On the Nature of Science Fiction: A Dialogue of Writer and Editor

[J-Sun]

I'm going to quote (with "he said"s elided and speakers' parts given anonymously at first) from an essay I thought was really excellent and interesting overall and especially, from one angle, in the following parts in which a writer goes to an editor's office ultimately to discuss SF.

Writer: "You've got to understand the human element here, it's not machinery, it's people, people being consumed at the heart of these machines, onrushing technology, the loss of individuality, the loss of control, these are the issues that are going to matter in science fiction for the next fifty years. It's got to explore the question of victimization."
Editor: "I'm not interested in victims. I'm interested in heroes. I have to be; science fiction is a problem-solving medium, man is a curious animal who wants to know how things work and given enough time can find out."
Writer: "But not everyone is a hero. Not everyone can solve problems--"
Editor: "These people aren't the stuff of science fiction. If science fiction doesn't deal with success or the road to success, then it isn't science fiction at all."
Editor, again: "Mainstream literature is about failure, a literature of defeat. Science fiction is challenge and discovery. We're going to land on the moon in a month and it was science fiction which made all of that possible." (His face was alight.) "Isn't it wonderful? Thank God I'm going to live to see it."
Writer: "The moon landing isn't science fiction. It comes from technological advance--"
Editor: "There's going to be a moon landing because of science fiction. There's no argument."
(Writer, in narrative: Probably there wasn't. Most of the engineers and scientists on Apollo had credited their early interest in science to the reading of science fiction, which meant, for almost all of them, Astounding).)

As is obvious by now, the Editor is John W. Campbell. The writer is Barry N. Malzberg. While the point of my posting is to see what comments there are on the points above, it wouldn't be right not to quote more of the essay (found in The Engines of the Night, expanded as Breakfast in the Ruins), the whole of which is interestingly nuanced. It continues with Malzberg being in an agitated youthful fury with this inflexible old guy and leaving, but running into Campbell again while trying to exit the building.

[Campbell] regarded me for awhile. I looked back at him, shook my head, sighed, felt myself shaking as a sound of despair oinked out. A twinkle came into the Campbell eye as he surveyed it all.

"Don't worry about it, son," he said judiciously. And kindly after a little pause. "I just like to shake 'em up."

 

[Toby Frost]

My first thought is that Campbell, whilst putting it crudely, has a point where he says that mainstream literature is a literature of defeat, but I don't agree that SF is a literature of triumph, at least not in the crude Dirk Danger To The Rescue way.

In fact, if I had to mention the characteristics of a literary novel, I would stress the inability of the characters to actually change their circumstances. They are at best placid consumers, and at worst victims, conscripts and refugees. In literary writing, dynamic characters seem to be evil and observed at second hand (by evil I mean symptomatic of whatever the writer wants to condemn). I suspect this comes from the fact that literary novels are written by people leading very comfortable, urbanised lives.

But to go the other way risks creating crude, propagandistic writing. It's probably true that the great problems of the world can't be solved tidily, by a few heroes in a single novel. Often the solutions put forward are unrealistic. "The world will be much better once mankind has cast off religion!" says the old-fashioned SF writer, but the real, difficult question is "How will mankind cast off religion, when so many people want it?". That said, a simple throwing up of hands in despair seems pointless to me, and a symptom of the very comfortable lives we lead.

 

[Ihe]

Editor: "I'm not interested in victims. I'm interested in heroes. I have to be; science fiction is a problem-solving medium, man is a curious animal who wants to know how things work and given enough time can find out."
Writer: "But not everyone is a hero. Not everyone can solve problems--"
Editor: "These people aren't the stuff of science fiction. If science fiction doesn't deal with success or the road to success, then it isn't science fiction at all."

It depends. In Childhood's End, for example, there is no hero, and there is no real conflict a hero could solve or even understand. The characters only react to the gradual discoveries. Rikki and Jan try something, but they don't get very far in terms of "knowing", not by their own merits at least. When they finally "know", it isn't because of their efforts, but because the Overlords allowed it. In the end no one "wins" and the end was already under way before the story started. The characters basically just sat around and waited for it all to be over.

In this book, not one character could do anything to change anything, and yet, it is a very nice story. That's the beauty of SF: settings and ideas alone can carry it pretty far.

 

[farntfar]

It wasn’t so much necessary for a science fiction hero to solve things, the idea was the the solution would come from the science itself.
New types of energy would allow us all to live interesting and largely labour free lives, while robots, with the 3 laws to control them, did all the work and occasionally gave us puzzles to think about.
Space travel would give us new lands to tame and plenty of space to expand in.
And when we filled up the galaxy and civilisation collapsed psychohistorians would bring it all back in double quick time (if still a thousand years or whatever.)

Science fiction was generally optimistic and where the science went wrong, there WOULD be a hero to get us back on the good path.
The editor was right. It was a time when science fiction was pointing the way forward, with hope and enthusiasm, inventing satellites and mobile telephones, perfect societies, and world (if not galactic) peace.

Today we are plagued by realism and grimdarkness.
We have to look to the past for the promise of a bright future which they promised us in what is now the past. (Usually around 1999 )
It’s a future I look back on with nostalgia.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

It wasn’t so much necessary for a science fiction hero to solve things, the idea was the the solution would come from the science itself.

I think only one narrow aspect of optimistic SF.

 

[farntfar]

Ah! But that's how I see myself too, Ray: narrow and optimistic.

(But ask my wife and she'll tell you I'm just a fat pessimist.)

 

[Ihe]

Today we are plagued by realism and grimdarkness.
We have to look to the past for the promise of a bright future which they promised us in what is now the past.

The SF "darkness" of today, as you put it, could just be the readers-then-writers-now lashing out at the false hopes they were fed in more optimistic times. We were promised hoverboards. I want my hoverboard N-O-W!

 

[psikeyhackr]

The SF "darkness" of today, as you put it, could just be the readers-then-writers-now lashing out at the false hopes they were fed in more optimistic times. We were promised hoverboards. I want my hoverboard N-O-W!

ROFL

I think SF incorporates both sides of the above arguments. There isn't any one kind of science fiction.

But hoverboards are just a science fiction trope. A good author has to do something with the trope.

"90% of everything is crud." - Sturgeons Law

Lots of stuff that qualifies as science fiction is really entertaining drivel that isn't worth discussing. I like most of the Flinx series by Alan Dean Foster, but I admit that it is merely entertainment and there is nothing serious to discuss about it. So we need categories of science fiction and discuss SF that fits within the same group.

psik

 

[J-Sun]

My first thought is that Campbell, whilst putting it crudely, has a point where he says that mainstream literature is a literature of defeat, but I don't agree that SF is a literature of triumph, at least not in the crude Dirk Danger To The Rescue way.

But to go the other way risks creating crude, propagandistic writing. It's probably true that the great problems of the world can't be solved tidily, by a few heroes in a single novel.

It wasn’t so much necessary for a science fiction hero to solve things, the idea was the the solution would come from the science itself.

I think farntfar is basically saying what I'd say - I agree that a literature of "triumph" would be going too far and not everything can be solved by Dirk Danger but I do think the distinction from a literature of failure is a good one. If it was all success, all the time - especially if it was an easy similar sort of success - that would be an overly limited literature but I think the mentality that there can be a solution, that reason can help, that struggling for something better is good and leads to something better - maybe not 100%, maybe not today, maybe not quite in the expected way, but something somehow better - is a key characteristic of SF and not a very important one in most other subsets of fiction (or even of the world at large, it sometimes seems).

It depends. In Childhood's End, for example, there is no hero, and there is no real conflict a hero could solve or even understand.

<obi-wan voice>It's been a long time since I read it - a long time</obi-wan voice> but I do recall it as being one of my favorites. My recollection was that the main character had a great deal of persistence and diplomacy and did come to an enlightenment. While it may have been "allowed" by the more powerful species, it was still there. The key point - not to spoil it too much - was that the bogeyman under the bed turned out to be something rationally explicable and the human race could change to realize this. Socially, as a species, we were depicted as rising to a level where we could understand, or would be able to. Evolution, progess. I think these are definitely parts of that book.

I think SF incorporates both sides of the above arguments. There isn't any one kind of science fiction.

Yeah, I do agree with that. Campbell was saying this in the 60s, I believe or somewhere in there, when it couldn't be said to be literally true the way it basically was in the 40s. But I think he was arguing for an "ideal" SF. And I like the occasional downer or horror or inexplicable sort of SF (although much of that can be described as "not SF" insofar as I think the rationalism and realism is sort of required to be "true" SF vs. "speculative fiction") so I'm glad there is some diversity to it. My personal preference would be to have the dominant type be pretty optimistic (in a loose sense) though.

(Re: the speculative fiction - PKD is a good example of someone who's like one of these ancient Greek pre-Socratic "philosphers" vs. a scientist. He's obviously interested in "the nature of things" and he has a remarkable knack for seeing futures that include tech that is self-perpetuating and not entirely under conscious control and so on but he's obviously not interested in hard physics as such and he's just more intuitively or accidentally "correct" insofar as he is. Leucippus and Democritus didn't know diddly about "atoms" in any testable, falsifiable, machine-aided sense, but their intuitive metaphors turned out to be remarkably similar to the story we use today. But they're no "scientists", I don't think. And Dick understood some very high-tech things but in the same speculative way. Dick ultimately didn't believe in reason and "victory" but he's obviously near to SF and is included in it and yet is one of the most mainstream-acceptable authors like that other rose-glassed optimist, Vonnegut. Maybe I'm digressing here. Can't tell. I think I'm talking about "big tent speculative fiction is diverse" but "strict SF - while diverse in its own way - does have certain requirements".)

 

[tinkerdan]

I have no idea what Campbell was up to with all of that.

I do know that prior to that time science fiction contained a lot of cautionary tales.
For example:
To serve man by Damon Knight
and
The Unpleasant Profession of Johnathan Hoag by Robert Heinlein
just for starters.