Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  And so on. I’ve limited myself to my notions about science fiction, but don’t forget Mr. Kipling’s comment. In any case it isn’t necessary to know how—just go ahead and do it. Write what you like to read. If you have a yen for it, if you get a kick out of “Just imagine—”, if you love to think up new worlds, then come on in, the water’s fine and there is plenty of room.

  But don’t write to me to point out how I have violated my own rules in this story or that. I’ve violated all of them and I would much rather try a new story than defend an old one.

  I’m told that these articles are supposed to be some use to the reader. I have a guilty feeling that all of the above may have been more for my amusement than for your edification. Therefore I shall chuck in as a bonus a group of practical, tested rules which, if followed meticulously, will prove rewarding to any writer.

  I shall assume that you can type, that you know the accepted commercial format or can be trusted to look it up and follow it, and that you always use new ribbons and clean type. Also, that you can spell and punctuate and can use grammar well enough to get by. These things are merely the word-carpenter’s sharp tools. He must add to them these business habits:

  1.You must write.

  2.You must finish what you start.

  3.You must refrain from rewriting except to editorial order.

  4.You must put it on the market.

  5.You must keep it on the market until sold.

  The above five rules really have more to do with how to write speculative fiction than anything said above them. But they are amazingly hard to follow—which is why there are so few profesisonal writers and so many aspirants, and which is why I am not afraid to give away the racket! But, if you will follow them, it matters not how you write, you will find some editor somewhere, sometime, so unwary or so desperate for copy as to buy the worst old dog you, or I, or anybody else, can throw at him.

  4

  What do you mean: Science? Fiction?

  Judith Merril

  . . . some notes on the completion of an anthology of the year’s best what?

  I used to know what “science” meant: at least I understood the word well enough to believe that a statement like, “A revolution is occuring in science,” made clear sense. At that time, the distinctions between “physical sciences” and “biological sciences,” “theory” and “application,” “research” and “engineering,” “experimental” and “clinical,” seemed perfectly obvious.

  I also used to know what “fiction” meant. I knew the difference between a novel, a novella, a novelette, a short story, and a vignette; between “subjective” and “objective” narrative styles; between “psychological fiction” and the “adventure story”; between “realism” and “fantasy.”

  I never did know just what “science fiction” meant: in all the nights I stayed awake till dawn debating definitions, I do not recall one that stood up unflinchingly to the light of day. They all relied, in any case, on certain axiomatic assumptions about the meanings of “science” and “fiction.”

  Actually, when I first became involved in such debates—about twenty-five years ago—there was already a fair amount of honest confusion (among scientists) about the meaning of “science” in the 20th century. As dedicated—addicted—s-f readers, we had some awareness of the upheaval in process in scientific philosophy, following on the work of Heisenberg and Schroedinger, Bridgman and de Broglie; but as dedicated—addicted—s-f readers, we also made a complete, unconscious, adjustment when we talked stories instead of concepts—“science” in “science fiction” meant (and for most readers—and writers—still does mean) “technology.”

  What is viable in “science fiction” (whatever that may mean) today is coming from a comparatively small group of serious writers—in and out of the specialty field—who are applying the traditions of the genre and the techniques of contemporary literature to the concepts of 20th century science. The first results are already barely discernible. Science fiction is catching up with science. And the genre is returning from its forty years of self-imposed wandering, away from the wellsprings of literature.

  The two events could only be simultaneous. Art at any time can achieve validity only if it is rooted in the accumulated human experience of its day, and touches somewhere on the nerve center of the culture from which it springs. The literature of the mid-20th century can be meaningful only in so far as it perceives, and relates itself to, the central reality of our culture: the revolution in scientific thought which has replaced mechanics with dynamics, classification with integration, positivism with relativity, certainties with statistical probabilities, dualism with parity.

  If it seems I am saying that there is no adequate literature in existence now—I am. If it further seems I am claiming a special literary validity for science fiction—I would be, except that as it achieves that validity, it ceases to be “science fiction” and becomes simply contemporary literature instead.

  I must pause here to establish my lack of credentials. Although, as fellow science fiction readers, our knowledge of scientific history, and contemporary scientific concepts, is probably roughly equatable, and (for many of you at least) arrived at in rather the same manner (elementary courses at school, and wide and presumably intelligent reading since), our knowledge of literature is neither equal nor similar. I learned my definitions of “fiction” from pulp writers and editors initially: their rules were hard-and-fast, and the penalty for breaking them was hunger; or worse yet, working for a living instead of selling stories.

  So when I say I knew what fiction was, I mean I really knew. Things like: a short story is limited to one main character, who must be involved in a conflict which is resolved before the end of the story; it can be told from only one viewpoint, which must not shift during the story; a novelette is still primarily about one character, though it is possible to develop one or even two subsidiary characters to some degree—the main distinction is that there can be more than one or two incidents involved in developing the conflict before the resolution: if you get good enough, you can occasionally shift viewpoints in a novelette without killing the sale. Things like that.

  I found out by a combination of my own dissatisfaction with the rule-book, and by a very slow and extremely erratic catching-up process (still far from complete) in my reading, that the rules I had learned were not only not universal, but not particularly applicable to anything I wanted to do—except sell. I also found out that in the upper literary strata, it was possible to break them and sell; and in the way-out literary strata (where nobody gets paid for anything) it was almost required to break them.

  I didn’t find the rules in other areas any improvement; at least, I kept on enjoying reading s-f more than other contemporary work—until a few years ago. What happened, or started to happen, a few years ago, I will come back to. Meantime, let me tell you about my great discoveries, and try to see them through the eyes of a genuine discoverer. Bear with me if I sometimes state the obvious; it was not so to me. And if some things I say are obviously not so—remember, I claim no authority: I am speaking only of my own experiences and discoveries.

  It is not the Bomb or the Pill (or miracle drugs or synthetic materials or space travel) that are forcing us to re-think the meaning of “science”: these, after all, are comparatively mechanical, technological, applications of what I have been calling 20th century scientific concepts—although they of course began in the 19th. The reverberations of that conceptual revolution have by now shaken every branch of scientific investigation and human life. Indeed the failure of entrenched, established academic Humanism to comprehend the meaning of the rumblings from cross-campus (the “two-culture” phenomenon) was probably due in part to preoccupation with the local effects of the same conceptual explosion in the arts and social sciences.

  It was not James Joyce or Henry Miller or Jack Kerouac or William Burroughs who made it necessary to re-examine the idea of “fiction.” They were simply pion
eers in the process of re-examination. The seeds of the upheaval, as in the case of the scientific revolution, appeared at the height of Victorian formalist-mechanist complacency—the beginning of modern social science (Darwin, Freud, Boas, Veblen. . .) with a focus on human motivations, rather than surface behavior.

  What happened in the various sciences had its almost exact counterpart in literature, and most markedly so in “fiction,” that curious prose form which, like physics and chemistry, anthropology and psychology (and their numerous and hybrid offspring), came into existence as a distinct area of human endeavor during the Great Crackup of the 17th century. I will not attempt here to argue the causes. I am inclined to the notion that the voyages of exploration and discovery of America, and the printing press, with its attendant revolution in communications, were major factors. Whatever the chain of causation, the result was as though a figurative planet composed of man’s intellect, suddenly acquired so much additional mass, or velocity (or both?), that it flew out of orbit, breaking up and fragmenting under the strain. (Perhaps the settlement of America enlarged the “subjective mass” of the planet in men’s minds? Or possibly just the first accumulation of the sheer bulk of paper under which we are nowadays likely to be buried. . .)

  One might carry the metaphor further, and assume that the reduced planet, and its severed chunks, would have settled, eventually, into new orbits closer to the source of energy. Some bits would have been drawn into the sun and lost entirely: Divine Right went that way (and with it a substantial part of the certainty of divinity). Other pieces, the largest ones, would have been drawn back into the parent body very quickly, and become attached as discrete territories, no longer part of the amorphous whole: one might conceive of the establishment of national sovereignties this way, or of the broad demarcations of not-yet-“scientific” disciplines as they first appeared—naturalist, mathematician-astronomer, philosopher, and so forth. The intermediate chunks, settling into orbits somewhat closer to the sun at first, absorbed more energy perhaps, and grew, moving back closer to the parent body with each increment of mass and velocity.

  Take the fancy one bit farther, and picture the return of the pieces (rather as Planetarium lecturers are fond of presenting the image of an eventual falling-back of the Moon). At least one of the first returning bodies would have landed with tremendous impact—Newtonian physics, the laws of motion, gravitation, and the Calculus, containing within them (if anyone had thought to notice, or had energy to spare to think it through) a clear explanatory warning of descents yet to come.

  The new literary form, fiction, may be considered to have made its (far less impactful) return as a clearly formed body somewhere about the middle of the 18th century. (Even fancifullier, one might postulate that the date went unnoticed, and is still argued, because it landed in the tropic sea of some enchanted voyage of exploration—quite possibly just out of sight of Alexander Selkirk’s lonely island—and that it was in the nourishing warmth of these waters that the solid mass broke somewhat apart, and eventually attached itself to the land mass again as the full-blown novel and incipient short story.)

  * * *

  All metaphors aside, I believe it is significant that the fiction form took shape and name in the same intellectual-cultural upheaval from which the familiar “scientific disciplines” emerged—that it achieved a discernible form and popularity just about half way between the beginnings of physics and anthropology, and that its later history shows so many parallels with those of nineteenth-century science.

  We tend to think of the 19th century in terms of its own popular image of itself: a time of complacency and classification, of rationality, mechanistic philosophy, scientific certainties, technological, literary and artistic polish rather than innovation. Actually, there seem almost to have been two parallel nineteenth centuries: some things about the other one we are still finding out. But we do know that the groundwork for modern mathematics—the non-Euclidean geometries of Gauss, Lobachevsky, and Riemann, as well as Boolean algebra and the basis of symbolic logic—had already been worked out in 1850—when Kierkegaard was writing the first Existential works, and Baudelaire was setting forth the principles of the Symbolist movement—all before either the publication of The Descent of Man, or the organization of the Periodic Table.

  Fifty years later—just at the turn of the century, while Victoria still reigned, and Teddy Roosevelt brandished his Big Stick—Freud and Pavlov, Lorentz and Fitzgerald, Buber and Heidegger, laid the foundations for thought control, space-time cosmology, and even the Ecumenical Council.

  The first confused wave of reaction against these innovations came in the form of reinforced mechanism and increasingly “discrete” and complicated “classification”; perhaps it was not so much reaction as an honest effort on the part of people trained in the formalisms of the nineteenth century, to cope with the fascinating, staggering, new integrations while still using the familiar methods of separation and analysis.

  Thus, the twentieth century opened to a compartmentation and fragmentation of knowledge unprecedented in scope, and probably in attitude. Within the physical sciences, separate but traditional disciplines were splitting and resplitting: chemists became organic or inorganic chemists—then bio-chemists or physical chemists, etc. They devoted themselves to theory or to application. In the “social sciences,” the same phenomenon occurred. In both areas, the engineers took over—at least in popular esteem.

  The reasons for this are both obvious and subtle, and it would require, I think, a complete separate essay to examine them satisfactorily. All that matters for purposes of this retrospection, is that two completely separate—and for a time increasingly separating—streams of intellectual endeavor proceeded, in dialectical fashion, from the origins of modern thought in the last half of the nineteenth century. The most obvious, and most comprehensible of these was for some time the essentially engineering-type application of bits and pieces of new conceptual discoveries by the best of the old-school mechanicians: the flood of electronic, aeronautic, and biochemical inventions; the sensational discoveries of the behaviorists and early cultural anthropologists; the economic determinists in politics and sociology; and the school of twentieth-century “realism” in fiction.

  * * *

  I cannot define science fiction, but I can locate it, philosophically and historically:

  There is a body of writing of whose general outlines the readers of Extrapolation are, by common consent, already aware: that is to say, the “classical antecedents” from Lucian and Plato through, approximately, Kepler and de Bergerac; the “borderline” (both of acceptability and between periods) instances of Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, terminating probably (in general acceptability) with Gulliver’s Travels and Micromegas; the “Gothic” vein which characterizes the first half, or two-thirds, of the nineteenth century, and continues as a major element well into the twentieth; the period generally considered as “modern,” beginning with Verne, and achieving general popularity in the last two decades of the nineteenth century; and the specific area of American specialty science fiction starting in the pulp adventure magazines of the 1910’s, and being consolidated by Hugo Gernsback as a discrete phenomenon in his specialty publications during the 1920’s.

  Assuming this to represent some general area of agreement on what we mean when we talk about “science fiction,” I believe it is possible to distinguish within the broad area certain distinct and more reasonably definable forms:

  1.“Teaching stories”: the dramatized essay or disguised treatise, in which the fiction form is utilized to present a new scientific idea, sometimes (as with the Somnium, or the works of “John Taine” and other pseudonymous scientists) because of social, political, religious, or academic pressures operating against a direct presentation; sometimes (as with the typical Gernsbackian story, and a fair proportion of late nineteenth-century work) as a means of “popularizing” scientific information or theories, or (hopefully) sugarcoating an educational pill. (T
his is what used to be called by literary snobs, “pseudoscience,” and should have been called “pseudofiction”—although in the hands of an expert it can become reasonably good fiction: Arthur C. Clarke manages it occasionally, although his best work—Childhood’s End, for instance—is not of this type.)

  2.“Preaching stories”: primarily allegories and satires—morality pieces, prophecies, visions, and warnings, more concerned with the conduct of human society than with its techniques. These are the true “pseudoscience” stories: they utilize science (or technology), or a plausible semblance of science (or technology), or at least the language and atmosphere, in just the same way that the scientific treatise in disguise utilizes fiction. And let me point out again (rather more enthusiastically than before) that some first-rate writing has emerged from this sort of forced marriage. (Perhaps the difference between the work of a marriage broker and a shotgun wedding?) Stapledon’s Starmaker falls into this group, as well as Ray Bradbury’s (specifically) science fiction and a large proportion of both Utopian and anti-Utopian novels up through the turn of the century.

  3.Speculative fiction: stories whose objective is to explore, to discover, to learn, by means of projection, extrapolation, analogue, hypothesis-and-paper-experimentation, something about the nature of the universe, of man, of “reality.” Obviously, all fiction worth considering is “speculative” in the sense that it endeavors to reach, or to expose, some aspect of Truth. But it is equally true—and irrelevant—to say that all fiction is imaginative or all fiction is fantasy. I use the term “speculative fiction” here specifically to describe the mode which makes use of the traditional “scientific method” (observation, hypothesis, experimentation) to examine some postulated approximation of reality, by introducing a given set of changes—imaginary or inventive—into the common background of “known facts,” creating an environment in which the responses and perceptions of the characters will reveal something about the inventions, the characters, or both.