Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow

by Reginald Bretnor

  Beyond this general cultural background, the critic should also understand the conventions of science fiction. This implies a sensitivity to social change and a grasp of the scientific method. Here we must disqualify most of the well-known mainstream critics—Northrup Frye and Leslie Fiedler are the only ones I have seen at science fiction gatherings. Amis, in New Maps of Hell, seems widely read in the genre, yet so little aware of real change that he tends to reduce science fiction to disguised satire on the present.

  Finally, the critic should not belong entirely to either of Snow's two cultures. He must see the limits of progress that Wells explored so tellingly and the genuine danger that un-guided technology might desolate our planet. But he must also perceive that same technology as the essential instrument of our own survival, must learn to discount the indiscriminate attacks upon it that have recently become an automatic reflex of Snow's traditional academics.

  This last point disqualifies the New Wave critics—and also, I think, the naive Marxists who are equally at war with technology and capitalism. The motivation seems to be a sort of romantic individualism in revolt against all social control. The common error is the failure to see that the continued benefits of a technological civilization are going to require an increasingly fine division of labor and an increasingly firm social discipline. The critical platform of the party-line Marxist—whose one criterion of literary excellence is simply "correctness"—is narrow enough to suggest that the ironic outcome of all these romantic thrusts for absolute individual independence may be only to hasten the New Wave nightmare of total slavery to a mechanized state. This crucial problem of the Age of Science can't be solved by mere emotion, but I think our whole world culture can be endangered by it.

  Personally, I keep reconsidering where I stand. Hillegas identifies my best fiction as anti-utopian, but I am still optimist enough to feel cheered by Edwin Land's faith that we can solve any problem we can state. In a novel, Bright New Universe, I tried to write a Utopian reply to Huxley's Brave New World— only to discover that the need to get dramatic conflict into the story had led me to make the traditional opponents to progress so powerful that the actual establishment of the better world required an unlikely intervention from outside the earth. I suspect that the popularity of the nightmare school of science fiction is at least partly due to the fact that dramas of universal disaster are far more exciting than plans for universal happiness. Compare the attention value of a city burning and a city growing. More and more I agree with Stuart Chase that technology is worth at least two cheers. For all our ecological apprehensions, the majority of mankind still seems to feel that technological progress is worth whatever it may cost. We won't willingly give up antibiotics or electricity or even the ominous power of the atom.

  If critics had to face the tests outlined above, not all would pass. But science fiction is many things to many people—nowadays that it is often speculative fantasy with no science at all. The total flow of comment has become vast and various enough to carry every sort of interest. The general magazines and journals print frequent articles, often better informed and less satiric than they used to be. The fiction magazines Galaxy and If and Fantasy and Science Fiction run critical columns by such perceptive people as Joanna Russ and Theodore Sturgeon and Lester del Rey. With Ted White as editor, Amazing and Fantastic have found space for criticism, most notably for an ambitious series by Alexei and Cory Panshin. Analog's P. Schuyler Miller has become the dean of science fiction reviewers, the notes in his monthly column genially descriptive rather than critical.

  Extrapolation, edited by Thomas Clareson at the College of Wooster, is the oldest academic journal, launched in the late 1950s as the newsletter of the MLA seminar on science fiction. Science Fiction Studies is coming now from the department of English at Indiana University, Terre Haute. In England, Foundation is the journal of the Science Fiction Foundation. Elsewhere, criticism has become multilingual. Helikon, for example, is an impressive Hungarian journal that recently devoted a whole issue to science fiction, with a list of contributors that includes Darko Suvin—who is a Yugoslav Marxist —the Polish novelist Stanislaw Lem, the Soviet Wellsian Julius Kagarlitsky, and other critics from other nations, including the Americans Frederik Pohl and Donald Wollheim.

  Everywhere, the fan magazines offer the most copious source of science fiction criticism, seldom very scholarly but now and then excellent—the Atheling-Blish essays in The Issue at Hand appeared originally in Skyhook, Axe, Warhoon, and Xero. These fan magazines are commonly one-man labors of love, brief of life, erratic in intention, and frustrating to the collector. Not always interested in formal criticism or general literature, the writers usually do know science fiction. Recent useful comment has appeared in Algol, Riverside Quarterly, Speculation, SF Commentator, and assorted others. The Alien Critic is the individual voice of Richard Geis. Locus features timely news; Luna is chiefly a bibliographic record of current fiction and comment. Takumi Shibano's Uchujin is the organ of Japanese fandom.

  Ugo Malaguti's Nova SF is a beautifully printed Italian review that carries critical essays and such fannish features as letters to the editor along with translations of classic science fiction. The international reach of fandom and fan criticism is more striking, perhaps, in a recent issue of SF Commentary. Published in Australia, it features contributions from the United States, Canada,

  England, France, Austria, and Poland. (The French student enjoys Bradbury, Simak, Ballard, and Ellison. The Pole is Stanislaw Lem, author of Solaris. The Austrian is Franz Rottensteiner, a caustic Marxist, scornful of most Western science fiction.)

  Turning now from the critics to the teachers of science fiction, we find their points of view equally diverse. Though most commonly harbored in departments of English, they are also in history, religion, social studies, communications, humanities, history of science, chemistry, physics, design, theater and speech, popular culture, and honors—at every level from junior high to graduate school. Course titles show emphasis variously on social criticism, on the shape of the future, on science itself, on Utopian thought, on literary fantasy, on science fiction as a vehicle for religion and philosophy.

  John Campbell—a strong partisan of the culture of science— was distressed when he saw a preliminary breakdown of the required reading lists. He was featuring "hard" science fiction in Analog, and he felt sure the readers preferred it, because his magazine was selling about as many copies as all three of his chief competitors, which were devoted mostly to "soft" science fiction or fantasy. Bewildered by the lack of hard science fiction on the required lists—except for a few books by Wells, Hal Clement, and Asimov—he asked why the colleges were "teaching non-science fiction courses labeled science fiction."

  When I suggested that perhaps most of the teachers belonged to Snow's traditional culture, he seemed to agree. "I think the basic separation of the two cultures is somewhat like the late unlamented angry debates over science versus religion-based on the two different kinds of truth, with the academics insisting angrily that the only True Truths are the truths of human realization, of human consensus." He added, with Campbellian irony, "The scientific 'facts' are no more than opinions anyway, and scientists are arrogant, nasty fellows claiming a special authority with no more reason than anybody else for their opinions. And their opinions are unpleasant, unkind, inhumane, and arbitrary things such as 'You can't get something for nothing,' and 'Things always run downhill,' and other arbitrary impediments they put in the way of fine and noble ideas."

  Impossible to classify as the courses may be, I think most of them might be placed somewhere on a broad spectrum that ranges from futurology to fantasy. At the pole of futurology, the emphasis is on technological and sociological extrapolations in the real world; at the pole of fantasy, on symbolic myth or "transcendence" or stylistic value or sometimes pure escape. Campbell preferred stories that probe alternative futures in somewhat the same way that good historical fiction reconstructs the probable past. But the de
fenders of fantasy point out that mythic fiction can make even profounder statements about our human predicament.

  Courses in the nonfictional future have been growing as fast as science fiction. Yet, according to Professor Dennis Livingston of Case Western Reserve, "there is not much overlap between the futurists and the sf people. Some people now engaged in forecasting for fun and profit do have sf backgrounds (Joe Martino, Don Fabun, Harry Stine), while some sf writers are called on from time to time to lend their talents to exploratory projects (Asimov, Anderson, Pohl)." Livingston sees himself as a middleman between the two disciplines.

  Classroom methods vary as widely as the cultural slants. In Livingston's Utopian course, teams of students studied present-day radical groups that claimed to have "a handle on the future." In a course on "Religious Dimensions of Science Fiction," Andrew J. Burgess, also at Case, had students working out ways to communicate religious concepts to the insect inhabitants of a planet in the constellation Scorpio. Richard Doxtator has brought Ray Bradbury and other writers to his class at Wisconsin State by conference telephone. Arlen Ray Zander, at East Texas State, has bridged the cultural gap by combining a physicist, a psychologist, and two English professors into a teaching team. James Gunn, at Kansas, is not only teaching, but also filming a science fiction course available for rental from the Audio-Visual Center at Lawrence.

  The science fiction virus reached the high schools a few years ago, and it is spreading fast there. Teachers often report multisection courses with several hundred students enrolled. Special high-school texts are already appearing, such as Harry Harrison's Science Fiction Reader and Sprague and Catherine de Camp's 3000 Years of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

  The trickle of college texts that began with Silverberg's Mirror of Infinity and Allen's SF: The Future is swelling toward a paperback flood that includes Harrison's The Light Fantastic, Clareson's Spectrum of Worlds, Ofshe's Sociology of the Possible, McNelly and Stover's Above the Human Landscape. More are out or on the way. Most of these are "quality" paperbacks, priced at five or six dollars. Though they seem to be selling well, reading lists show that most instructors still use the low-cost newsstand paperbacks that come from Ace, Avon, Award, Ballantine, Bantam, Berkley, DAW, Dell, Fantasy House, Lancer, Paperback Library, Popular, and Signet.

  The total output is currently about one a day, including reissues. Average print printings are fifty to one hundred thousand copies, but the wasteful newsstand distribution system destroys perhaps half the copies unsold—and often makes particular titles hard for college bookstores to obtain. This abundance may baffle the individual critic, but there are two efforts at organized criticism—the Hugo awards at the fan conventions, and the Nebulas, from the Science Fiction Writers of America. Both are under fire, because too few voters read all the stories and too many awards are won by high-pressure campaigns.

  The magazines are suffering from poor distribution and paperback competition, but they are still a major source of new science fiction, especially of shorts and novelettes. Half a dozen competing anthologists currently offer the collected "best of the year." The newest rivals of the magazines are the periodic books; among them, Fred Pohl's Star series was followed by Damon Knight's Orbit, Chip Delany's Quark, Robert Silverberg's New Dimensions, Robert Hoskins's Infinity, Terry Carr's Universe, and Harry Harrison's Nova. Roger Elwood alone is editing scores of new paperbacks. Harlan Ellison's huge Dangerous Visions anthologies have encouraged experimental writing. Translations of able new foreign writers are beginning to appear.

  Though all this may overwhelm the critic, it offers riches for the teacher. Tabulating eighty lists of required texts, I found nearly three hundred books named at least once. The top twelve were Asimov's I, Robot, Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land, Herbert's Dune, Huxley's Brave New World, Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness, Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz, Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants, Silverberg's Science Fiction Hall of Fame (volume I), Wells's The Time Machine and The War of The Worlds. Heinlein and Wells emerge as the most-taught writers here, with two titles each, but there is no unanimity—no title appears on more than one list out of three.

  Glancing at the science fiction student, James Gunn reports a survey of the more than 150 members of his class at Kansas. Only 39 were already fans, and only 42 "wanted to know the history and the literary value of science fiction"; 106 enrolled simply "because the course sounded interesting." When they checked a list of writers they already knew, Ray Bradbury came in first, followed in order by Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Vonnegut, and Ellison. Speculating about why students take to science fiction, Gunn suggests "the prevailing alienation which leads young people to seek a literature of alternatives, the affluence (until the recent recession) of the young, and the availability of good juvenile science fiction."

  For teacher and critic alike, the major puzzle is not this sudden academic acceptance of science fiction, but rather its earlier rejection. It wasn't always in the doghouse. Its first appeal is wonder, and the amazing tale has always been popular. Critics from Aristotle and Longinus to Tasso and Edmund Burke recognized wonder as a literary value. Verne found no special ghetto waiting for his "imaginary voyages," nor Wells for his "scientific romances." By the 1920s, however, when Gernsback was inventing such new labels as "scientifiction" and "science fiction" for the stuff in his pulp magazines, critics—and book publishers—had no use at all for the marvel tale.

  The causes for this fall of wonder seem complex and not very clear. The rationalism of a scientific age was hostile to the irrational which Aristotle had seen as the chief sense of wonder— and science fiction, if not quite irrational, does test the limits of reason. The tradition of the modern novel is no friend of science fiction. Don Quixote, perhaps the first great novel, was begun as a satire on the wonder romance. The novel soon became the genre of the rising middle class, respecting reason more than feeling, too much absorbed with money and morality to care about the marvelous.

  The history-minded critic can trace the cultural split we have seen in current science fiction back at least to the Renaissance, when modern science was born. Once upon a time—so the story goes—man lived at the center of a simple world, one created for his own comfort and maybe to test his fitness for heaven. Materially, by today's measures, he was disadvantaged. Spiritually, he wore the image of God. Shakespeare and John Donne were among the last literate inhabitants of that good world, before satanic science divided it into a sphere of knowledge and a sphere of faith. The two spheres are Snow's two cultures, still at war.

  Taking an even longer perspective, we might suggest that the culture of science is simply a current phase of the Utopian tradition that begins, perhaps, with Plato's Republic—the idea that reasonable men can create an ideal society here on earth. The tradition is Greek; it reflects the self-confidence of Homer's Odysseus. The anti-utopian tradition appears even older. Its roots are Egyptian and Hebraic, I think; its mythic anti-hero is Adam. Homer's symbol for reason is the glorious Athena, the comrade and helper of epic man. The Hebrew symbol is the snake, the betrayer. In the pattern of the culture that built the stone pyramids, the Hebrew tradition makes society dominant, visiting divine wrath on any impious individual who tries to disturb it. The Greek tradition allows more individual freedom, a more hopeful view of change. H. G. Wells, I think, was torn between those two traditions, with the Hebraic dominant in his great early fiction and the Greek in his later campaign for a modern Utopia.

  Such immense generalizations are very coarse nets, I know; they let most of the truth run through. History was never simple. No two people have experienced the impact of our fragmented culture in quite the same way, and nobody is likely to agree entirely with any statement about it. Yet I think it does make some sort of sense to say that Asimov and Clarke and Heinlein and a good many others are spokesmen for the Greek tradition in those optimistic moments when they choose to show men solving problems to m
ake things better. I think it makes sense to call the New Wave writers the sons of Adam— along with all the earlier anti-utopians who show man tripping over his own intelligence, and even the producers of the science-horror films in which arrogant scientists came to grief for seeking "what man was not meant to know."

  Whatever it may say about our roles as masters or victims of the machine, the wonder story is still a living voice. If it was once nearly stifled by rationalistic science and realistic fiction, it is louder now.

  The mainstream novel has begun to stammer. Its middle-class concerns of money and sex have lost most of their old obsessive appeal, at least on the campus. Maybe not yet dead, realistic fiction is less alive than it used to be. As a model for writer and critic, science is also losing its old charisma. Though the individual scientist may try to be as strictly rational as ever, his world seems far less so. Each new insight leads to new and unexpected bafflements—the atom is split into swarms of new enigmas, the great telescopes discover more quasars than answers. The scientist has grasped the keys to a technological utopia, but also to inferno. Faced with new dilemmas of his own invention, he finds his best computers not yet so wise as Homer's Athena. His expanding universe is it seems at least irrational enough to admit a renewed sense of wonder.

  The panic fear of a technological crisis, however, has no doubt done more to get science fiction into college than any appeal to wonder. The Greeks among us are still busy building wooden horses, and the sons of Adam are alarmed by the new threats to their ancient ramparts. Pro or con, science fiction offers at least a vivid language for reporting the impending battle. At the best, it can hope to fuse the insights of new science and truths of old tradition into a better way of looking at our evolving world.