Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow

by Reginald Bretnor

  Certain pitfalls exist in our tendency toward overdependence upon the professional expert, the specialist. When we turn toward such counsel, we begin by admitting that we are helpless and require their superior guidance. At the very moment we seek such help, we have created a particular kind of nonsymmetrical relationship: the professional, all-powerful and knowledgeable on one hand, and the dependent, abject one on the other hand. One side assumes all of the healthy viewpoint and the other side takes on all of the sickness. With a kind of suicidal totality, we turn matters over to the professional, saying: "Heal me."

  This is the situation upon which the politician capitalizes and which psychiatry/psychology have been unable to resolve. Instead, the so-called mental sciences have been seeking political power for many years. This was to be expected as a natural outcome of their power posture. They assumed the position of all-health dealing with all-sickness. Such non-symmetrical relationships inevitably produce shattering crises.

  Remember the old Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times."

  The Chinese of those days valued a serene existence. Their Utopian ideal was based on a sophisticated appreciation of the world, on the guiding of the senses into heightened awareness. It's not surprising that Zen found wide acceptance in such a culture. The inner world obviously was where one dealt with consciousness. Thus, external crises were to be avoided. Ignorance, poverty, starvation, and disease were the evils. War was a class monopoly and was to be kept in its own place. Famous generals could not hope for the status of famous teachers. Fear was a tool of statecraft and was to be used to keep down the size of government. Apotheosis (transubstantiation to an immortal state with one's ancestors) was a necessary part of culture.

  In such a setting, interesting times were times that changed dramatically, rolled on the wheel of crisis. Those old Chinese could have made common cause with Middle America. Both look to the ideal society as one of social unity, of togetherness as the ultimate social achievement. The distinguishing of one individual from another has to be held within tight limits. To be different is to be dangerous.

  God bless the child who has his own. That's the catch phrase, but don't sing it too loudly except on Saturday nights.

  This is both a pure and abstract notion. It is the seeking for solace against the physical isolation of the individual identity. It is a barrier against mortality akin to ancestor worship. It is also the stuff of paradox because it brings with it dreams of gods, of nations, and professional experts as the allpowerful arbiters of our lives. This necessarily creates the conditions of crisis because it fails to deal with change. It does not square with a changing universe.

  Thus, we get the stuff of crises and of science fiction.

  On this relatively small planet well out into the edge of a minor spiral galaxy, we have been simultaneously breeding ourselves an abundance of humans while creating an abundance of material things for a small proportion of that burgeoning life. Against a backdrop of false absolutes, we reduce the variables that we permit in our societies, in our individuals, and in our possessions. By our acts, we demonstrate that we want mass production of a standard human who employs standardized consumer goods. We execute this mass production of sameness in a largely unexamined, unconscious manner.

  But nature constantly evolves, trying out its new arrangements, its new kinds of life, its differences, its interesting times, its crises. Against such movement, we attempt our balancing acts, our small sallies at equilibrium. In the dynamic interrelationships of the universe around us, we look for models upon which to pattern our lives. But that universe greets us with complexities everywhere we turn. To talk about just one element, carbon, for example, we are forced to deal with combinations whose complexities we have not yet exhausted.

  You've read about such things in science fiction; you see the conditions around you which touch your own life. Still, you seek the answer.

  Our land of plenty was supposed to lead the way to a world of plenty for humankind. Instead, we followed a more ancient pattern, becoming like the worst in those we opposed. We lead the world today in the potential for mass violence. The material doldrums of the 1950s trended gradually into this era, and instead of plenty we find ourselves in a world where, if we shared the world's food supply equally with every living human being, all of us would starve.

  Malthus pointed the way. Science fiction has been filling in the possibilities of a Malthusian world ever since. If we experience massive human die-back in such areas as the island of Java by 1980, Malthus and science fiction will have been proven correct.

  But at what a cost!

  We approach this next level of crises as though we lived constantly in the presence of devils. If no devils appear, we manufacture them. Give us this day our daily devil To counter the unconscious (and conscious) tensions aroused by such a process, we seek seclusion, individual privacy—all the while breeding ourselves out of that vanishing commodity.

  Creativity of any kind has become the modern devil.

  And the oddball is dangerous.

  We want to end all conflicts. They not only kill us, they never seem to produce the glorious and victorious end conditions which we verbally attach to them. But now that the Vietnam war has been brought near a close, we awaken to the realization that we still live in a world threatened by imminent, totally destructive, mass conflict. We cure the disease and find we still suffer from it.

  Paradox, paradox: the stuff of crises and of science fiction.

  We walk across the ground of our fears and our movement stores up static electricity which shocks us every time we touch the real world. Somehow, we are not grounded to the universe. But we go doggedly about those tasks we consider necessary, emulating the muddle-through quality of the ideal nineteenth-century British public servant. And all the time, we fight to repress the sinking feeling that everything we do is useless, that the next crisis will leave us destitute.

  Why can't the world be more like me?

  Middle America uber alles!

  On the wall of a small hotel in Kabul, Afghanistan, there is a notice, which reads as follows:

  Menu

  Acid.... $1

  Opium ... 30 Afghanis

  Heroin ... 70 Afghanis

  Ask Abdul

  The hotel, populated in season by large numbers of expatriate American youths, represents a full retreat from crises—retreat from crises into crisis.

  You may find it strange that I read this and other signs as heralding hard times ahead for science fiction as we have known it. This is how I read it:

  The current Utopian ideal being touted by people as politically diverse (on the surface, but not underneath) as President Richard M. Nixon and Senator Edward M. Kennedy goes as follows—no deeds of passion allowed, no geniuses, no criminals, no imaginative creators of the new. Satisfaction may be gained only in carefully limited social interactions, in living off the great works of the past. There must be limits to any excitement. Drug yourself into a placid "norm." Moderation is the key word. And how the old Chinese would have loved that!

  In a word, you can be a Bozo, but little else.

  Rolling Stone in the fall of 1972 described this world of bozoness:

  “Bozos are the huge, fat middle waist in the land. They clone. Everybody tends to drift toward bozoness. It has Oz in it. They mean well. They like their comforts. The Bozos have learned to enjoy their free time, which is all the time."

  Among the secondhand, limited excitements permitted in the Bozo world would be reading science fiction, but its creators are in for harsh treatment unless they hew strictly to the well-worn concepts already treated by the field, unless they eschew anything truly new or pertinent.

  No more 1984s. No untimely accuracy. You must stick to such things as Walden Two, which is really Edward Bellamy brought up to date. You must look backward, only backward.

  Creativity, however, requires wide open alternatives. It fits with the random chaos of the unknown universe and with tho
se limited (and limiting) laws which we learn to apply for our temporary benefit. Science fiction has functioned well against such a backdrop. The more diverse our work, the more profoundly creative, the more luxurious the literature.

  The luxury of unbridled investigation carries its own ongoing sense of excitement, one of the attractions of the best science fiction. What will I find around the next corner? This is one of the marvelous lures of pure science, as well. And pure science already is finding itself in the public doghouse. The levelers ask: "Why'd you bastards discover atomic weapons and lasers and bacteriological weapons and all that crazy stuff?"

  One of the answers goes this way: "I was driving down this road, see, and there it was."

  “But how'd you find the right road?"

  “Well, I took that turn back there a ways and, you see, there it was."

  The best science fiction and pure science assume an infinite universe where we can look up at the blue sky. That's our playing field. Eton is too confining. That sense of infinity (anything can happen) gives us the proper elbow room. But an infinite universe is a place where crimes of passion can occur, where any dream can be dreamed and realized. The reward of investigating such a universe in fiction or in fact is not so much reducing the unknown but increasing it, opening the way to new dangers, new crises. This implies disorder when what we suppose we're seeking is order. The story plot and the scientific law represent order, but chaos lurks at their edges.

  Order equals law, a key word for humans.

  Law indicates the form by which we attempt to understand order. It enables us to predict and otherwise deal with order. And we don't like the mathematician suggesting to us that we occupy a universe of multiple orders, plural, and thus of multiple laws.

  Humans want beginnings and nice anthropomorphic motives and happy endings. But motives (intent) are not required against an infinite field of laws. The assumption of infinity opens quite a contrary view. Infinity does not require beginnings or endings. Intent does require them. The essence of infinity is no-beginning, no-ending. Without beginning there is no intent, no motive, mysterious or otherwise. Without ends, there can be no ultimate (absolute) goals, no judgments, and the whole concept of sin and guilt (products of intent) falls apart. Such concepts as sin-guilt-judgment require beginnings which are cut out of an infinitive system, boxed-in, articulated and defined for human motives. They occur as segments of a linear system whose infinite surroundings must be represented as nonlinear. Such concepts are ways of dealing with finite, human-created and human-interpreted laws, and are only incidentally (in the fullest meaning of that word) related to infinity.

  To project a god, a government, or a professional expert against such a backdrop, we set limits.

  Law and order represent a system of dealing with interesting times such that we set our preordained limits upon crises. Law and order is a breeder of crises because it cannot predict everything that will happen.

  To accept a universe where anything can happen, however, is to accept a hellish insecurity which is, in itself, an ongoing crisis. We don't know how to understand such a universe. The essence of something we don't understand is that it appears chaotic; it lacks recognizable order. There's a devil in anything we don't understand. It is menacing. It is an outer darkness in which we not only lose a recognizable ground upon which to stand, but we also lose all sense of identity. It is a vision of hell. We must defeat such a devil at all cost.

  And we forget that we created this devil.

  We say, instead: "This is who I am. This is my absolute god. These are my absolute laws. Get thee behind me, Sathanus!"

  Thus, we strive for the illusion of all-knowing in an infinite universe where anything can happen. We seek the basic law to explain a never-ending All which stands as a seething backdrop, as the Vedantic void, that ultimate chaos from which any form of law or order must derive.

  In The God Makers, I have a religious leader say it this way:

  “We have a very ancient saying: the more god, the more devil; the more flesh, the more worms; the more property, the more anxiety; the more control, the more that needs control."

  The lost existence of our Eden-Paradise gets further and further from a dichotomized, man-limited world, less attainable every instant. We must turn to science fiction for the temporary illusion, for the prediction that once again we will enter into the blissful universe of godlike order. You would be astonished at how often science fiction editors get the Adam and Eve story as the first effort of the aspiring writer. It has become the cliche of cliches in our field. We attempt to deny Eden's ultimate, unchanging conservatism, its essential boredom for the questing intelligence. The very language in which these concepts are couched provides a retreat to match the menu on the Kabul hotel's wall.

  Santaroga Barrier puts it thus:

  “We sift reality through screens composed of ideas. (And such ideas have their roots in older ideas.) Such idea systems are necessarily limited by language, by the ways we can describe them. That is to say: language cuts the grooves in which our thoughts move. If we seek new validity forms (other laws and other orders) we must step outside language."

  We must stand silently and point at the new thing.

  This represents an essential Zen concept.

  Santaroga portrays an extreme reaction against many of the problems challenging human survival in the 1970s. Technology worship, endless economic growth, human alienation, the limitless powers implied by scientific investigation—all products of today's American-style society—are rejected by Santaroga's counterculture. Santaroga attempts to control change and thus to scale down both the physical and social pace of human life. Isolated, but with a purpose to their hibernation, Santarogans try to make better people for a static world which is necessarily depicted as a valley, a place of high walls, both natural and man-made.

  It is the mind, not the artifacts of human ingenuity, on which Santarogans concentrate. However admirable their intentions, the result of their behavioral control is not totally positive. Santaroga is dangerously stable, poised always on the edge of destructive crisis. Its people seem happy but without individual vitality. They are not enslaved by technological innovation, but neither are they much concerned about creativity and personal development. Life for the Santarogan revolves around an archaic super-loyalty to the community which is deliberately akin to nation-state patriotism.

  Santarogans indulge in their own form of the step-by-step behavioral engineering you see in Walden Two. They also remain self-suspended in time. They have chosen a rather static "good life" to escape the dilemma that Alvin Toffler's Future Shock details. The closed society creates its own Berlin Wall to keep out visitors, tourism, the threats inherent in things and people which are different.

  Santaroga turns out to be Middle America and Old China brought up to date. As in Walden Two, Santarogans extol the merits of their society and permit selective immigration. Essentially, both Santaroga and Walden Two ask whether human happiness can be achieved through positive reinforcement techniques and tampering with chemical and psychological characteristics of the species. It is not a question to pass over lightly because every extant culture does these very things, although in a relatively haphazard manner. The difference is that Walden Two and Santaroga Barrier describe a conscious, "scientific" approach to social conditioning.

  Why is it, then, that most people detect something sinister in such a process to produce humans who would behave in a predictable, although "socially beneficial" way? Behavioral control and happiness appear to be inextricably linked in the contemporary social engineering field. Most humans feel, however, that such tampering would not produce happiness, but would force us into new crises.

  We have always distrusted Machiavelli.

  Is it the coldness? The manipulation of humans by humans? Is it the inevitable separation into the users and the used, the abject seekers after help and the all-knowing helpers?

  The character, Gilbert Dasein, sees the commo
n identity of Santaroga thusly:

  “In there behind the facade, Santaroga did something to its people. They lost personal identity and became masks for something that was the same in all of them, a one-pointedness... such that every Santarogan became an extension of every other Santarogan."

  Arthur Clarke, in Childhood's End, states it baldly; his entire story represents a comment on differences. He is saying to you that, while men have been able to adapt to wide differences in climate, geography, and threats to survival, they have not always been able to adapt to differences in one another. In the end, the children of Clarke's Earth become what can only be interpreted as a single identity and that identity reflects the myth structure of Western man. Witness the way anthropological studies of acculturation focus on the difficulties a non-Western "underdeveloped" people confront while undergoing cultural assimilation by the West. Almost no studies have been done on the difficult adaptation problem faced by Western men when thrust into a non-Western society.

  In fact, Western men tend to refuse such adaptation; we must force others to imitate us. One does not go native!

  Why can't the universe be more like me?

  Through what is probably a profound unconscious process, the flow of Western scientific/technological development takes on much the same characteristics. Most of science fiction has followed the same channel.

  Nature, as a system of systems which we attempt to reduce to some kind of order, has been conceived by much of Western science as flowing from a unified field. Eastern researchers have taken a quite contrary viewpoint, saying that a unified field is inconceivable because even such a mental construct would tend to flow and change. To the Eastern viewpoint, seeking after a fixed, unchanging unified field is the ultimate in conservative thinking. It requires a god (or government, or society of professional experts) who must be worshiped by a mass consciousness that agrees slavishly with everything coming from the god, the government, or the experts.