Science fiction is based upon the belief that the world is changing, that the way we live is changing, and that humanity will adjust to it, or will adjust change to humanity, or will perish.
Note 2
Sometimes, as Ray Bradbury said was his purpose, their intention has been not to predict the future but to prevent it.
Note 3
The rise of fantasy may have been only a trend led by a best-selling trilogy, or it may have represented the abandonment of a search for rational solutions.
Note 4
“Fiction is simply dreams written out,” wrote John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding (now called Analog). “Science fiction consists of the hopes and dreams and fears (for some dreams are nightmares) of a technically based society.”
Note 5
“It may be suggested that science fiction is composed of 'supernatural' writing for materialists,” wrote Groff Conklin in the first big postwar anthology, The Best of Science Fiction. “You may read every science fiction story that is true science fiction and never once have to compromise your id. The stories all have rational explanations, provided you are willing to grant the word 'rational' a certain elasticity.”
Note 6
“Science fiction is fantasy wearing a tight girdle,” said Sam Merwin, Jr., the editor of Startling Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories in the late 1940s.
Note 7
“Social science fiction is that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings,” wrote Isaac Asimov, a science-fiction great who became even better known as a prolific author of science popularizations.
Note 8
“A [good] science fiction story,” said Theodore Sturgeon, one of the best of science-fiction writers himself, “is a story built around human beings, with a human problem and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its scientific content.”
Note 9
Sam Moskowitz, a fan who became an editor, a researcher into early science-fiction history, and an anthologist, wrote, “Science fiction is a branch of fantasy identifiable by the fact that it eases the willing suspension of disbelief on the part of its readers by utilizing an atmosphere of scientific credibility for its imaginative speculations in physical science, space, time, social science, and philosophy.”
Note 10
Kingsley Amis, mainstream author and critic, and sometimes SF author and SF enthusiast, wrote in a similar vein: “Science fiction is that class of prose narrative treating a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesized on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology. It is distinguished from pure fantasy by its need to achieve verisimilitude and win the 'willing suspension of disbelief' through scientific plausibility.”
Note 11
In his survey of American science fiction of the 19th century, Future Perfect, Professor Bruce Franklin wrote:
You may think of realistic fiction, historical fiction, science fiction, and fantasy as theoretically distinct strategies for describing what is real.... Realistic fiction tries to imitate actualities, historical fiction past probabilities, science fiction possibilities, fantasy impossibilities.
Note 12
Ray Bradbury told an interviewer “Science fiction is the art of the possible. Fantasy is the art of the impossible.”
Note 13
And Arthur C. Clarke, in an earlier attempt suggested, “Fantasy is something that can't happen and you wish it could; science fiction is something that could happen and hope it won't.”
Note 14
If I wanted to keep it short, I'd call science fiction “the literature of change,” but I also have a fondness for “the literature of the human species,” which is similar to Aldiss's longer definition, “Science fiction is the search for definition of mankind and its status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science).”
(James Gunn)
Note 15
A common element in most of these definitions is an understanding that science fiction developed out of fantasy when technology began to shape the way people lived and the future became a better guide to decision-making than history, when what is going to happen became more important than what has happened. Science fiction became possible a bit more than two centuries ago with the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution.
Note 16
Then came the Industrial Revolution. Not suddenly but gradually over the last half of the 18th century everyone who felt its effects – mainly in Western Europe and the United States – could have observed that change was now going to be humanity's fate, and that if humanity wished to be the master of change rather than its victim, people would have to start thinking about the consequences of their behavior and their choices.
Note 17
The myth of creation goes back far beyond Frankenstein, of course, and into the religious needs of man, to explain the origins of his world and himself; and the attempt to encroach upon the exclusive prerogative of deity – whether through the alchemist's search to turn base metals into gold, or attempts to find the elixir of life that would prolong man's existence beyond the God-given span, or plans to create life itself – always has ended in punishment for its blasphemy. Daedalus built a man of bronze to repel the Argonauts, and Jewish folklore tells of the creation of the Golem, molded of clay and animated by the charm or shem (one of the names of God) by various medieval rabbis, the most famous of them Rabbi Low of sixteenth century Prague. The Golem, too, turns against its creator. Only in recent times have robots and androids been treated without religious awe, and only with the development of Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics (see Chapter 10) that built in a prohibition against harming man has the creation of artificial life not resulted in tragedy. And yet many recent considerations of computers, fictional and speculative, involve overtones of punishment for blasphemy; and HAL, the murderous computer in the Kubrick-Clarke motion picture 2001: A Space Odyssey, harks back to Frankenstein and the Golem.
Note 18
Throughout most of humanity's history it has looked back toward a happier time, toward Paradise, toward a “golden age.” Ahead lay only hope of laying aside sufficient food to provide for a family until the next crop matured. The major changes in life were personal and natural: birth, marriage, death. From outside came war, disease, drought, flood, violence, theft, murder, execution.
Note 19
By the nineteenth century increasing emphasis on production for trade had created a middle class, and the middle class had adopted as its philosophy the ideal of rationalism – the establishment of rational goals (in business the goal was profits) and the conscious examination of the best methods for attaining those goals. So deeply ingrained is rationalism in our society that such a philosophy seems like mere common sense, but it was not so when larger, less-measurable goals were held up by emperors or priests or warriors, when ideal rather than practical states were considered to be the proper pursuit of humanity. In recent days, of course, rationalism has been challenged by sensationalism, which ranks feelings above thought, but that is another story to be covered in Chapter 13.
Note 20
One of the eternal dreams (and bureaucratic necessities) of humanity has been rapid communication over great distances;
Note 21
Erewhon (1872) attacks what The Coming Race idealizes. Samuel Butler's narrator finds in the interior of New Zealand an advanced civilization which has discarded machinery because by a process of evolution machinery would develop consciousness, enslave man, and finally supersede him. In this connection we might compare Arthur Clarke's speculation that man is the organic, evolutionary bridge between the inorganic and the ultra-intelligent machine which may well be man's successor.
Note 22
In 1902, before the Royal Institution, Wells distinguished between two kinds of minds. The first, oriented to the past, regards the future “as sort of black nonexistence upon which the advancing present will presently write events,” That is the legal mind, always referring to precedents. The second kind of mind, oriented to the future, is constructive, creative, organizing. “It sees the world as one great workshop, and the present as no more than material for the future, for the thing that is yet destined to be.”
Note 23
However, in it's [Five Weeks in a Balloon] complex detail – of the trip, of the balloon, and of its equipment – it was beyond the capacities of his times and certainly beyond the imaginings of Verne's readers. (Years later editor John Campbell would point out that “the reader wants the author to do one of two basic things – and prefers the author who does both. The author's function is to imagine for the reader, of course – but he must either (a) imagine in greater detail than the reader has, or (b) imagine something the reader hasn't thought of. Ideally, the author imagines something new, in greater detail.”)
Note 24
This conflict between the literary and the journalistic, the past and the future, the pessimistic and the optimistic, can be traced through the later history of science fiction down to the controversy created by the introduction in the sixties of what was called the New Wave.
In terms of practical application, the argument sums up as a statement by the scientific culture: “Things can be better if we apply our minds to the task.” And the reply of the literary culture: “But they won't,” and its unconscious extension to, “They can't.”
Note 25
Another analysis, focused on the practical problems of the working writer, might point out that Wells was saying, as he said in almost every story of invention, “You want something wonderful (like invisibility)? Like everyone who wishes for great powers, you will be sorry.” It was a principle of story construction that later writers of science fiction would find particularly useful: every new ability, every invention, carries along with it a price; you gain something and you lose something, and often the price is too high.
Note 26
As Wells looked back from the vantage point of 1934:
World forces were at work tending to disperse the aristocratic system in Europe, to abolish small traders, to make work in the retail trades less independent and satisfactory, to promote industrial co-ordination, increase productivity, necessitate new and better informed classes, evoke a new type of education and make it universal, break down political boundaries everywhere and bring all men into one planetary community. The story of my father and mother and all my family is just the story of so many individual particles in the great mass of humanity that was driving before the sweep of these as yet imperfectly apprehended powers of synthesis.... An outburst of discovery and invention in material things and of innovation in business and financial method, has, we realize, released so much human energy that, firstly, the need for sustained toil from anyone has been abolished, secondly, practically all parts of the world have been brought into closer interaction than were York to London three centuries ago and, thirdly, the destructive impulses of men have been so equipped, that it is no longer possible to contemplate a planet in which unconditioned war is even a remote possibility. We are waking up to that a planned world- state governing the complex of human activities for the common good, however difficult to attain, has become imperative, and that until it is achieved, the history of the race must be now inevitably a record of catastrophic convulsions shot with mere glimpses and phases of temporary good luck. We are, as a species, caught in an irreversible process. No real going back to the old, comparatively stable condition of things is possible; set-backs will only prolong the tale of our racial disaster. We are therefore impelled to reconstruct the social and economic organization until the new conditions are satisfied.
Note 27
Undervalued for many years after his death and even in the last years of his life, in his early period he was compared to Robert Louis Stevenson or H. Rider Haggard or Jules Verne, in his comedies to Dickens, in the journalism of his last period to Defoe. (Such comparisons, Wells suggested, were created our of “the medieval assumption that whatever is worth knowing is already known and whatever is worth doing has already been done.... Anybody fresh who turned up was treated as an aspirant Dalai Lama is treated, and scrutinized for evidence of he predecessor's soul. So it came about that every one of us who started writing in the nineties, was discovered to be 'a second' – somebody or other.”)
Note 28
Other elements in Wells's dream book: massive cities, sometimes roofed in glass, while the countryside is relatively deserted and sometimes is tilled by machine; travel by ship to the moon; the abolition of the home; education of children in creches; improvement of medicine and increase in longevity; the freeing of mankind from labor by the perfection of machines; free, rapid movement from place to place; the withering away of government; a great central index to all the world's inhabitants, so that the state is kept informed of each individual's location; regulated parenthood; eugenics; the World State.
Note 29
The influence of Wells on the writers who followed him was summed up by George Orwell in 1945:
Thinking people who were born about the beginning of this century are in some sense Wells's own creation. How much influence any mere writer has, and especially a “popular” writer whose work takes effect quickly, is questionable, but I doubt whether anyone who was writing books between 1900 and 1920, at any rate in the English language, influenced the young so much. The minds of all of us, and therefore the physical world, would be perceptibly different if Wells never existed.
Note 30
His [Wells] influence on science fiction, moreover, has been greater than his influence on intellectual history. In a sense the science-fiction writers of the forties and fifties and at least part of the sixties were the children of Wells. They were writers who in their youth had been unable to find sufficient science fiction in magazines too satisfy their thirst for fantasy and their hunger for the future. They had searched dim, book-lined corridors of public libraries for anything that resembled science fiction, and they had dug out the old books by Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and H. G. Wells – particularly H. G. Wells. And the ideas shaped the writers.
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