Expanded Universe (46 page)

"Science Fiction" is a portmanteau term, and many and varied are the things that have been stuffed into it. Just as the term "historical fiction" includes in its broad scope
Quo Vadis,
nickel thrillers about the James Boys or Buffalo Bill, and
Forever Amber,
so does the tag "science fiction" apply both to Alley Oop and to Aldous Huxley's
After Many a Summer Dies the Swan.
It would be more nearly correctly descriptive to call the whole field "speculative fiction" and to limit the name "science fiction" to a sub-class—in which case some of the other sub-classes would be: undisguised fantasy (Thorne Smith, the Oz books), pseudo-scientific fantasy (C. S. Lewis's fine novel
Out of the Silent Planet,
Buck Rogers, Bradbury's delightful Martian stories), sociological speculation (More's
Utopia,
Michael Arlen's
Man's Mortality,
H. G. Wells'
The World Set Free,
Plato's
Republic
), adventure stories with exotic and non-existent locales (Flash Gordon, Burroughs' Martian stories, the
Odyssey, Tom Sawyer Abroad
)
.
Many other classes will occur to you, since the term "speculative fiction" may be defined negatively as being fiction about things that have not happened.

One can see that the name "science fiction" is too Procrustean a bed, too tight a corset, to fit the whole field comfortably. Nevertheless, since language is how we talk, not how we might talk, it seems likely that the term "science fiction" will continue to be applied to the whole field; we are stuck with it, as the American aborigines are stuck with the preposterous name "Indian."

But what, under rational definition, is
science
fiction? There is an easy touchstone: science fiction is speculative fiction in which the author takes as his first postulate the real world as we know it, including all established facts and natural laws. The result can be extremely fantastic in content, but it is not fantasy; it is legitimate—and often very tightly reasoned—speculation about the possibilities of the real world. This category excludes rocket ships that make U-turns, serpent men of Neptune that lust after human maidens, and stories by authors who flunked their Boy Scout merit badge tests in descriptive astronomy.

But the category includes such mindstretchers as Olaf Stapledon's
Last and First Men,
William Sloane's
To Walk the Night,
Dr. Asimov's
The Stars, Like Dust,
even though these stories are stranger than most outright fantasies.

But how is one to distinguish between legitimate science fiction and ridiculous junk? Place of original publication is no guide; some of the best have appeared in half-cent-a-word pulp magazines, with bug-eyed monsters on their covers; some of the silliest have appeared in high-pay slicks or in the "prestige" quality group.

"The Pretzel Men of Pthark"—that one we can skip over; the contents are probably like the title. Almost as easy to spot is the Graustark school of space opera. This is the one in which the dashing Nordic hero comes to the aid of the rightful Martian princess and kicks out the villainous usurper through superscience and sheer grit. It is not being written very often these days, although it still achieves book publication occasionally, sometimes with old and respectable trade book houses. But it does not take a Ph.D. in physics to recognize it for what it is.

But do not be too quick to apply as a test to science fiction what are merely the conventions of better known fields of literature. I once heard a librarian say that she could not stand the unpronounceable names given by science-fiction writers to extraterrestrials. Have a heart, friend! These strings of consonants are honest attempts to give unearthly names to unearthly creatures. As Shaw pointed out, the customs of our tribe are not laws of nature. You would not expect a Martian to be named "Smith." (Say—how about a story about a Martian named "Smith"? Ought to make a good short. Hmmmm—)

But are there reliable criteria by which science fiction can be judged by one who is not well acquainted with the field? In my opinion, there are. Simply the criteria which apply to all fields of fiction, no more, no less.

First of all, an item of science fiction should be a story, i.e., its entertainment value should be as high as that which you expect from other types of stories. It should be entertaining to almost anyone, whether he habitually reads the stuff or not. Second, the degree of literacy should be as high as that expected in other fields. I will not labor this point, since we are simply applying an old rule to a new field, but there is no more excuse here than elsewhere for split infinitives, dangling participles, and similar untidiness, or for obscurity and doubletalk.

The same may be said for plotting, characterization, motivation, and the rest. If a science-fiction writer can't
write,
let him go back to being a fry cook or whatever he was doing before he gave up honest work.

I want to make separate mention of the author's evaluations. Granted that not all stories need be morally edifying, nevertheless I would demand of science-fiction writers as much exercise of moral sense as I would of other writers. I have in mind one immensely popular series which does not hold my own interest very well because the protagonist seems to be guided only by expediency. Neither the writer nor his puppet seems to be aware of good and evil. For my taste this is a defect in any story, nor is the defect mitigated by the wonderful and gaudy trappings of science fiction. In my opinion, such abstractions as honor, loyalty, fortitude, self-sacrifice, bravery, honesty, and integrity will be as important in the far reaches of the Galaxy as they are in Iowa or Korea. I believe that you are entitled to apply your own evaluating standards to science fiction quite as rigorously as you apply them in other fiction.

The criteria outlined above take care of every aspect of science fiction but one—the
science
part. But even here no new criterion is needed. Suppose you were called on to purchase or to refuse to purchase a novel about a Mexican boy growing up on a Mexican cattle ranch; suppose that you knew no Spanish, had never been to Mexico and were unacquainted with its history and customs, and were unsure of the competence of the author. What would you do?

I suspect that you would farm out the decision to someone who was competent to judge the authenticity of the work. It might be a high school Spanish teacher, it might be a friend or neighbor who was well acquainted with our neighboring culture, it might be the local Mexican consul. If the expert told you that the background material of the book was nonsense, you would not give the book shelf room.

The same procedure applies to science fiction. No one can be expected to be expert in everything. If you do not happen to know what makes a rocket go when there is no air to push against, you need not necessarily read Willy Ley's
Rockets, Missiles, and Space Travel
—although it is a fine book, a "must" for every library, desirable for any home. You may instead consult anyone of your acquaintance who
does
know about rocket ships—say an Air Force or Artillery officer, a physics teacher, or almost any fourteen-year-old boy, especially boys who are active in high school science clubs. If the novel being judged concerns cybernetics, nuclear physics, genetics, chemistry, relativity, it is necessary only to enlist the appropriate helper.

You would do the same, would you not, with a novel based on the life of Simón Bolívar?

Of course, there is the alternate, equivalent method of testing the authenticity of any book by checking on the author. If the Simón Bolívar novel was written by a distinguished scholar of South American history, you need concern yourself only with the literary merit of the book. If a book about space travel is written by a world-famous astronomer (as in the case of the one who writes under the pen name of "Philip Latham"), you can put your mind at rest about the correctness of the science therein. In many cases science-fiction writers have more than adequate professional background in the sciences they use as background material and their publishers are careful to let you know this through catalog and dustjacket blurb. I happen to be personally aware of and can vouch for the scientific training of Sprague de Camp, George O. Smith, "John Taine," John W. Campbell, Jr., "Philip Latham," Will Jenkins, Jack Williamson, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, E. E. Smith, Philip Wylie, Olaf Stapledon, H. G. Wells, Damon Knight, Harry Stine, and "J. J. Coupling." This listing refers to qualifications in science only and is necessarily incomplete, nor do I mean to slight the many fine writers without formal scientific training who are well read in science and most careful in their research.

But some means of checking on a writer of alleged science fiction is desirable. Most writers of historical fiction appear to go to quite a lot of trouble to get the facts of their historical scenes correct, but some people seem to feel that all that is necessary to write science fiction is an unashamed imagination and a sprinkling of words like "ray gun," "rocket tube," "mutant," and "space warp." In some cases the offense is as blatant as it would be in the case of an author of alleged historical fiction who founded a book on the premise that Simón Bolívar was a Chinese monk! It follows that, in order to spot these literary fakers it is necessary to know that Bolívar was not a Chinese monk—know something of the sciences yourself or enlist competent advisers.

Writers talking about writing are about as bad as parents boasting about their children. I have not done much of it; the few times that I have been guilty, I did not instigate the project, and in almost all cases (all, I think) my arm was twisted.
I promise to avoid it in the future.
The item above, however, I consider worthy of publication (even though my arm was twisted) because there really are many librarians who earnestly wish to buy good science fiction . . . but don't know how to do it. In this short article I tried very hard to define clearly and simply how to avoid the perils of Sturgeon's Law in buying science fiction.
Part way through you will notice the origin of the last name of the
Stranger in a Strange Land
. 
 

Superficially this looks like the same sort of article as "Pandora's Box"; it is not, it is fiction—written by request to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Amazing Stories. In "Pandora's Box" I was trying hard to extrapolate rationally to most probable answers 50 years in the future (and in November 1979 I gave myself a score of 66%—anybody want to buy a used crystal ball with a crack in it?).
But in this short-short I wrote as if I were alive in 2001 and writing a retrospective of the 20th century. Of course everyone knows what happened in 2001; they found a big black monolith on Luna—but in 1956 I didn't know that. So I wrote as far out as I thought I could get away with (to be entertaining) while trying to make the items sound plausible and possible if not likely.
Figures in parentheses refer to notes at the end. 
 

Now, at the beginning of the year 2001, it is time to see where we have been and guess at where we are going. A thousand years ago Otto III ruled the Holy Roman Empire, William the Conqueror was not yet born, and the Discovery of America was almost five hundred years in the future. The condition of mankind had not changed in most important respects since the dawn of history. Aside from language and local custom a peasant of 1000 B.C. would have been right at home in a village of 1001 A.D.

He would not be so today!

The major changes took place in the last two centuries, but the most significant change of all occurred in the last fifty years, during the lifetimes of many of us. In 1950 six out of ten persons could neither read nor write; today an illiterate person is a freak.(1)

More people have learned to read and write in the past fifty years than in all the thousands of years preceding 1950. 
 

This one change is more worldshaking than the establishment this last year of the laboratory outpost on Pluto. We think of this century just closed as the one in which mankind conquered space; it would be more appropriate to think of it as the century in which the human race finally learned to read and write.

(Let's give the Devil his due; the contagious insanities of the past century—communism, xenophobia, aggressive nationalism, the explosions of the formerly colonial peoples—have done more to spread literacy than the efforts of all the do-gooders in history. The Three R's suddenly became indispensable weapons in mankind's bloodiest struggles—learn to read, or die. Out of bad has come good; a man who can read and write is nine-tenths free even in chains.)

But something else has happened as important as the ABC's. The big-muscled accomplishments of the past fifty years—like sea-farming, the fantastic multiplication of horsepower, and spaceships, pantographic factories, the Sahara Sea, reflexive automation, tapping the Sun—overshadow the most radical advance, i.e., the first fumbling steps in founding a science of the human mind.

Fifty years ago hypnotism was a parlor trick, clairvoyance was superstition, telepathy was almost unknown, and parapsychology was on a par with phrenology and not as respectable as the most popular nonsense called astrology.

Do we have a "science of the mind" today? Far from it. But we do have—

A Certainty of Survival after Death,
proved with scientific rigor more complete than that which we apply to heat engines. It is hard to believe that it was only in 1952 that Morey Bernstein, using hypnotic regression, established the personal survival of Bridget Murphy—and thereby turned the western world to a research that Asia and Africa had always taken for granted.(2)