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

by David G. Hartwell

  I am attempting here a sufficient distance from science fiction in order to combine and resolve images of the field, examining both the preconceptions of insiders and outsiders for the illumination of both. There is perhaps more nonsense spoken about science fiction than any other variety of narrative. The sheer amount of noise generated by and about SF over the years should have signaled perceptive outsiders that here is something that ought to be examined and understood. That you are reading this sentence indicates an awareness that civilization in the twentieth (and twenty-first) century has somehow been influenced by science fiction. Perhaps even that your own circumstances or personality as a child have been so influenced—can you remember what the effect of science fiction was on you?

  Science fiction can and does create transformations into the mythic for our culture. Every chronic reader of SF knows this, just as she knows certain things about the shape of our future and about the attractions of SF that no one ever seems to have been able to communicate to outsiders.

  And so, in a sense, the chronics have built walls around themselves, invented the whole paraphernalia of SF fandom to protect their access to these myths, these wonder stories, and to keep outsiders from positions of power in the SF community—this includes critics, publishers, all those who would abuse SF by using it as some sort of device, or who would somehow obscure or compromise the essential core of wonder. Paranoia and idealism have always been among the most salient characteristics of the science fiction community.

  The congregation, Damon Knight’s “small number of people” (with its distant echoes of the Miltonic “fit audience, though few”), still worships at the church of wonder—but you can’t come in unless you join.

  II

  EXPLORING THE WORLDS OF SCIENCE FICTION

  4

  RUNNING AWAY FROM THE REAL WORLD

  Perhaps the most common term used these days for what we seek in the popular arts is “escape,” a word ordinarily implying condescension or contempt. Yet, though C. S. Lewis was once moved to observe that the only people to whom the word “escape” is a pejorative are jailers, it is hard to use it as an honorific.

  —Leslie A. Fiedler, What Was Literature?

  OKAY, YOU are now twelve years old and you have made a discovery that at least temporarily will change your life: You have found science fiction in written form. You have known SF from TV cartoons since you were two years old and could hardly say “Popeye” or “Bugs Bunny.” You have seen it in comic books, played with SF toys, and watched monster movies—all the normal elements of kid culture. But now you have discovered something more intense and wonderful, the real SF. And it transports you out of the problem-filled, adult-controlled world of the kid into alternate universes.

  Sure, reading is good for you and yes, you do learn something of science and logic, but this stuff is not popular science writing: This is fiction—this is escape! The excitement of escape is what creates SF omnivores. The world of SF is not just different, it is better than reality, and you want to escape to it as often as possible.

  All of us have problems in the real world that we are incapable of solving. We perceive a disparity between how we would like things to be and how they are. At age twelve, most of our desires, the solutions to most of our problems, lie in the future when we will know more, understand more, be more in control of ourselves and our destiny. SF takes us to a multiplicity of futures. Vonnegut remarked, apropos of escape, that science fiction and pornography offer in common an escape from our real and unsolvable problems into an impossibly hospitable world.

  The further discovery by some omnivores of an actual community of SF writers and readers that they can join may well represent utopia here and now. We have seen that the science fiction environment, at conventions and through amateur magazines, is hospitable to individuals with minor or major problems of social adjustment (something American culture in the latter half of the twentieth century allows too little room for in general now that the small town and local church environments have shrunk into comparative obscurity). The SF world awaits you if you choose.

  So it is no wonder that one of the central appeals of science fiction is the myth of a better future, especially a future in which problems are solved or solvable through science and the application of logic, a future you can find yourself participating in through the story. This is a future in which you can be larger than life, a variety of superman or wonder woman—yes, it is wish-fulfillment, but it is better and more convincing than a magic kiss that turns you into a prince, froggie. It seems convincing for the duration because the question of how all these wishes might actually be fulfilled through science is addressed.

  Over his decades of influence, John W. Campbell devoted much editorial verbiage to tying SF to problem-solving. “Convince me,” he said to his writers, “that the problem you have posed in the story is soluable and that the manner of the solution is possible.” By saying this, he was articulating and reinforcing one of the foundations of all SF: It has to be possible, so the reader’s suspension of disbelief is not betrayed.

  But let us not put too much weight on this aspect of the escape into SF, because in the omnivore stage, a person will read anything he can get his hands on, no matter how weak or strong the underpinnings. Every story is new, different, appealing because the offer is eternally renewed: come to the future where things are exciting; you don’t have to wait for it to come to you.

  It is easier for a reader today than it used to be, too. Almost any older chronic reader of SF will tell you tales of the old days, when a twelve-year-old had to hide an SF book or magazine from parents, teachers, even friends, because it was universally known to be damaging trash only a small step above porn. Brain rot. You had to take it as your personal thing and have the courage to keep buying it and reading it (ah, secret thrill) and hiding it. Of such shared experiences are revolutionary cadres welded together. The early SF fan clubs seem to have felt this intense sense of shared escape. Now we are laid back.

  Science fiction has been accused of being escapist literature. It is. Judith Merril and her cohort SF writers of the fifties were creating seeds of change, using SF ideas to alter the present and create a more desirable future. One implication of that conscious effort is that the writers were unsatisfied with their present reality and actually planned an escape from it through their own creative efforts. The whole field, writers as well as fans, shared a need for change and a common bond through the awareness that SF really can affect the way things are and will be.

  At least once in every decade, beginning with Hugo Gernsback in the 1920s, there has been a revolutionary impulse to create a better future through SF. The most recent cycles were the anti–New Wave/back-to-technological-optimism movement spearheaded by Lester del Rey in the 1970s, almost Gernsbackian in its thrust, and the “cyberpunks” of the 1980s, “radical reformers of hard SF,” whose prophet was Bruce Sterling, out to change the world. This might seem more than a little absurd on the surface to an outsider involved in, say, social work or politics. But consider the influence of SF on a linguistic and conceptual level: the truly revolutionary act is writing it and reading it—especially reading it—through which our perception of reality is altered. Bruce Sterling, for instance, is now two personas downstream from the radical composer of manifestos, Vincent Omniveritas (which persona was replaced by the brilliant journalist/author of The Hacker Crackdown, now sloughed for the recrudescent Sci-Fi-Guy who wishes to stay home and do SF).

  One reason it is so difficult for an outsider to communicate successfully with a person in the SF field is that SF insiders are living in a somewhat different reality, one that incorporates a spectrum of desirable (and undesirable) futures. Think of the old saw about university professors living in ivory towers isolated from the realities of daily life—well, SF people have escaped certain conceptual limitations that most outsiders suffer like horse-blinders, preventing them from seeing what is not smack in front of them. By means of SF reading
, chronics have isolated themselves in a world of ideas, have built towers that afford them vistas beyond the mundane. They have little leverage in the great world of politics and commerce, but they can see for miles in many directions.

  A twelve-year-old who has escaped the gym classes of daily life for exciting visions of the future has not lost anything in terms of potential adjustment to the real world. She may be an omnivore for several years and then venture fully into the outside world, pimples gone and breasts grown. But SF will ever after be accessible to her, and the vistas of the future she has seen remain, even if half forgotten. Escape is open to her. More than likely she can see further into the future than her parents and friends, and her behavior will be different because of it.

  In a way, the dream of science fiction is to control reality by creating it. If you don’t like the way things are, read a story about a world in which things are different. Be in that world. A long-term chronic, separated in some way from mundane life to begin with, does lose touch with many of the elements of daily life in the present, much like an absentminded professor—he is distracted by the future.

  William Tenn, a leading SF humorist, stylist, and crazy-idea man, wrote an important essay on the art of science fiction as a preface to his first book, Of All Possible Worlds (New York: Ballantine Books, 1955), in the course of which he attacked the frequent charge that SF is “escape literature.” Tenn’s argument is that all fiction is entertainment and that the purpose of entertainment is to draw the audience into a world other than the reality of the moment. Therefore all literature is escape, and the charge that escape is somehow pernicious is “a jealous argument of very ancient lineage indeed,” used by “entrenched intellectual privilege” against popular literature from the time of Elizabethan drama to the present. And we might note that this argument has been used successfully in modern times to nearly eradicate adult fantasy from serious literary attention until the advent of the fashionable school of magic realism.

  What has all this to do with Star Wars, Star Trek, The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Buck Rogers, pulp magazines, and John Carter of Mars? Tenn would say that escape entertainment can aspire to and become art—but there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with plain old escape entertainment that doesn’t aspire to art—much of written SF and all of media sci-fi. The science fiction audience wants escape—for good and sufficient reasons, as we have seen. If the escape mechanism happens to aspire to and in fact be literary art, all well and good; but we have investigated that already and know it is more or less irrelevant to initiates (remember A. E. Van Vogt, Doc Smith, and the rest). It is outsiders who pretty much invariably and rigidly impose their standards and fashions on SF and find it wanting, much to the chagrin of writers such as Tenn.

  For all that our center of focus has been the written SF of the last seven decades, its nature and its appeal, we must spend a bit more time now on the other conduits through which SF ideas penetrate popular consciousness. Films, comics, toys, games, and pictorial art all contribute to the transmission and spread of SF in our culture. The purpose of all of these media forms is escape, entertainment, but this does not necessarily deprive them of power and influence. We have mentioned the creation of SF myths and referred to Superman, the Star Trek television series, and the proliferation of sci-fi movies in the 1950s. It would seem impossible for any adult in our culture to have escaped getting a visual impression of what SF “looks like” given the proliferation of the garish covers of magazines or paperbacks displayed everywhere in the nation for decades now. And what it looks like is romance, technology, fantasy.

  So this is what we get from the media—the package is the message. No logic—logic is what you get in written form only. There are well-known stories in the lore of the SF field about film directors cutting out all the explanations and logic in favor of pacing and the emotional impact of images. About the best thing an SF chronic has to say concerning sci-fi films and TV shows is that the best of them (some episodes of Star Trek, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, [both versions] 2001, Blade Runner) at least allow you to imagine a reasonable SF explanation between the scenes without introducing illogical howlers.

  The case of Destination Moon, discussed earlier, proved to the media that accuracy and concern with detail is no more commercial than simply ignoring it all. Star Wars, with its dazzling effects and disregard for precision in terminology, reconfirmed this in recent decades. The mass audience just doesn’t care, as long as it is entertaining to them. But what has come through to mass audiences is a large variety of the crazy ideas of science fiction, making those ideas (spaceships, for instance) familiar. And the particular scientific and technological images of science fiction translated into visual forms have often proven striking and popular. Susan Sontag wrote an interesting essay on the monster films of the 1950s as Cold War myths. She pointed out the repetitive patterns in film after film, of a monster created or raised by the power of the atom that ultimately could be destroyed only by an atomic bomb or by “nature restoring the balance” (like the ending of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds).

  That the moral or message of much sci-fi is diametrically opposed to that of written SF (reason, science, knowledge are worthwhile and effective in solving problems) does not at all relate to the general spread of images throughout our culture. These are now the images through which we confront reality, not escape from it. Whatever our philosophy or attitude, we now state our problems in terms of these images, so solutions must also come through them. We have escaped in the real world partly through media sci-fi into a new reality, the technology-filled world of the twenty-first century, and it is, of course, science fictional. Where do we escape to next?

  Well, into the fiction again, into the far distance in time and space beyond the probability of the present catching up to the future. No matter where we are in reality, current science fiction is ranging beyond, by its very nature and the demands of the audience.

  We have spoken of the distance between present reality and the world of an SF story, and of science fiction as a means of escape. But there is something paradoxical about this escape, for in a fair number of cases, distancing allows us to confront aspects of reality that we have no other means of approaching. Just as some sci-fi films embody a certain kind of contemporary truth (e.g., the Cold War myths), so SF can represent certain truths because everyone knows that what is said in SF is not true. This is one of the secrets of its attraction. The author of a science fiction story is free to tell the truth because everyone knows the story is not real. Thus in the era of Joe McCarthy, SF writers regularly portrayed and satirized the senator quite openly in SF stories, since the common knowledge that whatever they said couldn’t be true protected them from political reprisals which were a clear and present threat to other writers. There has always been a strain of SF since then that is political allegory, from Cold War xenophobia to libertarian anarchist pitchery, but the political aspect of truth is a minor part of the field today (except in certain foreign language SF literatures).

  If you start writing a factual article for Newsweek by saying, “Two out of every three people we see on the street are not real humans at all, but alien androids masquerading as people,” you will be in trouble. You won’t get past the first copy editor. You may not even get out of the building. If you begin a science fiction novel with the same words, however, you are on perfectly safe ground. Your novel will be published and quite a few of your readers will smile when they read your words because they know them to be essentially true. The chronics will be entertained by your ridiculously clear, daring statement of a commonly felt awareness. This is the kind of truth most nearly accessible exclusively through SF.

  In Time Out of Joint (1959), a novel by Philip K. Dick, Ragle Gumm in the middle of an ordinary day walks up to a hot dog stand when suddenly the place vanishes before his eyes, and all that’s left where it used to be is a slip of paper with the words “hot dog stand” printed on it. At the end of the book, afte
r a series of increasingly unnerving incidents like this one, and the development of quite a few subplots, we discover that our hero, Ragle, is not living in 1959 at all (as he had assumed) but in a construct of 1959 built for his benefit in 1995 as a means of overcoming his refusal to use his psychic powers against “the Enemy” in a war between Earth and its moon colony. While Ragle thinks he is solving 1959 newspaper puzzles and winning prizes, he is actually predicting the landing sites of enemy missiles.

  And any reader who has ever suspected that the world is an unreal construct built solely to deceive him has had a marvelous, hair-raising time learning that he’s not really alone in his paranoia. The truths of science fiction are authentic somehow because they are built on outright lies.

  The authentic SF experience is a perception of truth, reality in an unreal environment. The immediate and clear presentation of the palpably untrue is a distancing device of great power and effectiveness. The radical distancing from quotidian reality frees the writer from many of the literary conventions through which reality is represented in fashionable literatures from Zane Grey to Saul Bellow. From this point of view, the science fictional world of the story is an unreal construct built to deceive the reader—and the reader eagerly penetrates the deceit to find the core of truth. This is an ancient reading protocol invented by the exegetical readers of the medieval church, called allegoresis, through which the knowledgeable reader provides the allegorical interpretation (truth) for which the text is only a concealment. The more superficially fantastic, the better. Any kind of allegorical reading makes the reader feel clever, a perception that has not escaped the most popular allegorist writing today, Stephen King.

  Now, the truths or kinds of truth the reader of SF finds in a story are not what she or he can find in other literature. Those conventions of representation used by writers from Grey to Bellow are finely tuned to illumine the daily details of human psychology and behavior under ordinary present or historical conditions (and indeed under many extraordinary conditions producing tension and abnormal behavior—viz. King); the conventions aim at artful precision and verisimilitude. The SF writer may use some of these conventions but there is always a fundamental projection out of context—the world of the story is not real, so that any word or words may have a new figurative or literal meaning in the new context.