-now—almost. “Love Calls” (and “The Angel’s Gift,” which appeared earlier in this book) originally appeared under a pen name. When I was the Editorial Director of Omni magazine, I would occasionally submit a short story to the fiction editor or the editor of The Best of Omni Sci
ence Fiction through my agent, using a pen name so that they would not know who the actual author was. Once I left the magazine, though, I could put my “alter ego” into retirement and go back to writing short fiction under my own name.

  Branley Hopkins was one of those unfortunate men who had succeeded too well, far too early in life. A brilliant student, he had immediately gone on to a brilliant career as an investment analyst, correctly predicting the booms in microchip electronics and genetic engineering, correctly avoiding the slumps in automobiles and utilities.

  Never a man to undervalue his own advice, he had amassed a considerable fortune for himself by the time he was thirty. He spent the next five years enlarging on his personal wealth while he detached himself, one by one, from the clients who clung to him the way a blind man clings to his cane. Several bankruptcies and more than one suicide could be laid at his door, but Branley was the type who would merely step over the corpses, nimbly, without even looking down to see who they might be.

  On his thirty-fifth birthday he retired completely from the business of advising other people and devoted his entire attention to managing his personal fortune. He made a private game of it to see if he could indulge his every whim on naught but the interest that his money accrued, without touching the principal.

  To his astonishment, he soon learned that the money accumulated faster than his ability to spend it. He was a man of fastidious personal tastes, lean and ascetic-looking in his neatly-trimmed beard and fashionable but severe wardrobe. There was a limit to how much wine, how many women, and how loud a song he could endure. He was secretly amused, at first, that his vices could not keep up with the geometric virtue of compounded daily interest. But in time his amusement turned to boredom, to ennui, to a dry sardonic disenchantment with the world and the people in it.