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

by David G. Hartwell

  And yes, SF was changing in the fifties—a lot of writers were trying new ways of writing. This was not necessarily what the readers wanted, and for the first time, starting at the end of the 1940s, SF began to move partially out of the controlling hands of a few knowledgeable editors and publishers into more general circulation, at the hands of powerful people who might understand the material only dimly.

  From 1950 to 1954, it looked to everyone both inside and outside that science fiction was about to be recognized as major, worthwhile, meritorious—that everyone would finally stop putting science fiction down and consider it seriously on its own merits. These were the boom years. In one month during this period, forty different SF magazine titles were displayed, and could all be found on a sufficiently large newsstand; several of the prestigious hardcover publishers had begun regular hardcover SF programs, and SF also began to appear in paperback books—in fact, some of the SF classics of the past began to reach general circulation through paperback publication. The first wave of science fiction movies, both profitable and popular, had been released; SF was on TV, in the daily comic strips, comic books, everywhere.

  But the feast turned to sand. SF seemed to degenerate as it grew.

  From Destination Moon, reflecting the highest aspirations of science fiction—technical accuracy, realism, romantic and exciting events—the motion picture industry learned something very important: You could make money on an ambitious SF film. But while Destination Moon was in production and beginning to look successful, another moviemaker decided to beat it into the marketplace with a quick, inaccurate, unrealistic SF adventure cobbled together on a low budget: Rocket Ship X-M. Well, Destination Moon made money, but Rocket Ship X-M did beat it out to the theaters and made a lot of money too. So what the industry also learned was that you could make quick, cheap, inaccurate SF movies and make money.

  Suddenly everyone who was doing science fiction from outside the field was using the sensational and gaudy elements of the cheapest pulp SF and ignoring any underlying seriousness. Robert A. Heinlein, who had gone to Hollywood to create the first real American SF film, had indeed been paid to draft a version in which there were dancing girls on the moon—it exists in the papers of the Heinlein estate. It was as if they only looked at those garish covers and never read the stuff. Popularity, it turned out, was not necessarily recognition. But at least more people than ever before were having fun with science fiction, with aliens and rocket ships and all the imagery of the field. SF was beginning to be a major repository of images for popular culture.

  Which is why the initial reaction of the field to Sputnik was so overwhelmingly positive—this would show them that we had been serious all along. Instead, it showed that we had been fantastic all along—although it took several years for this to penetrate the consciousness of those in SF.

  Why was this so hard for SF people to understand? The answer is that for at least twenty years before Sputnik, John W. Campbell and others had been fostering the slogan “Today’s fiction—tomorrow’s fact,” a legacy left over from Hugo Gernsback’s obsession with science education through fiction and with “true” science in stories. Campbell had been educated at M.I.T. and Duke University as a physicist (though he did not complete an advanced degree) and was known for adding scientific explanations to manuscripts before printing them in his magazine. All evidence is that, throughout his career, Campbell believed that by using real science in stories, SF authors could predict real future events or at least real future technology, if only in the context of an adventure story. Since he was the editor of the best and most popular science fiction magazine from 1937 to the end of his life in 1971, and the most prestigious SF editor of modern times, he was most often the field’s spokesman to outside groups. One of the special frissons was that sometimes SF really did come true, and Campbell could, by the late 1940s, quote lots of examples:

  H. G. Wells predicted tank warfare in “The Land Ironclads” (1903); Rudyard Kipling predicted airmail in With the Night Mail (1905); Hugo Gernsback made a whole forest of predictions, including that of television, in Ralph 124C 41 + (1911–12); in the early 1940s, Robert A. Heinlein (“Blowups Happen”) and Lester del Rey (“Nerves”) both wrote stories about the dangers of nuclear power plants; another Heinlein story, “Solution Unsatisfactory” (1941), suggests that the U.S. would be drawn into World War II, would end the war by building an atomic bomb, using the weapon to impose a “pax Americana” upon the rest of the world. In 1944, Campbell published an atom bomb story, “Deadline” by Cleve Cartmill, which contained so much accurate physics (some of which Campbell had added) that agents of Military Intelligence descended on Campbell’s office, sure of a security leak and ready to suppress the magazine. What a story for Campbell to tell after the war! And tell it he did, at every opportunity.

  Dealing with the future as it might really be was portrayed by Campbell as the transcendent goal of the best science fiction, and, since he controlled the highest-paying regular market for science fiction in the world, his writers most often included a prediction or two, and the SF world waited with bated breath to see what might come true.

  Robert A. Heinlein, a writer with a good engineering mind, won the prediction lottery most often. Heinlein’s 1942 story “Waldo” describes a mechanical genius with a muscular disease that forces him to create a remote-control device that repeats the movements of his own hands, at a distance, with equal accuracy and much greater force. When such devices were actually built a few years later to handle radioactive materials, they were named “waldoes” in honor of the story that inspired their creation.

  Of course all those predictions involving atom bombs and nuclear power turned sour real quick. Science fiction people, who had been reading and writing about the atom for decades, were among the first to react with dismay. Atomic disaster stories proliferated in the late forties and early fifties, so the really positive and optimistic aspect of SF prediction which Campbell had to focus on was space travel. And by the early fifties, everyone in SF, Campbell especially, knew it was just a matter of time before it would be real. There was a continual atmosphere of that triumph to come—until Sputnik.

  The U.S. space program ground slowly but it ground exceeding small. Some SF people continued to believe in the romance of space travel throughout the 1960s and 1970s, in the face of the boring facts, but a lot of others, particularly sensitive to what had been their own province for decades, became more and more alienated from U.S. media/government space travel. What good is it to have predicted all of this technology, from space suits and orbital velocities to stage rockets and communication satellites, if roles can be performed by trained chimpanzees? Where is the vision and romance and excitement?

  Well, to some the excitement remained—there is a certain charm and beauty in machines that perform well and are, after all, built and created by humans. But the heroic astronauts began to retire and become politicians(!) and administrators(!) and converts to religious sects(!). By the time of the second moon landing, all according to TV script and utterly anticlimactic, even the most committed SF people had begun to mutter and grumble that the right thing was being done by the wrong people in the wrong way. How could they make it so unromantic? How could they! So the TV networks turned away from space, and most of the SF world missed the drama and excitement of Apollo 13 until the film version 25 years later.

  When science fiction comes true, it’s no fun anymore. Even Campbell recognized, as early as 1950, with the advent of Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, major new magazines with editorial policies radically different from Campbell’s, that his idea of science fiction’s qualities had some serious competition even within the field.

  All during the 1940s, while Astounding was supreme, a bunch of other magazines—pulps such as Startling Stories, Planet Stories, and Thrilling Wonder Stories—were publishing fantastic SF that made little pretense of scientific accuracy but still gripped the readers. Such upstart writers as Ray Br
adbury, Leigh Brackett, Jack Vance, and John D. MacDonald rarely if ever sold to Campbell—not enough science in their fiction, for the most part—science fantasy writers mostly, not in the mainstream of SF. None of their stuff could ever happen.

  Well, it turns out from the vantage point of hindsight that except for a very few instances, no one ever actually set out primarily to predict through science fiction. H. G. Wells did, sometimes, in his later works. Perhaps Heinlein did, sometimes, but always subordinate to telling a good story. Certainly Gernsback did. But don’t get the idea that very many SF readers and writers ever accepted Campbell’s argument—it seems to have been much more widespread, a cliché even, outside the field. Meanwhile the cliché, the joke, was that with all the SF being published, it stands to reason that someone, somewhere, would be at least partly right once in a while and predict something—but more by luck than by intent. SF writers have never intended to be prophets, nor have most readers expected it of them.

  The dominance of heavily science-oriented SF was broken by the advent of the new markets of the fifties, by new editors such as H. L. Gold (Galaxy), who was particularly interested in varieties of social and political extrapolation rather than technological extrapolation, and by Anthony Boucher, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, who was interested in fantasy and SF and in stylistic excellence, in equal parts. New writers rose to prominence—Ray Bradbury, Frederik Pohl, William Tenn, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Sheckley, Arthur C. Clarke, Alfred Bester, Damon Knight, James Blish, Clifford D. Simak, and a host of others—to join the Campbellian pantheon of Heinlein, Asimov, Van Vogt, and L. Ron Hubbard. This was the era from which come most of the acknowledged classics of contemporary SF.

  What these authors and their peers do is better than prediction—they envision, then analyze their visions to show how they work. They are in the habit of creating a science fictional world that may indeed be highly improbable for a “real” future, but then they focus sincere concentration on the way that envisioned world could work, especially certain selected aspects of it. Literary critics such as Fredric Jameson refer to this careful construction of focused SF settings as “world-reduction.” It is usually known in SF as “world building.”

  The aspects a writer selects often characterize that writer to the SF community. Hal Clement is known for his creation of astrophysically interesting worlds in space as settings for his SF adventures. Larry Niven is known for carrying on Clement’s tradition and for creating interesting alien races and technological artifacts. Theodore Sturgeon is known for using SF settings for investigating complex human behavior and psychology. Arthur C. Clarke is known for portraying technology and environment in space. The list could go on, but the examples all tell us how things work. Readers escape into these visions because they are able to suspend disbelief and participate in the exciting process of having the vision’s works revealed.

  And neither the reader nor the writer is expected to believe in the vision itself, necessarily—it might be just a wonderful, unlikely hypothesis. Look at the small type on the back of the title page in any early edition of Arthur C. Clarke’s great SF novel Childhood’s End and you will find this note: “The opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author.” Not only is Childhood’s End just a science fictional vision, it is also a vision that contradicts what the writer believes to be the true and real. But while we, and Clarke, are caught up in the vision, we are convinced that this is how it would or should work. The vision of Childhood’s End is metaphysical in the tradition of Olaf Stapledon—while humanity transcends science and technology in the end, Clarke doesn’t believe that we should or could—but his personal beliefs are external to the novel. Many readers of SF prefer Clarke’s metaphysical to his more technological visions of the future.

  The basic rule of thumb in the SF community for critical discussion has always been “It works/it doesn’t work.” A few years back, Samuel R. Delany appeared before a group of seniors at Stevens Institute of Technology who were taking an elective course in science fiction. One of them asked him to explain a bothersome point regarding a classic story by Bob Shaw, “Light of Other Days,” in which the idea of “slow glass” is envisioned (“slow glass” is glass through which light takes so long to pass that you can see the past through it as if it were now). The student had done calculations and found that slow glass could not work the way Shaw declared it would in the story. Doesn’t this invalidate the story, Mr. Delany? No, said Delany, the point is that the explanation has to be untrue or the story would be present technology, not future science—Shaw’s explanation is credible and intelligent but is still a lie told for the greater good of the idea.

  Shaw may or may not point in the right direction with his explanation, but SF operates in a universe where things are explainable, so Shaw creates an explanation, which is false, for his visionary idea, which is authentic, so that the idea does not seem to violate what is known when explained. Delany told the student that if he could do more calculations and find out how slow glass would really work, then he could make it, but Shaw’s vision remains valid anyway, even after reality contradicts it, because truth according to the rules of present science is not the business of science fiction. And SF specifically is concerned with possibility that does not offend against what is known to be known.

  When an idea from SF does come true, it may be gratifying for a short while, but it is the pleasure of serendipitous discovery, ironic. Camp Concentration (1968), a novel by Thomas M. Disch, concerns a U.S. government prison facility wherein the prisoners are intentionally given a syphilislike spirochete as an experiment to see if their intelligence is increased before they die. Several years after the novel was published, it was revealed in The New York Times that government researchers had indeed carried on a similar research program: a wrongheaded 1930s medical experiment in which certain cases of syphilis were allowed to go untreated—to which news Disch responded with irony, “I was right!” He had predicted the past!

  SF authors are prophets of wonder. Specifics are not the point. Prophets speak in images that must be interpreted, not in literal statements. SF ideas have “come true,” but never in precisely the manner of the story wherein they originate. Waldoes were not in fact invented to help an eccentric, brilliant victim of myasthenia gravis manipulate his environment, but to manage radioactive materials safely at a distance. Yet the public wants prophecy and they want it literal—what will happen next? There has been enormous public pressure on SF and on SF writers, since the first of its “predictions” that turned out to be true, to be oracular, to create microwave ovens and better Saran Wrap and to predict the next war. No wonder it’s no fun when it comes true. It’s so often minor league.

  Still, the visionary enterprise remains wonderful for SF author and audience. And some SF authors, such as Frederik Pohl (an active futurologist), engage in activities peripheral to SF, such as corporate think-tank sessions or futurology conferences, which try to bring the visionary aspects of SF into predictive use. Various think tanks (whose purposes include developing practical solutions to anticipated future problems so that the future can be directed) sometimes use SF that bears upon the problem at hand as a repository of solutions or to develop a catalog of far-out possibilities. The futurologists, whose purposes include describing near-future probabilities so that we as individuals can prepare appropriate responses and not be incapacitated by future shock, also use SF as a mental exercise in considering possibilities. And so of course John Brunner wrote a science fiction novel, The Shockwave Rider, about futurologists, to close the circuit.

  Everyone outside the field feels that SF should be used and that prophecy is somehow the most appropriate use. It is truly extraordinary, when you think about it, that a form of literature published for entertainment should have such public pressure brought to bear on its utility. And it makes some SF writers, every once in a while, really want what they write to come true. This has caused some repercussions in the real wor
ld.

  The author of the famous Riverworld novels, Philip José Farmer, wrote a Hugo award-winning story in the mid-sixties, “Riders of the Purple Wage,” about a revolutionary new economic system. He then suggested to the membership of the World Science Fiction Convention in 1968, in a legendary guest of honor speech, that the SF world band together to put this system into action. Hardly anyone took him seriously, a deep disappointment to him. Perhaps his mistake was trying to convince SF fans rather than economists. Later, however, in Red Orc’s Rage (1991), Farmer got to write a novel based on the fact that a real-world psychiatrist uses Farmer fantasy novels to treat his patients. But consider the story of L. Ron Hubbard.

  Hubbard was a flamboyant pulp SF writer for Campbell’s Astounding in the late thirties and throughout the forties. He wrote on a continuous roll of paper, wore cowboy boots, and filled the room with his presence. He made a strong impression on everyone he met in SF. He had big ideas. In 1949 he wrote a speculative nonfiction essay, published in 1950 in Astounding, announcing his development of Dianetics, “the modern science of mental health.” His ideas were immediately taken seriously, were published at book length, and won thousands of converts; they even became a source of controversy in the letter column of The New York Times. Dianetics in subsequent years took on the name Scientology and became a “scientific” religion.

  Scientology was originally a psychological training system through which you could become so completely sane that you could attain wonders of physical and psychological control over yourself and your environment, ridding yourself of pernicious engrams (prenatal influences). Its unusual history and development are littered with scandals and public controversies. In the 1970s it was revealed that the Scientologists had infiltrated the FBI. In the early 1980s, the question of whether L. Ron Hubbard was alive or dead (one of his heirs forced him to prove himself alive) made national news. In the 1990s full-page ads in The New York Times accused the German government of implicit Nazi tactics in clamping down on Scientology in that country. Whatever the inside story of Scientology is, it has never been told thoroughly—although there is a book on Hubbard, Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, and a 1988 article in Fortune—that between them paint a weird but fascinating picture of Hubbard and his followers. There are others, including a book co-authored by L. R. Hubbard, Jr. Whatever the truth of the matter, it is clear that the cult is a significant force and Hubbard’s a powerful and mysterious legacy today.