Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume II (72 page)

And yet, I have come to know a great many science-fiction writers of substantial talent who have, variously proportioned, the following characteristics in common: (1) They share a passionate belief in science fiction as a means of literary expression that has particular validity and significance in this age. (2) They are deeply concerned with their own development as writers in the new and untried channels of their medium. (3) They are resolutely dedicated to the proposition that while man may not live by bread alone, bread is nonetheless a good beginning and should be purchasable by arts as well as crafts.

Rather odd commercial writers, these, worrying about esthetic questions
as well as
word rates, closely questioning the integrity of each narrative performance in their field
while
exchanging market gossip and trade talk—odd, and markedly unlike their colleagues, the Shoot-Em-Down Daltons and the Love-Em-Up Desdemonas in the media immediately adjoining on the newsstands and bookstores. Admittedly this phenomenon has occurred briefly in other areas of commercial writing, the detective story, for example. But there was one Dashiell Hammett, and Raymond Chandler was hardly his prophet.

Then again, the occasional sincere and highly capable author working the well-hewn quarries of realistic crime and timeless West comes to feel an unpleasant constrictive sensation about the more imaginative places of his mind. The reverse is true of the science-fiction writer, who has infinity—literally!—at his disposal, an infinity of concept as well as of cosmos from which he must fashion dimensioned narratives that will be significant to creatures of his species, time, and place. In other words, a Dorothy L. Sayers works in a medium whose limitations are decreed by its definition, while an Olaf Stapledon or a C.S. Lewis is limited only by his skills, his sensitivity, and the thematic range of his intellect. Is it any wonder that science fiction has tended to attract those writers who are interested not only in literature but also in the proliferating problems of our time, a time which one day sees strong conventions smashed in their yellow molds and the next is witness to a revival and reunderstanding of myths centuries upon centuries old?

But then there are those, in and out of the field, who will claim that all this talk of Art and Expression-of-the-Age is so much noonday nonsense. They disagree with the dictum that science fiction has to do primarily with people—that whether the people are modern
Homo sapiens
hammering out the first rocket, twenty-fifth-century mutants hammering out the first
xxl-yyrdk
, robots trying to form labor unions, androids fighting to have the manufacturer's label removed from their backsides, or monocotyledonous Arcturians pathetically attempting to smuggle themselves past Terran Immigration disguised as lima beans, it is first and foremost with their problems and view of
themselves
as people that the SF writer has to deal successfully. It is with their characters as individuals or their collective personality as an alien community that he must grapple long before he has a story. There are still those, in other words, who feel that science fiction is essentially the field of the wonderful gimmick, the dramatized gadget, the engineer's doodle made into flesh and bone and narrative action. They crawl, these folks, out of the cave of the past and cry constantly for more science, more
science
in science fiction.

This is the group that plays Scylla to the litterateur's Charybdis. Against them, the average science-fiction writer has been able to develop only the thinnest, most pathetic defense. At least he can reply to the exotics who challenge the artistic substance of his work with the many-lunged rebuttal of
vox populi
; he can dig his fists truculently into his hips and remind sneering estheticians that that part of our heritage which today's taste would call "fine arts" was
popular
art in its own time, that the masses flocked to watch Michelangelo sculpt and crowds of standees sweated to see Euripides' latest; and that while popularity, by itself, is no guarantee of future fame, it would seem historically important enough to dim the immortality aspirations of most present-day "serious fiction," for which—according to its publishers—apathy among the buying, reading public has been growing steadily. But the critic who successfully charges the science-fiction writer with inadequate or—much, much worse—
inaccurate
science has smitten him hip, thigh, and jawbone, and left him a thing of gibbering, barely audible apologies.

There are two reasons for this: first, the fear of science fiction's being labeled an "escape" literature and, second, the heavy quantities of physics and chemistry in the early science-fiction magazines on which most of the modern writers were suckled. As a result of the latter, if it can be proved that a story contains an incorrectly computed orbital velocity or, heaven help us, a presently impossible faster-than-light speed, while the writer's ears are no longer cropped nor his nose slit, there is a general backing away from the story and a widespread tendency to regard it as "spoiled."

But consider.

Years ago, Robert Heinlein, who is an engineer and naval officer, wrote a novel entitled
Beyond This Horizon
, in which he described a future of abundance and plenty so overwhelming that the principal social problem of the day was keeping the bulk of the population amused and occupied. Then Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth, who received their training in advertising and journalism, respectively, gave us
The Space Merchants
, a portrait of a world to come wherein the economic returns have diminished so close to the vanishing point that only the wealthiest and most successful can afford a room of their own. Both books are among the best modern science fiction.

Both Ward Moore's
Bring the Jubilee
and Isaac Asimov's
Pebble in the Sky
turn to history for their inspiration, the one to depict a thoroughly believable 1953 America in which the South had won the Civil War; and the other to show the Earth, a millennium or so hence, in the same position
vis-à-vis
the galactic civilization as Judea of the first century AD to the Roman Empire. And both of these are among the best modern science fiction.

In none of these stories would a scientific error or two be of any consequence; even in the factual matter behind the specific narrative action, an inaccuracy should be considered of no more importance than the boners in Shakespearean historical plays. Of course, obvious errors can be annoying to the reader, and the writer who has any pride at all will check all doubtful items carefully. But the stories mentioned, like all good fiction, are essentially stories of human relationships, individually and communally, and no misstatements of scientific fact could rob them of this quality, nor can dozens of validating footnotes add to their stature.

And as to the charge of "escape" literature, a charge which even so respected a science-fiction personality as Fletcher Pratt found it necessary to refute in an article that appeared in a West Coast literary magazine, well, I think it's about time that we who read and write this new kind of story recognize that here is a jealous argument of very ancient lineage indeed. When, back in the eighteenth century, novels first began to appear—and flourish—in booksellers' windows, they were attacked by writers of heavy sermon-essays as instruments of the devil in that they pulled the book-buying public away from the stuff which they should have been reading for the sake of their immortal souls: heavy sermon-essays. The same thing happened when the tedious miracle play of the Middle Ages began to give way to the Elizabethan drama. In every age, entrenched intellectual privilege has attempted to preserve itself by slighting the newer and more popular forms or by attacking them outright as dangerous. But despite these efforts, the audience for miracle plays and bound volumes of sermons has contracted considerably.

The dictionary definition of
escape
that is pertinent here is "avoidance of reality." On this basis, science fiction, dealing as it does with events that have not yet occurred (or, as in the Ward Moore story, events that by a matter of historical necessity have never occurred), frequently stands accused of leading our youth astray and perverting the population in general by ladling out great quantities of verbal opiate.

But why do people read fiction in the first place—any kind of fiction? To learn more about their own irritating, unfulfilled, and insecure lives? To gather useful moral precepts by means of allegories thinly veneered with narrative? I think not.

The fiction writer is the heir of the Homeric epic poet and the Viking
skald
. His lyre has been replaced by a typewriter, true; and his voice amplified enormously by the printing press—but his role today is fundamentally the same as when the local warriors of that period, having returned from a hard day's skull-cracking and armor-denting, sat down in the great smoke-filled hall and, cutting themselves a slab of burnt boar, belched a couple of times and commanded, "Hey, fellow, you with the funny stink; take your arms off that wench and sing us a song of how brave we were in last week's battle. And it better be plenty interesting if you know what's good for you."

Today, if the writer knows what's good for him, he continues to make it plenty interesting. And realizing that few people can see the place-time segment they occupy as an intriguing phenomenon, he wanders as far afield as he can,
without jeopardizing the sense of reality.

In that last phrase is the secret—and a paradoxical one!—of the escape element in fiction. It has to be believable. Whether the reader is a sex-starved slum kid following the slickly written, highly spiced adventures of a well-to-do, well-preserved roué; or an impotent, rich old man wallowing in the sordid details of a naturalistic novel about young juvenile delinquents; or, for that matter, an intense young girl reliving a handful of tall tales told on a fourteenth-century pilgrimage to Canterbury, all demand a feeling of reality, a feeling that it did happen, that it is happening, that—at the very least—what they are reading
could
happen.

But before that, all have demanded—and found—a literary escape hatch out of the dullness of their own lives. First, the child will climb on your knee and ask to be told a story;
then
, he will demand of you: "Is it true?" The minstrel who dared to sing of last week's battle in terms of the situation as it actually occurred would have been brained with a mead flask. No, he increased the numbers of the enemy ten- or twenty-fold; he verbally blunted the axes and broke the swords of the men to whom he was singing until it seemed to his listeners that they had practically committed suicide by getting involved in the battle in the first place; and then, by alternately extolling their stout hearts and decrying the cowardice of their opponents, he showed how, in a magnificent charge behind their invincible leader, they had carried the day and won eternal fame for themselves and the patch of hillside on which they lived. It is more than possible that when he finished, his enthusiastic audience had already forgotten that the battle had been no more than an attack on a neighboring village, the majority of whose male inhabitants had been known in advance to be away on a fishing expedition. So the minstrel was cheered to the greasy rafters for creating an interesting tale out of what was essentially a rather routine slaughter-and-rape fest—and asked to give an encore.

For an encore, he probably selected his well-known piece about the gods—strange, eternal creatures that could hurl lightning bolts from their bare hands and wrestle with serpents twice as long as the Earth, but who, in the song's opening stanzas, were sitting in
their
great, smoke-filled hall munching roast meat and listening to
their
minstrel sing of
their
wars with the mud giants to the south. And the mortal, dirty humans who heard this encore were completely fascinated and marveled delightedly at the incredible, homey parallels between their lives and the lives of their divinities.

And there, right there, is the area in which science fiction leads the literary side of its life. It is the job of the science-fiction writer to take the utterly fantastic, if need be, and make it seem as real as a copy of today's tabloid newspaper folded to the sports section. To the extent that he succeeds in this he is a good
science-fiction
writer, and to the extent that he fails to make the story believable he is a bad one, be it ever so full of faster-than-light gimmicks and fantastic individuals with triple brains and mechanical genitalia. When H.G. Wells gave us the giant children in
Food of the Gods
, he made it clear at one point that they intended to conquer humanity and take over the planet for themselves; yet he had, by then, made them so completely understandable that the reader realized them much more vividly than he did his next-door neighbors and hoped rather wistfully that they would succeed in replacing him and his comparatively minuscule fellow citizens.

Science fiction, it is true—as opposed to pure fantasy—is not supposed to deal in the impossible or utterly fantastic. In theory it originates in the best available knowledge of the day and thus should concern itself only with those events which can conceivably occur. I have always been impatient of this approach.

Does it really matter that much of Swift's
Gulliver
and most of Rabelais's
Gargantua
are based on what today's science would call fables and legends and impossibilities? Is either work rendered less valid for the child seeking pure entertainment or the adult seeking entertainment plus depth? Yet both Swift and Rabelais were among the best-educated men of their time and based their work as well as they could on such facts (and extensions of these facts) as their age could boast. The facts—the science, so to speak—have been outdated; the fiction will out-endure our civilization.

I tend to limit fantasy, in my own mind, to those stories based primarily on superstitious belief, but I find myself much troubled by this definition. The term "superstitious belief" partakes far too much of a pejorative quality.
Who
is calling
whom
superstitious, I ask, and how much careful investigation has been made of the superstition? On the one hand, you had the spectacle, a few years ago, of extremely able scientists in a science-oriented country like Germany insisting that abruptly they found themselves able to detect real differences between "races," a term which, after all, is no more than a semantic convention; on the other hand, you had Professor Rhine of Duke University looking into the hoary old superstitions of telepathy and telekinesis and coming across results which could be expressed in surprisingly positive mathematical terms. And then a madman like Fredric Brown writes a magnificent, mad yarn entitled
What Mad Universe
, based on some very acceptable modern theoretical physics, and creates a literary matrix where, as someone dazedly pointed out to me, "Anything, absolutely
anything
, could happen and yet be entirely logical!"