Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow

by Reginald Bretnor

  F. R. Leavis, the English literary critic, quoted Lawrence's statement in Leavis's 1962 rejoiner to C. P. Snow's "The Two Cultures." A brief summary of that debate may be illuminating here: Snow was describing the scientific culture, but for that we might, without significant distortion, substitute science fiction; and Leavis was defending the literary culture, but for that we can substitute "mainstream," that at its best is the literary culture's mode of expression. Through an examination of the positions taken in the debate we may be able to understand why the mainstream became what it is and why until recently science fiction was excluded from it.

  After expressing regret over the fact that most scientists are ignorant of literature and greater regret over the fact that almost all members of the literary culture are ignorant of science, Snow attacked literary intellectuals as "natural Luddities" who "have never tried, wanted, nor been able to understand the industrial revolution, much less accept it. Almost everywhere. intellectual persons didn't comprehend what was happening. Certainly the writers didn't. Plenty of them shuddered away, as though the right course for a man of feeling was to contract out; some. tried various kinds of fancies which were not in effect more than screams of horror."

  Snow saw "those two revolutions, the agricultural and the industrial-scientific" as "the only qualitative changes in social living that men have ever known" and noted that "with singular unanimity, in any country where they had the chance, the poor walked off the land into the factories as fast as the factories could take them." Against this Leavis placed a "vision of our imminent tomorrow in today's America: the energy, the triumphant technology, the productivity, the high standard of living and the life-impoverishment—the human emptiness: emptiness and boredom craving alcohol—of one kind or another" and compared it with "a Bushman, an Indian peasant, or a member of those poignantly surviving primitive peoples, with their marvelous art and skills and vital intelligence."

  “If the scientists have the future in their bones," Snow said, "then the traditional culture responds by wishing that the future did not exist."

  Leavis inherited his critical principles from Matthew Arnold who said, "Literature is the criticism of life." Of course Arnold meant "criticism" in the broad sense of judging and evaluation rather than faultfinding, but the standards of literature—and literary comparisons with past successes—have led to more faultfinding than programs for improvement. In 1913 Bertrand Russell pointed out:

  In the study of literature or art our attention is perpetually rivetted upon the past: the men of Greece or of the Renaissance did better than any men do now; the triumphs of former ages, so far from facilitating fresh triumphs in our own age, actually increase the difficulty of fresh triumphs by rendering originality harder of attainment; not only is artistic achievement not cumulative, but it seems even to depend upon a certain freshness and naivete of impulse and vision which civilization tends to destroy. Hence come, to those who have been nourished on the literary and artistic productions of former ages, a certain peevishness and undue fastidiousness towards the present, from which there seems no escape except into the deliberate vandalism which ignores tradition and in the search after originality achieves only the eccentric.

  And H. G. Wells noted in 1929:

  We are constantly being told that the human animal is “degenerating,” body and mind, through the malign influences of big towns; that a miasma of “vulgarity” and monotony is spreading over a once refined and rich and beautifully varied world, that something exquisite called the human “soul,” which was formerly quite all right, is now in a very bad way, and that plainly before us, unless we mend our ways and return to mediaeval dirt and haphazard, the open road, the wind upon the heath, brother, simple piety, an unrestricted birth-rate, spade husbandry, hand-made furniture, honest, homely surgery without anaesthetics, long skirts and hair for women, a ten-hour day for workmen, and more slapping and snubbing for the young, there is nothing before us but nervous wreckage and spiritual darkness.

  One source for such accusations might be Ruskin, who noted in the mid-nineteenth century "signs of a slavery in our England a thousand times more bitter and more degrading than that of the scourged African, or helot Greek. Men may be beaten, chained, tormented, yoked like cattle, slaughtered like summer flies, and yet remain in one sense, and the best sense free"; and Ruskin went on to praise the age of nobility and peasantry when "famine, and peril, and sword, and all evil, and all shame, have been borne willingly in the causes of masters and kings."

  In this context Leavis wrote that the human faculty above all others to which literature addresses itself is the moral consciousness, which is also the source of all successful creation, the very root of poetic genius, and to maintain that great literature asks deeply important questions about the civilization around it, but "of course, to such questions there can't be, in any ordinary sense of the word, answers." The questions, moreover, will all be of the sort to make society hesitate, slow down, lose confidence in the future, distrust both social planning and technological advance.

  In support, the Spectator remarked that "philosophy. takes the form of that effort to impart moral direction, which is to be found in the best nineteenth-century English writers."

  If Snow's scientists have the future in their bones, the literary culture claims moral direction.

  Professor Martin Green pointed out in 1962 that "for the last ten or fifteen years the study of literature, and to some extent the general intellectual climate, has been increasingly dominated by a movement very largely antithetical in tendency—a movement which insists on narrow intense knowledge (insights), on the need for personal freedom within the best-planned society, on the dangers of modern science and technology, on the irreducibility of artistic and religious modes."[111

  Webster's New World Dictionary defines science as "knowledge as opposed to intuition," and Maxwell Anderson described the work of art as "a hieroglyph, and the artist's endeavor is to set forth his version of the world in a series of picture writings which convey meanings beyond the scope of direct statement."

  By what criteria is literature evaluated? Theories of criticism have not so much evolved as alternated: beginning with the classical criticism of Aristotle, Longinus, and Horace criticism moved through the ecclesiasticism of the Middle Ages, the classical revival of the Renaissance, various attempts like that of Sir Philip Sidney's to find a new theory of criticism, the neoclassicism of Alexander Pope, the romanticism of Wordsworth and Coleridge, the impressionism, growing out of romanticism, of Walter Pater, the realism of Matthew Arnold and then of William Dean Howells and Henry James, the naturalism of Emile Zola and Frank Norris, and finally arriving in this century at the new humanism of Irving Babbitt and Paul Elmer More, Marxist pragmatism, and the New Criticism of Robert Penn Warren, Allen Tate, and Cleanth Brooks.

  M. H. Abrams in The Mirror and the Lamp suggests that criticism can be categorized according to the dominance of one of four elements in "the total situation of a work of art": the work, the artist, the universe, and the audience. If the critic judges the work on how well it imitates the universe, he is using "mimetic theory"; in terms of its effect on an audience, "pragmatic theory"; in terms of the artist, "expressive theory"; in its own terms, "objective theory."

  “Mimetic theory"—imitation—was dominant in Aristotle and his successors, "pragmatic theory," from Horace through most of the eighteenth century; "expressive theory" came in with romanticism; "objective theory"—the work itself for its own sake—emerged in the nineteenth century and became dominant in the twentieth.

  Modern criticism—and the popular book-review media which, insofar as they contain criticism rather than reviews, are subconsciously influenced by prevalent critical standards and modes—has ignored science fiction for most of its recent history not only because of the crudeness of its craftsmanship, the ephemeral nature of its medium, and its nondiscriminating popular audience but also because its philosophy was optimistic and scientific in a pessimistic
, anti-scientific literary climate, because its values were accessible only through mimetic and pragmatic theory in a period dominated by expressive and objective theory, and because modern criticism finds nothing to say about its style and content.

  Hilary Corke, British poet and critic, says of Snow's novels, "Their emphasis is on plot, not character," and "A paragraph of a Snow novel yields nothing whatever to deep analysis; his merits lie in the structure and ordering of the whole."

  The same comments might be made about a well-constructed science fiction novel.

  All of this was true until recently. About half a dozen years ago—a time roughly coincident with the student riots, not only in the United States but in France and Great Britain as well— revolution came to science fiction. Perhaps a revolution was inevitable against the apparent inhumanity of a viewpoint which could equate the Vietnam War with Wat Tyler's Rebellion, Discrimination with serfdom, individual tragedy with the crushing of a cockroach, which could think of mass starvation as a possible long-term good, plague as a genetic boon, humanitarianism as genetic suicide, and war as merely another means of redressing Malthusian imbalances. Although science fiction has been consistently egalitarian, libertarian, and fraternitarian, its penchant for the long view ultimately created a new breed of writers who focused their concerns on the short term, on individuals and their inalienable worth, on men's passions and perplexities rather than their reason.

  But it was no coincidence that the revolution in science fiction —Judith Merril called it "the New Wave" in her later SF: The Year's Best anthologies—occurred at the same time as the campus disturbances over civil rights and the Vietnam war, which spilled over into university governance and even the structure of the college curriculum. The New Wave was more than a reaction to the scientific positivism that had become the main current of science fiction; it was a response by young writers to the spirit of the times which was rejecting intellectualism as a blind alley, which demonstrated itself in a resurgence of fantasy, occultism, and mysticism and in a willingness to sacrifice the universities to end the war in Vietnam, to trade the classroom and the book for the experience, to seek answers in drugs and meditation rather than in study and experiment, to put together new groupings rather than improve old ones.' "I think therefore I am" became "I feel therefore I am," and this shift from rationalism to sensationalism found its way into science fiction first in England through Michael Moorcock's state-subsidized New Worlds and the writings of J. G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, and in part of John Brunner and Moorcock himself; and was picked up in the United States by Harlan Ellison,

  Norman Spinrad, Thomas Disch, and a host of younger writers.

  Tom Godwin's "The Cold Equations" ends:

  A cold equation had been balanced and he was alone on the ship. Something shapeless and ugly was hurrying ahead of him, going to Woden where its brother was waiting through the night, but the empty ship still lived for a little while with the presence of the girl who had not known about the forces that killed with neither hatred nor malice. It seemed, almost, that she still sat small and bewildered and frightened on the metal box beside him, her words echoing hauntingly clear in the void she had left behind her:

  “I didn't do anything to die for—I didn't do anything—”

  J. G. Ballard's "Terminal Beach" also is about death, but death which is not caused but casual and dealt with not directly but symbolically through the wanderings of a man named Traven among the sterile, incomprehensible structures remaining on deserted Eniwetok, site of a post-war hydrogen bomb test. The story is evocative and its meaning comes, elusively, through descriptions of a psychological numbness to death and a premonition of atomic catastrophe. Traven's wife and six-year-old son were killed in an automobile accident, but this seems to Traven only part of what he calls the pre-Third—the two decades between 1945 and 1965 "suspended from the quivering volcano's lip of World War III." Now Traven has come to Eniwetok for a purpose he does not understand and he moves aimlessly around the island. Ballard's story ends:

  As the next days passed into weeks, the dignified figure of the (dead) Japanese sat in his chair fifty yards from him, guarding Traven from the blocks. Their magic still filled Traven’s reveries, but he now had sufficient strength to rouse himself and forage for food. In the hot sunlight the skin of the Japanese became more and more bleached, and sometimes Traven would wake at night to find the white sepulchral figure sitting there, arms resting at its sides, in the shadows that crossed the concrete floor.

  At these moments he would often see his wife and son watching him from the dunes. As time passed they came closer, and he would sometimes turn to find them only a few yards behind him.

  Patiently Traven waited for them to speak to him, thinking of the great blocks whose entrance was guarded by the seated figure of the dead archangel, as the waves broke on the distant shore and the burning bombers fell through his dreams.

  Stories like "Terminal Beach" partake more of the mainstream than of science fiction in its traditional form, and some traditional writers and readers of science fiction objected to what they considered their inconclusiveness, willful obscurity, pointlessness, and aping of mainstream experimental techniques at the expense of content. But the deeper objections of the traditionalists were stirred, I believe, by the mainstream attitudes New Wave writers adopted. In general, New Wave stories have traded the viewpoints of detachment for identification with the individual, and their viewpoint on reality has been subjective.

  Professor Arthur Mizener believes that contemporary fiction draws upon four main traditions: realistic, romantic, subjective, and southern (the last falls outside the framework of the other three, and we will ignore it). The three traditions can be distinguished, Mizener says, by their attitude toward objective common sense: the realistic story makes us feel that objective common sense will not only be correct about how things will turn out, but right and wise and understanding that they must turn out that way; the romantic story makes us feel that objective common sense is likely to be correct about how things will turn out, but will miss the real meaning of things because it will not take into account the feelings of the central character; and the subjective story makes us feel that what men dream is so important, and therefore so real, that the objective world of common sense, however resistant to men's desires, does not finally count.

  Science fiction, in the tradition established and nourished by John Campbell in the magazine first called Astounding and then Analog, is primarily realistic; science fiction in the tradition of the scientific romance of the early pulp magazines was primarily romantic. The writers of the New Wave seem primarily subjectivists—a thoroughly respectable literary position but one which is foreign not only to main-current science fiction but to science itself. It is not alien, however, to fantasy, which always has been subjective. Science fiction is a public vision; fantasy is a private vision. As a consequence, writers of fantasy always have been more acceptable to the mainstream than writers of science fiction. Ray Bradbury, for instance, was welcomed into the mainstream early in his career; Asimov and Heinlein never were—although Heinlein's least characteristic and most private science fiction novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, achieved some recognition. Professor Gary K. Wolfe, writing in Extrapolation, responded to Sam Lundwall's criticism of Bradbury's Mars as a fantasy world—or rather "the nostalgic Middle West of Bradbury's dreams"—with the statement that "the 'weakness' of Bradbury's Mars being a transplanted Middle West is what ultimately gives the book its strength because it argues that values are transmitted by individuals rather than society and that man tries to remake the natural world in his own image."

  But the New Wave did more than insinuate a mainstream viewpoint into science fiction; it also brought in a greater concern for technique, for stream of consciousness and interior monologue, for shifting viewpoints and symbols and metaphors, for complex characters conducting their lives on a treadmill of meaningless days, for little people or strange people caught up in the
innumerable folds of an inexplicable world, for lives that are static, trapped, or doomed.

  “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream," writes Harlan Ellison, and Tom Disch writes "The Squirrel Cage."

  Some of the younger writers have picked up, or reinvented, Heinlein's 1947 suggestion that science fiction be renamed "speculative fiction" on the grounds that "science fiction" is too narrow a term to cover the various kinds of fiction that qualify under any reasonable definition but include no science. The motivations of these writers of speculative fiction probably are a bit more complex: the term "science fiction" is not broad enough to cover the kind of fiction they wish to write, and a new name suggests new possibilities, new directions, and a break with old pulp origins.

  By now the waves have quieted. Writers who want to do new things, experimental things, are doing them; writers who want to say new things, difficult things, outrageous things, are saying them. Many of these new voices are finding new audiences; young people, particularly, are finding the new subjective writers appealing. The net result has been, in spite of the outcries of the traditionalists, an increase in the audience for science fiction; the dividing line between the traditional and the new is blurring, and the differences may be striking to the informed but the similarities are greater to the reader looking for something different in reading matter that recognizes the pressing importance, both objective and subjective, of external problems.

  A side effect of the new wave has been an increased freedom within the field to experiment, to use unfamiliar techniques and unusual subject matter—in other words to liberate still further what has always prided itself on being the freest medium for fiction. The final shape of science fiction—or speculative fiction —is still unclear. Some observers fear the dominance of the New Wave, of style to the detriment of content. If the decision were up to mainstream critics alone, this fear might be realized, for they find many familiar and valued elements in New Wave fiction, and their close analysis can be rewarding. But New Wave fiction, no matter how avant-garde the style (and much of it is no more avant-garde than Ulysses (1922) and U.S.A. (Manhattan Transfer, 1925)), still is about something, which is not the usual situation in mainstream fiction.