realistic expectation of achieving a victory over cancer, at that moment the equality will dissolve, and the possible and workable will be separated from the impossible and unworkable. It is only when the existence of a rational science permits us to rule the phenomena in question that we can differentiate between wishful thinking and reality. When there is no source for such knowledge, all hypotheses, myths, and dreams are equal; but when such knowledge begins to accumulate, it is not interchangeable with anything else, because it involves not just isolated phenomena but the whole structure of reality. When you can only dream of space travel, it makes no difference what you use as technique: sailing ships, balloons, flying carpets or flying saucers. But when space travel becomes fact, you can no longer choose what pleases you rather than real methods.
The emergence of such necessities and restrictions often goes unnoticed in science fiction. If scientific facts are not simplified to the point where they lose all validity, they are put into worlds categorically, ontologically different from the real world. Since science fiction portrays the future or the extraterrestrial, the worlds of science fiction necessarily deviate from the real world, and the ways in which they deviate are the core and meaning of the science-fiction creation. But what we usually find is not what may happen tomorrow but the forever impossible, not the real but the fairy-tale-like. The difference between the real world and the fantastic world arises stochastically, gradually, step by step. It is the same kind of process as that which turns a head full of hair into a bald head: if you lose a hundred, even a thousand hairs, you will not be bald; but when does balding begin — with the loss of 10,000 hairs or 10,950?
Since there are no humans that typify the total ideal average, the paradox of the balding head exists also in realistic fiction, but there at least we have a guide, an apparatus in our head that enables us to separate the likely from the unlikely. We lose this guide when reading portrayals of the future or of galactic empires. Science fiction profits from this paralysis of the reader’s critical apparatus, because when it simplifies physical, psychological, social, economic, or anthropological occurrences, the falsifications thus produced are not immediately and unmistakably recognized as such. During the reading one feels instead a general disturbance; one is dissatisfied; but because one doesn’t know how it should have been done, one is often unable to formulate a clear and pointed criticism.
If science fiction is something more than just fairy-tale fiction, it has the right to neglect the fairy-tale world and its rules. It is also not realism, and therefore has the right to neglect the methods of realistic description. Its genological indefiniteness facilitates its existence, since it is supposedly not subject to the whole range of the criteria by which literary works are normally judged. It is not allegorical; but then it says that allegory is not its task: science fiction and Kafka are two quite different fields of creation. It is not realistic; but then, it is not a part of realistic literature. The future? How often have science-fiction authors disclaimed any intention of making predictions! Finally, it is called the Myth of the Twenty-first Century. But the ontological character of myth is antiempirical, and though a technological civilization may have its myths, it cannot itself embody a myth. For myth is an interpretation, a
A quite general symptom of the sickness in science fiction can be found by comparing the spirit in ordinary literary circles to that in science-fiction circles. In the literature of the contemporary scene there is today uncertainty, distrust of all traditional narrative techniques, dissatisfaction with newly created work, general unrest that finds expression in ever new attempts and experiments; in science fiction, on the other hand, there is general satisfaction, contentedness, pride; and the results of such comparisons must give us some food for thought.
I believe that the existence and continuation of the great and radical changes effected in all fields of life by technological progress will lead science fiction into a crisis, which is perhaps already beginning. It becomes more and more apparent that the narrative structures of science fiction deviate more and more from all real processes, having been used again and again since they were first introduced and having thus become frozen, fossilized paradigms. Science fiction involves the art of putting hypothetical premises into the very complicated stream of sociopsychological occurrences. Although this art once had its master in H. G. Wells, it has been forgotten and is now lost. But it can be learned again.
The quarrel between the orthodox and heterodox parts of the science-fiction fraternity is regrettably sterile, and it is to be feared that it will remain so, since the readers that could in principle be gained for a new, better, more complex science fiction could be won only from the ranks of the readers of mainstream literature, not from the ranks of the fans. I do not believe that it would be possible to read this hypothetical, nonexistent, and phenomenally good science fiction if you had not first read all the best and most complex works of world literature with joy (that is, without having been forced to read them). The revolutionary improvement of science fiction is therefore always endangered by the desertion of large masses of readers. And if neither authors nor readers wish such an event, the likelihood of a positive change in the field during the coming years must be considered as very small, as, indeed, almost zero. It would then be a phenomenon of the kind called in futurology “the changing of a complex trend,” and such changes do not occur unless there are powerful factors arising out of the environment rather than out of the will and determination of a few individuals.
Postscript. Even the best science-fiction novels tend to show, in the development of the plot, variations in credibility greater than those to be found even in mediocre novels of other kinds. Although events impossible from an
SCIENCE FICTION: A HOPELESS CASE — WITH EXCEPTIONS
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On reading
For example: in science fiction fandom rumor has it that science fiction is improving every year. If so, why does the average production, the lion’s share of new productions, remain so bad?
Or: we do not lack definitions of this genre. However, we would look in vain for an explanation for the absence of a theoretical, generalizing critique of the genre, and a reason why the weak beginnings of such criticism can be found only in “fanzines,” amateur magazines of very low circulation and small influence (if any at all) on the authors and publishers.
Furthermore: Blish and Knight agree that science-fiction readers cannot distinguish between a high-quality novel and a mediocre one. If they are right, how are readers selected to belong to the public who reads this literary genre, which intends to portray the (fantastically magnified) outstanding achievements of mankind?
The important question is: even if science fiction was born in the gutter, and lived on trash for years on end, why can’t it get rid of the trash for good?
My essay tries to answer these questions. Therefore, it is a “Prolegomenon to Science-Fiction Ecology” — or an “Introduction to a Socioculturally Isolated Realm of Creative Work” — or a “Practical Guide for Survival in the Lower Realm of Literature.” These pompous titles will be justified below. The books by Blish and Knight were of great assistance to me in writing, but I did not regard them as only collections of critiques, but more as ethnological
