A few examples of technical advances which will remove all the barriers between what the science fiction writer can imagine and what can be put on the screen with complete realism, include the so-called "Magicam" process, minisets, micro-photography and video-tape techniques. Any set can now be built in miniature and live people can be projected into the sets with complete believability. This allows the instant changing of sets during shooting, as well as their construction and use for a fraction of previous costs. The use of video tape, involving the transfer of video-tape images to film, means that sf film—as well as all film—can be produced more flexibly and economically.
What this means for science fiction writers, for those who will or will not work in films, is that sf films will become more ambitious, moving closer to the use of genuine sf ideas on the screen. Filmed sf will have a chance of becoming more than the morality play of the monster cycles. It will become science fiction film, possessing the characteristics of both mediums.
The problem, we have seen, has been on the film maker's side, as well as on the side of the critics and audiences who adapted to the level of sf film in the past, confusing it with horror and fantasy stories. Things To Come was a financial failure and a critical target. Too much was suddenly required in the understanding of the new literary child called science fiction, and its filmic brother. The idea of menace in the form of a monster was more familiar than the country of the future.
Things changed after 1945. Destination Moon remains a victory. The Day the Earth Stood Still made audiences feel that there was something serious about science fiction. They saw that an alien could be more than The Thing, but perhaps a person. The idea of the future permeated the public awareness in the 1960s. The audience changed. Film makers learned more about sf films' potential from sf writers and the younger breed of film innovators. 2001, more complex than Things To Come, became a financial success. It would have baffled the audiences of 1937. And maybe Wells also would have had some trouble with it. Film audiences and critics and film makers alike learned, to some degree, that sf cinema, like all film, is a cultivated taste where it is serious, a continuing process of enjoyment and widening awareness which should lead to an understanding of what its best creators intend, both in terms of good sf and what sf film requires as visual expression.
The successful creation of sf film will require a level of skill and creativity beyond all except those who deliberately set out to meet the challenge. If I am correct, and sf film making achieves an integrative, unified approach to its various aspects, then the resulting excellences are not ones I would want to miss. They may even be strong enough to convince me that fully half the life of science fiction in time to come will be in the visual media.
Acknowledgments: I would like to thank James E. Gunn, who discussed with me certain points made in this article. And Harlan Ellison for information concerning new film processes.
George Zebrowski
Born in 1945 in Villach, Austria, of Polish parents, George Zebrowski grew up in England, Manhattan, Miami, and the Bronx. He attended Harpur College, SUNY at Binghamton, where he studied philosophy. He brings much of his interest in the philosophy of science to this science fiction. He was Lecturer in Science Fiction at SUNY Binghamton in 1971, teaching a full credit course in the genre. He has also taken part in informal seminars on the future in the School of Advanced Technology, Center for Integrative Studies, SUNY at Binghamton, under John McHale. He is a speaker at colleges and universities, a member of the World Future Society and the Science Fiction Writers Speaker's Bureau. Since 1970 he has been the editor of the Bulletin of the Science Fiction Writers of America, the official publication of the SFWA. In 1971 his short story "Heathen God" was a Nebula Award Finalist for Best Short Story.
His short fiction has appeared in If, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and in original collections like Infinity One, Three, Four and Five, in Strange Bedfellows (Random House); and in forthcoming original collections from Doubleday, Trident Press, Aurora, Ballantine, Avon, Walker, Pyramid, and others. He has written science fiction for younger readers for Lerners Publications and Allyn & Bacon. He is a reviewer for the British Vector, the publication of the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA). He has been a full-time writer since 1970.
The Omega Point, 1972 (Ace)
Faster Than Light, (Harper & Row, forthcoming in 1974), coedited with Jack Dann Planet One: Tomorrow Today, (Unity, forthcoming in 1974)
Science Fiction, Science, And Modern Man
Frank Herbert
Science Fiction and a World in Crisis
Washington's Mount Olympus is a pile of dirt and rock with snow on its crown. I can see it out of my study window. It helps sometimes to look out at it and remind myself of Lao-tze's words:
The soul may be a mere pretense.
The mind makes very little sense.
So let us value the appeal Of what we can taste and feel.
If you write science fiction in a crisis-ridden world, the value of the pragmatic reasserts itself regularly. You have to say to yourself: "As I see it. " We need to touch base on occasion the way Atlas had to touch the earth. If we don't, we lose an important contact and we may write sentences such as this one from NASA's Apollo 14 documentary:
Astronauts Alan B. Shepard Jr. and Edgar D. Mitchell were climbing a steepening slope (on the moon); their maps indicated they were approaching their destination, the rim of Cone Crater where rocks may have remained unchanged since time began. (Italics mine)
Since time began?
You see it all around in crisis after crisis —how deeply we remain immersed in the Cartesian division between material and mental. It is virtually impossible for anyone conditioned in a Western culture to think with any empirical directness about Infinity—about a universe without beginnings and without end, a universe of continual temporary conditions, one merging into another forever.
Time does not begin in such a universe. A beginning may be only the moment you notice something move against that background which ancient India called "the void."
I found it necessary to begin this way because of something that happened to me at a recent cocktail party. The setting was so common to our culture that it has become a cliche—and so was the tall, heavyset fellow with the bushy black beard who came up to me with a question often asked of science fiction writers.
“You science fiction guys have imagined every problem the world could face. What the hell do we do about this planet that's ready to come apart?"
It is to laugh, but bitterly.
With alcohol-induced clarity, the fellow had just realized that the end of the Vietnam war has changed very little in respect to a world balanced precariously on the edge of an explosive finale. The threat of ultimate war is still with us and just as potent as ever.
But I've thought about every problem, so.
My God! Every problem? Not by a long shot on a rainy Monday. Otherwise I'd be out of work. In common with the rest of my fellows, I do not have the book of answers. Sorry. I do, however, know something about crises. They're the stuff of good stories. If you write fiction, you become fairly adept at solving unsolvable problems which (and this is crucial) you have first created that you may solve them entertainingly.
Straw men.
But every now and then, we hit pay dirt. Realpolitik catches up with fiction. Industry just happens to manufacture the device we imagined—Telstar, Waldos, the Bracone collapsible oil barge.
Technology turns a corner around which we have peeked.
You can wake up, as did Cleve Cartmill in 1944, to find yourself answering the questions of suspicious minions from the FBI. "Yes, Mr. Cartmill, but you speak in this story of an atomic bomb. Where did you get that idea? And why did you set your story at Manhattan Beach?"
Cartmill had pretty well laid out the developmental process for an atom bomb, which was then the private domain of the top-secret Manhattan Project. It was a good story and John Campbell published it.
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But who could believe such coincidence?
And who can convince a security-conscious minion of the government that there is no way to keep these things secret when knowledge about the steps leading up to such developments permeates an entire layer of world society. There is no way. Despite Descartes, mental and material do not separate.
But nobody seems to believe that a mere science fiction writer can think up such things out of his own head. The question has a definite accent to it: "Where'd you get that idea (pause), out of your head?"
The head of a science fiction author is not supposed to produce the stuff of real crises. We're supposed to entertain, to amuse, to provide interesting food for thought and, occasionally, to bring people up short with a gasp or two.
Vide 1984.
Vide Brave New World.
When you think about it, you realize these two works have influenced our world. Neither Brave New World nor 1984 will prevent our becoming a planet under Big Brother's thumb, but they make it a bit less likely. We've been sensitized to the possibility, to the way such a dystopia could evolve.
If we're to understand the relationship between such fiction and a world of real crises, it pays us occasionally to look out at Mount Olympus and append some footnotes.
With the exception of the fancy eugenics, BNW presents us with a society that might've been planned by a committee of behavioral psychologists. In many ways, it resembles nothing more than a worldwide Walden Two. The universal infant conditioning, the College of Emotional Engineering, and the system of World Controllers ruling by scientific behavioral modification would appear to meet with the approval of W-Two author, B. F. Skinner, who, you may recall, has been described as the world's foremost social engineer.
Both Orwell and Huxley were concerned with the ability of our democratic institutions to survive the onslaughts of overpopulation and rising industrialism—mass business, mass government, mass automation, etc. They were concerned with their own understanding of that concept which we call "freedom."
Pause now and consider certain practices by the United States federal government, by state and local authorities here and elsewhere in our world. Consider wiretapping, mandatory lie-detector tests, the keeping of extensive files on citizens alleged to be dissenters, refined electronic surveillance, manipulation of the media, the deliberate distortion of meanings in language. All of this foreshadows 1984.
Make special note of the ways that have been developed to create demands for goods: the manufacture of goods so shoddy they break down at a predictable rate; a constant stream of "new" models which are not really new; advertising propaganda to maintain demand for goods that have little relationship to human survival (the appeal to sexual and status longings, etc.), and recall Huxley's words:
“As political and economic freedom diminishes, sexual freedom tends compensatingly to increase." Does that sound familiar?
When people such as Theodore Roszak in The Making of a Counter Culture take up these themes, then science fiction leaves the realm of fiction and enters a shadowland between myth and reality. Roszak comments on the repressive desublimation factor in "Playboy sexuality" which has taken over American society: "... casual, frolicsome and vastly promiscuous. It is the anonymous sex of the harem. It creates no binding loyalties, no personal attachments, no distractions from one's primary responsibilities—which are to the company, to one's career and social position, and to the system generally."
Whether you begin from science fiction or from educational commentators such as Roszak, you can smell a crisis coming.
The promiscuity which Puritans thought would undermine the foundations of society has been coopted by technocracy and channeled in a way that makes it serve the establishment —maintaining a state of non-freedom, of economic servitude, as well as stability for a social system that allows the technocracy to go its own way.
Our society tolerates drugs such as tobacco, alcohol, barbiturates, and tranquilizers because they serve a useful social purpose. They enable people to endure an otherwise intolerable existence, to remain on the production/consumption treadmill.
Perhaps 1984 isn't all that far away and we may already be living in a Brave New World.
In a society of Spocked babies and spooked adults, it gets easier to understand why marijuana, acid, and other drugs are tolerated to help keep the populace under control, especially when you add the mind-numbing properties of TV (audio-visual soma). Whoever said that the realities of twentieth century industrial mass society cannot be endured without outside help may not be far from wrong and the phenomenon of the black-bearded fellow asking a science fiction author for "the answer" becomes more acceptable.
According to Huxley, the greatest triumphs of propaganda have been accomplished not by doing something, but by refraining from doing something. Silence is greater than truth. "We'll appoint a committee to study this problem." The assumption by most of today's social engineering types is that independence is not the natural state of man.
Vide BNW.
Misfits are removed to their island—"a11 the people who, for one reason or another, have got too selfconsciously individual to fit into community life. All the people who aren't satisfied with orthodoxy, who've got independent ideas of their own."
When they begin feeling out of sorts, the people of BNW get a jolt from hypnopaedic memory telling them to take a gram of soma, to enter the "warm, richly colored, infinitely friendly world of soma holiday."
It's clear that both in science fiction and the crisis-beset "real" world, drugs (like magic) need to be taken seriously and considered significant socially as well as individually. Can't you visualize the sincere announcer on TV telling you:
“Drugs can be of significant value when used in a conscientiously applied program of personal hygiene and regular professional care."
In the foreword to BNW, Aldous Huxley begins his prescription for the revolution to bring about the world of his book by telling you that, first, the government requires a greatly improved technique of suggestion to make everyone susceptible to the propaganda of the new society. He includes infant conditioning and the use of certain drugs and a greatly transformed "norm" of sexual behavior from that which our fathers openly accepted. Where BNW pointed the way, Masters and Johnson or Katchadourian and Lunde follow to fill in the gaps.
You've read all of this in science fiction, of course, and made many of the comparisons yourself, and it's nice to think you're sitting there with the avant-garde, first to know what tomorrow's world will be. Let me recommend, therefore, that you study the records of history a bit more carefully. The sexual morality of BNW was the norm in the nineteenth century Oneida colony of upstate New York. The Arab culture pioneered in the use of drugs to control the populace a thousand years ago.
If history teaches us that we learn nothing from history, then there may be little point in rehashing these observations on human behavior. Perhaps it'd be better to save this material for fiction, that world of perfection, which is where things operate the way I want. In the "real" world it has all happened before. There's no such thing as a new crisis, just instant replays on the old ones.
It's fun to play the game, though, and to hope that your newest window dressing on the old patterns will tell us something really new. After all, science fiction in its dealings with crises for the sake of story, does indicate other avenues open to us.
We can, for example, assume that behind any accepted morality, fictional or otherwise, is the function of maintaining social stability. When emotions brought out by repression become socially disruptive, dangerous to social harmony, then the repression may be eliminated by the society itself. Our "new morality" so shocking to Middle America could be an evolutionary force to eliminate potentially disastrous social conditions. It could be the social organism's way of dealing with the need for sexual expression without the dangers inherent in producing too many new humans.
As you can see by the foregoing, the science fiction mind is
always ready with alternative possibilities —which is part of the game of human change.
Much of our lives we're breaking camp from one set of known surroundings and heading off into an unknown Other Place which we hope will become just as familiar as today's surroundings. That's the stuff of science fiction and it is, as well, the stuff of world crises. The hierarchical levels of a future society may very well be sharply defined by categorical birth into different intelligence classes, a birth prearranged from conception. Science of the pragmatic world may give us the aristocracy of the IQ which previous aristocracies attempted to create by mating only with their "own kind." We may look back on 1984 and BNW as relatively mild and amusing examples of fictional exploration in social engineering.
Much depends upon the way we integrate the myth world of our wishes into the physical experiences that define who we are as an animal society. This is the crux of all attempts to diagnose current conditions and form some articulated whole that expresses the nature of world crises. If we say, on the one hand, that our world suffers from a certain kind of disease that brings on these recurrent crises, then under present conditions of dependence upon words, the disease we "have" becomes more important than who we are as a people. This could be why we, as a society, suspect the large social diagnoses of the engineers and psychiatrists. We know with a sure and ancient instinct that to be treated and "cured" of such a disease could take from us both the why and the who of our identity.
Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow Page 8