Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow

by Reginald Bretnor

  Before the public can understand and appreciate what science can and cannot do, the people must get to see and understand the scientists themselves. Get to know their work, their aims, their dreams, and their fears.

  A possible answer to this problem of humanizing science and scientists comes from the field in which Graves made his major contribution: mythology.

  Joseph Campbell, professor of literature at Sarah Lawrence College, has spent a good deal of his life studying humankind's mythology and writing books on the subject, such as the four-volume The Masks of God, and Hero with a Thousand Faces. He has pointed out that modern man has no real mythology to turn to. The old myths are dead, and no new mythology has arisen to take their place.

  And man needs a mythology, Campbell insists, to give a sort of emotional meaning and stability to the world in which he lives. Myths are a sort of codification on an emotional level of man's attitudes toward life, death, and the whole vast and sometimes frightening universe.

  An example. Almost every primitive culture has a Prometheus myth. In our Western culture, the Greek version is the one most quoted. Prometheus was a demigod who saw man as a weak, starving, freezing creature, barely able to survive among the animals of the fields and woods. Taking pity on man, Prometheus stole fire from the heavens and gave it to man, at the cost of a horrible punishment to himself. But man, with fire, became master of the Earth and even a challenge to the gods.

  A typical myth, fantastic in detail yet absolutely correct in spirit. One of man's early ancestors "discovered" fire about half a million years ago, according to anthropological evidence. Most likely these primitive Homo erectus creatures saw lightning turn shrubbery into flame; hence the legend of the gift from the heavens. Before fire, our ancestors were merely another marginal anthropoid, most of whom died out. With fire, we've become the dominant species on this planet.

  The Prometheus myth "explains" this titanic event in terms that primitive people can understand and accept. The myth gives an emotional underpinning to the bald facts, ties reality into an all-encompassing structure that explains both the known and the incomprehensible parts of man's experience.

  Much of today's emotion-charged, slightly irrational urge toward astrology and the occult is really a groping for a new mythology, a mythology that can explain the modern world on a gut level to people who are frightened that they're too small and weak to cope with this universe.

  Joseph Campbell's work has shown that there are at least four major functions that any mythology must accomplish.

  First: a mythology must induce a feeling of awe and majesty in people. This is what science fictionists call "a sense of wonder."

  Second: a mythology must define and uphold a system of the universe, a pattern of self-consistent explanation for both the known and incomprehensible parts of man's existence. A modern mythology would have a ready-made system of the universe in the continuously expanding body of knowledge that we call science.

  Third: a mythology must usually support the social establishment. For example, what we today call Greek mythology apparently originated with the Achaean conquerors of the earlier Mycenaean civilization. Zeus was a barbarian sky god who conquered the local deities of the matriarchal Mycenaean agricultural cities. Most of the lovely legends about Zeus's romantic entanglements with local goddesses are explanations of the barbarian, patriarchal people overwhelming the farmers' matriarchies.

  Fourth: a mythology must serve as an emotional crutch to help the individual member of society through the inevitable crises of life, such as the transition from childhood into adulthood, the adjustments of the individual to his society, the inescapable prospect of death.

  Science fiction, when it's at its very best, serves the functions of a modern mythology.

  Certainly science fiction tries to induce a sense of wonder about the physical universe and man's own interior private universe. Science fiction depends heavily on known scientific understanding as the basic underpinning of a universal order. Science fiction does not tend to support a given political establishment, but on a deeper level it almost invariably backs the basic tenet of Western civilization: that is, the concept that the individual man is worth more than the organization—whatever it may be —and that nothing is more important than human freedom.

  Whether or not science fiction helps people through emotional crises is more difficult to tell, and probably the only remaining test to the genre's claim to mythological stature. It is interesting that science fiction has a huge readership among the young, the adolescents who are trying to figure out their own individual places in the universe. And how many science fiction stories about superheroes and time travel and interstellar flights are really an attempt to deny the inevitability of death?

  On this emotional level, science fiction can—and does—serve the functions of mythology. On a more cerebral level, science fiction helps to explain what science and scientists are all about to the nonscientists. It is no accident that several hundred universities and public schools are now offering science fiction courses and discovering that these classes are a meeting ground for the scientist-engineers and the humanists. Science and fiction. Reason and emotion.

  Science fiction can also blend reason with emotion in another way: to show the true beauty and grandeur of the universe, whether it's a galaxy full of stars or a drop of water teeming with delicate, invisible life.

  How many young students have been "turned on" to science by reading science fiction? Most of the men who have walked on the Moon's surface trace their careers back to early readings in science fiction. For, in addition to examining the problems of the future, science fiction opens the door to the widest of all possible worlds. The bone chess cities of Ray Bradbury's Mars, the galaxy-spanning adventures of E. E. Smith, the quietly extraordinary pastorals that Zenna Henderson writes, Asimov's robots, Dickson's droll aliens—the canvas available to science fictionists is as wide as the universe and as long as time itself. And by showing this marvelous, varied, puzzling, colorful universe—and humanity's role in it—science fiction stories give their readers the kind of excitement that simply does not exist elsewhere.

  And there's more. By showing the wonders of the physical universe, science fiction also tends to show the beauty of this system of thought that is called science.

  The essence of the scientific attitude is that the human mind can succeed in understanding the universe. By taking thought, men can move mountains—and have. In this sense, science is an utterly humanistic pursuit, the glorification of human intellect over the puzzling, chaotic, and often frightening darkness of ignorance.

  Much of science fiction celebrates this spirit. Although there are plenty of science fiction stories that warn of the dangers of science and technology—the Frankenstein, dystopia stories— there are even more that look to science and technology for the leverage by which human beings can move the world. Even in the dystopia stories, where the basic message is usually, "There are some things that man was not meant to know, Doctor," there is still an aura of striving, an attempt to achieve greatness. Very few science fiction stories picture humanity as a passive species, allowing the tidal forces of nature to flow unperturbed. The heroes of science fiction stories—the gods of the new mythology— struggle manfully against the darkness, whether it's geological doom for the whole planet or the evil of grasping politicians. They may not always win, these Kimball Kinnisons and Charlie Gordons and James Retiefs. But they always try.

  This attitude may stem from science fiction's long ghetto existence in the pulp magazines. But it is very much the same attitude that motivates scientists. As Einstein once said, when struggling with a particularly difficult problem in theoretical physics, "God may be subtle, but He isn't perverse." The problem may be tough, unsolvable even; but men still try, through the application of human thought.

  That's what is behind this elusive quality that science fictionists call "the sense of wonder." When a Larry Niven hero detours his spaceship so
that he can take a look at the complex beauty of the double star Beta Lyrae, when James Blish creates a detailed and marvelous world of intelligent creatures of microscopic size whose world is a tiny pond, when A. E. van Vogt's time traveler swings across the aeons to trigger the creation of the universe—the sense of wonder inspired in the reader is twofold. First is the sheer stupendous audacity of the writer in attempting to create such exciting settings, and getting away with it! But at a deeper, perhaps unconscious, level is the thrill of realizing that the human mind can reach this far, can encompass such ideas, can both produce and appreciate such beauty.

  Understanding and appreciation: two more words that help define the role of science fiction.

  But perhaps the most important aspect of science fiction's role in the modern world is summed up in a single word: change.

  After all, science fiction is the literature of change. Each and every story preaches from the same gospel: tomorrow will be different from today, violently different perhaps.

  For aeons, humankind accepted and expected that tomorrow would be very much the same as today.

  Change was something to worry over, to consult priests and oracles about, to fear and dread. Today we talk about "future shock" and long for the Good Old Days when everything was known and in its proper place.

  Science fiction very clearly shows that changes—whether good or bad—are an inherent part of the universe. Resistance to change is an archaic, and nowadays dangerous, habit of thought. The world will change. It is changing constantly. Humanity's most fruitful course of action is to determine how to shape these changes, how to influence them and produce an environment where the changes that occur are those we want.

  Again, in this attitude, science fiction mirrors science itself. Lewis M. Branscomb, former director of the National Bureau of Standards, has said:

  Technology has brought us changes, most of which we should welcome, rather than reject. Wealth is the least important of these changes. Of greater importance is change itself. Those young humanists who think themselves revolutionaries are nothing compared to technology.

  Perhaps this is the ultimate role of science fiction: to act as an interpreter of science to humanity. This is a two-edged weapon, of course. It is necessary to warn as well as evangelize. Science can kill as well as create; technology can deaden the human spirit or lift it to the farthermost corners of our imaginations. Only knowledgeable people can wisely decide how to use science and technology for humankind's benefit. In the end, this is the ultimate role of all art: to show ourselves to ourselves, to help us to understand our own humanity.

  Science fiction, with its tremendous world view, with all of time and space to play with, gives its adherents a view that spans galaxies and aeons, a breadth of vision that exposes provincialism and prejudice for the petty concepts that they are. This is the world view that a modern mythology must have.

  And this is what makes science fiction so much fun.

  Ben Bova

  Ben Bova is editor of Analog Science Fiction—Science Fact magazine, the most widely read and influential science fiction magazine in the world. He succeeded the late John W. Campbell, Jr., in this post in 1971.

  A prolific writer of science fiction and science fact himself, Bova has also been a working newspaperman, an aerospace executive, and a writer of teaching films. As Manager of Marketing for Avco Everett Research Laboratory, in Massachusetts, he has worked with leading scientists in advanced research fields such as high-power lasers, magnetohydrodynamics (MHD), plasma physics, and artificial hearts. Prior to joining Avco, he wrote motion-picture scripts for the Physical Sciences Study Committee, working with the MIT Physics Department and Nobel Laureates from many universities. Earlier, he was a technical editor on Project VANGUARD with the Martin Co. in Baltimore. He also worked on several newspapers and magazines in the Philadelphia area.

  Bova has lectured on topics ranging from the history of science fiction to the future of America's cities. His audiences have ranged from junior high students to the New York Academy of Sciences. He was born in Philadelphia, where he attended Temple University and received a degree in journalism.

  His short stories and science articles have appeared in all the major science fiction magazines, as well as the Smithsonian Magazine, the IEEE Spectrum, and many other technical journals. His book, The Fourth State of Matter was honored as one of the top one hundred science books of the year, in 1971, by the American Library Association. Starflight and Other Improbabilities was selected as a Junior Literary Guild book in 1973.

  SCIENCE FICTION

  The Star Conquerors, 1959 (Winston Co.)

  Star Watchman, 1964 (Holt, Rinehart & Winston)

  The Weathermakers, 1967 (Holt, Rinehart & Winston)

  Out of the Sun, 1968 (Holt, Rinehart & Winston)

  The Dueling Machine, 1969 (Holt, Rinehart & Winston)

  Escape, 1970 (Holt, Rinehart & Winston)

  Exiled From Earth, 1971 (Dutton)

  THX1138, 1971 (Paperback Library); with George Lucas The Many Worlds of SF, 1971 (Dutton), editor Flight of Exiles, 1972 (Dutton)

  As On a Darkling Plain, 1972 (Walker)

  SFWA Hall of Fame, Vol. II 1973 (Doubleday), editor The Winds of Altair, 1973 (Dutton)

  SCIENCE FACT

  The Milky Way Galaxy, 1961 (Holt, Rinehart & Winston)

  Giants of the Animal World, 1962 (Whitman)

  Reptiles Since the World Began, 1964 (Whitman)

  The Uses of Space, 1965 (Holt, Rinehart & Winston)

  In Quest of Quasars, 1970 (Crowell)

  Planets, Life and LGM, 1970 (Addison)

  The Fourth State of Matter, 1971 (St. Martin's)

  The Amazing Laser, 1972 (Westminster)

  The New Astronomies, 1972 (St. Martin's)

  Man Changes the Weather, 1973 (Addison)

  Starflight and Other Improbabilities, 1973 (Westminster)

  Frederik Pohl

  The Publishing of Science Fiction

  Although science fiction exists in many forms—film, television, radio, the graphic arts, and the think tanks—and, in fact, one writer defines science fiction as a method of looking at the world, still when most of us use the term science fiction we mean to describe some story that, in some form or another, we have read.

  In order for a story to be read by any sizable number of people, it has to be published.

  The basic fact that one must realize about the publishing business is that it is a business. It happens to be a business that is devoted to the preservation and circulation of an art form, namely writing. Nevertheless publishing itself is not an art, and like every other business it is basically concerned with earning a profit. There are exceptions. Some kinds of publishing companies are subsidized (university presses, denominational presses, and the like), and a few are run as hobbies—most of these latter are small, although from time to time the odd Texas oil millionaire will buy himself a book firm or a magazine to get rid of some of his surplus cash. But by and large publishers who do not show a profit do not survive. Once one gets this fact firmly in mind, a lot of questions that come up about the publishing of science fiction resolve themselves pretty quickly: "Why isn't sf published in weekly magazines on slick paper with four-color illustrations?" Because whoever tried it would lose his shirt, that's why. (Hugo Gernsback did try something like it, around 1950, and did in fact lose a packet— It was called Science Fiction Plus.)

  There are two main genera of publishing: books (defined as anything that does not bear a date) and periodicals (newspapers and magazines).

  For much of the active part of the history of science fiction, its principal medium of publication was the magazine. This is no longer true: as I write this, there are only about eight English-language sf magazines in the world, and most of them are struggling bimonthlies in imminent danger of collapse, or use a lot of reprints, or dilute the sf with fantasy. And there was a time, prior to 1926, when there was no such thing as a specialist sf magazine at
all. Science fiction did appear, rather a lot of it. Wells's stories appeared in all the big slicks and in book form. Doyle, Burroughs, and the dozen or two lesser-known sf writers operating in those antediluvian days also appeared in general magazines, or in adventure pulps, or in book form only. But the real birth of science fiction as a specialized genre or category (you use the first term if you are a literary critic, the other if you are a publisher) occurred in April 1926, with the first issue of Amazing Stories.

  It was incredibly cheap to publish a magazine in those days, and incredibly easy to get it put out on the newsstands where customers could buy it. Hugo Gernsback, who published that first sf magazine, once wrote an editorial complaining about the bitter fact that out of every one hundred copies he had printed, as many as twenty might never get sold. He urged the readers to subscribe, or to reserve their copies in advance at their corner newsstand, thus permitting the dealers to order exactly as many as they could sell and avoid that shameful twenty percent waste. Modern publishers who happen to come across that fifty-year-old editorial will either laugh or weep. An eighty percent sale is an impossible dream today. Fifty percent is close to the industry average, which means that, by and large, every time a customer buys a copy of an sf magazine or paperback, he is paying for two of them: the one he takes home to read, and the one that the wholesaler strips of the cover (to return for a refund of what he paid for it) and puts through a shredding machine, without ever displaying it on a newsstand at all.

  But in those days before inflation, before The War, before even the Great Depression, paper was cheap, printing was cheap and not yet unionized, writers were cheap enough, too. The word rates that writers were paid were low; well, they are still pretty low, but in those days the check a writer got from an sf magazine was all he had any real hope of ever seeing for that particular story, while now it is usually only the first installment of a much larger sum that will be realized from various book editions. Since Amazing Stories was the only sf magazine there was, it was in a good position to set its rates at whatever Hugo Gernsback thought appropriate, and he was not known as a big spender on writers. Most of the stories Amazing published in its first few years were reprints, picked up for whatever the copyright owners would accept or for nothing at all. H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, Fitz-James O'Brien with his Diamond Lens, and a dozen other writers turned up in Amazing with stories ranging from a decade to half a century or more in age. Even when the magazine bought original and previously unpublished work, its rates were not high. Fletcher Pratt, in Paris with his bride, Inga Marie Stephens Pratt, trying to keep ahead of the concierge and the bistro proprietors, wrote some forty thousand words called A Voice Across the Years and sold it for $250. More fortunate writers, closer at hand and better able to haggle, might get a cent a word and occasionally even a little more, but usually even that was not paid until the story had been published—at least a few months, sometimes a year or more after the story was accepted.