Science Fiction
Science Fiction
Science fiction consists of stories, often set in the future and off the planet Earth, that emphasize scientific, sociological, and especially technological innovation. While a writer might imagine what could happen to, say, an Irish Catholic politician who felt attracted to his brother’s American Episcopalian wife in the 1960s, a science fiction writer might imagine what could happen to an implant formed from the mental software of a human male and the hardware body and brain of a human female. Similarly, while Henry James (1843–1916), in Daisy Miller (1878), imagines a nineteenth-century American heiress involved with a European suitor, the science fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin, in The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), speculates about a human male who comes to know a hermaphrodite humanoid, a Gethenian, who sometimes turns male or sometimes female, depending on its emotional circumstances (the Gethenian often remains neuter if no suitable partner is around). James concentrated his attention on Daisy Miller, her commanding father, her suitor, and so forth, while taking the social, cultural, and biological background for granted. Le Guin, in contrast, imagined a world without gender and in consequence (or she so thought) without war, examining it through the eyes of her human visitor.
Science fiction has been said to begin with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) or with Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon (1865) and Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1870) or even as far back as Plato’s Timaeus (c. 300 BCE), his imagined version of Atlantis. However, science fiction as a distinct literary genre, with specialty magazines such as Amazing Science Fiction and Astounding Science Fiction, dates from the late 1920s and early 1930s. Its “golden age” of the 1950s and 1960s was driven primarily by technological speculations about the future, whether set primarily on Earth or spreading throughout the galaxy (with science fiction heroes typically confronted by rapacious aliens). Early readers of science fiction were often budding engineers and natural scientists. Writers and characters were mostly male. Isaac Asimov (1920–1992), although he began publishing science fiction stories in his teens, became a professor of biochemistry at Boston University, eventually publishing over five hundred books. (He was fired from his tenured professorship, not for writing science fiction but for publishing factual science texts for the general reader—“popularizations”). Many of Asimov’s stories concerned robothuman interactions. His Foundation series sketched the psychohistory of a vast galactic civilization, loosely paralleling the decline of the Roman Empire and the rise of the modern era.
Robert Heinlein (1907–1988) and Fritz Leiber (1910–1992) created theories of time travel that have fascinated philosophers and physicists (e.g., if you kill a butterfly in the age of dinosaurs, will this event cascade into a future in which intelligent dolphins dominate the world, or will the future conserve reality by resisting change?). In Gather, Darkness! (1943), Leiber anticipated a post–World War III dark age of theocracy in which a religious government maintains control using technology concealed as supposed miracles, only to be challenged by revolutionary forces that clothe their technology as witchcraft, thus making it real to the thoroughly medieval mind-set of the populace. Heinlein produced a version of Plato’s Republic, titled Space Cadet (1948), in which he imagined a future where an intelligent elite has engineered a world government that the populace believes to be a democracy. Later, during a period of opposition to the U.S. war against Vietnam (1957–1975), the patriotic Heinlein lost trust in intellectuals and wrote Starship Troopers (1959), in which warriors ruled politically. Paradoxically, Heinlein also then wrote Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), from which American hippie readers enthusiastically co-opted the term grok for intimate understanding (as in free lovemaking), although they misconstrued Heinlein’s underlying libertarian attitude. In retrospect, some see Heinlein as typifying male chauvinist science fiction. Paradoxically as well, his first novel in manuscript, For Us, The Living, written in 1939, describes a man who clashes with, and eventually accepts as wholly justified, a 2086 future in which women have social and career equality with men (this rejected manuscript was not published until 2004, after Heinlein’s death).
In the late 1960s, science fiction began to draw more female authors and readers. A readership consisting of budding engineers and scientists gave place to social science and humanities students, while technological innovation, space war, and abstract ideas gave way to psychological and stylistic experimentation. The quietly egalitarian 1950s work of such science fiction writers as Judith Merril (1923–1997) and Katherine Maclean gave way to Joanna Russ’s brilliantly feminist Female Man (1975), Ursula LeGuin’s novels, and Alice B. Sheldon’s (1915–1987) many short stories (published under the pen name James Tiptree Jr.). There were also “crossover” figures such as Kurt Vonnegut (1922–2007), who began his career in science fiction and then smoothly switched to a broader “mainstream” readership. Doris Lessing established her reputation as a mainstream writer but has also written much that is science fiction in content terms. In 1976 Octavia Butler (1947–2006) published Kindred, whose contemporary African American protagonist time travels to the antebellum South. Butler’s Exogenesis series explores issues of sexual identity, sexuality, and power, blurring lines between science fiction and other literatures. Butler’s work won her a coveted MacArthur Fellowship in 1995. In the 1980s and 1990s, Orson Scott Card dazzled the science fiction community with Ender’s Game (1985), Speaker for the Dead (1986), and Xenocide (1991), infusing traditional science fiction with computer gaming and winning a large youth audience. A practicing Mormon who has complained that science fiction did not take religion seriously, Card has also written explicitly scriptural stories.
The term mainstream was adapted by the middle of the twentieth century to distinguish “literature” from specialized, not-quite-literary genres such as science fiction, horror stories, romance fiction, spy stories, and crime fiction (bookstores often arrange their shelves in accord with this distinction). At the same time, however, this breakdown can seem increasingly dubious. For one thing, older books tend to migrate to the literature shelves. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), and Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon will be found there, along with Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1855) and Edgar Allan Poe’s (1809–1849) horror stories. Graham Greene (1904–1991), who made his mark as a crime and espionage writer, is now wholly included in the literature sections of libraries and bookstores. “Classics” sections may include not only Poe, Wells, Greene, and Dostoyevsky, but also Arthur Conan Doyle’s (1859–1930) Sherlock Holmes detective stories and Leguin’s and Lessing’s writings, alongside such long-celebrated “literary giants” as Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) and William Faulkner (1897–1962). Moreover, the centrality and celebrity once granted literary figures now generally envelops only writers, stars, and producers of movies and television. Quite simply, story writers such as Mark Twain (1835–1910) and O. Henry (1862–1910) were the most famous, most widely enjoyed, and best-paid professional entertainers of their day. Even as late as 1952, the issue of Life magazine that carried Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea sold over five million copies in two days. Arguably, Hollywood and television comprise the only “mainstream” today.
SEE ALSO Fiction; Le Guin, Ursula K.; Literature
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Heinlein, Robert. 2004. For Us, The Living: A Comedy of Customs. New York: Scribner.
Le Guin, Ursula K. 1969. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: Walker.
Leiber, Fritz. 1950. Gather, Darkness! New York: Pellegrini and Cudahy. Originally serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in May, June, and July 1943.
Russ, Joanna. 1975. The Female Man. New York: Bantam.
Justin Leiber