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The Roots of Tomorrow: Science Fiction and Politics
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13304 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
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10 / 1987 |
5,124 Words |
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J.R. Dunn
J.R. Dunn is editor of The Contrarian and writes often on the
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Science fiction has been called many things in its short history: pulp, escapism, leisure reading for engineers. Few have seen the genre for what it is: the product of a small group of intellectuals who work outside mainstream literature, who deal in facts rather than theories. The facts concern science and technology, and the fiction relates the effect these have on human beings, both as individuals and members of society.
Science fiction (or SF, the preferred term) achieved its unique niche in the literature of the modern era by default. In the early years of the century, when science was on the verge of an expansion into daily life unequalled in history, the literary elite utterly rejected any examination of scientific topics. This retreat from the concrete is as obvious as it is unexplained: In the late nineteenth century most writers of stature wrote stories quite similar to modern science fiction, but by 1905--the year widely regarded as the annus mirabilis of modern science--this had ended. With the rise of modernism, the literati turned from the biological speculations of Wallace and Darwin and the physics of Planck and Einstein to embrace instead the pseudoscientific ideas of Marx and Freud. With the exception of a few movements like futurism, led by a handful of writers such as Sinclair Lewis and C.P. Snow, the situation has remained the same to this day.
Within a few years of this change in literary focus science fiction moved in to fill the gap, rising slowly from cheap pulp entertainment to respectability and influence. In its treatment of solely technical matters, the genre's record is superb. A large number of scientific advances from nuclear reactors to communications satellites were described in detail years and sometimes decades before their appearance in the real world. On occasion, SF was accurate enough to cause jitters in high places. In 1944, a story by Cleve Cartmill described an atomic bomb so similar to what was actually being built by the Manhattan Project that the FBI panicked and raided the offices of his editor, John W. Campbell. Luckily Campbell was able to show them the source of the data right in his office: the Encyclopedia Britannica.
The genre's treatment of social and political matters was, however, a very different story. Far from attempting to analyze political questions, SF, as a rule, chose to mirror the beliefs and attitudes of its time. While writers boasted of their freedom from censorship and taboo, they allowed the political ideas of the genre to be dictated from outside. Questions of individual freedom, the power of the state, and the future of democracy were left to be
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