I think that science fiction is dead. I think that
what we see published under that label today is a kind of zombie
genre, kept alive more by the commercial demands of the media –
publishing, movies, TV, comics and journalism – than by the urgent
questions that formed the seeds of the genre as it emerged last
century.
I’m conflicted by doubt of course: is SF really dead or am I just a
miserable old git? Many other signs point to the latter being so.
For my own
peace of mind I need to know. I need to understand what has changed
and why: is the genre dead or have I simply lost my capacity for
wonder? To test the vital signs of science fiction today, I need a
solid idea of what those vital signs are. I need to make sure I’ll
know them when I see them before I declare them absent from the
contemporary scene. For that reason, I’ve been looking for a way to
re-familiarise myself with classic SF.
I came across this set of three volumes in a
second hand bookshop in New Zealand, a snap at forty dollars for all
three. Each volume covers a decade, starting with the foundation of
Amazing Stories in
1926, with the third ending in 1955. (There’s a fourth volume,
covering 56 to 65, which would have been handy to have, but it looks
like that one didn’t a proper distribution and is hard to come by.)
There were of course stories of the general type
we’ve come to know as science fiction long before 1926. Ashely
points to Frankenstein in his introduction, as a starting
point, but there are a few dozen candidates in various forms going
back to the ancients. Where it started exactly isn’t important, I
don’t think, in comparison to the clear growth in this type of
thing during the 19th century. That makes Frankenstein
a pretty good staring place: whether later writers were directly
influenced by Shelley or not, there was definitely something in the
air that began around about that time.
This came to an early first peak in the work of H
G Welles and Jules Verne who examined the transformations to the
world that might come from scientific knowledge. Starting with the
industrial revolution, the rhythms of daily began changing for
everyone. This new type of story seemed to be the first to describe
the changes that were happening in the world and answer the question,
what do all these new discoveries mean?
Ashley describes three general types of story
common before the founding of Amazing Stories:
‘Firstly the scientific romance epitomised by Burroughs and Merritt that appeared in Munsey Publications. Secondly the scientific extrapolation of Gernsback, and thirdly the weird and bizarre science fiction of Weird Tales.’
It’s a break-down that still seems current today
– adventure stories, hard SF and stories that use SF elements for
literary effect.
Ashley’s choice of the foundation of Amazing
Stories as his starting date sees him side with category two as
‘real’ SF. Clearly, there will never be hard lines where it
begins and ends, but the heart of SF is with stories featuring real
science in a believable futuristic world. That’s the sort of story
I’m thinking about when I say ‘science fiction is dead’.
Adventure stories in exotic locales and various forms of surrealism
or satire have been a constant in literature. Today they exist in
abundance. Just about every movie and TV show you might see featured
in SFX or spoilered on io9 belong in these groups.
But this other type of story was something new in
the popular culture. Before Amazing Stories, Gernsback had
discovered the growing public appetite in his non-fiction
publications, Radio News and Science & Invention.
He coined the term ‘scientification’ for a special issue of the
latter which included half a dozen SF stories and articles
extrapolating future trends. The launch of Amazing Stories in
1926 was the spark into life of something that had been building for
a decade or so already.
Ashley’s introduction points to two important
developments in the genre in this first decade. The first is
important for the type of story science fiction became. In 1933
Frederick Tremaine became the editor of Astounding Stories. He
immediately made it known he was looking for ‘stories completely
original in idea, treatment and scope.’ He called these stories
‘thought variants’. This seems to be the point where SF moved
away from super-science stories showing off scientific knowledge to
stories that examined the consequences of scientific theories and
technological innovations.
The second important development was the evolution
of the audience. Pulp magazines used to publish addresses with
letters in the letters column, which gave fans a way to contact each
other and fandom was born. When groups began forming, Gernsback saw
another opportunity and formed the Science Fiction League.
Since then, the activities and opinions of fandom
have formed an important part of the way SF has developed. I’d say
that without it, we wouldn’t have such a distinct division between
SF/F and mainstream fiction. Most SF and fantasy would fit into other
genres – crime, adventure, thrillers – without much effort and a
lot of SF authors might be thought of more as writer/journalists or
writer/scientists than members of this other group.
The 1999 edition of the Encyclopedia
of Science Fiction says, interestingly, in its entry on
fandom: ‘It has been suggested that, if SF ceased to exist, fandom
would continue to function quite happily without it.’ This, I
think, is where we are. Because of this commercial resource,
something called science fiction is still published and placed in
bookshops labelled as such. It’s created a tribe of readers who
identify with a genre of fiction as intensely as some identify with
genres of music. The frequent complaints about the absence of science
fiction writers from book pages and mainstream awards are more
concerned with tribal affiliation than the quality or nature of the
fiction.
In the meantime, mainstream literary culture is
also in the process of claiming back a lot of the tricks and elements
that SF and fantasy fans has claimed belonged exclusively to them.
This eats away at the generic distinction claimed by SF – if it
doesn’t belong to a tribe, it’s not a distinct thing. Like crime
or thriller or romance, it’s a set of choices a writer can choose
to make or not depending on the needs of an individual work.
However, there is something to the complaint made
by SF fans that mainstream authors are just picking over the dry
bones of well-used themes. I think that’s generally true.
Innovation and originality is one of the key qualities of SF: it
moves with the technological Zeitgeist. That’s why Tremaine’s
statement is important. Charles Horning made a similar statement a
couple of years later as editor of Wonder Stories, claiming the high
ground in the search for stories ‘so different from the old days of
rehashed themes and stereotyped characters.’
However, my feeling is that SF has been mined out.
I don’t think there’s anything new to say about the themes and
questions that SF sought to answer. Partly that’s because I think
we’ve internalised the messages that SF was built upon. The idea of
scientific progress isn’t the source of fear and optimism it once
was: we’ve had a century or so now of rapid technological change
and it’s pretty much part of our mundane existence. In the lifetime
of our grand-parents we’ve gone from manual exchanges to iPhones;
the idea of that kind of change for a similar period in the future is
now just one of the man-on-the-street’s assumptions about the world
rather than a frightening or exciting new idea.
In the meantime, a lot of the possibilities we
imagined have turned out to be impossible or non-existent: telepathy,
artificial intelligence, easy inter-planetary travel, the
colonisation of space and abundant alien civilization. The pressing
questions associated with these ideas and explorations of their
unseen consequences are therefore less pressing. They still exist as
metaphorical constructs for authors who want to dramatise
philosophical or ethical problems. They are a useful background for
conflict for military or adventure fiction that wants to avoid
difficult moral and political questions raised by those genres in the
real world. But they no longer hold the power of potential worlds. No
one now seriously believes in Dan Dare, Robbie the Robot or The
Tomorrow People (or, if you like, Hari Seldon, Susan Calvin or Ben
Reich.)
Between these two elements, my feeling is that
hard speculative SF as a distinct category of fiction has lost its
power address the matters that led to its creation. That’s what I
mean when I say ‘science fiction is dead’. This reading project
is about finding out if I’m right: like a good SF fan I’m going
to test my hypothesis against the evidence.
In the next few months I’ll blog about each
story and we’ll see what progress was made in SF’s Golden Age.
When I’ve done that, I’ll have a think about how I’m going to
undertake a similar exercise on fiction from the previous decade,
where so much new thinking in SF inhabits novels rather than stories
(another factor in the dissolution of fandom) and maybe even at the
movies and on TV.
In the meantime, though, let’s get started with
the stories.
many of the things you said, have turned out to be impossible or non-existent are actually things that many scientists are working on all the time for example artificial intelligence is developing really fast right now, in 20 or 30 years we will have true artificial intelligence and just because we haven't colonized space yet doesn't mean we can't. it is proven that there is a huge amount of earth like planets in only our galaxy, I would be very surprised if there isn't an alien civilization somewhere in space.
ReplyDeleteHi Andreas, Well, we'll see I suppose. More importantly they are all areas that have lost their cultural urgency and thus their grip on the popular imagination.
ReplyDeleteThis post is pretty old now and my thoughts on this have been evolving. I'm just finishing off the Amis edited colelciton the golden Age of SF and I'll be posting again on this topis soon. However, I'm mothballing this blog, so please come and follow me at www.patrickhudson.co.uk