Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow

by Reginald Bretnor

  A beautiful example of this sort of pseudo-scientific proclamation is the Marxist teleology, which purports to explain man's history, his behavior in the present, and his future all in the ultrasimplistic terms of an early nineteenth century economic theorist. Another is the equally simplistic Freudian formulation.

  Here, indeed, we have the origins of the conflict between Snow's "Two Cultures," and if we consider one other factor in connection with it, we can begin to understand the reasons for our alienation. The social impulse behind scientific discovery has always been an unbalanced one—the desire for profit, monetary or political—on the part of those who, in whatever socio-economic system, have controlled the necessary resources. Hence, scientific research and its technological exploitation have usually been directed into money-profitable or power-profitable (and to a lesser extent into prestige-profitable) channels. The best example, and probably the most important, is that of the mass media, which without science and technology could never have come into being.

  Scientific discovery and technological development progress exponentially. (A dramatically simple example is the frightening curve showing the history of artillery: a slow, almost imperceptible climb over several centuries, then a sharply steepening one for several decades, then in the space of a single generation the leap from guns with a maximum range of, say, thirty or forty miles to projectiles capable not just of spanning continents but of bridging the gap between the worlds.) Similarly, social waves stirred up through the increasing application of science-generated techniques and devices must also proceed exponentially, first perhaps as ripples, then as heavier seas, and suddenly —sometimes before we know it—as tsunami.

  It took a long time for non-scientific intellectuals, in their eagerness to make their own astonishing discoveries, to demolish the old ideal of a good general Classical education and to substitute for it a narrow and often premature specialization which, they argued, was more "practical" and more "relevant." It took even longer for them to establish their new semi-sciences and pseudo-sciences on the same prestige level as that enjoyed by the physical sciences and traditional disciplines, and to begin that general dilution of the educational process, in the name of progress, which not infrequently produces high school graduates who are quite literally illiterate, and men with higher degrees who have no picture of history, almost no idea of the geography of the world they live in, and no concept whatever of their culture's artistic and literary heritage. Not content with this, they managed to undermine parental authority and prestige without offering any effective substitute.

  In this process, that once self-determined intellectual middle class to which I have referred (which included innumerable skilled craftsmen, farmers, and the like in addition to business and professional men) began to find its self-assurance undermined. These were people who, by and large, had always known how to conduct their lives, how to rear their children, how to choose the books they read and the things they needed. They knew that they were part of the community, and were reasonably sure of their status in it. Though they were, like all men, influenced by fashion and by the propaganda of the times, their response to pressures of this sort was not yet Pavlovian. In short, a very high percentage of them were capable of making up their own minds.

  Perhaps the best evidence of this is the fact that for about fifty years in the United States, until the late 1920s, they—as a class, if not invariably as individuals—managed to support more than twenty major general magazines which dealt with all those subjects which are of interest to educated, cultured men: Scribner's, the old American Mercury, the Bookman, Current History, the Dial, and at one time or another many more. These were magazines designed for the reader, not for the advertiser or "consumer." They published speculative and discursive articles and essays, purchased largely on the open market and therefore representing a wide and spontaneous cross section of American thought. What is left of these magazines today? Harper's and the Atlantic—and even these have the smell of Madison Avenue manufacture about them. Nothing has emerged to take their place. The academic quarterlies, with minuscule circulations, are read by almost no one but academics.

  The disappearance of the serious general magazines and subsequently of the better general slicks— the Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, and the American, for instance—is of course only one symptom of the massive de-intellectualization and vulgarization of the intellectual middle class by diluted education and by the mass news-entertainment media. The process became readily noticeable in the 1930s and '40s, but its culmination did not come until TV became universal in the early '50s, for television was able to accomplish something no other communications medium could ever do— provide a world of total unreality, a world which demanded nothing of the viewer, not even an effort of imagination, and which, regardless of its quality or content, inevitably alienated its addicts from the actual world.

  This statement may appear extreme, but consider the statistics of TV viewing today. The average for every child in the country is more than three hours a day. The average set is on for five and a half hours; these are hours when there can be no meaningful communion between children and their parents, between men and women. In the alienation process, this has been—and still is—the true tsunami. Without it, the rupture could never have been so complete—and the counter-culture could never have been born.

  This is of critical importance if we are to assay the part science fiction is going to play in the immediate future, for the counter-culture has proven to be eminently salable, and the temptation to go along with its sometimes suicidal irrationalities will be—and indeed already is—extremely strong.

  Science Fiction and the Counter-Culture

  The voices of the counter-culture have been so strident, its militants and propagandists have employed shock and abrasion to such good effect, and its middlemen—academic, religious, and commercial—have decked it out in so much pseudo-moralistic and pseudo-scientific claptrap, that its real nature has been pretty much obscured.

  Stripped of all the McLuhanesque verbiage, there is nothing new about it. Until a few years ago, it was an under-the-counter culture, varying in detail, varying in legality, but essentially the same animal. For centuries, it has thrived in every major slum from Marseilles to Marrakech, from Port Said to Bombay. It is a culture of fear, and of fear-born irrationalities and excesses. It offers us no new discoveries: the age-old flight into "mind-blowing" drugs, the age-old flight into unrestrained and immature sex, the child's resentment of all rules (those governing personal cleanliness, for instance,) his blind faith in his immediate impulse rather than measured judgment, his temper tantrums when he can't have his way, and—in every area of activity— that antithesis of the scientific spirit, the uncontrolled experiment.

  Why have so many young people drifted into this? I myself believe that, in their alienation, they are searching not so much for a better and brighter future as for a past they have been denied by adults whom they have really scarcely met. The generations with which we are now concerned—and there are as many generations as there are days in the year—have had the TV unreality from birth, not as entertainment in the traditional sense, but as a major life activity. In schools where pupils outnumber teachers by fifty or a hundred to one, they have grown up in what is essentially a children's society, and this has continued in their colleges and universities, where dormitory living is now increasingly the rule, and where too many professors, playing their "publish or perish" pecking order game, leave the greater part of the teacher-pupil relationship to often immature teaching assistants. For many kids, the experiences and associations which used to lead to adulthood are no longer available. Practical lessons in civilized survival, civilized competition, civilized restraints, adult resiliency and adaptability— children seldom can learn these from other children, and young adults cannot mature fully unless they do learn them, unless the survival skills and the necessary graces of their culture are communicated to them in their earliest years
by adults.

  And they know it. The counter-culture is retrogressive. It copies not just the pre-adult behavior of the child and the savage, but even the superficial trappings of past generations and preliterate cultures. It has created no new styles, not even in its clothing. Some it has taken from nineteenth-century Europe, others from Edwardian England, others still from the scrap heap of the 1920s. This is true also of its poses and transient beliefs. In Berkeley, at the main entrance to the University of California, all a boy needs is a beaded headband and a peyote button to be an instant medicine man. Give him a grubby loincloth and he's an instant guru. By wearing clodhopper boots and a Dogpatch hat, he can become a hardy mountaineer; and a Boer War tunic, a string of trade beads or an ankh, a ponytail and a pair of Viking braids can transmute him into something adequately archaic but never previously assembled in pop art. Even his music is unoriginal—fake folk, pseudo-African, or just plain noise.

  The best way to judge the counter-culture is in the measurable statistics of how men and women treat each other. These people claim that they are "liberated," that they have shaken off the repressions of a cruel society and an evil past; they claim that they are animated by love of all men and veneration of the earth. If that is so, why is it that among them unwanted pregnancies, cases of VD, hepatitis, and the dirt-borne diseases, drug freak-outs and psychoses, suicides, and crimes of violence are far more common than ever before, and are still increasing? Why are they not rising instead among the repressed Mormons or the unliberated Amish?

  Because behavior is a better standard by which to judge people than any number of pronouncements,

  I frankly cannot see how the counter-culture can help science fiction, for it is nothing more than the

  unscientific alienation of human beings carried to an unsane extreme. It can provide us with no ideas we could not get elsewhere. (It has not even managed to come up with any coherent scenarios for the new world it is proposing.) It can almost certainly produce no science fiction writers of any stature— not if the field is to retain any of the rationality of the scientific method or any of the discipline of literature and the arts. Its one service to us can be to provide material for extrapolation and for satire —for stories like Fred Pohl's "If All the World Were Like Berkeley," and Clancy O'Brien's "Generation Gaps," (Analog, September 1972).

  And there is always the question of what it may turn into:

  It’s a new cult—the abandonment of civilization, poverty and nature, peace and beauty, beggars for the love of God.

  A reference to the hippie segment of the counter-culture? No, a description of the wandervogel, those alienated youngsters who, after World War I, roamed the German countryside —destined to form a nucleus of Hitler's storm troops. Philip Gibbs, who wrote it in the early 1920s, in a story prescient with anxiety, put those words into the mouth of a Berlin waiter.[41

  The counter-culture appears to be moving in a similar direction, for the search of alienated youth is not only for a past denied to them but for a lost or never-known authority. The counter-culture's uglier involvements—with slum underworlds, with demoniac cults, with sadistic and rapacious street and motorcycle gangs, with far-out terrorists and deftly organized and managed "urban guerillas"—all point in this direction. So do the increasing adulation of "the thoughts of Mao Tse-tung" and the continuing influence of Mr. Marcuse.

  These are matters with which science fiction writers should be deeply and rationally—never hysterically—concerned, for science fiction cannot thrive in any atmosphere of fear or repression, whether it be imposed by revolutionists or by an established society trying to prevent revolution.

  I have, of course, been dealing in great generalizations. What are the parameters of the counterculture? Where does it begin and end? In treating it as a coherent whole, are we not, perhaps, being unjust to innumerable individuals half in, half out of it? I think not. The Egyptian army, in 1967, probably included many men as brave as lions, eager to give their lives for Nasser and whatever else they thought they were fighting for. If so, they failed to stem the panic-stricken flight of the majority— and it is with majorities that we most frequently must deal, not with the odd exceptions to the rule. The fact that science fiction has many readers—and indeed many intelligent and inquiring readers— within the counter-culture does not and cannot outweigh that culture's general influence, which is essentially anti-scientific and anti-rational, and which can only deepen the false split between the "intellect" and the "emotions" dividing modern man against himself.

  Even without the counter-culture and its irrationalities, the world is going to be a complicated enough place for science fiction writers during the next decade, for we are going to have to cope with—among other things—the new and curious fact of academic recognition. Twenty years ago, when I edited the symposium Modern Science Fiction, Its Meaning and Its Future more than a hundred reviews of the book came to my attention; of these, the few that were academic consisted of little more than sneers at science fiction and at the hacks who allegedly were writing it. Now suddenly the academic world, prompted perhaps by the undeniable fact that men have landed on the moon (and possibly by a growing shortage of materials for the Ph.D. mill) has not only discovered our watering place but is splashing around in it with all four feet. Personally, I think that this will prove to be a somewhat mixed blessing.

  The Academic Involvement

  Were the academic involvement confined to those dedicated teachers who delight in practicing what is one of the most creative of professions, and whose critical publications, if any, are of secondary importance to them, it would indeed be a blessing. However, it will not be so confined, for at the other end of the academic spectrum, the minority of critical mandarins have already, with considerable eclat, defined the role which they intend to play.

  Like so much nonscientific and pseudo-scientific "research," academic literary criticism has become very largely a word game, a game of inconstant perspectives and uncertain, shifting values. Often, because many careers depend on it, it is a spiteful, cutthroat game. Even more often, when its play becomes a substitute for teaching and its ploys a substitute for learning, it is a foolish and wasteful one.J5J. The dramatic experience, whether on stage or on the printed page, must be whole for the audience or the reader. To succeed fully, it must touch and involve the whole man, "intellectually" and "emotionally." Where it does indubitably succeed—in the Greek tragedians, in Shakespeare and Moliere, in Tolstoi and Ibsen and Thomas Mann—it does precisely that. A cultural matrix may be needed for it to have its full effect, but even this is minimal. It is universal. Shakespeare, for example, translates and has been translated into splendid Japanese. Because we are all similarly conceived and born of woman, we all have something of Oedipus and Electra in our souls. If we are at all intelligent and sensitive, we also are, in some small part, Hamlet and hunchbacked Richard and Anna Karenina and the brothers Karamazov, Don Juan and Don Quixote and the Ancient Mariner. We really need no tortuous explication either to feel the impact of what the authors have conveyed or, on the "whole man" level, to understand it. The reader of Jane Austen or the Brontes can derive no benefit from a study, no matter how cleverly footnoted, of (say) their putative toilet-training. Nor can he really profit from a psychological exploration of the subconscious drives of Herman Melville or Edgar Allan Poe. It would be more to his enrichment if his general education made him familiar with the courtesies and cruelties of early Nineteenth-Century England, of how the sea and sweat smelled in the forecastle of a New Bedford whaler, or even simply how it felt, dying, to write by candlelight in the raw cold of a New York winter.

  The psychoanalytical illusion of penetrating and exhibiting the soul of man is strong meat for those egos who would magnify themselves by doing so. Put into practice by "qualified" professionals—isn't the going rate now fifty dollars for the fifty-minute hour?—it can claim virtually no predictability and can guarantee no result.[61 In other words, in great measure it is a put-on�
��a very prestigious and profitable put-on, but a put-on nonetheless.