WHEN IT COMES TRUE, IT’S NO FUN ANYMORE
SPACE TRAVEL, the future—that’s what science fiction is about. SF stories and the people who write them have always been enthusiastic about our future in space. So when Sputnik went up in 1957 and suddenly rockets to space were real, it was the greatest thing that could happen to the science fiction field. Right? Wrong. Science is speculative (science is fiction?). When it becomes real, it’s merely technology. Real space travel almost killed the science fiction field.
How? Why?
* * *
The popular idea outside the field—that somehow the business of SF is to predict what will come true—is dangerous and mistaken, a perversion of the truth of science: Science, when it works, tells you what will happen in defined circumstances every time. This is what we were all taught in school about science and what all scientists believed about science right up until the last few decades, when things like “uncertainty principles” and “wave-particle dualities” (sometimes it looks like matter and sometimes energy) began to make hard sciences like physics and chemistry look a lot more indeterminate to the scientists themselves—but more exciting and speculative, too! These days, theoretical physicists are a happy and energetic breed, with lots of really strange theories.
But until 1957, a whole lot of the creative energy of SF had gone into visions of space and space travel, producing a large majority of the popular enduring works up to that time. A wave of excitement and euphoria broke over SF in late 1957: Finally, it’s real! Now everyone will know that we were right all along, all during those decades when we were called space nuts (or simply nuts)—we were the ones who had faith, who knew, and now the world is at our feet!
Within a few weeks the horrible truths began to pile up. The world didn’t care that the SF field had been right all along—aside from a few early headlines and Sunday-supplement pieces about science fiction becoming science fact, no one paid any more attention to SF than they ever had. And as 1958 wore on, it got worse: Fewer and fewer people were buying and reading SF books and magazines. During the years after Sputnik, the field declined radically.
John W. Campbell, the leading spokesman for SF, came up with a rationalization typical of the elitist traditions of the SF family: Now that science fiction has proven its power to become real, people were frightened of it and stayed away. In a positively orgiastic fit of power fantasies fulfilled, Campbell asserted that the recession in SF would cleanse the field of those lily-livered readers who had never really believed in the first place, who had just come to SF for escapist adventure. Now the true elite could get on with the business of predicting other great things, such as the development of mental powers (psychic powers or “psi,” and Scientology).
The truth is that in a single instant the fact of space travel turned most of the classic space travel stories of science fiction into fantasies. Every week of the new space age made more science fiction untrue. This was such a big thing for SF that no one could quite think it through at the time. Everyone knew that something was really wrong, however, and the sudden decline in SF was a numbing disappointment to everyone, coming at the end of the great boom in SF that characterized the early fifties.
In such classics as Heinlein’s “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” SF readers had been told in no uncertain terms that space travel would be a private enterprise, usually the inspiration of an Edisonlike inventor or visionary businessman. That the Russian government had gotten there first, that the U.S. military would follow in a bungling fashion (at least initially) boggled SF readers. Doc Smith’s The Skylark of Space, Heinlein’s Future History stories, all the classics and standard works were now no longer improbable but possible: They were dead wrong. Space travel, one of the greatest visions of generations of SF writers and fans, was real, and the euphoria of SF fans at the fact was real, but a major and confusing readjustment was suddenly necessary.
The publication that won the Hugo award for best amateur magazine at the 1961 World SF Convention was a fat little one-shot published in 1960 called Who Killed Science Fiction? The whole field knew that SF was contracting, maybe even dying on the vine, and of course everyone had his own theory of why. And wanted to fight about it. The SF magazines were contracting and some of them disappearing, and it was not apparent at the time that the new form of SF, the paperback, was stable and growing some, for magazines had been the primary source of SF since 1926, unchallenged. Fortunately science fiction was not dying, but it certainly was changing—and selling less—and for the first time since the beginning, writers and readers were actually leaving the family in significant numbers.
For years afterward, no one paid much attention to some of the other significant factors in the decline of SF in those years. Frederik Pohl, among others, has repeatedly drawn attention to the simple fact that half or more of the SF publications of the fifties were pretty marginal economically, and that in the mid-fifties the largest and only national magazine distributor in the U.S. (the American News Company) was gobbled up by a conglomerate and sold off piecemeal, thus ending national distribution for about half the magazines in the U.S., including a whole lot of SF publications. Only the largest survived.
And yes, SF was changing in the fifties—a lot of writers were trying new ways of writing. This was not necessarily what the readers wanted, and for the first time, starting at the end of the 1940s, SF began to move partially out of the controlling hands of a few knowledgeable editors and publishers into more general circulation, at the hands of powerful people who might understand the material only dimly.
From 1950 to 1954, it looked to everyone both inside and outside that science fiction was about to be recognized as major, worthwhile, meritorious—that everyone would finally stop putting science fiction down and consider it seriously on its own merits. These were the boom years. In one month during this period, forty different SF magazine titles were displayed, and could all be found on a sufficiently large newsstand; several of the prestigious hardcover publishers had begun regular hardcover SF programs, and SF also began to appear in paperback books—in fact, some of the SF classics of the past began to reach general circulation through paperback publication. The first wave of science fiction movies, both profitable and popular, had been released; SF was on TV, in the daily comic strips, comic books, everywhere.
But the feast turned to sand. SF seemed to degenerate as it grew.
From Destination Moon, reflecting the highest aspirations of science fiction—technical accuracy, realism, romantic and exciting events—the motion picture industry learned something very important: You could make money on an ambitious SF film. But while Destination Moon was in production and beginning to look successful, another moviemaker decided to beat it into the marketplace with a quick, inaccurate, unrealistic SF adventure cobbled together on a low budget: Rocket Ship X-M. Well, Destination Moon made money, but Rocket Ship X-M did beat it out to the theaters and made a lot of money too. So what the industry also learned was that you could make quick, cheap, inaccurate SF movies and make money.
Suddenly everyone who was doing science fiction from outside the field was using the sensational and gaudy elements of the cheapest pulp SF and ignoring any underlying seriousness. Robert A. Heinlein, who had gone to Hollywood to create the first real American SF film, had indeed been paid to draft a version in which there were dancing girls on the moon—it exists in the papers of the Heinlein estate. It was as if they only looked at those garish covers and never read the stuff. Popularity, it turned out, was not necessarily recognition. But at least more people than ever before were having fun with science fiction, with aliens and rocket ships and all the imagery of the field. SF was beginning to be a major repository of images for popular culture.
Which is why the initial reaction of the field to Sputnik was so overwhelmingly positive—this would show them that we had been serious all along. Instead, it showed that we had been fantastic all along—although it took several years for this to penetrate the consciousness of those in SF.
Why was this so hard for SF people to understand? The answer is that for at least twenty years before Sputnik, John W. Campbell and others had been fostering the slogan “Today’s fiction—tomorrow’s fact,” a legacy left over from Hugo Gernsback’s obsession with science education through fiction and with “true” science in stories. Campbell had been educated at M.I.T. and Duke University as a physicist (though he did not complete an advanced degree) and was known for adding scientific explanations to manuscripts before printing them in his magazine. All evidence is that, throughout his career, Campbell believed that by using real science in stories, SF authors could predict real future events or at least real future technology, if only in the context of an adventure story. Since he was the editor of the best and most popular science fiction magazine from 1937 to the end of his life in 1971, and the most prestigious SF editor of modern times, he was most often the field’s spokesman to outside groups. One of the special frissons was that sometimes SF really did come true, and Campbell could, by the late 1940s, quote lots of examples:
H. G. Wells predicted tank warfare in “The Land Ironclads” (1903); Rudyard Kipling predicted airmail in With the Night Mail (1905); Hugo Gernsback made a whole forest of predictions, including that of television, in Ralph 124C 41 + (1911–12); in the early 1940s, Robert A. Heinlein (“Blowups Happen”) and Lester del Rey (“Nerves”) both wrote stories about the dangers of nuclear power plants; another Heinlein story, “Solution Unsatisfactory” (1941), suggests that the U.S. would be drawn into World War II, would end the war by building an atomic bomb, using the weapon to impose a “pax Americana” upon the rest of the world. In 1944, Campbell published an atom bomb story, “Deadline” by Cleve Cartmill, which contained so much accurate physics (some of which Campbell had added) that agents of Military Intelligence descended on Campbell’s office, sure of a security leak and ready to suppress the magazine. What a story for Campbell to tell after the war! And tell it he did, at every opportunity.
Dealing with the future as it might really be was portrayed by Campbell as the transcendent goal of the best science fiction, and, since he controlled the highest-paying regular market for science fiction in the world, his writers most often included a prediction or two, and the SF world waited with bated breath to see what might come true.
Robert A. Heinlein, a writer with a good engineering mind, won the prediction lottery most often. Heinlein’s 1942 story “Waldo” describes a mechanical genius with a muscular disease that forces him to create a remote-control device that repeats the movements of his own hands, at a distance, with equal accuracy and much greater force. When such devices were actually built a few years later to handle radioactive materials, they were named “waldoes” in honor of the story that inspired their creation.
Of course all those predictions involving atom bombs and nuclear power turned sour real quick. Science fiction people, who had been reading and writing about the atom for decades, were among the first to react with dismay. Atomic disaster stories proliferated in the late forties and early fifties, so the really positive and optimistic aspect of SF prediction which Campbell had to focus on was space travel. And by the early fifties, everyone in SF, Campbell especially, knew it was just a matter of time before it would be real. There was a continual atmosphere of that triumph to come—until Sputnik.
The U.S. space program ground slowly but it ground exceeding small. Some SF people continued to believe in the romance of space travel throughout the 1960s and 1970s, in the face of the boring facts, but a lot of others, particularly sensitive to what had been their own province for decades, became more and more alienated from U.S. media/government space travel. What good is it to have predicted all of this technology, from space suits and orbital velocities to stage rockets and communication satellites, if roles can be performed by trained chimpanzees? Where is the vision and romance and excitement?
Well, to some the excitement remained—there is a certain charm and beauty in machines that perform well and are, after all, built and created by humans. But the heroic astronauts began to retire and become politicians(!) and administrators(!) and converts to religious sects(!). By the time of the second moon landing, all according to TV script and utterly anticlimactic, even the most committed SF people had begun to mutter and grumble that the right thing was being done by the wrong people in the wrong way. How could they make it so unromantic? How could they! So the TV networks turned away from space, and most of the SF world missed the drama and excitement of Apollo 13 until the film version 25 years later.
When science fiction comes true, it’s no fun anymore. Even Campbell recognized, as early as 1950, with the advent of Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, major new magazines with editorial policies radically different from Campbell’s, that his idea of science fiction’s qualities had some serious competition even within the field.
All during the 1940s, while Astounding was supreme, a bunch of other magazines—pulps such as Startling Stories, Planet Stories, and Thrilling Wonder Stories—were publishing fantastic SF that made little pretense of scientific accuracy but still gripped the readers. Such upstart writers as Ray Bradbury, Leigh Brackett, Jack Vance, and John D. MacDonald rarely if ever sold to Campbell—not enough science in their fiction, for the most part—science fantasy writers mostly, not in the mainstream of SF. None of their stuff could ever happen.
Well, it turns out from the vantage point of hindsight that except for a very few instances, no one ever actually set out primarily to predict through science fiction. H. G. Wells did, sometimes, in his later works. Perhaps Heinlein did, sometimes, but always subordinate to telling a good story. Certainly Gernsback did. But don’t get the idea that very many SF readers and writers ever accepted Campbell’s argument—it seems to have been much more widespread, a cliché even, outside the field. Meanwhile the cliché, the joke, was that with all the SF being published, it stands to reason that someone, somewhere, would be at least partly right once in a while and predict something—but more by luck than by intent. SF writers have never intended to be prophets, nor have most readers expected it of them.
The dominance of heavily science-oriented SF was broken by the advent of the new markets of the fifties, by new editors such as H. L. Gold (Galaxy), who was particularly interested in varieties of social and political extrapolation rather than technological extrapolation, and by Anthony Boucher, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, who was interested in fantasy and SF and in stylistic excellence, in equal parts. New writers rose to prominence—Ray Bradbury, Frederik Pohl, William Tenn, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Sheckley, Arthur C. Clarke, Alfred Bester, Damon Knight, James Blish, Clifford D. Simak, and a host of others—to join the Campbellian pantheon of Heinlein, Asimov, Van Vogt, and L. Ron Hubbard. This was the era from which come most of the acknowledged classics of contemporary SF.
What these authors and their peers do is better than prediction—they envision, then analyze their visions to show how they work. They are in the habit of creating a science fictional world that may indeed be highly improbable for a “real” future, but then they focus sincere concentration on the way that envisioned world could work, especially certain selected aspects of it. Literary critics such as Fredric Jameson refer to this careful construction of focused SF settings as “world-reduction.” It is usually known in SF as “world building.”
The aspects a writer selects often characterize that writer to the SF community. Hal Clement is known for his creation of astrophysically interesting worlds in space as settings for his SF adventures. Larry Niven is known for carrying on Clement’s tradition and for creating interesting alien races and technological artifacts. Theodore Sturgeon is known for using SF settings for investigating complex human behavior and psychology. Arthur C. Clarke is known for portraying technology and environment in space. The list could go on, but the examples all tell us how things work. Readers escape into these visions because they are able to suspend disbelief and participate in the exciting process of having the vision’s works revealed.
And neither the reader nor the writer is expected to believe in the vision itself, necessarily—it might be just a wonderful, unlikely hypothesis. Look at the small type on the back of the title page in any early edition of Arthur C. Clarke’s great SF novel Childhood’s End and you will find this note: “The opinions expressed in this book are not those of the author.” Not only is Childhood’s End just a science fictional vision, it is also a vision that contradicts what the writer believes to be the true and real. But while we, and Clarke, are caught up in the vision, we are convinced that this is how it would or should work. The vision of Childhood’s End is metaphysical in the tradition of Olaf Stapledon—while humanity transcends science and technology in the end, Clarke doesn’t believe that we should or could—but his personal beliefs are external to the novel. Many readers of SF prefer Clarke’s metaphysical to his more technological visions of the future.
The basic rule of thumb in the SF community for critical discussion has always been “It works/it doesn’t work.” A few years back, Samuel R. Delany appeared before a group of seniors at Stevens Institute of Technology who were taking an elective course in science fiction. One of them asked him to explain a bothersome point regarding a classic story by Bob Shaw, “Light of Other Days,” in which the idea of “slow glass” is envisioned (“slow glass” is glass through which light takes so long to pass that you can see the past through it as if it were now). The student had done calculations and found that slow glass could not work the way Shaw declared it would in the story. Doesn’t this invalidate the story, Mr. Delany? No, said Delany, the point is that the explanation has to be untrue or the story would be present technology, not future science—Shaw’s explanation is credible and intelligent but is still a lie told for the greater good of the idea.
Shaw may or may not point in the right direction with his explanation, but SF operates in a universe where things are explainable, so Shaw creates an explanation, which is false, for his visionary idea, which is authentic, so that the idea does not seem to violate what is known when explained. Delany told the student that if he could do more calculations and find out how slow glass would really work, then he could make it, but Shaw’s vision remains valid anyway, even after reality contradicts it, because truth according to the rules of present science is not the business of science fiction. And SF specifically is concerned with possibility that does not offend against what is known to be known.
When an idea from SF does come true, it may be gratifying for a short while, but it is the pleasure of serendipitous discovery, ironic. Camp Concentration (1968), a novel by Thomas M. Disch, concerns a U.S. government prison facility wherein the prisoners are intentionally given a syphilislike spirochete as an experiment to see if their intelligence is increased before they die. Several years after the novel was published, it was revealed in The New York Times that government researchers had indeed carried on a similar research program: a wrongheaded 1930s medical experiment in which certain cases of syphilis were allowed to go untreated—to which news Disch responded with irony, “I was right!” He had predicted the past!
SF authors are prophets of wonder. Specifics are not the point. Prophets speak in images that must be interpreted, not in literal statements. SF ideas have “come true,” but never in precisely the manner of the story wherein they originate. Waldoes were not in fact invented to help an eccentric, brilliant victim of myasthenia gravis manipulate his environment, but to manage radioactive materials safely at a distance. Yet the public wants prophecy and they want it literal—what will happen next? There has been enormous public pressure on SF and on SF writers, since the first of its “predictions” that turned out to be true, to be oracular, to create microwave ovens and better Saran Wrap and to predict the next war. No wonder it’s no fun when it comes true. It’s so often minor league.
Still, the visionary enterprise remains wonderful for SF author and audience. And some SF authors, such as Frederik Pohl (an active futurologist), engage in activities peripheral to SF, such as corporate think-tank sessions or futurology conferences, which try to bring the visionary aspects of SF into predictive use. Various think tanks (whose purposes include developing practical solutions to anticipated future problems so that the future can be directed) sometimes use SF that bears upon the problem at hand as a repository of solutions or to develop a catalog of far-out possibilities. The futurologists, whose purposes include describing near-future probabilities so that we as individuals can prepare appropriate responses and not be incapacitated by future shock, also use SF as a mental exercise in considering possibilities. And so of course John Brunner wrote a science fiction novel, The Shockwave Rider, about futurologists, to close the circuit.
Everyone outside the field feels that SF should be used and that prophecy is somehow the most appropriate use. It is truly extraordinary, when you think about it, that a form of literature published for entertainment should have such public pressure brought to bear on its utility. And it makes some SF writers, every once in a while, really want what they write to come true. This has caused some repercussions in the real world.
The author of the famous Riverworld novels, Philip José Farmer, wrote a Hugo award-winning story in the mid-sixties, “Riders of the Purple Wage,” about a revolutionary new economic system. He then suggested to the membership of the World Science Fiction Convention in 1968, in a legendary guest of honor speech, that the SF world band together to put this system into action. Hardly anyone took him seriously, a deep disappointment to him. Perhaps his mistake was trying to convince SF fans rather than economists. Later, however, in Red Orc’s Rage (1991), Farmer got to write a novel based on the fact that a real-world psychiatrist uses Farmer fantasy novels to treat his patients. But consider the story of L. Ron Hubbard.
Hubbard was a flamboyant pulp SF writer for Campbell’s Astounding in the late thirties and throughout the forties. He wrote on a continuous roll of paper, wore cowboy boots, and filled the room with his presence. He made a strong impression on everyone he met in SF. He had big ideas. In 1949 he wrote a speculative nonfiction essay, published in 1950 in Astounding, announcing his development of Dianetics, “the modern science of mental health.” His ideas were immediately taken seriously, were published at book length, and won thousands of converts; they even became a source of controversy in the letter column of The New York Times. Dianetics in subsequent years took on the name Scientology and became a “scientific” religion.
Scientology was originally a psychological training system through which you could become so completely sane that you could attain wonders of physical and psychological control over yourself and your environment, ridding yourself of pernicious engrams (prenatal influences). Its unusual history and development are littered with scandals and public controversies. In the 1970s it was revealed that the Scientologists had infiltrated the FBI. In the early 1980s, the question of whether L. Ron Hubbard was alive or dead (one of his heirs forced him to prove himself alive) made national news. In the 1990s full-page ads in The New York Times accused the German government of implicit Nazi tactics in clamping down on Scientology in that country. Whatever the inside story of Scientology is, it has never been told thoroughly—although there is a book on Hubbard, Bare-Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, and a 1988 article in Fortune—that between them paint a weird but fascinating picture of Hubbard and his followers. There are others, including a book co-authored by L. R. Hubbard, Jr. Whatever the truth of the matter, it is clear that the cult is a significant force and Hubbard’s a powerful and mysterious legacy today.
What excites people outside SF is when you claim that what you are saying is literally true (e.g., flying saucers are real and I met the driver). And many people within the SF community, because of Hubbard’s standing in the field and because Campbell himself was a convert (Campbell maintained throughout his life that he believed in the techniques of Dianetics), took up the “new science.” After all, the result of participating in the new science was to be that through training and hard work, you would become saner than everybody else (that familiar elitist strain). Hubbard left SF immediately to devote full time to his new science and took with him A. E. Van Vogt (author of Slan), then at the height of his reputation as one of the top four or five SF writers, and a number of lesser lights. Van Vogt returned to writing SF in the late sixties, but Hubbard until his death lived the life of a wealthy cult leader on his yacht. His ideas have come true, so to speak. He is no longer primarily a writer but a prophet.
Even so, a huge new SF novel by Hubbard appeared in 1982 and made the national best-seller lists, buoyed up by a large publicity campaign. An even larger opus, a ten-volume “dekalogy” announced just before his death in 1986, began in 1985 and sold for the rest of the decade. Hubbard was always a writer to contend with in the thirties and forties and, with the power of his church behind him, his sudden comeback in the 1980s built up to a crisis at the 1987 World SF Convention in Brighton, England, where his promoters (unintentionally as far as anyone can tell) spent so much money that it frightened and offended the whole SF field. It was evident that they could have bought the whole convention and could have simply bought enough memberships to vote for, and win, all the awards.
SF readers want SF authors to be prophets, but not in the Hubbard manner or in the restricted sense of predictors. After all, an SF story about a new kind of liquid fuel for a NASA rocket would probably be uninteresting and perhaps unpublishable, no matter how accurate. The idea just isn’t very big and exciting. What SF readers want is for writers to come up with projections, not of the most likely, but of the most interesting and original futures. They want, in other words, prophetic images. And SF today is faced with a time problem, as we remarked earlier, since the newly investigated solar system has made fantasy out of many of its classics. As a result, there is a great rise in the popularity of fantasy and science fantasy, while the whole SF field strives to come up with new settings that have the range, power, and immediacy of the interplanetary future of our recent past.
In the interim, while the outright fantasy genre invades the SF market, perhaps the most successful mass market magazine founded in a decade was Omni, an odd mixture of science, SF, psychic phenomena, and flying saucers, which came out of left field (the successful publisher of Penthouse, one of the competitors of Playboy) to sell a million copies per issue. One can see the immediate appeal of Omni in its vivid and lovely graphics, but the editorial appeal is comprehensible only if one understands that the public’s desire for prophetic images is strong today, and Omni presents a variety of these images in a format that is not cheap but rather is classy and respectable. Somehow Omni tapped a search for truth through these images. If it continues to survive (online or in print), it will do so because it continues to hold out the promise of revelation. This promise is basically the same that SF holds out to its readers. The difference is that SF fulfills the promise in giving wonderful images, while Omni can only promise to search for truth, and publish a little SF. New titles such as Wired (without any SF, but with the prophetic feel of a pre-1926 Gernsback magazine, such as Science and Invention—someone needs to do a comparison) begin to look more like the wave of the future, in the mainstream, while new genre titles such as Science Fiction Age appear vigorous.
Prophecy is tricky business, and most SF writers would back-step quickly away and into the nearest bar for fortification if you told any one of them he was a prophet. Nevertheless, SF is a wellspring of prophecy; its writers are prophets not by high calling and appointment but simply by doing the job of writing SF well, by envisioning a future and showing how it works (or how it doesn’t), how it interacts with human nature. We need only look at the examples of famous SF novels over the last century or so that have leaned toward social prophecy to verify that it is not the prediction but the prophetic vision wherein the power resides.
Consider for a moment that Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?, certainly a catalyst of the events in Russia that culminated in the 1917 revolution, is essentially an SF novel. In the U.S., we have the interesting case of Colonel House, Woodrow Wilson’s closest adviser, who published in 1912 an SF novel called Philip Dru: Administrator, predicting civil war in the U.S. in the 1920s and 1930s. At the height of his power during the Wilson administration, House, according to historian Christopher Lasch, “found it increasingly difficult to distinguish what was happening from what he had predicted was to happen.” Then, of course, we have Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, such dominant images of prophecy in our culture that the very titles have come to stand for specific potential realities. In 1984, William Gibson published his novel Neuromancer, which established “cyberspace” as an idea and a place (analogous to that imaginary place you inhabit when you are on the telephone), where you are when you are on your computer. Cyberspace is now an accepted word in journalism and all discourse concerning the online world, to which one may be personally connected using computer technology. It is a strong and beguiling image for the mental space you inhabit through the monitor screen (analogous to through the looking-glass).
Finally there is the whole area of utopian and dystopian fiction, which early in this century became almost entirely conflated with science fiction (in previous centuries, utopias were often set in the present; now, with rare exceptions such as B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two, they are set in the future)—most of our social visions in the latter half of this century are SF.
Sometimes, for better or worse, the imagery of SF is so strong that someone caught by it decides to act out some SF in the real world. Stephen Gaskin, spiritual and temporal leader of the largest and most successful rural commune, the Farm in Summertown, Tennessee, author of Monday Night Class and other books, read a great deal of SF when he was young and acknowledges that it gave him ideas, such as how people might be telepathic with one another, that he has gone on to try to act out. Jane Roberts, the medium through which the spirit “Seth” communicated to us mortals (she is listed as the author of the books) was for many years an active SF writer and held a famous séance in the 1950s involving Damon Knight, Algis Budrys, and Cyril Kornbluth among others. But there is very little science in the real-life fictions of Roberts and Gaskin, and of Charles Manson, mentioned earlier, and SF pales into a minor shadow in light of their other accomplishments, metaphysical, criminal, or social.
More significant and more complex is the decades-long desire on the part of a large number of otherwise average people to interact with flying saucers. This is turning SF images into reality with a vengeance.
Have you ever read one of the hundreds of books about flying saucers? If so, you will remember that most of the wordage is spent trying to tell you in one way or another that “they’re real.” The question of why it should be so important to so many people for flying saucers to be real or true has seldom been addressed (but was, notably, by C. G. Jung in his book on the subject), and certainly not in most of the pro-saucer literature. Few publishers are foolish enough to publish anti-saucer material—no one cares to buy it. The gist of the matter seems to be that flying saucers are messengers and the message is not knowledge but transcendence.
Only recently has the situation calmed down for people in the SF community, most especially for the writers—for from the late 1940s to the 1980s, the most common questions asked by an outsider of a science fiction person was “Do you believe in flying saucers? What do you think of them?” The immediate assumption was that anyone in SF would know more than the ordinary person about things such as flying saucers; so for more than a decade SF was known in some circles as “that flying saucer stuff”—a perversion of the fairly accurate “that space stuff.”
All this happened initially without any cooperation from the SF community at all—except that flying saucers did in fact begin to appear from time to time in SF stories and especially movies, up to and including Star Trek (note that the main body of the Enterprise is a saucer). SF had spent many years prophesying visitors from space, and the image stuck in the popular consciousness in a manner no one from Wells on down could have predicted. Early signs of it were evident in the reaction to the famous Halloween broadcast of The War of the Worlds, when thousands panicked because they believed in it.
When it comes true it can be dangerous and frightening.
And it is fairly evident that thousands, if not more, are acting out SF fantasies in the real world now and today, because they believe in psi powers or invading aliens or whatever. In the 1990s there are thousands of people who believe that they can turn on their computer and become in it a character in “cyberspace.” (Where are you? Sitting in a chair in front of a computer.) Moreover, a great deal of marketing in the computer and online industry caters to this in the 1990s. Let us hope that the fantasies are benign.
Because SF deals with big ideas, the images SF authors use are often powerful and large, commensurate with the breadth of vision in a given work. Sometimes the power springs from the uncanniness of the alien, but more often it arises from playing with huge-scale distances, immense scope, great size—larger than life. Visions of galactic civilizations, mind-boggling technology, eons of time are supposed to distance us from the mundane here-and-now. But aside from these absolute clichés, which need no explanation, the big images are supposed to be rationalized, explaining how and why things work the way they do in the world of the story, as Bob Shaw did for his “slow glass.”
If you don’t get the idea that the explanations are essentially a convention to establish verisimilitude, using contemporary science as a springboard, and if you believe after the story is over that what you read is in some way literally real, then you are in deep trouble and should perhaps switch to reading Arthur Conan Doyle and join the Baker Street Irregulars (who purport to believe in the literal existence of Sherlock Holmes). (I am not, after all, here to recommend expensive therapy, and we all should have a rich fantasy life, if nothing else.) It is much safer for you. And even, perhaps, for the rest of us.
On the other hand, it is okay if you happen to be a scientist or engineer and happen to have some free time and want to play around with how something like that device you just read about might actually work and be constructed. You just might, then, invent it, as Frederik Pohl does in the title story of The Gold at the Starbow’s End (New York: Ballantine, 1972, p. 46):
Most problems have grammatical solutions. The problem of transporting people from the Earth to another planet does not get solved by putting pieces of steel together one at a time at random and happening to find out you’ve built the [spaceship] by accident. It gets solved by constructing a model (= equation (= grammar) which describes the necessary circumstances under which the transportation occurs. Once you have the grammatical model, you just put the metal around it and it goes like gangbusters.
You would then have created a prediction, which, until that moment, would only have been one speculative idea among many. The author would necessarily have fantasized in his “grammatical model” and your achievement would be to modify, revise, and correct it until it becomes scientifically and technologically accurate.
Today’s fiction, tomorrow’s fact!
That SF stories are in some sense possible is essential to the pleasure of SF as opposed to fantasy. That every once in a while a speculation turns into a prediction because someone up and invents the space suit or the waldo or some such in real life provides concrete verification of SF as “possible” fiction. It is fun, in this one particular sense, when it comes true, because in a special way it validates the whole developing literary aesthetic of SF (the best book on the subject to date is Samuel R. Delany’s Starboard Wine [Pleasantville, NY: Dragon Press, 1984]). But it doesn’t have to happen very often, and coming true, as we have seen, is not really the point.
To make it the point is to rob the vast majority of SF of its validity as vision. And to believe in the “fun lies” of SF without questioning them in the real world is dumb and, at worst, could lead to a life of crime.
Please, don’t believe it for a moment. It’s all in fun.