This is “Inconstant Moon”: A lover stands with his beloved on a balcony looking up at the moon as lovers do. The moon grows brighter and brighter as he watches, and his present joy turns to awe and fear as he reasons it out, for now it casts a glow nearly as bright as full daylight and he knows that a transcendent catastrophe is occurring (the other side of the Earth is being burned to a crisp), the sun increasing its brightness many times over, and that humanity may have only hours to live. As the world turns toward dawn, the man and his girlfriend spend their brief hours in a night of frantic romance as tension mounts—until, with dawn approaching, the moon fades back to normal. A solar flare, not a nova! Our lovers will have a fighting chance to survive, though the daylight side of the Earth must surely have been destroyed. They begin to plan for the future.
The nightmare vision of that uncanny moon is as powerful an image as was ever projected by a work of science fiction. You must know something of high school astronomy to get the idea immediately, but any chronic or omnivore of science fiction is so charged by that image that he may reimagine it at will without rereading the entire story and still get the thrill of wonder.
This is a crucial point in our discussion of what SF is all about. You must understand that a constant desire for arousal, for that electric input that charges the “wonder sense,” is what really hooks people on science fiction and makes omnivores into chronics. The science fiction person would rather read a story that alerts and strokes this sense than anything else. Anything. He would rather read (or reread, after a time) “Inconstant Moon” than any work of fiction, no matter how perceptive and carefully written, polished and artful, that does not arouse wonder.
Chronics are patient and determined. They spend years reading SF regularly and frequently, supporting specialized magazines and large publishing programs, seeking and constantly finding stories that ignite wonder.
It looks strange to an outsider, but perhaps you should think of it this way: A chronic reading science fiction is more like one of the faithful attending a church service than an experienced critic responding to a work of art. The act of reading SF continually provides access to wonder, just as the church service provides access to worship.
But an outsider doesn’t gain access easily. Walk into the temple of a religion other than yours and you feel discomfort and, perhaps, disorientation. Or, better, consider the situation of a child in the cathedral of her parents’ faith—she must spend years of training in the symbology of the religion before she has access to the awe and wonder of it. Until then it is just a big fancy room with strange decorations.
Beyond the actual is the realm of wonder and the mysterious. Who would deny the existence of mysteries, or their power over human life and civilization? Young people search for mystery to inform and validate their lives; older people venerate the mysteries they have confronted, shape their lives around the attempt to penetrate the mysteries they perceived or stumbled upon in their youth. Mysteries stimulate the heart, the will, and the imagination toward something beyond day-to-day survival.
For many young people today, science fiction stories in all their variety take the place of religious texts from times gone by, stimulating their readers to take interest in and hunger for something larger than mundane life, for a life lit by the glow of wonder. And it is not uncommon for a young omnivore to become derailed from science fiction by precisely the arousal of wonder. Joanna Russ relates that one of her students explained how reading Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End had awakened her religious feelings and led her to join the Catholic church (this caused by an SF novel about humanity evolving into an ultimate being of pure group mind). Enough people who are influential in religious education have perceived dimly enough this connection between SF and religion to create a fair number of courses around the U.S. in SF and religion. Most of them, however, make the elementary mistake of teaching only SF works that are about religion, thereby directing the students’ attention away from whatever point there might be.
One story to have received such treatment is Clarke’s 1953 classic “The Nine Billion Names of God.” Toward the end of this short piece of brilliant plotting, two rational computer engineers aboard a plane leaving a lamasery high in the Himalayas have discussed the quaint but threatening attempts of a religious sect in the East that hired them to use a computer to help fulfill God’s purpose for mankind—to list all the possible names of God and thereby find the real name, after which the world will end (as a prelude to something bigger). They are on their way home as the contract is completed by the computer below. One engineer, George, remarks that the computer run must be ending about now just as Chuck notices that outside (“without any fuss”) the stars in the sky are beginning to go out!
Of course, science fiction can be used for purposes other than its own, and often is, by everyone from futurologists and sociologists to physicists. (At a recent academic conference, the annual Modern Language Association meeting, a couple of physicists spoke on using SF to teach physics—Hugo Gernsback would have been delighted.) But to teach such an SF story as “The Nine Billion Names of God” as anything other than a story about the sense of wonder is narrow and, we suspect, just the kind of reduction of literature to “teachability” that discourages students from reading on their own for whatever range of pleasure literature offers. To use science fiction is, most often, to abuse it. So it is a common complaint of SF chronics and omnivores, which we will discuss in a later chapter, that science fiction courses are a danger to the field, at best irrelevant, at worst pernicious and perverse.
Science fiction stories are performances, just like the Christian mystery plays of the Middle Ages. In the mystery plays, full of miracles and wondrous paradoxes (he was dead and yet he lives, a virgin has borne a child), the audience experienced in vivid and dramatic reenactment the wonders of their faith, and their religious feelings were aroused and celebrated. The original location of the plays, the ministerium (church), from which they took their name, changed over the course of time to the streets and the word “mystery” came to signify the wonders and miracles presented. So “science fiction” has come to signify, for the field, stories that arouse “sense of wonder.” A science fiction story clothes and enacts in narrative a wonder.
A useful example of the consciousness through which a science fiction writer creates an embodiment of wonder is the story (and the circumstances by which the story came to be) “Nightfall,” by Isaac Asimov. It is often pointed to as perhaps the greatest of the classic SF stories of Campbell’s “golden age.” When the Science Fiction Writers of America voted in 1965 to establish the contents of the definitive science fiction anthology to that date, “Nightfall” received the most votes of all for inclusion in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame:
On a distant planet orbiting a complex system of six multiple suns, so that total darkness occurs anywhere on the planet only every two thousand and forty-nine years, astronomers predict that such a darkness can and will happen, only to be ridiculed by their two-thousand-year-old society. A certain nut cult has a tradition that civilization is cyclic and ends in darkness every 2,050 years, but no one else takes the astronomers’ prediction seriously: No living human is psychologically capable of withstanding real darkness. And then, as night begins to fall, the entire race, which never had the need to invent artificial light, goes mad from fear and begins to light great fires, burning down their civilization in order to escape the dark. With nightfall, the race is reduced to madness and barbarism, doomed by its own psychology.
In The Early Asimov (New York: Doubleday, 1972, p. 319) Isaac Asimov recalls entering John W. Campbell’s office with a story idea that was instantly rejected because Campbell had just come across a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe, and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!”
Campbell asked me what I thought would happen if the stars would appear at
only very long intervals. I had nothing intelligent to suggest.
“I think men would go mad,” he said thoughtfully.
We talked about that notion for quite a while, and I went home to write a story on the subject, one that Campbell and I decided from the start was to be called “Nightfall.”
To say that the situation outlined is a uniquely successful example of editor and author arriving at a commercial idea and that the professional environment of the science fiction writer and editor has always encouraged such interactions (remember Sloane and Doc Smith) does not penetrate beyond the surface of this example. The unspoken and a priori agreement between Asimov and Campbell was that they were engaged in a continuing enterprise with rather specific goals: to search out peculiarly science fictional story ideas, ideas that, when cast in story form, would not merely be clever and effective but would also satisfy the desire for arousal of a sense of wonder through the impact of their range and scope. They knew that what they were doing was serious and important.
John W. Campbell was one of the most successful and innovative practicing science fiction writers when he agreed by contract with the publisher of Astounding never to publish any fiction during his editorship. Rather than work to support himself elsewhere while he wrote, he chose to edit because he had a powerful and serious vision of the greater potentialities of science fiction—and he used his editorship to create this greater flowering. He committed the rest of his life to the task. And Isaac Asimov, from his early teens an avid reader of science fiction and member of the famous Futurians (the New York City SF fan club that included Frederik Pohl, Donald A. Wollheim, C. M. Kornbluth, and later James Blish, Damon Knight, and Judith Merril—read the fascinating, gossipy history of the group, The Futurians, by Damon Knight), was a young man whose whole personality had been formed by his association with science fiction. They certainly were not in it for the money. They were Members of the Elect.
This feeling of importance and seriousness is expressed over and over: “The humble truth is that science fiction is only for the small number of people who like to think and who regard the universe with awe, which is a blend of love and fear. ‘The public’ does neither; it wants to be spoon-fed by its magazines and movies, and it regards the universe with horror, which is a blend of fear and hate” (Damon Knight, In Search of Wonder, second edition, Chicago: Advent, 1967; pp. 277–78). The demands that science fiction makes on the chronic and omnivore—of reading, with unflagging enthusiasm, through the bad stuff to find the good stuff, always open and responding though often dissatisfied; of loyalty and faith—are worth it because the quest is important. Loyal and faithful reading is the act of worship.
I have spoken earlier about big ideas and the importance of scale in science fiction, of great distances and spans of time, huge objects and vast importances (“Only one man in all the universe could combat the menace…”). It is the intention of science fiction to heighten and intensify, to highlight and cast in relief whatever matter the individual story chooses. Science fiction is by nature symbolic at the same moment that it is logical and rational. The impact of “Nightfall” or “Inconstant Moon,” so logically and carefully grounded, is beyond the rational and in the realm of awe.
Let us examine Arthur C. Clarke’s well-known dictum on the importance of point of view: He states that a technology that is sufficiently advanced beyond our present state of knowledge would be indistinguishable from magic, just as lighting a match would be considered an act of magic if it were witnessed by a human from a primitive culture. The science fiction reader asks of a story that it reveal an act of such magic and, according to the field’s conventions, explain the magic, usually as technology. What makes the story SF is not the magic but the explanation that suggests that the magic is actually possible. We are given an explanation that does not destroy the magic (“it was only a dream”) but rather promises the possibility of that particular magic, perhaps far away in space, or in the future.
Science fiction promises wonder outside the confines and limitations of the story. The wonder we perceive in the story could be real in a faraway place, or might be real someday. Science fiction delivers us from the written page into a universe of wonder infinitely renewed. It is the transcendence of the written page that is at the core of the appeal of science fiction. Science fiction makes us transcendent. That is why I keep returning to the analogy of science fiction and religion, to the extraliterary appeal.
C. S. Lewis, in his An Experiment in Criticism (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1961), develops an unusual and relevant argument: In an attempt to combat the narrowing elitism and swings of fashion with which criticism has beset literature and the readers in modern times, he characterizes the “unliterary” reader of fiction as attracted to fiction in three ways: by excitement—imminent dangers and hair-breadth escapes, the continual winding up and relaxing of (vicarious) anxiety; by arousing curiosity, prolonging, exasperating, and finally satisfying it (“Hence the popularity of stories with a mystery in them. This pleasure is universal and needs no explanation. It makes a great part of the philosopher’s, the scientist’s, or the scholar’s happiness. Also of the gossip’s.”); and by success stories (“They like stories which enable them—vicariously through the characters—to participate in pleasure or happiness,” p. 37).
But we should not make the facile connection between science fiction and what Lewis refers to as “bad books” (the opposite of “good books”). Lewis maintains that a good book is one that may be read by a good reader—a provocative assertion, to which Lewis devotes the support of his impressive learning and talents.
Science fiction is for the most part read by readers who, when they are reading anything other than science fiction, fall quite comfortably into Lewis’s character of the unliterary reader. When an omnivore or chronic reads a science fiction story, however, the case is different, as different as, say, the response of an American baseball fan to a World Series game as opposed to his reaction to a Test Match in cricket. Or if you consider that analogy too extreme, then consider the disparity between the response of a sophisticated reader of fiction to a short story versus a work of contemporary poetry (which is read, sadly, by few who are not poets). All too many readers of fiction find poetry unruly nonsense, impenetrable. I maintain that a science fiction person reading a science fiction story interacts with that story in a rich and complex way, purposeful and meaningful.
Lewis goes on to devote an entire chapter (“On Myth”) to the kind of story with which contemporary criticism is poorly equipped to deal. The myth (Lewis is using the word “myth” in a generalized sense from its root meaning in Greek: story) has six salient features:
1. It is extraliterary in the sense that a bare outline or summary communicates a powerful impression to any person of sensibility. Lewis demonstrates that this is not true of good literary works, using examples from The Odyssey to Middlemarch.
2. The pleasure of myth depends hardly at all on the usual narrative attractions of suspense or surprise. It is a permanent object of contemplation, more like a thing than a narration.
3. Human sympathy is at a minimum. We do not project ourselves strongly into the inner life of the characters. “We feel indeed that the pattern of their movements has a profound relevance to our own life, but we do not imaginatively transport ourselves into theirs.” (This is true of some great science fiction but not by any means all—some SF does have the literary virtues of characterization, e.g., the novels of Ursula K. Le Guin or Philip K. Dick).
4. These stories are always fantastic. They deal with impossibles and preternaturals.
5. The experience may be sad or joyful but it is always serious (“grave”).
6. The experience is not only serious but awe-inspiring. “We feel it to be numinous. It is as if something of great moment had been communicated to us.”
Thus Lewis establishes a framework of considerable import for the consideration of science fiction.
Following this, Lewis discusses the difference between the unliterary reader and the extraliterary reader, which points directly to our characterization of the SF reader (p. 46):
The man who first learns what is to him a great myth through a verbal account which is baldly or vulgarly or cacophonously written, discounts and ignores the bad writing and attends solely to the myth. He hardly minds about the writing. He is glad to have the myth on any terms. But this would seem to be almost exactly the same behavior which … I attributed to the unliterary. In both there is the same minimum attention to the words and the same concentration on the Event (what happens). Yet if we equated the lover of myth with the mass of the unliterary we should be deeply mistaken.
Of course it may be that the words that tell the story are in themselves a fine work of literary art. When this happens, the SF field rejoices in the attention paid by outsiders to that work and is dismayed that those same outsiders cannot appreciate the appeal and virtues of the rest of science fiction merely because it is not quite so well written. The extraliterary pleasure is the real and true value of all the works to the initiated.
Since the 1930s, writing about SF by insiders has been filled with assertions that the essence of science fiction is “wonder,” but not one of these discussions has made itself intelligible to nonreaders of science fiction. Indeed, a majority of the books and essays on science fiction have been so myopic that they have been ridiculed within large portions of SF itself. I have experienced decades of discussion with people exposed to science fiction only through media sci-fi whose perception of science fiction was incoherent but favorable—they like to be massaged by SF. And I have experienced of course more (and necessarily shorter) conversations with people who know nothing about SF and know they wouldn’t like it. My inevitable conclusion has been that there are so many barriers set up in contemporary society to keep individuals away from the experience of aroused wonder that the messianic impulse of so many SF chronics and omnivores is generally doomed with adults.
Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction (2nd Edition) Page 7