Kevin Ahearn writes about...

The Tradition and Future of Science Fiction

Dear BwS:

I disagree with many sf fans on science fiction. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. The strength of the genre has always been a contrast, even a conflict of visions.

I was a child in a window of science fiction never wider or more enticing — novels and anthologies, magazines, comic books, including Classics Illustrated, the first great graphic novels, a run of incredible movies, and something revolutionary... television. Not HD wide-screen in glorious color, a seven-inch fuzzy black and white boxy thing — and it was science itself.

My science fiction was fiction inside the science and, in the end, as strong as the science might be, the fiction would overpower it. The fiction won.

Think about it. What science could hope to stand up to Frankenstein’s “monster,” Captain Nemo, The Invisible Man and The Time Traveler, Mr. Savage, Winston Smith, or Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?

On the screen, science fared no better. Not against The Thing, Klaatu and Gort, The Body Snatchers, and Them!

Things were changing and TV was only the Cyclops in an Odyssey of scientific evolution: Sputnik and the Space Race, the coming of computers, jet travel, and the H-Bomb.

By the early 60s, science pulled even with fiction and then sought to surpass it. And when it did, science fiction suffered. No longer fiction inside science — science was being stuffed into fiction until it overpowered it.

The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits rose above the growing “over-scienced” science fiction because in their classic episodes, the fiction prevailed over the science. What made the original STAR TREK classic was not the technology, but its humanity — fiction over science.

A defining example came in 1968: in Planet of the Apes, the fiction won; In 2001: A Space Odyssey, science triumphed. Not rated by the Science Fiction Book Club as one of the top fifty novels in the last fifty years, Apes’ strong fictional spine was judged much below Clarke’s ET monoliths. The only humanity in 2001 was its most memorable character, HAL, a technological icon.

But it was more than just the relentless crush of technology in the second half of the 20th Century that led to the dominance of “science over fiction” sf. John W. Campbell had defined science fiction as, “What science fiction editors buy.”

And so they did. Science fiction, once a genre, became a “community” written by sf writers, bought by sf editors and published by sf publishers for sf fans.

Science had taken over fiction, and in print, thanks to its strict “community,” has been in command ever since. But not on the screen. Star Wars, The Terminator, and Back to the Future proved yet again that when the fiction is stronger than the science, the work draws a crowd. However, when fiction failed these franchises as it did in their sequels, all the CGI in the universe couldn’t help them.

So why has science fiction, especially in print, been in free fall for the past decade? Blame has been laid all around, but none on the sf “community” itself and its editorial mandate for “over-scienced traditonal sf.”

But isn’t that the sf of this age? Technology has seen unparalleled growth in the last generation. Isn’t it sf’s purpose to address, to confront the disturbing challenges of science in the New Millennium?

So it would seem, but then why are so few bothering to read it? Once the torchbearer in the lead in the Olympian march of literature, why has sf been left behind, its flame barely flickering in a niche market?

The answer is as obvious as it is unthinkable: we are already living in an sf age. Reality has caught up with “over-scienced” sf. Moreover, readers, especially young readers, are being bombarded by technology in all shapes and sizes, prices and functions; they don’t need sf to tell them what they think. They already know.

Those who try science fiction do so in search not of technological theses, but a sliver of themselves, and they can’t find it anywhere.

If “tradition” is the future of sf, one wonders if it has one.

Kevin Ahearn