In Kuttner’s “The Proud Robot,” Gallagher builds an enormously complicated humanoid robot while drunk, then cannot figure out its purpose when he sobers up—the robot just hangs around admiring itself while Gallagher tries to solve an involved problem concerning the future of the television industry. At the end, it is discovered that the robot is a beer can opener and, secondarily, can solve the TV problem. (In the last line of the story, as noted earlier, Gallagher is singing a duet with his can opener.) Kuttner’s story, written in 1942, is as full of surprising and strange ideas as the Varley story. It projects a future world in which television is the dominant form of entertainment for the middle class, when average people drink beer in front of the TV instead of going to theaters, when robots are real and domestic beer is sold in plastic containers. But there is no doubt that the serious extrapolation is the background and the craziest ideas the foreground of “The Proud Robot.” It is supposed to be funny—the world turned upside down.
Sometimes, as in the stories of Tenn, Pohl, Dick, and John Sladek, it is difficult for an outsider to penetrate the deadpan surface to appreciate the often complex ironies that the crazy ideas produce. And a New Wave story such as Michael Moorcock’s “The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius” is all wit, irony, and absurdity, without a visibly developed SF context to encompass it in (proving to any outsider who gets hold of it that everything I have said above is not universally true).
I have used “crazy” to characterize the ideas of which SF is a repository. It is about time that we examined “crazy” a bit more closely. We understand that it is a term of casual derogation used for decades by outsiders to apply to all SF ideas (all the ideas used in SF stories that were not in fact true). But I have been using the term in a somewhat more specialized manner, applying it either to the complex of ideas that surrounds the central or big idea in a given SF story, or to the general play of ideas (or playing with ideas) that occurs in an SF story.
Not all of these ideas are worthwhile or intelligent, of course. Many of the minor background or supporting ideas in SF are glib fabrications included to justify logical inconsistencies created by or necessary to the central idea of the story. And a lot of the ideas in SF are stuck in there in spite of the fact that they really have nothing to do with the story: digressions that interest the author, random bits of knowledge or partly baked ideas (“What could have caused that civilization to disappear, Professor?” “Well, let me tell you about how civilizations evolve.…”) Remember that Theodore Sturgeon defined SF as “knowledge fiction.” The ideas, even the sloppy ones, establish an environment wherein knowledge is important, wherein ideas can solve problems, wherein characters who think are efficacious.
In most types of popular fiction other than SF, characters act according to their feelings more than their rational abilities (only “cold” villains think “too much”). Even the tough detective and the gunfighter must have their emotions involved conventionally—but in SF good is smarter than evil. Another notable example is the growing mystery subgenre (in the eighties and nineties) of women’s cozies, featuring woman detectives who are smarter than the criminals. Good triumphs over evil in SF because the central character solves problems using thought and knowledge (usually technological). Even when the hero cuts a Gordian knot, he usually has to build or invent the sword first. And the triumph is all the more thrilling and satisfying if the solution is surprising and unusual—a crazy, far-out, wild idea that really works in context. This is one of the great differences between fantasy and SF—the fantasy hero triumphs through brute force or superior virtue, never through superior intelligence or knowledge (unless supplied by a tutelary spirit). In order to read and like SF, you have to be able to believe that ideas are interesting and quite possibly useful, no matter how strange and different they may seem at first. Just because an idea is not true at the moment does not mean that it may not be true under other circumstances, especially the circumstances that are the given in an SF story—and which might be real in another place or time.
A classic example of a science fiction story which arouses expectations that the rules are violable only to reinforce them is Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” (1954). This story enraged readers when it first appeared because its premise is that the problem is insoluble. It seems that a space pilot on a mission of mercy (delivering medicine to a plague-stricken space colony) discovers that a young girl has managed to stow away aboard the ship. Her weight alone will use up enough fuel so that he will not be able to complete the mission, and there is no other ship available or near enough to rescue her. She must be jettisoned into space and die. The science and logic of the situation is set up so that it cannot be contravened except by a deus ex machina—her plight is milked for all its pathos; no regiment of cavalry arrives; she dies. The moral is that facts are facts, knowledge is knowledge, feelings don’t change anything. This story remains controversial even in the mid-1990s—there were two years of nearly monthly argument over “The Cold Equations” carried on in the pages of The New York Review of Science Fiction in the early 1990s (and see the appendix on Hard SF for more on this story and what it implies about SF). It is, as James E. Gunn remarked, a litmus test for attitudes toward reading SF.
What do “The Cold Equations” and Kuttner’s story about the drunk who invents a super can opener have in common? In each case a whole catalog of ideas is presented and discarded, after examination, in search of a solution to the problem, and in the end logic triumphs. To get the effect of either story, you must follow the logic and consider the ideas as they occur. In this respect, SF is not different from the classic detective story in which the crime is solved through a proper assemblage of facts. There is in fact a whole class of “scientific detective” fiction that is in many cases indistinguishable from SF, except that it died out for the most part in the 1920s, at the same time SF was becoming self-conscious. These were the stories in which an arch-criminal genius invents a new weapon or criminal device which the detective must combat through scientific detection—this genre is still alive in the superhero comic books, although in a degenerate form wherein the hero triumphs through moral virtue, since evil genius tends to make silly mistakes due to overconfidence. Minor exceptions aside, however, an unlimited spectrum of SF settings is possible in which wild and unusual ideas are the facts of daily life.
We noted earlier that an SF story about a new liquid rocket fuel would be uninteresting—while a story about a spaceship propelled by exploding a series of atomic bombs might be much better SF, since the idea is bigger and crazier (yet such a ship was in development, although never built, by U.S. scientists in the late 1950s and early 1960s—and they still maintain that it would work). To SF readers, the wilder and bigger and more unusual the ideas, the more gripping and intense is their involvement in the story and their interest in the ideas. Alien and future settings, technological devices capable of doing new things, humans pitted against strange and different problems in imagined situations—ideas generate the stories and fill the stories.
Within the SF field, you can escape from a mundane world into an environment where ideas are respected, discussed, the essential coin of the realm. It is not so much that any given idea is taken seriously by the field as that every idea is potential meat for discussion. Robert A. Heinlein, you will remember, made a full-scale attack on the preconceived ideas of Western civilization in Stranger in a Strange Land. In thirty years of editorials, John W. Campbell continually shook up the field by defending unconventional ideas such as slavery, Dianetics, psi powers, atomic power (especially before 1946), and a host of others. The field as a whole is an enormous repository of ideas of all sorts, but particularly strange, controversial, wild, and crazy ideas.
In the long run, perhaps the seminal influence of science fiction on our lives and on the lives of our descendants will have been that SF gives access to ideas that may become real and embodies them in a variety of scenarios for reality. Of more significance than predict
ion is the vision of alternate modes of life, of changed behavior patterns that the future might demand or permit. Heinlein’s Stranger was a novel of extraordinary influence outside the SF community; along with Frank Herbert’s Dune, it helped to shape the popular consciousness of the late 1960s as communal, sexually liberated, environmentally conscious. Powerful ideas concerning great changes in humanity are waiting in accessible form, clothed in science fiction. If you read them when you were twelve, you will remember them when you are older, even if you do not remember where they came from. You have a fairly definite idea of what the future holds in store right now, and you have gotten it from SF or from people who read or have read SF.
Think about it for a minute. For the first time in human history, most educated people know quite a bit about the future. It exists in three potentialities: most probable (worst)—things will continue downhill leading to disaster or depression or dictatorship; next most probable (best)—humanity will improve through science and technology, raised consciousness, moral rearmament; improbable—an outside force (God, aliens from space, sudden mutation producing universal telepathy, sudden disaster or catastrophe) will intervene and change the rules. Sane humans prepare against the worst and work for the best because they also know that both the best and the worst will happen. And everything we think we know about the future comes ultimately from SF, from Wells to the present. For all of us today, the future is as real as the past, and as different from the present.
The details of the future are going to be more eccentric than we can imagine. (Who could have imagined Madonna, the Beatles, or Eldridge Cleaver’s codpieces?) But SF writers have been writing about the energy crisis, for instance, since the mid-fifties (Frank Herbert’s first novel, Under Pressure, dealt with underwater oil-drilling stealing from another country’s offshore reserves). Most of our large general problems have been dealt with for years and from a variety of points of view as SF, and the SF treatments have been read and filtered back into popular consciousness as attitudes toward our problems.
The earliest SF that had any significant impact was the body of nineteenth-century utopian writings set in the future, bright visions of where social progress might lead. At the same time there were visions of technological progress, but until the 1890s it was the social visions that penetrated popular consciousness, right up to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Then quite suddenly, H. G. Wells in England, Kurd Lasswitz in Germany, and a host of minor writers in the U.S. and elsewhere began to write of futures altered by scientific and technological innovation. And not all of these visions were optimistic. Whereas the utopian visions were undoubtedly influential, it was the anti-utopian visions of E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Yevgeny Zamiatin, George Orwell, Jack London, M. P. Shiel, and, of course, H. G. Wells that really made us conscious of the future by basically making us scared of it in a new way.
Meanwhile, after 1926 the new SF genre magazines were grinding out numerous stories about technology that would alter our daily lives and our worldview. In the U.S., science fiction had absorbed and subsumed the whole utopian tradition by the early 1940s—it was where anyone had to go to find images of the future. Since that time, our future has been imaged and imaginable only through SF. Such is the power of SF that we can no longer imagine a future without scientific and technological change as a major factor. Too many clichés of science fiction, such as space travel and atomic bombs and atomic energy, have already become fact and altered our lives. We are now living, more or less, in the SF world of the future as envisioned in the early 1940s—and moving into the world of 1950s SF: The computer-controlled house of Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” can be built and purchased today. In a way, the futurologists such as Alvin Toffler are more correct than even most of their group realize when they advise reading SF—somewhere in the literature are the ideas that will organize and limit our lives in the future. And those of us who read SF enough to know what the choices are will have, more than most others, the opportunity to make an informed choice among the alternatives.
Lest I overemphasize, however, the utilitarian aspect of ideas, let us back off and remember that only a minority of SF is about the near future (say, the next two hundred years). The majority is either about the third-track future mentioned earlier, the improbable future, or about the distant results of the more probable futures (e.g., Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s classic novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz, which opens hundreds of years after a disastrous nuclear war). Only with distance can the SF writer achieve the scope to develop most big ideas (note that Varley’s story takes place after alien superbeings have exiled the human race from Earth). Why write another variation on the near future when you have millions of years to play in?
The chronic readers don’t really care so much for near-future stuff. After all, they want entertainment, including the entertainment of big, wild speculation. And remember that most of the chronics are not the movers and shakers of our society. The chronics and omnivores are not really living in the present at all, are independent of or alienated from or rejected by peer groups. In a real sense the fans are enlightened masters who have no relation to mere present mundane existence—they play their godlike games and shun the world. Every once in a while they deign to notice something like the energy crisis—“Oh, yes, of course … that…”—but for the most part they can’t be bothered with reality. They live on paper and ink in the realm of Platonic forms. You may be a concerned and aware citizen building a better life in the present, but don’t expect much help from the fans. Even in conversation with one, it is difficult to elicit a response that is solid and to the point. You really have to read the literature. Afterward you may be able to conquer the universe—although you may not care to anymore.
Judith Merril, in a 1980s interview, stated that she was very much aware, as a writer of SF, of ideas and their impact, and gives the clear impression that the writers of the late 1940s and 1950s were intensely concerned with the transmission of ideas through SF. “Back in the Fifties,” says Merril, “I used to talk about science fiction as being a sort of encyclopedia, in the sense of the French encyclopedia, which paved the consciousness-ground for the French and American revolutions. And I felt that this was very much what we were doing, that we were putting into print and into words ideas whose time was about to come, making it possible for people to become conscious of it. Not laying out programs or ideologies, but finding the images and the metaphors and the crystallizations in phrases.” She goes on to observe that later, in the sixties, some of the ideas from SF became part of the public consciousness, often without awareness of the source. “I’ll tell you, for me personally the ultimate and complete reward for any writing I did or editing or any time I put into science fiction was when I first met Tom Disch. And he said, ‘I want to thank you, because when I was growing up in the Midwest, I picked up a copy of one of your anthologies; and growing up in the Fifties there, it was the first time I ever knew that things could be different.’”
Merril and her friends, including Katherine MacLean and Theodore Sturgeon, “felt that what we were producing was consciousness seeds, which were going to grow and expand.” How? “I did really believe that it was a vitally important literature and was going to have a significant effect on society in my own time. I didn’t expect it to have that by becoming big and popular, not even to the extent that it has become, by any means, but only by influencing people who would influence people. The basic concept that an idea that’s alive is going to spread.”
Certainly the famous astronomer Carl Sagan is a case in point. In a New York Times essay (“Growing Up with Science Fiction”) he testifies that SF led him to a life of science after he became an omnivore at age eleven (he was ten when he first read Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Martian books). He provides a catalog of SF ideas in discussing the relation of SF to science, and concludes: “Such ideas, when encountered young, can influence adult behavior. Many scientists deeply involved in the exploration of the solar syst
em (myself among them) were first turned in that direction by science fiction. And the fact that some of the science fiction was not of the highest quality is irrelevant. Ten-year-olds do not read the scientific literature.” It is of immense significance to Sagan and to us that SF conveys “bits and pieces, hints and phrases, of knowledge unknown or inaccessible to the reader.” These ideas can and have changed individual lives, and individuals can and have changed the world.
Not only scientists such as Sagan and writers such as Thomas M. Disch but everyone since the 1940s has grown up in a world saturated with SF ideas. Margaret Mead, in her 1970 book Culture and Commitment, suggested that people born during or after World War II grew up in a world so profoundly different from what came before that it is useful to think of them as native born, while everyone born before World War II is an immigrant here. In relation to prewar reality, we are all living in a science fiction world, and we instinctively reach for science fiction concepts to help us understand and to explain to ourselves what is going on. Science fiction is the natural context of our times. Robert A. Heinlein, in his Future History chart published in 1941, named the 1960s “the crazy years,” to be followed by years of religious revivalism leading to a religious dictatorship in the U.S. I sure hope he was way off base. But Heinlein also wrote stories of nuclear power plant disasters and space exploration taking place in this time period—makes us feel a bit uncomfortable.
Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction (2nd Edition) Page 13
