And fiction: naturalism took much of its inspiration from Darwin, and H. G. Wells found inspiration for his first scientific romances from Darwin through Wells's inspirational biology teacher, Darwin's foremost champion, Thomas H. Huxley.
With Wells science fiction began to take form and direction; it became more a medium of ideas than a variety of adventure, and the ideas that Wells incorporated in his stories and novels created whole new thematic lineages down to the present, from time travel through alien invasion, forced evolution, invisibility, overspecialization, urban development, and so on and on.
And still there was no mainstream. When relatively few people can read and relatively few books are published nice distinctions between kinds of fiction are unnecessary. General literacy was another product, in the English-speaking countries at least, of the last third of the nineteenth century. Until then the reading of fiction, at least, was almost exclusively restricted to a small upper class. The great majority of the people were illiterate or, at best, literate enough only to read their Bibles.
Compulsory primary schooling was a product of the post-Civil War era, when enthusiasm for the power of education swept all parts and levels of the nation. By the mid-1890s thirty-one state legislatures had made elementary school attendance compulsory.
With more young people completing elementary school, attendance in high school shot upward. In 1870 only sixteen thousand boys and girls were graduated from high school; in the next thirty years the number of high schools jumped from about five hundred to six thousand and the number of high-school graduates to nearly ninety-five thousand a year. Americans were being educated for upward social and economic mobility and as citizens and workers in an increasingly technical and urbanized society; as a side benefit, they were being taught to read fiction.
In England a similar process was launched by the Education Act of 1871 which organized the British and national schools into a state system and supplemented them with board schools and a system of degrees by examination which created the correspondence colleges. By the last decade of the century, H. G. Wells noted in his autobiography, "The habit of reading was spreading to new classes with distinctive needs and curiosities. New books were being demanded and fresh authors were in request."
This was the period, also, when the mass magazines originated, beginning with George Newnes's TitBits in 1881 and The Strand ten years later, imitated in the United States in 1893 beginning with McClure's Magazine. The development of mass magazines was made possible by the inventions of the rotary printing press in 1846, the linotype and wood-pulp paper in 1884, and the half-tone engraving in 1886.
The processes which were creating a greatly expanded reading public with new and untutored reading tastes, and the popular magazines to publish the material that public wished to read not only were creating popular fiction, including science fiction, to fill these magazines, but also the critical necessity to distinguish between mere "popular" entertainment and "serious" fiction.
Of course, even the short story and the novel themselves are relatively young. "The only new pleasures invented since Greek times have been smoking and the reading of novels," a French critic once commented. Although man always has invented narratives to amuse his fellows or to transmit cultural information, and we can trace the development of story through Greek and Roman episodes and incidents, Medieval fables, epics, and romances, and English and Italian tales, the novel as we know it did not develop into a formal kind of storytelling until the eighteenth century, and the short story, which became a peculiarly American specialty, was not consciously formulated into an art form until the nineteenth century, with writers like Hawthorne and Poe, Merimee and Balzac, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. The reading of fiction was closely associated with the emergence of the middle class as the dominant element in European and American society.
The impulses that finally produced science fiction when the conditions were right go back to times as early as the development of narrative itself: the desires to entertain and to be entertained, to instruct, to explain, to illuminate, to invent, to imagine things that are not. Homer's Iliad gave the Greeks a common heritage, but his Odyssey naturalized their Mediterranean universe. Not until the facts of change created by man through his growing control over nature and the possibility of controlling change became apparent to perceptive men and then to most men, however, did science fiction become possible: that is, somewhat after the Industrial Revolution, generally dated about 1750. Considering the cultural inertia of the eighteenth century, that it took another hundred years to produce the first true science fiction writer is not surprising.
Some sixty years after the publication of Journey to the Center of the Earth, Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories and the first science fiction magazine was born. Between Verne and Amazing Stories science fiction had existed in individual books and in the pulp fiction magazines—Argosy, All-Story, Popular, People's Cavalier, Blue Book, Black Cat, New Story, and others —where science fiction stories, mostly adventure in remote places, were found adjacent to adventure stories, western stories, sea stories, war stories, romantic stories, and other kinds of popular fiction.
In 1914, Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan of the Apes, when it appeared in book form, still could be reviewed, even by such newspapers as The New York Times. Thirty years later Burroughs's books were excluded from most public libraries, along with those of the other famous storytellers of the first two decades: Garrett P. Serviss, George Allen England, and A. Merritt. In fact, during the thirties and forties virtually no hardcover science fiction was being published; only after the end of World War II, first with the fan presses and then with publishers such as Simon and Schuster, Doubleday, Frederick Fell, Random House, and Pellegrini and Cudahy, did science fiction return to book form. Even then it received no critical attention. A bit later, when most science fiction novels appeared as paperback originals, they shared the critical fate of all paperbacks: oblivion.
One faculty member told me in 1950, "Science fiction is at best subliterary."
What had happened to the genre since H. G. Wells's novels were welcomed by such literary figures as Henry James, who was filled with "wonder and admiration" by Wells's early work and spoke of reading the First Men in the Moon: "a. petites doses as one sips (I suppose) old Tokay," and of allowing Twelve Stories and a Dream "to melt, lollipopwise, upon my imaginative tongue"; and Joseph Conrad, who wrote to Wells how much he liked his work, particularly The Invisible Man: "Impressed is the word, O Realist of the Fantastic!" and added: "It is masterly —it is ironic—it is very relentless—and it is very true." Both James and Conrad kept after Wells to improve his description, his characterization, his subtlety, but they were not put off by his material.
One thing that happened to science fiction was a change in criticism and the appearance of the mainstream as a concept. More important than both, however was the creation of the science fiction magazine. Today the observer of the science fiction scene can recognize that magazine science fiction was a ghetto, but in the early days of the magazines readers and writers had no such concern. The discovery of Amazing Stories was a joyful recognition that now readers could enjoy their favorite kind of reading without having to winnow it out of general magazines or search it out in obscure corners of the public library. Fans, and Gernsback discovered many of them, now could read, collect, and even communicate with one another, first in the letters columns of the magazines, then in clubs and fan magazines.
Science fiction became a refuge and a mission. Science fiction writers were the missionaries: they worked in strange lands, they were underpaid, and they preached salvation and a better world. Gernsback believed that readers would be introduced to science and technology through science fiction and some of them would be inspired to become scientists and through science create a better world; one of the early fan feuds centered around the contents of a fan magazine: should it be devoted to science fiction or science?
At first Amazing Stories ran only rep
rints, mostly from Verne, Wells, and Poe, but gradually new writers were discovered and introduced. The first generation was composed primarily of pulp writers who had to write very fast and in a variety of categories—adventure, sea, detective, war—in order to make a living. They helped give science fiction its subliterary reputation; by necessity their stories were constructed to narrative formulas and they were hastily written by people who did not know much about writing and cared somewhat less. There were no H. G. Wellses among them.
Among that first generation of science fiction writers, however, were men like E. E. Smith, Jack Williamson, and Edmond Hamilton who did not know a great deal about writing but were eaten up with wonder and the desire to create it themselves. They were fascinated by Amazing Stories and the creations of Verne and Wells and Merritt, and they were inspired by the cosmic visions of scientists like Einstein and Hubble and Rutherford and Planck and de Broglie and Heisenberg and Jeans and Shapley, who were peering into the atom and staring out at an expanding universe.
The second generation were writers more like Smith and Williamson and Hamilton; they had grown up reading science fiction magazines—not only Amazing Stories but its competitors, Wonder Stories and Astounding Stories—and they had learned something about ideas and science and speculation and a little bit more about writing, mostly learned from other science fiction writers. Many of them read little except science fiction and perhaps some science and philosophy and history, but they could tell a story and they could build on the ideas of other science fiction writers. They were men like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and A. E. van Vogt, who all came along in 1939, not long after John W. Campbell took over as editor of Astounding Stories (shortly to become Astounding Science Fiction) in December 1937.
Now science fiction was truly a ghetto, and it began breeding its own traditions, its own myths, its own history, and its own storytellers: the third generation—some, like Ray Bradbury, were in the second—came largely out of fandom. They wanted to be better Asimovs, Heinleins, Sturgeons, and van Vogts. They were largely ignored by the world outside, but greatly admired within the ghetto itself. That seemed enough.
The fourth generation. But I will get to that a bit later.
Meanwhile science fiction had begun developing a philosophy and a concept of the future based upon that philosophy— a sort of consensus future history. This vision of man's destiny saw him conquering space, spreading his colonies through the solar system and the nearer stars and finally the galaxy itself (sometimes meeting alien races but most often not), experiencing a breakdown in communications or government which left isolated human communities to develop along divergent paths until a new galaxywide government arose to bring mankind back together, wiser and kinder and stronger than before.
From the vantage point of that future, earth was viewed as an ancestral home, sometimes remembered, sometimes recalled only in myth or legend, or a backwater of human progress, a planet ravaged by radioactives, as Isaac Asimov speculated in Pebble in the Sky, or a burial ground for earth's far-flung trillions, as Clifford Simak speculated in Cemetery World.
Donald Wollheim, in his personal history of science fiction, The Universe Makers, traces the beginnings of that consensus future history to Asimov's Foundation stories, which began with "Foundation" in 1942, although there were predecessors like Edmond Hamilton and Doc Smith, and Robert Heinlein contributed significantly with his future history of the next two centuries. In the ghetto, however, as the stories and ideas passed, so to speak, from hand to hand, they were refined and added to like an oral epic until general agreement was reached —no one was bound to it, but through most stories ran the same general assumptions about what was likely to happen.
That future was so significantly like our present that we can say we are today living in a science fiction world.
Behind the assumptions of that future history lay a concept of man which was at the same time arrogant and humble. It was a concept that grew out of the dominant literary and scientific movements of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: realism and naturalism on the literary side, Darwinism, sociology, Marxism, and Freudianism on the scientific.
Realism, which helped shape critical standards of what fiction ought to be, sprang up about the middle of the nineteenth century mostly in reaction to romanticism; realism—"the truthful treatment of material," William Dean Howells called it— was the ultimate in middle-class art, focusing its concerns on the immediate, the present, the specific action, and the clear consequence; it was democratic, emphasized character and ethics, that is, issues of conduct, and believed that art should imitate life (i.e., be "mimetic," in the language of criticism), and since life had neither plot nor symmetry, realistic fiction should also eliminate them.
Naturalism, which followed but did not succeed realism, shared with realism its concern for fidelity to detail and reaction to the assumptions of romanticism, but it shared with romanticism a belief that the action was important not so much for itself as for what it revealed about the nature of a greater reality. Naturalism was the application to fiction of the principles of scientific determinism; it drew much of its inspiration from Darwin but also was influenced by Newton's mechanistic determinism, by Marx's view of history as a battleground of great economic and social forces, by Freud's concept of inner and subconscious determinism, and by Comte's view of social and environmental determinism.
Under the influence of naturalism, science fiction adopted a view of man as an animal selected by environmental pressures for intelligence, aggressiveness, possessiveness, and survival; from the scientific optimism of the times, science fiction saw man also as an animal whose passions, aspirations, and understanding had given him a tragic nobility: he might not be divine but in his hubris and his understanding he partook of divinity —he had eaten of the tree of life and of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; he was a creature who could dream of greatness and understand that it was only a dream.
“Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps," Hazlitt wrote, "for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they ought to be."
Man exists, science fiction said, and he must continue to exist, for the process that evolved him selected survival characteristics of dominance, intelligence, adaptability, and endurance.
Arthur C. Clarke illustrated that philosophical position with an early story called "Rescue Party." A spaceship manned by members of a race who "had been lords of the Universe since the dawn of history" discovers that earth's sun is to become a nova in seven hours and that earth, examined only four hundred thousand years ago and found to have no intelligent life, has developed a civilization. After searching an abandoned earth, the ship finally discovers in the lonely void far beyond Pluto a vast, precise array of chemically powered spaceships. Alvaron, the old, wise captain of the alien ship, gestures (with a tentacle) toward the Milky Way, "from the Central Planets to the lonely suns of the Rim," and comments:
“You know, I feel rather afraid of these people. Suppose they don’t like our little Federation.
Something tells me they’ll be a very determined people. We’d better be polite to them. After all, we only outnumber them about a thousand million to one.”
Rugon laughed at his captain’s little joke.
Twenty years afterwards, the remark didn’t seem so funny.
Robert Heinlein, in his juvenile novel Have Spacesuit—Will Travel, set up a situation in which a teenager faces the responsibility of representing man's right to survive before a Council of Three Galaxies which has accused humanity of being a danger to all other intelligent creatures. The boy finally can endure the unfairness no longer:
“It’s no defense, you don’t want a defense. All right, take away our star—you will if you can and I guess you can. Go ahead! We’ll make a star! Then, someday, we’ll come back and hunt you down—all of you!”
Nobody bawled me out. I suddenly felt like a kid who has made a ho
rrible mistake at a party and doesn’t know how to cover it up. But I meant it. Oh, I didn’t think we could do it. Not yet. But we’d die trying. “Die trying” is the proudest human thing.
Pride in humanity has been one of science fiction's most significant attitudes (alternating, of course, with feelings of shame, dismay, and disgust; misanthropy has been a persistent ingredient in the mix; I do not wish to suggest that science fiction writers have been single-minded but that certain attitudes represent the main current)—but pride not so much in the qualities a creature must have to survive, though survival is basic and without it everything else is frivolous, but pride in the qualities a creature that must survive can develop and sustain in spite of unrelenting adversity. Man, says the science fiction main current, must be tough and aggressive, but his glory is that he can temper his toughness and aggressiveness with an appreciation for beauty, with artistic creativity, with self-sacrifice, with a capacity for love. And that paradox is what it means to be truly human.
Naturalism held no such pride in man nor hopes for him; what it seemed to demand was understanding of man's predicament and through understanding an amelioration of the harsh judgments and treatments inflicted upon him. Science fiction moderated its naturalism, its Darwinism, not merely with optimism but with rationalism.
Leo Rosten concluded a recent book with a story about Destiny:
Destiny came down to an island, centuries ago, and summoned three of the inhabitants before him. “What would you do,” asked Destiny, “if I told you that tomorrow this island will be completely inundated by an immense tidal wave?” The first man, who was a cynic, said, “Why I would eat, drink, carouse, and make love all night long!” The second man, who was a mystic, said, “I would go to the sacred groves with my loved ones and make sacrifices to the gods and pray without ceasing.” And the third man, who loved reason, thought for a while, confused and troubled, and said, “Why I would assemble our wisest men and begin at once to study how to live under water.” [10]
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