The Number of the Beast
WELL, WHAT IS IT? Fifty experts—as the old Yiddish saying might have it—will produce fifty-one definitions. Still, we all try; here I am in Collier’s Encyclopedia:
“Science fiction is that form of literature which deals with the effects of technological change in an imagined future, an alternative present or a reconceived history.”
Workable and cautious, but it does not evade what could be called the Arrowsmith problem—Sinclair Lewis’s novel, that is, which all of us science-fictioneers would instinctively agree is not of the genre, would probably fall into it under the terms of this definition. Certainly, technological (medical) change is an important aspect of this novel as are the effects of science upon the protagonist and his marriage. Clearly, my definition would also exclude some of the whimsical short stories of Robert Sheckley, whose bemused characters face the absurdities of a slightly disorienting metaphysics in the recognizable present: there is nothing technological about these stories, much less concern with technological change, and yet they appeared, most of them, in Horace Gold’s Galaxy and fit indistinguishably into the format of that magazine. On the basis of this kind of work Sheckley was recognized in his early career as one of the most promising of the new writers. My definition would also exclude Randall Garrett’s Darcy series, whose novels and novelette depict an alternate present in which magic has assumed the role of science and modern science never found its way into being discovered. Change, to be sure, but not technological change: here is genre science fiction that deals with technological absence.
Shrug, consider the bar bill, try Theodore Sturgeon’s nineteen-forties dictum: a good science fiction story is one whose events would not have occurred without its scientific content. This is promising—among other things, it manages to summarize, for the decade, the essence of John W. Campbell’s editorial vision in Astounding . . . but Anne McCaffrey’s dragons could not fly in Sturgeon’s science fiction and Sheckley’s work, right through his great novel Dimension of Miracles, would not fit. Nor would the visions of J. G. Ballard and his descendants; if The Terminal Beach or The Drowned World are about anything, they are about a world in which science has failed and gone away . . . and yet the works of Ballard are considered central to any understanding of post-1960s science fiction.
James Tiptree’s famous The Women Men Don’t See has no science in it either, nor does Robert Silverberg’s 1972 novel Dying Inside, generally regarded as one of the pivotal works of the decade. (It concerns a telepath, who has lived concealing his gift, slowly losing his powers in early middle age in contemporary New York.) Then, too, Sturgeon’s definition would admit not only Arrowsmith but many novels about science—Morton Thompson’s Not As a Stranger, Peter George’s Red Alert, George P. Elliott’s David Knudsen. Any definition so inclusive would obviously attenuate a category which, however ill-defined, is very clearly understood by its readers, writers, editors and critics to be a distinct and limited (if not really limiting) form of literature.
Perhaps one throws up one’s hands and dives back to the fifties to Damon Knight’s “Science fiction is whatever we point to when we say ‘this is science fiction.’ ” Lots of truth in that; whatever trouble we may have with definitions, there is a consensual feeling among those of us who pretend to understand the form: McCaffrey’s Dragonflight belongs in the genre and Arrowsmith does not. Check The Science Fiction Encyclopedia and the bibliographies. Still, if Knight’s path of implied least resistance is the way to go, I would prefer Frederik Pohl’s useful, provocative, and contained: “Science fiction is a way of thinking about things.”
Science fiction, then, is a methodology and an approach. Pohl is surely on the trail of something important here, and if one could define what that way of thinking about things is, one perhaps would come as close to a working definition of science fiction as will be needed to understand almost all of it. Let me have a try at this, noting my indebtedness to A. J. Budrys, who has prowled this corridor some, most notably in his introduction to John Varley’s collection The Persistence of Vision.
Science fiction, at the center, holds that the encroachment of technological or social change will make the future different and that it will feel different to those within it. In a technologically altered culture, people will regard themselves and their lives in ways that we cannot apprehend. That is the base of the science fiction vision, but the more important part comes as corollary: the effects of a changed technology upon us will be more profound than change brought about by psychological or social pressure. What technological alteration, the gleaming or putrid knife of the future, is going to do will cut far deeper than the effects of adultery, divorce, clinical depression, rap groups, consciousness-raising, encounter sessions or even the workings of that famous old law firm of Sack, Pillage, Loot & Burn. It will be these changes—those imposed extrinsically by force—which really matter; this is what the science fiction writer is saying, and in their inevitability and power they trivialize the close psychological interactions in which most of us transact our lives (or at least would like to).
Lasting, significant change, science fiction says, is uncontrollable and coming in uncontrollably; regardless of what we think or how we feel, we have lost control of our lives. When the aliens debark from their craft to deal with the colonization assignment, the saved and the unsaved, adulterous and chaste, psychoanalyzed and decompensated will be caught in their terrible tracer beams and absorb the common fate. When the last layer of protective ozone is burned out by International Terror & Trade, discussion leaders, the born again and the members of the American Psychological Association will all go together.
This is what was being said, implicitly, in all of the crazy and convoluted stories of the thirties and forties behind the funny covers; more sedately, and occasionally in hardcover, it is being said today. Because this vision is inimical to the middle class (which has been taught that increased self-realization is increased control), because it tends to trivialize if not actually mock the vision of the modern novel and drama (the shaping of experience is its explanation), genre science fiction has been in trouble in America from the outset. It has been perceived almost from the beginning as the enemy of the culture. Science fiction has had a hearing from those who control access to the broad reading audience at only a few points in its history (I suggest 1946, 1957, and 1972) and in every case has been swiftly repudiated. The successful media science fiction of the seventies (most, though not all of it, debased adventure stories with crude science-fictional props) has forced literary science fiction into juxtaposition with the culture. The increase in readership funneled in by Star Trek and Star Wars has indicated that publishers will not permit it this time to go away . . . but science fiction is hardly, at the outset of the decade of the eighties, much more of a reputable and critically accepted genre than it was thirty years ago.
It is my assumption that it never will be. Science fiction is too threatening.
At the center, science fiction is a dangerous literature. It represents the beast born in the era of enlightenment to snarl at the heart of all intellectual and technological advance. As the technology becomes more sophisticated and intrusive, as our lives in the postindustrial twentieth century came to be dominated in every way by technology, science fiction became more cunning in its template. We know not what we do; the engines can eat us up—this is what science fiction has been saying (among many other things) for a long time now. It may be preaching only to the converted, but the objective truth, the inner beast, will not go away and so neither—despite the hostility of the culture, the ineptitude of many of its practitioners, the loathing of most of its editors, the corruption of most of its readers—neither will science fiction. It, if no given writer, will persist; will run, with the engines, the full disastrous course.
Some notes on how it ran and how it runs follow, at length and in humility.
1980: New Jersey