The Value Of Science Fiction

I just started watching “Star Trek: Picard” (the jury is still out on it) and there was a joke: Picard finds his friend reading Asimov’s Complete Robot stories and says “I never cared for science fiction; I just didn’t get it.” Ha ha, funny. (It bothered me!)

I have heard this a lot. I’ve never understood the comment. What is there not to get? It’s not our world. It’s a different world. A world of the future, or an alternate past. A world in which possibilities are realized that aren’t in ours. Do lots of people really lack the imagination to understand this? (Positing that Picard is such a person makes no sense at all.)

It has always bothered me that science fiction has never quite been accepted as “literature” or “art.” A great deal has been written about this (some by Asimov!) The science fiction works most likely to be taught or read in school – 1984, Brave New World, A Handmaid’s Tale, Vonnegut – represent a subset of science fiction. These works use sf as a metaphor, or other literary device, to express their views about politics or culture. They aren’t really speculative. (By the way, in case you didn’t already know, readers of sf don’t use the term “sci fi!” I believe this was one of the many examples of wordplay introduced by Forrest J. Ackerman, best known for the long-running magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland.) So, what is “real” sf? (“Genre” science fiction.)

Science fiction got its start as we all know in the 19th century with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells (maybe Mary Shelley), but “modern” sf began in 1923 with the beginning of the pulp magazine Weird Tales (mostly fantasy; it includes the wonderful Interstellar Patrol stories by Edmond Hamilton and the story that introduced the term “blaster” – “When The Green Star Waned” by Nictzin Dyalhis.) Or, it REALLY began in 1926 when Hugo Gernsback (for whom the Hugo award is named) started publishing Amazing Stories. This wonderful magazine published “The Metal Man” in 1928 – the first published story by my favorite sf writer, Jack Williamson. (Gernsback had already been publishing sf stories in his nonfiction radio mags.)

But really really real modern sf started in 1938 when John Wood Campbell, the Editor of Editors, took over at Astounding Science Fiction (later renamed Analog) and made it the first magazine to publish really serious sf. Stories that went beyond adventure and girls in space bikinis and BEMs (Bug-Eyed Monsters.) Campbell inspired and nurtured such amazing talent as Robert Heinlein (the first author to build a carefully-constructed Future History linking his stories), Isaac Asimov (whose Three Laws of Robotics were Campbell’s idea) and Theodore Sturgeon (who, in a different magazine, published “A World Well Lost” – a remarkably sensitive portrayal of homosexual love – in the 1950s!) The Campbell Era is usually referred to as “the Golden Age.”

As usual, I have strayed from my topic. What is the actual value of sf?

First answer: it doesn’t need one! Stories exist to entertain and amuse and explore and make life worth living by TELLING life. Sf is no different. Heinlein said “Butterflies, like little girls, need no excuse.” The same can be said for sf.

Second answer (not a good one) : predicting the future. Science fiction isn’t meant to forecast what will happen – and it has done a remarkably poor job of it. Oh, there are exceptions. Heinlein’s story “Waldo” introduced those glove-in-a-box things for touching radioactive stuff – they are called waldoes to this day. Jack Williamson introduced the term genetic engineering in his novel Dragon’s Island. (And also terraforming.) Asimov introduced the term robotics. But, in general, little of what has happened in our world happened just as sf said it would. Verne launched us to the Moon with a giant gun. Heinlein had us land on the Moon due to a private investor, not the government. Asimov’s robots use positrons (antimatter electrons) – he admitted he just used the term because essentially it sounded cool. Hundreds of sf stories and movies suggested the “visiphone” – a visual telephone locked in place on a desk or wall like old rotary phones; none that I know of predicted the cell phone.

But science fiction isn’t really about predicting the future. If it needs a value beyond beguiling us, I think it’s this: science fiction makes us aware that things needn’t be the way they are. That the world isn’t just what it looks like in our prosaic, limited view. That there are wonders, and possibilities.

Most sf readers are true progressives. We see the world today as a sketch; a possible reality surrounded by hundreds of unseen possible realities. Sf readers opposed racism from the beginning (its history in that regard is far from perfect, but that’s another story.) Why? Because we see intelligence and spirit and dignity in minds, however they are constituted. For the same reason, the gender fluidity that has so many people irrationally scared today is no problem for an sf reader. We’ve been to planets with three sexes, or no sexes, or fallen in love with characters who change their gender.

We’re futurists, by and large. Anyone who has read Foundation knows that the future, like the past, is determined by statistics. Who can take seriously the idea that the world will be saved if only “our” party is in office, who has read Foundation? We’ve also walked amid the rubble of shattered worlds and know that ours is precious and needs protecting. Sf readers knew the dread power and wonderful potential of the energy locked in the atom long before the rest of the world.

In “A World Well Lost,” the people of earth call two aliens “Loverbirds” because of their routine displays of affection for each other – not realizing that both are male.

On an even deeper level, science fiction, even bad science fiction, makes us think about the inner nature of things, not just their outer appearances. What is awareness? What is meaning? What might the future hold? How can we find truly new solutions to age-old problems?

How sad to consider these questions and say “I just don’t get it.”