Mimetic fiction is explainable in daylight terms. It might equally be called social fiction, because it deals in the world of consensus, or rational fiction, because it deals in rational explanations. This is fiction of a conscious world. Its ultimate loyalties are to the power of the conscious mind, just as the loyalties of your conscious mind are to itself.
The purpose of mimetic fiction is consciousness-raising. Through inventory, the interconnections of the known are traced. The known gets to know itself. So might Charles Dickens acquaint you with society, Mark Twain with life on the Mississippi, and James Joyce with conscious phrasings of the existence of the unconscious.
On the other hand, the kind of story that insists on the primacy of symbols of the unknown is fantasy. Symbols of the unknown are such things as magics, or strange powerful spirits and beings, all that no ordinary power can successfully oppose. Magic can defeat an ordinary armed knight. It wouldn't be magic if it couldn't. Telekinesis can defeat an atomic bomb by mentally separating atoms.
Modern sf is fantasy. Its magics are various "scientific" powers that are stronger than any known to existing science. Its spirits and beings are robots and aliens.
Fantasy is fiction of the unconscious mind. It acts out unconscious knowledge. In the reflection of the universe presented in contemporary sf, our unconscious becomes more apparent than in any other fiction.
The purpose of fantasy is consciousness-expanding. The existence of unconsciousness, and the existence of unknown things in the world around us, forces us to expand the borders of the known. Consciousness expands itself by forays into the unconscious. Then consciousness makes a new inventory of itself—the act of consciousness-raising.
In the universe and in stories, the unconscious includes the conscious. And also, in the mind. If we accept the similarity of the three—the universe of experience, the universe symbolized in stories, and the human mind—we can demonstrate this in terms of story symbols.
An sf story may include any known symbol. In the farthest reaches of time and space, in the World Beyond the Hill, an sf story may still refer to anything presently known. Moreover, any sf story may be set in the most familiar of familiar places— Greenwich Village, for instance. And into that familiar place, an unknown power or alien will be able to intrude. Such an sf story exists—Chester Anderson's novel The Butterfly Kid. The unknown includes the known. The unconscious includes the conscious.
It we take this contention in terms of mimetic fiction—fiction of the conscious mind and the known universe—we discover that mimetic fiction cannot set foot in the farthest reaches of time and space.
That isn't the known universe—the experienced universe has only gotten as far as the Moon. And in a known place like Greenwich Village, the most unknownlike things that mimetic fiction can produce are a flock of Brazilian sailors, or a mad poet, or the gurgle of a stream of consciousness. But the sailors are reducible to fun-loving, sex-mad Brazilians; the poet is mad, but then Village poets are inclined to be like that, and we understand; and the stream of consciousness is the ear of the conscious listening for hints. The known excludes the unknown.
But if the unconscious were to break through into consciousness, if the truly unknown and possibly not knowable did appear in the heart of the known—if the Brazilians are from Betelgeuse, if the mad poet speaks words that take form and go capering down the streets of the Village to annoy us, if we are asked to take symbols of the unconscious as the most, not the least, serious thing—then our story must be sf. Mimetic fiction, conscious fiction, won't have it, because an item in it has not been rationalized. In a mimetic story, a character might kiss a lamppost, the homeliest of known things, in gratitude that he does not have to take his fantasies seriously.
In order to write fully effective stories, stories of the whole mind, fantasists need two things. First, they need a conception of the universe in which the unknown includes the known. If the conception is compromised, the effectiveness of the stories is compromised. As in the universe of experience, so in the mind. As in the mind, so in the universe of a story. And the reverse, of course.
Second, fantasists must have a sensitive symbolic vocabulary that can be generally understood and that is capable of representing all aspects of the unconscious. Without this vocabulary, it would be difficult to represent some of what must be represented, and communication of it would be altogether impossible.
For a period of five thousand years or more, both necessary conditions existed. Representation of the whole mind was possible. In this assumed universe, the known world was Middle-earth. Middle-earth lay between the heavens, the unknown home of the gods above, and the underworld, the lower sky, the unknown home of the demons below. The juncture of worlds is the point where the two celestial hemispheres and the horizon meet. The known world is surrounded by the unknown.
In a universe like this, the unconscious and the full mind may be represented. Moreover, a sensitive symbolic vocabulary that could be read by anyone also existed. There were magics of every sort. There were strange gods, spirits, and beings. There were endless countries.
The assumption of these stories was that in a past Golden Age, access between the known world and the unknown realms had been easy. The gods had visited Earth and men had visited the gods. But even in these later times, ghosts or spirits might wander onto our Earth in search of victims or at the call of sorcerers. Interconnections between the known and unknown worlds did exist. Subtleties could be expressed.
In this universe of ours, we do learn. The unknown lures the known. The known changes by accumulation. As the known world changes, the unknown world must change to contain it.
A shift in the conception of the universe must be traumatic for the people involved. As in the story universe, so in the mind. As in the mind, so in the world of experience.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the shape of the known world changed. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton revised the shape of the universe for us. They made the earth into a sphere in orbit about the sun. They made the planets into other spheres like the earth, also in orbit about the sun. They made the two celestial hemispheres into a single thing. They made the stars into other suns. In this new universe, earth was no longer Middle-earth. At best, the underworld might be found in the vitals of the earth. And the heavens were to be found nowhere.
The known had changed so radically that a new universe had to be conceived. The unknown world was seemingly turned into the known, or the knowable. In a time like this, it would be impossible to express anything but rationality. It was no accident that the eighteenth century was self-proclaimedly rational. It was no accident that the eighteenth century should have invented the mimetic novel. They could not do anything else. They made a virtue out of a limitation.
In a time when the World Beyond the Hill seems untenable, you will see sunlit excuses for midnight acts. In a century like that it will be impossible to see the entirety of the mind. The unconscious will be feared, doubted, and denied, as it has been since the eighteenth century.
In the time of disintegration of the old universe, fantasists suddenly began to live in a conscious world. This world allowed the World Beyond the Hill no place. If that were true, the end of the universe would truly be at hand. If the universe becomes totally conscious, all change will end. Stasis will have been achieved.
So fantasists reserved exception. One of the ways in which they did this was to conceive of a temporary corner of this earth in which the symbols of the unknown might claim to hold existence. The explorers of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries had glimpsed a variety of strange countries. Fantasists placed the source of some of their unknowns in these countries, or in others like them beyond the present reach of exploration.
Exploration always proved these fairy lands false, but they were the described locations of many of the fantasies of the rational world — More's Utopia (1516), Gulliver's Travels (1726), and the lost race stories so common from 1870 to 1930. These
stories were placed in the last crannies of the Global Village—in spring-heated valleys in the Antarctic, in subterranean caverns, in narrow wonderlands in the Himalayas. The last creditable example of this sort of compromise fantasy may have been James Hilton's Lost Horizon (1933). In this final statement of the relationship of the unknown to the known in the known world, we are told when the immortals of the fabulous land of Shangri-la are exposed at last to the light of the mimetic world, they must wither and die of old age, dissolving "like all too lovely things, at the first touch of reality."
During these past centuries of exploration, men have demonstrated in very real terms just how far they can extend the bounds of the known. They have shown they can extinguish every possible preserve of the World Beyond the Hill on this earth. And if that were all there were to the universe, the end of the universe would be at hand.
Consciousness is really very arrogant. It looms over the last delicate bit of unknown fluff in this world and, knowingly and brutally, it touches the thing, and laughs while the unknown fluff withers into a known thing.
Many fantasy symbols were never comfortable in this vulnerable unknown province in the hinterlands of earth. For instance, Gulliver may have found Lilliput at the ends of the earth, but no one ever found Witchland there. Many of the most powerful fantasy symbols took refuge in other unknown worlds — chiefly Never-never land.
Never-never land, in essence, is the old World Beyond the Hill. Because it was the old unknown, it could only include the old known. It must exclude much of the modern world, and hence no one was ever able to take it seriously, even in the hands of William Morris, Lord Dunsany, or J. R. R. Tolkien.
However, during these same past centuries, fantasists did locate a new true home for the World Beyond the Hill that incorporates Never-never land. They reconceived the universe. In order to do this, it was necessary that the known be extended to its fullest, as conscious busy-beavers, explorers, encyclopedists, novelists, and scientists have seen that it has been in these past three centuries of consciousness-raising. We retire from the Moon. We strain at the limits of our conscious vision. The results of investment in monumental conscious projects like cyclotrons are less while our expense grows greater. Consciousness is such a burden that we are turning as much of it over to computers as we can. Our new conscious limits are now available to fantasists.
During the nineteenth century—or, shall we say more properly, in the bit more than a hundred years between Frankenstein (1818) and the founding of Amazing Stories—a new picture of the universe was adapted from science by writers like Poe, Verne, Wells, Burroughs, and Merritt. They presented this picture in pieces, but it was complete and established by implication prior to Gernsback. The publication of Amazing Stories confirmed the new universe. The name of the new fantasy — scientifiction or sciencefiction—indicated its nineteenth-century origin. Amazing assumed an audience that had made the conclusions of Poe, Verne, and Wells their premises.
This new universe, as we have come to discover it, is one so vast that the Global Village, circling its little sun in the suburbs of its galaxy, lost among many galaxies, can easily be lost. And likewise, this new universe contains reaches of time so extended that Earth could be forgotten.
A universe like this has room for the unknown. Our known world is surrounded by unknown again beyond our ability to explore.
In this new universe, the heavens and the underworld have become space and other dimensions. The Golden Age of the past is replaced by a vision of future perfection. Spirits become alien beings. Magic is replaced by science-beyond-science. Sorcerers become scientists.
The writers of the first hundred years of modern speculative fantasy established the existence of the new World Beyond the Hill. They demonstrated powers beyond the known. They showed that aliens might interact with us in a variety of ways. They showed that stories might be set in the future or on Mars, and that they might encounter the unknown there.
In the period since 1926, the period in which sf has been called "science fiction", modern fantasists have mentally explored the dimensions of their new universe. Science has played so much less a role in this process that apologists have had to strain to justify the name of science fiction. If speculative fantasy was "science fiction" prior to 1926, then sf from 1926-1957 was "idea fiction."
In these mental explorations can be found the meaning of some of the early "trends" of the field. For instance, inventors in stories built strange devices in their basements, including machines to travel in time and space. This was seen as a trend to gadget stories. Then, in the time-ships and space-machines, explorers leaped to the planets, to the stars, outside the galaxy. They scouted, mapped, and circumnavigated large portions of space and time. They saw the beginning and end of the universe. This was seen as a vogue for what the early Thirties called "thought variant" stories. Then, behind the explorers came all conditions of men—patrolmen, miners, pirates, pioneers— proving that men could survive in tents or domes here. That was a trend to adventure stories—space opera.
Behind them came the engineers, the planners, the bureaucrats, the empire-builders. In the 'Forties, space was structured into possible political units of every size, from earth in the future, to Terra and her colonies, to Galactic Empires. Time was structured into epochs in which things could change and change again from the presently known.
It was a joy and a tumble to invent this. The void was filled consistently, vividly, and plausibly with transportation, communication, government, economics, and sociology. The arguments were made over and over. The best ones were rehearsed until they became accepted justifications. The worst ones were improved or discarded. So many arguments were made that it became clear that any situation could be plausibly justified in a variety of ways. And what we saw of all this was the Golden Age of Astounding. The surly little stories of the 'Fifties were the nit-picking end of all the arguments over symbols.
In other words, we suggest that most of the trends in science fiction from 1926 to 1957, including the stories and the careers of writers like E. E. Smith, Jack Williamson, John W. Campbell, Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt and Isaac Asimov, may be explained as symbol invention, the defining and testing of a symbolic vocabulary. Or, if you like, these stories put in the plumbing and engineering of the new unknown universe. People can believe in a universe with these dimensions because of these stories.
The writers of this period thought of this process of defining and testing symbolic vocabulary as "playing with ideas." James Blish, who began as an sf writer in 1940, has said, for instance:
Since at least about 1938, treatment has become steadily more important than springboard notion. Science-fiction writers borrow such notions from each other freely, to an extent that in other fields would sometimes be indistinguishable from plagiarism; this is almost never resented as long as direct quotation is avoided, and the resulting story is commonly welcomed as fresh if the borrowing writer succeeds in looking at the old idea in a new light—whether that light be dramatic, emotional, or even simply technological. Innovations of this kind, which are far more important in any literary field than any single germinal notion, are what make or break modern science fiction.
But what Blish is describing here is more fruitfully described as the defining and testing of symbols than as "looking at old ideas in a new light." By 1957, the symbols of sf were complete enough to sustain a wide range of imaginary activities—stories of invention, exploration, engineering, politics, economics; careers of various sorts; different life-styles. Activities as varied as the worlds of Smith,
Sturgeon, Heinlein, van Vogt, Clarke, Knight, Pohl, and Kornbluth.
This range of symbols is now the common property of our culture. Children encounter the symbols of the sf of the Fifties from the time they are small. They know what a spaceship is. They know time machines. They know extraterrestrials. All these are to be found on the backs of cereal boxes. The culture as a whole is sufficiently educated in the symbols of th
e new World Beyond the Hill that it was able to accept and understand the TV series Star Trek and the movie 2001: Space Odyssey, which were equivalent to the written sf of the Fifties. The shows had to assume an audience familiar with these symbols.
As the set of sf symbols has grown relatively complete, the symbols have been learned by a general audience. In a period when mimetic literature has been choking on its own desperation, sf has been the one consistently expanding literature in the Western world. The audience of sf has steadily grown since Gernsback. Sf has suddenly taken on interest as a subject in the academic community. The sense of this trend is apparent if we say again that a fantasist must have a sensitive symbolic vocabulary that can be generally understood and that is capable of representing all aspects of the unconscious. With the vocabulary that was established by the end of the Fifties, sf had become intelligible to a more general audience, and so attracted one.
We can assume that as these symbols continue to be used and acquire meanings and nuances through use—as our symbolic vocabulary grows more sensitive—the audience of speculative fantasy will continue to grow.
At the same time, it is clear that the symbolic vocabulary of the new reaction of the World Beyond the Hill is not as sensitive and flexible as the old vocabulary of fantasy was. Magic has subtleties that super-scientific power or even psi power do not have. Sorcerers have moral overtones that scientists do not have. There is a dimension in Faust that cannot be duplicated in the symbols available in Frankenstein.
A fantasy dragon has a wide and sensitive range of meanings as a symbol. Science fiction writers have attempted to write of alien beings that have dragonly qualities. De Camp has tried, and Jack Vance, and Robert Heinlein, and Anne McCaffrey, and Poul Anderson a number of times. All have caught at some of the essence of dragonness, but none has equaled or bettered the original.
Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow Page 24