Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  However, as the example of Wells suggests, there were authors who did touch on these dangerous territories. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World excited widespread criticism at its publication in 1931. While inherently conservative in its outlook, its depiction of a totalitarian society characterized by joyless casual sex, rampant drug-addiction, and artificial reproduction was met with almost universal criticism at the time of publication. The “savage” protagonist of the book has been raised on a reservation where babies are still conceived and born naturally and marriage still exists. His horrified reaction to the society in which he finds himself after being removed from the reservation culminates in his eventual suicide as he refuses to live in this more “civilized” world. Huxley’s story has since received critical acclaim, but its engagement with socially sensitive subjects created significant controversy at the time of its publication. Subsequent cultural shifts have rendered much of this sensitive matter considerably less scandalous.

  In contrast to the reception of Brave New World, Robert Heinlein’s 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land (a book that deals at length with similar taboo subjects) was both popular and critically well received (winning the 1962 Hugo award and appearing on the New York Times best-seller list). The novel describes the return to Earth of a human orphan raised by Martians, his initial government confinement, and his dissemination of Martian religion and philosophy to humans. Valentine Michael Smith, the protagonist of the novel, promotes a religion in which a central tenet is an absolute understanding of others (to “grok” another is to have a full knowledge of him or her). This kind of absolute knowledge of other living things is the route to divinity in Martian belief, in which the idea of God translates as “one who groks.” The book deals, in a much more positive way than Brave New World, with topics like sexual license that had made Huxley’s text so negatively received. In addition, Heinlein’s book discusses issues of religion and its influence on society, including the concept of ritual cannibalism, described in the text in Eucharistic terms. In fact, while the book’s contents made and continue to make it controversial, over one quarter of the original manuscript was cut, in part to trim more objectionable material. The full manuscript was not published until 1991. However, despite coverage of taboo or sensitive subjects, books like Brave New World and Stranger in a Strange Land nevertheless largely retained traditional gender roles and stereotypes.

  This changed, however, with the publication of Dangerous Visions in 1967, an anthology edited by New Wave author Harlan Ellison that addressed a number of taboo subjects in ways that fundamentally expanded the scope of science fiction (or Ellison’s preferred term, speculative fiction) as a genre. Notably, it was a collection of all original stories, the largest all-original anthology published in a field where anthologies had predominantly collected already extant works in a second wave of publication. Stories in reprint anthologies had thus already had to find a print market in the SF magazines of the era, a requirement that largely prevented short stories from addressing the kinds of taboo subjects that longer novels had sometimes been able to broach. Dangerous Visions, Ellison notes in its introduction, was “intended to shake things up.” He collected stories that authors had either not been able to sell or had not written due to the stories’ controversial nature with the intent to create a collection that would push the boundaries of existing speculative fiction and provide “new horizons and styles and forms and challenges” to revitalize the genre (xix). Although the text was thus actively intended to represent a break with existing forms, it nevertheless included works from established authors. Its foreword, written by Isaac Asimov, characterizes the collection as marking a “second revolution” in science fiction that echoes an earlier paradigm shift in the 1940s as the field evolved, a movement that included some earlier authors but consisted largely of a new wave of authors with entirely different ideas and expectations; Dangerous Visions, he notes contains the field “at its most daring and experimental” (xi).

  The anthology includes stories that deal radically with a range of sensitive or controversial subjects. Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye and Gomorrah,” the final story in the anthology, describes the inherently unfulfillable desire between human astronauts, “Spacers,” who have been surgically rendered genderless and asexual at puberty, and the fetishist subculture that sexually desires them, “Frelks.” While the spacers profess disdain for the frelks, they nevertheless prostitute themselves to frelks in order to both obtain extra finances and, more fundamentally, attempt to assuage their own inarticulate and unconsummatable desire. Read by many critics as a commentary on homosexual male experience in the 1960s, the story is described instead by Delany in his afterword as “basically a horror story” in its depiction of desire that cannot be satisfied. Delany highlights the potential science fiction has for exploring this kind of concept, claiming that “s-f” is the best medium “in which to integrate clearly the disparate and technical with the desperate and human” (520). Philip K. Dick’s “Faith of Our Fathers” depicts a future ruled by a communist totalitarian government that maintains its control over the population through the use of hallucinogenic drugs. The protagonist of Dick’s story, Tung Chien, takes an illegal anti-hallucinogenic drug while viewing a television appearance of the party leader, the “absolute benefactor,” and has a vision of the leader’s horrific non-human nature. Prompted by a group of other people who have experienced similar visions, Chien discovers that the absolute benefactor is not human but an all-destroying, all-devouring God. Dick’s story engages with theology, government control, and illegal drug use (particularly central to the story in light of both Ellison and Dick’s comments on Dick’s experience with LSD as a part of the creative process) (174, 205).

  Some stories in the collection promote their primary goal as intentionally inspiring controversy, such as Theodore Sturgeon’s “If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?” The story dramatizes the encounter between an man from Earth who visits a paradisical planet, Vexvelt, shunned by other human colonies, to investigate the possibilities of trade. He at first is horrified to discover that the Vexveltian culture encourages incest, only to discover that the promotion of incest is the root of its utopian society. Returning to his own world, he encounters irrational prejudices in those he reports to who reject as unthinkable the adoption of “ecological sexuality” despite its proven ability to prevent war, disease, and other social ills. Sturgeon intentionally selects an “unsettling” topic in order to stimulate his reader to question the bases of social “truths.” He notes in his afterword that he has waited twenty years to write the story, which he intends to “star[t] some fruitful argument” (370).

  In accordance with Ellison’s hopes, the collection did prove to be a major intervention in the field, both demonstrating the market for and possibilities of some of these controversial topics. Both the anthology itself and a number of individual stories received critical acclaim and awards, and Ellison followed up the success of the anthology with a larger sequel, Again Dangerous Visions, in 1972. Again, Ellison invited authors to contribute stories on edgy or “unpublishable” subjects.

  Authors responded with material that continued to push the boundaries of cultural taboos. Joanna Russ’ “When it Changed” explores the reestablishing of contact between Earth and “Whileaway,” a colony where a gender-specific plague has killed off all men several generations before. The remaining female settlers use artificial technology to create female children from fused ova, raised by female married couples. The astronauts anticipate an enthusiastic response from the inhabitants to resuming “normal” lives with the addition of men from Earth. However, the colonists, who have done away with established gender roles, resist the transformation of their culture, threatening the men with firearms. Russ’ story questions cultural assumptions about gender and sexuality, asserting the validity of an all-female culture and the limitations of gendered roles and expectations. Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Word For World in Forest” cri
tiques imperialist practices and attitudes. The story follows the exploitation by Earthlings of the smaller peaceful natives of the planet Athshe, who the Earthlings enslave and brutalize. After a number of atrocities, including the brutal rape of one native woman who later dies of her wounds, the Athsheans develop the idea of armed resistance and retaliate against the Terrans, culminating in their final slaughter of many of the human colonists, especially human women whom they see as particularly threatening to their long term society in their ability to produce new human colonists. The story criticizes military occupation and control as well as wartime atrocities, hotly debated topics in the late 1960s and early 1970s during the height of the Vietnam War.

  In addition to stories that examine aspects of society that prove harmful or constraining for humans, the anthology contains a polemic endorsement of animal rights, Piers Anthony’s “In the Barn.” Anthony’s story advocates for animal rights by dramatizing the cultivation of human beings as domestic animals. In the story, Hitch, an investigator from Earth Prime travels to a newly discovered parallel Earth (#722) that seems to contain no animals, but a large number of barns. Working as a farmhand, Hitch discovers that on this Earth, a slave class of humans are reduced to near-animal intelligence through a program of sensory deprivation in infancy along with the removal of their thumbs and tongues. Females are raised primarily as milk animals, maintained in conditions similar to large commercial dairy farms, while males are culled as useless except for a small number kept for breeding purposes. Hitch is horrified and disgusted, returning to Earth only to be confronted with the parallel conditions in which animals are kept on Earth Prime. The story has been described by Anthony as “a message story intended to be an animal-rights shocker.”

  Again Dangerous Visions also received critical acclaim within the Science Fiction community and Ellison announced plans for a third collection, The Last Dangerous Visions. This final collection has never seen print, although Ellison continues to retain copyright on the stories collected for the anthology. The influence of the first two collections, however, strongly influenced the shape of the field, expanding markets for edgy science fiction stories and encouraging continued experimentation with socially taboo subjects. These explorations are more frequent and more readily published.

  In more recent years, controversy has often accompanied young adult science fiction that explores these themes. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass) explores theological issues through the inter-dimensional explorations of its protagonist Lyra and her “demon” (her embodied soul), calling into question organized religion, a theme that has led to large-scale outcry from some Christian groups. Sexual content has provoked calls to ban Garth Nix’s Shade’s Children, a 1997 young adult novel, set in a dystopian future in which adults have disappeared and the children who remain are confined in dormitories until the age of 14, when they are “harvested” for raw materials. While these kinds of topics have become more widely accepted in adult science fiction, the perceived influence of these texts on younger readers has led many of the same arguments of earlier decades to be revisited in this more restricted arena.

  Science fiction authors are unlikely to stop pushing and crossing social boundaries in their attempts to explore human potential. Although the “blasphemous and sensationalist” ideas of Wells and the “scandalous” sexual content of Huxley have become relatively commonplace, texts that lead us to question our beliefs and attitudes in new ways continue to create controversy. What has changed from the days of Wells or Huxley, however, is that these explorations are, in the wake of the New Wave, more likely to be heard and seriously considered as the dangerous, but exciting, visions that they are.

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  Works Cited

  Anthony, Piers. “Ogre’s Den: From the Desk of Piers Anthony.” Piers Anthony, February 2006. Web. February 22, 2011.

  Ellison, Harlan. Dangerous Visions. Garden City, NY; Doubleday and Co., 1967.

  Hillegas, Mark R. The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-utopians. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.

  Wells, H.G. The Island of Dr. Moreau. 1896. New York; Bantam, 2005. Print.

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  Liberty Stanavage is an Assistant Professor at SUNY Potsdam. Her research focuses primarily on English drama from the late Medieval era through the Restoration, but her broader teaching and research interests include science fiction, textual studies, gender and popular print.

  ROBERT SILVERBERG

  (1935– )

  While I don’t think you can be too talented or too prolific, Bob Silverberg has pushed the envelope, writing literally hundreds of books and burning out repeatedly only to come back to the field an even stronger writer. He’s best known for a tremendous run of brooding science fiction in the 1960s and early 1970s and for the lavish fantasy series begun with Lord Valentine’s Castle in 1980, but he was already a prolific SF writer as a twenty-year-old in the mid-1950s, and he continues to write stories and edit anthologies today.

  As a student at Columbia, Bob rented an apartment that turned out to be next door to SF writer Randall Garrett, and in the same building as Harlan Ellison. Garrett mentored Bob and introduced him to other writers and editors; they ended up collaborating on a number of works as well, usually writing as Robert Randall. Writing more than a million words a year, Bob published (using various names) more than 220 short works and 11 novels, most notably Recalled to Life (1958).

  He then retired from SF until 1966, when the combination of editor Fred Pohl and the New Wave emphasis on the craft of writing lured him back. In the next five years he wrote dozens of dark-edged stories and 25 novels, including the Hugo winner Nightwings (1969), Dying Inside (1972), Tower of Glass (1970), Thorns (1967), Downward to the Earth (1970), and The Book of Skulls (1971). He also served a term as president of SFWA, moved to California, and suffered a series of personal disasters. Not surprisingly another burnout and retirement followed.

  Since his return to the field he’s written at a more sustainable pace, remarried (to author Karen Haber), and done some terrific writing and editing. He’s won five Hugos, five Nebulas, and in 2004 was presented with the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award.

  PASSENGERS, by Robert Silverberg

  First published in Orbit 4, December 1968

  There are only fragments of me left now. Chunks of memory have broken free and drifted away like calved glaciers. It is always like that when a Passenger leaves us. We can never be sure of all the things our borrowed bodies did. We have only the lingering traces, the imprints.

  Like sand clinging to an ocean-tossed bottle. Like the throbbings of amputated legs.

  I rise. I collect myself. My hair is rumpled; I comb it. My face is creased from too little sleep. There is sourness in my mouth. Has my Passenger been eating dung with my mouth? They do that. They do anything.

  It is morning.

  A gray, uncertain morning. I stare at it awhile, and then, shuddering, I opaque the window and confront instead the gray, uncertain surface of the inner panel. My room looks untidy. Did I have a woman here? There are ashes in the trays. Searching for butts, I find several with lipstick stains. Yes, a woman was here.

  I touched the bedsheets. Still warm with shared warmth. Both pillows tousled. She has gone, though, and the Passenger is gone, and I am alone.

  How long did it last, this time?

  I pick up the phone and ring Central. “What is the date?”

  The computer’s bland feminine voice replies, “Friday, December fourth, nineteen eighty-seven.”

  “The time?”

  “Nine fifty-one, Eastern Standard Time.”

  “The weather forecast?”

  “Predicted temperature range for today thirty to thirty-eight. Current temperature, thirty-one. Wind from the north, sixteen miles an hour. Chances of precipitation slight.”

  “What do you recommend for a hangover?”

  “Food or me
dication?”

  “Anything you like,” I say.

  The computer mulls that one over for a while. Then it decides on both, and activates my kitchen. The spigot yields cold tomato juice. Eggs begin to fry. From the medicine slot comes a purplish liquid. The Central Computer is always so thoughtful. Do the Passengers ever ride it, I wonder? What thrills could that hold for them? Surely it must be more exciting to borrow the million minds of Central than to live awhile in the short-circuited soul of a corroding human being!

  December fourth, Central said. Friday. So the Passenger had me for three nights.