Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  It is in this last area that the essence of science fiction resides; it covers a great deal of territory, shading at either end into the first two categories. Clearly, there is hybridization all through the groups—as for instance in satire (such as The Child Buyer, or Player Piano) whose main devil actually is some specific aspect of science or technology.

  For purposes of this discussion, I am not considering the space adventure story, the transplanted western or historical, as science fiction at all.

  * * *

  In his introduction to Future Perfect, H. Bruce Franklin points out: “There was no major nineteenth-century American writer of fiction, and indeed few in the second rank, who did not write some science fiction or at least one Utopian romance.”

  I doubt that a statement quite so all-embracing could be made for all of Western literature, but if you take fiction, for the moment, to include all forms of story-telling (other than the documented reportorial), and allow science its broadest (and I think truest) meaning—the conscientious seeking after knowledge of the nature of the universe, the nature of man, and the nature of “reality”—then I believe Franklin’s statement can be applied with few exceptions to the major story-tellers of Western civilization, at almost all times in almost all countries.

  One of the exceptional times-and-countries was America of the first half of the 20th Century. (There is, frankly, some question in my mind as to whether this period can claim any “major” writers. But within its own framework, it had accepted “greats”—and almost to a man, they shunned anything resembling either science fiction or fantasy—except such fantasy as clearly existed only in the mind of a character.)

  My contention is that “realistic” fiction, rather than speculative or science fiction, was the transient oddity—as grotesque a product of nineteenth-century super-rationalism and mechanistic philosophy as Watson babies and the Stakhanovite movement. For nearly a half century, American writers were somehow impelled to choose, not only one field of writing (poetry, essays, journalism, drama, fiction, biography), but—within fiction at least—one area. “Serious” fiction writers wrote realistic fiction (with Cabell as the exception). “Slick writers” wrote “realistic” stereotypes for the glossy magazines; “pulp writers,” for the pulps. (They at least had some variety of subject, if not style, open to them.) Offhand, I can think of four notable names other than Cabell who broke the rules: Philip Wylie, Conrad Aiken, William Saroyan, and Stephen Vincent Benet. (When Santayana published The Last Puritan, he added an epilogue explaining that it was really a work of philosophy more than a novel.) But the Name Novelists—with the notable exception of Sinclair Lewis in It Can’t Happen Here—stuck to realism exclusively; or if they didn’t, their realistic work was all we saw. (I used a science-fiction satire of Farrell’s in a recent anthology, and met astonishment everywhere; the truth is, Farrell wrote the story almost fifteen years ago, and wasn’t able to sell it: it wasn’t “Farrell”!) Men of scientific or academic or professional standing who suffered from a compulsion to write fiction did so under pen names. Eventually, even the pulp adventure magazines broke up into “categories”: detective, western, sea, sports, science fiction, fantasy.

  This was the unique—indeed, baroque—situation, when the first magazines devoted exclusively to fantasy and science fiction were published here in the mid-twenties. It was a time for extremes and bizarre combinations. The richest country in the world was enjoying its richest years—in the cities—while mortgages foreclosed and the Big Depression gained its first beachhead on the farms. These were the years of prohibition and gangsterism, Bix Beiderbecke and Isadora Duncan; the Scopes Trial in Tennessee and psychoanalysis in New York; bottle babies and “back to normalcy.” Heisenberg published his theories on quantum matrices the year after Coolidge’s election, and announced his “uncertainty” principle the year before the Model A replaced the Model T. Alfred Korzybski’s first book had been published here in 1921; Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead were working with Franz Boas in the new field of cultural anthropology; Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape and T. S. Eliot’s The Wasteland had appeared in 1922, as had Ulysses, and the big American novel that year was Babbitt. In 1926, the “new criticism” was gaining adherents here, but Dali and Surrealism were still almost unknown on this side of the ocean; Goddard tested his first successful liquid fuel rocket; while Lindbergh prepared for his non-stop flight to Paris; Rudolph Valentino died, and the first sound film was made; Hemingway (in Paris) published The Sun Also Rises, and became an important writer overnight.

  The War to End All War had ended a way of life in Europe; here, we were still clinging desperately to certainties where we could find them, flinging out wildly when we lost hold. If Darwin, Freud, and Einstein had made Our Trust in God less than certain, Edison, Ford, and Marconi had given us back something solid. We did our speculating on the stock market—not in our fiction.

  “Scientifiction” in its beginnings was a pure extension of the most mechanistic realism: tomorrow’s machines today. The early Gernsback magazines were confined almost entirely to the Teaching school of science fiction, and were further confined almost exclusively to technology in particular rather than science in general. (The exceptions tended to be pseudonymous works by scholars and scientists who had no other outlet, in the rigid framework of the academic Establishment, for speculation outside the sharply defined range of their own specialties.) John Taine (Eric Temple Bell) affords perhaps the best, though not only, example.

  The others, such as Amazing, seem, in retrospect, to have contained endless expositions of technical, technological, technophiliac, and Technocratic ideas, set forth in ponderous prose, illustrated with cardboard figures spouting wooden dialogue—yet at the time, it was exciting stuff indeed. Perhaps it gave us only more hardware, and gave it dressed in olive drab—but it was tomorrow’s hardware, and it was knowledgeably projected. There was vast scope for the reader’s own imagination to operate, in the cities and spaceships and satellites and time machines of the World of Science (Technology) and Progress to Come.

  And of course, “scientifiction” was not the only game in town. For those who craved madder music and gaudier lights, there was always Weird Tales (established in 1923), where amid warlocks and werewolves one could still find a good supply of mad scientists, mutant plants, Unidentified Alien Objects, mysterious islands, hollow planets, hypnotized beauties, shambling neo-frankensteins, lost civilizations, and all the rest of the gorgeous panoply of Gothic romance—perhaps a bit worn from a century’s heavy use by Hawthorne, Poe, Mary Shelley, Wilkie Collins, Stevenson, Doyle, Haggard, Wells, et al. At times this Gothicism hardly showed the shabby spots at all in the bright purple and muted mauve lighting effects preferred by Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith—and was perhaps no less powerful in its symbolism than when it was first used.

  Weird ran heavily to the Preaching school—allegory and fable, not satire—with the idea content almost exclusively limited to the Battle between Good and Evil. Technological or scientific novelties introduced were usually fully exploited by the author; they left comparatively little to the reader’s imagination. But the rare story (and they were probably no less rare in the fantasy magazines than in science fiction) that did contain some genuine speculative content was much more likely to be equipped with movable-joint characters and appropriate imagery in the background—plus a considerably more colorful and complex prose style. (When they were good they were really quite good, but when they were bad, they were Gothic awful.)

  What I have described is of course an extreme differentiating characteristic, not so much of two specific magazines as of the prevailing atmospheres associated with “scientifiction” and “weird” as sub-categories of the magazine specialty field of science fiction: Gernsback and Lovecraft (who dominated Weird Tales, though he did not edit it) as they look forty years after.

  Actually, the near-total polarization imputed here was effective, if at all, only at the starting-point. Science fict
ion and fantasy of all sorts were still appearing regularly in a number of “all-story” pulp magazines in the twenties, particularly what one might call (absurdly) the “prestige pulps” (Golden Book, Argosy, Blue Book). And by 1930, there were two more specialty magazines: Street & Smith’s Astounding, and Gernsback’s Wonder (first Air Wonder and Science Wonder; later, combined in the single title; later yet, Thrilling Wonder) In the decade following the first issue of Amazing, the admixture of story types, and overlap of authors—and readers—was considerable. Although Weird retained its own distinctive flavor, several of its authors (Carl Jacobi, Clark Ashton Smith, C. L. Moore, for instance) adopting their styles somewhat, began to appear in the other magazines; other writers from the general pulp field, like Leinster and Williamson, made themselves at home, particularly in Astounding under Tremaine’s editorship; and new writers, science fiction specialists from the beginning, established themselves (John W. Campbell, Jr., Harry Bates and Clifford D. Simak and, from England, John Beynon Harris—now John Wyndham—and Eric Frank Russell).

  In the thirties, or more precisely in October 1929, it became abruptly apparent, even to the most dedicated believers in Progress as embodied in Free Enterprise and the Survival of the Fittest, that all was not necessarily for the best in this most solid of all possible worlds. Yet inside science fiction, there was no serious questioning of the virtue inherent in machines, or of the inevitability of the accelerated growth of the super-technological civilization. (However blind the first viewpoint may have been, the second was absolutely clear-sighted.) The net effect, was simply to soften the Technocratic tone, and make the evangelical aspect less obvious. The problem-story took over from the treatise: how to use the machine, how to apply the techniques.

  - - -

  When John W. Campbell, Jr. took over the editorship of Astounding at the end of 1937, the field in general, and Astounding in particular, had acquired a solid nucleus of steady contributors of true speculative science fiction: and I do mean “nucleus.” The number of thinkers capable of new ideas is never large; the number of those with even those rudimentary insights into human behavior and the story-telling knack that constitute the bare minimum capability of a writer of fiction is much smaller. There has never been any likelihood of much genuine speculative science fiction at any time: less so in a low-paid and low-prestige isolated enclave of literature. The astounding thing is, not that the quantity was small, but that there was any noticeable quantity at all. Much more astounding was the rapid growth of that nucleus during Campbell’s first five years of editorship.

  The list of new names in Astounding and Unknown in 1938 and 1939 alone contains more than half the important bylines of the first book publishing boom of the early 50’s: Asimov, De Camp, del Rey, Gold, Heinlein, Hubbard, Jameson, Kuttner, Leiber, Sturgeon, van Vogt. (Boucher, Fredric Brown, Hal Clement, George O. Smith and James H. Schmitz came along in 1941-3.)

  Thus the field gained strength; yet John Campbell has taken a good deal of criticism these past years, from fans, writers, and critics inside the field; recently he has been subject to what might better be called abuse, mostly from people too new to the field, or too uninformed (i.e., Amis’s churlish comments in New Maps of Hell), to comprehend Campbell’s role as writer and editor, in the decade 1935-1945—or how much of what has happened since derived from his impact at that time. If he has been a damaging influence on some writers in recent years, the evil he has done is still far outweighed by the good—and one cannot but suspect, particularly considering Campbell’s working habits—that those writers who have been trapped in the Analog Formula these last years (or intellectually raped by Campbell’s enthusiasms) solicited the economic haven of the trap, and offered up their thematic honor more eagerly than otherwise. Since 1948, it has been easy for any writer who cared to, to resist Campbell’s pressure; before that, Astounding dominated the market so completely that a case might be made against the man for literary despoilage at that time—if anyone cared to. Certainly it is true that Asimov, Sturgeon, Heinlein, Leiber, were revivified by the emergence of new and more literarily demanding markets in the fifties. But it is hardly reasonable to condemn Campbell for not improving things enough; the fact is, when he took over Astounding, the time was ripe for the qualitative, and quantitative, explosion that occurred. But it is equally true that Campbell was the right man for the right time—and perhaps as true that his peculiar limitations were as useful as his considerable abilities.

  After the 1965 Science Fiction Convention in London, the London Sunday Times Magazine published a thoughtful profile of Campbell, by Pat Williams, who suggested:

  . . . Life to Campbell is a gigantic experiment in form, and earth the forcing-house—an impeccable vision, but one not warmed (in his theories, that is) by a feeling for the pain or personal potential of the individuals in the experiment. That kind of gentleness in expression seemed to disappear with Don A. Stuart.

  So that, ironically, as SF becomes increasingly respectable, John Campbell, its acknowledged father-figure, can’t really claim his throne. He provides the continuity, he shaped much of the thought, he made many reputations. SF narrowed from the vastness of space to the greater complexity of “sociological” SF with him presiding.

  But now it is narrowing towards the highly-focused, upside-down detail of “inner space.” The tone is personal and subjective, the quality of expression important. . . . None of this is Campbell’s style.

  I think Mrs. Williams was exceptionally perceptive in her interviewing, and intelligent in her assessment; if she missed a stage between Campbell and “inner space,” it is understandable, because British science fiction has not gone through exactly the same development. It was never effectively cut off, as the specialty field was here, from the main streams of literature and scientific philosophy. In England, they had Priestley, Huxley, Collier, Stapledon, Lewis, Heard, Kersh, Russell, through the thirties and forties. Here, we had Campbell—and eventually, Anthony Boucher and H. L. Gold.

  It may seem self-contradictory to say that Campbell is the “sociological science fiction” editor, and add that his great limitation is his essentially engineering frame of mind: but this is precisely the “useful” limitation I referred to earlier. In the deepest sense, Campbell was the linear and logical successor to Gernsback. He was as technology-minded and application-oriented as the rest of the field in the thirties, with this difference: that he had a broader concept of the scope of “science” (technology and engineering); he wanted to explore the effects of the new technological world on people. Cultural anthropology, social psychology, cybernetics, communications, sociology, education, psychometrics—all these, and a dozen intermediate points, were thrown open for examination.

  There were two immediately noticeable effects: better stories and more and better speculative development. A third effect came inevitably on their heels: one I do not believe Campbell was looking for, and may not have noticed when it arrived—better writing.

  The thinking improved not only because there were vast unworked areas to explore, but because these particular areas attracted writers of somewhat more flexible intellectual inclination—and most of all, because the editor wanted clear thinking; he was honestly (at the beginning) interested in learning about human behavior; he genuinely lacked (as yet) any preconceptions, or even strong opinions, about how the answers should look.

  The stories improved because they were required to be about things that happened to people, rather than just to have people in them. (Nor could they be inside people—and as the “mainstream” has painfully learned, psychiatric introspections make little good fiction.)

  The writing gradually improved because the essence of good writing is clear observation, and you cannot project human responses accurately without observing some humans closely first. It also improved, I think, through hybridization: “scientifiction” had been pro-machine; the Lovecraft school, generally, anti-machine. There had been some overlapping before, but now there was flue
nt admixture of those writers from both areas who were least satisfied with their own sub-genre patterns. Treatise Drab and Poe Purple studied each other with interest, and adapted toward a common center. The general result was not anything that could properly be called literary style; but it approximated a tolerable narrative prose—determinedly matter-of-fact, slangy, colloquial, with a fair balance of color and economy.

  There was even the beginning of characterization. In Asimov’s robot stories an individual grew out of a prototype: Dr. Susan Calvin became more complex and believable in each story. And of course the robots were individuals: in fact, characterization for aliens, elves, androids and others hit the field awhile before living breathing humans arrived. Some of Leiber’s too-true witches may have marked the transition. Del Rey began to generate character in his protagonists. Simak was perhaps the first to do so with any consistency (in the City series). Sturgeon, at that stage, was creating memorable puppets: his characters were cut from no stock on which other authors drew, but the Sturgeon whole-cloth was no more genuine—just brighter colored and better designed.

  In those first few years of Campbell’s domination of the field, the basic pattern was set for the next twenty years: the application of technological development to human problems; the application of human development to technology.

  And, my God, how the stories rolled out! Beyond This Horizon, Gather Darkness, Asimov’s robots, “Microcosmic God,” “The Gnarly Man,” “Elsewhen,” “Helen O’Loy,” “Mimsy Were the Borogroves,” Slan, “Pride,” “Smoke Ghost,” the City stories, “First Contact,” Universe, “Etaoin Shrdlu,” “Nightfall,” “Killdozer!,” “Opposites—React!,” “No Woman Born,” “Nerves,” “Adam and no Eve”. . . One could go on and on, and the sad fact is that with all but a few, remembering them is better than rereading them.