“I HAVE A COSMIC MIND. NOW WHAT DO I DO?”
—Jack Speer
THE SCIENCE fiction world orbits around the fictions, the stories, and the ideas in them, and the writers who produce the works. What is in science fiction that binds readers to it? Much of my continuing examination here and in the following chapters will be devoted to the attractions SF exerts on readers and writers and how these attractions distinguish SF from other varieties of contemporary literature.
Science fiction has flowered and prospered in our troubled and fast-evolving century in part because it alone among contemporary prose literatures consistently deals with the big questions: What are we here for? Where are we going? How much worse can things get? Modern readers, especially the young, no longer believe in or even necessarily desire a stable universe. They are anxious about the present. And as a kind of defense, they have learned to find pleasure in studying the big picture: the long view of human history and human affairs apparent in the SF enterprise. There is a fascination in kicking around ideas when you know that ideas can and will alter objective reality.
ABSTRACT IDEAS are made flesh through science fiction. Except for all these crazy stories about space and time, radically distanced from the mundane, the literature of ideas is pretty much moribund in the latter half of this century. Popular magazine articles, scholarly essays, speculative nonfiction such as all those Bermuda Triangle books, flying saucer stuff, is mostly degraded and disenchanting. Hardly enough, as they say, to keep the mind alive—and often badly written to boot. Even with magazines from Omni to Wired providing moments of illumination, about the only writing other than science fiction in the last two decades in which you can find complex and wonderful speculation is in certain scientific and technical journals, with their quarks and quasars, black holes and dark twin stars. But the context of these journals makes them inaccessible to all but a few specialists (a few of whom—eureka!—are science fiction writers, friends of science fiction writers, or SF fans).
And that’s not all. Numerous science fiction writers are omnivorous readers, their knowledge an enormous kitchen sink of ideas and speculations from ten or a hundred different disciplines. A new theory in any field (history, economics, biology, home ecology, gestalt psychology) gets transformed very quickly by someone, somewhere, into a science fiction story.
It all started with Poe and Verne, who developed an aesthetic of using knowledge, especially contemporary scientific knowledge, as a literary device to achieve or increase verisimilitude. Verne, especially, was interested not only in theory but also in speculative technology, so he read widely in natural science journals and presented wonderful devices, such as high-tech balloons, submarines, and airplanes, which he found in those journals. James Blish was fascinated by Arnold Toynbee’s cyclical theory of history, so he wrote his great four-volume series, Cities in Flight, to demonstrate his version of how this theory would operate in a galaxywide civilization over enormous time spans. Robert A. Heinlein combined a whole complex of economic, political, semantic, and technological ideas into a huge chart, a history of the future, which he used in the early 1940s to write the stories and novels in his masterful Future History series. A. E. Van Vogt developed a theory of science fiction writing in the early forties which dictated that a story or novel should be written in approximately 700-word blocks, with a new speculative idea introduced in every block (a dizzying aesthetic that no one but Van Vogt ever practiced). And if a writer hasn’t got any firsthand ideas, then secondhand ideas are perfectly acceptable, as long as she or he handles them in a new and exciting manner.
Of course science fiction is not all big ideas, and some of the best SF is really about very old ideas (age-old religious controversies, the whole range of the histories of philosophy and society). The science fictional histories of the future are rife with monarchies, feudal estates writ large, democracies, oppressive dictatorships—not generally very innovative politically. But the best SF always deals with ideas, as opposed to fantasy, which almost always deals with morality, ethics, and the inner life of characters (though mostly through symbol and metaphor). This is not to say that SF is either amoral or unconcerned with character—just that characteristically it is primarily concerned with ideas.
What happens when a science fiction writer gets excited by a big idea? Well, when any idea begins to irritate the consciousness, you begin to play with it, turn it every which way, see if the reverse is true (or interesting), begin to feel the onset of thematic insight, a flash of meaning or possible meanings. James E. Gunn tells the anecdote about reading an encyclopedia article on pleasure, which ended with the stylish grace line “but the real science of pleasure has not yet been invented.” He was stopped in his tracks and immediately began to think about a possible science of pleasure, what it would entail, and then wrote his novel The Joy Makers, about a future world ruled by the science of hedonics. Robert A. Heinlein had a cat who went uncomfortably from door to door in the house one foul winter day. When his wife remarked that the cat was looking for the door into summer, Heinlein knew he had the kernel of a science fiction story—and a dynamite title.
Ideas are everywhere, but there are no big ideas unless they grow in the mind of the writer into something that allows the world to change utterly, to change in a manner that has the broadest thematic implications. What if humanity could actually attain the eternal frontiers of space and time, if whole universes of alternate possibilities really existed, if time began to run backward, if part or all of humanity were immortal, if humans could attain through evolution or technology a whole spectrum of mental powers, if there were truly alien intelligences, if any of a thousand speculations could be posited as true? What kind of exciting, frightening, wonderful, depressing times might human characters be living through if any of these big things happened; how, precisely, might they happen; and how would things work?
Ursula K. Le Guin addresses this point in her trim little essay “On Theme” (in Those Who Can, ed. Robin Scott Wilson, New York: Signet, 1973, pp. 204–205):
Every now and then one can say of a specific short story that it did begin with a single, specific idea, with a single, specific source. This is the case with “Nine Lives.”
I had been reading The Biological Time Bomb by Gordon Rattray Taylor, a splendid book for biological ignoramuses, and had been intrigued by his chapter on the cloning process. I knew a little about cloning … but so little that I had not got past carrots, where it all started, to speculate about the notion of duplicating entire higher organisms, such as frogs, donkeys, or people. I did not have to read between the lines. Rattray Taylor did it for me. He pointed out that some biologists have been contemplating these more ambitious possibilities quite seriously (why don’t people ever ask biologists where they get their ideas from?) In thinking about this possibility, I found it alarming. In wondering why I found it alarming, I began to see that the duplication of anything complex enough to have personality would involve the whole issue of what personality is—the question of individuality, of identity, of selfhood. Now that question is a hammer that rings the great bells of Love and Death.…
SF writers do not merely play with scientific or other ideas, merely speculate or extrapolate; I think—if they’re doing their job—they get very involved with them. They take them personally, which is precisely what we ordinarily think scientists must forbid themselves to do. They try to hook them in with the rest of existence.
And that is a distillation of what happens when things go well. Of course a high percentage of the time, the SF writer is off base, sometimes even way out in left field, either in regard to scientific probabilities or to human nature and thematic implications—and sometimes the obvious purpose is merely to provide riproaring adventure against a science fictional background. Still, the distance between mundane reality and the reality of the given SF story gives a size and scope to SF—authentic or illusory as the case may be—that’s big, wonderful, mind-stretching. You can find things you never thought of, or thought possible, or thought of in that way, in every SF story.
In Kurt Vonnegut’s God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (New York: Dell, 1965, p. 27), Eliot Rosewater, an inveterate reader of SF, drunkenly addresses the Milford SF writers conference—an actual event, which Vonnegut once attended:
I love you sons of bitches.… You’re all I read anymore.… You’re the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstandings, mistakes, accidents and catastrophes do to us. You’re the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distances without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell.
Prophets without honor, that’s how Rosewater sees the SF writing community of nearly forty years ago. And Eliot, we can see, lives in the SF field we have been talking about, is part of the family, especially since he lives in a real world that he cannot communicate to the other inhabitants of mundane reality, a world of big ideas. Eliot with all his heart wants to act out some of those big ideas and to the extent that he does, he gets himself into a heap of trouble.
Someday some good literary scholar will do an illuminating comparison between Eliot and Jack Isidore, of Seville, California, the central character of Philip K. Dick’s Confessions of a Crap Artist. Jack is a creep and a weirdo but is essentially kind and humane, caught in the grip of one big idea after another—he’s a science fiction fan, among other pursuits. He’s never quite able to tell the good ideas from the bad, having none of what we usually call common sense, until he’s lived with them for a while. Meanwhile, all the supposedly saner people around him, who consider him a harmless nut, boring and bothersome, are being cruel to one another, acting out selfish and petty fantasies and believing themselves superior to Jack. Vonnegut and Dick are making similar points about human values in a way that SF readers are particularly attuned to appreciate.
Eliot Rosewater and Jack Isidore, however, have nothing on Claude Degler, superfan and founder of the Cosmic Circle. Degler attended the Denver Worldcon as a young fan. His travels around the SF family make fascinating reading; they are chronicled in Harry Warner Jr.’s history of the doings of early SF enthusiasts up to about 1950, All Our Yesterdays (Chicago: Advent, 1969). First Degler invented out of his fevered desires a hotbed of SF fan activity, clubs full of local SF enthusiasts in and around the town of New Castle, Indiana. Then, in 1943, the Cosmic Circle went nationwide, “so that cosmic fandom will actually be some sort of power or influence in the postwar world of the near future.” The members of the Cosmic Circle began to deluge SF fans everywhere with material on the group, all, according to Warner, “containing symptoms of deriving from the same mind, typewriter and mimeograph” (p. 189):
Declaration of existence: of a new race or group of cosmic-thinking people, a new way of life, a cosmology of all things. Cosmen, the cosmic men, will appear. We believe that we are actual mutations of the species.
Such was the opening manifesto of the Cosmic Circle Fans of the era were either horrified or just amused, depending on their paranoia quotient. Jack Speer, a well-known fan at the time, arranged through friends to send Degler a series of postcards from around the country, all inscribed, “I have a Cosmic Mind. Now what do I do?”
Degler’s enthusiasm created a microcosmic scandal, a bizarrely energetic effort to unite the fan world into an elitist movement. What Degler had done was to assemble all the half-serious, juvenile, and utopian self-aggrandizing notions held by differing groups within the SF family, put them together, and assert their literal truth. The Cosmic Circle was in essence a call for support for all these assertions so that the SF family could be important in the real world of the future. But everyone with any common sense in the SF world knew that most of this stuff just wasn’t true.
Claude Degler was verifiably seen on the West Coast in 1950—he borrowed fifty cents from a fan in San Francisco for transportation—and in the 1980s he appeared at a small convention in the Midwest, where Wilson Tucker saw him—another verified sighting. The net effect of Degler on the SF field was, in the end, to create a historic controversy that only confirmed the essential premises of “agreement to disagree,” a basis of unity in the SF world. And a reaction in fandom against taking SF too seriously (see SERCON and FIJAGH, page 272–73). Fans and writers may propose any kind of idea, big or small, for consideration and discussion (for which read disagreement). But the idea must be distanced in some way from the mundane world so that it can be thought about and discussed—but not necessarily acted upon. Going out and trying to put big ideas into practice, like Jack Isidore or Claude Degler or Eliot Rosewater did, can get you crucified, after all.
But the big ideas of science fiction do interact with the real world, though not usually in a direct cause-and-effect manner. Let us consider the most popular SF of the last couple of decades.
Dune, by Frank Herbert, is one of the two most popular science fiction novels of the last thirty-five years; the other is Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land. Each has sold in the millions of copies, beggaring the sales of any individual title of the last two decades. Dune is an epic romance about ecological/political/economic struggles in a galactic empire in the far future. Its hero, Paul Atreides (the name invokes a whole structure of Greek tragedy), is considerably larger than life, the culmination of a thousand years of secret genetic manipulation and the product of the toughest formal and informal training any young prince ever went through. Happily for the effectiveness of the novel, we go through this training and experience with the hero. The tone of the book is instructive, which is flattering, not annoying, since who among us doesn’t want to learn how to be Prince of the Universe?
The strengths of the book are setting, plot, characterization, and suspenseful writing (in the clear, precise, naturalistic mode). The characterization is mainly in terms of good and evil, strength and weakness, and is completely effective in spite of a lack of full rounding and depth. The plot is complex but not episodic; everything that happens is necessary to the story and follows logically from the original premise: the exile of the Atreides family to the desert planet Dune. The setting of Dune is its special achievement: The story depends completely on the interaction of the hero with the setting, the ecosystem of Dune.
Briefly, the Atreides family is locked in a deadly power feud with the Harkonnen family, and shortly after Paul and his parents arrive on Dune, the Baron Harkonnen succeeds in having Paul’s father, Duke Leto, murdered. Paul and his mother escape into the desert that covers most of the surface of the planet; there they meet the Fremen, the tough, nomadic natives of Dune. Here the importance of the setting begins to be emphasized: The Fremen have so little water that they wear suits that conserve every milliliter of sweat, urine, and exhaled vapor; when a person dies, they drain the water from him. The toughness of their environment has made the Fremen geniuses at survival and forced them to become a very tight, sometimes brutally efficient, tribal unit. Fremen training and consciousness give Paul the edge he needs to survive and triumph in the cosmopolitical struggles ahead.
On Dune the key factor in both economics and ecology is the addictive spice, melange. This is the planet’s greatest natural resource for interplanetary trade (Herbert foresaw in Dune the Arab role in our 1970s energy crisis—after all, his first novel, Under Pressure, written a decade before Dune, was about future oil thievery among nations). The spice also turns out to play a critical part in the complex ecological process that keeps Dune from running out of water altogether. And its hallucinogenic properties arouse Paul’s latent prescience, giving him mystic moments of painful knowledge of the future. And more.
All these elements of the story merge perfectly into climactic resonance and resolution, which is not so much the triumphant battle against the Harkonnens as the implied triumph-to-come from the Fremen effort to turn their desert planet into a paradise—a triumph not of technology but of ecological planning and awareness.
Dune was published in 1965. By 1967 it was already a cult book; a mention of the word “ecology” in a college dining hall or in the office of an underground newspaper would immediately bring the response, “Have you read Dune?” It is quite possible that the emergence of ecology as a popular idea in the mass media in the late sixties and early seventies can be traced to the impact of this one science fiction novel on youthful opinion-shapers. The word “ecology” is prominent in Dune. Even for the reader who’d heard the word before, Dune was an effective introduction to its powerful implications, and the book is still one of the only novels in any genre that makes constructive awareness of one’s place in his ecosystem a heroic quality. Most of the other works of fiction that deal with the theme at all are just ecodisaster novels.
In looking for the reasons for Dune’s popularity, we have to note that it is an unusually well-drawn and effective adventure story on a grand scale, and is at the same time something more: a book with immediate and intentional relevance, a moral allegory of our own time that can be grasped immediately as such, even, perhaps especially, by the very young.
Dune’s success over the years has been enormous and significant. It has sold millions of copies in numerous editions, and when Herbert completed the third book of the Dune series, Children of Dune, it became an authentic hardcover best-seller with 75,000 copies sold (not including book club sales). It was the first hardcover best-seller ever in the science fiction field, by a science fiction author, with a science fiction cover, with science fiction written all over it. Children of Dune proved to the publishing industry that science fiction could make it big without denying the name. And Dune itself continues to sell in the 1990s—it may be the best-selling SF book of all time. It would be pointless to deny the potential effects of such a book with such a record. Dune is a book that entertains and educates.
Star Trek is a phenomenon rather than a book, but in a discussion of how SF deals with big ideas and how those ideas begin to impinge more or less directly and immediately on our daily lives, Star Trek is as significant an example as Dune. Star Trek, however, does not deal with ideas in the tradition of written SF. Beginning as a TV show that was canceled in spite of a heroic letter-writing campaign by its committed fans, the Star Trek world refused to stay canceled. It has become apparent that Star Trek is about ideals and idealism in a science fiction setting, ideals which are not discussed but rather embodied and projected.
Star Trek fiction offers a kind of Reader’s Digest approach to science fiction—snappy, compact summaries of standard SF plots and clichés. The familiar flat characters and cardboard starship serve to make SF ideas accessible, and therefore exciting, to an audience familiar otherwise only with “sci-fi.” It’s an undemanding audience that reads very little prose that makes demands on it, basically style-deaf.
However, the execution of the Star Trek books and show does not detract from the essential emotional appeal of Star Trek. The starship Enterprise and its crew represent an ideal civilization, a utopian community in which all races and types of humanity live in harmony according to the highest (1960s American) ideals. The characters are all representative types, both professionally and racially, under the benevolent command of Captain Kirk. External problems constantly invade this perfect society; these problems are solved neither by force nor technological know-how but by emotional adjustment. Each story has this emotional dimension, in which the stability of the perfect society is challenged and one of the central characters must respond, with humane emotion as well as logic, to restore harmony.
Mister Spock, the half-human Vulcan who is racially incapable of showing emotion, is a pivotal character, a constant embodiment of the war between logic and feeling, himself a challenge to the emotional stability of the Enterprise. He is a symbol of repressed emotion (bad) who constantly implies emotional virtues (good) in his loyalty to Kirk and to the crew of the ship. Thus is the godless power of science tamed by future society.
The Enterprise is an idealized future of humanity, the heaven of many science fiction readers. Each episode of Star Trek starts and ends at home in utopia. The archetypal cry of the Enterprise crew after any adventure is, “Beam us home.” (For effective and ironic uses of this motif, note the song “Beam Me Up,” by Tom Rush, and also the story “Beam Us Home,” by James Tiptree, Jr.)
All of which is very comforting to the readers. It reinforces unsophisticated idealism, offers an optimistic picture of the future, and provides the reader an orderly world of romance and adventure to escape to when the “real” world is oppressive or boring.
The first Star Trek books filled twelve paperback volumes of short stories by James Blish, a veteran science fiction writer who applied none of his varied talents to the task but instead tried to reproduce the effect of the original TV episodes as accurately as possible. He turned each of the scripts for each of the episodes into a separate story. Altogether, the twelve Blish volumes retell the three seasons of the TV show. He also wrote a tie-in novel, Spock Must Die.
There followed several volumes of stories from the animated Star Trek Saturday morning TV series, then novels by various hands featuring the world and characters, billed by the publisher as “new Star Trek experiences.” And every year throughout the seventies more and more nonfiction and associational books appeared. With the advent of the 1980s, and Star Trek—The Motion Picture, a whole spate of new (now bestselling) books and films appeared, comics, toys, then a new TV series, then another, proving the continuing vitality of the Star Trek world, in which ideals are right up front and important.
Furthermore, as the seventies and eighties progressed, Gene Roddenberry (the creator of Star Trek) and the original stars of the series began to be interested in the U.S. space program, to speak in public in favor of NASA’s efforts. Nichelle Nichols (Lieutenant Uhura) actively toured and recruited for NASA. All this first showed its power in a huge letter-writing campaign among Star Trek fans, which succeeded in convincing President Gerald Ford to name the first actual space shuttle the Enterprise. Perhaps it is still too early to assess the impact of Star Trek on three decades of American children, but there are a whole lot of young supporters of space exploration in the U.S. today.
Only some SF people have participated in the Star Trek phenomenon, providing an essential rallying core at the very start in the sixties, but the feelings of the SF community as a whole toward Star Trek have generally stayed benign, especially since the Star Trek fans began to hold their own conventions in the early seventies and stop (for the most part) demanding time for Star Trek events at the regular round of SF conventions. Addiction to Star Trek has been known to lead to omnivorous reading of science fiction, even to becoming a well-known SF writer (Vonda N. McIntyre, Lisa Goldstein, and others), so the regular adult SF chronic suffers Star Trek as a slight embarrassment that probably does more good than harm.
However (until it became unfashionable in some circles in the recent past), like Trekkies and Trekkers, the whole science fiction field has always supported space travel in the real world. In the earliest days of science fiction, in the late twenties and early thirties, science fiction readers were often out on weekends building small rockets; were in correspondence with German experimenters such as Willy Ley; and were uniformly optimistic about space and space travel. The first place Wernher von Braun came when he reached New York was to a local science fiction convention. And the great names of modern science fiction, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Robert A. Heinlein, at one time or another appeared in public in support of the U.S. space program, and of course have promoted it through their fiction.
Space travel was the big idea of science fiction right up through the 1950s. It is not an overstatement to say that the whole SF field believed that the future of humanity lay, immediately or ultimately, in space. SF magazines such as Space Science Fiction Magazine, Rocket Stories, Space Stories, Wonders of the Spaceways, and a number of others evidence this focus. Writers and readers believed in space travel. They wanted that future full of adventure among the planets and stars to be real.
In 1947, after his service in World War II, Robert A. Heinlein moved from Philadelphia to Hollywood. He was already the embodiment of the best in science fiction, already possibly the most popular SF writer in the world. And he moved to Hollywood with the announced intention of writing the first real American SF movie, about the first flight to the moon. He succeeded. Destination Moon, technologically accurate and based on Heinlein’s script, was the film that started the great cycle of science fiction films in England and America in the 1950s. At the same time, Heinlein was writing his famous novella “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” about D. D. Harriman, a visionary industrialist who causes the first rocket to the moon to be built. This was the glowing bright side of SF in the years when the other big idea of prewar SF that John W. Campbell had promoted—the power of the atom—had turned frightening. Nothing could stop Heinlein.
Robert A. Heinlein, the dean of science fiction writers, wrote over forty books, all science fiction (except for a few posthumously published books on travel, or politics, and a selection of letters called Grumbles From the Grave) with total sales of over thirty million copies. His position as the leading SF author has been firmly established since the early 1940s. Heinlein always gave us a darn good yarn (as he would say) peopled by attractive characters and their amusing, instructive conversations, and full of fascinating, smoothly tossed-off details of the future.
Heinlein’s books fall roughly into three categories: his later novels (1959 to 1986); his earlier works, including both novels and short stories (1939 to 1959); and his “juveniles,” twelve novels written between 1947 and 1959 expressly for the teenage market, many of which, however, were initially serialized in adult SF magazines. By the same token, Heinlein’s “adult” books are read by young people as enthusiastically and indiscriminately as his juveniles are read by adults. Young people who read SF read adult SF all the time.
Heinlein’s early novels and stories usually hypothesize a future situation—what would happen if the U.S. turned into a religious autocracy (“If This Goes On—”)?; what would happen if society discovered a group of people in our midst who have secretly used genetics to achieve an average life span twice as long as the rest of us enjoy (Methuselah’s Children)?; what would happen if the leader of a world government were replaced by an actor impersonating him (Double Star)?—and then develop this situation to its logical conclusion. His stories have charm and depth; they can be read and reread with constant pleasure.
The Heinlein juveniles differ from his early books mainly in having a young adult protagonist, usually but not always male. They are less self-conscious than the adult books about offering instruction, mostly in astronomy and survival. Heinlein often includes as a major character a lovable and intriguing alien who becomes pals with the protagonist—this same prototype shows up in several of his later works as an intelligent computer. The books are upbeat in tone; the protagonists have interesting rough times, go through a maturing process, and end up with bright futures.
One thing the juveniles and much of Heinlein’s early work have in common is a real enthusiasm for space travel, a sense of wonder about exploring the solar system and eventually leaping into interstellar space, and a reverence for scientifically and technically accurate detail about space travel. Most of them are still readable and in print today.
Precisely at that moment in the late 1950s when space travel became a reality, shocking most of the world, Heinlein’s interests and his fiction turned in other directions. In 1961 he published Stranger in a Strange Land, his most famous and controversial novel, a full-scale satire on the taboos of Western civilization. If H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling are the paradigms of early Heinlein, then perhaps George Bernard Shaw—garrulous, long-winded, brilliant, and satirical, especially the Shaw of Back to Methuselah—is the paradigm of Heinlein in Stranger and after. For Stranger is for the most part a series of dialogues in a dramatic SF setting through which ideas are discussed: set pieces on art, cannibalism, sex, religion, and a myriad other topics, attacking cultural prejudice with logic. (Logic always wins.) Stranger is principally about religion, but within its framework Heinlein creates perhaps the most universal of all SF novels about ideas.
Stranger was unquestionably the most popular SF novel of the 1960s, selling millions of copies and becoming, for good or bad, the great cult novel of the hippie movement. Heinlein’s logical attack on American culture and the social shams that limit personal freedom was consistent and deadly, just exactly what a generation of youngsters disillusioned by the fall of Kennedy’s Camelot, the rise of the war in Southeast Asia, and the failure of peaceful demonstrations against racism needed to express their own frustration and then point out paths elsewhere. Stranger became a sacred text. A number of people even attempted to put the religion of Stranger into practice, including Charles Manson, whose selective interpretation of the practices of Valentine Michael Smith, one of the central characters, permitted Manson to “discorporate” evildoers in the name of right and justice. Poor Heinlein. Poor us.
Heinlein’s examination of social, economic, political, and cultural ideas continued throughout his later works, his method remained the same, and his sales never flagged until the present decade. But with Stranger he turned away from the wonders of science and technology as a wellspring of ideas, the kinds of ideas for which SF is known and by which it is characterized in the public mind.
The big visionary technological idea has been the hallmark of Arthur C. Clarke’s great career in SF. His first big success was The Exploration of Space, a nonfiction best-seller in 1952. But it was the success of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 that finally catapulted him into wider public recognition, a success attributable to the sense of wonder the film projects through its loving attention to technological detail and its awesome, mystical thematic content.
Arthur C. Clarke is an example of the excellent science fiction writer who probably couldn’t succeed in any field of writing other than SF or popular science. His great assets are his knowledge of and enthusiasm for the details of astronomy, astrophysics, and oceanography, and his prodigious visual imagination when applied to the experiences humans may have in their exploration of space and the ocean depths. Clarke’s other talents—his ability to plot (which is good) and to characterize (rather poor)—don’t add up to much when you take away his enthusiasm for describing science fictional environments. His popularity in SF stems from the fact that, for all his interest in science (indeed, as a result of that interest), he is a romantic and on occasion a mystic, and even more than Heinlein he succeeds in making space travel an authentically romantic experience.
“The Sentinel,” a Clarke story written in 1951 that was the inspiration for 2001, gives us a portrait of a romantic scientist (he likes to look at moonscapes and climb lunar mountains) who has a rational, tangible, yet mystical experience. He discovers a pyramid surrounded by a force field on a mountainside in an unexplored part of the moon—and realizes that Someone Has Been There Already.
In “The Sentinel,” Clarke appeals to us on two levels, one straightforward, the other transcendental. On the straightforward level, SF readers who have an appetite for space stuff enjoy the description of everyday life on the moon. The narrator is part of an expedition exploring the Mare Crisium:
As I stood by the frying-pan, waiting, like any terrestrial housewife, for the sausages to brown, I let my gaze wander idly over the mountain wall which covered the whole of the southern horizon, marching out of sight to the east and west below the curve of the Moon. They seemed only a mile or two from the tractor, but I knew that the nearest was twenty miles away. On the Moon, of course, there is no loss of detail with distance—none of that almost imperceptible haziness which softens and sometimes transfigures all far-off things on Earth.
The simple wonder of looking out of the window and seeing the mountains of the Moon in all their splendor is pleasurable and satisfying, given the quality of Clarke’s descriptive prose (he writes with real affection) and given that such description is relevant to an effectively plotted story. But in the end of the story, Clarke opens out with a transcendent sweep into something far more exciting than moon scenery; he suggests that the pyramid is a device for sending signals, planted in the knowledge that humanity would discover it if and when they evolved and matured enough to travel into space. And that humanity will try to take it apart to see how it works and in doing so, destroy it—so the pyramid will stop sending out signals. Which will itself be the signal to the older race that it is time to come see what’s happening on Earth.
The story ends with the narrator looking up at the sky: “I do not think we will have to wait for long.” Science at its boldest is not mere rationality but the means to step into the larger Unknown. Clarke uses this awareness to write stories that send cosmic chills down our spines.
This is the kind of idea for which science fiction is famous, plots that can be summarized and still transmit the essential chill—what a fantastic idea—big, wonderful, mind-stretching.
These are ideas from the wellsprings of science and technology made flesh and hooked into the rest of existence to give them thematic reverberations. This is what science fiction does. And the ideas intersect with the real, mundane world through whatever thematic material the writer can provide to sound great bells.