by Isaac Asimov
And yet this is highly tenuous; and while I accept the line of reasoning thoroughly (having, as far as I know, made it up), I can see that others might dismiss it as special pleading by someone who doesn’t want the stuff he writes to be dismissed as just…stuff.
Well, then, has science fiction already influenced the world? Has anything that science fiction writers have written so influenced real scientists, or engineers, or politicians, or industrialists as to introduce important changes?
What about the case of space flight, of trips to the Moon?
This has been a staple of imaginative literature since Roman times; and both Jules Verne and H. G. Wells wrote highly popular stories about trips to the Moon in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Certainly, those scientists and engineers who began to deal with rocketry realistically had read science fiction; and there is no question that men such as Robert Goddard and Werner von Braun had been exposed to such things.
This is not to say that science fiction taught them any rocketry. As a matter of fact, Wells used an anti-gravity device to get to the Moon, and Verne used a gigantic gun, and both of these devices can be dismissed out of hand as ways of reaching the Moon.
Nevertheless, they stirred the imagination, as did all the other science fiction writers who flooded into the field as the twentieth century wore on, and who began to write material in large masses (if not always in high quality). All of this prepared the minds of more and more people for the notion of such trips.
It followed that when rockets were developed as war weapons during World War II, there were not lacking engineers who saw them as devices for scientific exploration, for orbital flights, for trips to the Moon and beyond. And all this would not be laughed out of court by the general public, all the way down to the rock-bottom of the average Congressman—because science fiction had paved the way.
Even this may not seem enough—too general—too broad.
How about specific influence? How about something a specific writer has done that has influenced a specific person in such a way that the world has been changed?
That has been done, too. Consider the Hungarian physicist, Leo Szilard, who—in the middle 1930s—began thinking of the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction that might produce a nuclear bomb, who recognized that his thought had become a very real possibility when uranium fission was discovered in 1939, who moved heaven and earth to persuade Allied scientists to censor themselves voluntarily in order to keep information from reaching the Nazi enemy, who persuaded Einstein to persuade President Roosevelt to initiate a vast project for developing a nuclear bomb.
We know how that changed the world (whether for better or for worse is beside the point right now, but I certainly would not have wanted Hitler to have gotten the first nuclear bomb in the early 1940s), so we can say that Leo Szilard changed it.
And how did Szilard come to have his original idea? According to Szilard himself, that idea came to him because he read a story by H. G. Wells (originally published in 1902) in which an “atomic bomb”—the phrase H. G. Wells himself used—had been featured.
Here’s another case. At the present moment, industrial robots are appearing on the assembly line with increasing frequency. In Japan, whole factories are being roboticized. What’s more, the robots themselves are being made more versatile, more capable, and more “intelligent” very rapidly. It isn’t far-fetched to say that in a couple of decades this roboticization will be seen to have changed the face of society permanently (assuming that civilization continues to survive).
Is there anyone we can credit for this? It is difficult to place that credit on a single pair of shoulders, but perhaps the pair most likely to deserve it belongs to a man named Joseph F. Engelberger, who is the president of Unimation, which manufactures one-third of all the robots in use and has installed more of them than anybody else.
Engelberger founded his company in the late 1950s, and how do you suppose he came to found it?
Some years before, according to his own account, when he was still a college undergraduate, he became enthusiastic about the possibility of robots when he read I, Robot by Isaac Asimov.
I assure you that when I was writing my positronic robot stories back in the 1940s, my intentions were clear and simple. I just wanted to write some stories, sell them to a magazine, make a little money to pay my college tuition, and see my name in print. If I had been writing anything but science fiction, that’s all that would have happened.
But I was writing science fiction—so I’m now changing the world.
Women and Science Fiction
My early science fiction stories had no women in them for the most part. There were two reasons for this, one social, one personal. The social reason first.
Prior to public recognition in the United States that babies are not brought by the stork, there was simply no sex in the science fiction magazines. This was not a matter of taste, it was a matter of custom that had the force of law. In most places, non-recognition of the existence of sex was treated as though it was the law, and for all I know, maybe it was indeed local law. In any case, words or actions that could bring a blush to the leathery cheek of the local censor were strictly out.
But if there’s no sex, what do you do with female characters? They can’t have passions and feelings. They can’t participate on equal terms with male characters because that would introduce too many complications where some sort of sex might creep in. The best thing to do was to keep them around in the background, allowing them to scream in terror, to be caught and then rescued, and, at the end, to smile prettily at the hero. (It can be done safely then because THE END is the universal rescue.)
Yet it must be admitted that science fiction magazines showed no guts whatsoever in fighting this situation. That brings us to the personal reason. In the 1930s and 1940s, the readership of the science fiction magazines was heavily (almost exclusively, in fact) masculine. What’s more it was young-and-intellectual masculine. The stereotypical science fiction reader was a skinny kid with glasses and acne, introverted and scapegoated by the tough kids who surrounded him and were rightly suspicious of anyone who knew how to read.
It stands to reason these youngsters knew nothing about girls. By and large, I imagine they didn’t dare approach them, and if they did, were rejected by them scornfully, and if they weren’t, didn’t know what to do next. So why on Earth should they want this strange sub-species in the stories they read? They had not yet gotten out of the “I hate (translation: “I’m scared of”) girls” stage.
This is an exaggeration, perhaps, and no doubt there were a number of tough young men and girl-chasing young men who read science fiction, but by and large, I suspect it was the stereotypical “skinny intellectual” who wrote letters to the magazines and denounced any intrusion of femininity. I know. I wrote such letters myself. And in the days when I was reading and rating every science fiction story written, I routinely deducted many points for any intrusion of romance, however sanitized it might be.
At the time I wrote and sold my first few stories, I had not yet had a date with a young woman. I knew nothing about them except what I could guess by surreptitious glances from a distance. Naturally, there were no women in my stories.
(I once received a letter from a woman who denounced me for this lack. Humbly, I wrote back to explain the reason, stating that I was, very literally, an innocent as far as women were concerned at the beginning of my writing career. She had a good answer for that, too. She wrote back in letters of flame, “That’s no excuse!”)
But times change!
For one thing, society changed. The breath of liberty brought on by all the talk about it during World War II weakened the censor, who retreated, muttering sourly under his breath. The coming of the pill heralded the liberation of women from unwanted pregnancy, and marked the weakening of the double standard.
For another, people will grow up. Even I didn’t remain innocent. I actually went out on a d
ate on my twentieth birthday. I met a particular woman two years later, fell in love at first sight, and all trace of fear suddenly left me. I was married five months later and you’d be surprised how I changed! I have in my proud possession a plaque handed me by a science fiction convention. On the brass plate is inscribed that quality of mine that had earned me the plaque. It reads “Lovable Lecher.”
And yet science fiction lagged a bit, I think. Old habits didn’t change easily. My own stories, for instance, remained free of sex except where it was an integral part of the development and then only to that extent, and still so remain. I have gotten rid of my fear (witness my five volumes of naughty limericks), but not of my sense of decorum.
What, then, really brought on the change and brought science fiction more nearly into the mainstream of contemporary literature?
In my opinion, it was not chiefly social evolution; it was not the daring new writers; not the Russes and LeGuins.
It was the coming of women into the science fiction readership!
If science fiction readers had remained almost entirely masculine—even had the acne cleared up and the youth withered—I think science fiction would have remained male chauvinist in the crudest possible way.
Nowadays, I honestly think that at least a third, and possibly nearly half the science fiction readers are women. When that is so, and when it is recognized that women are at least as articulate as men and (these days) quite ready to denounce male chauvinism and to demand treatment as human beings, it becomes impossible to continue villainy.
Even I have to bow to the breath of decency. In my new novel, Foundation’s Edge, of my seven central characters, four are women—all different, all perfectly able to take care of themselves, and all formidable. (For that matter, I introduced Susan Calvin in 1940, and she strode through a man’s world, asking no quarter, and certainly giving none. I just thought I’d mention that.)
And what brought in the women readers? I suppose there are a large number of reasons, but I have one that I favor. It’s Mr. Spock’s ears.
There is no question in my mind that the first example of decent science fiction that gained a mass following was the television show Star Trek, nearly twenty years ago. For a wonder, it attracted as many women as men. I don’t suppose there is room to doubt that what chiefly served to attract those women was the unflappable Mr. Spock. And for some reason I won’t pretend to guess at, they were intrigued by his ears.
Very few of the “Trekkies” leaked over into print science fiction (or all the magazines would have grown rich), but a minor percentage did and that was enough to feminize the readership of the science fiction magazines. And I think that was all to the good, too.
With so many women thumbing the magazines, women writers were naturally more welcome and their viewpoints greeted with greater reader sympathy—and women editors made more sense, too.
Don’t get me wrong. There were women writers even in the early days of magazine science fiction, and women editors, too. When I was young, some of my favorite stories were by A. R. Long and by Leslie F. Stone. I didn’t know they were women, but they were. In addition, Mary Gnaedinger, Bea Mahaffey, and Cele Goldsmith were excellent editors. I never met Ms. Gnaedinger, but I did meet Bea and Cele and I hereby testify that in addition to lots of brains, character, and personality, they each happened to be beautiful. (Irrelevant, I know, but I thought I would mention it.)
Consequently, when George Scithers left us, I found it delightful that Kathleen Moloney agreed to be the new editor. It never occurred to me for an instant that a woman couldn’t handle the job just because she was a woman and, as a matter of fact, Kathleen took to it with a kind of rabid delight. She introduced interesting changes and stamped her personality on the magazine.
But then, there came along the all-too-frequent villain in such cases, the offer-one-can’t-refuse. It may have been Kathleen’s performance here that aroused interest in other publishing houses and—well, one can’t turn down a chance to advance in one’s chosen profession, so we lost Kathleen.
And yet all is not lost, either. I have on numerous occasions mentioned the charming Shawna McCarthy, who is as sharp as a scalpel, and who is universally liked for the excellent reason that she is universally likable. I like her.
Shawna served faithfully as right-hand person first to George, and then to Kathleen. In the process, she learned every facet of the editing business and developed (thank goodness) the ambition to hold the top position.
So when Kathleen left, I said, “It has to be Shawna” and everyone agreed with me, especially Shawna.
And here she is. Readers—female and male—I give you Shawna!
Religion and Science Fiction
In the November 1983 issue of Asimov’s, the cover story was “The Gospel According to Gamaliel Crucis,” by that excellent writer, Michael Bishop. It dealt with a sensitive subject—the coming of a savior, or, in effect, the second coming of Christ.
What makes it even more effective as a science fiction story is that the savior is an extraterrestrial, and not a particularly attractive one to our human eyes since she (!) is a giant mantis. This is entirely legitimate, it seems to me, since if there is other life in the universe, especially intelligent life, one would expect that a truly universal God would be as concerned for them as for us, and would totally disregard physical shape since it is only the “soul,” that inner intellectual and moral identity, that counts.
What is more, Bishop decided to make the story more powerful by casting it into a biblical shape, dividing it into chapters and verses and making use of a touch of suitable biblical wording.
The result was a tour de force which we obviously considered quite successful, or we would not have published it. Still we were prepared for the fact that some readers might feel uneasy with, or even offended by, the subject matter and/or style.
One letter was quite angry, indeed. The writer was “strongly displeased” and considered it “a burlesque of the scriptures” and, finding no other value to the story, considered it to have been written and published only for the sake of the burlesque.
This can be argued with, of course, but never entirely settled. If a reader sees in it only burlesque, he or she can scarcely be argued out of it. There will always be differences of opinion, often based upon emotion rather than reason, with regard to the value of any work of art.
But there is something more general here. There is the matter of how science fiction ought to deal with religion, especially our religion. (Few people worry very much about how some other religion is handled, since only our own is the true one.)
No one wants to offend people unnecessarily, and religion is a touchy subject, as we all know. In that case, might it not be best simply to avoid religious angles altogether in writing science fiction? As our angry correspondent says, “I suggest…that offending any substantial religious group is not the way to win friends or sell magazines.”
Yes, we know that, and since we do want to win friends and sell magazines, we would not knowingly go out of our way to embarrass and humiliate even non-substantial groups of our readers just for the fun of it.
But we are also editing a serious science fiction magazine that, we earnestly hope, includes stories of literary value, and it is the very essence of literature that it consider the great ideas and concerns of human history. Surely that complex of ideas that goes under the head of “religion” is one of the most central and essential, and it would be rather ashame to have it declared out of bounds. In fact, for a magazine to self-censor itself out of discussing religion would be to bow to those forces that don’t really believe in our constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech and press. If we were to do so, we would be, in a very deep sense, un-American.
Besides, if we were to try to avoid this very touchy subject where do we stop? I tend to ignore religion in my own stories altogether, except when I absolutely have to have it. Well, I absolutely had to have it in some of my early Foundation stories and
in “Nightfall,” and so I made use of it. And, whenever I bring in a religious motif, that religion is bound to seem vaguely Christian because that is the only religion I know anything about, even though it is not mine. An unsympathetic reader might think I am “burlesquing” Christianity, but I am not.
Then, too, it is impossible to write science fiction and really ignore religion. What if we find intelligent beings on other worlds. Do they have a religion? Is our God universal, and is he/she/it their God as well? What do we do about it? What do they do about it?
This point is almost never taken up but, since it would certainly arise if such beings were discovered in actual fact, science fiction loses touch with reality in taking the easy way out and pretending religion doesn’t exist.
Or, consider time-travel. I don’t know how many stories have been written about people going back in time to keep Lincoln from being assassinated, but how about people going back in time to keep Jesus from being crucified? Surely that greater feat would occur to someone in actual fact, if time-travel were possible.
Think of the changes that could be rung on such a theme. If Jesus were rescued while on his way to the site of crucifixion, and if the rescue were made by modern technology—a helicopter or something more advanced, while the Roman soldiers were held off by rifle-fire at the very least—would it not seem to the people of the time that supernatural forces were rescuing Jesus? Would it not seem that angels were coming to the aid of a true savior? Would it not establish Christianity as the true religion at once?
Or would it? Clearly, it was God’s divine purpose (assuming the God of the Bible exists) to have the crucifixion take place in order that Jesus serve as a divine atonement for Adam’s sin. Would the subversion of this plan be allowed to take place?
It’s a nice dilemma, and it is within the province of legitimate science fiction. Yet who has ever considered writing such a story, even though it would give us a chance to deal with what many consider the central event of history? The story would be an extremely difficult one to write, and I wouldn’t feel up to it myself, but I think it is primarily self-censorship that keeps it from being written.