Science Fiction Today and Tomorrow Read online

  SCIENCE FICTION, Today and Tomorrow

  Edited By Reginald Bretnor

  © Penguin Books 1975 ISBN-10: 014003921X

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION by Reginald Bretnor

  SCIENCE FICTION TODAY

  BEN BOVA,

  The Role of Science Fiction FREDERIK POHL,

  The Publishing of Science Fiction GEORGE ZEBROWSKI,

  Science Fiction and the Visual Media

  SCIENCE FICTION, SCIENCE, AND MODERN MAN

  FRANK HERBERT,

  Science Fiction and a World in Crisis THEODORE STURGEON,

  Science Fiction, Morals, and Religion ALAN E. NOURSE,

  Science Fiction and Man's Adaptation to Change THOMAS N. SCORTIA,

  Science Fiction as the Imaginary Experiment REGINALD BRETNOR,

  Science Fiction in the Age of Space

  THE ART AND SCIENCE OF SCIENCE FICTION

  JAMES GUNN,

  Science Fiction and the Mainstream ALEXEI AND CORY PANSHIN,

  Science Fiction, New Trends and Old POUL ANDERSON,

  The Creation of Imaginary Worlds HAL CLEMENT,

  The Creation of Imaginary Beings ANNE MCCAFFREY.

  Romance and Glamour in Science Fiction GORDON R. DICKSON,

  Plausibility in Science Fiction JACK WILLIAMSON,

  Science Fiction, Teaching, and Criticism

  Introduction

  It is now scarcely necessary (as it was when I assembled and edited Modern Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Future in 1953) to explain to any literate general readership why a book on science fiction should be written, for in the past few years the field has achieved the wide recognition then denied to it. However, because this sudden recognition has not meant sudden understanding, much remains unchanged. In the preface to Modern Science Fiction, I wrote about the book's purposes and my own:

  This is not the first book to deal with science fiction. It is, however, the first general survey of modern science fiction against the background of the world today. It is the first attempt to examine modern science fiction in its relation to contemporary literatures, contemporary human problems. Having taken the approach of the ecologist, rather than that of the anatomist, for its model, I have made no effort to confine its authors too rigidly to the defined limits of their subjects, or to inhibit their discussion of whatever matters they considered pertinent. Under these circumstances, naturally, I have allowed myself a similar degree of liberty in the writing of my own chapter.

  Twenty years have passed, during which many more books on science fiction in its various aspects have appeared. Aside from that, everything in the statement applies equally to this new symposium, Science Fiction, Today and Tomorrow. It is an examination of science fiction in our contemporary world, which means of course that it looks at science fiction as a life process—something that has its sole existence in the minds of men, created by those minds out of their aspirations and imaginings, their passions and philosophies, influencing those minds for good or ill, and through them influencing and being influenced by that exterior world of which we are a part.

  Today the world is vastly more complex, in many ways more puzzling, and to most thinking men far more perilous than the world of 1953. Besides, we have become very largely a mandarin society, where (except in the hard sciences) the steps taken toward status too often are equated with learning, status with wisdom, notoriety with stature, and platitudes with profundity. In such societies, which tend to manufacture literatures and speculations according to ever narrower "go/no-go" criteria, the creative mind is curbed from the beginning. When, in addition, the manufacture is on a mass basis, when literatures and speculations are contrived by fewer and fewer men to reach more and more people through mass news-entertainment media, those natural channels of interpersonal interchange and feedback that enrich a culture become spontaneously constricted (very much as they are deliberately constricted by totalitarian governments), and creative minds not only are constrained, but the chances for creative individuals to realize their potential can be nullified almost completely.

  In my own chapter, I have discussed those aspects of this process which I consider vital to the future of science fiction, and indeed, to the future of the arts in general. I will say no more about them here. However, my concern with them has to a great extent determined the nature of this book. Even more than in 1953, I wanted to present as many fresh and vital views of our surrounding complexity as possible, not interpreted ritualistically, not forced into conformity with any rigid Ideology, not carefully culled to display the fashions and pretensions of literary criticism, but marshaled to produce what can perhaps be described as a survey of Science Fiction, Today and Tomorrow from that broad perspective which science fiction has itself invented. Essentially, this meant that the imaginative scope, the creative talent, the vast variety of backgrounds in education and experience, and the almost limitless range of beliefs and hopes, ambitions and ideals, which have produced science fiction as we know it, should be harnessed to the task of its interpretation.

  That is why all the contributors are writers well known in the field. That is why as individuals and as writers they are so diverse. That is why they were selected. The book was written to a prepared table of contents, from which we departed only very slightly as the text took shape. Alan Nourse, for instance, suggested his own subject of "Science Fiction and Man's Adaptation to Change," which I had not thought of, and Tom Scortia, by changing one word in the title of his chapter, made its meaning much clearer.

  The book is, I think, a good and useful one. My major debt is, of course, to its authors, who brought it into being and who, in the majority of cases, gave it much more than was required, with an enthusiasm and a generosity far beyond what I had contracted. I am also indebted to Victoria Schochet and others on Harper & Row's editorial staff, first for their interest in the book, and then for their patience with its compiler. I am very grateful to Jacques Barzun and to Larry Niven for permission to quote from their published works, and to Richard J. Portal, Chief Reference Librarian at the Jackson County Public Library, for his prompt and always accurate answers to my many questions. Finally, I want to thank Carol Young, of Grants Pass, Oregon, who somehow puzzled out and typed the final manuscript.

  Reginald Bretnor

  Science Fiction Today

  Ben Bova

  The Role of Science Fiction

  The year 1972 was marked by publication of a controversial book, The Limits to Growth. This study of the world's future, done by a team of MIT scientists with the aid of computer "models" of the future of our society, was sponsored by an international organization called The Club of Rome. The study forecast a planetwide disaster unless humankind sharply limits its population growth and consumption of natural resources.

  The MIT group worked out a technique for simulating certain aspects of the world's social and economic behavior, and the interrelationships among them. Thus the computer model could show how population grows when the death rate is kept low and the birthrate is unchecked, how consumption of natural resources is affected by increased population, how pollution stems from industrial output, etcetera. Putting all these factors together, the study showed that total disaster is waiting for humankind within a century.

  According to the computer's model of the world, if we don't change our present style of growth-oriented society, and change it drastically, we will soon use up all the available natural resources, and produce so much pollution and overpopulation that the entire world society will collapse. Resources will run out. Food and industrial production will tumble. The death rate will climb out of sight. Mass starvation, war, pestilence—all shown on clear,
inexorable—looking graphs, straight from the computer's print-out.

  The graphs show that the curves representing population, industrial production, farm output, and natural resources all peak early in the twenty-first century, then collapse. Super-disaster. And it's all very real, if you grant a few critical assumptions.

  The MIT study evoked immediate howls of protest and delight. Some said the book was a mathematically accurate forecast of a doom that we must work hard to avert. Others said it was a grab bag of poor assumptions and unwarranted straight-line extrapolations. As of this moment, the debate rages on. And the clock is ticking.

  Most people were caught by surprise when the book came out. Many refused to believe that disaster is possible, probable, inevitable—if we don't change our mode of running Spaceship Earth. But science fiction people were neither surprised nor outraged. The study was really old news to them. They'd been making their own "models" of tomorrow and testing them all their lives.

  (Incidentally, several science fictionists—including Arthur C. Clarke—immediately pointed out that the MIT scientists automatically assumed that the earth is a closed system. The MIT team didn't consider that humankind now has the ability to draw natural resources from elsewhere in the solar system. This is perhaps the major flaw in the MIT study.)

  What the scientists attempted with their computer model is very much like the thing that science fiction writers and readers have been doing for decades (or centuries, if you want to define the works of earlier writers as science fiction). Instead of using a computer to "model" a future world society, science fiction writers have used their human imaginations. This gives the writers some enormous advantages.

  One of the advantages is flexibility.

  Science fiction writers are not in the business of predicting the future. They do something much more important. They try to show the many possible futures that lie open to us. If the history of the human race can be thought of as an enormous migration through time, with thousands of millions of people wandering through the centuries, then the writers of science fiction are the scouts, the explorers, the adventurers who send back stories that warn of the harsh desert up ahead, or tales that dazzle us with reports of the beautiful mountains that lie just over the horizon.

  For there is not simply a future, a time to come that's preordained and inexorable. Our future is built, bit by bit, minute by minute, by the actions of human beings. One vital role of science fiction is to show what kinds of future might result from certain kinds of human actions.

  Have you ever stood on a flat, sandy beach, at the edge of the water, and watched the little wavelets that play at your feet? After the breakers have dumped their energy and the water rushes as far up the beach as it can, there's a crisscross pattern of wavelets that mottle the beach. If the sun's at the proper angle, you can clearly see what physicists call interference patterns. The wavelets interact with one another, sometimes adding together to form a stronger wave, sometimes canceling each other to form a blank spot in the pattern.

  The myriads of ideas that parade across the pages of science fiction magazines and books each month form such a pattern in the minds of readers and writers. Some ideas get reinforced, added to, strengthened by repetition and enlargement. Other ideas get canceled, fall out of favor, are found lacking in one way or another. Thus, for more than a generation now, science fiction people have been worrying about problems such as pollution, nuclear warfare, overpopulation, genetic manipulation, runaway technology, thought control, and other threats that burst on the general public as shocking surprises.

  Other potential problems have been examined and dropped. Today there are few stories about invisible men seized by dreams of power. Or plagues of "space germs" infecting Earth. When Michael Crichton's Andromeda Strain became a vastly popular book and movie, most science fiction people groaned. "But it's an old idea!" they chorused, meaning that it's no longer a valid idea: the problem does not and probably will not exist. But this old idea was shatteringly new and exciting to the general public.

  To communicate the ideas, the fears and hopes, the shape and feel of all the infinite possible futures, science fiction writers lean heavily on another of their advantages: the art of fiction.

  For while a scientist's job has largely ended when he's reduced his data to tabular or graph form, the work of a science fiction writer is just beginning. His task is to convey the human story: the scientific basis for the possible future of his story is merely the background. Perhaps "merely" is too limiting a word. Much of science fiction consists of precious little except the background, the basic idea, the gimmick. But the best of science fiction, the stories that make a lasting impact on generations of readers, are stories about people. The people may be nonhuman. They may be robots or other types of machines. But they will be people, in the sense that human readers can feel for them, share their joys and sorrows, their dangers and their ultimate successes.

  The art of fiction has not changed much since prehistoric times, mainly because man's nervous system and the culture he's built out of it have not basically changed.

  From the earliest Biblical times, through Homer to Shakespeare, Goethe, and right down to today's commercial fiction industry, the formula for telling a powerful story has remained the same: create a strong character, a person of great strengths, capable of deep emotions and decisive action. Give him a weakness. Set him in conflict with another powerful character—or perhaps with nature. Let this exterior conflict be the mirror of the protagonist's own interior conflict, the clash of his desires, his own strength against his own weakness. And there you have a story. Whether it's Abraham offering his only son to God, or Paris bringing ruin to Troy over a woman, or Hamlet and Claudius playing their deadly game, Faust seeking the world's knowledge and power, Gully Foyle, D. D. Harriman, Montag the Fireman, Michael Valentine Smith, Muad'Dib—the stories that stand out in the minds of the readers are those that are made incandescent by characters—people—who are unforgettable.

  To show other worlds, to describe possible future societies and the problems lurking ahead, is not enough. The writer of science fiction must show how these worlds and these futures affect human beings. And something much more important: he must show how human beings can and do literally create these future worlds. For our future is largely in our own hands. It doesn't come blindly rolling out of the heavens; it is the joint product of the actions of billions of human beings. This is a point that's easily forgotten in the rush of headlines and the hectic badgering of everyday life. But it's a point that science fiction makes constantly: the future belongs to us—whatever it is. We make it, our actions shape tomorrow. We have the brains and guts to build paradise (or at least try). Tragedy is when we fail, and the greatest crime of all is when we fail even to try.

  Thus science fiction stands as a bridge between science and art, between the engineers of technology and the poets of humanity. Never has such a bridge been more desperately needed.

  Writing in the British journal New Scientist, the famed poet and historian Robert Graves said in 1972, "Technology is now warring openly against the crafts, and science covertly against poetry."

  What Graves is expressing is the fear that many people have: technology has already allowed machines to replace human muscle power; now it seems that machines such as electronic computers might replace human brainpower. And he goes even further, pointing a shaking finger at science as the well-spring of technology, and criticizing science on the mystical grounds that science works only in our usual four dimensions of space/time, while truly human endeavors such as poetry have a power that scientists can't recognize "because, at its most intense [poetry] works in the Fifth Dimension, independent of time."

  Graves explains that poetry is usually the product of intuitive thinking, and grants that some mathematical theories have also sprung from intuition. Then he says, "Yet scientists would dismiss a similar process... as 'illogical.' "

  Apparently Graves sees scientists as a
sober, plodding phalanx of soulless thinking machines, never making a step that hasn't been carefully thought out in advance. He should try working with a few scientists, or even reading James D. Watson's The Double Helix.

  As a historian, Graves should be aware that James Clerk Maxwell's brilliant insight about electromagnetism—the guess that visible light is only one small slice of the spectrum of electromagnetic energy, a guess that forms the basis for electronics technology—was an intuitive leap into the unknown. Maxwell had precious little evidence to back up his guess. The evidence came later. Max Planck's original concept of the quantum theory was also mainly intuition. The list of wild jumps of intuition made by these supposedly stolid, humorless scientists is long indeed.

  Scientists are human beings! They are just as human, intuitive, and emotional as anyone else. But most people don't realize this. They don't know scientists, any more than they know much about science.

  C. P. Snow pointed out two decades ago that there is a gap between the Two Cultures, and Graves's remarks show that the gap is widening into a painful chasm. Graves is a scholar who should know better. He's justly renowned for his work in ancient mythology, where he's combined his gifts of poetry and historical research in a truly original and beautiful way.

  But he doesn't seem to understand that scientists do precisely the same thing. Because he doesn't understand scientists.

  Since the prehistoric days of tribal shamans, most people have held a highly ambivalent attitude toward the medicine man-astrologer-wizard-scientist. On the one hand they envied his abilities and sought to use his power for their own gain. On the other hand, they feared his power, hated his seeming superiority, and knew damned well that he was in league with dark forces of evil.

  There has been little change in this double-edged attitude over the centuries. Today most people still tend to hold scientists in awe. After all, scientists have brought us nuclear weapons, modern medicines, space flight, and underarm deodorants. Yet at the same time, we see scientists derided as fuzzy-brained eggheads or as coldly ruthless, emotionless makers of monsters. Scientists are a minority group, and like most minorities they're largely hidden from the public's sight, tucked away in ghettos —laboratories, campuses, field sites out in the desert or on Pacific atolls.