WORSHIPPING AT THE CHURCH OF WONDER
THE QUESTION of science fiction and religion has been raised frequently since the 1950s. Before that there was no question, since it had been settled in the late nineteenth century that science and religion were unalterably opposed. And the writers of science fiction, beginning at the time of H. G. Wells, had not dealt with the subject except, infrequently, to portray religious characters as “the opposition.” A whole body of clichés (e.g., the repressive religious dictatorship, antiscientific and antihumanistic, found in Heinlein’s Future History series or in Fritz Leiber’s Gather, Darkness) dominated American SF for decades. The other side of the coin, the idea of a new “scientific religion,” occurs in the field infrequently, in fringe-area works such as M. P. Shiel’s The Last Miracle and L. Ron Hubbard’s controversial Dianetics (a discipline now know as Scientology). Certainly the works of David Lindsay (especially A Voyage to Arcturus) and later C. S. Lewis are intimately involved with religious questions, but these are generally isolated examples far from the main body and traditions of popular science fiction prior to the mid-1950s.
However, in the place of religion per se there was a tradition of wonder and transcendence at the very heart of the SF field from H. G. Wells, Olaf Stapledon, James Blish, and Arthur C. Clarke to E. E. Smith, John W. Campbell, Robert A. Heinlein, Ray Bradbury, A. E. Van Vogt, and Isaac Asimov. One might even say that to the members of the SF field, there was and is an anagogical level present in SF literature.
I am not going to pursue those particular works of SF that deal with theology and dispute, though many of them are among the generally acknowledged masterpieces of SF, from Clarke’s “The Star” and Blish’s A Case of Conscience through Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz to the later works of Philip K. Dick (especially the VALIS trilogy). These are often discussed in courses on SF and religion for the purpose of illuminating religion, not SF. I propose to use religion to discuss SF, as an approach to what readers get from it and how.
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A sense of wonder, awe at the vastness of space and time, is at the root of the excitement of science fiction. Any child who has looked up at the stars at night and thought about how far away they are, how there is no end or outer edge to this place, this universe—any child who has felt the thrill of fear and excitement at such thoughts stands a very good chance of becoming a science fiction reader.
To say that science fiction is in essence a religious literature is an overstatement, but one that contains truth. SF is a uniquely modern incarnation of an ancient tradition: the tale of wonder. Tales of miracles, tales of great powers and consequences beyond the experience of people in our neighborhood, tales of the gods who inhabit other worlds and sometimes descend to visit ours, tales of humans traveling to the abode of the gods, tales of the uncanny: All exist now as science fiction.
Science fiction’s appeal lies in its combination of the rational, the believable, with the miraculous. It is an appeal to the sense of wonder.
Science fiction has about it an extraliterary quality. Most SF stories that lack literary distinction—all the average and below-average tales that comprise the bulk of the field—can be summarized as well as or better than they read in full text. What is attractive to the sense of wonder may be evinced in a single paragraph or outline, just as the power and wonder of an ancient Greek myth is communicated in summary form. Certainly an excellent SF story, just like an excellent literary version of one of the Greek myths, has powerful and complex virtues not available in summary. But the wonder is not necessarily lost or absent in a not-very-literate popular telling. The crude level of style and the pulp storytelling conventions did not prevent the earliest Gernsbackian SF from filling its audience with wonder.
Wonder stories of science and technology go back at least to the late eighteenth century and progress in various forms through Louis-Sébastien Mercier and Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and Poe (and a very large number of others in France, Germany, England, and America) to Verne and Wells.
Jules Verne was the first writer to make his name almost entirely from the production of this kind of story. For a hundred years, readers of Verne have thrilled to the wonder of a voyage to the moon in a capsule shot from a huge cannon; of a journey through the caverns underneath an extinct volcano into the depths of the Earth; of a trip undersea, filled with adventures, in an enormous submarine. These stories have sunk their hooks deep into the consciousness of a large number of readers, some of whom became SF writers in later decades. Verne’s influence on SF cannot be overstated; he was the first to produce a whole body of work about the wonders of science. That he has had an international bestseller in the 1990s (Paris in the Twenty-First Century), a dystopian work thought by his original publisher to be too grim and uncommercial for his contemporaries only confirms his continuing importance as a world literary figure.
H. G. Wells began writing while Verne was still active, and produced his last major SF work, Things to Come, nine years after Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories. The power of Wells’s greatest novels, The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon, and The Island of Dr. Moreau, and of his many short stories, makes him the crucial writer linking Verne and modern SF. He was a writer with literary virtues lacking in Verne, but his other talents pale in the light of his ability to envision things and ideas that excite wonder: the time machine itself, and the beauties and terrors of the future; a war on Earth with invading intelligent beings from another planet; a visit to an alien civilization on the moon; the creation of beast-men; the incursion into our daily lives of astronomical events (“The Star” and In the Days of the Comet). His extrapolative novels, such as When the Sleeper Wakes, A Modern Utopia and The War in the Air (and his novella, “A Story of the Days to Come,”), provided fodder for the minds of Gernsback and his first generation of readers and writers (in fact, generations raised on Verne and Wells were the core of Gernsback’s audience), as well as a technique for creating future worlds that has dominated the SF field since his day.
But Gernsback was an inventor, obsessed with technology, and it was Verne and the followers of Verne, in the dime novels and boys’ books such as the Tom Swift series with their wonderful machines, who initially influenced the new field and astounded and delighted the audience. The early issues of Amazing Stories, with their blazing, glowing covers of strange worlds and creatures and of cataclysmic events, delivered the technological miracles of the future. It was not until the mid-1930s that the Wellsian influence began to dominate the field.
Meanwhile, there were two authors, rarely discussed today, whose work dominated the early SF field and who contributed romance and adventure mixed with color and strangeness: Edgar Rice Burroughs and E. E. Smith, Ph.D.
Burroughs was one of the world’s most popular adventure writers from 1912 onward, and the major portion of his work aside from the Tarzan books was one variety of SF or another: his Martian adventures (beginning in 1912 with A Princess of Mars) and his Pellucidar books, Carson of Venus and the world “at the Earth’s core.” Although most of his work appeared in the adventure pulps such as Argosy and Blue Book, Gernsback did get The Master Mind of Mars for Amazing Annual. Burroughs’s Mars was the first great SF series setting, a world of adventure to which readers could return again and again for decades of stories.
“Doc” Smith, batter chemist for a doughnut manufacturer, who had written a romance of space travel in 1920 but never sold it, found a market for The Skylark of Space in Amazing Stories, and for the first time catapulted humanity in spaceships beyond the solar system out into the galaxy and beyond, there to meet strange races both good and evil. Smith widened the possibilities of SF and remained the most popular author in the field right until the advent of Heinlein, Asimov, Van Vogt, and the rest in John W. Campbell’s Astounding. Campbell’s own writing career began as author of rousing interstellar adventures in emulation of Smith—and his name was so identified with those adventures that when he began in the mid-1930s to write intense, atmospheric Wellsian SF, he used the pseudonym Don A. Stuart.
Neither Burroughs nor Smith had any literary pretensions. Smith even dressed as one of his own characters at early SF conventions. They were popular writers of pulp adventure, knew it, and gloried in it. Burroughs’s SF had a wider audience because most of his works were immediately put into hardcover, but within the burgeoning field Smith was the greatest. And for one reason only: His stories struck the sense of wonder like lightning. His huge, galactic, cosmic adventures were electrifyingly new. After reading Smith, you could look up at the night sky as never before, and be filled with a whole new range of awesome potentialities.
The writer of science fiction could expand his consciousness into new ranges of possibilities, obtain totally new perspectives, see new visions. And the readers, the first generation of omnivores, became chronic omnivores—after all, it was then possible to read literally all SF published and catch up on the classics of Verne and Wells and still have time left for other reading. For the first time ever, after the existence of Amazing Stories, you could identify yourself to others as a fan of that particular kind of literature, correspond with others of like mind, and proselytize.
Young men such as Jack Williamson and Edmond Hamilton and Raymond Z. Gallun got published in Amazing Stories and founded careers in the late 1920s and early 1930s with the intention of writing this new kind of fiction. Most of their stories were rough or crude or cliché-ridden, or all that and more; but they had the addiction and knew what the readers wanted—action, excitement, cosmic ideas. And they knew that the action and excitement, although necessary, were not the real point. The crux of every story had to be the aspect that sparked the sense of wonder. That was what differentiated the “scientifiction” readership from all other pulp adventure readers.
Nearly all the classic works of Smith and all of Burroughs’s SF were still in print in paperback and reissued regularly with new packages until the end of the 1980s—Burroughs still is—probably the best evidence of their enduring popularity and of the success with which they still inspire wonder, regardless of archaic clichés, outdated science, and just plain bad writing.
To this day some of the best SF is not terribly well written. A sensitive reader of fiction must put aside literary fashion and prejudices against “bad writing,” even with some of the classics of science fiction, if he hopes to understand what attracts so many seemingly intelligent people. Of course even today a majority of the readers of SF have no literary sophistication or are style deaf or both; but this has helped the field immeasurably during its formative decades, when it served raw unprepared wonder in unassimilated lumps, when no one ever let the writing get in the way of the cosmic and awesome ideas.
There is a substantial amount of fine writing that is also good SF now. Even though a whole lot of people in the field would rather not admit any longer that wonder is still the crucial element of success in SF, it is and will remain so as long as the field survives. After all, very few of the major SF novels of the forties and fifties were out of print in paperback in the 1980s—at least not for long—although in the 1990s the forties are gone into literary history and the fifties and early sixties have produced fewer durable works than it seemed a decade ago. Wonder endures, but audience tastes and attitudes change, as does literary fashion.
Obviously SF does not have a corner on wonder—certain works of fantasy and supernatural horror have a similar ability to arouse fear, delight, and awe (and, as we noted earlier, those works tend to be written by writers who also write SF). Much more rarely, one finds modern or contemporary fiction that evokes mystery and wonder. Such works have not been common since the 1920s outside the borders of fantasy and science fiction except in children’s literature—here fantasy abounds but is not constrained into conventional limitations of any sort, from Oz and Winnie the Pooh and Andrew Lang’s fairy books through Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and James Thurber and many others to the present. Luckily for the SF field, the children raised on this literature are ripe for the wonders of SF, a repository of potential omnivores and chronics.
Science fiction has claimed the domains of time (especially the distant future) and space, the infinite possibilities out there, just at the moment when the last locations of awe and mystery have disappeared from our planet—terra incognita, distant islands, forbidden Tibet, the mysterious East. And recently the possibility of alternate universes, including an infinity of possible pasts and presents, has been claimed by SF. Except for the imaginary past of classical or other, such as Arthurian mythology, science fiction has most of the territory. SF ranges free through the infinite spaces and times, finding and focusing on the nodes that inspire wonder—catastrophes, big events, crucial turning points in history, the supernal beauties of cosmic vistas, endless opportunities for new and strange experiences that astound and illuminate. This is the point John W. Campbell was addressing when he asserted that all the rest of literature is just a special case of SF, while SF is broader and freer than any other writing. The territory is huge.
The readers want it huge too, and want it always expanding. In the 1920s, they clamored for more Doc Smith, and the editor of Amazing convinced him to write a sequel to his original novel. Skylark Three was filled with “a stupendous panorama of alien lifeforms, mile-long spaceships travelling faster than light, devastating ray-weapons, and frightful battles in the void ending in inevitable triumphs for the visiting Earthmen” (Walter Gillings, introduction to The Best of E. E. “Doc” Smith, London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1975, p. 11). Then in 1931, after Gernsback had left Amazing Stories to found Science Wonder Stories and Air Wonder Stories, Smith came up with another story, Spacehounds of IPC, which confined his heroes of the Inter-Planetary Corporation to the solar system. This, he insisted, was true scientific fiction, not pseudoscience, and he planned to make it the first of a series—but it wasn’t what his fans wanted: “‘We want Smith to write stories of scope and range. We want more Skylarks!’ was the cry. And Amazing’s eighty-year-old editor, Dr. T. O’Conor Sloane, who still had seven years to go before he retired, pointed a lean finger out towards the Milky Way” (The Best of E. E. “Doc” Smith, p. 11).
But as H. G. Wells maintained in his famous introduction to his collected early novels, where everything is possible, nothing is particularly interesting or wonderful. So the challenge to the wondermakers who have written SF has been to set limits acceptable to their audiences and, presumably, based on knowledge of science, then to push on to the very edges of those limits (or, carefully and with respect, to break them) to create wonder. It is entirely the task of the writer to limit the work, since such enormous freedom is granted by the audience.
So there has always existed from the time of Smith a dynamic and fruitful tension between writer and audience in science fiction, between the author’s need to control the matter of science fiction and the audience’s insatiable desire for more marvels. And in the end the audience has always triumphed. It is an audience thoroughly experienced in the work of the field, knowledgeable, jaded even, which has pressed the authors of science fiction continually for newer, bigger, better tales of wonder, more fantastic worlds and astounding stories—more excess, more often than not.
It is not surprising, then, that from the 1920s onward, science fiction writers have eagerly incorporated other related subgenres such as utopias and dystopias, stories of lost races, mythologies, marvelous voyages, and indeed all of literary fantasy. And it cannot be surprising that such an acquisitive agglomeration should resist definition, since each successful story contributes to a redefinition of the field’s boundaries. Given the mandates of the loyal, vocal core audience, with its traditions of immediate feedback to the writers, the pressure to be creative is always on a writer of science fiction.
And to turn the coin over, the pressure is always on the author to repeat past triumphs. The lesser talents have solved this problem by hacking out variations on the creative successes of their earlier work or the SF stories of others—but the audience has usually been able to spot the difference between creative emulation (which they like and support) and clichéd repetition. They will support an entire career that is devoted to wringing every last drop of essential wonder from an original idea complex (Doc Smith wrote only two substantial series of novels over his five decades in the field; Isaac Asimov ended his fifty-year career by writing a series of novels that extended and tied together his Foundation series and his robot stories and novels) but will withdraw support and approval from any writer, no matter how talented his execution, who fails them by turning attention away from the marvelous. They are particularly resistant to and suspicious of stylistic sophistication or experimentation unless it is clearly in support of some wondrous effect. They are the children of H. G. Wells, not Henry James.
To the uninitiated observer and to academics approaching the literature, one of the most difficult perceptions to grasp is that the SF audience is just as important as the writers and the written work to an understanding of science fiction. Why is the fiction often so badly written but seemingly praised and honored by its devotees? Because the execution is secondary to the wonder aroused by it. Why are science fiction writers, a noticeably bright and creative lot, so paranoiac about the lack of serious attention paid their works outside SF? Because they know that only the very best of them can satisfy the demands of their audience and also pull off the trick of writing according to present literary fashion (which is of course irrelevant to their markets and supporting audience).
Science fiction is as much a phenomenon as it is a body of written work; outsiders are in the position of the blind men in the fable of the blind men and the elephant: They tend to arrive at generalizations based on parts, not the whole. But the evidence is all there, in the books and magazines, the fanzines, histories, social events, reference books. The science fiction field worships wonder.
A pointed example of the modern wonder-story is Larry Niven’s 1972 Hugo award-winning “Inconstant Moon.” The evening I first read the story in 1971, I thought, This story is going to win the Hugo! Even if history had proved that wrong, what I knew in a moment was that “Inconstant Moon” would delight chronic readers of SF.
This is “Inconstant Moon”: A lover stands with his beloved on a balcony looking up at the moon as lovers do. The moon grows brighter and brighter as he watches, and his present joy turns to awe and fear as he reasons it out, for now it casts a glow nearly as bright as full daylight and he knows that a transcendent catastrophe is occurring (the other side of the Earth is being burned to a crisp), the sun increasing its brightness many times over, and that humanity may have only hours to live. As the world turns toward dawn, the man and his girlfriend spend their brief hours in a night of frantic romance as tension mounts—until, with dawn approaching, the moon fades back to normal. A solar flare, not a nova! Our lovers will have a fighting chance to survive, though the daylight side of the Earth must surely have been destroyed. They begin to plan for the future.
The nightmare vision of that uncanny moon is as powerful an image as was ever projected by a work of science fiction. You must know something of high school astronomy to get the idea immediately, but any chronic or omnivore of science fiction is so charged by that image that he may reimagine it at will without rereading the entire story and still get the thrill of wonder.
This is a crucial point in our discussion of what SF is all about. You must understand that a constant desire for arousal, for that electric input that charges the “wonder sense,” is what really hooks people on science fiction and makes omnivores into chronics. The science fiction person would rather read a story that alerts and strokes this sense than anything else. Anything. He would rather read (or reread, after a time) “Inconstant Moon” than any work of fiction, no matter how perceptive and carefully written, polished and artful, that does not arouse wonder.
Chronics are patient and determined. They spend years reading SF regularly and frequently, supporting specialized magazines and large publishing programs, seeking and constantly finding stories that ignite wonder.
It looks strange to an outsider, but perhaps you should think of it this way: A chronic reading science fiction is more like one of the faithful attending a church service than an experienced critic responding to a work of art. The act of reading SF continually provides access to wonder, just as the church service provides access to worship.
But an outsider doesn’t gain access easily. Walk into the temple of a religion other than yours and you feel discomfort and, perhaps, disorientation. Or, better, consider the situation of a child in the cathedral of her parents’ faith—she must spend years of training in the symbology of the religion before she has access to the awe and wonder of it. Until then it is just a big fancy room with strange decorations.
Beyond the actual is the realm of wonder and the mysterious. Who would deny the existence of mysteries, or their power over human life and civilization? Young people search for mystery to inform and validate their lives; older people venerate the mysteries they have confronted, shape their lives around the attempt to penetrate the mysteries they perceived or stumbled upon in their youth. Mysteries stimulate the heart, the will, and the imagination toward something beyond day-to-day survival.
For many young people today, science fiction stories in all their variety take the place of religious texts from times gone by, stimulating their readers to take interest in and hunger for something larger than mundane life, for a life lit by the glow of wonder. And it is not uncommon for a young omnivore to become derailed from science fiction by precisely the arousal of wonder. Joanna Russ relates that one of her students explained how reading Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End had awakened her religious feelings and led her to join the Catholic church (this caused by an SF novel about humanity evolving into an ultimate being of pure group mind). Enough people who are influential in religious education have perceived dimly enough this connection between SF and religion to create a fair number of courses around the U.S. in SF and religion. Most of them, however, make the elementary mistake of teaching only SF works that are about religion, thereby directing the students’ attention away from whatever point there might be.
One story to have received such treatment is Clarke’s 1953 classic “The Nine Billion Names of God.” Toward the end of this short piece of brilliant plotting, two rational computer engineers aboard a plane leaving a lamasery high in the Himalayas have discussed the quaint but threatening attempts of a religious sect in the East that hired them to use a computer to help fulfill God’s purpose for mankind—to list all the possible names of God and thereby find the real name, after which the world will end (as a prelude to something bigger). They are on their way home as the contract is completed by the computer below. One engineer, George, remarks that the computer run must be ending about now just as Chuck notices that outside (“without any fuss”) the stars in the sky are beginning to go out!
Of course, science fiction can be used for purposes other than its own, and often is, by everyone from futurologists and sociologists to physicists. (At a recent academic conference, the annual Modern Language Association meeting, a couple of physicists spoke on using SF to teach physics—Hugo Gernsback would have been delighted.) But to teach such an SF story as “The Nine Billion Names of God” as anything other than a story about the sense of wonder is narrow and, we suspect, just the kind of reduction of literature to “teachability” that discourages students from reading on their own for whatever range of pleasure literature offers. To use science fiction is, most often, to abuse it. So it is a common complaint of SF chronics and omnivores, which we will discuss in a later chapter, that science fiction courses are a danger to the field, at best irrelevant, at worst pernicious and perverse.
Science fiction stories are performances, just like the Christian mystery plays of the Middle Ages. In the mystery plays, full of miracles and wondrous paradoxes (he was dead and yet he lives, a virgin has borne a child), the audience experienced in vivid and dramatic reenactment the wonders of their faith, and their religious feelings were aroused and celebrated. The original location of the plays, the ministerium (church), from which they took their name, changed over the course of time to the streets and the word “mystery” came to signify the wonders and miracles presented. So “science fiction” has come to signify, for the field, stories that arouse “sense of wonder.” A science fiction story clothes and enacts in narrative a wonder.
A useful example of the consciousness through which a science fiction writer creates an embodiment of wonder is the story (and the circumstances by which the story came to be) “Nightfall,” by Isaac Asimov. It is often pointed to as perhaps the greatest of the classic SF stories of Campbell’s “golden age.” When the Science Fiction Writers of America voted in 1965 to establish the contents of the definitive science fiction anthology to that date, “Nightfall” received the most votes of all for inclusion in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame:
On a distant planet orbiting a complex system of six multiple suns, so that total darkness occurs anywhere on the planet only every two thousand and forty-nine years, astronomers predict that such a darkness can and will happen, only to be ridiculed by their two-thousand-year-old society. A certain nut cult has a tradition that civilization is cyclic and ends in darkness every 2,050 years, but no one else takes the astronomers’ prediction seriously: No living human is psychologically capable of withstanding real darkness. And then, as night begins to fall, the entire race, which never had the need to invent artificial light, goes mad from fear and begins to light great fires, burning down their civilization in order to escape the dark. With nightfall, the race is reduced to madness and barbarism, doomed by its own psychology.
In The Early Asimov (New York: Doubleday, 1972, p. 319) Isaac Asimov recalls entering John W. Campbell’s office with a story idea that was instantly rejected because Campbell had just come across a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe, and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God!”
Campbell asked me what I thought would happen if the stars would appear at only very long intervals. I had nothing intelligent to suggest.
“I think men would go mad,” he said thoughtfully.
We talked about that notion for quite a while, and I went home to write a story on the subject, one that Campbell and I decided from the start was to be called “Nightfall.”
To say that the situation outlined is a uniquely successful example of editor and author arriving at a commercial idea and that the professional environment of the science fiction writer and editor has always encouraged such interactions (remember Sloane and Doc Smith) does not penetrate beyond the surface of this example. The unspoken and a priori agreement between Asimov and Campbell was that they were engaged in a continuing enterprise with rather specific goals: to search out peculiarly science fictional story ideas, ideas that, when cast in story form, would not merely be clever and effective but would also satisfy the desire for arousal of a sense of wonder through the impact of their range and scope. They knew that what they were doing was serious and important.
John W. Campbell was one of the most successful and innovative practicing science fiction writers when he agreed by contract with the publisher of Astounding never to publish any fiction during his editorship. Rather than work to support himself elsewhere while he wrote, he chose to edit because he had a powerful and serious vision of the greater potentialities of science fiction—and he used his editorship to create this greater flowering. He committed the rest of his life to the task. And Isaac Asimov, from his early teens an avid reader of science fiction and member of the famous Futurians (the New York City SF fan club that included Frederik Pohl, Donald A. Wollheim, C. M. Kornbluth, and later James Blish, Damon Knight, and Judith Merril—read the fascinating, gossipy history of the group, The Futurians, by Damon Knight), was a young man whose whole personality had been formed by his association with science fiction. They certainly were not in it for the money. They were Members of the Elect.
This feeling of importance and seriousness is expressed over and over: “The humble truth is that science fiction is only for the small number of people who like to think and who regard the universe with awe, which is a blend of love and fear. ‘The public’ does neither; it wants to be spoon-fed by its magazines and movies, and it regards the universe with horror, which is a blend of fear and hate” (Damon Knight, In Search of Wonder, second edition, Chicago: Advent, 1967; pp. 277–78). The demands that science fiction makes on the chronic and omnivore—of reading, with unflagging enthusiasm, through the bad stuff to find the good stuff, always open and responding though often dissatisfied; of loyalty and faith—are worth it because the quest is important. Loyal and faithful reading is the act of worship.
I have spoken earlier about big ideas and the importance of scale in science fiction, of great distances and spans of time, huge objects and vast importances (“Only one man in all the universe could combat the menace…”). It is the intention of science fiction to heighten and intensify, to highlight and cast in relief whatever matter the individual story chooses. Science fiction is by nature symbolic at the same moment that it is logical and rational. The impact of “Nightfall” or “Inconstant Moon,” so logically and carefully grounded, is beyond the rational and in the realm of awe.
Let us examine Arthur C. Clarke’s well-known dictum on the importance of point of view: He states that a technology that is sufficiently advanced beyond our present state of knowledge would be indistinguishable from magic, just as lighting a match would be considered an act of magic if it were witnessed by a human from a primitive culture. The science fiction reader asks of a story that it reveal an act of such magic and, according to the field’s conventions, explain the magic, usually as technology. What makes the story SF is not the magic but the explanation that suggests that the magic is actually possible. We are given an explanation that does not destroy the magic (“it was only a dream”) but rather promises the possibility of that particular magic, perhaps far away in space, or in the future.
Science fiction promises wonder outside the confines and limitations of the story. The wonder we perceive in the story could be real in a faraway place, or might be real someday. Science fiction delivers us from the written page into a universe of wonder infinitely renewed. It is the transcendence of the written page that is at the core of the appeal of science fiction. Science fiction makes us transcendent. That is why I keep returning to the analogy of science fiction and religion, to the extraliterary appeal.
C. S. Lewis, in his An Experiment in Criticism (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1961), develops an unusual and relevant argument: In an attempt to combat the narrowing elitism and swings of fashion with which criticism has beset literature and the readers in modern times, he characterizes the “unliterary” reader of fiction as attracted to fiction in three ways: by excitement—imminent dangers and hair-breadth escapes, the continual winding up and relaxing of (vicarious) anxiety; by arousing curiosity, prolonging, exasperating, and finally satisfying it (“Hence the popularity of stories with a mystery in them. This pleasure is universal and needs no explanation. It makes a great part of the philosopher’s, the scientist’s, or the scholar’s happiness. Also of the gossip’s.”); and by success stories (“They like stories which enable them—vicariously through the characters—to participate in pleasure or happiness,” p. 37).
But we should not make the facile connection between science fiction and what Lewis refers to as “bad books” (the opposite of “good books”). Lewis maintains that a good book is one that may be read by a good reader—a provocative assertion, to which Lewis devotes the support of his impressive learning and talents.
Science fiction is for the most part read by readers who, when they are reading anything other than science fiction, fall quite comfortably into Lewis’s character of the unliterary reader. When an omnivore or chronic reads a science fiction story, however, the case is different, as different as, say, the response of an American baseball fan to a World Series game as opposed to his reaction to a Test Match in cricket. Or if you consider that analogy too extreme, then consider the disparity between the response of a sophisticated reader of fiction to a short story versus a work of contemporary poetry (which is read, sadly, by few who are not poets). All too many readers of fiction find poetry unruly nonsense, impenetrable. I maintain that a science fiction person reading a science fiction story interacts with that story in a rich and complex way, purposeful and meaningful.
Lewis goes on to devote an entire chapter (“On Myth”) to the kind of story with which contemporary criticism is poorly equipped to deal. The myth (Lewis is using the word “myth” in a generalized sense from its root meaning in Greek: story) has six salient features:
1. It is extraliterary in the sense that a bare outline or summary communicates a powerful impression to any person of sensibility. Lewis demonstrates that this is not true of good literary works, using examples from The Odyssey to Middlemarch.
2. The pleasure of myth depends hardly at all on the usual narrative attractions of suspense or surprise. It is a permanent object of contemplation, more like a thing than a narration.
3. Human sympathy is at a minimum. We do not project ourselves strongly into the inner life of the characters. “We feel indeed that the pattern of their movements has a profound relevance to our own life, but we do not imaginatively transport ourselves into theirs.” (This is true of some great science fiction but not by any means all—some SF does have the literary virtues of characterization, e.g., the novels of Ursula K. Le Guin or Philip K. Dick).
4. These stories are always fantastic. They deal with impossibles and preternaturals.
5. The experience may be sad or joyful but it is always serious (“grave”).
6. The experience is not only serious but awe-inspiring. “We feel it to be numinous. It is as if something of great moment had been communicated to us.”
Thus Lewis establishes a framework of considerable import for the consideration of science fiction.
Following this, Lewis discusses the difference between the unliterary reader and the extraliterary reader, which points directly to our characterization of the SF reader (p. 46):
The man who first learns what is to him a great myth through a verbal account which is baldly or vulgarly or cacophonously written, discounts and ignores the bad writing and attends solely to the myth. He hardly minds about the writing. He is glad to have the myth on any terms. But this would seem to be almost exactly the same behavior which … I attributed to the unliterary. In both there is the same minimum attention to the words and the same concentration on the Event (what happens). Yet if we equated the lover of myth with the mass of the unliterary we should be deeply mistaken.
Of course it may be that the words that tell the story are in themselves a fine work of literary art. When this happens, the SF field rejoices in the attention paid by outsiders to that work and is dismayed that those same outsiders cannot appreciate the appeal and virtues of the rest of science fiction merely because it is not quite so well written. The extraliterary pleasure is the real and true value of all the works to the initiated.
Since the 1930s, writing about SF by insiders has been filled with assertions that the essence of science fiction is “wonder,” but not one of these discussions has made itself intelligible to nonreaders of science fiction. Indeed, a majority of the books and essays on science fiction have been so myopic that they have been ridiculed within large portions of SF itself. I have experienced decades of discussion with people exposed to science fiction only through media sci-fi whose perception of science fiction was incoherent but favorable—they like to be massaged by SF. And I have experienced of course more (and necessarily shorter) conversations with people who know nothing about SF and know they wouldn’t like it. My inevitable conclusion has been that there are so many barriers set up in contemporary society to keep individuals away from the experience of aroused wonder that the messianic impulse of so many SF chronics and omnivores is generally doomed with adults.
I am attempting here a sufficient distance from science fiction in order to combine and resolve images of the field, examining both the preconceptions of insiders and outsiders for the illumination of both. There is perhaps more nonsense spoken about science fiction than any other variety of narrative. The sheer amount of noise generated by and about SF over the years should have signaled perceptive outsiders that here is something that ought to be examined and understood. That you are reading this sentence indicates an awareness that civilization in the twentieth (and twenty-first) century has somehow been influenced by science fiction. Perhaps even that your own circumstances or personality as a child have been so influenced—can you remember what the effect of science fiction was on you?
Science fiction can and does create transformations into the mythic for our culture. Every chronic reader of SF knows this, just as she knows certain things about the shape of our future and about the attractions of SF that no one ever seems to have been able to communicate to outsiders.
And so, in a sense, the chronics have built walls around themselves, invented the whole paraphernalia of SF fandom to protect their access to these myths, these wonder stories, and to keep outsiders from positions of power in the SF community—this includes critics, publishers, all those who would abuse SF by using it as some sort of device, or who would somehow obscure or compromise the essential core of wonder. Paranoia and idealism have always been among the most salient characteristics of the science fiction community.
The congregation, Damon Knight’s “small number of people” (with its distant echoes of the Miltonic “fit audience, though few”), still worships at the church of wonder—but you can’t come in unless you join.