Science Fiction – Page 51 – Auxiliary Memory

Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

Childhood’s End holds up extremely well in the 55 years since the book first appeared in 1953. I just finished listening to the new Audible Frontiers audio book edition from Audible.com, and I was surprised in several ways. First, I was surprised that a science fiction book from 1950s worked so well as a whole. I’ve been re-reading a number of classic SF novels from the 1950s this year and many of them are fix-up novels, made by gluing short stories together, stories that were first published in the pulp magazines, and the results feel episodic. The original idea of Childhood’s End started out as a short story, “Guardian Angel” from a 1950 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries, but it works well as a novel even though it’s a series of encounters with different characters over time that could be also criticized as episodic. It cohered for me perfectly.

Second, I was surprised how so much of the story had stuck with me since my last reading in 1985, showing how memorable the story is. Third, I was surprised by how many classic SF ideas Clarke included in his novel. Fourth, I was surprised by how many social issues Clarke dealt with that would explode later in the 1960s. Finally, I was very surprised by Clarke’s belief in the limits of mankind. Unlike Heinlein, Clarke suggests that man isn’t the toughest alien around, and is unfit to be the alpha creature of the galaxy.

Childhood’s End has to be somewhat inspired by the 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still. In the film, Klaatu, a traveler in a flying saucer from a distant alien civilization comes to help the Earth. In the book, Karellen, the leader and his crew from an advance alien civilization come to help Earth in flying saucers. Of course, Arthur C. Clarke takes the idea much further than the “Farewell to the Master” story by Harry Bates which inspired the film. And strangely enough both stories have deep religious undertones, with Klaatu acting out the Christ role, and Karellen and his crew acting out the role of angels, messengers of God, even if they look like Lucifer.

Klaatu came to Earth, preached about our evil ways and told the people of our planet to get their act together or face retribution from a higher power. Karellen came to Earth and stayed, gently guiding the transformation of human society with miracle powers. Both the film and book preached that human society is severely flawed, that the human race is a danger to itself, that our governments can’t help and that individuals are full of weak behaviors (the seven deadly sins). Clarke is very philosophical about the future of mankind, and if you haven’t read the book yet, stop reading here because I’m going to give everything away.

To carry the religious metaphor further, both stories suggest that aliens from the stars will bring salvation to mankind. Arthur C. Clarke goes even further, and suggests that mankind must be reborn before we can travel to the heavens because our current minds and bodies are too limited to see the wonders of transcendental society of higher beings.

Clarke explores what will happen to people when the aliens solve all of our big problems. We fall back onto finding meaning in art, music, sports, sex and self education, but that isn’t enough. Karellen won’t allow people to travel beyond the Moon, and Clarke says without the final frontier our lives will become meaningless. In other words, life on Earth isn’t the real show, and it’s only until we evolve into a higher being that finally we will really understand our true purpose. Isn’t that same exact message religion gives to us poor mortals. Is this message built into our DNA? Is it some kind of ancestral memory?

When I was young, back in the 1950s when I first saw the film The Day the Earth Stood Still, and the 1960s when I first read Childhood’s End, I believed in what Clarke was saying. Science fiction was my substitute for religion. I’ve been a religious skeptic since I was 12, but it’s taken me much longer to become skeptical of the preaching of science fiction. Childhood’s End is a wonderful story, but so is the Bible. I don’t believe either. Whoever we are as a species, and as individuals of that species, is all we’ll ever be. Nobody will save us but ourselves, and if we are condemned to oblivion, then we only have ourselves to blame.

We might not be alone in this universe, but for now, we stand alone. Clarke really must have believed in higher psychic powers and that mankind would evolve into a super-being because the same message was replayed in his 1960s story, 2001: A Space Odyssey. ESP was a major theme in 1950s science fiction. Science fiction writers obviously believed, or wanted to believe, than humans would one day evolve their own miracle powers and become god-like ourselves. This is one hell of a wish fulfilling fantasy! Of course this same fantasy appears in both religion and regular fantasy novels. The same year 2001 came out, shows like I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched were hits, and those power fantasies are still just as popular in various forms of entertainment today.

In the year 2008 I think we need to psychoanalyze Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke and his fans, rather than evaluate the novel as science fiction. It is a metaphysical fantasy that needs to be interpreted. Do people really believe that we can’t solve our own problems and need God or alien overlords to save us? Will life on Earth always be meaningless without a purpose delivered from a higher being? Is frail mortal life so worthless? Do people really believe that homo superior will be telepathic? Or that any adaptation of nature to our evolution will include ESP powers?

Arthur C. Clarke was a scientist, so could he have been savvy enough to have written Childhood’s End for the masses, well knowing Marx’s dictate that religion is the opium of the masses and fashioned his SF novel to addict science fiction readers in the same way and sell more books?

This is why back then, I was a disciple of Robert A. Heinlein. He was “a better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” kind of guy, believing mankind would build it’s own spaceships and the Klaatus and Karellens of the sky better get the fuck out of our way, for we are a jealous people.

JWH 12/30/8

Science Fiction in My Lifetime

When I wrote this title I intended it be about science fictional predictions coming true in my lifetime, and especially what might still happen before I die. Then I realized it could also imply I was writing about the great science fictional books that came out in my lifetime, leaving me room to speculate on what far-out ideas could appear in the near future. Over at Visions of Paradise, Bob Sabella chronicles seven waves of science fiction since H. G. Wells, and wonders when a new wave will hit. I’ve lived through three of waves Bob describes, the 1950s transition from pulp mags to book SF, the 1960s New Wave and the most recent Cyberpunk movement, but I think we all live in a reality partly shaped by Herbert and Jules and their literary descendants.

Right now the science fiction scene is dormant. Most of the new books in the science fiction section at your favorite bookstore are fantasy books, or adventures set in classical science fictional worlds, like Baroque art encouraged by the Catholic Church. No radically new science fiction concepts have been created since the 1990s with the concepts of mind uploading and the singularity. What I’d like to do is recap the big SF ideas of the 20th century and then try to predict where science fiction might go in the 21st century.

How many grand ideas imagined in science fiction stories will become real in our lifetimes? Humans landing on the Moon is the shining example for science fiction stories going back hundreds of years. Before that, submarines and airplanes were predicted long before they became a reality. Some concepts are harder to judge. Many science fiction stories were written about overpopulation, terrorism and running out of natural resources after the year 2000, and some of those dreary predictions are coming true, just read John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar.

How likely will the exciting, positive concepts of science fiction, bear fruit in our lifetimes? Some people are anxiously awaiting flying cars and rocket backpacks. Other fans are expecting alien visitors, while some folk can’t wait to go where no man has gone before themselves. How many science fiction readers hope life-extension will keep them reading science fiction until the 22nd or 23rd centuries? I know, I’d love my own Jeeves the robot.

I keep writing about the science of science fiction over and over again, but what really are the odds of these fantastic things happening before I die? I had a revelation in the shower this morning. Science fiction’s popularity has skyrocketed in the last 35 years not because of the validity of it’s ideas, but because the story telling has gotten dramatically better and thus appeals to a wider audience.

I thought my wife and lady friends were getting more and more into the ideas of science fiction when it became obvious they loved SF movies because of the hot actors and thrilling story telling. Most people have zero expectation from science fiction, it’s just good fun. They don’t want to homestead Mars, or expect the galactic overloads to come save Earth from ourselves.

I’ve been reading a number of classic science fiction novels from the 1950s this year and I’ve been amazed at the ideas, but disappointed with story telling aspects – it’s no wonder that science fiction had limited appeal back then. I keep reading for the ideas and predictions, judging the science of science fiction, but the real success of science fiction in the last few decades has been in telling better stories.

I’m happy for that, but I want to focus on the science fiction ideas. What are the likely odds for many of science fiction’s most popular visions coming true? Let’s use the year 2050 as a cutoff. If I could live to be 100, it would be 2051, so that’s close enough to call 2050 the end of my lifetime. The odds I list are just my best-guess hunches because there is no way for anyone to really calculate them. As far as I know, there are no bookies taking bets on these future endeavors.

Colonizing the Moon – 1 in 10

It’s been over 40 years since man has walked on the Moon, so this almost seemed a dead dream until China, India and Japan took a interest in the Moon and started up their own space programs. This is very positive, except that the world-wide recession might slow things down. Still the Moon is the logical base to start a beachhead on conquering space. Colonizing the Moon is the cornerstone of all our science fictional dreams about space travel.

I think Robert A. Heinlein owned the Moon fictionally, with classics like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Have Space Suit-Will Travel, The Rolling Stones, The Menace From Earth, The Green Hills of Earth, Rocket Ship Galileo and The Cat Who Walks Through Walls. John Varley and Rudy Rucker are modern writers who have been homesteading the Moon in recent years, giving it a twist with mind uploading, cloning and mad robots.

Some of these books are among my all-time favorite books, but I’ve got to admit, none of them have approach colonizing the Moon in any serious way. For such an old subject this leaves lots of room for future science fiction writers to work.

Colonizing Mars – 1 in 100

Growing up in the 1960s I really expected to see manned missions to Mars in my lifetime. It just seemed such an obvious step after the Apollo program Men like Werner von Braun and Robert Zubrin made it sound so doable. Well, it’s not. If you do the research you’ll find just how tough a job going to Mars truly is, not impossible, but well on the edge of the limits of what humans can do now and the near future.

And I think it’s silly to think about Mars until we can conquer to Moon. If we can send men and women to the Moon for three years, and prove we have the skills to keep them alive, then it will be time to talk about Mars. However, colonizing Mars is the next step after the Moon, and for many, it’s the main goal. On the other hand, I believe the road to the stars is paved with airless chunks of rock and we have a convenient one at hand to practice our space survival skills.

Many scientists have said it was amazing luck that some of the twelve men who made it to the Moon weren’t killed. Most of their luck came from making short journeys lasting less than 2 weeks. Moon dust would have ruined their suits, landers and machinery if they would have tried to stay much longer. Is it possible to build self-contained habitats that will last three years, the length of a Mars mission?

Science fiction has always made the near impossible sound easy. Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars have set the standard for Mars colony science fiction. His work is far more realistic than most SF writers, but still way too full of fantasy. Science fiction writers might be visionaries, but they have trouble seeing the details. Speculation on how to build a self-sustaining colony on Mars is wide-open. Terraforming is a great idea, but explaining how to build a computer on Mars without help from Earth would be magical.

Manned Missions Beyond Mars – 1 in 100,000

Theoretically, it’s well within our means technologically to colonize the Moon and Mars within the next 25-40 years. We could make some amazing breakthroughs in technology that would allow us to go further, but we need to get busy, and I think public opinion will be against it. To go beyond Mars will require developing nuclear rocket technology on the Moon or out in space. Mars is about the maximum range for manned missions using chemical rockets, and that mission would be far easier if we could perfect nuclear rocketry before we try. The people of the Earth will not let scientists develop nuclear rockets anywhere near our home world. The Moon is a fine place to work with radioactive elements. The real future of manned space travel will depend on the industrialization of the Moon.

Asteroid miners have been a staple of SF since the days of John W. Campbell took over Astounding, ignoring the fact that it’s much cheaper to find the same resources locally on Earth, the Moon or Mars. Unless space ships can be built on the Moon, mining asteroids is silly. Any colony on the Moon will want organic elements, and especially hydrogen, nitrogen and carbon. Moonies will probably want to mine comets.

Manned Interstellar Flight – 1 in 1,000,000,000,000

I guess it’s possible we could discover some magical space drive system that will let us zoom off to the stars before 2050, but it’s highly unlikely. Personally, I think the only way for humans will travel to the stars will be to build giant generational spaceships that can operate for thousands of years, but even that idea is mostly fantasy. We might have the will and tech to build interstellar spaceships in a few centuries, but for now the idea is almost pure fantasy. Star Wars like galactic civilizations are absolute pure fantasy. Even our very best hard science fiction novels are really just thrilling stories, and are rather pointless for our needs of predicting the near future. Hard core space opera gives us grand hopes, but the chances of colonizing worlds around other stars is about equal to finding biological immortality.

Intelligent Humanoid Robots – 1 in 5

Asimov, Simak and Williamson ruled the robot stories, but robot stories aren’t as popular today. Robots and robotics seem to be moving full-steam ahead though, with scientists like Ray Kurzweil predicting an artificial intelligence singularity in the near future. Hobby robotics is probably much more popular than hobby rocketry ever was. Anybody with some programming ambition can get into robotics. And after Spirit and Opportunity’s success on Mars, I can even picture an ever evolving series of robots going where no man can afford to go. That’s a goddamn shame, but that’s the way it is. I hope NASA at least starts building in real-time high definition video feeds from it’s metal Martian explorers so us biological creatures back on Earth can feel like we’re walking on Mars vicariously.

Many people believe artificial intelligence is impossible. I figure if nature can accidentally stumble upon the recipe, than scientists should be able to figure it out sooner or later. The question is how long. Robots are cheap enough compared to manned space exploration, so we should see a continual increase in robotic intelligence on space missions, and that might evolve into intelligent robots. The military is also pushing robots to do more. The more we ask of robots the more intelligence they acquire.

What’s surprising is I don’t think science fiction has ever done any really good realistic robot stories, either they are people-like and cute, or they are like Gort, all-powerful and scary. Commander Data was among the best, but not very realistic. Before 2050 I think we’ll see some pretty amazing robots, and just maybe science fiction will predict what they really will be like.

Visitors From Space – 1 in 1,000,000,000,000

I’d really love to be proven wrong here. We could use an alien like Klaatu or Karellen to knock some sense into us, but I don’t think that will happen. What are the odds of intelligent life developing anywhere in the universe? What are the odds of intelligent life developing twice and near enough to each other to visit? It must be tremendous. I’m not saying it’s impossible. Let’s say it will be nice surprise.

For story purposes, the concept of visitors from space is pretty tired, although it will remain popular. The idea has endless possibilities and offers so much fun and thrills. Essentially, it’s a fantasy concept equal to stories about angels and vampires.

SETI Contact – 1 in 1,000,000,000

Detecting an intelligent signal from space is probably far more likely than having aliens over for coffee. Detecting intelligent alien life in the universe would have profound philosophical implications to our society, so it’s strange that this topic is so seldom tackled by science fiction. Often it’s a setup for physical contact or acquiring super-science, like Contact by Carl Sagan. We need more books like His Master’s Voice by Stanislaw Lem, The Hercules Text by Jack McDevitt and The Listeners by James Gunn.

I figured if we were real lucky, and I mean astronomically numbered lucky, SETI would detect a signal from space before I passed on. That’s the most exciting thing I can practically hope for, but I doubt it will happen. I think if we build some really gigantic space telescopes we might visually detect artificial elements in the atmospheres of extra-solar planets.

Cloning Humans – 1 in 100

I’ve always considered cloning boring. It’s making a human without sex, but you end up with another human, big whoop. Most science fiction is about 20 year-old cloned bodies grown in a month, which is silly. Also, the idea of copying the brain patterns of a natural human onto a clone’s brain is also silly.

Uploading Minds – 1 in 1,000,000,000,000

Mind uploading is a growing topic. It’s all part of the Human 2.0 theorizing, and has been slowly emerging in science fiction for decades.

[You can see the complete documentary here, or go to YouTube and watch all the parts.]

Whether you copy my brain to a computer simulation, clone, or android mind, I’m still going to die in the process. What’s the point? This is no route to immortality. I’d much rather design an AI mind than copy my own. Being alive is about experiencing the now, and that’s not copying memories. However, seeking to reach Human 2.0 status is where much of the science fictional action will be during the 21st century.

The Cutting Edge

If you really want to explore the frontier of what’s happening scientifically, right on the border of where science meets science fiction, be sure and read the Edge.org. Top thinkers from around the world examine the most far out ideas on the planet. Most of the articles are very down to Earth, but some could be used to springboard into science fiction stories.

The Future of Science Fiction

From what I can detect, I’m thinking the appeal of science fiction is even waning, at least for the moment. I examined many months of book reviews at SFSite.com and only a handful could be considered new breakthrough science fiction. If the editors there removed all the obvious fantasy titles their site would shrink dramatically. Many of the titles that most SF fans would classify as science fiction, are really adventure stories set in old comfortable science fiction worlds with few writers trying to imagine anything new conceptually. Like I said above, science fiction writers have gotten much better at telling stories.

Right now I think of all the predictions dreamed up by science fiction writers, I think robots, AI and Human 2.0 explorations are the ones most likely to come somewhat truer in my lifetime. SETI contact with alien signals from space is going to be like finding one snowflake in all the snow storms of Earth each winter. It could happen, it might take a thousand years, or a million years, or it could be next year.

I don’t think we’ll ever seen visitors from the stars, and I doubt mankind will ever be an alien invader. Science fiction has always been deceptive about interstellar rocketships, implying they’d be something like a new model airliner from Boeing. That thinking is on the order of asking how fast does Santa have to travel to visit every house on Earth.

Until men and women colonize the Moon and Mars and we learn how to build with materials found in outer space and create a new economy that has no dependency on Earth, we won’t be able to think about traveling further than Mars.

I think the dramatic new ideas that come out of science fiction will be about living on Earth. The potential of combining the Internet, artificial intelligence, robots, advanced learning techniques, simulated computer worlds, and so on will generate new possibilities for humans. Science fiction writers need to think very hard about what’s going on in this world. Sooner or later a new H. G. Wells, Jules Verne or Robert A. Heinlein will show up and surprise us.

JWH 12/28/8

A Case of Conscience by James Blish

A Case of Conscience by James Blish is the 1959 Hugo award winning novel that was recently produced as an unabridged audio book by Audible Frontiers, the science fiction and fantasy publishing imprint from Audible.com. The book is wonderfully narrated by Jay Snyder. When I became addicted to audio books back in 2002 I constantly searched for classic science fiction books on audio. There weren’t many available. For about a year now Audible Frontiers has been cranking out far more SF audio books than I have time to listen to. Even today, when I go through the audio sections at book stores, I seldom see many science fiction titles for sale.

You can buy A Case of Conscience as an audio book through Amazon, via a link back to Audible, or from the iTunes Store, for $17-19 dollars, but the cheapest way to get it is to join Audible.com. To get those bargain prices requires committing to a 1 or 2 book-a-month plan. I buy an annual 24-pack deal and get books for $9.56 each. To get some idea of why you might want to join Audible.com, look at Hugo Winners on Audible and Heinlein on Audio. The catch is you have to be tech savvy enough to listen to audio books on your iPod or MP3 digital player. Audible.com does allow you to burn CDs, but that takes some tech know-how too.

Now, do I recommend you go buy A Case of Conscience? I enjoyed the book, but I’ve got to warn modern readers about 1950s science fiction. A Case of Conscience is a fix-up novel, combining the 1953 novella set on the distant planet Lithia, with newer material, with the same characters back on Earth continuing the story. Many classic science fiction novels, like Foundation by Isaac Asimov, and City by Clifford Simak, were fix-up novels. They feel like reading short stories rather than novels. The second warning I have to give is about the nature of classic SF, especially books from the 1950s. They are idea driven, rather than plot driven. My guess is young people today who love action driven science fiction might grumble about these older cerebral stories.

James Blish does some excellent world-building with Lithia. It’s a planet poor in heavy metals like iron, but the intelligent beings there have learned alternate routes to scientific discoveries and have engineered a technologically advance society. The Lithians never discovered magnetism and electricity, but have created technology based on static electricity, and pushed the limits of biology further than we have. Blish did a great job creating a fascinating planet and culture, but that’s only the setup for the real idea that’s central to the book.

A Case of Conscience combines science fiction and religion to make for a philosophical story. A team of four scientists are sent to evaluate Lithia, but the biologist, Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, is a member of the Society of Jesus, a Jesuit, and he makes a startling claim about Lithia and the Lithians. The Lithians have no concept of God, afterlife, sin, or even things like fiction or lies. They are logical. Their culture is an atheist’s utopia. I love what Blish does with this, and I won’t spoil any of his story. I’m very appreciative to Steve Feldberg and Audible.com for bringing this book to audio. I tried to read A Case of Conscience twice before in my life and didn’t get into it either time. This wonderful audio reading made it completely accessible to me. Blish’s style was too dry for me to read, but lovely to listen to. I don’t know why.

The real reason I want to recommend this book is because we should think about contact with alien culture and religion. What if SETI makes first contact and our new friends have never even imagined the concept of God? That is possible. What will they do when we tell them about our spiritual theories? What if they have theories about the origin of the universe that we never thought about?

Most fundamentalists cannot handle even minor variations in their own religion, much less deal with ecumenical diversity of world religions. Their narrowly focused personally held concepts would probably be blown away by ancient ideas in the many dead religions in our history, so how would they react to a true alien spirituality? So what happens if the nightly news programs are bombarded with religious ideas from light years away? What if these alien missionaries have existed for millions of years and know a lot more about everything? Will we form cargo cults in reaction to these superior wisdom, like primitive people in the 20th century when encountering modern westerners for the first time?

In the next ten thousand years we will probably never meet any aliens face to face, but there’s a good chance of finally having some success with SETI, and initiate interstellar texting sessions with dialog response times in the decades, centuries or even millennia. Even if we detected an alien signal today, it could take so long to respond and develop a way to converse that it could be centuries before we get down to chatting about vague philosophical concepts. The novelty of the alien existence will wear off before we know what they think.

Today, because of science fiction, I believe most of the world assumes that there are intelligent life forms elsewhere in the universe. We also assume we’ll share the same mathematics, physics and chemistry, but will probably diverge with biology. But what kind of overlap will be possible for philosophy, religion, art and music? Music has a relationship with mathematics and physics, so it is possible there could be strange alien music we could hear and think of as melody. Art connects with vision which also connects with physics. The idea of creating beautiful objects that nature didn’t could be common.

Alien religion and philosophy are harder to imagine. James Blish essential creates an alien world and then forces a John Milton like Catholic interpretation upon it. Mary Doria Russell explores the same ground in her magnificent novel, The Sparrow. Is it possible to evaluate an alien religion without seeing it through our own glasses made from our religion? Can we even see a religion without being religious? Do dolphins and whales have religion? They are the closest thing we have to alien intelligence and we know so little about them.

Is worship the defining characteristic of religion? Is it possible to have religion without gods, either seen or unseen? If all aliens have the same image in their homes, do we consider that a sign of religion? Would aliens exploring our world think of religion when they count all the photos of Brittany Spears?

We often talk as if God is the same deity whether the Earthy believer is Christian, Muslim or Jew. Would our alien friends see that? Would they assume our God is their God? For most of this planet’s history, our believers believed their God made this world, but they never knew it was just one of billions upon billions of worlds. Does each world get their own creator? Or is their one God that knows about every sparrow on this world, also know about every sparrow like creature on every other world?

In the end, we have to judge James Blish on how he handles his religious problem in A Case of Conscience. Does the ending imply that Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez was right in his judgement of Lithia? If that is true, then we have to believe that Blish does believe, at least for this story, that it’s possible that our God is supreme, that our Earth is the center of reality, and that all the rest of the universe is part of a lesson to teach us about God’s word. Isn’t it rather strange that God would build such a big school-house just for us?

What would a universal religion be like that covered a universe fourteen billion light years across and was home to billions of intelligent life-forms and their planets. Knowing as much astronomy as I do I find it hard not to be an atheist, but I could be wrong. I believe religion is only practical at the tribal level, but again I could be wrong. But if there is one God and his territory covers all of the cosmos, then I can’t help believe that mathematics, physics, chemistry and all the other sciences is the true Bible of this God.

JWH 12/21/8

Defining Science Fiction

This is my 185^th post for my WordPress blog and my 51^st that will be filed in the science fiction category. I started out as a late middle-aged guy wanting to reinvent himself by pursuing a new hobby and ended up doing way too much naval gazing. I need to break out of that loop, wrap up what I’ve learned, and move forward. Because I have spent so much time on the subject of science fiction, I’ve decided the way to find closure is by being my own Freud and define the term “science fiction.”

Hundreds of people have tried to define the phrase science fiction. It’s as slippery a definition to pin down as pornography. Among the billions of people that ride planet Earth through space, there are probably several million that would describe themselves as science fiction fans. That implies that science fiction is an art form, like there are fans of jazz or impressionistic art. But if you were given two jazz songs to listen to, one by Benny Goodman, and one by Miles Davis, could you define jazz? To say that Galaxy Quest and Red Mars are both science fiction is true, but one is a parody of science fiction and the other is hard-core science fiction. It’s like looking at all the breeds of dogs and then coming up with a definition that describes them all but doesn’t include cats and other animals.

After pursuing hundreds of hours of meditation on the subject, I want to define science fiction as a belief system rather than an art form, and when we label something science fiction we’re doing the same thing as when people call something Christian music or a religious novel. Religion is an approach to defining reality. Science fiction is an approach to defining reality. So too are philosophy, science and journalism.

If you watch the Christmas classics The Bishop’s Wife, It’s A Wonderful Life or A Christmas Carol, you are seeing a religious definition of reality put into fictional form. Viewers are asked to believe that angels exist as part of our reality, and that the spirit of Christmas is as fundamental as gravity.

For the viewers who choose to watch Star Wars or Star Trek movies instead, they see a much different reality defined. Both belief systems suggest aspects of our reality that science has never seen. And even though the word science is part of the phrase science fiction, and the implication is science fiction uses science as part of its belief system, science fiction is no more scientific than creationism or intelligent design philosophy.

Personally I have always wanted “real science” fiction to exist, and some writers try, but such works are rare and they are not the works that people point to when they use the phrase science fiction. It is possible to sidestep the philosophical issues and just lump religious fiction, science fiction and call it all fantasy fiction. I love movies about angels, but I don’t believe they exist. I also love movies about faster-than-light travel, time travel, and magic like in Harry Potter stories, but none of those things exist in reality either.

It’s easy to use the fantasy-for-fun escape clause, except that too many of our homo sapiens billions do believe in those fantasy concepts. That’s why I define science fiction as a belief system like religion.

What we need to define now is fiction. Is fiction no more than shared fantasies that have been made into an art form? Films and television shows have become the most popular art form of all time, with some stories embraced by millions of fans. Fiction becomes an escape from reality, and the different forms of fiction appeal to variations in belief systems. We admire what we believe, or want to believe.

I chose not to believe in a religious system when I was a child probably because I had already been imprinted with science fictional beliefs before religion had a chance to imprint on me. By age four or five, Topper, Invaders from Mars, The Day the Earth Stood Still, Superman, Target Earth and a host of other science fictional and fantastic stories got to me before Bible stories could. Instead of believing in God, gods, angels, devils, and miracles, I took up beliefs in space ships, aliens, robots, time travel, invisibility, telepathy, and what not. Is it any wonder that the fundamentalist religions of the world want to protect their children from popular culture?

If I wanted to, I could write a book about how science fiction affected people in the same way a social scientist could write a book about how religion affected people. If I had the time, that might be a fun project. Part of the fun would be to show how various science fictional ideas were introduce into the culture through the evolution of science fiction. The roots of Star Wars could be taken back to E. E. “Doc” Smith and Edmund Hamilton. Tracking the seeds planted by John W. Campbell Jr. or Robert A. Heinlein would take years.

The difference between the belief systems religion and science fiction is we can track down who introduced a belief concept into reality with science fiction, but we have no idea who invented the concept of angels or gods, but rest assured, humans in the distant past thought them all up.

I now feel like I know where I got my science fictional beliefs and how. What do I do now? If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. I’ve gotten to this realization many times before in my life. It’s like a heroin addict finally seeing that injected bliss is false bliss – it doesn’t mean he’ll stop shooting up. Religious teachers often use the metaphor of sleep to describe the condition that exists before enlightenment. There is both religious Buddhism and atheistic Buddhism, and the same must be true for science fiction.

As long as readers can stay awake and remember the concept of “real science” fiction, ordinary science fiction falls into the black hole called opium for the masses. My constant struggle to define science fiction is merely my struggle to stay awake and fight my addiction to science fictional beliefs. The only way to save fiction from escapism is to define true art as that which exposes belief systems.

The trouble is most citizens of our reality prefer escapism to reality. Harry Potter books will always be more popular than the stories of James Joyce or Edith Wharton. This makes the role of the book critic to define a novel as being realistic or escapist, and if the work is fantasy, rate the quality of the opium. Harry Potter books would be primo smoke. A book like The Life of Pi by Yann Martel is a fictionalized version of this essay. It uses fantasy to trick the reader into seeing reality, and then admits that most readers will want to go back to sleep.

I know I will go back to sleep now, and return to my science fiction beliefs to while away the hours while I wait for death. I should reject all fantasy fiction, but I know the power of my addiction, and if I reread this essay from time to time, I’ll even remind myself of where it comes from, and wake myself up for a moment or two. I know I will spend the afternoon watching WALL-E with my wife and friends, and this evening watch the twelfth and final episode of True Blood with another friend. Tomorrow night I’ll watch The Big Bang Theory and Heroes. If I could understand why I prefer entertaining fiction to seeking a deeper understanding of reality I would really find enlightenment.

JWH 11/23/8

The Children of Science Fiction

I am a child of science fiction and the 1960s. On rare occasions while growing up I’d run into others of my kind, but it didn’t happen often. It’s not like today where most kids love science fiction, even the popular pretty girls. I was a member of many pop culture groups, including the first generation raised on the boob tube that became the hordes that worshipped long hair, rock music and the counter culture. It seems a few us also read Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke.

As I type this Jefferson Airplane’s “The Ballad of You and Me and Pooneil” is blasting through the speakers. The long version. If I had a Venn diagram that collected people born from 1950-1955 and grew up interested in science fiction, astronomy and San Francisco acid rock music of the 1960s, how many of those people would have overlapping interest in all three subjects? How many people out there grew up influence by L. Frank Baum, Robert A. Heinlein, Mark Twain and Jack Kerouac?

I know who my blood relatives are, but now I’m wondering, who are my literary relatives? With the advent of the Internet I’m running across my kind more and more. This first started happening back in the 1980s with online bulletin board systems. Just recently I stumbled on a couple of online watering holes, where my SF siblings hang out talking about the classic books of science fiction. These are two Yahoogroup discussion lists:

There are about two hundred science fiction fans signed up between the two groups, with each group reading a classic SF title a month and discussing it, and a subset of those participating are a number of fans my age that started reading SF the same time I did in the early 1960s. We all discuss those old SF books with various levels of passion for the genre, but it seems like science fiction did a number on us that made us different from the normal kids growing up around us, giving us our own unique subculture.

I feel the kids who grew up with Star Wars are much different from my generation that grew up with Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke. Sure we might have evolved some when we started reading Delany, Zelazny and Dick, and the New Wave writers, but we’re strangely tied to that generation of Ace Doubles and Ballantine Books and finding our reading thrills on twirling wired racks. And I wonder if the kids who grow up now with the many forms of science fiction today have any sense of kinship at all. I know about First Fandom, and later generations of SF fans from the 1940s and 1950s that preceded my generation, because dozens of them became the science fiction writers my generation loved.

From my science fiction cousins, born 1950-1955, many also went on to write science fiction too, like Catherine Asaro, Kage Baker, Iain M. Banks, Steven Barnes, Greg Bear, David Brin, Pat Cadigan, Orson Scott Card, Brenda Clough, Julie Czerneda, Karen Joy Fowler, Lisa Goldstein, Kathleen Ann Goonan, K. W. Jeter, Gwyneth Jones, James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel, Michael P. Kube-McDowell, Geoffrey Landis, Paul J. McAuley, Pat Murphy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Richard Paul Russo, Mary Doria Russell, Geoff Ryman, Lewis Shiner, John Shirley, Melinda Snodgrass, Bruce Sterling, S. M. Stirling, Michael Swanwick, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Walter Jon Williams, Robert Charles Wilson, Timothy Zahn, and many others.

Will their fans be as faithful as my generation for going back now after forty and fifty years and rereading their favorite adolescent books? The 1960s was one strange trip. The times, with rock and roll, Vietnam, the counter culture, civil rights, psychedelic drugs, and all the other pop cultures of the 1960s, seared deeply into our brains. Distinctive smells trigger memories, and science fiction is like newly mown spring onions, dredging up long forgotten past experiences – but artificial ones, one of adventures on far off worlds, induced by a self mesmerizing technique of staring at black marks on cheap paperback pulp pages. I can’t play an oldie rock song without an old science fiction story haunting me. I can’t read an old science fiction story without 60s rock music coming out of that old memory radio.
No matter how hard I try, I can’t exorcise science fiction from my soul, and I have tried. Fifty of my nearly two hundred blog posts have been about science fiction. Science fiction is a toy I’ve never outgrew. No matter how much I try to convince myself into believing that science fiction is merely entertaining stories I can’t deprogram myself. I once wrote, “The Religion that Failed to Achieve Orbit” to be funny, but it’s not. I rejected religion as a tyke, but caught the science fiction bug instead. No matter how much my Zen master beats me with his bamboo cane, I still see the Maya of science fiction.

Is it just me? Or are there other aging science fiction junkies out there still looking for sense-of-wonder fixes? When I turned fifty and decided to go to the Clarion West Writer’s Workshop, I intended to write Science Fiction 2.0 stories. I wanted to purify my mind of all the old science fiction tropes and invent new ones for the twenty-first century. Heinlein, for all of his success never achieved escape velocity. The science fiction I grew up with was merely wish-fulfilling fantasies about escaping this problem filled world and running off to enchanting new worlds.

Rereading the classics of science fiction is like retracing the original trail looking for new clues. Joining these Yahoogroups have introduced me to other people doing the same thing. Is it merely nostalgia? Is circling back just a common trait of getting older? Are my efforts just a silly desire to recapture my youth? Is it just a search for lost meaning, or a narcissistic impulse to find importance in my life? Or could it simply be that I want to be a amateur scholar of genre history?

I don’t know if this is true or not, but somehow I feel my generation was more influenced by growing up with science fiction than earlier or later generations of science fiction fans. For most readers of science fiction, the genre is just a category of entertainment. For people growing up with the 1960s, the baby boomers, who felt the whole world was watching, science fiction added an extra dimension of drama about the future. We listened to our rock and roll brothers and sisters sing about the revolution, and thought, “sure thing man!” But we believed the revolution was going to lead mankind into outer space, not some groovy hippie commune.

Now that I’m getting old, and reconnecting with other science fiction fans who are rereading those old classic SF novels from our youth, I think we’re reevaluating the meaning of science fiction. Were we just kids reading repackaged pulp fiction because it was exciting, or was it visionary and educational?

I’m currently listening to METAtropolis, a shared world-building theme anthology edited by John Scalzi and published by Audible.com. The five writers, all newer science fiction writers born 1962-1979, write about cities of the near future with the same kind of 1960s revolutionary excitement. They grew up with science fiction and the Internet, another social revolutionary vector, and they see exciting possibilities. Does that help us?

Unfortunately, the world of science fiction philosophers is tiny, and not as influential as the more famous digital-world philosophers. There is overlap, but I have to wonder if the unfolding of the future has already outpaced the writers of the future. How will John Brunner’s epic experimental Sci-Fi masterpiece, Stand on Zanzibar from 1968 and set in 2010, match up with the real 2010 when it arrives, or even the science fiction writers of 2008 trying to predict the near future?

Using hindsight, and rereading old science fiction, how many of those childhood reads really prepared me for the present? I recently discovered this quote while rereading The Space Merchants by C. M. Kornbluth and Frederik Pohl:

The Conservationists were fair game, those wild-eyed zealots who pretended modern civilization was in some way “plundering” our planet. Preposterous stuff. Science is always a step ahead of the failure of natural resources. After all, when real meat got scarce, we had soyaburgers ready. When oil ran low, technology developed the pedicab.

That’s a pretty fascinating quote written originally in 1952. Especially when you realize that this is satire and the conservationists are right even back then. Science fiction is just amateur philosophers thinking about the future. Sometimes, it’s just an action story. Sometimes, it’s a “what if this goes on…” story. Science fiction writers and readers think about all the possibilities. Now the children of science fiction are growing up in the real future. Have their literary parents, the science fiction books they were raised on, prepared them properly?

I’m always surprised to find seeds like the quote above when rereading old science fiction. It makes me wonder if reading science fiction helped program my personality. I’ve been concerned with over population, the limits of growth, pollution, global terrorism, economic collapse, and more, all my life. A certain percentage of the population take global warming very seriously. Another percentage don’t. Is it because they weren’t prepared by reading lots of science fiction scenarios?

I fondly remember hundreds of wonderful science fiction novels, but when I reread them, many aren’t so wonderful today. Foundation by Isaac Asimov has some cool ideas, but the storytelling in that fix-up novel is clunky. City by Clifford Simak is another fix-up novel that still provoked a sense of wonder in me, but failed to work with some of my friends. Strangely, I discover that I admire Philip K. Dick’s old work because he wrote about quirky realistic people who were motivated by their own self interests that often superseded the direction of the plot.

Too often old science fiction novels contained characters that are just mouthpieces for the author to rattle off his pet ideas. That makes for bad storytelling, but is maybe a clue about my personality and why I’m haunted by science fiction. Science fiction wanted to explain reality. It lacked the discipline of science. It was much further out than religion, which was always quite far out, but science fiction sold itself as being scientific, which has never been true. The 1960s was a kooky time, with UFO freaks, drug trippers, Edgar Cayce disciplines, ESP dreamers, so is it not all that strange that a bunch of kids wanted to follow Danny Dunn and Tom Swift Jr. into outer space.

Of course, you know what that means? I reread science fiction in my fifties because I’m wanting to return to the dreams I had in my teens. 2008 is the far future from my kid self of 1968. It’s just not the future I expected or wanted. Is being nostalgic merely wanting to start over again, and maybe this time get it right?

I finish this as Jefferson Airplane starts singing, “Have You Seen the Saucers.” I kid you not.

JWH 11/19/8