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

by David G. Hartwell

  What excites people outside SF is when you claim that what you are saying is literally true (e.g., flying saucers are real and I met the driver). And many people within the SF community, because of Hubbard’s standing in the field and because Campbell himself was a convert (Campbell maintained throughout his life that he believed in the techniques of Dianetics), took up the “new science.” After all, the result of participating in the new science was to be that through training and hard work, you would become saner than everybody else (that familiar elitist strain). Hubbard left SF immediately to devote full time to his new science and took with him A. E. Van Vogt (author of Slan), then at the height of his reputation as one of the top four or five SF writers, and a number of lesser lights. Van Vogt returned to writing SF in the late sixties, but Hubbard until his death lived the life of a wealthy cult leader on his yacht. His ideas have come true, so to speak. He is no longer primarily a writer but a prophet.

  Even so, a huge new SF novel by Hubbard appeared in 1982 and made the national best-seller lists, buoyed up by a large publicity campaign. An even larger opus, a ten-volume “dekalogy” announced just before his death in 1986, began in 1985 and sold for the rest of the decade. Hubbard was always a writer to contend with in the thirties and forties and, with the power of his church behind him, his sudden comeback in the 1980s built up to a crisis at the 1987 World SF Convention in Brighton, England, where his promoters (unintentionally as far as anyone can tell) spent so much money that it frightened and offended the whole SF field. It was evident that they could have bought the whole convention and could have simply bought enough memberships to vote for, and win, all the awards.

  SF readers want SF authors to be prophets, but not in the Hubbard manner or in the restricted sense of predictors. After all, an SF story about a new kind of liquid fuel for a NASA rocket would probably be uninteresting and perhaps unpublishable, no matter how accurate. The idea just isn’t very big and exciting. What SF readers want is for writers to come up with projections, not of the most likely, but of the most interesting and original futures. They want, in other words, prophetic images. And SF today is faced with a time problem, as we remarked earlier, since the newly investigated solar system has made fantasy out of many of its classics. As a result, there is a great rise in the popularity of fantasy and science fantasy, while the whole SF field strives to come up with new settings that have the range, power, and immediacy of the interplanetary future of our recent past.

  In the interim, while the outright fantasy genre invades the SF market, perhaps the most successful mass market magazine founded in a decade was Omni, an odd mixture of science, SF, psychic phenomena, and flying saucers, which came out of left field (the successful publisher of Penthouse, one of the competitors of Playboy) to sell a million copies per issue. One can see the immediate appeal of Omni in its vivid and lovely graphics, but the editorial appeal is comprehensible only if one understands that the public’s desire for prophetic images is strong today, and Omni presents a variety of these images in a format that is not cheap but rather is classy and respectable. Somehow Omni tapped a search for truth through these images. If it continues to survive (online or in print), it will do so because it continues to hold out the promise of revelation. This promise is basically the same that SF holds out to its readers. The difference is that SF fulfills the promise in giving wonderful images, while Omni can only promise to search for truth, and publish a little SF. New titles such as Wired (without any SF, but with the prophetic feel of a pre-1926 Gernsback magazine, such as Science and Invention—someone needs to do a comparison) begin to look more like the wave of the future, in the mainstream, while new genre titles such as Science Fiction Age appear vigorous.

  Prophecy is tricky business, and most SF writers would back-step quickly away and into the nearest bar for fortification if you told any one of them he was a prophet. Nevertheless, SF is a wellspring of prophecy; its writers are prophets not by high calling and appointment but simply by doing the job of writing SF well, by envisioning a future and showing how it works (or how it doesn’t), how it interacts with human nature. We need only look at the examples of famous SF novels over the last century or so that have leaned toward social prophecy to verify that it is not the prediction but the prophetic vision wherein the power resides.

  Consider for a moment that Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, certainly a catalyst of the events in Russia that culminated in the 1917 revolution, is essentially an SF novel. In the U.S., we have the interesting case of Colonel House, Woodrow Wilson’s closest adviser, who published in 1912 an SF novel called Philip Dru: Administrator, predicting civil war in the U.S. in the 1920s and 1930s. At the height of his power during the Wilson administration, House, according to historian Christopher Lasch, “found it increasingly difficult to distinguish what was happening from what he had predicted was to happen.” Then, of course, we have Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, such dominant images of prophecy in our culture that the very titles have come to stand for specific potential realities. In 1984, William Gibson published his novel Neuromancer, which established “cyberspace” as an idea and a place (analogous to that imaginary place you inhabit when you are on the telephone), where you are when you are on your computer. Cyberspace is now an accepted word in journalism and all discourse concerning the online world, to which one may be personally connected using computer technology. It is a strong and beguiling image for the mental space you inhabit through the monitor screen (analogous to through the looking-glass).

  Finally there is the whole area of utopian and dystopian fiction, which early in this century became almost entirely conflated with science fiction (in previous centuries, utopias were often set in the present; now, with rare exceptions such as B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two, they are set in the future)—most of our social visions in the latter half of this century are SF.

  Sometimes, for better or worse, the imagery of SF is so strong that someone caught by it decides to act out some SF in the real world. Stephen Gaskin, spiritual and temporal leader of the largest and most successful rural commune, the Farm in Summertown, Tennessee, author of Monday Night Class and other books, read a great deal of SF when he was young and acknowledges that it gave him ideas, such as how people might be telepathic with one another, that he has gone on to try to act out. Jane Roberts, the medium through which the spirit “Seth” communicated to us mortals (she is listed as the author of the books) was for many years an active SF writer and held a famous séance in the 1950s involving Damon Knight, Algis Budrys, and Cyril Kornbluth among others. But there is very little science in the real-life fictions of Roberts and Gaskin, and of Charles Manson, mentioned earlier, and SF pales into a minor shadow in light of their other accomplishments, metaphysical, criminal, or social.

  More significant and more complex is the decades-long desire on the part of a large number of otherwise average people to interact with flying saucers. This is turning SF images into reality with a vengeance.

  Have you ever read one of the hundreds of books about flying saucers? If so, you will remember that most of the wordage is spent trying to tell you in one way or another that “they’re real.” The question of why it should be so important to so many people for flying saucers to be real or true has seldom been addressed (but was, notably, by C. G. Jung in his book on the subject), and certainly not in most of the pro-saucer literature. Few publishers are foolish enough to publish anti-saucer material—no one cares to buy it. The gist of the matter seems to be that flying saucers are messengers and the message is not knowledge but transcendence.

  Only recently has the situation calmed down for people in the SF community, most especially for the writers—for from the late 1940s to the 1980s, the most common questions asked by an outsider of a science fiction person was “Do you believe in flying saucers? What do you think of them?” The immediate assumption was that anyone in SF would know more than the ordinary person about things such a
s flying saucers; so for more than a decade SF was known in some circles as “that flying saucer stuff”—a perversion of the fairly accurate “that space stuff.”

  All this happened initially without any cooperation from the SF community at all—except that flying saucers did in fact begin to appear from time to time in SF stories and especially movies, up to and including Star Trek (note that the main body of the Enterprise is a saucer). SF had spent many years prophesying visitors from space, and the image stuck in the popular consciousness in a manner no one from Wells on down could have predicted. Early signs of it were evident in the reaction to the famous Halloween broadcast of The War of the Worlds, when thousands panicked because they believed in it.

  When it comes true it can be dangerous and frightening.

  And it is fairly evident that thousands, if not more, are acting out SF fantasies in the real world now and today, because they believe in psi powers or invading aliens or whatever. In the 1990s there are thousands of people who believe that they can turn on their computer and become in it a character in “cyberspace.” (Where are you? Sitting in a chair in front of a computer.) Moreover, a great deal of marketing in the computer and online industry caters to this in the 1990s. Let us hope that the fantasies are benign.

  Because SF deals with big ideas, the images SF authors use are often powerful and large, commensurate with the breadth of vision in a given work. Sometimes the power springs from the uncanniness of the alien, but more often it arises from playing with huge-scale distances, immense scope, great size—larger than life. Visions of galactic civilizations, mind-boggling technology, eons of time are supposed to distance us from the mundane here-and-now. But aside from these absolute clichés, which need no explanation, the big images are supposed to be rationalized, explaining how and why things work the way they do in the world of the story, as Bob Shaw did for his “slow glass.”

  If you don’t get the idea that the explanations are essentially a convention to establish verisimilitude, using contemporary science as a springboard, and if you believe after the story is over that what you read is in some way literally real, then you are in deep trouble and should perhaps switch to reading Arthur Conan Doyle and join the Baker Street Irregulars (who purport to believe in the literal existence of Sherlock Holmes). (I am not, after all, here to recommend expensive therapy, and we all should have a rich fantasy life, if nothing else.) It is much safer for you. And even, perhaps, for the rest of us.

  On the other hand, it is okay if you happen to be a scientist or engineer and happen to have some free time and want to play around with how something like that device you just read about might actually work and be constructed. You just might, then, invent it, as Frederik Pohl does in the title story of The Gold at the Starbow’s End (New York: Ballantine, 1972, p. 46):

  Most problems have grammatical solutions. The problem of transporting people from the Earth to another planet does not get solved by putting pieces of steel together one at a time at random and happening to find out you’ve built the [spaceship] by accident. It gets solved by constructing a model (= equation (= grammar) which describes the necessary circumstances under which the transportation occurs. Once you have the grammatical model, you just put the metal around it and it goes like gangbusters.

  You would then have created a prediction, which, until that moment, would only have been one speculative idea among many. The author would necessarily have fantasized in his “grammatical model” and your achievement would be to modify, revise, and correct it until it becomes scientifically and technologically accurate.

  Today’s fiction, tomorrow’s fact!

  That SF stories are in some sense possible is essential to the pleasure of SF as opposed to fantasy. That every once in a while a speculation turns into a prediction because someone up and invents the space suit or the waldo or some such in real life provides concrete verification of SF as “possible” fiction. It is fun, in this one particular sense, when it comes true, because in a special way it validates the whole developing literary aesthetic of SF (the best book on the subject to date is Samuel R. Delany’s Starboard Wine [Pleasantville, NY: Dragon Press, 1984]). But it doesn’t have to happen very often, and coming true, as we have seen, is not really the point.

  To make it the point is to rob the vast majority of SF of its validity as vision. And to believe in the “fun lies” of SF without questioning them in the real world is dumb and, at worst, could lead to a life of crime.

  Please, don’t believe it for a moment. It’s all in fun.

  6

  WHERE DO YOU GET THOSE CRAZY IDEAS?

  “WHERE DO your ideas come from?”

  That question so often asked of science fiction writers by neo-fans, the media, relatives who don’t read SF, and all manner of outsiders was answered once, tongue in cheek, by SF author Roger Zelazny. In front of a group of fans at a convention, he replied to a vacuous teenager that the Journal of Crazy Ideas is published quarterly in Schenectady, New York, and that when you join the Science Fiction Writers of America and become a certified professional you get a free subscription and can use any of the ideas in the magazine instead of having to think up your own. This is one of the secrets of being a professional and one of the reasons why two different writers will have the same idea in different stories.

  The reason the question is difficult to answer is that there are so many true answers. Asimov, you will remember, got the idea for “Nightfall” from John W. Campbell—until the end of the 1950s it was common for SF writers to get story ideas directly from an editor such as Campbell or Galaxy’s Horace Gold. It was also standard practice from the early 1930s to the beginning of the 1970s for a writer to be given the cover story of a magazine, by which we mean that the editor of a pulp would buy a piece of commercial illustration from an artist for use on the cover, fitting the image and marketing approach of the magazine, and then call in one or more writers and assign them the job of writing a story to fit and tie into the cover illustration. Alfred Bester, for instance, wrote his extraordinary story “5,271,009” for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction on assignment to fit a painting of a man in old-fashioned prison stripes and glass space helmet sitting alone on a boulder-sized piece of rock in space. The number on his prison suit is 5,271,009. Bester’s story is about the number (used as a leitmotif). In the commercial field of magazine writing (originally the pulp field) you were often assigned ideas.

  Another true answer is that ideas are everywhere and they occur to you, the writer, all the time. Except when they don’t, and then you wait until they do. This is not a satisfactory answer because it is so universally true; and besides, anyone who asks such a question is sure that you have a secret to tell them and won’t be satisfied with general truth. Which is why science fiction writers, just like all other artists, lie a lot. You can’t just say that every idea is individual, a unique case. Or, worst of all, that really most SF ideas are lifted and altered consciously or unconsciously from other SF stories and that this is an honorable tradition in the field. But this is perhaps the most meaningful answer. We will explore it in detail in a few moments.

  First, though, let’s consider the plight of the science fiction writer who wants to use an idea. Initially, she must ask herself the same question that most teenagers are unable to answer in, say, math class when confronted with the square root of minus one: How can this mean anything in reality? Can I conceive of a situation in which this abstract idea would be of relevant and crucial significance in the life of a human being or humanity? In the days of Hugo Gernsback, this really meant to a writer “Can I use this idea to build a machine that will do something?” But it has come to mean what Ursula K. Le Guin has described for us in chapter 2, something that reverberates with thematic implications.

  Yet I want to make a distinction between the central and overarching ideas of science fiction, of individual works even, and the more general and stimulating free flow of supporting ideas and bits of information combined a
nd recombined in story after story; the kind of overwhelming flow of input to the reader that led Theodore Sturgeon to define SF as “knowledge fiction.” SF writers tend to be magpies for odd facts and bits of knowledge of all sorts. Alfred Bester told in his speeches and essays how he always kept a notebook of interesting facts and events, which he then put in his stories, suitably adapted. Science fiction readers desire these ideas as part of the environment of the fiction, admire a story that is full of ideas of all sorts, historical, theological, technological, psychological, you name it. As long as the story integrates the ideas into the fiction and makes them concrete—or creates a fictional situation wherein ideas are discussed seriously, especially from several points of view or a new point of view—it’s acceptable SF.

  The net effect of all these ideas is to alienate most uninitiated readers. We have heard too many people say for too many years that science fiction is just too fantastic for the average person of taste. At the same time we see that the books and shows these people do like are filled with illogical and preposterous coincidences and monstrous and mechanical oversimplifications of human psychology from Harold Robbins and Judith Krantz to I Love Lucy and such mass market phenomena as the Harlequin Romance. The mass audience wants an incredible (to SF people) sense of ordinariness in the details surrounding whatever fantasy they read—and make no mistake, they are reading nothing but fantasies—as if their imaginations have been brutally trained to function only in an environment of endless and boring repetition. The only things that are real to them are things they have seen before. It sure feeds the ego of SF people to feel superior to all these others—who may in daily life be more canny and sharp and successful than SF people have ever been.