The man who loved reason had the rational approach of a science fiction writer. The spirit he represents finds alien the dismal view of man displayed by the mainstream when its writers venture into the genre, like Aldous Huxley with Brave New World or Nevil Shute with On the Beach; it is not so much that their view of man is tragic nor even that they perceive him as an emotional rather than a rational being, but that they underestimate him. If threatened by destruction, science fiction says, man will not surrender peacefully; he will struggle to the end, studying how to live under water, on a frozen or a flaming earth, in outer space, on the most hostile worlds. It seems to me that this is the truer picture of man's character. That concept is not unique to science fiction, of course. "I decline to accept the end of man," William Faulkner said in his 1950 Nobel laureate speech; and "I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail." And Dylan Thomas wrote:
Do not go gentle into that good night,/Old age should burn and rave at close of day;/Rage, rage against the dying of the light—
But rationalism—the belief that the mind is the ultimate judge of reality and can be relied upon to provide an answer to any problem—even rationalism modified by experimentalism does not completely describe science fiction's philosophic position. Independently it arrived at a position which approximated existentialism, described by Jean-Paul Sartre in these terms:
Atheistic existentialism, of which I am a representative, declares with greater consistency that if God does not exist there is at least one being whose existence comes before its essence, a being which exists before it can be defined by any conception of it. That being is man or, as Heidegger had it, the human reality. What do we mean by saying that existence precedes essence? We mean that man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world—and defines himself after wards.
Man is nothing else but that which he makes of himself. If, however, it is true that existence is prior to essence, man is responsible for what he is. Thus, the first effect of existentialism is that it puts every man in possession of himself as he is, and places the entire responsibility for his existence squarely upon his own shoulders.
And, when we say that man is responsible for himself, we do not mean that he is responsible only for his own individuality, but that he is responsible for all men. When we say that man chooses himself, we do mean that every one of us must choose himself; but by that we also mean that in choosing for himself he chooses for all men.
Even before Sartre, though not before Kierkegaard (whose influence upon science fiction is doubtful), science fiction said that man was responsible and that each individual was a representative of humanity. Even if he is a conditioned animal, through his passions and his understanding he has free will; he can choose between actions and between fates. Even in a hostile universe deserted by God and meaning, he still must struggle to remain human, to do the human thing. The human thing varies: it may be to survive, to keep evolving, to keep improving, to explore the ultimate potential of the human form, the human mind, the human spirit, or of intelligence itself. In this sense, the arrogance of the science fiction man is a kind of humility before the blind creative processes which produce him, and a determination to assume the responsibilities of choice. Carried to its ultimate form this philosophy results in not only individual but racial sacrifice: if some alien race or intelligence, natural or artificial, proves itself superior, better fitted to think, to understand, to create, to survive, man has a responsibility to step aside and, perhaps wearily, perhaps gratefully, lay down the earthman's burden. Science fiction writers almost always considered this solution even if they did not always choose it; mainstream writers venturing into the genre never consider intellectual superiority or promise.
In a story called "Resurrection" (also, "The Monster"), A. E. van Vogt illustrated science fiction's pride in humanity and its still unrealized potential. An alien spaceship descends upon an earth where life has been wiped out by an unexpected cosmic storm. The aliens recreate men from fragments of bone and destroy them as soon as they suggest a possibility of danger; each resurrected man has greater powers until the fourth understands the situation at the moment of his rebirth, vanishes instantly, and revives the rest of mankind to fulfill man's interrupted destiny.
Other stories demonstrate science fictional man's concern for the survival of his successor if not himself. Nietzsche called man a rope stretched between the animal and the superhuman; Arthur Clarke calls man the organic phase between the inorganic. "It's hard to see," he has said, "how on a lifeless plant an IBM computer could evolve without passing through the organic phase first." The intelligent machine may be man's successor.
Clifford Simak, in a collection of related stories called City, imagined that man's successors would be dogs and robots. In John Campbell's story "Twilight," it was too late for dogs: "as man strode toward maturity, he destroyed all forms of life that menaced him" and eventually, because of their interdependence, all other forms of life. Now man was dying because he had lost his curiosity, but the machines still operated perfectly. A visitor to that distant future "brought another machine to life and set it to a task which, in time to come, it will perform. I ordered it to make a machine which would have what man has lost. A curious machine."
On a more immediate level, science fiction tests mankind and the future against the principles of scientific positivism, a philosophy which rejects metaphysics and maintains that knowledge is based only on sense experience and scientific experiment and observation. The basic attitude of serious, main-current science fiction speculation about the future and man's role in it is pragmatism. "It is not what you believe to be true that will determine your or humanity's success," John Campbell's Analog insisted, "but what works." A substantial body of science fiction is dedicated to overturning prejudice and prior judgments, romanticism and sentimentality; and some writers have created careers out of asking themselves what mankind and its folk wisdom hold dear and then demonstrating fictionally that the opposite makes more sense.
The ultimate expression of this pragmatism is embodied in Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations." A girl, hoping to see her brother, who is a member of an advance group on a frontier planet, stows away aboard a one-man emergency delivery ship sent out by an interstellar liner with vital serum for another exploration party on that planet. The amount of fuel necessary to reach the planet has been carefully calculated because the "frontier" demands the strictest economy. Interstellar regulations state that a stowaway must be jettisoned immediately upon discovery; otherwise the ship will crash and kill eight people instead of one. The cold equations say that the girl must leave the ship, that she must die; she does.
“The Cold Equations" looks at humanity from the viewpoint of the universe; the universe is indifferent to the feelings of individuals. It doesn't care whether they live or die, whether mankind itself survives; its cosmic processes involve the titanic birth and death of suns, of galaxies, and of a universe itself slowly running down toward the universal heat death called entropy, and even for these things it does not care. Those who infer purpose or concern in the universe may find comfort, but they also assume risk; and what they hazard is not merely their own lives and the lives of others but the waste of those lives, those human efforts, those human purposes, through sentiment or ignorance.
Viewpoint is a key to the writing of fiction. More than fifty years ago, Percy Lubbock, in his classic study called The Craft of Fiction, wrote: "The whole intricate question of method, in the craft of fiction, I take to be governed by the question of the point of view—the question of the relation in which the narrator stands to the story." The kinds of viewpoints that science fiction adopts, however, are more than questions of narration; in a larger sense, irrespective of the point of view from which the story is narrated, the viewpoints of science fiction, whether implied or explicit, have made science fiction what it is; they create the tone and perspective which have distinguished science fiction from other kinds of fiction, and m
ore than anything else, subject or scene, created the effects it has achieved.
These viewpoints detach the reader from his anthropomorphism, from his blind involvement with the human race; for the first time, perhaps, he is able to see man—and hopefully himself —from afar and judge objectively his potential and his accomplishments, his history and his prospects. The most distant, coldest, most objective view is the indifference of the universe. Another, a bit closer and a bit more subjective, is the view of man from space. One reason for getting into space is to attain this perspective, and one of the values of the space program was the photography of earth from space, and the comments of the astronauts. From this group of extroverted pragmatists came such remarks as Neil Armstrong's "I remember on the trip home on Apollo 11 it suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small." To Bill Anders the sight of earth from space evoked "feelings about humanity and human needs that I never had before." Rusty Schweickart said, "I completely lost my identity as an American astronaut. I felt a part of everyone and everything sweeping past me below." Or Tom Stafford: "You don't look down at the world as an American but as a human being." Michael Collins: "I knew I was alone in a way that no earthling had ever been before." Or Ed Mitchell: "You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world and a compulsion to do something about it."
Any of those statements could have come from Reverend McMillen in my 1955 short story, "The Cave of Night," in which the first man to venture into space gets stranded there and radios back:
“Up here you wonder why we’re so different when the land is the same. You think: we’re all children of the same mother planet. Who says we’re different?.
“I have seen the Earth. as no man has ever seen it— turning below me like a fantastic ball, the seas like blue glass in the sun. or lashed into gray storm-peaks—and the land green with life. the cities of the world in the night, sparkling. and the people.”
What the astronauts felt is what science fiction, at its best, can achieve. What other kind of fiction has this capability?
The view from space brings humility. In those photographs from space, where were man's monuments? Where were the signs of his civilization? "Is there life on earth?" I. S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan ask in their book Intelligent Life in the Universe, and go on to remark, after searching Tiros and Nimbus satellite photographs of the eastern seaboard of the United States and the southern tip of India and the island of Ceylon, "The regions depicted in these photographs are among the most heavily populated and densely vegetated areas of the earth; yet even close inspection shows no signs of life at all. New York appears deserted; India and Ceylon appear barren. when the resolution is no better than a few kilometers, there is no sign of life on Earth."
The farther into space one travels the less significant become the passions and agonies of man, and the only matter of importance in the long morning of man's struggle to survive is his survival so that his sons could be seeded among the stars, just as the only importance of the long, terrible efforts of gilled creatures to live upon the land was that they became the ancestors of all air-breathers, including man, and the only importance to the life of a man is what he passes on to his children or the children of his race in the form of a physical, genetic, or intellectual legacy.
In 1969 Ray Bradbury said, "Space travels says you can live forever. Now we are able to transport our seed to other worlds. We can be sure that this miraculous gift of life goes on forever."
Another detached viewpoint of science fiction is the future. Much of science fiction has looked back at man from this vantage place: from there the important function of the present is to make possible the future—or, at least, not to make it impossible. Ted Sturgeon made use of this viewpoint in his 1947 story "Thunder and Roses," in which the United States has been attacked with atomic bombs from both the east and the west; it is doomed, although a few survivors still are searching for the secret trigger that would send off the atomic weapons of the United States in a retaliation which would destroy all life on earth. One woman, a popular singer, tries to get across the message that "we must die—without striking back."
“Let us die with the knowledge that we have done the one noble thing left to us. The spark of humanity can still live and grow on this planet. It will be blown and drenched, shaken and all but extinguished, but it will live if that song is a true one. It will live if we are human enough to discount the fact that the spark is in the custody of our temporary enemy. Some—a few—of his children will live to merge with the humanity that will gradually emerge from the jungles and the wilderness. Perhaps there will be ten thousand years of beastliness; perhaps man will be able to rebuild while he still has his ruins.”
He looked down through the darkness at his hands. No planet, no universe, is greater to a man than his own ego, his own observing self. These hands were the hands of all history, and like the hands of all men, they could by their small acts make human history or end it. Whether this power of hands was that of a billion hands or whether it came to a focus in these two —this was suddenly unimportant to the eternities which now enfolded him.
“You’ll have your chance,” he said into the far future. “And, by Heaven, you’d better make good.”
Here is science fiction pointing out the ultimate horror of holocaust—the horror is not that so many will die so horribly and so painfully (all men are doomed to die and few deaths are easy) but that it destroys the future of mankind, all the unachieved potential, all the untested possibilities, all the art and love and courage and glory that might be; it is not just that some idiot kind of total warfare might destroy the present (the present is being destroyed minute by minute as it is pushed inexorably into the future) but that it might destroy eternity. From this viewpoint, from the viewpoint of our distant descendants, no matter what their alien forms, ways, beliefs, the ultimate crime is not murder but stupidity, as pollution, global war, civil strife, and other contemporary carelessnesses that threaten racial survival are stupid. In a metaphorical sense, science fiction might be considered letters from the future, from our children, urging us to be careful of their world.
A final detached viewpoint is that of the alien—sometimes the alien to our society such as the visitor from the future, as in Fredric Brown's "Dark Interlude," or the visitor from a distant planet, as in Robert Sheckley's "Love, Incorporated," or the earthman in an alien society, as in Sheckley's "The Language of Love" or Roger Zelazny's "A Rose for Ecclesiastes," or the man from the present in a future society, as in Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Wells's When the Sleeper Wakes, or Frederik Pohl's The Age of the Pussyfoot, sometimes the extraterrestrial beings who visit earth for conquest or exploration or judgment, as in Murray Leinster's "Nobody Saw the Ship," Ross Rocklynne's "Jackdaw," Jack Williamson's The Trial of Terra, or Gordon Dickson's "Dolphin's Way," or the alien conquerors of Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End, or the ultimate alien—the Creator—of Eric Frank Russell's "Hobbyist." From the alien viewpoint we can see more clearly the relativity of our most cherished beliefs, the ridiculousness of our traditions, our mores, and our concerns, and the temporality of our societies; and we can learn to share the broader vision that encompasses all living creatures, all thinking beings —as in Clifford Simak's Time Quarry and other stories—which by extension renders trivial the minor differences between races or individuals.
These viewpoints—there are others and innumerable variations upon them—help determine how a reader is going to react to science fiction; some readers welcome perspective on themselves or on humanity; some find it painful or silly or are unable to make the imaginative leap necessary to dissociate themselves from their unshakably earthbound preconceptions —they are unable to get outside their own skins and their own viewpoints. This may be one reason fewer women have read and written
science fiction than men; genetically or through conditioning women seem to be more emotionally committed to their own viewpoints.
Edmund Crispin pointed out in a 1962 London Times Literary Supplement:
All these things being thus, it would be surprising if science fiction were to be popular. Nobody can take altogether kindly to the thesis that neither he personally, nor anyone else whatever, runs much risk of unduly bedazzling the eye of eternity. The best seller lists are scarcely, if one comes to think of it, the place to look for fiction which instructs us, no matter how cheerfully, in how completely trivial we all are. In medieval times Man was commonly visualized as being dwarfed against a backdrop of stupendous spiritual or supernatural agencies; yet not dwarfed ultimately, since the Christian religion consistently averred him to be a special creation. From the Renaissance onwards that backdrop shrank, or was more and more ignored, with a corresponding gain in stature to the actor in front of it. What science fiction has done, and what makes it egregious, is to dwarf Man all over again (this time without compensation) against a new great backdrop, that of environment. Leopold Bloom has Dublin, and
Strether has Edwardian England, and Madame Bovary has provincial France; but the relative nonentities in science fiction have the entire cosmos, with everything that is, or conceivably might be, in it.
The mainstream and the literary criticism that created it emphasize instead the overriding importance of the individual. Crispin writes of science fiction as "origin of species fiction" in which a man is important only in his relationship to humanity; to focus on any individual "is as if a bacteriologist were to become fixated not just on a particular group of bacteria but on one isolated bacterium." Opposed to that is D. H. Lawrence's conviction that "only in living individuals is life there, and individual lives cannot be aggregated or equated or dealt with quantitatively in any way."
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