Thought Experiment Allen M

Thought Experiment Allen M. Steele The History of Science Fiction, and Why It Matters The following essay is adapted from a blue cellophane sheets over the skylight keynote speech delivered at the Melon windows to filter out UV rays, installed 2018 science fiction symposium, March LED lights and a fan for hot days, and 17, 2018, in Hong Kong. put down mousetraps for uninvited bib- irst, a disclaimer: the title of this ad- liophiles. If the house were ever to catch dress should not be taken literally. fire, my town’s volunteer fire department I’m not going to attempt to narrate would probably have to rescue me from F the history of science fiction in the the loft; I’d be up there, desperately short time the convention has generous- throwing my precious collection through ly given me this morning. It’s far too the windows I’ve broken out. complex for any sort of brief yet cogent Shelved on stainless-steel restaurant description. Even an attempt to summa- kitchen racks are the following: rize the most important stuff would soon A near-complete run of Astounding have people in this room checking their (now Analog), including all issues from watches and making furtive dashes for January 1934 to the present, and sixteen the door. issues before then, including January Instead, let me tell you where to search 1930, the first issue; for this history, and why I think it’s so A complete run of Asimov’s Science important for it to be studied, or at least Fiction, from Spring 1977 to the present, not forgotten. including all four issues of the short- If you were to visit me at home, I’d lived Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Ad- probably show you my office. It’s located venture Magazine; on the second floor in what used to be a Fantasy and Science Fiction, complete teenager’s bedroom, and above it is a from July 1969 to present and several small, barn-style loft, accessible by a dozen issues before then, including the built-in ladder. When my wife and I first issue, Fall 1949; bought our house more than twenty A near-complete run of Venture, F&SF’s years ago, one of the big attractions was sister magazine; this loft. I get my exercise from climbing A near-complete run of Unknown, As- the ladder at least twice a day to reach tounding’s sister fantasy magazine, in- that which I’ve put up there, my favorite cluding both the first and last issues; material possession: my science fiction A near-complete run of Planet Stories, magazine collection. including the issues where Ray Brad- I began this collection while still in bury and Philip K. Dick published their grade school more than fifty years ago, first stories; and I’ve been steadily adding to it ever A complete run of Captain Future; since, one issue at a time. I’ve never thrown Near-complete runs of both Galaxy away an SF magazine except when it and its sister magazine If, including the was so damaged that it was unreadable, first and final issues of both; and I’ve become an expert at reinforcing A near-complete run of Amazing Sto- spines, repairing torn covers, reinserting ries from the late sixties through the late loose pages, and erasing pen and pencil eighties, along with individual issues marks. My magazines are individually dating back to the late twenties and ear- stored in plastic bags, with cardboard ly thirties. stiffeners for the oldest issues; I’ve put Besides the racked magazines, rows of

13 November/December 2018 cardboard long-boxes hold complete runs was being published in Amazing and its of Vertex, Science Fiction Age, Absolute competitors Wonder Stories and Astound- Magnitude, Aboriginal Science Fiction, ing. The new genre quickly gained popu- Artemis, Future, and Cosmos, many is- larity. Through the Depression and the sues of Omni, Startling, Fantastic Uni- wartime years, a spate of newer maga- verse, and Thrilling Wonder, and miscel- zines appeared: Startling, Planet, laneous magazines that had brief, but Thrilling Wonder (which was Wonder memorable existences, such as the issue Stories under a more thrilling title), and of UnEarth where William Gibson made my personal favorite, Captain Future. his debut. And while it was mainly a fantasy and As obsessive collections goes, this one horror magazine, Weird Tales nonethe- might be considered a little extreme, but less published some early SF. The first it could be worse. I once saw a porn col- true space opera, “Crashing Suns” by lection nearly this big. Edmond Hamilton, appeared in the Au- I’m not going to try to explain why I’ve gust and September 1928 issues. spent a lifetime collecting SF magazines, A small confession here: in the past nor am I going to rationalize it, for there’s few years, I’ve read very little recent SF. nothing here that needs to be explained Many of the novels published over the or rationalized, let alone apologized for. I last decade, and the authors who wrote love science fiction, and since I go back to them, are unknown to me. It’s not be- a time when SF was principally a short- cause I don’t respect and enjoy their fiction form, with few novels and even work; for the most part, that which I fewer movies or TV shows (and no have read by SF’s newest generation has videogames), I came to it mainly through been pretty good. However, my attention reading SF magazines, and that’s still has lately been consumed by a long what I treasure the most. What I’d like to study of the genre’s history and develop- talk about, briefly, is what I’ve learned ment, and I feel that the best way to do from this obsession of mine. that is by reading the literary works Science fiction came from somewhere. themselves, and whenever possible in It wasn’t as if the Almighty looked down the form in which they first appeared. upon the face of the waters, said “Let So most of the SF I’ve read lately was there be SF!,” and with lightning and published before 1950, particularly from thunder Robert Silverberg appeared. We the twenties through the forties. The au- can debate forever who wrote the first thors I’ve been reading include Neil R. SF novel: Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Jones, whose Professor Jameson series or Jules Verne. And for what little I was probably the first treatment of what know about Asian SF, there may be a we’d now call transhumans, Clare Winger Chinese author who predates them all. Harris, the first female SF author of the In both name and form, though, sci- twentieth century, and Stanley G. Wein- ence fiction as a distinct and definable baum, whose tragically short life—he genre emerged from American pulp liter- died at age thirty-three—didn’t stop him ature. First in Argosy and All-Story, then from being one of the great innovators of in Science and Invention, and then, in early space opera. If you haven’t read any 1926, the great Amazing Stories, where of these writers, you’re not alone . . . and the genre was given its original name, I’ll come back to that in a minute. “scientifiction” (which, thankfully, never My fascination with early SF has noth- really caught on). It took many decades ing to do with nostalgia or a desire to live for major publishers to begin regularly in the past. And while most of the stories producing SF novels, and small-press I’ve read in the pulps are as entertaining publishers like Gnome, Shasta, and Fan- as anything published today, that’s not tasy Press didn’t appear until the late the principal reason either. Rather, I’ve forties, so at first nearly all science fiction developed an abiding interest in what I

14 Allen M. Steele Asimov’s consider to be science fiction’s greatest It can be said that science fiction is, it- contribution to human culture, the subtle self, a science fiction story: the invention yet detectable influence it’s had on scien- and development of a literary form that, tific inquiry and technological develop- over time, inadvertently changed the na- ment. ture of science and technology. More of- There’s a theory, which I happen to ten than not, SF as a source of inspira- share, that science and science fiction tion for real-world sci-tech development have established and sustained a pattern has been largely overlooked. Yet there of co-evolution for the past 150 years or have been so many instances in which so. Just as real-world science and tech- reality has echoed fiction that they can’t nology has influenced science fiction, so be considered coincidence or happen- SF has influenced scientific and techno- stance. And the further back you look, logical progress. SF does not predict the the more obvious the pattern becomes. future, and serious SF writers don’t con- Take, for example, the search for ex- sider themselves to be prophets. Howev- traterrestrial intelligence and our at- er, the genre has had demonstrable im- tempts to make contact with alien civi- pact on what scientists have chosen to lizations. investigate and what technologists have One of the earliest SF stories about chosen to invent. SETI is “Old Faithful,” by Raymond Gal- Science fiction came out of the nine- lun, published in the December 1934 is- teenth century industrial revolution, and sue of Astounding. The protagonist is a there is plenty to suggest that both sci- Martian astronomer who finds that in- ence and SF have influenced each other telligent life exists on Mars’ closest plan- ever since. Just as SF writers look over etary neighbor. The elderly astronomer the shoulders of scientists to gain inspira- makes this startling discovery while ob- tion for stories and novels, scientists and serving this nameless planet through his inventors have read SF and been inspired telescope; spotting a sequential series of to theorize, explore, and create. light flashes, he concludes that this world This has been going on for quite a long is inhabited. He attempts to respond the time now, and some examples are well same way, leading his human counter- known. Robert H. Goddard was inspired parts on Earth to refer to him as “Old by The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells Faithful” because of the regularity of the (and possibly Garrett P. Serviss’s unau- light signals from Mars. thorized sequel, Edison’s Conquest of (Incidentally, the idea of using light Mars) to spend his life developing the flashes to contact alien life was not new means for humans to travel to Mars; the when the story was written. Percival Low- liquid-fuel rocket engine was the result. ell, the early twentieth century astrono- The hand-held communicators of Star mer who mistakenly spotted canals on Trek inspired Motorola cell-phone engi- Mars, suggested much the same thing.) neers to replicate the design for the first The very idea of alien intelligence is flip-phones; similarly, today’s smart- considered heresy by the Martian scien- phones greatly resemble the pocket com- tific establishment, and so the old as- puters depicted in The Mote in God’s Eye tronomer, already nearing the end of his by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. No predetermined life span, is forced to one seriously considered time travel be- covertly build a spacecraft, which he fore SF writers began playing with the uses to travel to Earth. He survives the idea; now, it’s a subject of serious scien- long voyage, but Earth’s higher gravity tific inquiry. Likewise black holes; origi- and greater atmospheric oxygen content nally called “black stars” or “black suns,” prove fatal to him, and he dies almost as they showed up in science fiction as far soon as he reaches the location of the back as 1930, long before theoretical light flashes in the American southwest. physicists postulated their existence. “Old Faithful” was very popular when

Thought Experiment: The History of Science Fiction, and Why It Matters 15 November/December 2018 it was published, prompting Gallun to part of this progress, I think. There is an write a sequel, predictably titled “The indirect but nonetheless perceptible line Son of Old Faithful.” Published just six of thought that runs from “Old Faithful” months later in the July 1935 issue of As- to Project OZMA to Cixin Liu’s The Three- tounding, it tells the story of Old Faith- Body Problem (yes, I have read a little re- ful’s offspring, another Martian astrono- cent SF) to Ghizou. In Astounding, seri- mer who picks up his father’s work. But ous-minded SF stories were once called while the elder astronomer used light “thought variants,” and over time these flashes to communicate with the inhabi- intellectual experiments have subtly tants of Earth, the younger Martian goes manifested themselves in the real world. a different route. In order to avoid detec- If you go back and read the older works tion by the authorities, who still believe of SF, you see the development of ideas the existence of alien life to be heresy, the that would go on to shape the twenty-first son of Old Faithful uses radio. century. Over the course of decades, con- And not only this, but his first radio cepts for space travel, cybernetics, bio- transmissions are a repeating numerical technology, communications, advanced sequence, timed in such a way that they technology warfare, nuclear power, and can’t be mistaken for the naturally occur- on and on are explored and mapped out. ring radio sources found in deep space. In hindsight, this sort of thing looks like If this sounds familiar, it should: this is prediction. But it isn’t. Rather, it’s the out- much the sort of thing SETI astronomers come of an intellectual feedback loop, a have been doing for many years. The first never-ending conversation that has been known attempt to detect extraterrestrial going on month after month, year after radio signals was in August 1924, when year, decade after decade, for more than a an Amherst College professor used an or- century now. dinary 50 MHz receiver to listen for ran- However, there’s a catch. A conversa- dom transmissions. Since 1960, when tion, particularly a long one, has mean- Project OZMA was undertaken at the ing only when you know what’s been U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observa- said before. You take inspiration from tory in Green Belt, West Virginia, there ideas that others have formed and devel- have been fairly regular efforts to pick up op them further. This progression be- alien communications. And while the ef- comes a form of question and answer, in- ficacy of radio technology has been ques- quiry and extrapolation, that gradually tioned lately, nonetheless every ambi- becomes more logical and meaningful as tious effort to receive and send messages time goes on. from and to the stars, including the spec- For this process to work successfully, tacular efforts now being undertaken by though, you need to be aware of how these China with its colossal new radiotele- ideas have been handled in the past. scope in Ghizou, has involved very much One thing I’ve learned from studying the sort of thing Gallun described in his early SF is just how far back some ideas two stories, published long before SETI go. Often I’ve found inventions that have became actual fact . . . including the use become commonplace in the real world of numerical sequences as a way of get- first depicted, however loosely, in SF sto- ting the attention of distant listeners. ries published many, many years ago. Is this coincidence? I think not. Major publishers aren’t reprinting old- Where do ideas come from? Brain- er science fiction as much as they used storms happen, of course, and sometimes to, though, so anthologies of classic SF inspiration comes as a sudden flash of in- are seldom seen anymore. I think this sight. More often than not, though, the has caused the genre to develop a blind ideas that shape the world are formed spot to its own past. Quite a few younger over many years, even generations. Sci- readers, I’ve found, haven’t read many of ence fiction is a discrete yet fundamental the classics, mainly because all but a

16 Allen M. Steele Asimov’s handful of them aren’t readily available. Moon Pool, by A. Merritt), pocket phones So it’s hard for both them, and the young in a novel published in 1949 (Space SF writers who emerge from their ranks, Cadet, by Robert A. Heinlein), Google- to know that some ideas have been like information search and retrieval sys- around for a long, long time, and there- tems (“A Logic Named Joe” by Murray fore be able to explore new variations on Leinster; Astounding, March 1946) or the these themes. For the sake of the field’s breakdown of the American medical in- continued growth, it’s vital for those in dustry depicted in The Bladerunner by the millennial generation to not disre- Alan E. Nourse, which was published in gard that which was published before 1974. (The only relation between this their own lifetimes, but to seek out older novel and the movie that came out eight works, and not just well-known novels years later is the title, but that’s a story like Dune, Starship Troopers, or The Left for another day.) Hand of Darkness. Science fiction is the literature of pos- Thanks to the digital revolution and sible futures, but viable futures are built desktop publishing, older SF has become upon the lessons of the past. Memory is more accessible than ever. You don’t need as crucial to progress as foresight, and to spend fifty years building a magazine imagination often takes the form of collection like mine. Digital scans of many studying what’s been done before and of the magazines you see on my shelves determining how to do it again, but bet- can be found in online collections like the ter. Science fiction is a literature of ideas, Pulp Magazine Project or the Pulp Maga- but you have to know where those ideas zine Archive. Likewise, small-press pub- came from in the first place before you lishers like Armchair Science Fiction, Ad- can do something new with them. And venture House, Pulpville Press, and Altus because SF may be a tool for human sur- Press have begun issuing print-on-de- vival, it’s important that we have an his- mand paperback editions of older novels toric view of where it’s both succeeded and facsimile copies of individual issues and failed in the past. of various magazines. And if you find I give the last word to John W. Camp- that, like me, you have a burning desire bell, Jr., the author who became arguably to read the originals, there are dozens of the most influential American SF editor online booksellers who can send you just of the last century. In a 1953 essay, Camp- about any book or magazine you want. bell wrote: “Science fiction can provide for Indeed, many of the oldest magazines in a science-based culture . . . a means of my collection were purchased from eBay practicing out in a no-practice area.” and Amazon (just beware . . . you may To which he added: “If we fail to prac- have to lay down serious money). tice in imagination—practice with free, Yes, there’s some garbage among older open discussion and suggestions—we’ll works. Yes, there’s often clunky writing, be back to the days of trial and error. But weak characterization, and unintention- only for a little more time; we’ve already al humor. Sometimes, there are racial, done so much work that a few more tri- ethnic, and gender stereotypes that can als and we’ll hit the permanent error.”1 be greatly offensive. If you can look past And this is why I urge my audience the former, though, and recognize the lat- here today to live in the future, but not ter as—like smoking in public, driving neglect the past. ❍ drunk, or making unwanted sexual ad- vances—cultural relics that are no longer acceptable, then you’ll find a practically Footnote: bottomless supply of great SF. 1 “The Place of Science Fiction”; Modern In these stories, you’ll have the sur- Science Fiction: Its Meaning and Its Fu- prise of finding maglev vehicles de- ture (Reginald Bretnor, editor). Coward- scribed in a novel published in 1919 (The McCann, 1953.

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