Shaftel, Oscar 1953. The Social Content of Science Fiction. Science & Society 17(2): 97-118. [JSTOR]
Much science fiction writing shows the familiar corruption of sadism, pornography, or escape into fantasy that dominates mass publications. But the distinct tradition, subject matter, and technique of this interesting medium set it apart from the great bulk of pulp writing. Dimly related in method to the great Utopias, science-fiction is reinforced with solid matter from Plato, Campanella, More, and Wells; and the medium's natural camouflage of time (the future) and space (other planets and galaxies) permits some writers to make pungent comment on the here nad now. (Shaftel 1953: 97)
Both good points: (1) science fiction largely is influenced by utopian literature/philosophy; (2) depicting distant time and space enable authors to critique current social ills.
What arguments can be brought to spare science-fiction from the condemnation proper for mass pulp fantasy? The concept of "healtful speculation" must be argued on two related grounds: first, the predictive interest in science and technology; second, the inevitable effects of technological development on social and individual change. In the twenties those writers who were not exploiting the medium for the macabre fantasy and the space opera were following the Hugo Gernsback pattern of popularizing science in crude fiction form: "extrapolating" from actual laboratory achievements into imaginative applications in the future. Since the emphasis was on "science," characterization was primitive and plot episodic. (Shaftel 1953: 97-98)
"I have tried to supplement my own slight knowledge of natural science by pestering my scientific friends" (Stapledon 1937: vii).
Since it is the boast of the science-fiction fraternity that it is always pushing the boundaries of the known, we find fictional treatments of the new semi-social fields, such as cybernetics, hidroponics, parapsychology, and psycho- and socio-dynamics taking their place beside nucleonics, atomics, and electronics. The common themes of robots and psycho-scanning for adaptability to space must be taken more seriously today than even the most solidly grounded speculations on color television and atomic fission were [|] taken a scant fifteen years ago. And such serious speculation introduces a basic new element into scientific fiction, an element that re-confronts us with one of the first inspirations of science-fiction, the social utopia. A society that has mastered cybernetics and individual and mass psychic control, not to speak of space flight and planetary colonization, will have to ponder seriously the social order that will control or be controlled by such technological developments. In short, the fictioneer often becomes a political, economic, and social theorist. (Shaftel 1953: 98-99)
"Semiotics" could probably be included amongst these "semi-social fields". Surprisingly few robots in Stapledon's vision, though there is some automatization. The fictioneer must take on the task of Plato's Republic and become (1) an economic theorist, (2) a social theorist, and (3) a political theorist.
Just as writers casually dropped names like Albert Einstein, Ernest Rutherford, and Clerk Maxwell in stories of a generation ago, and Enrico Fermi and Robert Oppenheimer just after World War II, so today we find in reported dialogues of the twenty-third century learned hindsighted references to Thomas Malthus, Vilfredo Pareto, Oswald Spengler, Alfred Korzybski, and Karl Marx. Implicit in all such references in the willingness to recognize the problem of social change. (Shaftel 1953: 99)
Everyone else is roundabout familiar but Alfred Korzybski I think I've met in only a handful of mentions.
A corollary oy this problem is, of course, the nature of man himself. Much science-fiction accepts the assumption of our elite and pulp literature alike that mankind is degraded and unregenerate, not only in our own dying culture but by eternal nature. But there is enough of the utopian spirit operating in science-fiction (this is perhaps the one mass medium where a healthy humanistic spirit [|] can speak out) to provide us with much useful speculation on future modes of the human spirit in dialectical relationship to his mode of living. Not all treatments of the future man show him to be the remnant of atomic war or the effete degenerate product of robot-nurtured luxury. And even in the most degraded picture of the future we are likely to find reference to man the striver, the poet, the restless pioneer. (Shaftel 1953: 99-100)
Reminds me of some pythagorean statement about the debased nature of man. Science fiction can depict humanity any way it wishes. In Stapledon's future history he is both remnant and degenerate but also several dozen other things throughout his career in the Solar system.
Pratt lists some of the developments machine picked up by Huxley), artificial silk and wool-like rayon, rustproof alloy steel, magnesium alloys in lightweight construction, televised opera performances, glass furniture, fluorescent lighting, newspapers on microfilm, night baseball, paper from straw, radio direction finder, exsanguination and replacement of blood in disease, space flight, and a gravity neutralizer made technically explicable on the principle, later development by Einstein, of the similarity of gravity and other natural phenomena. (Shaftel 1953: 100, fn 4)
Some of these have come true, some (like glass furniture) seem impractical. The hypnobioscope I would like to look into.
A similar story, with crudely developed characters and space-opera plot, is Venus Equilateral, by George O. Smith in which some crack communication and electronics men, in a message-relay center built into an asteroid, proceed to invent matter-reproducers which destroy the basis of all stardards of wealth and property relationships (Shaftel 1953: 101)
The Star Trek future made possible by some radio engineers.
This dynamic relation between technological innovation and human readjustment is what occasionally rescues science-fiction from the pulp pattern. Detective fiction, cowboy stories, and true love confessions are socially static and formalized. Formulas are painfully frequent in the science-fiction magazines, but new research and theory, especially in the social sciences, encourage, even force fresh thinking. (Shaftel 1953: 101)
Any genre can become stereotyped; "phatic" within its own specific register.
The crux of the matter is the fiction writer's view of science itself, and behind that, his view of the nature of man. The anti-scientific temper is also anti-humanist. We find sophisticated writers like Ray Bradbury denying the traditional values and objectives of science, and turning it into its opposite, an argument for a static view of man, and a proof for mysticism and pietism. If man is by nature corrupt and doomed except for a supernatural intercession, then the dream of Lucretius, that science would free man from superstition and the fear of death, is a vain hope, as are the pretensions of science that it can help to an understanding and control of his environment and of himself. (Shaftel 1953: 102)
Key here is "a supernatural intercession". Those who hold that man is debased are also the ones who dream of a benevolent creator who is not debased. Curiously, those who preach the perfection of the universe also have an exceedingly dim view of humanity.
The main line of descent from Lucretius leaves open the future of man. In writers like Olaf Stapledon (Last and First Men, Odd Johnem>), A. C. Clarke (Prelude to Space), Isaac Azimov and Wells himself, the applications of hydroponics, cybernetics, sociology, and genetics lead to various speculations, some indeed ominous; but in them we find no dogmatic assumption of human fallibility and self-destruction resulting from Promethean hybris.. (Shaftel 1953: 102)
Stapledon is an example of the other extreme, writing about man's "fluid nature" (1937: 12).
A logical extension of the war theme appears in "The Last Objective" by Paul Carter, in which the fighting is done by tremendous underground rock-drilling dreadnoughts, and the human race is wiped out by an uncontrollable virus developed by the Asiatics; the sole survivor is a manufactured humanoid soldier. (Shaftel 1953: 107)
Unimaginable.
A more sophisticated treatment of population is Gravy Planet, a novel by Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, in which an outlaw group of idealists, nurtured on Vogt and Osborne, the Conservationists ("Connies") make plans to prevent the dominant powers of Earth from exploiting and destroying Venus in the name of free enterprise and ever-mounting sales. Corporations and advertising agencies preach the gospel of "creating demand" in an economic jungle, where control is maintained by private police forces (the hero, a star copysmith, is protected by private police forces (the hero, a star copysmith, is protected by Brinks, Inc., when the villain employs Burns, Inc. operatives), and the great mass of a teeming population face an ever more crowded existence and hopelessly reduced standard of living, with all earth's resources wasted for profit. The hero is converted by his wife, a leading Connie, and the secretly planned expedition takes off for the new planet, which they conquer with cooperative hard word and detailed planning. (Shaftel 1953: 112)
Wasting away the planet so that the line on the graph can go up? Unthinkable. Especially by people who do so because they believe that the Big Man In the Sky(tm) will reward them for it with an extra life.
Another current topic of pseudo-scientific vogue is the flying saucer. This development fits in nicely with the old thesis of Charles Fort, the collector of odd and inexplicable phenomena, to prove "we are property" of extra-terrestial visitors. Besides the nonfictional treatments, more or less serious, of Gerald Heard (Is Another World Watching) and Frank Scully (Behind the Flying Saucer), there are the fictionar Sinister Barrier by Eric Frank Russell and Heinlein's Puppet Masters. Beings from other worlds take power over some human beings, unknown to others, and proceed to spread their dominion, until destroyed in the nick of time. (Shaftel 1953: 113)
Indeed still a popular theme in amateur ufology. See the Zoo hypothesis. The earliest iteration of it in literature appears in Stapledon's Star Maker!
But probably the greatest service that science fiction can perform at this time is to continue to evade the official and unofficial censorship that has fallen upon most media of communication. Hollywood proclaims a code of production that forbids satirizing bankers or free enterprise; blacklists and redlists are the techniques of inhibiting positive criticism of a degraded social system. In science-fiction one can reflect our times in the mirror of the future or a far-off land, as More did in his Utopia. (Shaftel 1953: 115)
And ever since, the financial and economic systems have been extremely stable and free enterprise in no way leads us towards the brink of extinction.
0 comments:
Post a Comment