Lewis Baxter Schwellenbach

Home > People > History > U.S. History: Biographies

science fiction, The label ‘science fiction’ suggests a hybrid form, not quite ordinary fiction, not quite science, yet partaking of both. Beneath this label we find a variety of wares, some of which trail off from a hypothetical central point into utopianism or dystopianism, heroic fantasy, horror, and books on UFOs and the paranormal. Yet its startlements are normally based either on a possible scientific advance or on a natural or social change, or on a suspicion that the world is not as it is commonly represented. It follows that one of the unacknowledged pleasures of reading science fiction (or SF) is that it challenges readers to decide whether what they are reading is within the bounds of the possible.

Perhaps the safest broad definition of SF is to say that it is a series of mythologies of power, whether it be the power to travel through time or space, or to enter the thoughts of another, or to overcome death or the ineluctable process of evolutionary forces. The long-running TV series Star Trek utilizes all these elements at one time or another. Thus it is able, within a stereotyped format, to produce those surprises which are an inescapable element of the genre.

Of course, such elements, touching as they do on basic human fears, have a long ancestry. But it is really with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), that the fundamental lever of power and human control enters. Mary Shelley was well versed in the science of her time. While human beings, golems, and so forth, had been brought back to life before Shelley wrote, some kind of supernatural agency was involved. Shelley rejects all that. Only when Victor Frankenstein has engaged in scientific research does he achieve the seemingly impossible, and bring forth life from death.

Jules Verne's vigorous adventure writings, such as Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864), proved to be the next great worldwide success. Then there is small beer until H. G. Wells emerges on the scene with books like The Time Machine (1895). Wells was the great innovator, originating many themes, such as the invasion of the earth by alien beings, which have since been extensively cultivated. A writer who acknowledges his debt to Wells, while pursuing his own concerns, is W. Olaf Stapledon. His two great books which transcend the SF genre are Last and First Men (1930) and Star-Maker (1937). In full icy grandeur, this latter novel, brilliantly imaginative, presents an atheist's vision of the cosmos, past, present, and to come.

British writers are less cut off from the main vein of literary culture than their American colleagues. So we find well-known authors turning occasionally to SF. E. Bulwer-Lytton, Kipling, Forster, A. Huxley, C. S. Lewis, K. Amis, A. Burgess, and, most considerably, Doris Lessing have all written in this mode. Orwell's fame rests on Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), an apotropaic novel much filmed and televised.

In the 1960s, the rather tame British SF magazine New Worlds was taken over and transformed by editor M. Moorcock. The future had arrived: among Moorcock's revolutionaries, the names of Ballard and Aldiss stand out. These three writers seem to have followed the English pattern, and have written on other themes, without entirely forsaking SF. During this period, SF reached a level of popularity among intellectuals as well as the general public that it has since lost. Its involvement with the future and with technological advance has made it more enduringly popular with scientists than with the literary fraternity.

The invention in the 1880s of linotype machines, which were cheaper and faster than their predecessors, led to a proliferation of newsprint and magazines of all kinds. The magazines had an unquenchable thirst for short stories. The segregation of types of story into separate magazines, while tending to produce ghetto mentalities, proved commercially viable. The first magazine to be devoted entirely to a kind of gadget SF was the New York-based Amazing Stories, beginning publication in 1926. It fostered a vigorous but conservatively minded fandom, which still flourishes and holds many conventions, large and small.

The so-called Paperback Revolution, in the 1950s, accounts for another advance in the output of popular SF, increasing the number of novels available, many of them prophetically looking towards the coming Space Age. Then, with the arrival of television, another channel for SF opened. SF's ability to generate strange and striking images has made it an ideal medium for filmic special effects.

Inevitably, the wider popularity of science fiction has led to a diminution of challenging ideas. Yet there are those who still succeed in making readers think while being entertained. Among these are authors of long standing, such as A. C. Clarke, who commanded a worldwide audience with his novels of the 1950s, The City and the Stars (1950) and Childhood's End (1953), and who still continues to hold our attention.

Many authors suffer from writing too much (a habit easily acquired in the days when magazines paid writers 2 cents a word). Isaac Asimov (1920–92) is a case in point, although such early novels as The Naked Sun (1957) and his first Foundation Trilogy (1963), both essentially products of the 1950s, were deservedly popular, so much so that, by 1995, he had become the eighth most translated author in the world (to be overtaken by Lenin, whose popularity has subsequently dwindled).

Some of the best-known names in the international language of SF have been American. A. E. Van Vogt, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Frank Herbert, Harry Harrison, U. LeGuin, W. Burroughs, William Gibson (the inventor of Cyberpunk), Gregory Benford, and Greg Bear. But if the US dominates the marketplace, it does leave British writers free to go their own sweet way, at least to some extent. Noteworthy examples are Robert Holdstock with his Mythago series, Stephen Baxter, and the idiosyncratic I. M. Banks, who rose to prominence with his first novel, The Wasp Factory (1984). Nor should one forget that most successful lord of misrule and creator of Discworld, Terry Pratchett.

But the man whose example changed the direction of SF itself is J. R. R. Tolkien, the learned Merton Professor of English Language and Literature at the University of Oxford, whose Lord of the Rings was published in three volumes (1954–5). Tolkien's Secondary Universe became, in paperback, a campus favourite, inspiring many imitations and ‘good long reads’. These imaginary worlds, the recounting of whose affairs often sprawls across several volumes, generally provide a platform for a pre-industrial struggle between good and evil. By removing the centre of science-fictional speculation to easier pastures, dream-pastures, they lower the intellectual temperature of a genre still struggling to attain some philosophical status.

A significant development in recent years has been the growth of SF scholarship. Institutions like the SFRA (Science Fiction Research Association) and the lively IAFA (International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts) publish learned papers and hold annual conferences; and a research and teaching facility is being developed at the SF Foundation in Liverpool.

Lewis Baxter Schwellenbach , 1894–1948, American cabinet officer, b. Superior, Wis. After serving (1935–40) in the U.S. Senate, he was appointed (1940) U.S. district judge in Washington state. As Secretary of Labor (1945–48) under President Truman, he reorganized the Dept. of Labor and opposed congressional legislation curbing labor union activity.