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

by David G. Hartwell

  Because human characters nearly always survive in the face of an environment that is inherently inhuman, hard SF gained a reputation for optimism. But “The Cold Equations,” in which a responsible space pilot is forced to kill a sweet and ignorant stowaway because otherwise the mathematics of space travel say that all will die, is a title freighted with deep and complex meaning for the hard SF reader—it symbolizes the cold, inexorable, inhuman forces of universal law.

  Traditionally—although this was not so much a conscious literary strategy as a response to pulp-magazine publishing and editing, which dictated that central characters be heroic or likable or both and get on with the action of the story—there is not fully rounded characterization in hard SF, because that would reduce the impact of the general (mankind versus the universal) structure that underlies all hard SF. In a hard SF story the universe is external to character, and the character must interact with that universe and in so doing achieves or validates his identity. Hard SF characters tend not to achieve validation through gaining knowledge of their own inner life but rather through action in the external environment. Knowing oneself or feeling better about oneself is far secondary to having accomplished something important (such as saving a life or the world) for the SF protagonist. The external universe in all SF is distanced from the here and now in part to emphasize that this fiction is not about the specific human condition of any individual today but about a bigger, wider view of all humanity. Robert A. Heinlein plays sophisticated games with ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances in “It’s Great to Be Back!” as does Gregory Benford in “Relativistic Effects.” But the characters in both stories are relatively flat (vs. rounded) and represent or symbolize ordinary people: Everyman. Thus the human condition in hypothetical circumstances is illuminated. It is frequently a surprising literary experience and one of the ordinary pleasures of all SF.

  The characters in all hard SF, regardless of their individuality, have something of the Everyman about them. Sometimes they have to get past their own psychology to survive, or survive precisely because of their psychological quirks, but traditionally they act upon the environment and affect it. The implication is that any other man (who knows what the character knows) would do precisely the same. Hard SF tries to have it both ways: The character is at the same time exceptional (described and portrayed as a unique individual) and typical (acts and solves the problem using reason and knowledge). This is another of the qualities of hard SF that puts it at the core of the SF genre: It is only truly of interest to people with faith in science, faith that knowledge has meaning. Faith tells them that the universe is ultimately knowable and that human problems (the human condition) are solvable through science and technology; that although science can be misused, if used properly it will lead to the improvement of the human condition, implicitly to heaven on earth. This faith in improvement in the long run (combining images of evolution with the idea of progress) is a kind of bedrock Darwinism that underlies scientific and engineering culture in the Western world in this century. Science fiction is one of the most interesting and eloquent expressions of this faith. Look for a moment at the titles of some of the classic novels: Men like Gods, Childhood’s End, Mission of Gravity, The Stars My Destination on, and at the themes of immortality and transcendence that underlie so very much of the literature. Hard SF is a dream of winning against the house, beating the ultimate laws of the universe that constrain us and finally kill us, at least before the end of time. Hard SF validates this belief system in a way that other literature does not.

  And (as Karl Popper said of philosophical Marxism) it is a system that cannot be disproved by any conceivable historical event, even the end of the entire universe (which has been transcended in many stories, for instance Poul Anderson’s classic novel Tau Zero, or James Blish’s The Triumph of Time). It has frequently been noted that science fiction is often about catastrophes nuclear or cosmic, but almost always then about a small band of hardy survivors. Science fiction affirms the future. Human life, albeit often transformed, persists in science fiction in spite of the inimical universe. The optimism is, however, more cosmic than individual. Compare H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (in which the Martian victory is stopped by disease, not the actions of inferior humanity—nature rights the balance) to Thomas M. Disch’s The Genocides (wherein superior alien invaders win, and the hardy survivors are reduced to the status of vermin living inside huge alien farm plants until they wander off to die as pests—nature doesn’t right any balances) for an eloquent contrast in affect and attitude between hard SF and its post-Gothic opposite. Belief—individuals die, the race lives on—vs. unbelief—given the circumstances everyone dies.

  The whole argument might then seem a distraction blinding us to the real issue of affect and faith versus ironic distance and individual failure. The body of hard SF makes readers take the god’s-eye view. This is the ultimate meaning behind the aspect of hard SF that requires great aesthetic distance. Hard SF is in fact at base a neo-Platonic literature referring implicitly or explicitly to the forms behind external reality, which the readers are expected to know and identify as the laws and principles of science and mathematics. And believe in.

  II. History and Development: The Persistence of the Anti-Modern

  In the early years of this century a perceived divide developed between high art and popular culture under pressure from the Modernist movement. SF fell into the paraliterary or popular category, particularly since there was a long and bitter aesthetic battle between H. G. Wells (whose work is a major repository of ideas and techniques for all writers in the SF genre) and Henry James that for all practical purposes Wells lost—becoming the most popular and successful writer of his era at the price of losing literary influence and prestige to James. All this is well-known literary history. The other principal sources for the new genre were pulp fiction and boys’ books—low-class popular origins indeed. The case of science fiction is, however, complex and rather more interesting than has usually been credited.

  In the Modernist era, rather than remaining merely low art, SF evolved in opposition to the Modernist aesthetic of style as information and came to privilege innovation in the content rather than in style. Hard SF (at least from the time of science fiction’s genrification in the 1920s as a separate and self-conscious body of fiction with a separate audience) might best be seen as anti-Modern (or as the pop culture shadow of the continuing Realism of Dreiser with his chemical theories of human behavior or the pulp shadow of Ezra Pound’s utopianism). Modernism was rationalist and scientific in its attitude and method. But it generally averted its gaze from technological knowledge. The Jamesian aesthetic was embodied in the phrase “art for art’s sake.” The concerns of the scientific community interested in problem-solving, reproducible results and methods, clarity and logic, the nature of external reality, the world of action, cause, and effect—the whole external universe—became the meat of science fiction. Science fiction arose and thrived by validating this technological culture, by addressing its concerns and manifesting its values. Poe, Verne, and Wells all affirmed science as our essential hold on external reality, as giving us rules by which to interact and live. Their attitude differed from the earlier Gothic attitude toward science in literature, as represented by Hawthorne (and Mary Shelley, and later Stevenson), in that their point was what science could reveal and/or do, not particularly about human character but about humanity’s relation to the universe.

  Early in his career, Wells identified himself as writing in the genre of “Scientific Romance.” Hawthorne, too, exercised much effort to establish that he was a Romancer, not a novelist. Although there is a specific distinction from other Romances (as revelations of character) that Wells was affirming, still both writers felt a difference from the novel as it was understood in their day. The practitioners of proto–science fiction felt for decades a sense of being in opposition to fashionable art and literary forms. Not until the creation of the SF genre in 1926, o
ut of the materials and conventions of the earlier genre of Scientific Romance, did the actual genre coalesce and begin to take form. The Wellsian stream persisted well into the 1930s and beyond, as the “literary” (e.g., Yevgeny Zamiatin, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, George Orwell) form of which the “low art” pulp genre was the paraliterary shadow. It was not until the 1940s that all the strains blended.

  It is only a start, however, to observe the influence of Poe, Verne, and Wells (and the later philosophical novels of Stapledon) on the founding of the science fiction genre. Hugo Gernsback had the inspiration to put them all cheek by jowl in one publication and call it “scientifiction.” He described it as part “charming Romance” and part “scientific fact” in the founding issue of Amazing Stories (April 1926), the first genre magazine. Genre definition, however, began to reach a level of clarity and consensus only with the advent of John W. Campbell, Jr., more than a decade later.

  Campbell was the editor of modern science fiction. When in the late 1930s he took the helm of Astounding Stories, the highest-paying market for SF, he set about establishing a model for SF through a process that Alexei and Cory Panshin have elucidated in their award-winning study, The World Beyond the Hill. Campbell wrote editorials that pointed to stories written by L. Sprague de Camp (and in part conceived in discussion with Campbell) as examples of what he wanted science fiction to be. Campbell had already had a reputation as a popular space-adventure writer and had then begun to experiment with more ambitious hard SF under a pseudonym (Don A. Stuart). So his aesthetic position had both literary authority and economic force on writers. In this manner, Campbell privileged what came to be known as hard SF as the only true, pure, and real science fiction—all the rest, he later maintained, is fantasy.

  What he in fact did was set up a class system within the science fiction field that reflected the worldview of U.S. technological culture in that period, in opposition to the dominant literary culture. It was a thinly veiled version of the social Darwinism exemplified in Wells’s “The Land Ironclads” and Kipling’s With the Night Mail, with scientists and engineers, the people who know and can manipulate the physical universe, at the top. The values of this system derived from the axiom that knowledge is power and that the only real knowledge is scientific knowledge.

  At the top of the scientific hierarchy are physics, chemistry, and astronomy, whose knowledge and laws are mathematically verifiable. On the next level are the biological sciences, because they are in part descriptive or impure (dealing with living creatures); then the social sciences: anthropology, economics, political science—and experimental psychology. All of these are the meat of hard science fiction. But below them, one finds the humanities: theology, philosophy—and clinical psychology(!)—to which Modern science fiction is opposed (although it was always fair game to try to invent a way to reform these disciplines into true sciences—which led among other things, to Scientology). In general, hard SF still disdains theology, politics, and Modern art in all its manifestations.

  Campbellian SF privileges the outer life over the inner life, skills over feelings. Thought is associated with action. Intensity is generated through the macrocosmic or microcosmic scale of the settings that lend importance to the action of the stories. It also privileges exposition as a primary element of the fiction and therefore privileges the third person past tense as the dominant mode of hard SF (following the practice and influence of Wells and Kipling) because it allows for ease of exposition, and for the omniscient narrative voice that speaks for the values of the Campbellian system. SF today is still more often told in the third person than other contemporary fiction.

  Campbell’s own technological optimism (he was educated at M.I.T. and Duke in physics) led him to extend the domain of science over all literature. He often argued that science fiction is larger (better) than all other literature because its domain, all times and places in the universe, is larger. True science can predict events in the real world in Campbell’s system, and he encouraged his writers to attempt to predict real inventions, real science, and future events. In this way, science fiction would become more like science. Although Damon Knight, the leading SF critic of the 1950s, pointed out that including prediction in the aesthetic was absurd, leading to the logical necessity of waiting until the end of time to judge the relative merits of SF as literature, Campbell collected examples of successful predictions to enforce his point. Most writers did not take him entirely seriously but many readers of Astounding did, and in his heyday looked for story elements to come true in their lifetimes.

  Character in this literature is in a sense only a series of conventional stock characters with minor variations meant to display the natural superiority of intelligence over irrationality and emotions. Generally the central characters of hard science fiction are winners (the competent man, the engineer, the scientist, the good soldier, the man who transcends his circumstances, the inventor—the “Heinlein individual” who was for decades the model for the Modern SF hero). One needs to know no more than the basic qualities the author has presented of the character of, for instance, the surviving clone in Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Nine Lives” or the nun in Poul Anderson’s “Kyrie,” for each story to achieve full impact. What happens is more important, even in these two stories that are richer, deeper in characterization than most hard SF.

  What has been most undervalued by observers of SF is that it invents hypothetical human experiences and privileges them over real experiences. While these experiences may be interpreted metaphorically (the interaction between a human and an alien as a metaphor for a sexist or racist encounter, for example), sometimes with depth and richness, still there is a literal hypothetical experience that must be taken into consideration to read the experience as an SF reader. Thus “Dolphin’s Way” by Gordon R. Dickson requires an adjustment of our perception of humanity’s position in the natural world, Frederik Pohl’s “Day Million” confronts us with the true strangeness of a far-future environment, and David Brin’s “What Continues, What Fails” forces us to reconsider what is eternal versus what changes both in human nature and in the universe.

  Hard SF embodies the fantasies of empowerment of the scientific and technological culture of the modern era and validates its faith in scientific knowledge as dominant over other ways of knowing. And during the height of Campbell’s reign in the 1940s and 1950s a lot of it was also xenophobic, elitist, racist, and psychologically naive. For the most part that is not the literature we still read from that period today, but strains of it persist. Consider Raymond F. Jones’s “The Person from Porlock” or James P. Hogan’s “Making Light” as having grown out of Campbell’s social and political attitudes. The influence for good and ill of Rudyard Kipling’s jingoism (both in his proto–science fiction such as With the Night Mail and his other poetry and fiction) on Campbell, Heinlein, and other masters of the Campbellian “Golden Age” should not be ignored in considering the later evolution of hard SF.

  All that having been said, many of the best writers, for instance Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and Clifford D. Simak, either broke with Campbell quite early or often wrote in reaction to his dominant views. Others such as Frederik Pohl, C. M. Kornbluth, and Alfred Bester had to wait a decade or more to flourish, until the 1950s, when other markets appeared to publish new styles and approaches. This aggregation of fiction was called “speculative fiction” in its day by Judith Merril, Damon Knight, and other powerful critics and editors (who were also SF writers) and was happily and sometimes blindly published in all the other SF magazines and by the newly formed paperback book publishers of the day, as science fiction. It was at that moment in the late fifties that the term “hard SF” was coined by P. Schuyler Miller in his book review column in Astounding.

  The last year that Campbell’s magazine won the popular vote for the Hugo Award as best SF magazine of the year was 1965, the year the serial publication of Frank Herbert’s Dune concluded. After that came the revolutionary spirit of the New Wave,
which got all the media attention for the rest of the decade in both its British and American forms, reacting strongly against Campbell, Analog, and the traditions of science fiction, especially hard science fiction. Everyone had agreed that poorly written and conceived SF in the pulp adventure tradition was obsolete at least since the advent of Campbell in 1937. In the late sixties and early seventies a serious attempt was made to declare all hard SF before about 1965 as literary history, no longer a living part of the genre, and the hard SF enterprise as dead.

  This literary political tack did not entirely fail. Campbell’s prestige and influence were diminished, and hard science fiction became only one variety of a larger genre body still called science fiction but with less genre coherence than ever. This is the situation that stabilized in the 1970s and lasts into the 1990s. But while the social and political attitudes of Campbell began to lose their hold in the 1950s, the idea that science used in the Campbellian way was the ideal of hard SF never disappeared. It is still evident, for instance, in recent stories that concentrate entirely on presenting neat ideas such as Robert L. Forward’s “The Singing Diamond.”

  The advent of J. G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss at the end of the fifties can be seen in retrospect as the first harbinger of the return of the Hawthornian (Aldiss was later to characterize himself and all SF as Mary Shelleyan) Gothic mode, concerned with the inner life of character, as an influence on SF. Ballard’s first story, “Prima Belladona,” is a recasting of Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter.”

  The implied argument of the Ballardian stream of hard SF, written in reaction to the main tradition is: Campbellian hard SF said that if you know you may survive; Ballard says knowing is not enough to survive. Ballard is medically trained, clinically detached. His characters live ordinary lives in extraordinary landscapes. Even when they are scientists they tend to be obsessives fixated upon their own inner lives. Ballard’s stories thus feel radically different from other hard SF even when he uses science rigorously.