Authors: Ben Bova
Science fiction practitioners freely admit that literary standards have usually been less important in their field than idea content and narrative drive. It is all too easy for stories of the future to degenerate into “space operas” set on distant planets, in which alien “bug-eyed monsters” are the villains.
Theodore Sturgeon, one of science fiction’s most literate writers, long ago coined Sturgeon’s Law:
“Ninety percent of science fiction is crud; but then, ninety percent of
everything
is crud.”
Sturgeon has established himself well within the good ten percent of the field, with novels such as
More Than Human,
in which he examines the next step of human evolution—“Homo gestalt”—a group entity consisting of several individual human beings linked by telepathy into a single, superior, but touchingly vulnerable creature.
Lester Del Rey, a veteran of science fiction’s “Golden Age” of the early 1940s and now Fantasy Editor of Del Rey Books, has a different view about literary quality. Admitting that science fiction “doesn’t come off too well” in the usual terms of characterization and psychological insights, Del Rey then adds: “But if you want to take some of the added things that science fiction brings to literature—the ability to have a much more flexible attitude, to think of things in different ways, not necessarily accepted ways... to recognize the reality of the world, because science
is
the reality of the world and this is almost totally neglected in general fiction—then you’ve got a new set of standards, and those standards would say that current [straight] fiction is totally junk.”
In the view of Del Rey, and many others in the science fiction field, contemporary literature sees the human individual as a tragically flawed creature, unable to understand the world around him and doomed to inevitable failure and death. It is generally pessimistic and anti-heroic, because it is based on the notion that humankind has fallen from grace.
Science fiction, on the other hand, is built on the fundamental optimism of science itself, the belief in the perfectability of the individual human being and of human society. While admitting that technology is not an unmixed blessing, science fiction maintains that humanity cannot exist at all without science and technology. A man without technology would not be a noble savage in some idyllic Eden; he would be a dead naked ape.
In science fiction, the human mind can not only create problems, it can create solutions. Rational thought is our saying grace; we
can
understand the world around us and our place in it. Albert Einstein summed up the attitude of scientists and science fictionists alike when he said, “The ultimate mystery of the universe is its understandability.”
Frank Herbert, author of the best-selling
Dune
novels, says, “I decided quite early on that science fiction was the main stream, that you were too much confined by fiction that was restricted in its settings. Science fiction gives you unlimited settings in which to place your human beings... and it has no restrictions whatsoever, you have enormous elbow room, you can just let your imagination run. It also has the other function of putting you into a context where you can make social comments about things that are quite contemporary, but you do them in a setting where people will accept them, for the sake of the story, until they are caught by the story and they realize, ‘Hey, he’s talking about things that are going on around me all the time!’”
Clearly it is not literary excellence, in the academician’s sense, that has propelled science fiction onto the hardcover best seller lists. Nor do many best sellers of any kind rely on literary excellence for their popularity. It takes two things to make a best seller: the publisher’s decision to invest the effort and money that will allow the book to sell at least forty to fifty thousand copies in hardcover, and the public’s acceptance of the book.
Why is the hardcover book buyer turning to science fiction?
Anthropologist Helen E. Fisher, of the New School for Social Research and co-chairman of the New York Academy of Science’s anthropology department, sees the popularity of science fiction as part of the American public’s new-found interest in science itself.
“All of science is finding an audience,” says Dr. Fisher. Speaking of the boom in science-oriented magazines such as
Omni, Science Digest, Discover
and others that have appeared on the newsstands since 1978, she explained, “Suddenly we have... new magazines in popular science... several TV specials and series such as
Nova...
perhaps science fiction is a good gauge for an entire industry that’s doing well.”
When asked if she thought that science fiction helped readers to understand the possibilities and limitations of modern science, Dr. Fisher replied, “Totally. It’s like lateral thinking: if you can get out of your mind-set long enough to see other possibilities, then perhaps when you get back into the problems you’re trying to solve, you’ll be able to see new solutions.”
The nonfiction best seller lists support Dr. Fisher’s surmise. Books such as
The Soul of a New Machine
and
Megatrends
have surprised their publishers with their strong sales. Earlier, Tom Wolfe’s
The Right Stuff
showed that there was an audience among book buyers who were eager to read about heroes—men who dare to accept challenges such as space flight, and succeed. And Carl Sagan’s
Cosmos
and earlier books about the wonders of science were staples on all the best seller nonfiction lists.
Physicist Heinz R. Pagels, executive director of the New York Academy of Sciences, recalled that the Nobel Laureate physicist I. I. Rabi once scolded a gathering of his colleagues for their lack of interest in writing books about science for the general public. Rabi said that the general public owed more of its sense of excitement about science to science fiction writers than it did to scientists.
But in Dr. Pagels’ view, science fiction often
distracts
the reader from a realistic assessment of the future. While it is filled both with apocalyptic visions and the sense of progress—stemming from science and technology—he finds much of science fiction “shallow and inept,” filled with cardboard characters and shopworn ideas.
“I’ve always felt that science fiction writers are the moralists of our times, in a way,” says Dr. Pagels. “But they simplify the moral situation, a simplification that is so rudimentary it allows the reader to decide which are the good guys and the bad guys, and in fact most of our lives today are far more ambiguous and complex than you’ll find in the science fiction literature or any of the popular literature of today.”
The late Derek de Solla Price, Avalon Professor of the History of Science at Yale University, was one of the few academics to teach science fiction who thoroughly understood the field. A science fiction reader since he was seven, Professor Price was a classmate of Arthur C. Clarke’s at the University of London in the 1930s.
“I was intrigued as to why I liked what was then obviously such poor writing and literary style,” Professor Price said of his early science fiction reading, “and why I found it so important to me.... I think the secret of ‘hard core’ science fiction, what intrigued me... [was] that science fiction models the process of scientific discovery. The successful ‘hard core’ science fiction story enables the reader to experience, albeit vicariously, the thrill of scientific discovery.”
Even though science fiction “contains a lot of demonstrably poor writing,” Professor Price said that science fiction’s strength lies in “the intellectual style of the ideas” that form the backbone of the best science fiction. He saw science fiction as no more “escapist” than
Moby Dick
or any other literary endeavor.
Professor Price said that his class in science fiction was “the best sugar-coated pill that I have for creative talking about science and technology and preparing the [students] for the future.” Most of his students worked harder, he believed, at the science fiction course “in terms of writing and arguing ideas” than for any other class they took.
Professor Price saw no conflict between teaching science fiction and the history of science, “which is what I get paid for teaching,” although much of the Yale faculty still tends to regard science fiction poorly. In his view, science fiction helps to communicate “the great intellectual adventure of science,” the thrill of challenging the universe, the excitement of discovery, of blazing a trail into unknown intellectual territory, whether it is astronauts landing on a distant planet or laboratory researchers producing a cure for cancer.
“People are now realizing that science and technology are the ‘hard core’ of civilization,” said Professor Price. “There is a large and growing part of the population who accept high technology... it is part of their everyday lives.”
The audience for science fiction, then, has been growing. Since the mid-1970s, science fiction titles have accounted for roughly ten percent of all the new fiction published in the U.S. each year. But until recent years science fiction has been a market for paperback books, not hardcover. It was not until Herbert’s third
Dune
book that a “hard core” science fiction novel spent a few weeks on the hardcover best seller lists. Robert A. Heinlein, the acknowledged dean of American science fiction writers, did not crack the hardcover list until his forty-third book,
Friday,
was published in 1982.
To reach the best seller lists, a book must have the unstinting support of its publisher. Judy-Lynn Del Rey, publisher of Del Rey Books and a vice president of its parent Ballantine Books, paid Clarke a $1,000,000 advance for
2010: Odyssey Two,
according to
Locus,
the science fiction newsmagazine.
“There was no doubt in my mind that this would be a big best-seller,” Mrs. Del Rey states. “There is a whole generation who grew up and turned on and remembers the movie
2001: A Space Odyssey...
a whole generation who are waiting to find out [about] HAL, the monolith, and all.”
Among that “whole generation” she includes many book sellers, and particularly many of the buyers for the major national chains of book stores. “They grew up with science fiction,” she says. Buyers who have read science fiction paperbacks and watched science fiction movies since childhood have helped to create today’s market. “Book sellers want to make money,” and the success of science fiction is making the entire industry realize that there are profits to be gained from the prophets.
Hugh O’Neill, the editor at Doubleday who shepherded Asimov’s
Foundation’s Edge
to the best seller lists, agrees that the field’s growth is “generational.” Since the 1950s, Asimov’s prodigious output of books have been bought faithfully by an avid and growing audience of readers.
Foundation’s Edge
is the fourth novel in a series that began in the 1940s. The third novel in the series was published in 1953. For thirty years, readers waited for the next book.
“We knew from the time we signed the contract on this book that we had a very big seller on our hands.... Simply, in part, because of all the people—literally generations of people—who have been waiting all these years for it.”
O’Neill, like others, sees books about science and the future as part of a general trend of public concern about the future, “and in some way that concern makes its way across to fiction, specifically to science fiction.”
Doubleday’s initial faith in
Foundation’s Edge
led them to commit a large budget to advertising the book, and “we got all kinds of ‘word of mouth’ going about the book, literally from the time we signed the contract for it, which got people throughout the industry excited about it.” The sales force saw to it that the books were in the stores in large numbers, and the sale of various subsidiary rights— paperback rights to Del Rey, book club and foreign rights— helped to keep the publicity pot boiling.
The result: a quarter-million hardcover books sold within the first few months of publication.
O’Neill points out that the “mega-movies” such as
Star Wars
and
E.T.
had a powerful impact on readers, particularly younger readers. Novelist Herbert agrees that motion picture and television taught an audience of many millions to understand science fiction’s basic vocabulary of ideas and techniques. A major factor in this process of familiarization has been the TV series
Star Trek.
Although the series was cancelled in 1969 after three seasons of primetime broadcast, it has been rerun daily in almost every major TV market in the nation ever since.
Gene Roddenberry, the creator of
Star Trek,
points out that when he was trying to sell his series to television, network executives “considered science fiction as something a small group of sort-of ‘cuckoo’ people read and talked about.” His own father, Roddenberry says, was so ashamed of his son’s resorting to science fiction that he apologized to his neighbors when the first
Star Trek
episode was aired, in 1966.
Roddenberry sees science fiction as a means of commenting on society despite the restrictions of censorship. He had been writing television scripts for many years, and invented
Star Trek
so that he could “talk about sex, war, religion... and get it by the [network] censors.” He points out that Mark Twain, Jonathan Swift, Moliere and many other writers throughout history have used fantasy and science fiction as a means of satirizing their society without “having their heads chopped off.”
Entertainment, escapism, interest in the future, the ability to make social commentary—are these the only reasons for science fiction’s growing popularity? There may be a deeper reason, one that is rooted in the nature of modern civilization.
“Science fiction has taken the place of the old mythologies,” says Bruno Bettelheim, Distinguished Professor of Education and Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Chicago.
“People used to believe in gods and demigods; now they have invented extraterrestrial intelligences so that they don’t feel so lonely.”