WHERE DO YOU GET THOSE CRAZY IDEAS?
“WHERE DO your ideas come from?”
That question so often asked of science fiction writers by neo-fans, the media, relatives who don’t read SF, and all manner of outsiders was answered once, tongue in cheek, by SF author Roger Zelazny. In front of a group of fans at a convention, he replied to a vacuous teenager that the Journal of Crazy Ideas is published quarterly in Schenectady, New York, and that when you join the Science Fiction Writers of America and become a certified professional you get a free subscription and can use any of the ideas in the magazine instead of having to think up your own. This is one of the secrets of being a professional and one of the reasons why two different writers will have the same idea in different stories.
The reason the question is difficult to answer is that there are so many true answers. Asimov, you will remember, got the idea for “Nightfall” from John W. Campbell—until the end of the 1950s it was common for SF writers to get story ideas directly from an editor such as Campbell or Galaxy’s Horace Gold. It was also standard practice from the early 1930s to the beginning of the 1970s for a writer to be given the cover story of a magazine, by which we mean that the editor of a pulp would buy a piece of commercial illustration from an artist for use on the cover, fitting the image and marketing approach of the magazine, and then call in one or more writers and assign them the job of writing a story to fit and tie into the cover illustration. Alfred Bester, for instance, wrote his extraordinary story “5,271,009” for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction on assignment to fit a painting of a man in old-fashioned prison stripes and glass space helmet sitting alone on a boulder-sized piece of rock in space. The number on his prison suit is 5,271,009. Bester’s story is about the number (used as a leitmotif). In the commercial field of magazine writing (originally the pulp field) you were often assigned ideas.
Another true answer is that ideas are everywhere and they occur to you, the writer, all the time. Except when they don’t, and then you wait until they do. This is not a satisfactory answer because it is so universally true; and besides, anyone who asks such a question is sure that you have a secret to tell them and won’t be satisfied with general truth. Which is why science fiction writers, just like all other artists, lie a lot. You can’t just say that every idea is individual, a unique case. Or, worst of all, that really most SF ideas are lifted and altered consciously or unconsciously from other SF stories and that this is an honorable tradition in the field. But this is perhaps the most meaningful answer. We will explore it in detail in a few moments.
First, though, let’s consider the plight of the science fiction writer who wants to use an idea. Initially, she must ask herself the same question that most teenagers are unable to answer in, say, math class when confronted with the square root of minus one: How can this mean anything in reality? Can I conceive of a situation in which this abstract idea would be of relevant and crucial significance in the life of a human being or humanity? In the days of Hugo Gernsback, this really meant to a writer “Can I use this idea to build a machine that will do something?” But it has come to mean what Ursula K. Le Guin has described for us in chapter 2, something that reverberates with thematic implications.
Yet I want to make a distinction between the central and overarching ideas of science fiction, of individual works even, and the more general and stimulating free flow of supporting ideas and bits of information combined and recombined in story after story; the kind of overwhelming flow of input to the reader that led Theodore Sturgeon to define SF as “knowledge fiction.” SF writers tend to be magpies for odd facts and bits of knowledge of all sorts. Alfred Bester told in his speeches and essays how he always kept a notebook of interesting facts and events, which he then put in his stories, suitably adapted. Science fiction readers desire these ideas as part of the environment of the fiction, admire a story that is full of ideas of all sorts, historical, theological, technological, psychological, you name it. As long as the story integrates the ideas into the fiction and makes them concrete—or creates a fictional situation wherein ideas are discussed seriously, especially from several points of view or a new point of view—it’s acceptable SF.
The net effect of all these ideas is to alienate most uninitiated readers. We have heard too many people say for too many years that science fiction is just too fantastic for the average person of taste. At the same time we see that the books and shows these people do like are filled with illogical and preposterous coincidences and monstrous and mechanical oversimplifications of human psychology from Harold Robbins and Judith Krantz to I Love Lucy and such mass market phenomena as the Harlequin Romance. The mass audience wants an incredible (to SF people) sense of ordinariness in the details surrounding whatever fantasy they read—and make no mistake, they are reading nothing but fantasies—as if their imaginations have been brutally trained to function only in an environment of endless and boring repetition. The only things that are real to them are things they have seen before. It sure feeds the ego of SF people to feel superior to all these others—who may in daily life be more canny and sharp and successful than SF people have ever been.
If you don’t particularly want your consciousness raised about certain subjects, any subjects, then reading a fair amount of science fiction can be threatening. Because sooner rather than later, you are going to run into a science fiction story that adopts an a priori world view different from yours. For instance, Brian W. Aldiss’s novel The Dark Light Years (1964) is about a peaceful and passively resistant alien race superior in intelligence to humanity who travel about the galaxy in specially grown wooden spaceships and who worship their own feces. Humanity puts them in a zoo. Philip K. Dick’s novel, Counter-Clock World (1967) is about a future in which on a certain day time begins to run backward for everyone born after that moment, so that the world begins to fill with people who rise from the grave old and grow younger, imbibing nourishment in the bathroom and eliminating waste at the dining table. After all, one of the absolute givens of the whole of SF is that every single story must take place in a world that is not, in some identifiable manner, mundane reality. As a body of literature, science fiction is a catalog or encyclopedia of ideas about how things might be, might have been, or really are—although we don’t know it yet.
The most comfortable and nonthreatening kind of science fiction would seem to be the stuff set 3,000,000 years in the future on a distant planet, nicely distanced from anything real and nearby. Many SF readers prefer this type of SF, usually cast as space opera, with good guys and villains, ray guns and spaceships, and the odd alien or three. It can be wonderful escape. But even in this kind of paraphernalia-filled adventure, you are being asked to believe, for a moment, in an adventurous optimistic future filled with technological wonders and exceeding strangeness. And if you do limit your reading to only this kind of stuff, and even one minor element of it comes true right here today—like spaceships suddenly translating from the realm of space adventure into the NASA program—then you are threatened, you have to rethink a basic preconception and consider, for at least a millisecond, the possibility of rethinking others. In a minority of cases, you are then further hooked on SF—otherwise you stop reading it and turn to other areas for escape from the humdrum.
The committed SF reader gets part of his excitement from knowing that every new story will require some reconsideration of reality. Some idea, some new bit of information or speculation or recombination of old ideas will require thought, excite the mind as well as the viscera.
And, for goodness sake, some of the ideas are there for the pure fun of it. Not for contemplation or significance, or even to help validate the setting—some ideas are included by some writers just for atmosphere, for the sake of humor, or better, wit. The short stories of William Tenn or Robert Sheckley or Ron Goulart, Alfred Bester’s novels, much of Frederik Pohl’s short fiction are all examples of playful ideas supporting serious purpose.
Add all of the foregoing up, and science fiction is jam-packed with ideas of all sorts. Some chronics maintain that they read SF for the ideas alone, from the definitely possible to the widely improbable. In Future Shock, Alvin Toffler recommended that SF be studied and read by adults and taught to children to insulate them, through exposure to the vast interplay of possibilities, from a feeling of defeat in the face of unceasing change. Science fiction reading, he said, protects you against future shock, instills appropriate new ways of thinking, makes you ready to adapt to change because it teaches you to assume change as inevitable. This is true, certainly, and is another way in which science fiction can be used, just as it can be used to teach religion, as noted above. But the primary purpose of all those ideas is to entertain: to allow you, for a moment, to consider the idea in passing and draw whatever pleasure you can from it. And part of the game is the free access of all the other writers in the field to your ideas and yours to theirs. T. S. Eliot, the author of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” who said that good poets borrow and great poets steal, would have approved.
I would like to take you on a trip through a very good science fiction story, in all its complication, and show you ideas in place. The story is “The Phantom of Kansas” by John Varley, an early work of this popular author, which was first published in 1976 in Galaxy and later collected in The Persistence of Vision, one of the most important science fiction books of the 1970s. Varley’s story is a particularly successful tale of wonder and allows us to examine in some detail the role played by a proliferation of ideas within a science fiction story both in supporting the development of the central thematic complex and in creating independent flashes of wonder, moments of intellectual excitement and gooseflesh as the story progresses.
“I do my banking at the Archimedes Trust Association.” The first sentence of the story introduces the first-person narrator and indicates, by use of the present tense, that the speaker assumes a contemporary audience. This is a common device in science fiction—an experienced reader of science fiction knows the several signals this technique conveys: that contemporary to the speaker does not mean contemporary to the reader, and that the “when” of the story will emerge from the narrative through significant details; further, that Archimedes is a famous location on the moon, so that the matter-of-fact tone and the focus on the ordinary detail of banking suggest the possibility of a large and significant disparity between our world and the world of the story. This possibility is immediately confirmed in the second sentence, which indicates that the bank has its own “medico facility” and “takes recordings for the vaults.” This must be a new and different kind of bank—the reader’s anticipation is whetted, knowing that a new idea is about to be unveiled. But first a narrative hook—the plot is introduced: The bank was robbed two weeks ago.
Then, pow! The next two paragraphs contain in summary the caper plot for a whole mystery and detective novel. In this world, the technological re-creation of personality is possible, using recordings made regularly (to insure that your policy is up to date) and stored in bank vaults in plastic memory cubes, along with valuables and “negotiable paper.” When a bank robbery occurs, it is most often only a blind for the destruction of the memory cubes, since you can’t murder someone who has been recorded—he won’t stay dead unless you destroy the cube—and you destroy lots of cubes so the police won’t know whom you are going to kill. But this is all by the way. As a result of the robbery, the narrator is about to be rerecorded quickly, at the bank’s expense—“They had contracted to keep me alive forever.” Of course! This technology really means immortality! And this implication is just slid in as part of the everyday world of the story, never mentioned again—a wonderful moment.
The eighth paragraph of the story makes it clear that all of this is passing through the narrator’s mind in the moments before the narrator is led into the recording room. We are not fully in the dramatic present of the story: As the narrator is prepared for recording, there is a moment of reflection on having lived so long and met so many people over so many decades. How old is the narrator? We never really know, since this is a world in which it literally does not matter. As the narrator passes into unconsciousness for recording, we are left for a moment with this new idea to ponder.
As the narrator awakens, one of the attendants says, “She’s in,” and we know for the first time that the narrator is female. And though the narrative persona is continuous, she finds that she has died and been reborn in a new body two and a half years later—two pages later, she learns that she has died three times in those years, that she is the fourth incarnation of herself: “We suspect murder,” says the bank president.
The heroine’s multiple deaths are used to ignite the big idea of the story: the problems and complexity of preserving personal identity in this particular future (“the first order of business was to recognize that the things that were done by those three previous people were not done by me.”). Two years and more have been lost from her life, in which she lived and died, but which she can never remember because “she,” the first-person narrator, wasn’t there—she is discontinuous. (The person who wakes up is a print of the recording made two and a half years ago—so she can have only the memories that belonged to her when she was recorded. She knows nothing of what “she” did after the recording was made.) She learns the circumstances of her three deaths and, it seems, we have a murder mystery on our hands.
Then a whole new thread is introduced. We learn that Fox, the narrator, is an artist in a new art form: weather. This is the moon, after all, where only artificial weather can exist. And we get another infusion of ideas.
I had been robbed of an entire symphony. For the last thirty years I had been an Environmentalist. I had just drifted into it while it was still an infant art form. I had been in charge of the weather machines at the Transvaal disneyland, which was new at the time and the biggest and most modern of all the environmental parks in Luna. A few of us had started tinkering with the weather programs.… Later we invited friends to watch the storms and sunsets we concocted.… At the time of my last recording I had been one of the top three Environmentalists on Luna.
What a rich idea complex, a wonderful layering and mixing of inventions, analogies, and extrapolations! Environmental parks called “disneylands” on the moon, weather machines, the evolution of an art form. And then Fox 1 (the first of her three murdered selves) “went on to compose Liquid Ice … the high point of the art to date.” But she, Fox 4, has no memory of the creative process or the accomplishment of Liquid Ice, so her work has been stolen from her. Her whole identity is in question. In a single page of text we have a new art form, with all attendant paraphernalia—performances, reviews, cash rewards, and the intangible rewards of creativity (these last stolen from her)—and in the further course of the story, one pleasure for the reader is the revelation of more of the details of this art form, in which the artist works in tandem with a benign computer (the great “CC,” central computer, which runs the whole civilization) to create a program for the weather machines.
A forest of further complications arises as the plot progresses, as Isadora, the detective, outlines the problems and complexities of finding a criminal in this future society—knowing that the killer was a man when he killed Fox 3 tells them nothing, for he could have bought a “Change” the next day. Even an individual’s sex is technologically alterable at whim, for a price. Here is a society where identity is truly complex in every way.
Our narrator meditates on the problems of immortality and identity: Thousands of years in the future, there will live a being who is at least partly her, still “stringing chunks of experience onto her life” but with all her memories, even remembering her first sex change. So the loss of crucial memories, such as the creation of Liquid Ice, is the worst kind of disaster. “Robbed! Violated!” she exclaims dramatically to herself. And we become sentimentally involved in her desire to triumph over this foul murderer (even though Varley does overdo it by a hair).
Time passes and Fox must stay locked in her apartment while Isadora uses the police computers to attempt to track the killer down. Fox is content, for she is creating her next great work, A Conflagration of Cyclones, to be performed in the Kansas disneyland (note the allusion to Oz). CC, the benign computer with “free will” (borrowed, I think, from Samuel R. Delany’s Empire Star), becomes an important supporting character. We learn details of the planned artwork, absorb information about the world of the future, a fascinating environment—and find that Fox inhabits an attractive seventeen-year-old forced-grown clone body (the body has had its development speeded up). The benign computer is a marvelously effective expository device, especially since it can suggest information: Perhaps the murderer was a “ghost.”
“The term ‘ghost’ covers all illegal beings.… These are executed criminals with their right to life officially revoked, unauthorized children never registered, and some suspected artificial mutants.… They have no right to life. I must execute them when I find them.… It’s a job humans find distasteful. I never could keep the position filled, so I assumed it myself.”
By this point in the story the chronic reader of science fiction will have spotted enough allusions in this story to know that it takes place in the same future landscape as a number of Varley’s other stories, a future where sex and body design changes are the accepted norm, when humanity has adapted itself to live on most of the planets and moons of the solar system, but no longer on Old Earth, from which the race has been exiled by unknowable and superior alien beings (not present in this story). This allusive technique is a borrowing from Robert A. Heinlein’s famous Future History series (in turn a borrowing from H. G. Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes). The chronic reader derives an additional dimension of pleasure from perceiving a wider context for the events. But the unnoticed allusions all function in place for the uninitiated reader as simply additional details increasing the verisimilitude of the context.
But return to our catalog of the ideas of the story. Identity is confirmed in this society by analysis from a tiny skin sample of the unique genetic pattern of the individual—such samples are used in place of ID cards and credit cards—and this technique is infallible. If the killer is a ghost and is captured, he will be killed.
The night of the performance of A Conflagration of Cyclones arrives and Fox goes to Kansas to witness her opening. We are treated to a vivid description of the show. At the climax of the performance, it becomes evident to Fox that someone is tampering with it: her killer. She finds him, confronts him, and discovers that he is her!—of course, a ghost, a phantom of herself.
She cannot bring herself to kill her double. They talk and we discover that he was created by the initial bank robbers by error, and set free by them to be caught and destroyed. Instead, to survive, he killed her, desperately, three times—but he cannot do it again. They make love in the weather, and she decides that they must be together, he must be saved.
She develops a careful plan to save him by emigrating to Pluto (a frontier planet where his existence is not illegal) and succeeds in buying her own spaceship and getting him aboard. The romantic denouement occurs in a final scene in which the CC clears them for takeoff and reveals that it is aware of what is happening, yet is allowing it to happen. Working closely with Fox and her art has given this cold machine a sense of mercy. Humanity and its technology triumphs.
Whew! We remind you that all this has taken place in a long short story, not a novel, and that “The Phantom of Kansas” is the work of a talented newcomer, not a mature and experienced artist. Nevertheless, it is a highly developed example of the science fiction story, a particularly satisfying reading experience for most segments of the SF audience. Even readers who find the romantic subplot corny or unconvincing are delighted by the steady flow of original and stimulating ideas.
The big idea of the story is the changes that may be wrought on human identity by what we might term the technology of identity—sex change, cosmetic surgery, cloning, transfer of memory by technological means—and what complex, subtle new problems and variations could result from this technology. We even have a new kind of illegal love. The crazy ideas that fill the story—weather art, memory banks, disneylands, ghosts, and the digressions on art and the critics, police procedure, history, alien invaders—all make the story better and more popular science fiction. Every one of those crazy ideas contributes specifically to the wonderful world of the story, a world that reveals itself to the reader only through the details of these ideas.
As near as we can pinpoint it, without becoming absurdly categorical, the stimulation of the sense of wonder by Varley arises not just from the big idea of the story or from the crazy ideas, but from the whole story situation, from the big idea in the context of the crazy ideas. Not all big ideas evoke wonder, nor all crazy ideas—but both can and will when set within a well-told story.
We are reading and discussing stories such as the Varley piece in a more concentrated and analytic fashion than you would under normal circumstances, when you might not even notice many of the details in the pleasurable heat of reading. The point is that there are a whole lot of ideas, major and minor, borrowed and new, all organized and in place in the story. Some, if not all, of the ideas have an impact on you, the reader, even if you are skimming the story on a bus, snacking on science fiction.
The crazy ideas of science fiction are not always really serious (such as the idea of space travel) and thematically complex (such as Varley’s personality recording and the problem of identity). Something like the famous “eggplant that ate Chicago” is the reductio ad absurdum crazy idea. But in a real SF story (as opposed to a media representation) the craziness is ordered and placed within the self-defined boundaries of the story so that it is specifically not absurd, however improbable:
Absurdity is produced by taking the idea out of context. “The Phantom of Kansas” is a story about a future in which a woman is killed three times by a duplicate of herself. The duplicate is a man, and on the fourth try they get a chance to talk, fall in love, and leave the country to live together as a perfect couple.
That sort of summary is the other side of the question we discussed in Chapter 3, in this case a summary without the essentials of context which make a story rational and encourage suspension of disbelief. Misrepresentation of SF as absurdity is the most common response of an uninitiated reader to the ideas in SF. SF people are so used to this kind of treatment that they often do it ironically.
It is a thin line, sometimes, between irony and absurdity. People in SF have always treasured such works as the vignettes of Fredric Brown (and his novel What Mad Universe), the stories of William Tenn, Robert Sheckley, Ron Goulart, Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Saloon stories, Arthur C. Clarke’s Tales from the White Hart, and Henry Kuttner’s stories of Gallagher, the drunken inventor. Often in these stories, the purpose is to take an absurdity and place it in a story situation, the stranger the better, that allows it to be science fiction and therefore no longer (ironically) an absurdity.
In Kuttner’s “The Proud Robot,” Gallagher builds an enormously complicated humanoid robot while drunk, then cannot figure out its purpose when he sobers up—the robot just hangs around admiring itself while Gallagher tries to solve an involved problem concerning the future of the television industry. At the end, it is discovered that the robot is a beer can opener and, secondarily, can solve the TV problem. (In the last line of the story, as noted earlier, Gallagher is singing a duet with his can opener.) Kuttner’s story, written in 1942, is as full of surprising and strange ideas as the Varley story. It projects a future world in which television is the dominant form of entertainment for the middle class, when average people drink beer in front of the TV instead of going to theaters, when robots are real and domestic beer is sold in plastic containers. But there is no doubt that the serious extrapolation is the background and the craziest ideas the foreground of “The Proud Robot.” It is supposed to be funny—the world turned upside down.
Sometimes, as in the stories of Tenn, Pohl, Dick, and John Sladek, it is difficult for an outsider to penetrate the deadpan surface to appreciate the often complex ironies that the crazy ideas produce. And a New Wave story such as Michael Moorcock’s “The Pleasure Garden of Felipe Sagittarius” is all wit, irony, and absurdity, without a visibly developed SF context to encompass it in (proving to any outsider who gets hold of it that everything I have said above is not universally true).
I have used “crazy” to characterize the ideas of which SF is a repository. It is about time that we examined “crazy” a bit more closely. We understand that it is a term of casual derogation used for decades by outsiders to apply to all SF ideas (all the ideas used in SF stories that were not in fact true). But I have been using the term in a somewhat more specialized manner, applying it either to the complex of ideas that surrounds the central or big idea in a given SF story, or to the general play of ideas (or playing with ideas) that occurs in an SF story.
Not all of these ideas are worthwhile or intelligent, of course. Many of the minor background or supporting ideas in SF are glib fabrications included to justify logical inconsistencies created by or necessary to the central idea of the story. And a lot of the ideas in SF are stuck in there in spite of the fact that they really have nothing to do with the story: digressions that interest the author, random bits of knowledge or partly baked ideas (“What could have caused that civilization to disappear, Professor?” “Well, let me tell you about how civilizations evolve.…”) Remember that Theodore Sturgeon defined SF as “knowledge fiction.” The ideas, even the sloppy ones, establish an environment wherein knowledge is important, wherein ideas can solve problems, wherein characters who think are efficacious.
In most types of popular fiction other than SF, characters act according to their feelings more than their rational abilities (only “cold” villains think “too much”). Even the tough detective and the gunfighter must have their emotions involved conventionally—but in SF good is smarter than evil. Another notable example is the growing mystery subgenre (in the eighties and nineties) of women’s cozies, featuring woman detectives who are smarter than the criminals. Good triumphs over evil in SF because the central character solves problems using thought and knowledge (usually technological). Even when the hero cuts a Gordian knot, he usually has to build or invent the sword first. And the triumph is all the more thrilling and satisfying if the solution is surprising and unusual—a crazy, far-out, wild idea that really works in context. This is one of the great differences between fantasy and SF—the fantasy hero triumphs through brute force or superior virtue, never through superior intelligence or knowledge (unless supplied by a tutelary spirit). In order to read and like SF, you have to be able to believe that ideas are interesting and quite possibly useful, no matter how strange and different they may seem at first. Just because an idea is not true at the moment does not mean that it may not be true under other circumstances, especially the circumstances that are the given in an SF story—and which might be real in another place or time.
A classic example of a science fiction story which arouses expectations that the rules are violable only to reinforce them is Tom Godwin’s “The Cold Equations” (1954). This story enraged readers when it first appeared because its premise is that the problem is insoluble. It seems that a space pilot on a mission of mercy (delivering medicine to a plague-stricken space colony) discovers that a young girl has managed to stow away aboard the ship. Her weight alone will use up enough fuel so that he will not be able to complete the mission, and there is no other ship available or near enough to rescue her. She must be jettisoned into space and die. The science and logic of the situation is set up so that it cannot be contravened except by a deus ex machina—her plight is milked for all its pathos; no regiment of cavalry arrives; she dies. The moral is that facts are facts, knowledge is knowledge, feelings don’t change anything. This story remains controversial even in the mid-1990s—there were two years of nearly monthly argument over “The Cold Equations” carried on in the pages of The New York Review of Science Fiction in the early 1990s (and see the appendix on Hard SF for more on this story and what it implies about SF). It is, as James E. Gunn remarked, a litmus test for attitudes toward reading SF.
What do “The Cold Equations” and Kuttner’s story about the drunk who invents a super can opener have in common? In each case a whole catalog of ideas is presented and discarded, after examination, in search of a solution to the problem, and in the end logic triumphs. To get the effect of either story, you must follow the logic and consider the ideas as they occur. In this respect, SF is not different from the classic detective story in which the crime is solved through a proper assemblage of facts. There is in fact a whole class of “scientific detective” fiction that is in many cases indistinguishable from SF, except that it died out for the most part in the 1920s, at the same time SF was becoming self-conscious. These were the stories in which an arch-criminal genius invents a new weapon or criminal device which the detective must combat through scientific detection—this genre is still alive in the superhero comic books, although in a degenerate form wherein the hero triumphs through moral virtue, since evil genius tends to make silly mistakes due to overconfidence. Minor exceptions aside, however, an unlimited spectrum of SF settings is possible in which wild and unusual ideas are the facts of daily life.
We noted earlier that an SF story about a new liquid rocket fuel would be uninteresting—while a story about a spaceship propelled by exploding a series of atomic bombs might be much better SF, since the idea is bigger and crazier (yet such a ship was in development, although never built, by U.S. scientists in the late 1950s and early 1960s—and they still maintain that it would work). To SF readers, the wilder and bigger and more unusual the ideas, the more gripping and intense is their involvement in the story and their interest in the ideas. Alien and future settings, technological devices capable of doing new things, humans pitted against strange and different problems in imagined situations—ideas generate the stories and fill the stories.
Within the SF field, you can escape from a mundane world into an environment where ideas are respected, discussed, the essential coin of the realm. It is not so much that any given idea is taken seriously by the field as that every idea is potential meat for discussion. Robert A. Heinlein, you will remember, made a full-scale attack on the preconceived ideas of Western civilization in Stranger in a Strange Land. In thirty years of editorials, John W. Campbell continually shook up the field by defending unconventional ideas such as slavery, Dianetics, psi powers, atomic power (especially before 1946), and a host of others. The field as a whole is an enormous repository of ideas of all sorts, but particularly strange, controversial, wild, and crazy ideas.
In the long run, perhaps the seminal influence of science fiction on our lives and on the lives of our descendants will have been that SF gives access to ideas that may become real and embodies them in a variety of scenarios for reality. Of more significance than prediction is the vision of alternate modes of life, of changed behavior patterns that the future might demand or permit. Heinlein’s Stranger was a novel of extraordinary influence outside the SF community; along with Frank Herbert’s Dune, it helped to shape the popular consciousness of the late 1960s as communal, sexually liberated, environmentally conscious. Powerful ideas concerning great changes in humanity are waiting in accessible form, clothed in science fiction. If you read them when you were twelve, you will remember them when you are older, even if you do not remember where they came from. You have a fairly definite idea of what the future holds in store right now, and you have gotten it from SF or from people who read or have read SF.
Think about it for a minute. For the first time in human history, most educated people know quite a bit about the future. It exists in three potentialities: most probable (worst)—things will continue downhill leading to disaster or depression or dictatorship; next most probable (best)—humanity will improve through science and technology, raised consciousness, moral rearmament; improbable—an outside force (God, aliens from space, sudden mutation producing universal telepathy, sudden disaster or catastrophe) will intervene and change the rules. Sane humans prepare against the worst and work for the best because they also know that both the best and the worst will happen. And everything we think we know about the future comes ultimately from SF, from Wells to the present. For all of us today, the future is as real as the past, and as different from the present.
The details of the future are going to be more eccentric than we can imagine. (Who could have imagined Madonna, the Beatles, or Eldridge Cleaver’s codpieces?) But SF writers have been writing about the energy crisis, for instance, since the mid-fifties (Frank Herbert’s first novel, Under Pressure, dealt with underwater oil-drilling stealing from another country’s offshore reserves). Most of our large general problems have been dealt with for years and from a variety of points of view as SF, and the SF treatments have been read and filtered back into popular consciousness as attitudes toward our problems.
The earliest SF that had any significant impact was the body of nineteenth-century utopian writings set in the future, bright visions of where social progress might lead. At the same time there were visions of technological progress, but until the 1890s it was the social visions that penetrated popular consciousness, right up to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. Then quite suddenly, H. G. Wells in England, Kurd Lasswitz in Germany, and a host of minor writers in the U.S. and elsewhere began to write of futures altered by scientific and technological innovation. And not all of these visions were optimistic. Whereas the utopian visions were undoubtedly influential, it was the anti-utopian visions of E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Yevgeny Zamiatin, George Orwell, Jack London, M. P. Shiel, and, of course, H. G. Wells that really made us conscious of the future by basically making us scared of it in a new way.
Meanwhile, after 1926 the new SF genre magazines were grinding out numerous stories about technology that would alter our daily lives and our worldview. In the U.S., science fiction had absorbed and subsumed the whole utopian tradition by the early 1940s—it was where anyone had to go to find images of the future. Since that time, our future has been imaged and imaginable only through SF. Such is the power of SF that we can no longer imagine a future without scientific and technological change as a major factor. Too many clichés of science fiction, such as space travel and atomic bombs and atomic energy, have already become fact and altered our lives. We are now living, more or less, in the SF world of the future as envisioned in the early 1940s—and moving into the world of 1950s SF: The computer-controlled house of Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” can be built and purchased today. In a way, the futurologists such as Alvin Toffler are more correct than even most of their group realize when they advise reading SF—somewhere in the literature are the ideas that will organize and limit our lives in the future. And those of us who read SF enough to know what the choices are will have, more than most others, the opportunity to make an informed choice among the alternatives.
Lest I overemphasize, however, the utilitarian aspect of ideas, let us back off and remember that only a minority of SF is about the near future (say, the next two hundred years). The majority is either about the third-track future mentioned earlier, the improbable future, or about the distant results of the more probable futures (e.g., Walter M. Miller, Jr.’s classic novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz, which opens hundreds of years after a disastrous nuclear war). Only with distance can the SF writer achieve the scope to develop most big ideas (note that Varley’s story takes place after alien superbeings have exiled the human race from Earth). Why write another variation on the near future when you have millions of years to play in?
The chronic readers don’t really care so much for near-future stuff. After all, they want entertainment, including the entertainment of big, wild speculation. And remember that most of the chronics are not the movers and shakers of our society. The chronics and omnivores are not really living in the present at all, are independent of or alienated from or rejected by peer groups. In a real sense the fans are enlightened masters who have no relation to mere present mundane existence—they play their godlike games and shun the world. Every once in a while they deign to notice something like the energy crisis—“Oh, yes, of course … that…”—but for the most part they can’t be bothered with reality. They live on paper and ink in the realm of Platonic forms. You may be a concerned and aware citizen building a better life in the present, but don’t expect much help from the fans. Even in conversation with one, it is difficult to elicit a response that is solid and to the point. You really have to read the literature. Afterward you may be able to conquer the universe—although you may not care to anymore.
Judith Merril, in a 1980s interview, stated that she was very much aware, as a writer of SF, of ideas and their impact, and gives the clear impression that the writers of the late 1940s and 1950s were intensely concerned with the transmission of ideas through SF. “Back in the Fifties,” says Merril, “I used to talk about science fiction as being a sort of encyclopedia, in the sense of the French encyclopedia, which paved the consciousness-ground for the French and American revolutions. And I felt that this was very much what we were doing, that we were putting into print and into words ideas whose time was about to come, making it possible for people to become conscious of it. Not laying out programs or ideologies, but finding the images and the metaphors and the crystallizations in phrases.” She goes on to observe that later, in the sixties, some of the ideas from SF became part of the public consciousness, often without awareness of the source. “I’ll tell you, for me personally the ultimate and complete reward for any writing I did or editing or any time I put into science fiction was when I first met Tom Disch. And he said, ‘I want to thank you, because when I was growing up in the Midwest, I picked up a copy of one of your anthologies; and growing up in the Fifties there, it was the first time I ever knew that things could be different.’”
Merril and her friends, including Katherine MacLean and Theodore Sturgeon, “felt that what we were producing was consciousness seeds, which were going to grow and expand.” How? “I did really believe that it was a vitally important literature and was going to have a significant effect on society in my own time. I didn’t expect it to have that by becoming big and popular, not even to the extent that it has become, by any means, but only by influencing people who would influence people. The basic concept that an idea that’s alive is going to spread.”
Certainly the famous astronomer Carl Sagan is a case in point. In a New York Times essay (“Growing Up with Science Fiction”) he testifies that SF led him to a life of science after he became an omnivore at age eleven (he was ten when he first read Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Martian books). He provides a catalog of SF ideas in discussing the relation of SF to science, and concludes: “Such ideas, when encountered young, can influence adult behavior. Many scientists deeply involved in the exploration of the solar system (myself among them) were first turned in that direction by science fiction. And the fact that some of the science fiction was not of the highest quality is irrelevant. Ten-year-olds do not read the scientific literature.” It is of immense significance to Sagan and to us that SF conveys “bits and pieces, hints and phrases, of knowledge unknown or inaccessible to the reader.” These ideas can and have changed individual lives, and individuals can and have changed the world.
Not only scientists such as Sagan and writers such as Thomas M. Disch but everyone since the 1940s has grown up in a world saturated with SF ideas. Margaret Mead, in her 1970 book Culture and Commitment, suggested that people born during or after World War II grew up in a world so profoundly different from what came before that it is useful to think of them as native born, while everyone born before World War II is an immigrant here. In relation to prewar reality, we are all living in a science fiction world, and we instinctively reach for science fiction concepts to help us understand and to explain to ourselves what is going on. Science fiction is the natural context of our times. Robert A. Heinlein, in his Future History chart published in 1941, named the 1960s “the crazy years,” to be followed by years of religious revivalism leading to a religious dictatorship in the U.S. I sure hope he was way off base. But Heinlein also wrote stories of nuclear power plant disasters and space exploration taking place in this time period—makes us feel a bit uncomfortable.
Where do we get these crazy ideas? From science fiction, of course.