Why bother with science fiction?
Michael Harrington
Peter Swain's series for Channel Four on the history of science fiction (The Sci-Fi Files, just finished) took SF too much at its own estimation as the genre which grapples with the dangers and possibilities facing the human race. 'Science fiction is the litera- ture of change,' says the narrator at one point. Yet science fiction changes hardly at all, and very little of it could be called liter- ature. It would be more true to say that SF is a mainly American genre of popular entertainment with a fixed stock of themes and conventions, and some rather fatuous intellectual airs. A typical science fiction writer may think he takes after H. G. Wells or Mary Shelley but he is much more like Zane Grey or Agatha Christie — if he is one of the better ones, that is.
Science fiction was established in Ameri- ca as a marketing genre in 1926 when Hugo Gernsback started the pulp magazine Amazing Stories devoted to tales of science and invention and the future. In the begin- ning he called it `scientifiction'. Before 1926 SF did not really exist as a class or category. It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of this point. H. G. Wells, Jules Verne and Edgar Allen Poe, for example, were not science fiction writers as that expression is now understood. They were of the mainstream and they wrote for the mainstream. What Wells called his scientific romances' had their place in the middle-class reading diet. Gernsback and his successors changed all that. To begin with, Gernsback reprinted Wells and Verne and Poe. Of course there was something funny about a magazine devoted to the future subsisting on reprints from the 19th century, but there was no harm in it. Later he found some new writ- ers and began what became an unending stream of trash. Gernsback was a cheap- skate. He paid the lowest rates in the pulp fiction market and writers often had to sue him to get anything at all. He got what he Paid for. So the familiar mix of ray guns, space battles, monsters, time travellers and hind covers took shape. What Gernsback did was to establish a cultural ghetto in which anyone above the emotional age of about 14 was out of place. "ther magazines came into the ghetto with titles such as Science Wonder Stories and Super Science Stories and Startling Stories. At the height of the magazine boom in the early Fifties there were more than two dozen on the news-stands, including some British efforts such as New Worlds and Nebula, the latter being the one and only Scottish SF magazine, and distinctly above average.
John W. Campbell was for many years the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, the most influential of the magazines, and he is widely credited with inspiring the so- called 'golden age' of science fiction in the 1940s. Certainly he improved the scientific standard of the genre, and brought on some subsequently well known writers like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and the outstanding Robert A. Heinlein, the one generic SF writer with a touch of Wellsian genius. Otherwise Campbell was a crackpot with some nasty ideas. He was a kind of cosmic fascist who believed that the human race should expand into the galaxy, con- quering any other races who happened to be around. He despised democracy, defended slavery and worshipped the Superman. It is not surprising that he was one of the American cheerleaders of Wernher von Braun. At one time he sup- ported L. Ron Hubbard. But he paid better than Gernsback.
If the pulp magazines have mostly fold- ed, their spirit is alive in Hollywood as we can see in this year's blockbusters such as Lost in Space, Armageddon, and Deep Impact and in such other famous hits as Star Wars, Independence Day and Aliens. All these could have been taken from Science Wonder Stories, circa 1935. One can say that the face of the monster in Aliens represents the unchanging face of science fiction. It is a face lacking any trace of orig- inality. All the stuff that is of any dramatic interest can be traced back to Wells or Verne or Mary Shelley. Other sources included Conan Doyle (The Lost World) and R. L. Stevenson (Jekyll and Hyde). Where would Hollywood be without these Victorian authors?
H. G. Wells published The War of the Worlds 100 years ago. An appreciative review in The Spectator compared it with Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year. Wells had his Martian war machines moving with murderous efficiency through Surrey and the comfortable middle-class suburbs. He described these fantastic events with limpid, documentary precision. No one had ever imagined anything like it before. Wells's purpose was to give his English readers a taste of what imperialism was like to those on the wrong side of it. To that end he found highly convenient the popu- lar myth of Mars, the dying world with an old and desperate civilisation ready to seize another one. Three years before Wells had published The Time Machine in which he exhibited a Darwinian pessimism about the ultimate fate of humanity and life of any kind. Again, it was quite stunning in its novelty as well as its narrative force. Between 1895 and 1914 Wells produced all his greatest works of this kind.
Since then, science fiction hacks have worked, reworked and usually vulgarised Wellsian ideas without ever — or only very rarely — adding anything to them. Verne, Shelley and Poe have also been exploited, but Wells more than anyone else. Some serious writers outside genre SF, such as Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, have written novels set in a dystopian future, and apologists for SF have subjected them to posthumous conscription into the team. Few people are deluded.
In science fiction we have a fixed set of plot ideas and themes, as with Westerns and detective stories. We have time travel, space invaders, voyagers to other planets and stars, extended longevity, mad robots, mad computers, the end of the world and a few others. One does not find much sense of development or exploration, and none of it, of course, has much to do with the future. Any real attempt at prophecy, as in the Arthur Clarke/Kubrick film 2001: A Space Odyssey, usually becomes merely self-important and devoid of content. To be fair to Clarke, his early novel Child- hood's End, about future evolution, is grand and visionary and transcends the genre. It is too good to be SF.
The George Pal/Heinlein film Destina- tion Moon (1950) gave a fine picture, for its time, of a first journey into space. Fred Wilcox's film Forbidden Planet (1956) with Walter Pigeon, Anne Francis and Leslie Nielson was very loosely and unpreten- tiously based on The Tempest and it remains a pure delight. One person who must have seen it several times was Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek. It is quite breathtaking how much he borrowed from it. Mr Spock is almost the only Star Trek idea not to be found in Forbidden Planet.
Broadly speaking, however, science fic- tion is dull and repetitive. Its vision of tomorrow is usually the present or the past reflected back as in a fairground mirror. The aliens are merely different versions of ourselves, or otherwise familiar monsters from our collective unconscious. No doubt SF will carry on for a few more years, but surely it is as doomed as the Western. One cannot see a long-term future for science fiction any more than one can foresee a revival of Gunsmoke or Wagon Train.
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