Yestermorrow: Obvious Answers to Impossible Futures

SCIENCE FICTION: BEFORE CHRIST AND AFTER 2001

The history of modern science fiction is so astonishing and mercurial that I feel I must sum it up for you.

Imagine yourself back in the year 1946, 1947, or 1948.

If you had wanted to read science fiction in those years, in book form, anyway, it would have been almost impossible. Only a handful of books were being published. The finest authors in the field, Heinlein, Sturgeon, Smith, and Van Vogt were being put in print by tiny publishing companies in small editions of a few thousand copies, which almost amounted to vanity publishing; that is to say—paying to have your own work published.

These books, when they did appear, were greeted by silence. Very few got reviewed anywhere in our country at any time. For all that the critics knew, these authors had never been born, much less got around to writing a book or even a story.

In the forties, also, only a handful of paperback s-f collections had begun to pop up. Science was exploding all over the place, but s-f was still asleep in the minds of the experts and the great mass of people.

I remember going to a party, evenly divided between writers and dancers from the New York City Ballet. Back in those years, once the people discovered what I did for a living, I was hooted at and called “Buck Rogers” and “Flash Gordon.”

If the blacks of our country were a racial minority in the late forties and early fifties, the science-fiction writer was classed as a literary minority best not mentioned, better ignored. We would never go anywhere, do anything, or be anybody. We were rarely allowed to sell stories to the larger and more important magazines. And even in the s-f magazines, some of our more outrageous ideas were rejected and went unpublished.

In 1948, I wrote a story titled “Way in the Middle of the Air,” concerning a group of southern blacks who, tired of repression, built their own rockets and went off to Mars. The story was rejected by about every magazine in the country, and I finally sold it, late in the day, to a small s-f magazine for $80.

Not long after, I wrote another story about a group of priests who, arriving on Mars, try to decide whether a creature that they encounter, a fiery spirit that drifts on the air, is or is not “human.”

That story, “The Fire Balloons,” suffered a similar history. Rejected everywhere, it was published many years later in a small s-f magazine in Chicago.

It is hard for us today to realize that once upon a time the civil rights movement didn’t exist. And that once upon a time was 1948, 1949, 1950.

It is similarly hard for us to comprehend the vast power and influence of various religious groups in those same years. My story about the priests on Mars was rejected by editors, again and again, fearful of offending a wide variety of church thinkers, afraid of repercussions and criticism.

On a political level in early 1950, I wrote a story titled “And the Rock Cried Out.” It told the tale of a white man and his wife who were trapped in an Indian village in South America, shortly after an atomic holocaust. The man and his wife were forced to shine shoes and wait on tables for an existence. The shoe was indeed suddenly on the other foot, for the story questioned whether the couple could make do, and accept being a white minority in a country of dark-skinned people.

Well, 1950 and the years immediately following were Joseph McCarthy years, the years of McCarthyism, years when our country was shadowed and bullied by our real and unreal fears concerning Communism in the world.

This story, like the other two, was rejected by editors afraid to tell a tale that, with all its simplicity, might be considered anti-American and therefore pro-Communist.

It is hard to remember an America so involved with such shadows and such fears.

So far, I have named only three areas into which science fiction shoved its nose again and again.

Racial relations.

Religion.

Politics.

Are there more? Yes.

Philosophy. Pure technology. Art on any level you wish to speak of it. Logic, Ethics, Social science. History. Witchcraft. Time travel.

Well, the list, as you begin to see, is endless.

Architecture? But of course! One of the grand thrills of being young and falling in love with science fiction was seeing the early drawings and paintings by men like Frank R. Paul on old magazine covers and inside with each story. They were more often than not pure architectural renderings of fantastic cities, incredible environments.

Growing up in science fiction was, then, growing up amidst Everything.

Do you see how lucky I was?

I grew up in the old field that reached out and embraced every sector of the human imagination, every endeavor, every idea, every technological development, and every dream.

Is there a better way to grow up? I can think of none.

But even while I knew this, sensed this, lived this, the culture I lived in did not sense, know, live, or believe this.

As I have said, in the late forties, s-f was still Sleeping Beauty waiting to be kissed awake by atomic bombs, hydrogen explosions but, above all, Sputnik, then Neil Armstrong bootprinting the lunar soil for all mankind.

The earliest awakenings occurred from 1948 through 1950 when Doubleday and Simon & Schuster began to publish their own lines of science-fiction books, calling special attention to the incredible imaginative qualities within the field.

During those same years, Robert Heinlein was the first pulp s-f writer to shift over into The Saturday Evening Post with his, then remarkable, Green Hills of Earth.

I followed him a short time later.

But it was only in the Eisenhower years that we really got rolling. We are accustomed to think of Ike as a rather quiet president during whose terms not very much at all happened. The facts, in Space anyway, are otherwise. Long before Kennedy made his pitch in that direction, Eisenhower had, in effect, responded to the universe and the competition, if you wish, of Russia and Sputnik. We put our rockets and then our men, into trajectory. And it was a mild, supposedly conservative, father-image president who lit the fuse.

In the following years, from 1957 on up through this very summer, an incredible thing happened. Students began to teach teachers. They snowed them with science-fiction books and stories. The teachers held out for a long while, but then the really sly students placed a book on teacher’s desk and said, “Read just the first chapter. If you don’t like it, stop.”

So the teachers muttered “Lord, Lord” under their breaths, took Heinlein or Asimov or Clarke home, read the first chapter and were hooked.

The rest is simple but amazing history. Dozens and then hundreds of books of science fiction began to be taught in junior high schools, high schools, and colleges. Dozens and then hundreds of courses and seminars sprang up around the old but newly discovered imaginative field.

Now, hardly a day passes that some new hardcover science fiction book isn’t published. Now, no weekend is without a dozen new paperback s-f books hitting the newsstands.

Why has all this happened at this particular juncture in history? Why not 25 or 30 or, for that matter, 60 years ago?

I have no easy or complete answers. The easiest and most complete would run like this:

America, above all nations, has always been a country of ideas. We have always been revolutionary, in all the senses of that much overused word.

Somewhere, years ago, I used a term for us that I think fits more than ever. I called us a nation of Ardent Blasphemers. We ran about measuring not only how things were but how they ought to be. If the wilderness got in our way two hundred years ago, we chopped it down. If the English king and his smothering friends got in our way, we borrowed some revolutionary concepts, freshened them up, and chopped him down. If death and disease got in our way, we raised medicine to its greatest disciplines in the history of the entire world and chopped death down and cured disease and invented pain-killers. If distance got in the way, we chopped it in half by running locomotives down a track and shrinking time. If time got in the way, we raced the sun around the world with jets, and now rockets, and beat it, By Gosh and By Golly, beat it all hollow! We could make the sun rise and set half a dozen times a day by rushing with improbable haste through the heavens. Blasphemy? That was our middle name.

So with our medicines and steam trains and electrical devices we Ben Franklin’d our way into and up away from twentieth-century Earth. Which is to say we stood out in rains with a damned kite and stringed key and dared God to pin back our ears with lightning. He has pinned us back a few times. For, come to think of it, in the light of all the dogmas of a great deal of religious thought in the past, we have touched the nerve of the Universal Being. We have dared to sock Death right in the midst of its most terrible grin. We have messed with mosquitoes with sprays and saved half a billion lives. We have reached up to touch the Moon and promise ourselves immortality with starships moving on and on a billion years from this very evening. We Americans are better than we hope and worse than we think, which is to say, we are the most paradoxical of all the paradoxical nations in time.

That is what science fiction is all about.

For science fiction runs out with tapes to measure Now against Then against Breakfast Time Tomorrow. It triangulates mankind amongst these geometrical threads, praising him, warning him.

And since we are at the tail end of the Industrial Revolution and well into the Technological and/or Electronic Revolution, what else is there to read except—

Science Fiction.

It is being read now at long last because it is exciting, because it is human, because it is relevant, because it is ecological.

Sorry about those last two terms, which have been overused to the point of madness the last few years.

But, there are still snobs in the world, and I must give you weapons to fight them with. There still are people who will come up to you and say: Science fiction? Ha! Why read that?!

The most direct, off-putting reply is: Science fiction is the most important fiction ever invented by writers. It saw the whole mob of troubles pouring toward us across the shoals of time and cried, “Head for the hills, the dam is broke!” But no one listened. Now, people have pricked up their ears, and opened their eyes.

For, above all, science fiction, as far back as Plato trying to figure out a proper society, has always been a fable teacher of morality, saying: If you cut down trees, plant new ones. If you invent a pill what will you do with your religious concepts and structures? If your medicines allow people to grow old, what will you do with your old people? If you put people to sleep for five hundred years and wake them up, what then? Madness?

All of the above statements are science fictional. There is no large problem in the world this afternoon that is not a science-fictional problem.

The problem of war and world politics is the problem of the hydrogen bomb and the fact that as a teacher of Christian principles the Bomb has, sotto voce, suggested to politicians that war is no longer an extension of politics. All that has been short-circuited by the Bomb. Politics is now an extension of war. The old rules have been reversed. The old men, tired of arguing, willing to blow each other up, have been sent back to the table for yet another round of conversation. Grand, great, good, swell!

Which doesn’t rule out small wars, of course, but the big ones, for the time being, are stashed in the basement. The difference between large and small is important here. Any reduction is welcome. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed in Vietnam, but compared to the fifty million or more destroyed in a short five years in World War II, we can only be thankful that the giant Death has been dissolved down to pygmy size. And, under the shadow of the Bomb, the larger nations, even as I write this, move closer together, fused by mutual fears, instead of separated by selfish antagonisms, all because of a science-fictional invention, which was always impossible, and would never be invented: nuclear fission.

For you see, all the things that have happened to us, were never going to happen.

Good people said so. Nice people thought so.

But the science-fiction writers always knew otherwise. They could see that locomotive coming down the track, changing the face of the Civil War. They could see multitudinous inventions, shaping and reshaping mankind and thus shaking the very foundations of churches and synagogues around the world.

Science fiction then is the fiction of revolutions. Revolutions in time, space, medicine, travel, and thought. It is the fiction of the moralist who shakes his hand at us and says: Behave or I pull the switch! It is the fiction of the writer-theologian who shows man the mirror image of God in himself and promises him a real and true heaven if he gets off his ape-hunkers and fires himself into a new Genesis-orbit around the Moon and then on into the abyss dark.

Above all, science fiction is the fiction of warm-blooded human men and women sometimes elevated and sometimes crushed by their machines. Given tape recorders, “what do I do?” a man cries out. Given bugging devices and computers, “what next?” he asks again. Given television and movies and radio and records—a veritable Tower of Electronic Babel, where lies my sanity? Be still, stand among trees, green yourself, says science fiction.

I remember with what happiness, years ago (to the jeers of strangers), I predicted that if the philosopher Bertrand Russell ever wrote fiction it would be science fiction. When Lord Russell finally published two collections of stories, in the fifties, they were predominantly fictions of ideas, which is to say science fictions.

We are all of us, today, fourth-grade philosophers. We are all of us writers, in our minds, of science fictions, for we are being forced to deal with the problems of the ten thousand million machines, the robots that surround us, talk to us, move us. We must have answers so we speak in tongues, and the tongues are always, always, always science fiction. If your problems are metal and electricity, your answers must be run up out of the same stuffs. We move from simplicity to complexity to simplicity again. The history of radio is the history of mankind illustrated in a brief 53 year span: We began with cat’s-whisker crystal radios, expanded to ten-dial, maniac-complex devices, which drove men mad in 1928, and on around back to wrist watch-size radios in 1973. We will watch the same history repeated as small towns become mad supercities, collapse, die, and turn back to new small towns as we rebirth ourselves at the end of this century.

Plato’s name has been mentioned. You may well, in exasperation, demand why? Because in many ways I consider his Republic to be one of the earliest forms of science fiction. Whenever man tries to guess at an ethical/political concept, he is, in effect, oiling a machine, hopeful after controlling other men and giving them new freedoms by such control as will allow them to live in peace. So science fiction, we now see, is interested in more than sciences, more than machines. That more is always men and women and children themselves, how they behave, how they hope to behave. Science fiction is apprehensive of future modes of behavior as well as future constructions of metal. Democracy is a science-fictional concept trying to dream itself to birth with every generation. Any philosophy which does not exist but tries to exist, is by this definition science fiction. Politics is an inept science, God knows, but a science nevertheless, to which we are trying to fit keys and open hearts and souls.

Again, science fiction guesses at sciences before they are sprung out of the brows of thinking men and women. More, the authors in the field try to guess at machines, which are the fruit of those sciences. Then we try to guess at how mankind will react to those machines, how it will use them, grow with them, and how it will be destroyed by them.

All, all of it fantastic. All, all of it, the story of mankind and inventions, men and machines that step on God’s toes and now, late in the day, say Beg Pardon. To which the Universe says: That’s all right, go build Eden again. Build it on Earth. Build it on the Moon. Build it on out beyond our unreachable solar system; but build it, live in it, take root in it, survive.