Note: In the last ten years, I’ve really worked to broaden my literary horizons to include more non-male and non-white authors, and I am (and will continue to be) conscious of the importance of that for this project of mine. However, a lot of my early reading (and let’s be honest, just most of sci fi history) is very white and male, and what follows is a discussion almost entirely about European and American white men. Rather than try to shoehorn something into this that doesn’t make sense for the piece, I’m going to let this be what it is and just do better with other things.
Enjoy!
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“Language is an organ of perception, not merely a means of communication.” —Julian Jaynes
Why do we love stories? Why do some resonate as true in ways that are difficult to explain intellectually?
One possible answer has to do with the single great human advantage (evolutionarily speaking) over other forms of life: Our ability to reason abstractly about possible futures.
Hunting in a pack or trapping food requires understanding a story about the lives and habits of animals. Agriculture needs a farmer who believes a story about seeds becoming food only after months of careful effort. Creating shelters and clothing starts with a story about the bringing together of multiple materials in non-obvious ways, with many hours of effort invested before the story pays off.
Going to war is a story about serving something greater than one’s self. Getting married is a story told between two people, each taking the other on faith. Having children is the largest investment of self most people will ever make, in the service of a story that will be told mostly after they are dead.
The germ theory of disease is a story about particles nobody has ever seen. Fossil fuels are a story about harnessing the basest, most muscular aspects of nature. A mission to Mars is a story about a limitless human future.
Democracy is a story about accepting defeat with dignity and conducting victory with compromise. (This is not a topical comment.) America is a story about a frontier that does not end. Humanity itself is not a story—that’s a bridge too far—but nearly every aspect of human society and behavior has this characteristic of storyfication: Imagined futures sequenced in abstract thought before they enter reality.
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Science Fiction itself is linked in some pretty obvious ways to the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution, and to the cultural and political innovations that accompanied those periods.
Newton publishes the “Principia Mathematica” in 1686, and Locke publishes “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding” just three years later, which together provide a radically new intellectual tookit. Forty-one years later, in 1726—about the time it took for ideas to go around the world in those days—Jonathan Swift publishes “Gulliver’s Travels”.
Now “Gulliver’s Travels” isn’t necessarily thought of as sci fi, but it should be; there are certainly both utopias and dystopias involved, for example. In fact, the theatrical imagination of that book—from its serial structure to its biting social commentary— provide one of science fiction’s most enduring literary archetypes.
There is not space in these lines to trace the full history of this literary and cultural intertwining, but it is strange how often great advances in science fiction dance around the course of human events:
The French Revolution inspires the early feminist writings of Mary Wollstonecraft (who I must confess I have not read), who also gave birth to Mary Shelley, author of “Frankenstein” (who I have read, and whose work inspired me to write my first story ever, a “Frankenstein” ripoff with me as the hapless Dr. Frankenstein and my cat as the unspeakable monster.)
The late 19th Century sees the advent of the oldest truly modern technologies, including Electricity and the Telephone. H.G. Wells publishes “The Time Machine” in 1895, inventing the concept of Time Travel and introducing to mass consciousness the idea of a civilizational future that is self-consciously and radically different than its past because of technology
The Russian Revolution takes place in 1917, and just four years later, Yevgeny Zamyatin publishes “We”, the first modern Dystopian novel and the direct antecedent of George Orwell’s “1984”.
This list could be longer. There could be a book length treatment of this subject. There was little money in science fiction, and so those who wrote it were making their way in the world, responding to its events and subject to its pressures. And the world was changing rapidly.
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In “The Good Soldier”, Ford Madox Ford writes:
We are all so afraid, we are all so alone, we all so need from the outside the assurance of our own worthiness to exist.
That book is written in 1915, shortly before the outbreak of WWI, yet in it, Ford seems to prefigure (as genius writers so often do) a psychological break in both culture and literature that the upcoming war will reveal: The Inward Turn.
Books like “Gulliver’s Travels” are primarily outward-facing; Lemuel Gulliver visits many strange places, and those places are the subject of the story. The protagonist of “The Time Machine” is not given a name, and is simply referred to as “Time Traveller”. There are interesting exceptions too complex to trace here, but science fiction before WWI is largely outward-facing (Other types of literature develop on different tracks. Shakespeare had already written “Hamlet”, for example, which is very internal).
After the first War to End All Wars, everything changes. An entire generation traumatized by war (they were/are literally called “The Lost Generation”) returns or sees their men return from unspeakable horror, and it changes something in the human psyche. The ideals of chivalric honor that had sustained us culturally until the enlightenment started chipping away at them were truly, finally exhausted. The dry land those ideals protected inside us had been swallowed by a dark ocean of doubt, and we weren’t sure what was left.
And it is no coincidence that the popularization of the term “science fiction”—and the institutions that formalized it as a genre—develop into this vacuum, and in doing so leap forward into an art that addresses our humanity as much as the world in which we find ourselves:
Hugo Gernsback (for whom the Hugo Award, science fiction’s highest honor, is named) founds “Amazing Stories” in 1926, and starts publishing stories by Poe and Verne and Wells.
In 1932, Aldous Huxley publishes “Brave New World”, an unforgettably dystopian story in which a fascistic government controls reproduction and uses mood-altering drugs to suppress its subjects’ unhappiness. These internally-focused acts of oppression are a sci fi trope now, but when Huxley wrote them they were an innovation, indeed.
In 1939, Marvel Comics is founded, signaling the official arrival of a burgeoning new era in comics, one featuring stories that take place in our normal world, but star people who are themselves extraordinary—what is a mutant but a human with something undeniably special and purposeful about their life?
The World Wars, the postwar order that emerged, and America’s continued military adventurism (so to speak) have also given us tremendous sci-fi gifts in the more literal sense. It was Tolkien’s experiences in WWI that directly inspired “The Lord of the Rings”, for just one famous of many examples.
But the point is that every strand of 20th-century history is like this—science fiction is there at every turn, both creating and being created by the whirlwind cultural and scientific change, not around or above or observing the culture but IN the culture. What now reads as a pat few paragraphs in an email newsletter in fact encompassed millions of words written by geniuses in the service of exploring a human interiority that suddenly seemed urgent.
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What seems urgent today? Or, to ask the exact same question another way, what is science fiction becoming? What stories about the future are we just learning to tell ourselves? If the much-too-simple answer for the 20th century is “Individual Interiority and Metaphysics”, what is our answer today?
One thing that seems clear to me is that the 20th Century answer no longer functions. “Irony” was an interesting subject when Pynchon and Delillo were writing about it, but seems simple and tired today. “What does human life mean?” seems also somehow inadequate and exhausted as a question for literature. It is both too simple and irreducibly complex, both obvious and unknowable, too basic a query and yet also somehow irrelevant.
I do not have a pat or easy answer to the question of what either life or science fiction ought to strive towards today. Then again, I don’t imagine the greats did in their time, either. The striving does not reveal the answer, but rather creates it.
We live in a world now where everything is a story. Every corner of life and mind and spirit is filled with stories, stories to sell and stories to express and stories to persuade. This is an effect of the turn towards the individual—cultures that function as one unit need fewer, shared stories to unite them, individuals need more, disparate stories to differentiate them.
We moved from Humankind relating to the world (to God, if you like) to Humankind relating to itself, and now we must move to some third thing. The Internet has something to do with it, as will A.I. when it arrives. Climate Change has something to do with it, as does the new space race.
On a deeper level, though, what I find below all those things is a rediscovery. Consider Irony. We went from a pre-ironic civilization (when we were Chivalrous and Christian) to discovering Irony, to being post-Ironic, and now we’re all so sick of Irony that simply having a sincere conversation outside of a crisis has become a phenomenon worth remarking upon.
And yet recapturing sincerity cannot be achieved at the cost of turning back the clock. This is both impossible (The Internet is not going away) and undesirable (slavery, misogyny, etc). What we require is a new Sincerity. And a new Community, and a new Harmony with Nature, a new God, and all the rest of it.
The question “Can all those old things be replaced with individuality as a source of meaning?” has been answered—they cannot—and we are now in the phase of recoiling from acceptance of that answer. What will follow remains an open question.
The terrifying and joyous discovery of a new future and way of living, consonant with our past without recreating it, is the highest, most urgent purpose of science fiction today.
END
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