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

by David G. Hartwell

  It is a source of both amusement and frustration to SF people that public consciousness of science fiction has almost never penetrated beyond the first decade of the field’s development. Sure, Star Wars is wonderful, but in precisely the same way and at the same level of consciousness and sophistication that SF from the late twenties and early thirties was: fast, almost plotless stories of zipping through the ether in spaceships, meeting aliens, using futuristic devices, and fighting the bad guys (and winning).

  By now it should be obvious that we are dealing not with a limited thing but with a segment of reality. More than an alternate literary form or an alternate life-style, science fiction informs the lives of thousands and affects the lives of millions, is a fact of life more intimate than inflation whose influence is so all-pervasive that it is traceable daily in every home, through the artifacts and ideas that represent all possible futures and all possible change.

  2

  “I HAVE A COSMIC MIND. NOW WHAT DO I DO?”

  —Jack Speer

  THE SCIENCE fiction world orbits around the fictions, the stories, and the ideas in them, and the writers who produce the works. What is in science fiction that binds readers to it? Much of my continuing examination here and in the following chapters will be devoted to the attractions SF exerts on readers and writers and how these attractions distinguish SF from other varieties of contemporary literature.

  Science fiction has flowered and prospered in our troubled and fast-evolving century in part because it alone among contemporary prose literatures consistently deals with the big questions: What are we here for? Where are we going? How much worse can things get? Modern readers, especially the young, no longer believe in or even necessarily desire a stable universe. They are anxious about the present. And as a kind of defense, they have learned to find pleasure in studying the big picture: the long view of human history and human affairs apparent in the SF enterprise. There is a fascination in kicking around ideas when you know that ideas can and will alter objective reality.

  ABSTRACT IDEAS are made flesh through science fiction. Except for all these crazy stories about space and time, radically distanced from the mundane, the literature of ideas is pretty much moribund in the latter half of this century. Popular magazine articles, scholarly essays, speculative nonfiction such as all those Bermuda Triangle books, flying saucer stuff, is mostly degraded and disenchanting. Hardly enough, as they say, to keep the mind alive—and often badly written to boot. Even with magazines from Omni to Wired providing moments of illumination, about the only writing other than science fiction in the last two decades in which you can find complex and wonderful speculation is in certain scientific and technical journals, with their quarks and quasars, black holes and dark twin stars. But the context of these journals makes them inaccessible to all but a few specialists (a few of whom—eureka!—are science fiction writers, friends of science fiction writers, or SF fans).

  And that’s not all. Numerous science fiction writers are omnivorous readers, their knowledge an enormous kitchen sink of ideas and speculations from ten or a hundred different disciplines. A new theory in any field (history, economics, biology, home ecology, gestalt psychology) gets transformed very quickly by someone, somewhere, into a science fiction story.

  It all started with Poe and Verne, who developed an aesthetic of using knowledge, especially contemporary scientific knowledge, as a literary device to achieve or increase verisimilitude. Verne, especially, was interested not only in theory but also in speculative technology, so he read widely in natural science journals and presented wonderful devices, such as high-tech balloons, submarines, and airplanes, which he found in those journals. James Blish was fascinated by Arnold Toynbee’s cyclical theory of history, so he wrote his great four-volume series, Cities in Flight, to demonstrate his version of how this theory would operate in a galaxywide civilization over enormous time spans. Robert A. Heinlein combined a whole complex of economic, political, semantic, and technological ideas into a huge chart, a history of the future, which he used in the early 1940s to write the stories and novels in his masterful Future History series. A. E. Van Vogt developed a theory of science fiction writing in the early forties which dictated that a story or novel should be written in approximately 700-word blocks, with a new speculative idea introduced in every block (a dizzying aesthetic that no one but Van Vogt ever practiced). And if a writer hasn’t got any firsthand ideas, then secondhand ideas are perfectly acceptable, as long as she or he handles them in a new and exciting manner.

  Of course science fiction is not all big ideas, and some of the best SF is really about very old ideas (age-old religious controversies, the whole range of the histories of philosophy and society). The science fictional histories of the future are rife with monarchies, feudal estates writ large, democracies, oppressive dictatorships—not generally very innovative politically. But the best SF always deals with ideas, as opposed to fantasy, which almost always deals with morality, ethics, and the inner life of characters (though mostly through symbol and metaphor). This is not to say that SF is either amoral or unconcerned with character—just that characteristically it is primarily concerned with ideas.

  What happens when a science fiction writer gets excited by a big idea? Well, when any idea begins to irritate the consciousness, you begin to play with it, turn it every which way, see if the reverse is true (or interesting), begin to feel the onset of thematic insight, a flash of meaning or possible meanings. James E. Gunn tells the anecdote about reading an encyclopedia article on pleasure, which ended with the stylish grace line “but the real science of pleasure has not yet been invented.” He was stopped in his tracks and immediately began to think about a possible science of pleasure, what it would entail, and then wrote his novel The Joy Makers, about a future world ruled by the science of hedonics. Robert A. Heinlein had a cat who went uncomfortably from door to door in the house one foul winter day. When his wife remarked that the cat was looking for the door into summer, Heinlein knew he had the kernel of a science fiction story—and a dynamite title.

  Ideas are everywhere, but there are no big ideas unless they grow in the mind of the writer into something that allows the world to change utterly, to change in a manner that has the broadest thematic implications. What if humanity could actually attain the eternal frontiers of space and time, if whole universes of alternate possibilities really existed, if time began to run backward, if part or all of humanity were immortal, if humans could attain through evolution or technology a whole spectrum of mental powers, if there were truly alien intelligences, if any of a thousand speculations could be posited as true? What kind of exciting, frightening, wonderful, depressing times might human characters be living through if any of these big things happened; how, precisely, might they happen; and how would things work?

  Ursula K. Le Guin addresses this point in her trim little essay “On Theme” (in Those Who Can, ed. Robin Scott Wilson, New York: Signet, 1973, pp. 204–205):

  Every now and then one can say of a specific short story that it did begin with a single, specific idea, with a single, specific source. This is the case with “Nine Lives.”

  I had been reading The Biological Time Bomb by Gordon Rattray Taylor, a splendid book for biological ignoramuses, and had been intrigued by his chapter on the cloning process. I knew a little about cloning … but so little that I had not got past carrots, where it all started, to speculate about the notion of duplicating entire higher organisms, such as frogs, donkeys, or people. I did not have to read between the lines. Rattray Taylor did it for me. He pointed out that some biologists have been contemplating these more ambitious possibilities quite seriously (why don’t people ever ask biologists where they get their ideas from?) In thinking about this possibility, I found it alarming. In wondering why I found it alarming, I began to see that the duplication of anything complex enough to have personality would involve the whole issue of what personality is—the question of individuality, of identity, of selfhood. Now
that question is a hammer that rings the great bells of Love and Death.…

  SF writers do not merely play with scientific or other ideas, merely speculate or extrapolate; I think—if they’re doing their job—they get very involved with them. They take them personally, which is precisely what we ordinarily think scientists must forbid themselves to do. They try to hook them in with the rest of existence.

  And that is a distillation of what happens when things go well. Of course a high percentage of the time, the SF writer is off base, sometimes even way out in left field, either in regard to scientific probabilities or to human nature and thematic implications—and sometimes the obvious purpose is merely to provide riproaring adventure against a science fictional background. Still, the distance between mundane reality and the reality of the given SF story gives a size and scope to SF—authentic or illusory as the case may be—that’s big, wonderful, mind-stretching. You can find things you never thought of, or thought possible, or thought of in that way, in every SF story.

  In Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (New York: Dell, 1965, p. 27), Eliot Rosewater, an inveterate reader of SF, drunkenly addresses the Milford SF writers conference—an actual event, which Vonnegut once attended:

  I love you sons of bitches.… You’re all I read anymore.… You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstandings, mistakes, accidents and catastrophes do to us. You’re the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distances without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell.

  Prophets without honor, that’s how Rosewater sees the SF writing community of nearly forty years ago. And Eliot, we can see, lives in the SF field we have been talking about, is part of the family, especially since he lives in a real world that he cannot communicate to the other inhabitants of mundane reality, a world of big ideas. Eliot with all his heart wants to act out some of those big ideas and to the extent that he does, he gets himself into a heap of trouble.

  Someday some good literary scholar will do an illuminating comparison between Eliot and Jack Isidore, of Seville, California, the central character of Philip K. Dick’s Confessions of a Crap Artist. Jack is a creep and a weirdo but is essentially kind and humane, caught in the grip of one big idea after another—he’s a science fiction fan, among other pursuits. He’s never quite able to tell the good ideas from the bad, having none of what we usually call common sense, until he’s lived with them for a while. Meanwhile, all the supposedly saner people around him, who consider him a harmless nut, boring and bothersome, are being cruel to one another, acting out selfish and petty fantasies and believing themselves superior to Jack. Vonnegut and Dick are making similar points about human values in a way that SF readers are particularly attuned to appreciate.

  Eliot Rosewater and Jack Isidore, however, have nothing on Claude Degler, superfan and founder of the Cosmic Circle. Degler attended the Denver Worldcon as a young fan. His travels around the SF family make fascinating reading; they are chronicled in Harry Warner Jr.’s history of the doings of early SF enthusiasts up to about 1950, All Our Yesterdays (Chicago: Advent, 1969). First Degler invented out of his fevered desires a hotbed of SF fan activity, clubs full of local SF enthusiasts in and around the town of New Castle, Indiana. Then, in 1943, the Cosmic Circle went nationwide, “so that cosmic fandom will actually be some sort of power or influence in the postwar world of the near future.” The members of the Cosmic Circle began to deluge SF fans everywhere with material on the group, all, according to Warner, “containing symptoms of deriving from the same mind, typewriter and mimeograph” (p. 189):

  Declaration of existence: of a new race or group of cosmic-thinking people, a new way of life, a cosmology of all things. Cosmen, the cosmic men, will appear. We believe that we are actual mutations of the species.

  Such was the opening manifesto of the Cosmic Circle Fans of the era were either horrified or just amused, depending on their paranoia quotient. Jack Speer, a well-known fan at the time, arranged through friends to send Degler a series of postcards from around the country, all inscribed, “I have a Cosmic Mind. Now what do I do?”

  Degler’s enthusiasm created a microcosmic scandal, a bizarrely energetic effort to unite the fan world into an elitist movement. What Degler had done was to assemble all the half-serious, juvenile, and utopian self-aggrandizing notions held by differing groups within the SF family, put them together, and assert their literal truth. The Cosmic Circle was in essence a call for support for all these assertions so that the SF family could be important in the real world of the future. But everyone with any common sense in the SF world knew that most of this stuff just wasn’t true.

  Claude Degler was verifiably seen on the West Coast in 1950—he borrowed fifty cents from a fan in San Francisco for transportation—and in the 1980s he appeared at a small convention in the Midwest, where Wilson Tucker saw him—another verified sighting. The net effect of Degler on the SF field was, in the end, to create a historic controversy that only confirmed the essential premises of “agreement to disagree,” a basis of unity in the SF world. And a reaction in fandom against taking SF too seriously (see SERCON and FIJAGH, page 272–73). Fans and writers may propose any kind of idea, big or small, for consideration and discussion (for which read disagreement). But the idea must be distanced in some way from the mundane world so that it can be thought about and discussed—but not necessarily acted upon. Going out and trying to put big ideas into practice, like Jack Isidore or Claude Degler or Eliot Rosewater did, can get you crucified, after all.

  But the big ideas of science fiction do interact with the real world, though not usually in a direct cause-and-effect manner. Let us consider the most popular SF of the last couple of decades.

  Dune, by Frank Herbert, is one of the two most popular science fiction novels of the last thirty-five years; the other is Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Each has sold in the millions of copies, beggaring the sales of any individual title of the last two decades. Dune is an epic romance about ecological/political/economic struggles in a galactic empire in the far future. Its hero, Paul Atreides (the name invokes a whole structure of Greek tragedy), is considerably larger than life, the culmination of a thousand years of secret genetic manipulation and the product of the toughest formal and informal training any young prince ever went through. Happily for the effectiveness of the novel, we go through this training and experience with the hero. The tone of the book is instructive, which is flattering, not annoying, since who among us doesn’t want to learn how to be Prince of the Universe?

  The strengths of the book are setting, plot, characterization, and suspenseful writing (in the clear, precise, naturalistic mode). The characterization is mainly in terms of good and evil, strength and weakness, and is completely effective in spite of a lack of full rounding and depth. The plot is complex but not episodic; everything that happens is necessary to the story and follows logically from the original premise: the exile of the Atreides family to the desert planet Dune. The setting of Dune is its special achievement: The story depends completely on the interaction of the hero with the setting, the ecosystem of Dune.

  Briefly, the Atreides family is locked in a deadly power feud with the Harkonnen family, and shortly after Paul and his parents arrive on Dune, the Baron Harkonnen succeeds in having Paul’s father, Duke Leto, murdered. Paul and his mother escape into the desert that covers most of the surface of the planet; there they meet the Fremen, the tough, nomadic natives of Dune. Here the importance of the setting begins to be emphasized: The Fremen have so little water that they wear suits that conserve every milliliter of sweat, urine, and exhaled vapor; when a person dies, they drain the water from him. The toughness of their environment has made the Fremen geniuses
at survival and forced them to become a very tight, sometimes brutally efficient, tribal unit. Fremen training and consciousness give Paul the edge he needs to survive and triumph in the cosmopolitical struggles ahead.

  On Dune the key factor in both economics and ecology is the addictive spice, melange. This is the planet’s greatest natural resource for interplanetary trade (Herbert foresaw in Dune the Arab role in our 1970s energy crisis—after all, his first novel, Under Pressure, written a decade before Dune, was about future oil thievery among nations). The spice also turns out to play a critical part in the complex ecological process that keeps Dune from running out of water altogether. And its hallucinogenic properties arouse Paul’s latent prescience, giving him mystic moments of painful knowledge of the future. And more.

  All these elements of the story merge perfectly into climactic resonance and resolution, which is not so much the triumphant battle against the Harkonnens as the implied triumph-to-come from the Fremen effort to turn their desert planet into a paradise—a triumph not of technology but of ecological planning and awareness.