book was forgotten for so long.
By the end of the nineteenth century, pessimism was coming back into fashion. The Oxford English Dictionary lists as one of the meanings of the word Future, ‘A condition in times to come different (esp. in a favourable sense) from the present.’ Significantly, the usage quoted comes from 1852. The optimism of that favourable sense of the word had evaporated forty years later, when Wells’s first novels appeared. But gone forever was the eighteenth-century attitude expressed by Pope, ‘Oh, blindness to the future, Kindly given.’ Nineteenth-century findings rendered it both necessary and possible to speculate on the future; knowing the worst was a new tool in the intellectual armoury.
It may be that part of the stigma still attaching to science fiction lay originally in the fact that the men who helped create it as a form of expression were themselves outsiders, or regarded themselves as outsiders; examination of, say, one hundred typical texts would probably reinforce the theme of isolation (prominent for instance in Frankenstein). Even in overpopulation novels, which proliferated in the sixties of this century, the solitary individual occurs, almost in defiance of his context.
Isolation is manifestly one of the problems liable to crop up on a newly discovered planet, where you can find yourself alone except for a computer, a captain who has got religion, and the ship’s cat. It was particularly to the concept of new planets that American SF writers turned when they entered the science fiction lists with the launching of the pulp magazines. This phenomenon is generally explained as the Quest for the Last Frontier. It is less glib to consider imaginary planets as evidence of the fear and attraction of isolation.
Just as Hollywood on the West Coast of the USA was largely run by émigrés – Hungarians and the like – so was the pulp industry, peddling dreams and traumas on the East Coast. The émigrés came from the over-populated cities of Europe to another over-populated American city. Many SF writers, editors, and publishers were strangers in a strange land, autodidacts like Hardy and Wells. Isaac Asimov is a case in point. Born in a suburb of Smolensk in Russia, he was brought over to the United States at the age of three. His family settled in Brooklyn; his father ran a candy store. By the age of nine, Asimov Jnr was reading SF and educating himself by it; since when, with great single-mindedness, he has been trying to educate the rest of us. There can be few sciences which have not escaped his net. (The abrupt uprooting in early childhood sets him in a class with Mary Shelley, Nerval, Wells, Stapledon, Ballard, Aldiss, and many others).
Although we can point to the new science-fictional planets as logical extensions of such fictitious lands as Laputa and Butler’s Erewhon, we should bear in mind scientific considerations as well as literary ones. True, as the terrestrial globe shrinks, it is increasingly difficult to convince readers of the probability of finding even a satirical utopia in some undiscovered nook. Arthur Conan Doyle’s siting of the Lost World in the Amazon was plausible in 1912 (Professor Challenger’s ‘journey to verify some conclusions of Wallace and Bates,’ and his discovery of scientifically accurate and astonishing water-colours, designedly remind us of Cook’s and Darwin’s expeditions to undiscovered regions). After World War I, the increasing range of flying machines made similar caches of evolutionary anachronisms less and less likely. Science, a creative part of man’s mind, banishes literature, another creative part. One could chart the banishment of Doyle’s dinosaurs down the scale of fiction, down the scale of likelihood, to the boys’ magazines of the thirties, to the comics of the forties and fifties, to the Hanna Barbera cartoons of the sixties, and from the Matto Grosso to inside Everest, and from Atlantis back to – for in the most desperate fantasies credulity is neither here nor there – South America.
As the imagination needed new planets for its proper exercise, the new tools of theoretical science could supply them. This is revealed in the chief literary use to which new planets were put in early science fiction. Satire and utopianism, favourite ploys of the eighteenth century or earlier, were no more. The new planets did not form stages on which man could enact his social problems; instead, they were themselves the centre of the action, working models of scientific thought.
For to imagine out the full implications of evolution, geology, Malthusianism, and the famous Second Law, one needs to construct either a time machine, as Wells did, or a planet that represents Earth in an earlier or later stage of its life history. Even existent planets were converted for this purpose. By common consent, Mars became a dried up senescent version of Earth, and Venus a model of earlier terrestrial history, hot and steamy, sweltering under a Jurassic dream. Both models totally ignored astronomical fact, but fulfilled the need to act out in imagination current scientific theories.
The other element that assisted in the model-making was Infinite Lay Time. That also was a nineteenth-century invention. All time machines are ILT vehicles. Before their invention by sceptical theoretical scientists and mathematicians, anyone venturing back in time to 4004 BC would have banged his head on solid rock. The new speculative element, which rendered time immense, allowed the time traveller to go back far beyond page one of Genesis or forward beyond Armageddon to the ultimate heat death of the universe. SF writers had the job of making both accessible to the lay imagination. No-one else would touch the daunting task.
The connections between our world of today and the Enlightenment are now faint, erased by the horrors of our century, two world wars and the long-planned, long-term massacres of millions of people by Hitler and Stalin and their willing agents. Yet there are echoes. Europe has shrunk again, and is threatened by a new kind of Turk, though we are hardly likely to finance a new Prince Eugène.
Science fiction is here to stay, or will stay as long as we can at least speak of progress and dare to look at the future. In the West SF writers are still not mouthpieces of the state; one can see for them a unique function as disseminators of philosophical and scientific thought. Writers like Wells and Huxley excelled in that role, as did Olaf Stapledon, with his imaginative transformations of combined evolutionary and cosmological theory.
But the great commercial success of science fiction in the seventies diminishes the possibility that it will be treated even by its practitioners with proper seriousness. Money is not the enemy, but the greed for money. SF has become a sort of cultural reflex like the mother-in-law joke, used to sell cars and biscuits. Every time it is so used, it is drained of challenging ideas. Eventually it may become so trivial, so light, that it will sink below the intellectual horizon.
Paradoxically, this new commercial success comes at a time when its prime base – the grand gloomy ideas I have described – has worn thin, as genre material always does. As it becomes or tends to become less a literary genre, so – paradoxically again – it is being greatly taken up by universities, especially in the States, and the first international congress of SF critics has been held in Palermo (for SF is now an international pursuit, endowed by UNESCO).
But, science fiction has always been contradictory, and its best creators of a sturdily independent kind. This is perhaps the time of greatest potential for them and for the genre.
Even in a popular film like Star Wars, admittedly a mammoth with the brains of a gnat, one perceives at least latent thought. Although Star Wars was widely condemned by SF writers for its triviality, one can see how easily the idea of the Force as a spiritual weapon, rather than Robin Hood’s stave, could have been developed and deepened. The rebels would then have been fighting against the evil of the Empire with values on their side with which a general public would readily have identified; it could have entered scenes upon which, instead, it merely gazed.
The Force is a sort of corrupt version of the Samurai code. To have inserted the true thing with all its ritual of fasting and self-discipline and chivalric intent into the film would have increased immensely the film’s significance without spoiling the pace. Admittedly, Luke Skywalker would then have become less of a Disney kid; it is not sufficient to have togged him up with a shorty Roman toga instead of giving him a character.
Star
