Microworlds Read online

  It will always be impossible for a man to run 100 meters in 0.1 seconds. For such a feat a man’s body would have to be so totally reconstructed that he would no longer be a man of flesh and blood. Therefore a story based on the premise that a human being as a human being could run so fast would be a work of fantasy, not science fiction.

  The product of 2 × 2 can never become 7. To generalize, it is impossible to realize any kind of logical impossibility. For example, it is logically impossible to give a logical proof for the existence or nonexistence of a god. It follows that any imaginative literature based on such a postulate is fantasy, not science fiction.

  The pan-psychism of Stapledon is an ontological hypothesis. It can never be proved in the scientific sense: any transcendence that can be proved experimentally ceases to be a transcendence, for transcendence is by definition empirically unprovable. God reduced to empiricism is no longer God; the frontier between faith and knowledge can therefore never be annulled.

  But when any of these conditions, or any condition of the same order, is described not to postulate its real existence, but only to interpret some content of a semantic character by means of such a condition used as a signal-object, then all such classificatory arguments lose their power.

  What, therefore, is basically wrong in science fiction is the abolition of differences that have a categorical character; the passing off of myths and fairy tales for quasi-scientific hypotheses or their consequences, and of the wishful dream or horror story as prediction; the postulation of the incommensurable as commensurable; the depiction of the accomplishment of possible tasks with means that have no empirical character; the pretense that insoluble problems (such as those of a logical typus) are soluble.

  But why should we deem such procedures wrong when once upon a time myths, fairy tales, sagas, fables were highly valued as keys to all cosmic locks? It is the spirit of the times. When there is no cure for cancer, magic has the same value as chemistry: the two are wholly equal in that both are wholly worthless. But if there arises a 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 comparatio, an explication, and first you must have the object that is to be explicated. Science fiction lives in but strives to emerge from this antinomical state of being.

  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 objective-empirical standpoint (such as a man springing over a wall seven meters high or a woman givi
ng birth in two instead of nine months) do not appear in non-science-fiction novels, events equally impossible from a speculative standpoint (such as the totally unnecessary end-game in Disch’s Camp Concentration) appear frequently in science fiction. To be sure, separating the unlikely from the likely (finding in the street a diamond the size of your fist as opposed to finding a lost hat) is much simpler when your standard of comparison is everyday things than it is when you are concerned with the consequences of fictive hypotheses. But though separating the likely from the unlikely in science fiction is difficult, it can be mastered. The art can be learned and taught. But since the lack of selective filters is accompanied by a corresponding lack in reader-evaluations, there are no pressures on authors for such an optimization of science fiction.

  Translated from the German by Franz Rottensteiner and Bruce R. Gillespie, with R. D. Mullen and Darko Suvin.

  SCIENCE FICTION: A HOPELESS CASE — WITH EXCEPTIONS

  1

  On reading In Search of Wonder by Damon Knight and The Issue at Hand by James Blish, a couple of questions, the answers to which can be found nowhere, came to my mind.[3]

  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 protocols of several explorations into the exotic land of science fiction — i.e., as raw material to be subjected to a sociological analysis. For me, the facts collected by these authors were often more valuable than their opinions; that is to say, I arranged this material in a way not completely corresponding to the spirit of the sources.

  2

  I call science fiction a “collective phenomenon” of a sociocultural nature. It has the following parts: (a) the readers — on the one hand, the mute and passive majority of science-fiction consumers; on the other, the active amateur groups that constitute fandom proper; (b) the science-fiction producers — authors (some of them also critics) and publishers of magazines and books.

  Science fiction is a “very special case” because it belongs to two distinct spheres of culture: the “Lower Realm,” or Realm of Trivial Literature, and the “Upper Realm,” or Realm of Mainstream Literature. To the Lower Realm belong the crime novel, the Western, the pseudo-historical novel, the sports novel, and the erotico-sentimental stories about certain locations, such as doctor-nurse romances, millionaire-and-the-playgirl stories, and so on. I’d like to spare the reader a detailed description of what I mean by mainstream. Perhaps it will suffice to quote the names of some of the authors who inhabit this Olympus: Moravia, Koestler, Joyce, Butor, Sartre, Grass, Mailer, Borges, Calvino, Malamud, Sarrault, Pinget, Greene.

  It cannot be maintained with universal validity that these authors do not descend to the lower floors occasionally, for we know of crime novels by Graham Greene, “fantastic” novels by Orwell and Werfel, and Moravia’s “fantasies.” Some texts by Calvino are even considered science fiction. Therefore it should not be conceived that the difference between authors of the Upper and Lower Realms is that one of the first does not write fantasy or other literature related to science fiction, while one of the second does just this: the difference can be examined according to neither intrinsic type nor the artistic quality of a single work. To be a subject of the Lower or Upper Realm does not only and exclusively depend upon the product made by the author. There are much more complicated interrelationships of a sociocultural nature. I will talk about them a little later.

  At this point I want only to propose a practical rule of procedure, which will predict with ninety-eight percent accuracy whether an author will be considered as an inhabitant of the Upper or the Lower floor. The rule is simple and can be stated as follows: if someone starts to write in the mainstream, and the public and critics get to know him by name, or even as a world celebrity (so that, on hearing the name, they know that they are talking about a writer, not an athlete or actor, so his attempts at science fiction and/or fantasy are regarded as “excursions” or “side leaps,” even if repeated) then that man lives on the Upper floor. For instance, the “entertainments” of Graham Greene express a private mood or tactic of his.

  During H. G. Wells’s working life, there was no such clear-cut border between these two realms of literature. They shaded into each other gradually and continually. At that time Wells was known simply as an English writer, and the readers who appreciated his prose often knew of both his ambitions — the realistic and the fantastic. Only much later did an Iron Curtain descend between these two kinds of literature so that the typical science-fiction fan often knows the works of science fiction written by Wells, but ignores the fact that Wells also wrote “normal” realistic prose (and highbrow connoisseurs value it highly today, and more so than his science fiction). This curtain, this concrete ceiling (to maintain the image of a two-story building), has grown little by little, and this ceiling, hermetically sealed, became an impenetrable barrier only during the twenties. We can recognize this by the fact that Capek’s works are still classed with the literature of the Upper Realm, while Stapledon, who was writing about ten years later, is not accredited with being there. Therefore some authors do not earn their classifications exclusively on their merits. On the contrary, their works are subject to higher rules of taxonomy, rules that have developed in the course of history and know no exceptions.

  If, in spite of all this, a classificatory exception is made, the judgment is given that the (literary) case under consideration is not essentially science fiction, but wholly “normal” literature, which the author intentionally camouflaged as science fiction. However, if we proceed by disregarding all these “extenuating circumstances,” some novels by Dostoevsky become “crime novels,” though in fact they are not regarded as such. The experts say that the plot of a crime novel served the author only as a means to an end, and he definitely did not want to write a crime novel. This is the same situation as is the case of a brothel searched by the police. For simplicity’s sake the nameless, ordinary guests are regarded as customers of the prostitutes, but a prince or a politician defends his presence on the pretext that he descended to these lowest floors of social life because he longed for something exotic, because his fancy took him on such an excursion. In short, such people stay in the land of pestilence as extravagant intruders or even as curious scientists.

  3

  The status of trivial literature can be recognized by several typical attributes.

  First: its works are read only once, just like the cheapest mass products which are also intended for but a single use. Most of them become obsolete in the same way as mass products do. If crime novels were selected according to their literary merits, it would be superfluous to keep throwing new ones onto the market, be
cause we could find so many good ones among the multitude there already that nobody could read the choicest of them during his lifetime. Still, publishers keep on putting “brand-new” crime novels onto the market even though there are quantities of crime novels of undisputedly better quality that have sunk into oblivion. The same goes for refrigerators and cars: it is a well-known fact that today’s models are not necessarily better, technologically, than those of yesteryear. But in order to keep going, the machinery of production must put new models on the market, and advertising exerts pressure on the consumers to make them believe that only the current year’s models have the best quality. The dogma of continual change of models becomes a law of the market, although every specialist can distinguish clearly between fictitious obsolescence of the product and authentic technological obsolescence. Off and on there are real improvements in technological products. More often, change is dictated only by fashion, a dictatorship in the interest of profit by supplying new goods.

  The entanglement of real progress and economic laws constitutes a picture of a situation quite similar to that which reigns in the market of trivial literature. On principle, publishing houses like Ace Books could put on the market science fiction from the first half of the century exclusively, in ever-renewed reprints, because the number of this kind of book has already increased to such an extent that nobody could read even the better ones among them, even if he devoted all his time to this genre. Printing new books, ninety-eight percent of which are miserable products, published for purely economic reasons, makes many older works fall into oblivion. They die in silence, because there is no place for them on a clogged market. The publishing houses provide no filter to bring about a positive selection, because to them the newest book is also the best, or at least they want the customer to believe this, the justification for the well-known total inflation of publishers’ advertising. Each new title is praised as the best in the science-fiction genre. Each science-fiction writer is called the greatest master of science fiction after one or two of his books have been published. In the science-fiction book market, as well as in the whole market of trivial literature, we can perceive the omnipotence of economic laws. The literary market, moreover, has in common with the whole market the typical phenomenon of inflation. When all books and writers are presented as “the best,” then a devaluation, an inflation of all expressions of value is inevitable.