Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  For the writer of fantastic stories to help the reader to play the game properly, he must help him in every possible unobtrusive way to domesticate the impossible hypothesis. He must trick him into an unwary concession to some plausible assumption and get on with his story while the illusion holds. And that is where there was a certain slight novelty in my stories when first they appeared. Hitherto, except in exploration fantasies, the fantastic element was brought in by magic. Frankenstein even, used some jiggery-pokery magic to animate his artificial monster. There was trouble about the thing’s soul. But by the end of last century it had become difficult to squeeze even a momentary belief out of magic any longer. It occurred to me that instead of the usual interview with the devil or a magician, an ingenious use of scientific patter might with advantage be substituted. That was no great discovery. I simply brought the fetish stuff up to date, and made it as near actual theory as possible.

  As soon as the magic trick has been done the whole business of the fantasy writer is to keep everything else human and real. Touches of prosaic detail are imperative and a rigorous adherence to the hypothesis. Any extra fantasy outside the cardinal assumption immediately gives a touch of irresponsible silliness to the invention. So soon as the hypothesis is launched the whole interest becomes the interest of looking at human feelings and human ways, from the new angle that has been acquired. One can keep the story within the bounds of a few individual experiences as Chamisso does in Peter Schlemil, or one can expand it to a broad criticism of human institutions and limitations as in Gulliver’s Travels. My early, profound and lifelong admiration for Swift, appears again and again in this collection, and it is particularly evident in a predisposition to make the stories reflect upon contemporary political and social discussions. It is an incurable habit with literary critics to lament some lost artistry and innocence in my early work and to accuse me of having become polemical in my later years. That habit is of such old standing that the late Mr. Zangwill in a review in 1895 complained that my first book, The Time Machine, concerned itself with “our present discontents.” The Time Machine is indeed quite as philosophical and polemical and critical of life and so forth, as Men like Gods written twenty-eight years later. No more and no less. I have never been able to get away from life in the mass and life in general as distinguished from life in the individual experience, in any book I have ever written. I differ from contemporary criticism in finding them inseparable.

  For some years I produced one or more of these “scientific fantasies,” as they were called, every year. In my student days we were much exercised by talk about a possible fourth dimension of space; the fairly obvious idea that events could be presented in a rigid four dimensional space time framework had occurred to me, and this is used as the magic trick for a glimpse of the future that ran counter to the placid assumption of that time that Evolution was a pro-human force making things better and better for mankind. The Island of Dr. Moreau is an exercise in youthful blasphemy. Now and then, though I rarely admit it, the universe projects itself towards me in a hideous grimace. It grimaced that time, and I did my best to express my vision of the aimless torture in creation. The War of the Worlds like The Time Machine was another assault on human self-satisfaction.

  All these three books are consciously grim, under the influence of Swift’s tradition. But I am neither a pessimist nor an optimist at bottom. This is an entirely indifferent world in which wilful wisdom seems to have a perfectly fair chance. It is after all rather cheap to get force of presentation by loading the scales on the sinister side. Horror stories are easier to write than gay and exalting stories. In The First Men in the Moon I tried an improvement on Jules Verne’s shot, in order to look at mankind from a distance and burlesque the effects of specialization. Verne never landed on the moon because he never knew of radio and of the possibility of sending back a message. So it was his shot that came back. But equipped with radio, which had just come out then, I was able to land and even see something of the planet.

  The two later books are distinctly on the optimistic side. The Food of the Gods is a fantasia on the change of scale in human affairs. Everybody nowadays realises that change of scale; we see the whole world in disorder through it; but in 1904 it was not a very prevalent idea. I had hit upon it while working out the possibilities of the near future in a book of speculations called Anticipations (1901). The last story is Utopian. The world is gassed and cleaned up morally by the benevolent tail of a comet.

  Men like Gods, written seventeen years after In the Days of the Comet, and not included in this volume, was almost the last of my scientific fantasies. It did not horrify or frighten, was not much of a success, and by that time I had tired of talking in playful parables to a world engaged in destroying itself. I was becoming too convinced of the strong probability of very strenuous and painful human experiences in the near future to play about with them much more. But I did two other sarcastic fantasies, not included here, Mr. Blettsworthy on Rampole Island and The Autocracy of Mr. Parham, in which there is I think a certain gay bitterness, before I desisted altogether.

  The Autocracy of Mr. Parham is all about dictators, and dictators are all about us, but it has never struggled through to a really cheap edition. Work of this sort gets so stupidly reviewed nowadays that it has little chance of being properly read. People are simply warned that there are ideas in my books and advised not to read them, and so a fatal suspicion has wrapped about the later ones. “Ware stimulants!” It is no good my saying that they are quite as easy to read as the earlier ones and much more timely.

  It becomes a bore doing imaginative books that do not touch imaginations, and at length one stops even planning them. I think I am better employed now nearer reality, trying to make a working analysis of our deepening social perplexities in such labors as The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind and After Democracy. The world in the presence of cataclysmal realities has no need for fresh cataclysmal fantasies. That game is over. Who wants the invented humors of Mr. Parham in Whitehall, when day by day we can watch Mr. Hitler in Germany? What human invention can pit itself against the fantastic fun of the Fates? I am wrong in grumbling at reviewers. Reality had taken a leaf from my book and set itself to supersede me.

  3

  On the writing of speculative fiction

  Robert A. Heinlein

  “There are nine-and-sixty ways

  Of constructing tribal lays

  And every single one of them is right!”

  —Rudyard Kipling

  There are at least two principal ways to write speculative fiction—write about people, or write about gadgets. There are other ways; consider Stapleton’s Last and First Men, recall S. Fowler Wright’s The World Below. But the gadget story and the human-interest story comprise most of the field. Most science fiction stories are a mixture of the two types, but we will speak as if they were distinct—at which point I will chuck the gadget story aside, dust off my hands, and confine myself to the human-interest story, that being the sort of story I myself write. I have nothing against the gadget story—I read it and enjoy it—it’s just not my pidgin. I am told that this is a how-to-do-it symposium; I’ll stick to what I know how to do.

  The editor suggested that I write on “Science Fiction in the Slicks.” I shan’t do so because it is not a separate subject. Several years ago Will F. Jenkins said to me, “I’ll let you in on a secret, Bob. Any story—science fiction, or otherwise—if it is well written, can be sold to the slicks.” Will himself has proved this, so have many other writers—Wylie, Wells, Cloete, Doyle, Ertz, Noyes, many others. You may protest that these writers were able to sell science fiction to the high-pay markets because they were already well-known writers. It just ain’t so, pal; on the contrary they are well-known writers because they are skilled at their trade. When they have a science fiction story to write, they turn out a well-written story and it sells to a high-pay market. An editor of a successful magazine will bounce a poorly-written story from a “na
me” writer just as quickly as one from an unknown. Perhaps he will write a long letter of explanation and suggestion, knowing as he does that writers are as touchy as white leghorns, but he will bounce it. At most, prominence of the author’s name might decide a borderline case.

  A short story stands a much better chance with the slicks if it is not more than 5000 words long. A human-interest story stands a better chance with the slicks than a gadget story, because the human-interest story usually appeals to a wider audience than does a gadget story. But this does not rule out the gadget story. Consider “The Note on Danger B” in a recent Saturday Evening Post and Wylie’s “The Blunder,” which appeared last year in Collier’s.

  Let us consider what a story is and how to write one. (Correction: how I write one— remember Mr. Kipling’s comment!)

  A story is an account which is not necessarily true but which is interesting to read.

  There are three main plots for the human interest story: boy-meets-girl, The Little Tailor, and the man-who-learned-better. Credit the last category to L. Ron Hubbard; I had thought for years that there were but two plots—he pointed out to me the third type.

  Boy-meets-girl needs no definition. But don’t disparage it. It reaches from the Illiad to John Taine’s Time Stream. It’s the greatest story of them all and has never been sufficiently exploited in science fiction. To be sure, it appears in most s-f stories, but how often is it dragged in by the hair and how often is it the compelling and necessary element which creates and then solves the problem? It has great variety: boy-fails-to-meet-girl, boy-meets-girl-too-late, boy-meets-too-many-girls, boy-loses-girl, boy-and-girl-renounce-love-for-higher-purpose. Not science fiction? Here is a throw-away plot; you can have it free: Elderly man meets very young girl; they discover that they are perfectly adapted to each other, perfectly in love, “soul mates.” (Don’t ask me how. It’s up to you to make the thesis credible. If I’m going to have to write this story, I want to be paid for it.)

  Now to make it a science fiction story. Time travel? Okay, what time theory—probable-times, classic theory, or what? Rejuvenation? Is this mating necessary to some greater end? Or vice versa? Or will you transcend the circumstances, as C. L. Moore did in that tragic masterpiece “Bright Illusion”?

  I’ve used it twice as tragedy and shall probably use it again. Go ahead and use it yourself. I did not invent it; it is a great story which has been kicking around for centuries.

  The “Little Tailor”—this is an omnibus for all stories about the little guy who becomes a big shot, or vice versa. The tag is from the fairy story. Examples: “Dick Whittington,” all the Alger books, Little Caesar, Galactic Patrol (but not Grey Lensman), Mein Kampf, David in the Old Testament. It is the Success story, or, in reverse, the story of tragic failure.

  The man-who-learned-better; just what it sounds like—the story of a man who has one opinion, point of view, or evaluation at the beginning of the story, then acquires a new opinion or evaluation as a result of having his nose rubbed in some harsh facts. I had been writing this story for years before Hubbard pointed out to me the structure of it. Examples: my Universe and Logic of Empire, Jack London’s South of the Slot, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

  The definition of a story as something interesting-but-not-necessarily-true is general enough to cover all writers, all stories—even James Joyce, if you find his stuff interesting. (I don’t!) For me, a story of the sort I want to write is still further limited to this recipe: a man finds himself in circumstances which create a problem for him. In coping with this problem, the man is changed in some fashion inside himself. The story is over when the inner change is complete—the external incidents may go on indefinitely.

  People changing under stress:

  A lonely rich man learns comradeship in a hobo jungle.

  A milquetoast gets pushed too far and learns to fight.

  A strong man is crippled and has to adjust to it.

  A gossip learns to hold her tongue.

  A hard-boiled materialist gets acquainted with a ghost.

  A shrew is tamed.

  This is the story of character, rather than incident. It’s not everybody’s dish, but for me it has more interest than the most overwhelming pure adventure story. It need not be unadventurous; the stress which produces the change in character can be wildly adventurous, and often is.

  But what has all this to do with science fiction? A great deal! Much so-called science fiction is not about human beings and their problems, consisting instead of a fictionized framework, peopled by cardboard figures, on which is hung an essay about the Glorious Future of Technology. With due respect to Mr. Bellamy, Looking Backward is a perfect example of the fictionized essay. I’ve done it myself; “Solution Unsatisfactory” is a fictionized essay, written as such. Knowing that it would have to compete with real story, I used every device I could think of, some of them hardly admissible, to make it look like a story.

  Another type of fiction alleged to be science fiction is the story laid in the future, or on another planet, or in another dimension, or such, which could just as well have happened on Fifth Avenue, in 1947. Change the costumes back to now, cut out the pseudo-scientific double-talk and the blaster guns, and it turns out to be straight adventure story, suitable, with appropriate facelifting, to any other pulp magazine on the news stand.

  There is another type of honest-to-goodness science fiction story which is not usually regarded as science fiction: the story of people dealing with contemporary science or technology. We do not ordinarily mean this sort of story when we say “science fiction”; what we do mean is the speculative story, the story embodying the notion “Just suppose—”, or “What would happen if—”. In the speculative science fiction story accepted science and established facts are extrapolated to produce a new situation, a new framework for human action. As a result of this new situation, new human problems are created—and our story is about how human beings cope with those new problems.

  The story is not about the new situation; it is about coping with problems arising out of the new situation.

  Let’s gather up the bits and define the Simon-pure science fiction story:

  1.The conditions must be, in some respect, different from here-and-now, although the difference may lie only in an invention made in the course of the story.

  2.The new conditions must be an essential part of the story.

  3.The problem itself—the “plot”—must be a human problem.

  4.The human problem must be one which is created by, or indispensably affected by, the new conditions.

  5.And lastly, no established fact shall be violated, and, furthermore, when the story requires that a theory contrary to present accepted theory be used, the new theory should be rendered reasonably plausible and it must include and explain established facts as satisfactorily as the one the author saw fit to junk. It may be far-fetched, it may seem fantastic, but it must not be at variance with observed facts, i.e., if you are going to assume that the human race descended from Martians, then you’ve got to explain our apparent close relationship to terrestrial anthropoid apes as well.

  Pardon me if I go on about this. I love to read science fiction, but violation of that last requirement gets me riled. Rocketships should not make banked turns on empty space the way airplanes bank their turns on air. Lizards can’t crossbreed with humans. The term “space warp” does not mean anything without elaborate explanation.

  Not everybody talking about heaven is going there—and there are a lot of people trying to write science fiction who haven’t bothered to learn anything about science. Nor is there any excuse for them in these days of public libraries. You owe it to your readers (a) to bone up on the field of science you intend to introduce into your story; (b) unless you yourself are well-versed in that field, you should also persuade some expert in that field to read your story and criticize it before you offer it to an unsuspecting public. Unless you are willing to take this much trouble, please, please s
tick to a contemporary background you are familiar with. Paderewski had to practice; Sonja Henie still works on her school figures; a doctor puts in many weary years before they will let him operate—why should you be exempt from preparatory effort?

  The Simon-pure science fiction story—examples of human problems arising out of extrapolations of present science:

  Biological warfare ruins the farm lands of the United States; how is Joe Doakes, a used-car dealer, to feed his family?

  Interplanetary travel puts us in contact with a race able to read our thoughts; is the testimony of such beings admissible as evidence in a murder trial?

  Men reach the Moon; what is the attitude of the Security Council of the United Nations? (Watch out for this one—and hold on to your hats!)

  A complete technique for ectogenesis is developed; what is the effect on home, family, morals, religion? (Aldous Huxley left lots of this field unplowed—help yourself.)