Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow

by Reginald Bretnor

  The list of successful technological predictions is impressive. The list of failures on the other hand is overwhelming. One might suggest that the explanation for the successful predictions is simply that, if one makes enough wildly varying predictions, some of them must invariably come to pass. While this is a tenable hypothesis, particularly since the professional writer must continually generate a variety of extrapolations simply to keep food on the table, the writers with good technological educations score in an improbably high percentage of their stories. The success of these writers in anticipating technological trends is the success of the gifted experimenter contrasted with those with less insight and less-thorough preparation.

  The science fiction writer, as we remarked before, is somewhat less successful in his extrapolations of social and political trends. Here he is dealing with alternate futures and must restrict the premises of his extrapolation to a relatively few factors or to even one. The historical process is compounded of many forces with no reliable technique other than intuition for identifying the dominant ones or the significant interactions. Morever, completely unsuspected factors may develop in the future to alter the whole historical or social process.

  The science fiction writer then finds himself very much in the same position as the physicist setting up a gedankenexperiment; where he is concerned with the social sciences, he is first cousin to the think-tank scientist at the Hudson Institute extrapolating the historical process in a gedankenexperiment in a scenario. The physical scientist, the social scientist, the science fiction writer, all are concerned with answering the question "what if?" Each by his own techniques defines an imaginary experiment and through logical extrapolation or interpolation attempts to find one of the possible answers to the question. It is well to note that none of these workers truly believes that he can arrive at a unique and unqualified solution to the question.

  The science fiction writer, as are his colleagues, is engaged in a kind of knowledgeable speculation whether it be in describing the results of a simple imaginary experiment or at a higher level of extrapolation describing the consequences of his basic story assumption. It is worth noting that his speculation may be an extrapolation toward an unknown future or an extrapolation directed to the unknown past or may be in the truest sense an interpolation. In the later instance the writer is concerned with alternate explanations for the world as we see it now.

  This continued emphasis on the word speculation in discussions of science fiction has prompted Robert A. Heinlein to suggest "speculative fiction" as a more meaningful term than science fiction. Unfortunately, such a term would by definition have to include a great deal that is only marginal science fiction such as Fail-Safe or Marooned and much that is clearly not acceptable under present definitions of science fiction. The single criterion that seems to satisfy the intuitive definition that everyone has of science fiction is the use of the literary gedankenexperiment. Extrapolation of any form, particularly linear extrapolation, is a process with well-known pitfalls. The classic examples are amusing to remember: the 1890 projection of U. S. buggy whip manufacture to fantastic levels in 1930; Simon Newcomb's calculations that show quite clearly that no energy source is sufficiently compact to carry a manned vessel to the moon; the list is endless. The buggy whip extrapolation failed because no one predicted the advent of the automobile. Simon Newcomb, who used nitroglycerine in his calculations (nitroglycerine is, coincidently, a major component of the Poseidon missile propellant), failed completely to consider the mass ratio advantages of staging.

  Since it is impossible to anticipate all of the factors that will influence an extrapolation, science fiction stories are not intended as exercises in prediction even though, as we have noted, successful predictions have occurred. In many instances they follow the pattern that engineers know as "exploring the boundary conditions of the function." Very often in such an exercise the writer's purpose is intended as social warning or as satire and he clearly shows in his speculation that he does not believe that the situation he describes will necessarily come to pass.

  Many of the present-day ecological stories are of this nature. The chief intent of the writer is to develop a logical extrapolation of what will happen if a present trend remains unchecked. It is (to borrow a Heinlein title) an exercise in "if this goes on." In such an exercise the writer follows the fictional situation through its ultimate expansion to the boundary condition of the function.

  Two writers who have proven particularly adept at this kind of extrapolation and who have used their extrapolations for social and political satire are Pohl and Kornbluth. In the novels The Space Merchants and Gladiator At Law they envisioned two situations, one in which advertising had assumed a dominant social position in a world with shrinking sources of raw materials, and one in which urban sprawl brought on by an unregulated building industry had led to a complete deterioration of interpersonal social relations. Both of these novels represent science fiction social gedankenexperimenten used as vehicles of social comment. In reading the novels, the audience can identify in distorted form the factors in their own world that have led to the nonviable worlds that the authors postulate.

  Since the death of Kornbluth, Frederik Pohl has carried this technique a daring step further into the dangerous realm of the reductio ad absurdum. This classical exercise in logic has been used to show the invalidity of an extrapolation by demonstrating that its boundary conditions are patently illogical and absurd. Pohl has developed such extrapolations in, for instance, "The Man Who Ate the World." In seeking to comment on the insanity of the American way of conspicuous consumption, he has envisoned a world in which a citizen is penalized for not consuming and the penalty is a demand for even greater consumption. It is quite obvious that Pohl does not believe his story line. Rather he is concerned with showing the insanity of such thinking carried to extremes. That the story is rich with a manic humor only serves to heighten the satiric qualities of his comment.

  Mainstream science fiction has been traditionally a literature of ideas and the science fiction critic has rightly spent a great deal of his time examining the internal logic of the extrapolations in a story. There has been, in the last decade, however, a decline in this attitude that insists that the scientific extrapolations be as logical as possible. Indeed, one writer has advanced the thesis that the sole requirement of the modern science fiction story is that the science "feel right." He proposes that completely sophistic structures are perfectly acceptable, recognizing that to manufacture such "science" requires an endless number of dei ex machina.

  This trend may well have had its beginning in the writings of van Vogt, whose use of manufactured physical laws has been mentioned. It certainly gained stature and general literary acceptance in the works of Ray Bradbury who cares little about scientific extrapolation in his poetic stories. In the words of critic Damon Knight[3] "... he does not even take the trouble to make his scientific double-talk convincing; .worst crime of all, he fears and distrusts science."

  In recent years the growth of the self-styled "New Wave" has carried this trend still further. The New Wave authors are frequently unschooled in the physical or social sciences and — more —are heirs of the new distrust of the sciences growing in our culture. In science fiction they form the core of an attitude that reflects the general national mood that has embraced astrology, witchcraft, and mysticism.

  This is not to say that excellent extrapolative stories may not be written in which such mysticism plays a valid part. Heinlein demonstrated this repeatedly in the forties, particularly in his novella Waldo, in which a Pennsylvania hex doctor quite logically solves the breakdown of a universal transportation system. Under John Campbell of Analog Magazine, writers developed a bewildering range of speculations about the hidden powers of the mind, and the "psi story" is now firmly entrenched as a part of science fiction.

  The writers of the so-called New Wave are not interested in developing closely reasoned extrapolative stories, however. The conc
ept of science fiction as a gedankenexperiment is not so much rejected as ignored. The science fiction of this movement is based on the manipulation of the literary conventions we have discussed and concentrates its interest on other story values. The result of this change in emphasis has been, interestingly enough, to develop a body of fiction concerned with strong social and satiric comment. It appears now that there is a merging of these two creative streams to yield still a "newer wave" of writers who can construct valid scientific extrapolations while concentrating on the humanistic and social values explored by the New Wave. Two impressive examples of such novels are David Gerrold's recent When Harlie Was One (Ballantine, 1972) and Joseph Green's The Mind Behind the Eye (DAW Books, 1972).

  The function of the science fiction story as a vehicle for the imaginary experiment has gained new importance with the advent of space flight, atomic power, and a host of other once impossible developments. The remarkable progress in molecular biology since the elaboration of the genetic code has resulted in a number of stories dealing knowledgeably with speculations on the role of DNA and RNA in genetics, and in the biological storage of information. New observations on quasars and other astronomical arcana are quick to find their way into stories and novels. The whole spectrum of ecological endangerment has been the source of some frightening works.

  With the rapid growth of technology, rapid changes in the social order are inevitable. Toffler's Future Shock (Random House, 1970) has become a source book for many science fiction writers. We are worried about where we are going and the science fiction writer, working within his structured imaginary worlds, offers a variety of scenarios. predicting, warning, satirizing. Much of the hard-core science fiction presently written is strongly pessimistic, an indication of the dread with which we face the future.

  Yet, face the future we must. It would be foolish to ignore the menace of the future and equally foolish to turn our backs on its promise. Science fiction, quite apart from its entertainment value, has served an honorable function in showing us the alternates and identifying the critical decision points in the historical process. Where science fiction has served as a literary gedankenexperiment, it has fulfilled that function well. It has at the least served as a potent catalyst in teaching us the complex techniques for thinking about what will come, and has offered us, with all of its doomsday warnings, a chance to consider alternate courses for our inexorable voyage into the future.

  Thomas N. Scortia

  Thomas N. Scortia was born in Alton, Illinois, on August 29, 1926, of German and Rumanian parents.

  He entered the Army at seventeen, served in the infantry in the Pacific Theater in World War II, and went on to a year's occupation duty in Japan. He took his A.B. in chemistry at Washington University in St. Louis and did graduate work in biochemistry at the same school. Returning for a second period of two years' service with the Army (Chemical Corps) from 1951 to 1953, he commanded the last operational Heavy Chemical Mortar Company and later was the assistant commandant of the 3rd Army CBR School as well as being for a short time chief chemical officer of the XVIII Airborne Corps. After discharge he sold pharmaceuticals for a while before returning to a research position in industry. He was assistant manager of the Special Products Division of Union Starch and Refining before leaving to join the newly formed Propellex Chemical Corp. as Director of Research and Development. He left Propellex and he and his wife, Irene, moved to Ashville, North Carolina, when he joined Celenese's Amcel. A year later he accepted a position with United Technology Center, Division of United Aircraft, in Sunnyvale, California, where for nine years he headed the Advanced Propellants Branch.

  His first story, "The Prodigy," appeared in Fantastic Adventures in February 1954, and he wrote sporadically for some years, publishing a short novel, The Shores of Night, in the Bleiler-Dikty Best Science Fiction Stories of 1956 and a mainstream novel, What Mad Oracle?, for Regency in 1960. During this period he published in all but one of the existing science fiction magazines, and left the aerospace industry in 1970 to become a full-time freelance writer, an ambition of many years. Since then, he has sold extensively to both genre and men's magazines as well as to a large number of anthologists. A novel, Artery of Fire, was published by Doubleday in 1972, and an anthology which he edited, Strange Bedfellows, came out in 1973. Upcoming is an anthology co-edited with C. Quinn Yarbro from Ballantine Books; Two Views of Wonder, and a novel, Endangered Species, for Fawcett and Random House. He is currently collaborating with Frank M. Robinson on a novel, The Glass Inferno, which is due from Doubleday in the spring of 1974. The Glass Inferno was recently purchased by Twentieth Century-Fox, Inc., for Irwin Allen (of Poseidon Adventure fame) for $400,000 and five percent of the adjusted gross. Movie rights for Endangered Species are presently under negotiation with two major companies.

  Reginald Bretnor

  Science Fiction in the Age of Space

  Now that we have (at least tentatively) entered the Age of Space, the future of science fiction, which heralded and defined that age, like our own future, seems full of strange uncertainties and highly arbitrary ifs—and therefore doubly interesting because announcing and examining such futures is what so much of science fiction is all about.

  However, before attempting to discuss it, I had better define just what I mean when I say science fiction, for the meaning of the term has been confused by a plethora of definitions and by the tendency, in recent years especially, to derationalize the field and give it a non-scientific and even anti-scientific orientation. The definition I prefer, and to which I will adhere in this chapter, is a simple one which satisfies me:

  Science fiction: fiction based on rational speculation regarding the human experience of science and its resultant technologies.

  This is the central fact of science fiction, and if we accept it we can apply it also to science fantasy as part of the whole, distinguished from science fiction proper simply by being permitted greater freedom in choosing its bases for extrapolation. (Therefore sf is an especially useful term, for it can embrace both without explanation.) Except for this central fact, then, sf is governed by precisely the same literary and dramatic requirements as any other form of literature. Nor is there any need to quibble about what the word rational means; the dictionary definition is quite adequate for our present purposes. While characters in science fiction can think and speak and act as irrationally as story necessities demand, the writer himself cannot afford to lapse into irrationality—for once he indulges in its easy luxuries, he probably will no longer be writing science fiction.

  The main point I am making here is that science fiction cannot and must not be divorced from science —from an awareness of what the scientific method is and means. One of the stock arguments of those people whom C. P. Snow calls the "literary intellectuals," and who may perhaps better be described as non-scientific intellectuals, has always been that cold, inhuman science is somehow at war with everything warm and good and beautiful in man's nature, and that consequently science fiction, preoccupied with cold things and colder forces, cannot touch the human emotions, which must therefore remain the province of the non-scientifically, or anti-scientifically, oriented "serious" writer. This argument is based on a profound misunderstanding, for science is as human as man himself. On this earth at least, man alone has conceived, defined, and employed the scientific method; and the fact that in so many cases he has failed to use its products sanely, or misused them for insanely destructive purposes, cannot be blamed on science as an abstraction, or used to justify abandoning it for less rational approaches. It simply dramatizes one of the main dilemmas of modern man: that, individually and collectively, he has not yet come to terms with himself—that he still is fighting the artificial war of "the emotions" against "the intellect," still stating his most urgent problems in inaccurate, confusing, and emotionally abrasive terms, still letting himself be manipulated by unsane individuals for unsane purposes. Were it not for the weapons science and technology have given him to use a
gainst himself, the powers provided him to use against other living creatures and the earth, his situation would not be so critical. As matters stand, divided man cowers in terror, creates new terrors to cower from, and then takes refuge in an irrationality that can do nothing to diminish these terrors or the tensions born of them. He would do better to seek a clearer understanding of the scientific method, of the new areas—parapsychology, for instance—to which, with the aid of new devices and techniques, it is now being successfully applied, and to wait for answers and discoveries which can give him a better understanding of himself and a better map of cause and effect in his affairs.

  Here lie the main challenges and perils for science fiction in the immediate future, and here too lie our greatest opportunities. How we meet them, and what we make of them, will depend partly on ourselves, but also very largely on the intellectual environment within which we will have to work. Therefore let us examine that environment as it is now.

  The Age of Alienation

  The alienation of man is the dominant characteristic of society today, and particularly of Western society, with which here I naturally am most concerned: the alienation of men from other individual men, of citizens from government, of trades, professions, and special interest groups from the community, of cultural and linguistic segments, of races (real or imaginary), and — most terribly—of the young, not just from one another, but from their ambient reality. (Of this last I shall have much more to say.)

  Why has it occurred? I would like, very briefly, to propose a theory: that the process started with the application of the scientific method to the problems of the material world, and the resulting—and dramatically profitable—development of those technologies which brought about first the Industrial Revolution, then the wholesale destruction of established aristocracies, and finally, in our own century, the virtual dissolution of any self-determined intellectual middle class—in other words, the elimination of any effective counterbalance to political and commercial short-range pragmatism. It did not take long for physical scientists and technologists to acquire great prestige, and to begin threatening the previously unchallenged security of non-scientific intellectuals. The reaction was in part subconscious: Rousseau's idea of the "noble savage," for example, followed by the Romantic Movement early in the nineteenth century, then by the pseudo-Medieval pre-Raphaelites, and finally by that curious intellectual renunciation of the intellect which has, during the past sixty or so years, given us such aberrations as poetry, prose, drama, and painting devoid of definable form or content, and "intelligible" only to an elite of self-sanctified illuminati. On a conscious level, the reaction took a rather different form. The non-scientific intellectual hurried, neither to become a scientist nor to acquire a more or less scientific general orientation, but to ape the outward forms of the scientific process and, of course, all of its prestige symbols. Where the physical scientist, of necessity, invented new languages to describe newly discovered and demonstrated processes accurately, the non-scientific intellectual could (and did, and indeed still does) concoct his private languages almost at random, and then proclaim his discovery of new "sciences" as prestigious and momentous as anything out of the laboratory. In its essence, the process closely resembles the attempts of a child or a savage to copy a sophisticated mechanism—an alarm clock, for example. The hands are there; the numerals may even be in the correct order; the sign reads "Master Clockmaker": the only trouble is that it won't work. And here we have the essential flaw in those semi-sciences and pseudo-sciences which we now support so generously not only in our universities but in so many other areas of our lives: they lack the two essential elements of any applicable science—reproducible performance and predictability.