Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction (2nd Edition)

by David G. Hartwell

  However, in the place of religion per se there was a tradition of wonder and transcendence at the very heart of the SF field from H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, James Blish, and Arthur C. Clarke to E. E. Smith, John W. Campbell, Robert A. Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, A. E. Van Vogt, and Isaac Asimov. One might even say that to the members of the SF field, there was and is an anagogical level present in SF literature.

  I am not going to pursue those particular works of SF that deal with theology and dispute, though many of them are among the generally acknowledged masterpieces of SF, from Clarke’s “The Star” and Blish’s A Case of Conscience through Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz to the later works of Philip K. Dick (especially the VALIS trilogy). These are often discussed in courses on SF and religion for the purpose of illuminating religion, not SF. I propose to use religion to discuss SF, as an approach to what readers get from it and how.

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  A sense of wonder, awe at the vastness of space and time, is at the root of the excitement of science fiction. Any child who has looked up at the stars at night and thought about how far away they are, how there is no end or outer edge to this place, this universe—any child who has felt the thrill of fear and excitement at such thoughts stands a very good chance of becoming a science fiction reader.

  To say that science fiction is in essence a religious literature is an overstatement, but one that contains truth. SF is a uniquely modern incarnation of an ancient tradition: the tale of wonder. Tales of miracles, tales of great powers and consequences beyond the experience of people in our neighborhood, tales of the gods who inhabit other worlds and sometimes descend to visit ours, tales of humans traveling to the abode of the gods, tales of the uncanny: All exist now as science fiction.

  Science fiction’s appeal lies in its combination of the rational, the believable, with the miraculous. It is an appeal to the sense of wonder.

  Science fiction has about it an extraliterary quality. Most SF stories that lack literary distinction—all the average and below-average tales that comprise the bulk of the field—can be summarized as well as or better than they read in full text. What is attractive to the sense of wonder may be evinced in a single paragraph or outline, just as the power and wonder of an ancient Greek myth is communicated in summary form. Certainly an excellent SF story, just like an excellent literary version of one of the Greek myths, has powerful and complex virtues not available in summary. But the wonder is not necessarily lost or absent in a not-very-literate popular telling. The crude level of style and the pulp storytelling conventions did not prevent the earliest Gernsbackian SF from filling its audience with wonder.

  Wonder stories of science and technology go back at least to the late eighteenth century and progress in various forms through Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Poe (and a very large number of others in France, Germany, England, and America) to Verne and Wells.

  Jules Verne was the first writer to make his name almost entirely from the production of this kind of story. For a hundred years, readers of Verne have thrilled to the wonder of a voyage to the moon in a capsule shot from a huge cannon; of a journey through the caverns underneath an extinct volcano into the depths of the Earth; of a trip undersea, filled with adventures, in an enormous submarine. These stories have sunk their hooks deep into the consciousness of a large number of readers, some of whom became SF writers in later decades. Verne’s influence on SF cannot be overstated; he was the first to produce a whole body of work about the wonders of science. That he has had an international bestseller in the 1990s (Paris in the Twenty-First Century), a dystopian work thought by his original publisher to be too grim and uncommercial for his contemporaries only confirms his continuing importance as a world literary figure.

  H. G. Wells began writing while Verne was still active, and produced his last major SF work, Things to Come, nine years after Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories. The power of Wells’s greatest novels, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, and of his many short stories, makes him the crucial writer linking Verne and modern SF. He was a writer with literary virtues lacking in Verne, but his other talents pale in the light of his ability to envision things and ideas that excite wonder: the time machine itself, and the beauties and terrors of the future; a war on Earth with invading intelligent beings from another planet; a visit to an alien civilization on the moon; the creation of beast-men; the incursion into our daily lives of astronomical events (“The Star” and In the Days of the Comet). His extrapolative novels, such as When the Sleeper Wakes, A Modern Utopia and The War in the Air (and his novella, “A Story of the Days to Come,”), provided fodder for the minds of Gernsback and his first generation of readers and writers (in fact, generations raised on Verne and Wells were the core of Gernsback’s audience), as well as a technique for creating future worlds that has dominated the SF field since his day.

  But Gernsback was an inventor, obsessed with technology, and it was Verne and the followers of Verne, in the dime novels and boys’ books such as the Tom Swift series with their wonderful machines, who initially influenced the new field and astounded and delighted the audience. The early issues of Amazing Stories, with their blazing, glowing covers of strange worlds and creatures and of cataclysmic events, delivered the technological miracles of the future. It was not until the mid-1930s that the Wellsian influence began to dominate the field.

  Meanwhile, there were two authors, rarely discussed today, whose work dominated the early SF field and who contributed romance and adventure mixed with color and strangeness: Edgar Rice Burroughs and E. E. Smith, Ph.D.

  Burroughs was one of the world’s most popular adventure writers from 1912 onward, and the major portion of his work aside from the Tarzan books was one variety of SF or another: his Martian adventures (beginning in 1912 with A Princess of Mars) and his Pellucidar books, Carson of Venus and the world “at the Earth’s core.” Although most of his work appeared in the adventure pulps such as Argosy and Blue Book, Gernsback did get The Master Mind of Mars for Amazing Annual. Burroughs’s Mars was the first great SF series setting, a world of adventure to which readers could return again and again for decades of stories.

  “Doc” Smith, batter chemist for a doughnut manufacturer, who had written a romance of space travel in 1920 but never sold it, found a market for The Skylark of Space in Amazing Stories, and for the first time catapulted humanity in spaceships beyond the solar system out into the galaxy and beyond, there to meet strange races both good and evil. Smith widened the possibilities of SF and remained the most popular author in the field right until the advent of Heinlein, Asimov, Van Vogt, and the rest in John W. Campbell’s Astounding. Campbell’s own writing career began as author of rousing interstellar adventures in emulation of Smith—and his name was so identified with those adventures that when he began in the mid-1930s to write intense, atmospheric Wellsian SF, he used the pseudonym Don A. Stuart.

  Neither Burroughs nor Smith had any literary pretensions. Smith even dressed as one of his own characters at early SF conventions. They were popular writers of pulp adventure, knew it, and gloried in it. Burroughs’s SF had a wider audience because most of his works were immediately put into hardcover, but within the burgeoning field Smith was the greatest. And for one reason only: His stories struck the sense of wonder like lightning. His huge, galactic, cosmic adventures were electrifyingly new. After reading Smith, you could look up at the night sky as never before, and be filled with a whole new range of awesome potentialities.

  The writer of science fiction could expand his consciousness into new ranges of possibilities, obtain totally new perspectives, see new visions. And the readers, the first generation of omnivores, became chronic omnivores—after all, it was then possible to read literally all SF published and catch up on the classics of Verne and Wells and still have time left for other reading. For the first time ever, after the existence of Amazing Stories, you cou
ld identify yourself to others as a fan of that particular kind of literature, correspond with others of like mind, and proselytize.

  Young men such as Jack Williamson and Edmond Hamilton and Raymond Z. Gallun got published in Amazing Stories and founded careers in the late 1920s and early 1930s with the intention of writing this new kind of fiction. Most of their stories were rough or crude or cliché-ridden, or all that and more; but they had the addiction and knew what the readers wanted—action, excitement, cosmic ideas. And they knew that the action and excitement, although necessary, were not the real point. The crux of every story had to be the aspect that sparked the sense of wonder. That was what differentiated the “scientifiction” readership from all other pulp adventure readers.

  Nearly all the classic works of Smith and all of Burroughs’s SF were still in print in paperback and reissued regularly with new packages until the end of the 1980s—Burroughs still is—probably the best evidence of their enduring popularity and of the success with which they still inspire wonder, regardless of archaic clichés, outdated science, and just plain bad writing.

  To this day some of the best SF is not terribly well written. A sensitive reader of fiction must put aside literary fashion and prejudices against “bad writing,” even with some of the classics of science fiction, if he hopes to understand what attracts so many seemingly intelligent people. Of course even today a majority of the readers of SF have no literary sophistication or are style deaf or both; but this has helped the field immeasurably during its formative decades, when it served raw unprepared wonder in unassimilated lumps, when no one ever let the writing get in the way of the cosmic and awesome ideas.

  There is a substantial amount of fine writing that is also good SF now. Even though a whole lot of people in the field would rather not admit any longer that wonder is still the crucial element of success in SF, it is and will remain so as long as the field survives. After all, very few of the major SF novels of the forties and fifties were out of print in paperback in the 1980s—at least not for long—although in the 1990s the forties are gone into literary history and the fifties and early sixties have produced fewer durable works than it seemed a decade ago. Wonder endures, but audience tastes and attitudes change, as does literary fashion.

  Obviously SF does not have a corner on wonder—certain works of fantasy and supernatural horror have a similar ability to arouse fear, delight, and awe (and, as we noted earlier, those works tend to be written by writers who also write SF). Much more rarely, one finds modern or contemporary fiction that evokes mystery and wonder. Such works have not been common since the 1920s outside the borders of fantasy and science fiction except in children’s literature—here fantasy abounds but is not constrained into conventional limitations of any sort, from Oz and Winnie the Pooh and Andrew Lang’s fairy books through Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and James Thurber and many others to the present. Luckily for the SF field, the children raised on this literature are ripe for the wonders of SF, a repository of potential omnivores and chronics.

  Science fiction has claimed the domains of time (especially the distant future) and space, the infinite possibilities out there, just at the moment when the last locations of awe and mystery have disappeared from our planet—terra incognita, distant islands, forbidden Tibet, the mysterious East. And recently the possibility of alternate universes, including an infinity of possible pasts and presents, has been claimed by SF. Except for the imaginary past of classical or other, such as Arthurian mythology, science fiction has most of the territory. SF ranges free through the infinite spaces and times, finding and focusing on the nodes that inspire wonder—catastrophes, big events, crucial turning points in history, the supernal beauties of cosmic vistas, endless opportunities for new and strange experiences that astound and illuminate. This is the point John W. Campbell was addressing when he asserted that all the rest of literature is just a special case of SF, while SF is broader and freer than any other writing. The territory is huge.

  The readers want it huge too, and want it always expanding. In the 1920s, they clamored for more Doc Smith, and the editor of Amazing convinced him to write a sequel to his original novel. Skylark Three was filled with “a stupendous panorama of alien lifeforms, mile-long spaceships travelling faster than light, devastating ray-weapons, and frightful battles in the void ending in inevitable triumphs for the visiting Earthmen” (Walter Gillings, introduction to The Best of E. E. “Doc” Smith, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1975, p. 11). Then in 1931, after Gernsback had left Amazing Stories to found Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories, Smith came up with another story, Spacehounds of IPC, which confined his heroes of the Inter-Planetary Corporation to the solar system. This, he insisted, was true scientific fiction, not pseudoscience, and he planned to make it the first of a series—but it wasn’t what his fans wanted: “‘We want Smith to write stories of scope and range. We want more Skylarks!’ was the cry. And Amazing’s eighty-year-old editor, Dr. T. O’Conor Sloane, who still had seven years to go before he retired, pointed a lean finger out towards the Milky Way” (The Best of E. E. “Doc” Smith, p. 11).

  But as H. G. Wells maintained in his famous introduction to his collected early novels, where everything is possible, nothing is particularly interesting or wonderful. So the challenge to the wondermakers who have written SF has been to set limits acceptable to their audiences and, presumably, based on knowledge of science, then to push on to the very edges of those limits (or, carefully and with respect, to break them) to create wonder. It is entirely the task of the writer to limit the work, since such enormous freedom is granted by the audience.

  So there has always existed from the time of Smith a dynamic and fruitful tension between writer and audience in science fiction, between the author’s need to control the matter of science fiction and the audience’s insatiable desire for more marvels. And in the end the audience has always triumphed. It is an audience thoroughly experienced in the work of the field, knowledgeable, jaded even, which has pressed the authors of science fiction continually for newer, bigger, better tales of wonder, more fantastic worlds and astounding stories—more excess, more often than not.

  It is not surprising, then, that from the 1920s onward, science fiction writers have eagerly incorporated other related subgenres such as utopias and dystopias, stories of lost races, mythologies, marvelous voyages, and indeed all of literary fantasy. And it cannot be surprising that such an acquisitive agglomeration should resist definition, since each successful story contributes to a redefinition of the field’s boundaries. Given the mandates of the loyal, vocal core audience, with its traditions of immediate feedback to the writers, the pressure to be creative is always on a writer of science fiction.

  And to turn the coin over, the pressure is always on the author to repeat past triumphs. The lesser talents have solved this problem by hacking out variations on the creative successes of their earlier work or the SF stories of others—but the audience has usually been able to spot the difference between creative emulation (which they like and support) and clichéd repetition. They will support an entire career that is devoted to wringing every last drop of essential wonder from an original idea complex (Doc Smith wrote only two substantial series of novels over his five decades in the field; Isaac Asimov ended his fifty-year career by writing a series of novels that extended and tied together his Foundation series and his robot stories and novels) but will withdraw support and approval from any writer, no matter how talented his execution, who fails them by turning attention away from the marvelous. They are particularly resistant to and suspicious of stylistic sophistication or experimentation unless it is clearly in support of some wondrous effect. They are the children of H. G. Wells, not Henry James.

  To the uninitiated observer and to academics approaching the literature, one of the most difficult perceptions to grasp is that the SF audience is just as important as the writers and the written work to an understanding of science fiction. Why is the fiction often so badly
written but seemingly praised and honored by its devotees? Because the execution is secondary to the wonder aroused by it. Why are science fiction writers, a noticeably bright and creative lot, so paranoiac about the lack of serious attention paid their works outside SF? Because they know that only the very best of them can satisfy the demands of their audience and also pull off the trick of writing according to present literary fashion (which is of course irrelevant to their markets and supporting audience).

  Science fiction is as much a phenomenon as it is a body of written work; outsiders are in the position of the blind men in the fable of the blind men and the elephant: They tend to arrive at generalizations based on parts, not the whole. But the evidence is all there, in the books and magazines, the fanzines, histories, social events, reference books. The science fiction field worships wonder.

  A pointed example of the modern wonder-story is Larry Niven’s 1972 Hugo award-winning “Inconstant Moon.” The evening I first read the story in 1971, I thought, This story is going to win the Hugo! Even if history had proved that wrong, what I knew in a moment was that “Inconstant Moon” would delight chronic readers of SF.