With the exception of the Sherlock Holmesian Baker Street Irregulars with chapters in any parts of the world, I know of no other branch of imaginative fiction that has so strong a glamour for its readers.
In fact, when Conan Doyle tried to kill Holmes, there was such an uproar, the detective had to be resurrected to satisfy the outraged fans. James Blish had to blow up the galaxy to end his Cities in Flight series.
All readers have one or two—perhaps many more—books or stories that have affected them deeply in the course of their reading life. Speaking subjectively, I got turned on to science fiction by reading Edgar Rice Burroughs, A. Merritt, and H. Rider Haggard the summer I was twelve. But the Carnegie Library in Upper Montclair, New Jersey, had little more than the "classics." Fortunately I got another exposure to the magical equations when I was a young married woman. This time Edmund Hamilton's splendidly romantic Star Kings, Andre Norton's Beast Master and Daybreak 2000 A.D., and Isaac Asimov's Foundation series wove the essential "glamour."
The science fictional story that has had the most influence on me personally and philosophically is Austin Tappan Wright's Islandia. An exceptional novel on every count, Islandia is surviving the test of time on sterling merits. The book was published first in 1942. I took my voyage to Islandia's shores at sixteen, and I've reread the abridged version of 1,032 pages roughly every two or three years. Islandia was, in 1942, termed a Utopian novel but, by its scope, the novel exceeds any category. Islandia, as a place, is fully conceived, with meteorology charts, maps, detailed city plans, fables, poetry, and a history (written by one of the novel's characters). Islandia is also the exception to the rule of loveless sf stories. For Islandia defines and illustrates many facets of that emotion: the love of the hero, John Lang, for a country not his own, for which he had the greatest empathy and keenest affection—alia is the Islandian language word for this aspect of love. Islandians differentiate between apia (sexual lust) and apiata (puppy love or infatuation, soon to pass but hot and fierce while it lasts). Ania is the enduring, mature love between two people who desire to perpetuate their love in children, the energy and devotion of building a home together (continuing a home, actually, since love of birthplace is very strong in every Islandian). There is also amia, the love/affection/respect/esteem in which one can hold a group or a single person with no sexual overtones. And linamia, the strong friendship that occurs between members of the same sex only once or twice in a lifetime.
Good taste precluded promiscuity among Islandians yet John Lang does have a passionate love affair (apia) with Nattana Hytha. Lang also suffers through an intense platonic longing for Dorna, sister of his best friend, Dorn, with whom Lang exchanges linamia. Lang is cautioned against marrying an Islandian woman as there would always be an unbridgeable difference in outlook. He goes back to the States briefly to test his love for his adopted country, Islandia, and discovers true ania for a young American girl, Gladys Hunter. The two marry in Islandia and live, we hope, with reasonable felicity thereafter. Wright never suggests that life in Islandia is perfect.
Islandia is not without prostitutes, but they are not considered degenerate or classless: women seek this way of life for a variety of reasons. When they leave the protection of their family, the house in which they then abide looks after them in loco familiae. No shame is attached to their profession so that they are free to return to their home provinces and marry. An amazing notion when you consider that Islandia, although conceived by its author in his youth, was written during the '20s and '30s in Puritan American Pennsylvania.
Islandia is far more than John Lang's love stories, or his realization that Islandia is heart's home. It is a plea against the disadvantages of progress—disadvantages under which we are all suffering in this polluted world, and from which many of us take refuge in the enchanted pages of science fiction.
I have often looked longingly at the globe of the world, yearning to find Karain continent— somewhere. Mr. Wright never gives the exact longitude or latitude. I suppose that one of our astronauts may have seen it in passing—and judiciously kept silent. Islandia could not have survived her stubborn and glorious isolation in a modern world of jumbo jets and Telstar. Fortunately for us war-weary, illusion-shattered readers, she remains intact, as Mr. Wright first envisioned her, richly endowed with the glamour and romance that is the basic ingredient of all science fiction.
Anne McCaffrey
Born April 1, 1926, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Anne McCaffrey returned there to take a B.A. cum laude degree in Slavonic Languages and Literatures at Radcliffe College. After working as an advertising copywriter, she married Wright Johnson, had three children and did freelance stage direction of opera and operetta, occasionally performing in shows herself. With conductor Clarence Snyder, she stage directed and produced the American Premiere of Carl Orffs Ludus De Nato Infante Mirijicus in Greenville, Delaware. She began to write full-time in 1965 when her youngest child started school. From 1968-1970 she served as Secretary-Treasurer of the Science Fiction Writers of America. After her divorce in 1970, she moved to Ireland with her children where she is currently working on new novels and enjoying the amenities of the country, particularly hunting on her Irish gray, Mister Ed.
Ms. McCaffrey published her first short story in 1954 but did not publish with any regularity until the 1960s when the "Helva" stories began to attract attention. Since then she has published over thirty-five stories, eight novels, an anthology, and a cookbook. "Weyr Search" won her the Hugo Award in 1967, and "Dragonrider" (from the same series) claimed the Nebula Award in 1968 which, incidentally, made her the first woman to win both awards. She has lectured to universities, high schools, and library study groups in the States, been a Guest of Honor at conventions in the USA, Canada, and England, and has appeared on television and radio on both sides of the Atlantic.
Restoree, 1967 (Ballantine)
Dragonflight, 1968 (Ballantine and Walker & Co.)
Decision at Doona, 1969 (Ballantine)
Ship Who Sang, 1970 (Ballantine)
Alchemy & Academe, 1970 (Doubleday), editor Dragonquest, 1971 (Ballantine)
Mark of Merlin, 1971 (Dell)
Ring of Fear, 1971 (Dell)
To Ride Pegasus, 1973 (Ballantine)
Out of This World Cookbook, 1973 (Ballantine)
Catteni & White Dragon, (Ballantine, forthcoming)
Queendom's Story & Sight Unseen, (Dell, forthcoming)
Gordon R. Dickson
Plausibility in Science Fiction
There is no question that plausibility— that writerly art of making a story worthy of belief—in science fiction makes a different and extra demand upon its author in comparison, for example, to that which an equivalent piece of historical or contemporary fiction makes upon its creator.
The large reason for this different and extra demand is that science fiction attempts, by its own definition, to give its readers something more than they would expect to receive from an equivalent piece of non-science fiction.
In all forms of story-making, imagination is required for the creation of characters, the rendering of scenes, and in the organization of the action. These three vital elements not only need to be entertaining and original, but must also convey an impression of reality, or the reader will lose faith in the story and abandon it. However, science fiction undertakes a requirement beyond these three. It contracts with its readers to provide not only these necessary elements but also to offer an experience outside of ordinary reality; and it undertakes to make this particular experience believable—however unfamiliar or bizarre—or fail as a story.
Of all other forms of fiction, only the historical novel approaches this additional requirement in its proper form. The historical short story or novel promises in character and action all that the contemporary story does, laid in the here and now; but the historical story also attempts to do this with its scene laid in a time that is far enough in the past to be unfamiliar to the readers. Superficially, then, it might
seem that the undertaking of the sf story is no greater than that of the historical story in that, as the historical story undertakes to place its scene backward in time while the sf story merely places itself forward or elsewhere, the added difficulties of both forms must be equal.
But this is literally a conclusion based on a superficial view. A little closer attention to the difference between the requirements for authenticity in the three forms shows that if the contemporary author finds the straw of reality necessary to make his literary bricks lying openly around him in observable experience, the writer of historical fiction is only required to go a step further and dig for what he requires—to research for it, in fact, among the collected evidence of history concerning the period in which he is writing.
Moreover, in neither one of these two forms are the requirements for correctness of their realistic elements vital. The reader is not usually disposed to quarrel with the even moderately entertaining writer of fiction dealing with the contemporary scene just because the furniture of that scene is not portrayed with total accuracy or correctly connected with the period of his story. Minor anachronisms can be dismissed— though the good writer of contemporary fiction will know and render his scene as scrupulously as any other artist.
Similarly, an entertaining historical writer can with some safety turn out to be either a lazy researchist, in which case his work may be peppered with historical inaccuracies, or he can with comparable safety go to the opposite extreme. If he is an overzealous researcher—in fact, a historian in writer's clothing —he may deafen the mental ear of his reader with wagonloads of recorded fact that have only a flimsy justification for being mentioned within the framework of the story.
Again, if he is a good writer of historical fiction, he commits neither sin. He will achieve the difficult task of digging up and interweaving just the right choice and amount of historical fact in just the proper place and manner in his narrative to make his outdated scene glow with life and reality. But individual artistry and success should not be allowed to cloud the very real, basic differences in technical problems between the three story forms.
If the writers of both contemporary or historical fiction may succeed in spite of either lazy or excessive handling of the straw of reality in their scenes, the sf writer has no such freedom available to him. This is because his scene, by definition, cannot call on the authority of what is, or has been, actually existent. His premise is that what he has to tell you either does not exist, or has not yet come into existence. Consequently, he cannot take refuge in the record book. The only pretension to reality in scene that he can make is to show the scene as an integral part of a narrative which as a whole impresses the reader as something that could actually happen. In short, the straw of a manufactured realism with which the sf writer makes his particular literary bricks must be entirely convincing to the reader in its own right, or the whole story will lose its power to convince. In sf, the matter of a realistic —i.e., plausible—scene is one of the pillars that bears the whole weight of the story. If it fails, the story crumbles.
If this much is true in science fiction with the scene, it is on the same ground true of the elements of character and action. In a contemporary or historical story, we expect to find the characters resembling people we have known in our own lives; and the more they resemble, the more we feel they are true to life. In science fiction, on the contrary, we look for and expect to find ways in which the characters are different from anyone we have known, with differences that will reassure us we are not being served the warmed-over present, dished up falsely on a science fictional plate.
In contemporary or historical action we assume that the events taking place will reassure our sense of belief by taking place in the patterns and modes that we recognize from our own practical experience of life; and the more they seem to do so, the more we feel that what we are vicariously experiencing is made of the stuff of real events. But in science fiction we look forward to seeing that which takes place happen for reasons and causes we have never ourselves encountered or suspected to exist. Otherwise, there will be no surprise, no thrill of opening a door upon the unknown, which is what we expect to feel when we take a literary venture into the undiscovered lands lying outside the realms of the real present and the real past.
So then, if the straw of apparent reality is so ultimately necessary to successful science fiction, and if that straw exists nowhere around us to be picked up or even mined for—how can plausibility in science fiction be achieved?
The answer of course is by a refinement of the method by which a historical writer makes his story real to a present-day audience. The historical writer researches for the elements of reality out of which he constructs his story. The science fiction writer must research at second remove, not directly for the elements themselves, but for the raw materials out of which to manufacture these elements. He must take the process of infusing his story with reality clear through from the equivalent of digging of iron ore to the striking of the steel nails with which he will fasten together the imaginative panels of his story's structure.
The basic principle underlying what he does is one used by all writers—contemporary, historical, and science fictional alike. Behind every art, there are laws basic to it. Just as one might say that there is a physics of music, there is a physics of painting, a physics of sculpture, a physics (and physiology) of dance, and a physics of writing. In writing the most obvious and commonly recognized laws have to do with organization, of pattern with the form—for example, the recognized limitations of time and space within the one-act play, the strictures generally observed in the successful short story. A common mistake is to believe that these laws governing literary form are arbitrary and possibly academic ones, and the mind unfettered by tradition is free to break them without penalty. No misconception was ever greater.
The fact of the matter is that these strictures were not the invention of critics, professors, editors, nor even of writers, but of the readers themselves. From the beginning of all the arts, there have been continual efforts by the artists in all fields to work toward a larger and more effective vocabulary with which to speak to their audience. Each artist wrestles with this problem in his turn and, usually at the cost of his own trial and error, discovers that a solid core of existing techniques exists simply because these techniques have been proved more effective upon the audience than the alternatives that have come to his mind and the minds of generations of artists before him. In the end, if he is a serious artist and worker, he masters these techniques and goes on to develop from there in his struggle to achieve maximum personal expression, in his turn evolving refinements of technique upon which later artists will build.
In this manner, the classic short story form evolved on the basis of the classic tale, enjoying greater success with the reader or listener simply because the short story offered a richer and more satisfying literary experience to the reader than the older form.
So with classic forms generally in all the arts. The more ancient of these bear the same order of relationship to the newer forms following them that Newtonian physics bears to Einsteinian physics. The latter is simply a more sophisticated tool than the former; but the latter does not negate the former within the former's own terms, any more than the convenience of stretching out an objective lifetime by the contraction of time at near-light speeds, in the Einsteinian universe, negates our own subjective experience of the time it takes to travel at more Newtonian speeds about the surface of contemporary Earth.
Therefore, the technique of infusing sf with plausibility finds its solution in an already observed writing principle, that of the anchor in reality.
Like most workable principles in all the arts, this particular one relates to a fact of human perception — that we physically identify other people and objects on the basis of a certain number of recognized signals. In the case of a rock, these may be such signals as color, shape, lack of motion, and the sort of position in the surrounding
environment in which a rock would probably be found. In the case of more educated or familiar reading of signals, the identification could be: veined white = quartz rock; and "no rock there previously" = "must have fallen from overhanging cliff." The recognition mechanism of the reader, in his vicarious perception of the life that exists on the printed page, subconsciously demands from the story object a parallel to the signals he would get from the actual, physical object in real life. If he is merely told that it is a piece of quartz rock, his desire for identificational signals goes begging, and this puts a strain on his belief in the story. If he is allowed to see the color and veining of the rock (and if he knows quartz well enough to identify it by those signals) his signal-desire is at least partially satisfied and his belief is unimpeded.
The literary principle of giving him such anchors in reality, then, is an integral technique of the art of writing. As in actual life, there is a critical number of such signals which, once reached, carry complete conviction in the scene to which they belong. Examples of the power of these signals have been such constructions as rooms in which the laws of perspective were taken advantage of by the builder, in order to give a false appearance of distance, or to convince someone within the room that the floor was level when actually it was tilted. Even the evidence of the gravitational pull, when at odds with observed reality, has to fight hard for belief in the face of a critical number of accepted identificational signals.
The writer, then, takes advantage of that fact. He multiplies the number of his signals in any scene until he believes he has reached such a critical number. Taking the quartz rock mentioned before as one part of the scene of a firelit encampment in the woods, for example, the author might add such unarguable signals as the smell of the wood smoke from the fire, the crackle of the burning branches, the feel of the cool night wind on the backs of naked hands and necks not facing the fire.
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