For this reason even wider claims of influence on science fiction, like writer and editor Lester del Rey’s assertion that the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh is the earliest written science fiction story, seem appropriative, beside the point, and an overreach for legitimacy more useful as a “tell” about the position of science fiction in the 1940s and 1950s in North America.
But we brought up our triumvirate because they represent different strands of science fiction. The earliest of these authors, Mary Shelley, and her Frankenstein (1818), ushered in a modern sensibility of ambivalence about the uses of technology and science while wedding the speculative to the horrific in a way reflected very early on in science fiction. The “mad scientist” trope runs rife through the pages of the science fiction pulps and even today in their modern equivalents. She also is an important figure for feminist SF.
Jules Verne, meanwhile, opened up lines of inquiry along more optimistic and hopeful lines. For all that Verne liked to create schematics and specific detail about his inventions—like the submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (1870)—he was a very happy puppy who used his talents in the service of scientific romanticism, not “hard science fiction.”
H. G. Wells’s fiction was also dubbed “scientific romanticism” during his lifetime, but his work existed somewhere between these two foci. His most useful trait as the godfather of modern science fiction is the granularity of his writing. Because his view of the world existed at an intersection of sociology, politics, and technology, Wells was able to create complex geopolitical and social contexts for his fiction—indeed, after he abandoned science fiction, Wells’s later novels were those of a social realist, dealing with societal injustice, among other topics. He was able to quantify and fully realize extrapolations about the future and explore the iniquities of modern industrialization in his fiction.
The impulse to directly react to how industrialization has affected our lives occurs very early on in science fiction—for example, in Karl Hans Strobl’s cautionary factory tale “The Triumph of Mechanics” (1907) and even in the playful utopian visions of Paul Scheerbart, which often pushed back against bad elements of “modernization.” (For his optimism, Scheerbart perished in World War I, while Strobl’s “reward” was to fall for fascism and join the Nazi Party—in part, a kind of repudiation of the views expressed in “The Triumph…”)
Social and political issues also peer out from science fiction from the start, and not just in Wells’s work. Rokheya Shekhawat Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream” (1905) is a potent feminist utopian vision. W. E. B. Du Bois’s “The Comet” (1920) isn’t just a story about an impending science-fictional catastrophe but also the start of a conversation about race relations and a proto-Afrofuturist tale. The previously untranslated Yefim Zozulya’s “The Doom of Principal City” (1918) presages the atrocities perpetrated by the communism of the Soviet Union and highlights the underlying absurdities of certain ideological positions. (It’s perhaps telling that these early examples do not come from the American pulp SF tradition.)
This kind of eclectic stance also suggests a simple yet effective definition for science fiction: it depicts the future, whether in a stylized or realistic manner. There is no other definitional barrier to identifying science fiction unless you are intent on defending some particular territory. Science fiction lives in the future, whether that future exists ten seconds from the Now or whether in a story someone builds a time machine a century hence in order to travel back into the past. It is science fiction whether the future is phantasmagorical and surreal or nailed down using the rivets and technical jargon of “hard science fiction.” A story is also science fiction whether the story in question is, in fact, extrapolation about the future or using the future to comment on the past or present.
Thinking about science fiction in this way delinks the actual content or “experience” delivered by science fiction from the commodification of that genre by the marketplace. It does not privilege the dominant mode that originated with the pulps over other forms. But neither does it privilege those other manifestations over the dominant mode. Further, this definition eliminates or bypasses the idea of a “turf war” between genre and the mainstream, between commercial and literary, and invalidates the (weird, ignorant snobbery of) tribalism that occurs on one side of the divide and the faux snobbery (ironically based on ignorance) that sometimes manifests on the other.
Wrote the brilliant editor Judith Merril in the seventh annual edition of The Year’s Best S-F (1963), out of frustration:
“But that’s not science fiction…!” Even my best friends (to invert a paraphrase) keep telling me: That’s not science fiction! Sometimes they mean it couldn’t be s-f, because it’s good. Sometimes it couldn’t be because it’s not about spaceships or time machines. (Religion or politics or psychology isn’t science fiction—is it?) Sometimes (because some of my best friends are s-f fans) they mean it’s not really science fiction—just fantasy or satire or something like that.
On the whole, I think I am very patient. I generally manage to explain again, just a little wearily, what the “S-F” in the title of this book means, and what science fiction is, and why the one contains the other, without being constrained by it. But it does strain my patience when the exclamation is compounded to mean, “Surely you don’t mean to use that? That’s not science fiction!”—about a first-rate piece of the honest thing.
Standing on either side of this debate is corrosive—detrimental to the study and celebration of science fiction; all it does is sidetrack discussion or analysis, which devolves into SF/not SF or intrinsically valuable/not valuable. And, for the general reader weary of anthologies prefaced by a series of “inside baseball” remarks, our definition hopefully lessens your future burden of reading these words.
CONSIDER ANOTHER GRAND TRADITION: THE CONTE PHILOSOPHIQUE
Inasmuch as we have put on our Isolator and already paid some tribute to the “dominant” strain of science fiction by briefly conjuring up the American pulp scene of the 1920s through 1940s, it is important before returning to that tradition to examine what the Loyal Opposition was up to in the first half of the twentieth century—and for this reason, it is important to turn our attention to an earlier form, the conte philosophique.
Conte philosophique translates as “philosophical story” or “fable of reason.” The contes philosophiques were used for centuries in the West by the likes of Voltaire, Johannes Kepler, and Francis Bacon as one legitimate way for scientists or philosophers to present their findings. The conte philosophique employs the fictional frame of an imaginary or dream journey to impart scientific or philosophical content. In a sense, the fantastical or science-fictional adventure became a mental laboratory in which to discuss findings or make an argument.
If we position some early science fiction as occurring outside of the American pulp tradition but also outside of traditions exemplified by Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells, what remains as influence is both extremely relevant to science fiction and also relevant to more dominant traditions.
Early twentieth-century science fiction like Hossain’s “Sultana’s Dream,” Scheerbart’s utopian fables, or Alfred Jarry’s “Elements of Pataphysics” from his novel Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician (1911; first published in English in the 1960s) makes infinitely more sense in this context. More important, these stories take their rightful place within the history of speculative literature. Instead of being considered outliers, they can be seen as the evolution of a grand tradition, one that inverts the usual ratio of the fictional to nonfictional found in a typical conte philosophique. It is a mode that certainly helps us better understand Jules Verne’s fiction. In many cases, Verne was taking his cue from the trappings of the conte philosophique—the fantastical adventure—and using that form as a vehicle for creating his entertainments.
The conte philosophique, with its non/fictional fusion, also creates a fascinating link to Jorge Luis Borges and his essay-
stories from the 1940s. These stories often serve as a vehicle for metaphysical exploration. Indeed, Borges’s work can in this context be seen as the perfect expression of and reconciliation of the (pulpish) adventure fiction he loved and the intellectual underpinnings of his narratives, which rely in part on severe compression into tale (coal into diamonds) rather than traditional short story. Other Latin American examples include Silvina Ocampo’s “The Waves” (1959) and Alicia Yánez Cossío’s “The IWM 1000” (1975). Even Stanisław Lem in his Star Diaries voyages of the 1960s and 1970s is reimagining the contes philosophiques—there is the actual voyage (exciting enough!), but it is once again a pure delivery system for ideas about the world.
Although this tradition is not as common in the pulps, “science fiction tales” like A. Merritt’s “The Last Poet and the Robots” (1935) and Frederik Pohl’s “Day Million” (1966) can be seen as a fusion of the “speculative fairy tale” and the conte philosophique, or simply a mutation of the conte philosophique, which was itself influenced by ancient myths of fantastical journeys. Ironically, some of these stories add in elements of “hard science fiction.”
Interpreted charitably and not from a position espousing the superiority of the conte philosophique, this form infiltrates the pulps in the sense that the pulps showcase the physical actuality of the contes philosophiques—they are contes physiques into which can be reinjected or refed an abstract quality—“what/why/how/if?” And they can embody that quality or kind of inquiry as subtext. (Whereas on the mainstream side of the divide that subtext must manifest as metaphysics to be considered literature or be doomed in terms of approval—as would any non-character-based fiction.)
In this context, whether just as a thought experiment to turn the tables and challenge dominant modes of thinking, or as a subversive “real” metaphorical or metaphysical construct, we could then come to see American pulp space-travel fiction as a kind of devolution—a mistake in which the scaffolding (or booster rockets) used to deliver the point of a conte philosophique (the journey) is brought to the foreground and the idea or scientific hypothesis (the “what if”) is deemphasized or subtextual only. A case of throwing out the baby to glorify the bathwater?
Science fiction in the United States has often positioned itself as the “literature of ideas,” yet what is a literature of ideas if they can be expressed only through a select few “delivery systems”? Aren’t there ideas expressed in fiction that we can only see the true value of—good or bad, sophisticated or simple—if we admit that there are more than a few modes of expression with which to convey them? In examining the link between the conte philosophique and science fiction, we begin to grasp the outlines of the wider context: how many of these “alternative” approaches are—rather than being deformed or flat or somehow otherwise suspect as lesser modes—just different from the dominant model, not lesser, and as useful and relevant. (For example, where otherwise to fit Czechoslovakian writer Karel Čapek—both his 1920s robot plays and his gonzo novel War with the Newts from the 1930s?)
Just like our definition of science fiction, this way of thinking about science fiction works both from the “literary mainstream” looking in or from genre looking out. The reason it works is that the position or stance—the perspective or vantage taken—is from outside of either. And this is in a sense pure or uncontaminated by the subjective intent—colonizing or foundationally assumed superior—of either “mainstream” literary or genre.
In taking this position (on a mountaintop, from a plane, in a dirigible, from the moon, within a dream journey) much less is rendered invisible in general, and more “viable” science fiction can be recovered, uncovered, or discovered without being any less faithful about our core definition. Thus, too, in this anthology we have the actuality of exploration and the idea of it, because both thought and action expend energy and are both, in their separate ways, a form of motion.
Perhaps the reason the conte philosophique to date has been undervalued as an influence on science fiction is because of the “cultural cringe” of the dominant American form of science fiction, which has consistently positioned itself in relationship to the literary mainstream by accepting the literary mainstream’s adherence to the short story as needing to have three-dimensional, psychologically convincing characters to be valid. Even reactions against this position (pre-Humanist SF) have in essence been defining science fiction in relationship to the über-domination of the mainstream.
This is particularly ironic given that a fair amount of early science fiction fails at the task of creating three-dimensional characters (while displaying other virtues) and thus as the century progresses the self-punishment the science fiction genre parcels out to itself for not meeting a standard that is just one tradition within the mainstream looks increasingly odd, or even perverse, as are excuses like “the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12.” The genre would have been far better off taking up the cause of traditions like the conte philosophique to bypass mainstream approbation rather than continually recycling the Mesopotamian Defense or the Hawthorne Maneuver (“Canon fodder Nathaniel Hawthorne was the first science fiction/fantasy writer”) to create legitimacy or “proof of concept” on the mainstream’s terms.
FURTHER EXPLORATION OF THE PULP TRADITION
Remember the Age of the Pulps and later Golden Age of Science Fiction (the 1920s to mid-1940s)? Collectively, this era successfully exported itself as a system of plots, tropes, story structures, and entanglements to either emulate or push back against. It was typified not so much by movements as by the hegemonies created by particular influential editors like H. L. Gold, the aforementioned Campbell, and Frederik Pohl (at Galaxy).
Many of these editors, trying to push an advantage in the marketplace, created their own fiefdom, defended borders, laid down ground rules for what science fiction was and what it wasn’t. In some cases, it might be argued they had to because no one yet knew exactly what it was, or because enthusiasts kept encountering new mutations. These rules in the cutthroat and still-stuffy world of freelance writing could affect content quite a bit—Theodore Sturgeon reportedly stopped writing for a time because of one editor’s rules.
Writers could make a living writing for the science fiction magazines in an era with no competition from television or video games—and they could especially make a living if they obeyed the dictates of their editor-kings. Even if editorial tastes are not sound or rational systems of thought, still, they shape taste and canon as much or more so than stable systems or concrete movements—in part because the influence of editors often exists out of the public eye and thus is less subject to open debate.
In a few other cases, magazines like Weird Tales successfully forged identities by championing hybrid or new modes of fiction, to the point of becoming synonymous with the type of content they provided to readers. Dashing men in dashing machines having dashing adventures were not as prevalent in such magazines, nor in this Golden Age era. It was more likely that the dashing man might have a dashing accident and be dashed up on some malign alien world or be faced with some dashing Terrible Choice based on being dashed on the rocks of misfortune.
In fact, much written in the mode of purely optimistic fiction has not aged well—in part because it simplified the complexities of a very complex world and the universe beyond. For example, with each decade what we know about what it takes to travel in space makes it more and more unlikely that we will make it out of our own solar system. Even one of the foremost supporters of terraforming, Kim Stanley Robinson, admitted that such travel is highly improbable in a 2014 interview.
The other reason this brand of science fiction has mostly historical value is because the twentieth century included two world wars along with countless significant regional conflicts, the creation of the atom bomb, the spread of various viruses, ecological disaster, and pogroms in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Against such a growing tally, certain kinds of “gee-whiz” science fiction seem hopelessly out of date; we nee
d escapism in our fiction because fiction is a form of play, but escapism becomes difficult to read when it renders invisible the march of history or becomes too disconnected from readers’ experience of science, technology, or world events. When you also throw in institutional racism in the United States, a subject thoroughly ignored by science fiction for a very long time, and other social issues dealt with skillfully by non-SF through the first five decades of the twentieth century, it perhaps makes sense that there is very little from the Golden Age of Science Fiction in this anthology. Our representative choices are ones where the predictive nature of the story or its sophistication stands up to the granularity of the present day.
It is also worth remembering that in the wider world of literature writers outside of science fiction were trying to grapple with the changing nature of reality and technological innovation. After World War I, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and others experimented with the nature of time and identity in ways that at times had a speculative feel to it. These were mainstream attempts to engage with science (physics) that only entered into the science fiction tradition as influence during the New Wave movement of the 1960s.
The Big Book of Science Fiction Page 2
