Another possibility to be considered is that martial races which have not, as we have, been disunited may already have made it into space, but here again we come up against the same rule on a different plane—can rival warring races, considering the energies at their disposal when they attain interstellar capability, survive even in space against each other?
In any case, the argument would appear to be undeniable that it is to man's interest to unite, to make common cause against any and all apostles of disunion, Left against Right, race against race, religion against religion, or whatever. We almost certainly will not make it into space warring and divided, and if by some miracle we make it anyhow we'd better be united to meet whatever may await us there. Here we have one of the most important sf themes today—a theme great enough to challenge any writer, and any number of writers: how can man survive against himself?
And this, in turn—because our problem is so much a problem of our own confusions—leads directly into another area we have inadequately treated: that of the communications failure, the understanding failure, the world-view failure, that of semantics, of what we mean when we make noises or put marks on paper.
Science Fiction and the Problems of Meaning
Forty years ago, Count Alfred Korzybski published Science and Sanity, An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, a profound, revolutionary, and seminal work which has had considerable influence, not only on scientists but on science fiction writers—Robert Heinlein and
John W. Campbell, for example. (S. I. Hayakawa's Language in Thought and Action, a useful introductory simplification of Korzybski's formulation, is more widely known and available, but is not an adequate substitute for the original text.)
The essence of Korzybski's system is that the languages we use in daily intercourse are essentially primitive in structure, that they perpetuate false-to-fact concepts, and that they literally dictate contra-survival behavior. An analogy may be made to a world map—let's say Ptolemy's—that has been added to, altered, subtracted from, but never fundamentally revised. Were we to rely on such a map, we'd have one hell of a time trying to find our way from Patagonia to Peoria—it would be as difficult as it is now to find our way from hatred and suspicion to love and trust, from destructive anarchy to creative order. Korzybski pointed out that, for this reason, the developing sciences had been forced to invent entirely new maps—new languages (including the mathematics) designed to describe phenomena accurately. He emphasized the fact that, while all languages abstract only certain data from the reality with which they purport to deal, unconsciously their users confer on them an allness which is not only delusive, but psychologically crippling. He devised and described techniques by which individuals could train themselves to become conscious of abstracting and to avoid confusing orders of abstraction.
A very simple example will suffice. The word spider refers to any individual specimen of an entire order of creatures, the arachnida, the majority of which are harmless, some of which are useful, and only a few of which (at least in the West) are in any way dangerous to man. Yet to many individuals it is a word of fear, triggering instant and usually nonfunctional reactions. We don't have to look far for other, even sadder samples: words like nigger, Fascist, imperialist, wop, pig, Jew—the list is endless.
The result of a study of Korzybskian techniques is to de-fuse many of these words, and to expose the falseness of the intellectual-emotional meanings they convey—and of those terrible psychological push buttons manipulators of men have used throughout man's history. It is, I think, no exaggeration to say that anyone who has really worked at these techniques can scarcely read a political speech again without translating most of it into blab-blab-blab-blab-blab. Or listen to the hard-sell advertising of the mass news-entertainment media. Or take the glossolalia of the pseudo- and semi-sciences very seriously.
Naturally, the Korzybskian formulation was greeted with considerable antagonism by many non-scientific intellectuals, and particularly by those whose careers had been built on what he would have considered the unsane use of language—for few men are big enough to acknowledge even the possibility of error when their prestige is founded on it. Korzybski's influence, in the academic community and among intellectuals generally, while by no means negligible, was never able to realize its initial promise. However, at this juncture in human affairs, science fiction writers especially would do well to become familiar with it, for it is the only formulation, at least to my knowledge, offering us any really sane, uninvolved approach to those problems of meaning which are letting us tear ourselves apart—and which could follow us into space if we succeed in getting there.
Of course, they have already done so in our fictional adventures and encounters among the stars, limiting our imaginations where alien beings and civilizations are concerned just as they limit our imaginations with regard to man's affairs. They will not be easy for any of us to cope with, either in the personal dramas we present or the social frameworks which must contain them. But if more of us at least make the effort, our scope will be extended vastly—and so, perhaps, will be our contribution to mankind.
In his chapter for this symposium, Alan Nourse takes science fiction to task for its failure, in recent years, to invent new and alternative societies; and it is true that generally writers simply transpose old orders and old anarchies into new settings, usually not even endowing them with new insanities. It is as though our self-confinement in the stockade of our languages has made it almost impossible for us to imagine societies other than those evolved around their unconscious structural matrices; for almost always, where any truly alien society or truly new society is concerned, we take refuge in the explanation that its way of thinking or of doing things is simply unexplainable in human, or in contemporary human, terms.
Years ago, I made a very simple attempt at a departure from this pattern in a short story, "High Man, Low Man," published in Beyond (May 1954). It concerned a society of intelligent beings evolved, not from tree-climbing ancestors, but from earth-digging creatures similar to badgers. Their whole survival drive had been downward, for at bedrock they were safer from their enemies than anywhere. Consequently, their social value-system was the reverse of ours. In their history, slaves had been the highest social class; their Emperor had always been addressed as Your Abysmal Lowness. They plumbed the bottomless depths of science, philosophy, and ethics. They fell to success, and rose from grace. If they admired one of their fellows they said that they looked down on him, and called him the lowest of the low. Their stockbrokers, confronted by a market crash, didn't jump out of their office-building windows; they slammed their elevators up into the roof.
A light and rather inconsequential story, it proved disquieting to an editor or two—probably those who had worked hard to rise in the world. One of them (not a science fiction editor) returned it with an agitated note which she addressed to Dear Miss So-and-so—her own name.
I mention it here only as an example and a possibility How would the world look to beings dwelling in their own carapaces on the ocean floor, seeking refuge in caves and crevices? What social value-gradients might they not adopt? For that matter how do porpoises express such concepts as "superior" and "inferior," both of which derive from the basic physical fact that the chap higher in the tree could often brain his enemy without being hurt, or catch his dinner without it seeing him?
These are simplicities. The science fiction exploration of variant meanings and symbologies will, in many areas, go far beyond them. The first issue of Vertex contains an article by Larry Niven, a highly original and beautifully reasoned article "The Theory and Practice of Time Travel," in which the semantics of time travel are considered:
The English language can’t handle time travel. We conclude that the ancestors who made our language didn’t have minds equipped to handle time travel. Naturally we don’t either; for our thinking is too dependent on our language.
As far as I know, no language has tenses equ
ipped to handle time travel. No language on Earth. Yet.
But then, no language was ever equipped to handle lasers, television, or spaceflight until lasers, television, and spaceflight were developed. Then the words followed.
If time travel were thrust upon us, would we develop a language to handle it?
We’d need a basic past tense, an altered past tense, a potential past tense (might have been), an altered future tense, an excised future tense (for a future that can no longer happen), a home base present tense, a present-of-the-moment tense, an enclosed present tense (for use while the vehicle is moving through time), a future past tense (“I’ll meet you at the bombing of Pearl Harbor in half an hour.”), a past future tense (“Just a souvenir I picked up ten million years from now”), and many more. We’d need at least two directions of time flow: sequential personal time, and universal time, with a complete set of tenses for each.
We’d need pronouns to distinguish (you of the past) from (you of the future) and (you of the present). After all, the three of you might all be sitting around the same table someday.
Those creative minds who can conceive of such perspectives can also face the challenge of the meaning-gap in human affairs, and — perhaps simply by dramatizing the precision and beauty of the scientific method, perhaps by contrasting it with the destructive misuse of technology by non-scientific men, perhaps even by exploring new ways of seeing—can at least help to prepare the way to a new understanding and a new synthesis. This may not be easy, for it is much harder to make such subjects interesting in fiction than simply to fall back on the well-known tricks of shock, excitation, and abrasion.
From its beginnings, the best of science fiction has at least tried to provide entertainment for the whole man—lover and hater, son and father, worker and adventurer, and enquirer and problem solver —and perhaps today its most important function may be to help men realize their wholeness, that each man should indeed, to some degree at least, play all these roles, and thereby to repair some of the damage done by premature individual specialization, by the divisive forces in society, and by the sub-intellectual pressures of manipulators and the mass news-entertainment media.
Because every writer is a propagandist whether he wants to be or not, this means that, in the Age of Space, the science fiction writer must do his best to achieve, at least in his perspectives, the Renaissance ideal of the universal man. He must try to swallow the world whole. We have been told that this is no longer possible, for the facile reason that "in Leonardo's day one man could learn everything there was to know; today, there is so much to learn that all anybody can do is specialize."
This is very much like saying that, because no man can possibly know every town and hamlet, coastline and stream and mountain range in the wide world, a clear and accurate world map which he can understand cannot be drawn. It is not necessary to be a scientist to understand the uses and implications of the scientific method. It is not necessary to be an engineer to comprehend the workings of technology, or a mathematician to see that the mathematices are languages, supplementary to the tongues we speak.
These are areas in which our general educations are hideously deficient—and this deficiency today is much more critical even than the failure to transmit our "cultural" heritage, for it prevents us from coping successfully either with ourselves or with the world. Actually, in order to revive the ideal of a general education and of individual universality, the first step should be to introduce epistemology as a grade-school subject and to continue emphasizing it until the formal education is completed.
For this, science fiction can be at least a partial substitute— but only if its writers, new and old, are given the essential freedom and the necessary resources to penetrate and develop themes that still lie on the frontiers of our knowledge.
Writers must have the freedom to think, to discuss, to write and publish. (I wonder how much good science fiction has not been written, even in our own relatively open society, simply because of "security" regulations?)
Writers also need freedom of time, which can be translated bluntly as enough money. To cite expert testimony in support of this contention, I shall again quote Dr. Torrey. (Though of course he is referring to shamans, witch doctors, medicine men, and other highly qualified personages, perhaps we can apply his words to writers also.):
It is the dignity which brings the real payoff. If we accredit indigenous therapists but relegate their pay and status to that of a janitor, then we must expect to get janitor-level performance. [9]
The doctor has a real point there—for the responsibility of the serious science fiction writer in the Age of Space is, if not more important, certainly wider in its scope than the therapist's, indigenous or otherwise.
It is to do his utmost, while entertaining his readers, to make sure that there will be an Age of Space, and that the old Norse prophesy—
Wind time, wolf time—
There will come a year When no man on earth His brother shall spare.
—shall not be fulfilled.
Reginald Bretnor
Reginald Bretnor was born in 1911 in Vladivostok, Siberia, where his father was a banker. His family moved to Japan in 1915, and he lived there until brought to the U.S. in January 1920.
He received a haphazard education in a number of private and public schools and in one or two colleges, and has no degrees. During the War, he wrote propaganda to Japan and the Far East for the Office of War Information, and afterward continued with the Department of State's OIICA until he resigned in February 1947. Since then he has been freelancing, and is now living with his wife, Rosalie, in Oregon.
His fiction, much of it humor, has appeared in a wide variety of magazines: Harper's, Esquire, Today's Woman, a few academic quarterlies, the major sf magazines, Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and so forth. Many of his stories have been anthologized.
His articles, on public affairs and military theory, have been published in such periodicals as the Michigan Quarterly Review, Modern Age, and the Military Review; and he is the author of Decisive Warfare, a Study in Military Theory, 1969 (Stackpole Books).
As editor, he published Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Future, 1953 (Coward-McCann), a now-standard critical symposium, for which he wrote the final chapter on "The Future of Science Fiction." He is also the author of the article on sf in the last two editions of the Encyclopedia Britannica.
His interests include Japanese swords and related areas of Japanese art; antique and modern weapons (he is the inventor of an automatic mortar on which a U.S. patent has been issued); military and naval history and theory; parapsychology; people and their stories; the world at large; and the great adventure of the Age of Space. He is a member of several organizations which reflect these interests.
The Art and Science of Science Fiction
James Gunn
Science Fiction and the Mainstream
Science fiction is a relatively recent invention.
So is the mainstream.
We can uncover predecessors and cite precedents but they only obscure the fact that the first successful science fiction writer—in the sense that science fiction made him immensely popular and a sizable fortune—was Jules Verne, whose first science fiction novel, Journey to the Center of the Earth, was published in 1864, not much more than a century ago.
The word mainstream, on the other hand, is not listed in any metaphorical sense in that ultimate authority on word origins, The Oxford English Dictionary; Merriam-Webster's International does not list it until its 1961 edition; Random House, in 1968; and none of them mention its literary meaning.
Clearly the use of the term goes back half a century if not twice that far, but it should also be clear that the state of mind described by mainstream is contemporary. In fact, science fiction and the mainstream may have been created by the same conditions: the tendency toward specialization which produced, among many other aspects of our society, the all-fiction magazines beginning with Argosy in 1
896 and the category magazines beginning in 1906 with the Railroad Man's Magazine, continuing with The Ocean in 1907, Detective Story Monthly in 1915, Western Story Magazine in 1919, and culminating, for science fiction readers anyway, with Amazing Stories in 1926.
In the nineteenth century all kinds of fiction might be given different names—Jules Verne's novels were called voyages extraordinaires and H. G. Wells's science fiction novels were called "scientific romances"—but almost all (if we omit such publications as "penny dreadfuls" and "dime novels") were part of general fiction. Most nineteenth-century writers—including Verne and Wells and Kipling and Twain, as well as Poe and Hawthorne and Balzac and Haggard and Doyle, among many —wrote a variety of fiction dealing with contemporary life, history, adventure, and so forth, and did not feel that they were writing something markedly different when they wrote science fiction.
The readers of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories were likely to read his historical novels and The Lost World as well, John Brunner has pointed out; and those who read H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines and his Egyptian historical novels probably also read She and Ayesha.
The nineteenth century was the period when the impact of science and technology on the Western world became obvious to everyone—steam and its impact upon transportation led the list but it was followed quickly by electricity, submarines, balloons and other aircraft, telegraphy and the telephone, explosives, canals, weapons, medical advances such as anesthesia and Pasteur's work with bacteria, mesmerism, improved metal processes, the chemical industry, plastics, commercial oil wells, recording, photography, the internal combustion engine and the automobile, motion pictures, the incandescent lamp, and X rays.
More important, perhaps, than any of these was a theory: Darwin's theory of the Origin of Species which presented a different concept of man, not as a special creation but as a natural and evolving creature; and Darwin's speculations about natural selection and the survival of the fittest soon were translated into social, economic, and even political action.
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