Dune was published in 1965. By 1967 it was already a cult book; a mention of the word “ecology” in a college dining hall or in the office of an underground newspaper would immediately bring the response, “Have you read Dune?” It is quite possible that the emergence of ecology as a popular idea in the mass media in the late sixties and early seventies can be traced to the impact of this one science fiction novel on youthful opinion-shapers. The word “ecology” is prominent in Dune. Even for the reader who’d heard the word before, Dune was an effective introduction to its powerful implications, and the book is still one of the only novels in any genre that makes constructive awareness of one’s place in his ecosystem a heroic quality. Most of the other works of fiction that deal with the theme at all are just ecodisaster novels.
In looking for the reasons for Dune’s popularity, we have to note that it is an unusually well-drawn and effective adventure story on a grand scale, and is at the same time something more: a book with immediate and intentional relevance, a moral allegory of our own time that can be grasped immediately as such, even, perhaps especially, by the very young.
Dune’s success over the years has been enormous and significant. It has sold millions of copies in numerous editions, and when Herbert completed the third book of the Dune series, Children of Dune, it became an authentic hardcover best-seller with 75,000 copies sold (not including book club sales). It was the first hardcover best-seller ever in the science fiction field, by a science fiction author, with a science fiction cover, with science fiction written all over it. Children of Dune proved to the publishing industry that science fiction could make it big without denying the name. And Dune itself continues to sell in the 1990s—it may be the best-selling SF book of all time. It would be pointless to deny the potential effects of such a book with such a record. Dune is a book that entertains and educates.
Star Trek is a phenomenon rather than a book, but in a discussion of how SF deals with big ideas and how those ideas begin to impinge more or less directly and immediately on our daily lives, Star Trek is as significant an example as Dune. Star Trek, however, does not deal with ideas in the tradition of written SF. Beginning as a TV show that was canceled in spite of a heroic letter-writing campaign by its committed fans, the Star Trek world refused to stay canceled. It has become apparent that Star Trek is about ideals and idealism in a science fiction setting, ideals which are not discussed but rather embodied and projected.
Star Trek fiction offers a kind of Reader’s Digest approach to science fiction—snappy, compact summaries of standard SF plots and clichés. The familiar flat characters and cardboard starship serve to make SF ideas accessible, and therefore exciting, to an audience familiar otherwise only with “sci-fi.” It’s an undemanding audience that reads very little prose that makes demands on it, basically style-deaf.
However, the execution of the Star Trek books and show does not detract from the essential emotional appeal of Star Trek. The starship Enterprise and its crew represent an ideal civilization, a utopian community in which all races and types of humanity live in harmony according to the highest (1960s American) ideals. The characters are all representative types, both professionally and racially, under the benevolent command of Captain Kirk. External problems constantly invade this perfect society; these problems are solved neither by force nor technological know-how but by emotional adjustment. Each story has this emotional dimension, in which the stability of the perfect society is challenged and one of the central characters must respond, with humane emotion as well as logic, to restore harmony.
Mister Spock, the half-human Vulcan who is racially incapable of showing emotion, is a pivotal character, a constant embodiment of the war between logic and feeling, himself a challenge to the emotional stability of the Enterprise. He is a symbol of repressed emotion (bad) who constantly implies emotional virtues (good) in his loyalty to Kirk and to the crew of the ship. Thus is the godless power of science tamed by future society.
The Enterprise is an idealized future of humanity, the heaven of many science fiction readers. Each episode of Star Trek starts and ends at home in utopia. The archetypal cry of the Enterprise crew after any adventure is, “Beam us home.” (For effective and ironic uses of this motif, note the song “Beam Me Up,” by Tom Rush, and also the story “Beam Us Home,” by James Tiptree, Jr.)
All of which is very comforting to the readers. It reinforces unsophisticated idealism, offers an optimistic picture of the future, and provides the reader an orderly world of romance and adventure to escape to when the “real” world is oppressive or boring.
The first Star Trek books filled twelve paperback volumes of short stories by James Blish, a veteran science fiction writer who applied none of his varied talents to the task but instead tried to reproduce the effect of the original TV episodes as accurately as possible. He turned each of the scripts for each of the episodes into a separate story. Altogether, the twelve Blish volumes retell the three seasons of the TV show. He also wrote a tie-in novel, Spock Must Die.
There followed several volumes of stories from the animated Star Trek Saturday morning TV series, then novels by various hands featuring the world and characters, billed by the publisher as “new Star Trek experiences.” And every year throughout the seventies more and more nonfiction and associational books appeared. With the advent of the 1980s, and Star Trek—The Motion Picture, a whole spate of new (now bestselling) books and films appeared, comics, toys, then a new TV series, then another, proving the continuing vitality of the Star Trek world, in which ideals are right up front and important.
Furthermore, as the seventies and eighties progressed, Gene Roddenberry (the creator of Star Trek) and the original stars of the series began to be interested in the U.S. space program, to speak in public in favor of NASA’s efforts. Nichelle Nichols (Lieutenant Uhura) actively toured and recruited for NASA. All this first showed its power in a huge letter-writing campaign among Star Trek fans, which succeeded in convincing President Gerald Ford to name the first actual space shuttle the Enterprise. Perhaps it is still too early to assess the impact of Star Trek on three decades of American children, but there are a whole lot of young supporters of space exploration in the U.S. today.
Only some SF people have participated in the Star Trek phenomenon, providing an essential rallying core at the very start in the sixties, but the feelings of the SF community as a whole toward Star Trek have generally stayed benign, especially since the Star Trek fans began to hold their own conventions in the early seventies and stop (for the most part) demanding time for Star Trek events at the regular round of SF conventions. Addiction to Star Trek has been known to lead to omnivorous reading of science fiction, even to becoming a well-known SF writer (Vonda N. McIntyre, Lisa Goldstein, and others), so the regular adult SF chronic suffers Star Trek as a slight embarrassment that probably does more good than harm.
However (until it became unfashionable in some circles in the recent past), like Trekkies and Trekkers, the whole science fiction field has always supported space travel in the real world. In the earliest days of science fiction, in the late twenties and early thirties, science fiction readers were often out on weekends building small rockets; were in correspondence with German experimenters such as Willy Ley; and were uniformly optimistic about space and space travel. The first place Wernher von Braun came when he reached New York was to a local science fiction convention. And the great names of modern science fiction, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Robert A. Heinlein, at one time or another appeared in public in support of the U.S. space program, and of course have promoted it through their fiction.
Space travel was the big idea of science fiction right up through the 1950s. It is not an overstatement to say that the whole SF field believed that the future of humanity lay, immediately or ultimately, in space. SF magazines such as Space Science Fiction Magazine, Rocket Stories, Space Stories, Wonders of the Spaceways, and a number of others evidence this focus. Writers and readers
believed in space travel. They wanted that future full of adventure among the planets and stars to be real.
In 1947, after his service in World War II, Robert A. Heinlein moved from Philadelphia to Hollywood. He was already the embodiment of the best in science fiction, already possibly the most popular SF writer in the world. And he moved to Hollywood with the announced intention of writing the first real American SF movie, about the first flight to the moon. He succeeded. Destination Moon, technologically accurate and based on Heinlein’s script, was the film that started the great cycle of science fiction films in England and America in the 1950s. At the same time, Heinlein was writing his famous novella “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” about D. D. Harriman, a visionary industrialist who causes the first rocket to the moon to be built. This was the glowing bright side of SF in the years when the other big idea of prewar SF that John W. Campbell had promoted—the power of the atom—had turned frightening. Nothing could stop Heinlein.
Robert A. Heinlein, the dean of science fiction writers, wrote over forty books, all science fiction (except for a few posthumously published books on travel, or politics, and a selection of letters called Grumbles From the Grave) with total sales of over thirty million copies. His position as the leading SF author has been firmly established since the early 1940s. Heinlein always gave us a darn good yarn (as he would say) peopled by attractive characters and their amusing, instructive conversations, and full of fascinating, smoothly tossed-off details of the future.
Heinlein’s books fall roughly into three categories: his later novels (1959 to 1986); his earlier works, including both novels and short stories (1939 to 1959); and his “juveniles,” twelve novels written between 1947 and 1959 expressly for the teenage market, many of which, however, were initially serialized in adult SF magazines. By the same token, Heinlein’s “adult” books are read by young people as enthusiastically and indiscriminately as his juveniles are read by adults. Young people who read SF read adult SF all the time.
Heinlein’s early novels and stories usually hypothesize a future situation—what would happen if the U.S. turned into a religious autocracy (“If This Goes On—”)?; what would happen if society discovered a group of people in our midst who have secretly used genetics to achieve an average life span twice as long as the rest of us enjoy (Methuselah’s Children)?; what would happen if the leader of a world government were replaced by an actor impersonating him (Double Star)?—and then develop this situation to its logical conclusion. His stories have charm and depth; they can be read and reread with constant pleasure.
The Heinlein juveniles differ from his early books mainly in having a young adult protagonist, usually but not always male. They are less self-conscious than the adult books about offering instruction, mostly in astronomy and survival. Heinlein often includes as a major character a lovable and intriguing alien who becomes pals with the protagonist—this same prototype shows up in several of his later works as an intelligent computer. The books are upbeat in tone; the protagonists have interesting rough times, go through a maturing process, and end up with bright futures.
One thing the juveniles and much of Heinlein’s early work have in common is a real enthusiasm for space travel, a sense of wonder about exploring the solar system and eventually leaping into interstellar space, and a reverence for scientifically and technically accurate detail about space travel. Most of them are still readable and in print today.
Precisely at that moment in the late 1950s when space travel became a reality, shocking most of the world, Heinlein’s interests and his fiction turned in other directions. In 1961 he published Stranger in a Strange Land, his most famous and controversial novel, a full-scale satire on the taboos of Western civilization. If H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling are the paradigms of early Heinlein, then perhaps George Bernard Shaw—garrulous, long-winded, brilliant, and satirical, especially the Shaw of Back to Methuselah—is the paradigm of Heinlein in Stranger and after. For Stranger is for the most part a series of dialogues in a dramatic SF setting through which ideas are discussed: set pieces on art, cannibalism, sex, religion, and a myriad other topics, attacking cultural prejudice with logic. (Logic always wins.) Stranger is principally about religion, but within its framework Heinlein creates perhaps the most universal of all SF novels about ideas.
Stranger was unquestionably the most popular SF novel of the 1960s, selling millions of copies and becoming, for good or bad, the great cult novel of the hippie movement. Heinlein’s logical attack on American culture and the social shams that limit personal freedom was consistent and deadly, just exactly what a generation of youngsters disillusioned by the fall of Kennedy’s Camelot, the rise of the war in Southeast Asia, and the failure of peaceful demonstrations against racism needed to express their own frustration and then point out paths elsewhere. Stranger became a sacred text. A number of people even attempted to put the religion of Stranger into practice, including Charles Manson, whose selective interpretation of the practices of Valentine Michael Smith, one of the central characters, permitted Manson to “discorporate” evildoers in the name of right and justice. Poor Heinlein. Poor us.
Heinlein’s examination of social, economic, political, and cultural ideas continued throughout his later works, his method remained the same, and his sales never flagged until the present decade. But with Stranger he turned away from the wonders of science and technology as a wellspring of ideas, the kinds of ideas for which SF is known and by which it is characterized in the public mind.
The big visionary technological idea has been the hallmark of Arthur C. Clarke’s great career in SF. His first big success was The Exploration of Space, a nonfiction best-seller in 1952. But it was the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 that finally catapulted him into wider public recognition, a success attributable to the sense of wonder the film projects through its loving attention to technological detail and its awesome, mystical thematic content.
Arthur C. Clarke is an example of the excellent science fiction writer who probably couldn’t succeed in any field of writing other than SF or popular science. His great assets are his knowledge of and enthusiasm for the details of astronomy, astrophysics, and oceanography, and his prodigious visual imagination when applied to the experiences humans may have in their exploration of space and the ocean depths. Clarke’s other talents—his ability to plot (which is good) and to characterize (rather poor)—don’t add up to much when you take away his enthusiasm for describing science fictional environments. His popularity in SF stems from the fact that, for all his interest in science (indeed, as a result of that interest), he is a romantic and on occasion a mystic, and even more than Heinlein he succeeds in making space travel an authentically romantic experience.
“The Sentinel,” a Clarke story written in 1951 that was the inspiration for 2001, gives us a portrait of a romantic scientist (he likes to look at moonscapes and climb lunar mountains) who has a rational, tangible, yet mystical experience. He discovers a pyramid surrounded by a force field on a mountainside in an unexplored part of the moon—and realizes that Someone Has Been There Already.
In “The Sentinel,” Clarke appeals to us on two levels, one straightforward, the other transcendental. On the straightforward level, SF readers who have an appetite for space stuff enjoy the description of everyday life on the moon. The narrator is part of an expedition exploring the Mare Crisium:
As I stood by the frying-pan, waiting, like any terrestrial housewife, for the sausages to brown, I let my gaze wander idly over the mountain wall which covered the whole of the southern horizon, marching out of sight to the east and west below the curve of the Moon. They seemed only a mile or two from the tractor, but I knew that the nearest was twenty miles away. On the Moon, of course, there is no loss of detail with distance—none of that almost imperceptible haziness which softens and sometimes transfigures all far-off things on Earth.
The simple wonder of looking out of the window and seeing the mountains of the Moon in all their splendor i
s pleasurable and satisfying, given the quality of Clarke’s descriptive prose (he writes with real affection) and given that such description is relevant to an effectively plotted story. But in the end of the story, Clarke opens out with a transcendent sweep into something far more exciting than moon scenery; he suggests that the pyramid is a device for sending signals, planted in the knowledge that humanity would discover it if and when they evolved and matured enough to travel into space. And that humanity will try to take it apart to see how it works and in doing so, destroy it—so the pyramid will stop sending out signals. Which will itself be the signal to the older race that it is time to come see what’s happening on Earth.
The story ends with the narrator looking up at the sky: “I do not think we will have to wait for long.” Science at its boldest is not mere rationality but the means to step into the larger Unknown. Clarke uses this awareness to write stories that send cosmic chills down our spines.
This is the kind of idea for which science fiction is famous, plots that can be summarized and still transmit the essential chill—what a fantastic idea—big, wonderful, mind-stretching.
These are ideas from the wellsprings of science and technology made flesh and hooked into the rest of existence to give them thematic reverberations. This is what science fiction does. And the ideas intersect with the real, mundane world through whatever thematic material the writer can provide to sound great bells.
3
WORSHIPPING AT THE CHURCH OF WONDER
THE QUESTION of science fiction and religion has been raised frequently since the 1950s. Before that there was no question, since it had been settled in the late nineteenth century that science and religion were unalterably opposed. And the writers of science fiction, beginning at the time of H. G. Wells, had not dealt with the subject except, infrequently, to portray religious characters as “the opposition.” A whole body of clichés (e.g., the repressive religious dictatorship, antiscientific and antihumanistic, found in Heinlein’s Future History series or in Fritz Leiber’s Gather, Darkness) dominated American SF for decades. The other side of the coin, the idea of a new “scientific religion,” occurs in the field infrequently, in fringe-area works such as M. P. Shiel’s The Last Miracle and L. Ron Hubbard’s controversial Dianetics (a discipline now know as Scientology). Certainly the works of David Lindsay (especially A Voyage to Arcturus) and later C. S. Lewis are intimately involved with religious questions, but these are generally isolated examples far from the main body and traditions of popular science fiction prior to the mid-1950s.
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