Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  The very fact that no single science fiction organization has ever made any lasting impression on anything (except for the single exception of the ISA which did more or less practical research work on rockets before its dissolution) speaks for itself.

  It speaks in a resounding question:

  Just where has science fiction got to in six or seven years of loosely organized existence?

  On a world scale, nowhere. Locally, practically nothing has been done. The great local organizations are gone, their banners furled and tossed on the scrap heap. Internationally, science fiction is but the last gasping beats of a never very strong and young and healthy heart. What remains of it all is a gigantic junk pile of stinking literature and less than puerile achievement.

  Just what is this urge to organize, anyway? Why do science fiction fans gather all over the world in local clubs and sit up far in the nights to publish fan magazines and correspond on a scale almost unprecedented in its scope?

  Certainly because they like science fiction. And why do they like science fiction? Wherein lies this mysterious attraction which prompts most of them to make a fetish out of a new form of literature, a little tin god, as it were, before which their souls bend and scrape? Is it because of the cadence of the words, the turn of the clever phrases, well constructed paragraphs, a temporary exaltation on reading some powerful descriptive scene? Is it to orate and argue endlessly about the qualities of this or that writer or the shortcomings of this or that writer? We all know that science fiction itself is something different in literature. But what form and shape has it given the ideas of its adherents? Again I repeat, wherein lies this mysterious compelling force which has made science fiction fans accomplish what little practical work they have accomplished?

  The answer in great part is that science fiction is the smoothest form of escape literature known. In its infinite depths the lost, the lonesome, the inhibited, the frustrated soul finds understanding and expression, precisely because the world to which they escape is a world of their own fancies and imaginings—a world which they like. In this haven of refuge their creative instincts are given full rein.

  I venture to predict that a heavy majority of science fiction fans are escapists. I think I’m right when I say that because I’m a more or less normal type of fan, and I was an escapist and in a certain sense I still am.

  But why have the fans stopped at this point, content to revel in a seemingly unending debauch of good fellowship leading to what may seem to be a common end and purpose? As you can see by looking about you in the fan field, what remains of the great directive forces, the organizations proper, is nothing. Fandom has resounded for almost a decade with the hullabaloo and the shouting, and now the hollow shell of a structure stopped suddenly in headlong growth sounds to nothing but a painful silence, sterile on the shores of a lost world.

  What are you people looking for, anyway? Do you really intend to go on harping for more and better science fiction? Do you really think that merely asking for more and better science fiction is, in some miraculous way, to lift the field out of the slough? What makes you think that the editors and publishers of the magazines are going to give you their ears? Have they in the past? No. Can it actually be your intended purpose to continue arguing on the pros and cons of the literature of science fiction forever?

  Can it? If such is your purpose, you are a pack of fools, content to sit smugly by while the fine talents inherent in your brains, the brains which provided the spark which sent science fiction leaping to a halted youth, stagnate.

  But you cannot!

  Because, gentlemen, the world is catching up with you and will pass you by.

  Because, gentlemen, there is something in each and every one of you fans which places him automatically above the level of the average person; which, in short, gives him a vastly broadened view of things in general. The outlook is there, the brains are there. Yet, nothing has happened!

  But why not give science fiction a meaning? Naturally all types of fiction are idealized versions of situations found in everyday life. Science fiction is an idealized type of vision of the life of the future.

  What is wrong with science fiction today is that its outlook on the future has changed; or rather, has never existed in a rational sense.

  How can science fiction have any rational outlook on the future when today exists the greatest confusion in world affairs since the dawn of recorded history?

  What is important to us is what science fiction is going to do about it.

  Science fiction has to do something about it because its very life is bound up with the future and today practical events are working to shape the outline of that future in bold, sharp relief.

  Today we are face to face, face to face, I repeat, with the choice: Civilization or Barbarism—reason or ignorance.

  As idealists, as visionaries, we cannot retreat before this challenge. We must accept it and carry the battle into the enemy’s camp. Hitherto, this challenge has not even been recognized, much less accepted.

  So come out of your secure cubbyholes of clubrooms and laboratories and meeting places and look at the world before you.

  It is swiftly sinking in darkness and chaos. Why? Because the masses are being led by stupid men to a dreary doom.

  Dare any of you deny this? Look at the daily newspapers. Look at the authoritative weeklies and monthlies. You see nothing but confusion and the abandonment of every decent instinct left to this mad system under which we live.

  As idealists we cannot refuse to accept the challenge of the future.

  Science fiction has finally come to the parting of the ways with meaningless idealism, and, with that idealism, dies. Science fiction must mutate—must change into a new form of idealism, a fighting, practical idealism, an idealism based on action and not on words, on experience and achievements and not on bombastic and irrelevant swaggerings.

  The main point of this whole discussion is that you fans must prepare to incept this new state of things, else nothing is left but a slow, gradual decay of the gaunt corpse of the body stf until it disappears, eaten up by the fiery acid of mighty world events.

  Thus today the world of science fiction totters. Even science, its mainstay, wavers increasingly toward the vague and obscure.

  It would seem as though science were too secure in its ivory tower to pay much heed to the wails and groans (and pardon me if I use this old bromide) of suffering humanity. In its lofty and utterly pure elevation it squats safely amidst its own escapist atmosphere and does precisely nothing practical in the way of saving itself from the consequences of the coming world smash.

  Out of its test tubes and instruments it extracts life and the energy of the atom and with them both it fills up our war machine and vomits death and terror throughout the world.

  On one hand we are faced with the sickening spectacle of scientists throughout the world turning their backs on cold logic for the magic tinsel of colored military trappings, of a Pirandello in art and a Marconi in radio stooging for the Fascist dictator and general dirty rat, Benito Mussolini. On our own side of the Atlantic, renowned scientists and savants such as Millikan and others bow hypocritically before a standardized version of a God (of which none of them could possibly conceive) and attend rallies and demonstrations to uphold our military pride and honor.

  As the technical brains of the world in their supreme cynicism line up on the side of reaction, the backbone of science fiction itself dies, dies of inaction, of do-nothingness, of an inability to forget for a while its above-it-allness and lead humanity out of the Valley of the Shadow into the dazzling light of a triumphant future.

  Why all this? Because we have become stale and we stink in our staleness to the high heavens. Because we are conventional and set in our ways and the old way of life is easier to go on living because it demands little effort on the part of the haves and near-haves. We continue to do the same old things in the same old way and are smug and content in our pipe-dreams of super-scien
tific smoke. “Why change?” we cry.

  Why not change? Why in hell not do something about it?

  Great guns! We have brains, technical brains, introspective brains, thoughts and ideals that would put the greatest minds to shame for scope and insight. Put these brains to work before it is too late! The planet is ready for work, for practical work to wipe clean the slate and start anew. We must start anew if we have to smash every old superstition and outworn idea to do it.

  We fans can do a lot towards the realization of this rational idea. We can do that because determination very often means achievement. And how sick we are at base of this dull, unsatisfying world, this stupid asininely organized system of ours which demands that a man brutalize and cynicize himself for the possession of a few dollars in a savage, barbarous, and utterly boring struggle to exist.

  We say: “Put a stop to this—now!”

  We say: “Smash this status quo of ours by smashing the present existing forms of economic and social life!” Boldly, perhaps a bit crudely, we say: “Down with it!” Down with it before the war-lovers clamp on the screws and bind us in submission for who knows how long!

  Let humanity swing along in its goalless rut for more hundreds and thousands of years while the universe beckons for our participation in its active life?

  Not for us!

  Fearlessly and before the entire world we state our platform and beliefs (and I speak for all the visitors here today wearing the red delegate badges of the NYFA).

  We come out wholly and completely in support of every force seeking the advancement of civilization along strictly scientific and humanitarian lines.

  All help to the democratic forces of the world!

  All help to the heroic defenders of Madrid and Shanghai, defenders of democracy!

  Death and destruction to all forms of reaction!

  The machine that will shatter forever the reactional assault on civilization is already in motion. Let us become part of it.

  It is our job to work and plan and prepare, to teach and expound for the coming of that day when the human race shall stand erect as should a man and gaze on the stark, naked cosmos with firm eyes, to feel the solid, inconceivable impact of the grim void, to flood its consciousness with the realization that in the vast emptiness we must stand on our own feet and fight it out!

  Therefore:

  Be it moved that this, the Third Eastern Science Fiction Convention, shall place itself on record as opposing all forces leading to barbarism, the advancement of pseudo-sciences and militaristic ideologies, and shall further resolve that science fiction should by nature stand for all forces working for a more unified world, a more Utopian existence, the application of science to human happiness, and a saner outlook on life.

  16

  The imagination of disaster

  Susan Sontag

  Ours is indeed an age of extremity. For we live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies: unremitting banality and inconceivable terror. It is fantasy, served out in large rations by the popular arts, which allows most people to cope with these twin specters. For one job that fantasy can do is to lift us out of the unbearably humdrum and to distract us from terrors, real or anticipated—by an escape into exotic dangerous situations which have last-minute happy endings. But another one of the things that fantasy can do is to normalize what is psychologically unbearable, thereby inuring us to it. In the one case, fantasy beautifies the world. In the other, it neutralizes it.

  The fantasy to be discovered in science fiction films does both jobs. These films reflect world-wide anxieties, and they serve to allay them. They inculcate a strange apathy concerning the processes of radiation, contamination, and destruction that I for one find haunting and depressing. The naïve level of the films neatly tempers the sense of otherness, of alien-ness, with the grossly familiar. In particular, the dialogue of most science fiction films, which is generally of a monumental but often touching banality, makes them wonderfully, unintentionally funny. Lines like: “Come quickly, there’s a monster in my bathtub”; “We must do something about this”; “Wait, Professor. There’s someone on the telephone”; “But that’s incredible”; and the old American stand-by (accompanied by brow-wiping), “I hope it works!”—are hilarious in the context of picturesque and deafening holocaust. Yet the films also contain something which is painful and in deadly earnest.

  Science fiction films are one of the most accomplished of the popular art forms, and can give a great deal of pleasure to sophisticated film addicts. Part of the pleasure, indeed, comes from the sense in which these movies are in complicity with the abhorrent. It is no more, perhaps, than the way all art draws its audience into a circle of complicity with the thing represented. But in science fiction films we have to do with things which are (quite literally) unthinkable. Here, “thinking about the unthinkable”—not in the way of Herman Kahn, as a subject for calculation, but as a subject for fantasy—becomes, however inadvertently, itself a somewhat questionable act from a moral point of view. The films perpetuate clichés about identity, volition, power, knowledge, happiness, social consensus, guilt, responsibility which are, to say the least, not serviceable in our present extremity. But collective nightmares cannot be banished by demonstrating that they are, intellectually and morally, fallacious. This nightmare—the one reflected in various registers in the science fiction films—is too close to our reality.

  A typical science fiction film has a form as predictable as a Western, and is made up of elements which are as classic as the saloon brawl, the blonde schoolteacher from the East, and the gun duel on the deserted main street.

  One model scenario proceeds through five phases:

  1.The arrival of the thing. (Emergence of the monsters, landing of the alien space-ship, etc.) This is usually witnessed, or suspected, by just one person, who is a young scientist on a field trip. Nobody, neither his neighbors nor his colleagues, will believe him for some time. The hero is not married, but has a sympathetic though also incredulous girlfriend.

  2.Confirmation of the hero’s report by a host of witnesses to a great act of destruction. (If the invaders are beings from another planet, a fruitless attempt to parley with them and get them to leave peacefully.) The local police are summoned to deal with the situation and massacred.

  3.In the capital of the country, conferences between scientists and the military take place, with the hero lecturing before a chart, map, or blackboard. A national emergency is declared. Reports of further atrocities. Authorities from other countries arrive in black limousines. All international tensions are suspended in view of the planetary emergency. This stage often includes a rapid montage of news broadcasts in various languages, a meeting at the UN, and more conferences between the military and the scientists. Plans are made for destroying the enemy.

  4.Further atrocities. At some point the hero’s girlfriend is in grave danger. Massive counterattacks by international forces, with brilliant displays of rocketry, rays, and other advanced weapons, are all unsuccessful. Enormous military casualties, usually by incineration. Cities are destroyed and/or evacuated. There is an obligatory scene here of panicked crowds stampeding along a highway or a big bridge, being waved on by numerous policemen who, if the film is Japanese, are immaculately white-gloved, preternaturally calm, and call out in dubbed English, “Keep moving. There is no need to be alarmed.”

  5.More conferences, whose motif is: “They must be vulnerable to something.” Throughout, the hero has been experimenting in his lab on this. The final strategy, upon which all hopes depend, is drawn up; the ultimate weapon—often a super-powerful, as yet untested, nuclear device—is mounted. Countdown. Final repulse of the monster or invaders. Mutual congratulations, while the hero and girlfriend embrace cheek to cheek and scan the skies sturdily. “But have we seen the last of them?”

  The film I have just described should be in technicolor and on a wide screen. Another typical scenario is simpler and suited to black
-and-white films with a lower budget. It has four phases:

  1.The hero (usually, but not always, a scientist) and his girlfriend, or his wife and children, are disporting themselves in some innocent ultra-normal middle-class house in a small town, or on vacation (camping, boating). Suddenly, someone starts behaving strangely or some innocent form of vegetation becomes monstrously enlarged and ambulatory. If a character is pictured driving an automobile, something gruesome looms up in the middle of the road. If it is night, strange lights hurtle across the sky.

  2.After following the thing’s tracks, or determining that It is radioactive, or poking around a huge crater—in short, conducting some sort of crude investigation—the hero tries to warn the local authorities, without effect; nobody believes anything is amiss. The hero knows better. If the thing is tangible, the house is elaborately barricaded. If the invading alien is an invisible parasite, a doctor or friend is called in, who is himself rather quickly killed or “taken possession of” by the thing.

  3.The advice of anyone else who is consulted proves useless. Meanwhile, It continues to claim other victims in the town, which remains implausibly isolated from the rest of the world. General helplessness.

  4.One of two possibilities. Either the hero prepares to do battle alone, accidentally discovers the thing’s one vulnerable point, and destroys it. Or, he somehow manages to get out of town and succeeds in laying his case before competent authorities. They, along the lines of the first script but abridged, deploy a complex technology which (after initial setbacks) finally prevails against the invaders.

  Another version of the second script opens with the scientist-hero in his laboratory, which is located in the basement or on the grounds of his tasteful, prosperous house. Through his experiments, he unwittingly causes a frightful metamorphosis in some class of plants or animals, which turn carnivorous and go on a rampage. Or else, his experiments have caused him to be injured (sometimes irrevocably) or “invaded” himself. Perhaps he has been experimenting with radiation, or has built a machine to communicate with beings from other planets or to transport him to other places or times.