SF?
Speculative fiction?
It’s a term first used by Robert Heinlein in 1951 during a World Science Fiction Convention guest-of-honor speech, as a suggested replacement for Science Fiction. It better described, he felt, what he was interested in writing.
Today (1969) it is the term used by those SF writers (and I am sure Heinlein sees the convenient ambiguity) who, if they share nothing else, have balked before the particular parameters Heinlein’s SF has established, primarily in the minds of editors, secondarily in the minds of other writers, and finally in the minds of readers.
“Who,” someone asked Gide, “is the greatest poet of the French language?”
Always civilized, Gide replied: “Victor Hugo, alas!”
And that is Heinlein’s position in modern (post-Gernsback) SF to date.
A bit of the balking has been articulate, most has been emotional; some has taken place with respect, and some has transpired in rage. Personally, we are delighted that we have let him name us—the enemy.
Speculative fiction?
It is one of the numerous terms that numerous critics for numerous reasons have decided is inadequate for the numerous things that fall under it.
Even a statement like 2 + 3 = 5 is only a model of “the real world.” As a model it represents the world only more or less accurately.
In a country schoolhouse, a teacher with two apples at one side of the desk and three at the other pushes them all to the center and asks, “Now can any of you give me the sum of . . .”
A brighter student from his seat in the third row thinks: Even from here I can see all those apples are not the same. That one there is a third again as large as most of the others—except the one on the end, which is slightly smaller. Really, to describe the sum of those apples, I need to set up a Standard Apple, and then say that I have three Standard Apples, a Standard Apple-and-a-Third, and . . . I guess about four-fifths of a Standard Apple, so that altogether there are . . .
The technician, with her Melter Balance, says: If you really want to describe the sum of those apples at a measure even more accurate than grams and hundredths of a gram, you’ll have to take into account the tremendous amount of biological activity going on in those apples which is changing their weight all the time, so that to describe the sum of those apples you are going to have to think things through again: e.g., is the moisture adhering to the apples’ skins, which weighs a whole point oh-eight grams, really part of the apples? Where does the apple end and the rest of the world begin?
Assuming, says the relativity physicist, that those questions have been answered satisfactorily, and you will want a measure more accurate, you must consider that each of those apples has a gravitational field that affects the mass of everything else around it, including the other apples; so that to describe really the sum of those apples, you have to decide just what you are doing when you “add” them—how close are you bringing them together, for one, because any change in their proximity changes the mass of the apples themselves. Not to mention the speed at which you bring them together. Not to mention your own gravitational field about the instruments you are using to make your measurements. You must rethink the concept of “giving the sum” because two apples at a certain distance from another group of three is one situation. But to move any of them even a little bit (not to mention pushing them all to the center of the desk) changes the mass, weight, and volume of all the others.
The system of “rigorously logical” arithmetical relationships is only one possible model of “the real.” What gives this particular model its importance to us is our physical size, arbitrarily between the atomic and the stellar, along with the given accuracy of our unaided perceptions and the other billion accidents of human physiology. Granted these accidents, it is perfectly understandable that this model is such a country-school favorite. But we should also bear in mind that in “the real world” of weight, mass, and volume, there is no situation where one object, physically added to its twin (already a risky concept for that world), yields precisely twice as much. And many is only a convenient abstraction of much that humans happen to be able to make, under proper conditions. Many is what we divide much into because our senses happen to work the way they do. But as we divide a given much into a larger and larger many, the logical and seemingly self-evident relations of arithmetic must be manipulated in more and more complicated ways to make the answers resemble what is “really” there.
As soon as we want to look at “the real world” with any greater accuracy and sophistication than the country school house provides, other models than the arithmetically predictable are more useful to help us appreciate what we are looking at:
A quantitative analyst must have tables to let him know how to correct for the volumetric sums of dissimilar miscible liquids: One pint of water poured into one pint of alcohol yields noticeably less than a quart of liquid.
The physicist dealing with velocities approaching the speed of light uses an arithmetical model for summation corrected algebraically by Fitzgerald’s Contraction in which 186,000 mps plus any other velocity still equals 186,000 mps, and all other possible sums are scaled down proportionally.
The metallurgist observing the reaction of alloys at extremely low temperatures uses an arithmetic model that simply cuts off (in a completely different way than the upper limit on velocity) at 273.16 degrees centigrade below zero and admits of no temperatures below that—not only as a physical impossibility but as a conceptual one as well.
Fiction makes models of reality.
But often we need models for observations of an accuracy and sophistication beyond that of the country school house.
2.0121 . . . Just as we are quite unable to imagine spatial objects outside space or temporal objects outside time, so there is no object that we can imagine excluded from the possibility of combining with others.
If I can imagine objects combined in states of affairs, I can not imagine them excluded from the possibility of such combination.
2:022 It is obvious that an imagined world, however different it may be from the real one, must have something—a form—in common with it.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein/Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
which is the best explanation why there is “speculative fiction.”
An aesthetic object (a work of art? a story?) has internal tensions (form?) and also produces tensions with its environment. The resultant matrix of forces is called “audience reaction.”
As writers, we can’t control the real world. At best, we can observe it actively. We can control the internal tensions of the aesthetic objects of our making. Any of the “commercial writing tricks” to control reader reaction are a waste of time because they are attempts to control the real world, which is impossible, and distract from the time spent controlling internal tensions which—while they do not control audience reaction—are the workable points at which it is moored.
The attitude of the more commercial science-fiction writers in its most articulate expression:
“I am not an artist. I am a craftsman. I am concerned with entertainment not aesthetics. Science fiction is the only area of popular literature whose basic entertainment value is intellectual—technological or sociological—which makes it a socially valuable genre per se. You experimental writers, by your emphasis on aesthetics, have blurred the major valid claim SF has as a socially functional literature.”
But the problems of entertainment are aesthetic problems. If the definition of “entertainment” is allowed to include the emotions, the intellect, and the pure pleasure we take in form, then all aesthetic problems are problems of entertainment. Aesthetic discipline is that which makes most accessible all the substance of a given work. The writer who declines to make use of the full range of aesthetic discipline in deference to entertainment is cheating the reader of the entertainment he claims to be concerned with.
The argument for the social value of art over propaganda is too tedious and too familiar to reproduce here.
A great deal of very good “classic” SF was done in the U.S. during the disasters of the (first) McCarthy period, when it was practically impossible to make a socially pertinent statement in any area other than science fiction.
People were invariably astounded that so much freedom did exist within the genre. But the official reaction was that SF was lunatic and not to be taken seriously.
Underneath that rather cavalier insult is a considerable truth: Within the aesthetic structure laid out by “the adventure story” it is impossible to produce a politically dangerous fiction, no matter how revolutionary the proposed world is, no matter what evils the hero is faced with, nor how congruent they are to the present ones.
The efficacy of “political” fiction, from the point of view of the body politic, is measured precisely in terms of real action it can cause . . . and presumably becomes dangerous when somebody notices this action. The adventure, with its building tensions suddenly relieved, its preoccupation with the physical rather than the psychological, its linearity, simply doesn’t leave enough residue of discomfort in the mind to precipitate action. This is what dooms a social criticism set in this form to political inconsequence.
The two fictional works in the United States that have been near revolutionary, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Babbitt, are, despite whatever bar-barousnesses they contain, social chronicle novels, not adventures.
One’s only objections to science fiction “of value as social criticism” is precisely that it failed to be dangerous, because of an aesthetic choice by the authors deferring to “popular entertainment.”
A willingness to take risks means health and vitality in any artistic field. An unwillingness to take risks means stagnation, death. To view meaningfully the social, psychological, and technological crises presented by the particular illumination generated by the forms and textures of speculative fiction, we must encourage as much experimentation as possible, so that this illumination will reach beyond the boundary timid parents have tried to prescribe for their vigorous children.
SAN FRANCISCO
NEW YORK
1969 1970