by William Tenn
There are two reasons for this: first, the fear of science fiction's being labeled an "escape" literature and, second, the heavy quantities of physics and chemistry in the early science-fiction magazines on which most of the modern writers were suckled. As a result of the latter, if it can be proved that a story contains an incorrectly computed orbital velocity or, heaven help us, a presently impossible faster-than-light speed, while the writer's ears are no longer cropped nor his nose slit, there is a general backing away from the story and a widespread tendency to regard it as "spoiled."
But consider.
Years ago, Robert Heinlein, who is an engineer and naval officer, wrote a novel entitled Beyond This Horizon, in which he described a future of abundance and plenty so overwhelming that the principal social problem of the day was keeping the bulk of the population amused and occupied. Then Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, who received their training in advertising and journalism, respectively, gave us The Space Merchants, a portrait of a world to come wherein the economic returns have diminished so close to the vanishing point that only the wealthiest and most successful can afford a room of their own. Both books are among the best modern science fiction.
Both Ward Moore's Bring the Jubilee and Isaac Asimov's Pebble in the Sky turn to history for their inspiration, the one to depict a thoroughly believable 1953 America in which the South had won the Civil War; and the other to show the Earth, a millennium or so hence, in the same position vis-à-vis the galactic civilization as Judea of the first century AD to the Roman Empire. And both of these are among the best modern science fiction.
In none of these stories would a scientific error or two be of any consequence; even in the factual matter behind the specific narrative action, an inaccuracy should be considered of no more importance than the boners in Shakespearean historical plays. Of course, obvious errors can be annoying to the reader, and the writer who has any pride at all will check all doubtful items carefully. But the stories mentioned, like all good fiction, are essentially stories of human relationships, individually and communally, and no misstatements of scientific fact could rob them of this quality, nor can dozens of validating footnotes add to their stature.
And as to the charge of "escape" literature, a charge which even so respected a science-fiction personality as Fletcher Pratt found it necessary to refute in an article that appeared in a West Coast literary magazine, well, I think it's about time that we who read and write this new kind of story recognize that here is a jealous argument of very ancient lineage indeed. When, back in the eighteenth century, novels first began to appear—and flourish—in booksellers' windows, they were attacked by writers of heavy sermon-essays as instruments of the devil in that they pulled the book-buying public away from the stuff which they should have been reading for the sake of their immortal souls: heavy sermon-essays. The same thing happened when the tedious miracle play of the Middle Ages began to give way to the Elizabethan drama. In every age, entrenched intellectual privilege has attempted to preserve itself by slighting the newer and more popular forms or by attacking them outright as dangerous. But despite these efforts, the audience for miracle plays and bound volumes of sermons has contracted considerably.
The dictionary definition of escape that is pertinent here is "avoidance of reality." On this basis, science fiction, dealing as it does with events that have not yet occurred (or, as in the Ward Moore story, events that by a matter of historical necessity have never occurred), frequently stands accused of leading our youth astray and perverting the population in general by ladling out great quantities of verbal opiate.
But why do people read fiction in the first place—any kind of fiction? To learn more about their own irritating, unfulfilled, and insecure lives? To gather useful moral precepts by means of allegories thinly veneered with narrative? I think not.
The fiction writer is the heir of the Homeric epic poet and the Viking skald. His lyre has been replaced by a typewriter, true; and his voice amplified enormously by the printing press—but his role today is fundamentally the same as when the local warriors of that period, having returned from a hard day's skull-cracking and armor-denting, sat down in the great smoke-filled hall and, cutting themselves a slab of burnt boar, belched a couple of times and commanded, "Hey, fellow, you with the funny stink; take your arms off that wench and sing us a song of how brave we were in last week's battle. And it better be plenty interesting if you know what's good for you."
Today, if the writer knows what's good for him, he continues to make it plenty interesting. And realizing that few people can see the place-time segment they occupy as an intriguing phenomenon, he wanders as far afield as he can, without jeopardizing the sense of reality.
In that last phrase is the secret—and a paradoxical one!—of the escape element in fiction. It has to be believable. Whether the reader is a sex-starved slum kid following the slickly written, highly spiced adventures of a well-to-do, well-preserved roué; or an impotent, rich old man wallowing in the sordid details of a naturalistic novel about young juvenile delinquents; or, for that matter, an intense young girl reliving a handful of tall tales told on a fourteenth-century pilgrimage to Canterbury, all demand a feeling of reality, a feeling that it did happen, that it is happening, that—at the very least—what they are reading could happen.
But before that, all have demanded—and found—a literary escape hatch out of the dullness of their own lives. First, the child will climb on your knee and ask to be told a story; then, he will demand of you: "Is it true?" The minstrel who dared to sing of last week's battle in terms of the situation as it actually occurred would have been brained with a mead flask. No, he increased the numbers of the enemy ten- or twenty-fold; he verbally blunted the axes and broke the swords of the men to whom he was singing until it seemed to his listeners that they had practically committed suicide by getting involved in the battle in the first place; and then, by alternately extolling their stout hearts and decrying the cowardice of their opponents, he showed how, in a magnificent charge behind their invincible leader, they had carried the day and won eternal fame for themselves and the patch of hillside on which they lived. It is more than possible that when he finished, his enthusiastic audience had already forgotten that the battle had been no more than an attack on a neighboring village, the majority of whose male inhabitants had been known in advance to be away on a fishing expedition. So the minstrel was cheered to the greasy rafters for creating an interesting tale out of what was essentially a rather routine slaughter-and-rape fest—and asked to give an encore.
For an encore, he probably selected his well-known piece about the gods—strange, eternal creatures that could hurl lightning bolts from their bare hands and wrestle with serpents twice as long as the Earth, but who, in the song's opening stanzas, were sitting in their great, smoke-filled hall munching roast meat and listening to their minstrel sing of their wars with the mud giants to the south. And the mortal, dirty humans who heard this encore were completely fascinated and marveled delightedly at the incredible, homey parallels between their lives and the lives of their divinities.
And there, right there, is the area in which science fiction leads the literary side of its life. It is the job of the science-fiction writer to take the utterly fantastic, if need be, and make it seem as real as a copy of today's tabloid newspaper folded to the sports section. To the extent that he succeeds in this he is a good science-fiction writer, and to the extent that he fails to make the story believable he is a bad one, be it ever so full of faster-than-light gimmicks and fantastic individuals with triple brains and mechanical genitalia. When H.G. Wells gave us the giant children in Food of the Gods, he made it clear at one point that they intended to conquer humanity and take over the planet for themselves; yet he had, by then, made them so completely understandable that the reader realized them much more vividly than he did his next-door neighbors and hoped rather wistfully that they would succeed in replacing him and his comparatively minuscule fellow citizens.
Science fiction, it is true—as opposed to pure fantasy—is not supposed to deal in the impossible or utterly fantastic. In theory it originates in the best available knowledge of the day and thus should concern itself only with those events which can conceivably occur. I have always been impatient of this approach.
Does it really matter that much of Swift's Gulliver and most of Rabelais's Gargantua are based on what today's science would call fables and legends and impossibilities? Is either work rendered less valid for the child seeking pure entertainment or the adult seeking entertainment plus depth? Yet both Swift and Rabelais were among the best-educated men of their time and based their work as well as they could on such facts (and extensions of these facts) as their age could boast. The facts—the science, so to speak—have been outdated; the fiction will out-endure our civilization.
I tend to limit fantasy, in my own mind, to those stories based primarily on superstitious belief, but I find myself much troubled by this definition. The term "superstitious belief" partakes far too much of a pejorative quality. Who is calling whom superstitious, I ask, and how much careful investigation has been made of the superstition? On the one hand, you had the spectacle, a few years ago, of extremely able scientists in a science-oriented country like Germany insisting that abruptly they found themselves able to detect real differences between "races," a term which, after all, is no more than a semantic convention; on the other hand, you had Professor Rhine of Duke University looking into the hoary old superstitions of telepathy and telekinesis and coming across results which could be expressed in surprisingly positive mathematical terms. And then a madman like Fredric Brown writes a magnificent, mad yarn entitled What Mad Universe, based on some very acceptable modern theoretical physics, and creates a literary matrix where, as someone dazedly pointed out to me, "Anything, absolutely anything, could happen and yet be entirely logical!"
What then is the specific literary role of the science-fiction writer? I think it can be said to derive in equal parts from what I call the fictional quality in science and the scientific quality in literature.
Before the development of the electron microscope and sundry useful gadgets like cloud chambers and special photographic devices, it was obvious to most chemists that very definite laws governed the combinations of elements as well as more complex substances. Various laws were worked out, expressed in what were called "combining weights," to cover the observed phenomena. But the question of why the elements combined in the specific ways, weights, and quantities that they did could not be answered with the research equipment then available. So, over a century ago, an Englishman named John Dalton revived an ancient piece of Greek metaphysics, altering it to fit the observed data, and gave the world Dalton's Atomic Theory. And that's the theory which, with the necessary amendments to fit new facts as they've been discovered, is behind the modern atomic bomb. Dalton died without seeing either an atom or its path on a photographic plate, but the theory which bears his name still stands in all essentials.
A little while earlier, there was the matter of phlogiston. Unable to explain the phenomenon of combustion any other way, the alchemists and early chemists decided on an imaginary substance which had to be in all things that could catch fire. The more phlogiston, the hotter the flame. Eventually, of course, all the phlogiston would be burned away and only the original substance left. The trouble was that when Lavoisier finally burned material under laboratory conditions and weighed the residue carefully, he found that the weight increased because of the acquisition of oxygen and thus destroyed the phlogiston theory.
As a nonscientist, I have always been fascinated by both theories, one accepted even today and the other mentioned now only to be ridiculed. I have always felt that their respective originators, Dalton and Becher, were essentially poets of science. Operating from definite facts, they went beyond facts to create a scintillating explanation of how a specific part of our universe operated. With all due deference to hard-headed laboratory technicians, I call this the fictional quality in science and include in it such delightful items as Einstein's curved space and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. The entertainment and stimulation of such theories, utterly apart from their value to science, is prodigious to a speculative mind.
But the writer, and I mean any writer here, has to be scientific in his turn. To put it very simply, if the author constructs a character who is miserly and selfish, he cannot absent-mindedly allow him to be generous at odd moments for no good reason, without destroying the inner consistency of the work. And it is this inner consistency which is the scientific quality in literature. Every good story is a kind of sealed universe, in which, as the action unfolds, the reader is made privy to the laws peculiar to it. If the author destroys a law, he must rapidly reveal a higher one, or lose the reader's confidence irrevocably.
These two seemingly contradictory qualities from both science and literature have fused in science fiction and produced a situation where the possible number of "sealed universes" the author can create has multiplied enormously in number and variety. And the author who is true to his craft and daring in it can in this way employ the facts of science to liberate himself from the facts of everyday life and go exploring all kinds of dramatic situations far beyond the dreams of literature to date.
Science fiction, thus considered, is not a mere pocket in the varicolored vest of modern writing; it is a new kind of fiction, the beginnings of a long-delayed revolution in letters consequent upon the revolutions that the last two hundred years have witnessed in science, industry, and politics. By this I do not at all mean that it is the only possible literature of the present time, just that it is the type most peculiar to it, most indicative of its larger intellectual trends. The chansons de geste of the eleventh and twelfth centuries faithfully reflected the rigid feudal thinking of medieval, hero-worshipping Europe. Later, when the sacred institutional framework of church and knighthood was weakened by increasing trade, broadened cultural contacts, and the beginnings of modern thought, the picaresque novel appeared as an expression of the skepticism that was then exciting the minds of men. Just so, I feel, has the present age produced out of its own grating necessities and future-mindedness a science capable of examining man in the various psychosocial arenas he can occupy—and a literature to run parallel to the science, a literature which must, like all art forms, frequently outstrip the facts which birthed it. Nor, peculiarly enough, is science per se the only proper subject of science fiction. An Oxford don, the aforementioned C.S. Lewis, constructed a magnificent and indisputably science-fictional trilogy on purely religious themes, using the extrapolative techniques of the twentieth century's most flexible medium to affirm beliefs of the thirteenth!
Here it strikes me that I have flung down gauntlets enough all around this, my very first book of short stories. I should remind the reader that I have been attempting to show the potential as well as historical placement of the field as a whole, not by any means to imply that my own thin achievements have measured up to it. In fact, I may well paraphrase Wolsey's humbling comment to the eighth Henry: this, my realm of written stories, is but in an angle of the world of science fiction. I have worked the several fields which have interested me most, to the limits of my talents, moving on whenever urged by inner restlessness or the sudden vision of a brighter green. But there are others who have ranged much further, or cultivated a single, unchanging plot much more assiduously—with truly wonderful results.
How wonderful? Has science fiction produced a Cervantes yet, or a Fielding? No, but neither did the swarming golden glory of the Elizabethan stage produce an Aeschylus. Yet, in that day, the so-called university playwrights were desperately trying to revive the classic dramatic modes. They complained that "no right comedies or right tragedies" were being written. And they must certainly have looked with contempt on thumb-ruling, money-hungry, crowd-pleasing boors like Will Shakespeare, until, of course, Shakespeare's enormous achievement became undeniable. Whether or not
science fiction will eventually develop a Shakespeare, I would not dare to predict. But I do claim that it is a literature produced by our times as much as Shakespeare's was by his. And its unfortunate, frequent vulgarities can well be equated with the vulgarities and plebeian absurdities of much Elizabethan writing, both reflecting the primitive vitality of the mass audience that responded to them. It is, of course, in any age, only moribund fiction that is polished to a point of antisepsis, and that will, in losing touch with its audience, "lose the name of action." This new medium has as yet lost neither.
The human mind is lit by an elemental sense of wonder, a probing, restless curiosity that is our primate heritage and that from its beginnings has sought a knowledge, some knowledge, of the future. To satisfy that need there has come into being a massive and thoroughly modern creation, science fiction, the literature of extrapolative, industrial man.
AFTERWORD
Very early in 1954, I was having a conversation with Harry Harrison, then the editor of Science Fiction Adventures. I said something about how nobody in the field seemed to be paying any attention to the second word in the term "science fiction": most of the arguments seemed to deal only with the "science"—how to define it and just how much of it should be in a given story.
Harry, one of the most alert human beings I've met in my life—Harry pounced. "The fiction in science fiction," he said. "A good title. Write it fast. I have an open slot for it."
I liked the title myself, and I went home and wrote it that afternoon. I put into the essay all sorts of angers and theses and rebuttals that had been percolating inside of me for years. Harry rewarded me with an adequate check and a more-than-adequate editorial lunch.