Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow

by Reginald Bretnor

  As things now stand, you can be doing something that doesn't need to be done, which in fact is threatening to the survival of the human species, and yet you may be surrounded by a system which says you're doing your job well. The question "Should you be doing this at all?" is seldom asked in a species-wide context. We remain caught in the old "realities" with all of their myth-based selfjustifications.

  Remember that a way to align your behavior with my desires is to get you to accept my definition of reality. Power rests in getting masses of people to accept your interpretation of events, and this is firmly seated in the structure of language. The words you use, how they are defined as descriptions of events, these carry the weight. Certain definitions are established (Freedom is freedom, dammit!) and these are imposed on our social experiences. The delusional content of the definitions is masked by social pressures. "Historical knowledge" (any past definition) is marshaled to support the way we interpret new experiences. This all occurs within hierarchical structures where the occupants of niches may change but the structures, their myths, and their delusions remain. "There must be an absolute authority which will make everything right... eventually. "

  What one learns best in this world is how to please those farther up the ladder of authority. Education and social pressures cultivate individuals highly sensitive to the demands coming down to them from above. Most people believe what they are told to believe. The hedge against the unexpected, our social contingency factor, is to continue believing in the possibility of miracles. Of course, if you read the story of Jesus carefully, you'll note that the employment of miracles brought profoundly disruptive crises.

  I must take another look at Olympus and recall that it's the source of the most disastrous earthquakes which have struck the northwest corner of the United States. Even a pile of dirt can turn against you.

  Perhaps tomorrow I'll call my friend, the industrial engineer, and warn him: "There can be no absolute contingency allowance in an infinite universe."

  As long as that's a condition of our existence, the explorations of science and science fiction will continue to turn up exciting discoveries.

  But look out for the crises!

  Frank Herbert

  Frank Herbert has been writing thoughtful and exciting science fiction for more than twenty years; his first novel, Dragon in the Sea, is still in print here and abroad, as are many of his other books. In addition, he has published a great many short stories in the science fiction field in such magazines as Analog, Galaxy, and If.

  Probably his best known work to date is Dune, published in 1965, and winner of the World Science Fiction Convention Hugo and the Science Fiction Writers of America Nebula awards. Dune has attracted international attention both as a novel and as an "environmental awareness handbook."

  Mr. Herbert has done research in such diverse fields as undersea geology, psychology, navigation, jungle botany, and anthropology. He has been a professional newspaperman in several West Coast cities— including more than ten years with the San Francisco Examiner.

  In addition he has been a professional photographer, TV cameraman, radio news commentator, and oyster diver, and has lectured at the University of Washington and other universities around the country.

  Mr. Herbert was born in Tacoma, Washington, in 1920, and has recently returned to the Puget Sound area. He now lives in Port Townsend, Washington, with his family.

  Dragon in the Sea, 1956 (Doubleday and Avon)

  Dune, 1965 (Chilton and Ace)

  The Green Brain, 1966 (Ace)

  Destination Void, 1966 (Berkley)

  The Eyes of Heisenberg, 1966 (Berkley)

  The Heaven Makers, 1968 (Avon)

  Santaroga Barrier, 1968 (Berkley)

  Dune Messiah, 1970 (Putnam-Berkley)

  Whipping Star, 1970 (Putnam-Berkley)

  New World or No World, 1970 (Ace), editor Worlds of Frank Herbert, 1970 (Ace)

  Soul Catcher, 1971 (Putnam-Berkley)

  The God Makers, 1971 (Berkley)

  Project 40, 1973 (Bantam)

  Book of Frank Herbert, 1973 (DAW)

  Theodore Sturgeon

  Science Fiction, Morals, and Religion

  There is a force operating upon that body of literature called, or miscalled, science fiction, which, quite aside from the substantive content of the field, is moral and religious in nature; and we had better deal with it first.

  This force shows itself in critical snobbery, in the "ghettoization" of science fiction, in the wide and erroneous conviction among the general reading (and viewing) public that "Oh, I never read science fiction." What they really mean is that they consciously avoid that which is called science fiction, while attending in droves performances of The Andromeda Strain or Lord of the Flies or any of scores of other science fiction films, novels, and short stories written by "mainstream" writers for the most part —those who have cut their creative teeth elsewhere than in the pages of the science fiction magazines. The assumption is that the magazines themselves, and therefore all of their authors' products, are trash and junk, poorly conceived and poorly written, and concern bolts, nuts, nuclei, zap-guns, and bug-eyed monsters; and anyway, ninety percent of it in concept and execution is trash.

  Conceded, but then (and this has come to be known as Sturgeon's Law) ninety percent of everything is trash. The best of science fiction is as good as the best of any modern literature —articulate, poetic, philosophical, provocative, searching, courageous, insightful, and virtually anything else you expect of the best. Science fiction alone among the labels is consistently tarred with its own bad examples; the very same reader who knows the difference between Hopalong Cassidy and Shane, or between Mickey Spillane and Graham Greene, utterly fails to discriminate between the good and the bad in science fiction; utterly fails even to try, and says (in the words of Kingsley Amis), "This is science fiction —it can't be good," or, "This is good—it can't be science fiction"! And with this, we reach the point— the isolation of this genuinely religious force which has created such an injustice to the practitioners of science fiction—and which has committed such arrant robbery upon the reading public. For it has missed many delights, many excitements, and many beneficial explosions of mind.

  Our strange species has two prime motivating forces: sex, of course, and worship. We do worship. We will worship. We must. Take the temples away from the people and they will worship a football hero or a movie star; they will go to the shrine, they will touch the hem, they will record the words. This worship, like almost all forms of worship in recorded history, has its pantheon, its sects, its divisiveness, its intolerance, and many, many different objects. The most dominant of all in our age is —science.

  And indeed, science meets the specifications for a deity more than any other single thing in the current cultural cosmos. Science has rid us of crippling polio; science (to the lay mind, science and technology are the same) has killed Lake Erie and is murdering the oceans; science walks us on the moon and threatens the pupfish and the revered bald eagle. Science gives us longevity and hints at immortality; poisons the air; creates new sounds, tints, and textures for the creative artist; suggests potency over thunder, earthquake, poverty, ignorance, and the very tides; science, we are told, can sculpt our genes and produce demigods and demons at will, double us into clones, expand our minds, or drive them on pulses of contentment into endless rows of Skinner boxes.

  More: science has its acolytes and altar boys, its sextons, vestries, monks, and priests, its roadside chapels ("Seal your social security card in lifetime plastic, 25c), and its cathedrals, and within these ("authorized personnel only") its holies. Mary Shelley gave us its devil (Frankenstein) and the Swedish Academy its saints (Nobel Prize winners); it has its scriptures and its credos (though these have been known to change from time to time) and its sacred languages, known only to the elect. "Doctor, will you explain. ?"

  “Sorry, friend; you haven't the math."

  To put it simply, science is a god-th
ing: omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, master of that terrible trinity of hope, fear, and power. Science-the-god is (to the layman) incomprehensible, unpredictable, and reasonable only in its own mysterious ways. Its graven images are Promethean—sometimes a pillar of fire, sometimes a man in a white coat holding a test tube up to the light, sometimes an untenanted console encrusted with nubs and rounds and faced with a mosaic of gridded screens across which crawl green worms of light, whose body-language may be read only by the ordained. More and more the image becomes a gigantic computer studded with dots of orange radiance and randomly reversing tape reels (while computers themselves, incidentally, become smaller and smaller with fewer and fewer visible features). Science presents all the attributes of an object of worship, and is accordingly respected, feared, sacrificed to, and invoked—that is to say, worshiped.

  One of the phenomena of worship is its obverted obeisance —the childishly rebellious act or statement which by its occurrence serves only to acknowledge the authority. When a little boy, indoctrinated and thoroughly warned, yet screws up his courage and says Goddamn, and lightning does not strike him dead, he feels roller-coaster scary and a little brave. Such is the swagger of Boccaccio who, in the Age of Faith (which preceded our Age, which in turn precedes the real Age of Reason) told scandalous anecdotes about monks and nuns and probably felt scary and brave, and exactly delineated contemporary Authority. Today nobody bothers to scandalize the cloth; one can get no further than bad taste that way. Instead we have funny stories about insane psychiatrists, mad scientists (more often than not with German accents; the Obermensch lie dies hard), and the military, as in Dr. Strangelove, and the area of worship is quite as clear as that which Boccaccio inversely incised.

  Back now to that mysterious lack of discrimination amongst the reading-viewing public. I know of no other explanation for this strange lack than to submit that there is one target with Science in its title which is as safe to lob bricks at as the home of the only Jew in town: science fiction. Put it down and the lightning does not strike. To sneer at it is perhaps to express a suspicion that perhaps science has become too much the master, that perhaps science will become aware that dissent exists. Science fiction, then, because of its misnomer (it should from the first have been called something else, but it's too late now) is the victim of religious persecution, not from the heretics, but from the devout.

  Now to the subject in hand—science fiction, morals, and religion.

  Science fiction has been around a long time—at least since Ezekiel saw that flying saucer, and it's not easy to think of anything more religious than an Old Testament prophet. As to morals, it must be said that despite the oft-repeated assertion that science fiction is, or has been until the strictures disappeared in all current literature, a passionless, de- and un-sexed field, with all its gonads on its lurid front-cover art and none inside—science fiction has for a long time explored human relationships —a fair description, I think, of morals in action.

  But before citing source, I had better define my terms. Science fiction: the fiction of science, a word deriving from the Latin scientia, which does not mean "system" or "systematic," which does not mean "method"—it means knowledge. (For the emergence of this true original meaning, see my use of "omniscient" above—"omniscient," knowing all.) Fiction, to me, means people; that is to say, the impact of people upon people and of ideas upon people. Fiction, any fiction, primarily about ideas is not fiction at all, but tract. I demand of science fiction that it be good fiction. I demand further that the science—the scientia—be so essential to the plot that if it were removed the remainder would be incomprehensible. If a story remains, then it wasn't science fiction; it was the cowboy story on location on Mars. I do not demand of science fiction that it cleave to the so-called Hard Sciences, for as mathematics ascends through pure logic to something approaching philosophy, so does physics advance to areas of uncertainty and intangibility, and above all, mutability. "E = MC ," Albert Einstein once remarked, "may after all be a local phenomenon." Celestial mechanics depends absolutely upon motion, as do chemical reactions; change, passage, transience, evolution, and recidivism of cells and stars—these are the only universal "constants." As to mankind: there is more room in inner space than in outer space, and science fiction, within the wider parameters of true scientia, legitimately embraces it all. This is why I claim, for example, William Golding's superb Lord of the Flies for science fiction, for it is a study of the sources, in a relatively unindoctrinated group of human beings, of religious and political organization, a fable of cultural structures, with a meaning—a "moral" if you like—far greater than the narrative itself.

  Morals: that structure of law and convention within a society which guides the individual in his survival within the group. (Parenthetically, morals are distinguished from ethics in that the latter is a structure of thought which is directed toward the survival of the species. Huge families, for example, are at certain times, in certain places, an ethical imperative, and although at first emergence may run counter to contemporary morals, often win out and gradually achieve morality. Limitation of families, on the other hand, may become a survival factor, and the ethical thrust is toward that end, and engenders the same conflict with its society. Ethical thinkers are often decried and persecuted—and in the long run they, or their ideas, are yielded to and their innovations become conventions.) One must be reminded that "moral" and "immoral" should not be confused with "good" and "evil." In a cannibal society it is immoral not to eat human flesh.

  Religion: For any intelligent discussion, this word and its meaning must be divided into two parts—a concept which I have at times had extraordinary difficulty in expressing. On the one hand it means the religious establishment—the Church and the many Churches, old and new, and all their actual and theoretical divisions and subdivisions. On the other hand it means the force, the pressure, the urge to worship itself, that which underlies the existence of these structures. It is an arduous task indeed to keep these two separate when discussing religion; yet they have been separated sharply—largely by the Church establishment itself.

  Recently I saw a photograph of a large youth-rally for Christ, featuring a young man wearing a T-shirt on which was a cross with the legend "1 WAY." Established religions almost invariably proclaim that theirs is the one way, the only way ; it is this which caused the conflict between the Romans and the early Christians. Many Romans were quite intrigued, if not delighted, with Jesus and his works, and were only too willing to include him in their pantheon, with all respect. This the Christians totally, intolerantly refused, an attitude which then cost them savage persecution, which they returned with interest at a later date, directing it even on their own—the Catharists, for example, the Waldenses, and many others.

  None of which has anything at all to do with the urge to worship—religion in that sense—and has everything to do with the multiplicity of "one ways." Church establishments, as a matter of record, tend to disdain and even to exterminate any emergence of direct theolepsy—the seizure of an individual personally by a Higher Power—and may be said, in that light, to exist to prevent worship!

  Both forms of religion—the hierarchal, ritualistic structure, and the infinitely more personal theolepsy, have been a part of science fiction from the beginning. Like religion throughout history, it has had its tides. Lucian of Samosata, who was born around A.D. 125, told in his Icaromenippus of voyages, not only to the moon but to heaven, from which he could look down upon all the wickednesses of men and make some biting moral judgments. One of Cyrano's "travels" took him, via rocket, to the Garden of Eden, where he met the prophet Elias, who threw him out. Saint Thomas More in his 1516 Utopia takes great pains to describe toleration for divergence in religions, though taking a rock-firm stand against any who might suggest that the soul dies with the body. (The trouble with all Utopias, as Sweden's Sam J. Lundwall remarks in his excellent book Science Fiction: What It's All About, is that they demand of their citizens:
"Think whatever you like, but think right!") All through man's literary history, his "moral tales," his fantasies, satires, parables, and allegories have reflected religious influence and are stitched through and through with that metaphorical, fabulous (in the true sense of the word) quality which has now flowered into science fiction.

  The novels of C. S. Lewis, most especially his fine trilogy Perelandra, Out of the Silent Planet, and That Hideous Strength, strongly reflect the religious devotion of their author. Other true giants of science fiction—H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon, for example—seem to have largely ignored religion. And it's almost absent, as subject and motivator, in the crude beginnings of science fiction's formative years in the magazines. Not until its sudden explosion of quality, when in the late '30s and early '40s John W. Campbell, Jr., editor of Astounding Stories, gathered about him his astonishing coterie—Asimov, Heinlein, del Rey, de Camp, Simak, Russell, Pratt, and so many others—did the field give itself the elbowroom to get into things like religious ideas. Amongst the ever-widening search for variant ideas, it was inevitable that the religious area be touched upon, and finally invaded. One phenomenon of the field was L. Ron Hubbard, who was a slam-bang story machine for Astounding, which published the first article on Dianetics. Campbell was an ardent follower of Dianetics for a year or so and then dropped it; Dianetics evolved into Scientology and registered itself as a church, and thrives to this day.

  I could not give you an inclusive list of religiously oriented science fiction from Campbell's "golden age" to the present without far overrunning my allotted space here. One cannot discuss religion and science fiction without immediate mention of James Blish's beautifully constructed, provocative novel A Case of Conscience, in which a Jesuit unearths the underlying evil in an apparently perfect planetary culture: its ophidian natives have no souls. Equally provocative is Arthur C. Clarke's celebrated short story "The Star," which describes a truly beautiful, powerful, highly cultured alien civilization which is destroyed by its sun's going nova—that nova being the Star of Bethlehem. Here again the central character is a priest, and his view of these fine people and all they have done, versus what has happened here after the ignition at Bethlehem, costs him his faith. Ray Bradbury wrote a shattering story called "The Man," in which the protagonist visits planet after planet, arriving always just after the Messiah has left-and is forced to suspect that his advent is the reason for The Man's departure. Bradbury, by the way, in much of his writing, exhibits that kind of non-Church, absolutely devout religion I tried so hard to describe above. He believes forcefully that the proper worship of man is mankind.