Brian Aldiss - Collected Essays

All the stories would get a clean bill of health under the Havel edict. None pays a subscription to the glamour of power. They are fine SF for all that.

1. Here is an opportunity to recommend H. Bruce Franklin’s 1988 War Stars, the sub-title of which is The Superweapon and the American Imagination.

Suppose you want to boil yourself a perfect egg, the kind in which the white is hard and the golden centre still fluid like a medium-consistency honey. You are alone in the kitchen, there is no clock, you have lost the egg-timer, and your watch has stopped. How can you time the egg exactly?

One answer is that you could put a record of Mozart’s overture to The Marriage of Figaro on the record-player. The overture lasts four minutes. At its conclusion, remove your egg from the pan and it will be done to perfection.

We recognize that this useful culinary tip has nothing to do with music. It is a misapplication. It is using Mozart as a utility; we are amused by the inappropriateness of the idea, or perhaps we think it is vaguely immoral.

Literature is a bit different from music, and maybe science fiction is a bit different from literature. For science fiction authors, among them some of the best known, like to claim practical applications for their fiction. Not that their fiction boils eggs—although of course there is a fortune awaiting a man who writes the story which will boil the first four-minute egg—but, less modestly, that it changes opinions, that it turns them into scientists, or even that it helps Man on his Way to the Stars.

Other authors would claim the opposite, that their fiction can have no justification unless it succeeds as fiction. This would seem to them glory enough. In imaginative literature and in poetry, the human spirit has risen to some of its greatest heights. To turn fiction into propaganda is to demean it.

The two opposed views can best be exemplified by a juxtaposition Mark Adlard made (in an article entitled ‘The Other Tradition of Science Fiction’) of statements by Isaac Asimov and C. S. Lewis. In a film he made about the history of magazine SF, Asimov says in essence that the SF of the 1940s (when Asimov’s SF was in full spate) became the fact of the 1960s. He went on to imply that when Neil Armstrong stepped on the Moon it justified the work done by Campbell’s stable of writers in Astounding (see Decade 1940s).

In Of Other Worlds (1966), Lewis by contrast has this to say: ‘If some fatal process of applied science enables us in fact to reach the moon, that real journey will not at all satisfy the impulse which we now seek to gratify by writing such stories’.

The argument about the role of SF is highly germane to the sixties. It was a period of tremendous popular intellectual ferment, when everything was called into question. The great issues of the day found SF writers divided, whether on Vietnam, on the Space Race, on Marxism, on drugs, or on race. The question of one’s life-style became crucially important; beards were political.

It was a highly political decade, starting promisingly with a glamorous president in the White House and the dandyish Macmillan in 10 Downing Street, and continuing with ominous vibrati from all over the world. The two great communist countries, China and the Soviet Union (with its luckless satellites), turned their arts from aesthetic purposes to expressions of political intention, and many people in the West were prepared to do the same thing. But there is a gulf of difference between personal belief and state-imposed belief; certainly SF authors, whose very material has of necessity economic and political implications, often forsook aesthetic goals for the causes in which they believed. The Third World lay uneasy on their consciences. In the United States, despite its racial upheavals, some people found time to wonder at the justice which permitted a small number of people to consume something like ninety per cent of the world’s resources. There was reason to think of SF as ammunition in a global battle.

As change was inevitable in the world at large, so it was inevitable in the realm of SF. Each decade shows a changing pattern, although the basic arts of story-telling are perennial and less susceptible to alteration than readers may imagine. The forties was Campbell’s and Astounding ’s decade. The fifties saw the great change in taste which brought in Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, with emphasis on sociology and human values. The sixties re-emphasized this swing; in addition, it was the decade in which space travel and the future became less of an overriding concern.

The point needs some examination. Before the first Sputnik sailed up into the skies of the fifties, magazine SF seemed at times to have turned itself into a propaganda machine for space travel. Wernher von Braun was one of the heroes of this machine, as he laid before Congress and the general public grandiose plans for a fleet of ships to annex Mars. Yet, according to the mythology, sales of SF magazines declined with the launching of the first satellites. If this is what really happened, it justifies C. S. Lewis’s dictum and provides an argument for SF as an imaginative literature, SF as reverie rather than prophecy; its proper subject is the things that may be, not the things that will be.

Many of the older SF writers held as an article of faith the belief that space travel was possible. When the possibility became actuality, a sense of déjà vu set in. And more than that. In the context of the times, aspirations foundered. The multi-million-dollar and -rouble programmes aimed at getting men into space contrasted gratingly with the mess they left behind on Earth. Arguments were sometimes short-sighted on either side. The ‘space race’ eased an emergence from the Cold War which had dominated the fifties, as well as proving a tremendous and undeniable success in its own right, a technological miracle on a scale we may not witness again for many years.

And yet … Had the natural aggressiveness of mankind merely stumbled on a new arena for its working-out? Commenting on man’s arrival on Luna, J. G. Ballard said, ‘If I were a Martian, I’d start running now’.

The tremendous process of which journeys to the Moon are part has by no means unfolded fully. And yet … Propaganda apart, the brilliance of the success served to emphasize to one half of the world how grandiosely the other half lived.

Disenchantment or curiosity made many writers look away from space and the future to the world about them. There was plenty to explore, from computers to over-population, from injustice to the Pill, from heart-transplants to emergent nations. The sixties was the decade in which SF discovered the Present. It is no coincidence that it was also the decade in which the general reading public discovered SF.