Five Types of Science Fiction
By TOM PULVERTAFT This article arrived at the Spectator office accompanied by. the following letter: Dear Sir, —I enclose an article for consideration for the Spectator, also the usual s.a.e. I would like to add that, despite my age of fourteen, 1 would like this article considered in the ordinary way and not for the " schools competition" announced in your last number. I ask this because, in the unlikely event of it being accepted, I would rather buy a typewriter than get more books.—Yours truly, T. B. Pulvertaft. Cobham House, Stowe, Nr. Buckingham.
IAM going to write about modern science fiction because at the age of fourteen I have read more of it than anything " else, ever since I read a story in a pre-war magazine about Stick Men.
H. G. Wells and Jules Verne did not really write science fiction in the accepted sense of the word nowadays. It was • startedt by Hugo Gernsbeck in Modern Electrics, and was made popular by John W. Campbell, Jnr., author of The Thing, and tiow editor of Authentic Science Fiction.
The main theme of science fiction is travel in space-ships to other planets. There are many attempts to escape from this theme; the most common is the " atom war " plot which is sponsored by the continual fear Americans have of one. Another is " robots in control of civilisation," and yet another is " time travel " and the fourth dimension.
There is a generally accepted " code " in science fiction. Mars is always the scene of a once mighty civilisation either fallen in ruin and death or on the point of doing so. This is a basis much strummed-on for a story about " A Mars Warning," in which a rocket ship from Earth lands on Mars, finds that the Martians have destroyed themselves and vola- tilised their .seas by atomic warfare, and then returns to warn Earth. This was the theme of Rocket Ship XM, one of the pioneer science fiction films. Venus is described as being in a very primeval state of affairs, and is often the basis of an " After-the-end-of-Earth " type of story, but is not the basis of operations so much as Mars. Mercury is rarely used in science fiction, as it would be difficult for the writer to populate a planet where such conditions of heat exist, but I occasionally come across some very clever ideas. Jupiter is very rarely populated, but A. E. van Vogt has written two very clever stories about it. The " red spot " of Jupiter is usually described as being highly radio-active and a space-ship graveyard. Thpre are various grades of story. The first, such as the Dan Dare stories, are a sort of modern-western-cum-fairy story. There is always a hero and a villain, and the hero invariably triumphs. They are bursting with bug-eyed monsters and atomisers.
A second type is often " privately printed for the author," / and is just cranky. It is written by people who don't know anything about science and try to write frightfully intelligently. It always half describes everything, and the story is a mix-up in which one never knows what it is about or what has happened.
Then there are the better types of story. First, the sort in which people's feelings are described—the sensations of a rocket pilot as he is about to land on the moon, the reaction of the world to the information that the sun will become a nova in a week, the man who lives in his own story. It is a dream world of imagination, where people- and things dis- appear at the author's will. Then there is the type written by such men as Arthur C. Clarke, who really believe that what they write is what will happen when man does—if he does— conquer space. And lastly, there is real science fiction, that uses, a clever twist of true scientific fact. This type is written by such authors as Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov and van Vogt.
On roaring away from the confines of the solar system, the usual method of getting where you want to is by " hyper- space," some mysterious dimension which is rarely described in any detail and which is usually a somewhat unhealthy place to be in. When you have escaped from the meshes of hyper- space, and are landed on whichever star system you have chosen, almost anything may happen. You may land (by some mysterious twist of the space-time continuum) back .where you started. The planet may turn out to be a living thing, where no code can be applied. But whatever happens, never can an Earthman invade another planet in the role of a super- intelligence—it is always vice versa. There are various " drives " used to get from one planet to another : rocket travel, anti-gravity, " shot from gun," and " back rays." I have only come across the last once, but it is one of the cleverest, if the most improbable. It consists of a bottle of rays of light (which you fix in the front of your space ship) that are somewhat anxious to get back to their sun; this they do at the speed of light when the stopper is removed.
The mentality that reads science fiction books is easily deter- mined bywonsidering the advertisements in them, and the type of shop which sells them. The " lurid " type assume that the reader is the little man who wants to be big, but. has an inferiority complex—science fiction makes him feel mentally big, and the advertisements physically so.
I have given a description of the worst and the best types of science fiction story, but to my mind the real difference comes in the sensation that each story gives you. In the better stories you are given a feeling of desolation, of emptiness— a strange ruined terrain and freezing wastes of outer space. I cpnot myself understand how a boy of fourteen can in this modem age be more attracted_ by a picttge of Buffalo Bill shooting his head off, or an antiquated aeroplane in flames, than by that of an enormous space-cruiser flaming across the i void with a gaping hole in its side and bug-eyed monsters in flying saucers all around it. I myself would go through fire and water to get one of these.
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