Looking in this essay at the teaching and the criticism of science fiction, we must take the critic first.
He defines and evaluates what is to be taught. Here is where our problems begin, because—beyond James Blish and Damon Knight—certified critics scarcely exist. The mainstream critics have seldom made much sense about science fiction when they happened to notice it at all, and the amateurs are often in violent disagreement.
The very nature of science fiction is in bitter dispute. The chief issue is what might be called the futurological aspect, the claim of future possibility expressed by Hugo Gernsback's old slogan for Amazing Stories: "The magazine of prophetic fiction." To many readers, including most of the students who enroll for my own course, this sense of prophecy defines science fiction. To many contemporary critics and writers, it is naive nonsense. The quarrel is due partly to the way all fiction works, I think, and partly to those conflicting attitudes toward science that have troubled Sir Charles Snow.
The predictive gift of science fiction is a principle of popular mythology. Everybody knows how Jules Verne forecast the airplane and the submarine and flight to the moon, how H. G. Wells forecast atomic bombs. We're all looking for the impact of newer technologies, more wonderful or dreadful. The average writer, however, is more stage magician then scientist or prophet. His business is the creation of illusions good enough to win a momentary suspension of the reader's unbelief. Most of his devices are common to all sorts of literature—empathic characters, dramatic action, emotive atmosphere, meaningful theme, evocative language. The distinctive feature of science fiction—the special device that sets it off from other sorts of fantasy—is the claim that it could come true. This is important to the man in the street, even though he may be pretty ignorant about the actual limits of science and pretty tolerant about story logic. It is less important to the literary artisan who places greater faith in those other hard-learned devices of his trade. With no serious prophetic intention at all, the writer in search of story interest often opts for the least probable event, rather than the most probable, simply because he needs the unexpected. He usually knows what Wells discovered, that serious social forecasts mix poorly with fiction.
Yet, for all that, a few writers have been competent scientists genuinely concerned with things to come. Wells had learned biology from T. H. Huxley, Darwin's great champion, and his Time Machine grew out of a very sober extrapolation of the future evolution of life on earth. Polishing his techniques of technological and social prediction in story after story, he became the first futurologist. He announced his "discovery of the future" in 1902 and turned away from science fiction to begin his long campaign for the world state he projected as a refuge from the frightening future he had foreseen.
Wells was of course not quite the inventor of modern science fiction—credit for that must be shared with Verne and Poe and Mary Shelley, perhaps even with Defoe or Swift or Plato. But he crystallized the genre and established its techniques—his method was to limit each story to a single new assumption, surrounded with everyday detail, and developed with a strictly consistent internal logic.
The Wellsian method has shaped most science fiction since. Hugo Gernsback reprinted the best of Wells in Amazing Stories —the original science fiction magazine, launched in 1926. John W. Campbell edited Astounding, which in time became Analog, with the same respect for at least an illusion of scientific probability. (He also used Wells's recipe for the fiction in Unknown, his magazine of fantasy.) Ben Bova, his editorial successor, is renovating the same tradition, and Analog still leads the field in circulation.
Even though most science fiction may be produced and read for sheer entertainment, there have always been a handful of writers who shared Wells's command of the scientific method and his concern about the fate of man. Aldous Huxley and Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein are examples. Their sometimes serious futurology has kept life in the popular myth that science fiction does foresee the wonders and the terrors of the future.
Not that the bulk of published science fiction has ever owed any great debt to science. Wells himself was often more concerned with illusion than reality—as witness his own Invisible Man. But open defiance of the Wellsian convention is a rather recent thing. The slogan of revolt was "the New Wave," shouted a few years ago by Judith Merril and J. G. Ballard.
The rebellion sprang from an ignorance of science and a terror of technology. Slanted against the idea of progress and all the works of private enterprise, New Wave fiction magnified all the ugliness around us: of war and racism, of filth and crime and drugs and pollution. Its forecast futures were nightmares of overpopulation, mechanized oppression, and universal frustration, its gloating pessimism only thinly garnished with "new" stylistic devices too often borrowed from the literary experimenters of Joyce's generation, all this raucously merchandised as the wave of the future.
It's old now. Though it did wash up occasional bits of power and beauty, it failed to move most readers. Such able writers as Chip Delany and Harlan Ellison and Brian Aldiss, who once seemed to be swimming with it, have now gone their own brilliant and individual ways. Subsiding, it has I think left us all enriched with a sharpened awareness of language and a quickened interest in literary experiment—but still split with the old division from which it sprang, a quarrel now grown wider and more savage than ever, with the culture of science often breaking into retreat before the rearmed leaders of tradition.
I wonder how far science fiction itself has been a cause of this crisis of faith in our science and ourselves, how far only a symptom. At least since Swift, it has been debating our nature and our future. Several of Wells's great early novels were deliberately written as later voyages of Gulliver, borrowing Swift's black pessimism to criticize our smug belief in progress. Though it may seem ironic, I suspect that Wells and his anti-utopian heirs helped ignite the panic mistrust of technology that is now stifling our space programs, choking off funds for all research, even stalling efforts to cope with the energy crisis.
A glance at its critical history is enough to show that science fiction has never been noticed so much for purely literary values as for the dangerous inventions that keep escaping off its pages into reality. Before World War II, it was commonly regarded as crude pulp stuff, beneath criticism. My own early searches for scholarly discussions of "pseudo-scientific fiction" generally failed. There were a few bright bits—Wells's prefaces to his own "scientific romances," Haggard's comments on his writing
methods, Coleridge's famous saying about "that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith"—but even those precious bits were left from an older generation.
The atomic bombs and the V-2 rockets not only vindicated the prophetic power of science fiction in the minds of the faithful, but also awoke an uneasy public interest in whatever more dangerous device might be the next to escape. A small boom was born from that apprehension. Fans began setting up their own little firms to reprint the old pulp stories in book form. When Fantasy Press and Gnome Press and Arkham House and the others had established a market, the large publishers followed. Dressed now in hard covers, science fiction began getting its first serious critical attention since the world lost its first great faith in H. G. Wells.
One early book was Of Worlds Beyond (1947), a symposium on writing science fiction edited by Lloyd Arthur Eshbach, with essays by Campbell, Heinlein, van Vogt, de Camp, and other old hands. J. O. Bailey's Pilgrims Through Space and Time, published the same year, was a more significant critical beginning. Perhaps the first major academic study, it traces early use of the theme of travel in time and space, with emphasis on fiction written in the period 1870 to 1915. Recently reprinted, it is a rich mine of bibliographical and plot information about rare early titles—evidence that science fiction, under whatever name, was already a very sturdy infant even before the arrival of Verne and Wells.
Before the end of that postwar boomlet, two more major books came o
ut. L. Sprague de Camp's Science-Fiction Handbook (1953) was slanted for the writer, and the market tips are now long out of date; de Camp is a scholar, however, who both knows and writes science fiction, and the book is still useful for his historical and biographical and critical comment. Modern Science Fiction, an anthology of essays edited the same year by Reginald Bretnor, became a standard critical text. But the bubble was already bursting. Of some thirty-odd magazines, only half a dozen survived. Though Basil Davenport's brief Inquiry into Science Fiction came from Longmans, Green as late as 1955, the major publishers were warily turning science fiction back to the fans.
Damon Knight's In Search of Wonder (1956) was published by Advent, a small firm set up by a group of Chicago fans. Knight's achievement, to paraphrase Anthony Boucher's introduction, was simply to take science fiction seriously as a field of literature, to apply ordinary critical standards, and to make the result meaningful. Exposing "chuckleheads" and "cosmic jerrybuilders," dissecting "half-bad" writers, he brought a sharp mind and a new sense of value into the field. The book was reissued in 1967, with new essays added. Meanwhile, in 1964, Advent had also published The Issue at Hand, by "William Atheling"—who writes fine fiction as James Blish. Equals in wit and insight and contempt for chuckleheads, Knight and Blish have produced what is still perhaps the best science fiction criticism at hand.
Most of the other Advent titles have been more fannish than critical—among them Alva Rogers's Requiem for Astounding (1964), Ron Ellik and Bill Evans's The Universes of E. E. Smith (1966), and Harry Warner's All Our Yesterdays (1969). But The Science Fiction Novel (1959), introduced by Basil Davenport, collects critical essays by Robert Heinlein, C. M. Kornbluth, Alfred Bester, and Robert Bloch. Alexei Panshin's Heinlein in Dimension (1968) is notable as the first full-length study of Heinlein—who can still be defended as the foremost American science fiction writer.
Academic researchers were meanwhile following up Bailey's explorations of earlier science fiction.
Marjory Hope Nicolson's Voyages to the Moon (1948) is a study of imaginary moon trips in books published through the years 1493 to 1784. Roger Lancelyn Green carries his survey of such old dreams out to other planets and down to the twentieth century in Into Other Worlds: Space Flight from Lucian to Lewis (1958), brightening his findings with lively summaries of many novels now forgotten. In 1960, the domain of science fiction was recharted for the literary community by the popular British novelist Kingsley Amis. His New Maps of Hell reflects enthusiasm for the satire and contemporary social comment that he finds in such writers as Frederik Pohl, but he shows little concern for the futurological probing that I think gives science fiction its basic appeal.
The brightest achievement of science fiction criticism seems to have been the restoration of H. G. Wells—a just debt paid, I think, to the chief inventor of the genre. Once immensely respected, Wells had been misunderstood by a whole generation of critics, who considered him a hack journalist or a "crass materialist" or a hollow-headed Utopian, or more commonly ignored him altogether. His son Anthony West began the rediscovery with an article in 1957 that pointed out the dark philosophic pessimism beneath the life and wit and rich invention of Wells's great fiction. Bernard Bergonzi followed in 1961 with the The Early H. G Wells, a detailed study of the "scientific romances" that emphasizes their ambivalence and skepticism. My own dissertation, interpreting this early fiction as Swiftian criticism of the idea of progress, was finished in 1964 and more recently rewritten for book publication. Mark Hillegas, in The Future as Nightmare: H. G. Wells and the Anti-Utopians (1967), traces the influence of Wells's early work on Evgenii Zamyatin's We, on Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and George Orwell's 1984, on down to contemporary science fiction, documenting the use of Wells's own ideas and images to attack the utopianism of his later career. This later Wells, the world-planner, the world-educator, the would-be world-saver, is the subject of W. Warren Wager's H G. Wells and the World State, a study that shows Wells to have been somewhat wiser than his critics. The Wells papers are now at the University of Illinois, and a stream of books has come from scholars there, on Wells and George Gissing, Wells and Henry James, Wells and Arnold Bennett. Lovatt Dickson's H. G Wells: His Turbulent Life and Times (1969) continues the story of his private life, which Wells himself had begun so ably in his own Experiment in Autobiography. Although no complete life and works has yet appeared, Wells research is still in progress. Recent studies have appeared in Russia and France. When Professor Darko Suvin gathered an international group at McGill University in 1971 for a symposium on "H. G. Wells and Modern Science Fiction," critics came from Europe and Japan.
Such critical activities have been encouraged by a new climate of respect for science fiction, more pervasive and enduring than the postwar flash of interest but probably rising from similar concerns— with new ecological alarms now added to the old fears of war and space and the atom. Since the major publishers are turning friendly again, more people are entering the critical arena. One popular authority is Sam Moskowitz, an old-time fan and collector who was editor of Gernsback's last, shortlived science fiction magazine in 1953. In Explorers of the Infinite (1963) and Seekers of Tomorrow (1966), Moskowitz profiles the creators of science fiction. His lives of the writers are interesting, but his efforts at criticism seldom go beyond the game of tracing story origins through seeming similarities of plot. His more recent volumes, Science Fiction by Gaslight (1968) and Under the Moons of Mars (1970), are useful histories and anthologies of science fiction in the popular magazines, 1891-1911, and 1912-1920.
Richard A. Lupoff's Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure (1965: revised and enlarged for the paperback edition, 1968) is a scholarly—and entertaining—study of the most popular science fiction writer of all. Donald A. Wollheim's The Universe Makers (1971) deserves mention as an inside view of contemporary science fiction by a man who helped to shape the genre. As a long-time editor for Ace Books and now as an important paperback publisher himself, Wollheim has doubtless bought and printed more science fiction than anybody else. His book is intensely personal and very readable, marred I think by his limited knowledge of other literature and by occasional unfairness to some of his rival editors, but still fascinating for its view of science fiction as a sort of faith in man and his science, and particularly for its sketch of man's imagined future in space —of the rise and fall of the coming Galactic Empire that has been the background of so much "space opera."
The new academic approval of science fiction is already swelling the flow of scholarly comment— some of it excellent, some seemingly born from the logic of publish or perish. Into the Unknown (1970) by Robert Philmus is a survey of "the evolution of science fiction from Francis Godwin to H. G. Wells," erudite but slightly dry. Robert C. Elliott's The Shape of Utopia (1970) traces the idea of the ambiguous "good place" or "no place" from the golden age of the ancients to the nightmares of today. David C. Goldsmith's Kurt Vonnegut: Fantasist of Fire and Ice is a useful booklet in a promising new critical series from Bowling Green University Press. Robert Silverberg's Mirror of Infinity (1970) spans the period from Wells to Harlan Ellison with fine stories selected and discussed by a baker's dozen of current critics. In A Spectrum of Worlds (1972), Thomas Clareson has chosen another set of stories, ranging from Ambrose Bierce to Silverberg, introducing and annotating them in a way that relates science fiction to the main traditions of modern literature.
Clareson's SF: The Other Side of Realism (1971) is a thick anthology of mostly recent critical essays, some of them excellent. His Science Fiction Criticism: An Annotated Checklist (1972) classifies and describes some eight hundred items, of widely varied value. Another listing—more than a hundred items, many not noted by Clareson—is Advent's SF Bibliographies (1972) by Robert Briney and Edward Wood.
With such exceptions as Jules Verne, science fiction used to be pretty much a British-American phenomenon, with America offering the richest markets and England many of the more literate writers, but now,
with its swelling popularity in every industrial country, the criticism has become an international conversation. Though cut off from us by censorship, Russian science fiction seems to share our debt to Wells. Isaac Asimov has edited Soviet Science Fiction and More Soviet Science Fiction (1962), collections that reveal no hint of any New Wave. In a more scholarly work, Other Worlds, Other Seas (1970), Darko Suvin discusses and anthologizes socialist science fiction from Poland, Rumania, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria, as well as from the USSR. His Marxist dialectic may offer a narrow standard of value, but the stories are often brilliant.
But all this scholarship has had very little to do, I suspect, with making a place for science fiction in American high schools and colleges. Most of the credit for this new wave of recognition, as for the postwar wavelet, must be due to fear—to the contagious fear of the future that has brought our old faith in science to a crisis. All the dilemmas of accelerating change are suddenly too near to be ignored any longer. We see ourselves trapped in a frightening paradox. Terrifying as technology may seem, our own survival is bound up with it. Hence science fiction in the classroom. Pro or con, it can speak about our world predicament with far more force than the statistical predictions of the computer futurologists. Though it does offer other and maybe higher values, this relevance is what most college courses stress. The readings for my own are selected to review this ever-new debate about the nature and stature and future of man, with Swift and Wells and Huxley and Ellison challenging the optimism in Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein.
As some sort of referee in this conflict, what credentials should the critic show? First of all, I think, an awareness of other literature, along with some knowledge cf the traditions of criticism and humanism and an ear for language. Sam Moskowitz does poorly on this first test, as Blish points out. Knowing only science fiction, he has a limited view of even that.
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