On Writing Science Fiction

On Writing Science Fiction

ON SCIENCE FICTION / FANTASY AS ESCAPIST

About “escapism,” never let that flea stick in your ear. I was liberated from it once and for all when a friend said, “These critics are very sensitive to the least hint of escape. Now what class of men would one expect to be thus worked up about escape?—jailers.” Turnkey critics: people who want to keep the world in some ideological prison because a glimpse at any remote prospect would make their stuff seem less exclusively important.

Fantasy and science fiction is by miles the best. Some of the most serious satire of our age appears in it. What is called “serious” literature now—Dylan Thomas and Pound and all that—is really the most frivolous.

Letter to Arthur C. Clarke, January 26, 1954 (CL 3)

DON’T WASTE THE EXOTIC LOCATION IN A SCIENCE-FICTION NOVEL

With K. Neville’s She Knew He Was Coming we touch rock bottom. The old theme of the sentimentalized brothel and the whore with a heart of gold is mawkish anyway, but tolerable; but what, in heaven’s name, is the point of locating it on Mars? Surely in a work of art all the material should be used. If a theme is introduced into a symphony, something must be made of that theme. If a poem is written in a certain meter, the particular qualities of that meter must be exploited. If you write a historical novel, the period must be essential to the effect. For whatever in art is not doing good is doing harm: no room for passengers. (In a good black-and-white drawing the areas of white paper are essential to the whole design, just as much as the lines. It is only in a child’s drawing that they’re merely blank paper.) What’s the excuse for locating one’s story on Mars unless “Martianity” is through and through used?

Letter to Arthur C. Clarke, January 20, 1954 (CL 3)

ADVICE TO A BUDDING SCIENCE-FICTION NOVELIST

I hope you will not think it impertinent if I mention (this is only one man’s opinion, of course) some mistakes you can avoid in future.

Letter to Jane Gaskell, September 2, 1957 (CL 3)

GOOD AND BAD TYPES OF SCIENCE-FICTION STORIES

“I am, then, condemning not all books which suppose a future widely different from the present, but those which do so without a good reason, which leap a thousand years to find plots and passions which they could have found at home.”

Sometimes a village or small town which we have known all our lives becomes the scene of a murder, a novel, or a centenary, and then for a few months everyone knows its name and crowds go to visit it. A like thing happens to one’s private recreations. I had been walking, and reading Trollope, for years when I found myself suddenly overtaken, as if by a wave from behind, by a boom in Trollope and a short-lived craze for what was called hiking. And lately I have had the same sort of experience again. I had read fantastic fiction of all sorts ever since I could read, including, of course, the particular kind which Wells practiced in his Time Machine, First Men in the Moon, and others. Then, some fifteen or twenty years ago, I became aware of a bulge in the production of such stories. In America whole magazines began to be exclusively devoted to them. The execution was usually detestable; the conceptions, sometimes worthy of better treatment. About this time the name scientifiction, soon altered to science fiction, began to be common. Then, perhaps five or six years ago, the bulge still continuing and even increasing, there was an improvement: not that very bad stories ceased to be the majority, but that the good ones became better and more numerous. It was after this that the genre began to attract the attention (always, I think, contemptuous) of the literary weeklies. There seems, in fact, to be a double paradox in its history: it began to be popular when it least deserved popularity, and to excite critical contempt as soon as it ceased to be wholly contemptible.

Of the articles I have read on the subject (and I expect I have missed many) I do not find that I can make any use. For one thing, most were not very well informed. For another, many were by people who clearly hated the kind they wrote about. It is very dangerous to write about a kind you hate. Hatred obscures all distinctions. I don’t like detective stories and therefore all detective stories look much alike to me: if I wrote about them, I should therefore infallibly write drivel. Criticism of kinds, as distinct from criticism of works, cannot of course be avoided: I shall be driven to criticize one subspecies of science fiction myself. But it is, I think, the most subjective and least reliable type of criticism. Above all, it should not masquerade as criticism of individual works. Many reviews are useless because, while purporting to condemn the book, they only reveal the reviewer’s dislike of the kind to which it belongs. Let bad tragedies be censured by those who love tragedy, and bad detective stories by those who love the detective story. Then we shall learn their real faults. Otherwise we shall find epics blamed for not being novels, farces for not being high comedies, novels by James for lacking the swift action of Smollett. Who wants to hear a particular claret abused by a fanatical teetotaler, or a particular woman by a confirmed misogynist? . . .

I will now try to divide this species of narrative [science fiction] into its subspecies. I shall begin with that subspecies which I think radically bad, in order to get it out of our way.

In this subspecies the author leaps forward into an imagined future when planetary, sidereal, or even galactic travel has become common. Against this huge backcloth he then proceeds to develop an ordinary love story, spy story, wreck story, or crime story. This seems to me tasteless. Whatever in a work of art is not used, is doing harm. The faintly imagined, and sometimes strictly unimaginable, scene and properties only blur the real theme and distract us from any interest it might have had. I presume that the authors of such stories are, so to speak, displaced persons—commercial authors who did not really want to write science fiction at all, but who availed themselves of its popularity by giving a veneer of science fiction to their normal kind of work. But we must distinguish. A leap into the future, a rapid assumption of all the changes which are feigned to have occurred, is a legitimate “machine” if it enables the author to develop a story of real value which could not have been told (or not so economically) in any other way . . . . Brave New World and 1984 leap to our minds. I can see no objection to such a “machine.” Nor do I see much use in discussing, as someone did, whether books that use it can be called “novels” or not. That is merely a question of definition. You may define the novel either so as to exclude or so as to include them. The best definition is that which proves itself most convenient. And of course to devise a definition for the purpose of excluding either The Waves in one direction or Brave New World in another, and then blame them for being excluded, is foolery.

I am, then, condemning not all books which suppose a future widely different from the present, but those which do so without a good reason, which leap a thousand years to find plots and passions which they could have found at home.

Having condemned that subspecies, I am glad to turn to another which I believe to be legitimate, though I have not the slightest taste for it myself. If the former is the fiction of the displaced persons, this might be called the fiction of engineers. It is written by people who are primarily interested in space travel, or in other undiscovered techniques, as real possibilities in the actual universe. They give us in imaginative form their guesses as to how the thing might be done. Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Wells’s Land Ironclads were once specimens of this kind, though the coming of the real submarine and the real tank has altered their original interest. Arthur Clarke’s Prelude to Space is another. I am too uneducated scientifically to criticize such stories on the mechanical side; and I am so completely out of sympathy with the projects they anticipate that I am incapable of criticizing them as stories. I am as blind to their appeal as a pacifist is to Maldon and Lepanto, or an aristocratophobe (if I may coin the word) to the Arcadia. But heaven forbid that I should regard the limitations of my sympathy as anything save a red light which warns me not to criticize at all. For all I know, these may be very good stories in their own kind.

I think it useful to distinguish from these engineers’ stories a third subspecies where the interest is, in a sense, scientific, but speculative. When we learn from the sciences the probable nature of places or conditions which no human being has experienced, there is, in normal men, an impulse to attempt to imagine them. Is any man such a dull clod that he can look at the moon through a good telescope without asking himself what it would be like to walk among those mountains under that black, crowded sky? The scientists themselves, the moment they go beyond purely mathematical statements, can hardly avoid describing the facts in terms of their probable effect on the senses of a human observer. Prolong this, and give, along with that observer’s sense experience, his probable emotions and thoughts, and you at once have a rudimentary science fiction. And of course men have been doing this for centuries. What would Hades be like if you could go there alive? Homer sends Odysseus there and gives his answer. Or again, what would it be like at the antipodes? (For this was a question of the same sort so long as men believed that the torrid zone rendered them forever inaccessible.) Dante takes you there: he describes with all the gusto of the later scientifictionist how surprising it was to see the sun in such an unusual position. Better still, what would it be like if you could get to the center of the earth? Dante tells you at the end of the Inferno where he and Virgil, after climbing down from the shoulders to the waist of Lucifer, find that they have to climb up from his waist to his feet, because of course they have passed the center of gravitation. It is a perfect science-fiction effect. Thus again Athanasius Kircher in his Iter Extaticum Celeste (1656) will take you to all the planets and most of the stars, presenting as vividly as he can what you would see and feel if this were possible. He, like Dante, uses supernatural means of transport. In Wells’s First Men in the Moon we have means which are feigned to be natural. What keeps his story within this subspecies, and distinguishes it from those of the engineers, is his choice of a quite impossible composition called cavorite. This impossibility is of course a merit, not a defect. A man of his ingenuity could easily have thought up something more plausible. But the more plausible, the worse. That would merely invite interest in actual possibilities of reaching the moon, an interest foreign to his story. Never mind how they got there; we are imagining what it would be like. The first glimpse of the unveiled airless sky, the lunar landscape, the lunar levity, the incomparable solitude, then the growing terror, finally the overwhelming approach of the lunar night—it is for these things that the story (especially in its original and shorter form) exists.

How anyone can think this form illegitimate or contemptible passes my understanding. It may very well be convenient not to call such things novels. If you prefer, call them a very special form of novels. Either way, the conclusion will be much the same: they are to be tried by their own rules. It is absurd to condemn them because they do not often display any deep or sensitive characterization. They oughtn’t to. It is a fault if they do. Wells’s Cavor and Bedford have rather too much than too little character. Every good writer knows that the more unusual the scenes and events of his story are, the slighter, the more ordinary, the more typical his persons should be. Hence Gulliver is a commonplace little man and Alice a commonplace little girl. If they had been more remarkable they would have wrecked their books. The ancient mariner himself is a very ordinary man. To tell how odd things struck odd people is to have an oddity too much: he who is to see strange sights must not himself be strange. He ought to be as nearly as possible as Everyman or Anyman. Of course, we must not confuse slight or typical characterization with impossible or unconvincing characterization. Falsification of character will always spoil a story. But character can apparently be reduced, simplified, to almost any extent with wholly satisfactory results. The greater ballads are an instance.

Of course, a given reader may be (some readers seem to be) interested in nothing else in the world except detailed studies of complex human personalities. If so, he has a good reason for not reading those kinds of work which neither demand nor admit it. He has no reason for condemning them, and indeed no qualifi-cation for speaking of them at all. We must not allow the novel of manners to give laws to all literature: let it rule its own domain. We must not listen to Pope’s maxim about the proper study of mankind. The proper study of man is everything. The proper study of man as artist is everything which gives a foothold to the imagination and the passions . . . .

My next subspecies is what I would call the eschatological. It is about the future, but not in the same way as Brave New World or The Sleeper Awakes. They were political or social. This kind gives an imaginative vehicle to speculations about the ultimate destiny of our species. Examples are Wells’s Time Machine, Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, or Arthur Clarke’s Childhood’s End. It is here that a definition of science fiction which separates it entirely from the novel becomes imperative. The form of Last and First Men is not novelistic at all. It is indeed in a new form—the pseudo history. The pace, the concern with broad, general movements, the tone, are all those of the historiographer, not the novelist. It was the right form for the theme. And since we are here diverging so widely from the novel, I myself would gladly include in this subspecies a work which is not even narrative, Geoffrey Dennis’s The End of the World (1930). And I would certainly include, from J. B. S. Haldane’s Possible Worlds (1927), the brilliant, though to my mind depraved, paper called “The Last Judgment.” . . .

I turn at last to that subspecies in which alone I myself am greatly interested. It is best approached by reminding ourselves of a fact which every writer on the subject whom I have read completely ignores. Far the best of the American magazines bears the significant title Fantasy and Science Fiction. In it (as also in many other publications of the same type) you will find not only stories about space travel but stories about gods, ghosts, ghouls, demons, fairies, monsters, etc. This gives us our clue. The last subspecies of science fiction represents simply an imaginative impulse as old as the human race working under the special conditions of our own time. It is not difficult to see why those who wish to visit strange regions in search of such beauty, awe, or terror as the actual world does not supply have increasingly been driven to other planets or other stars. It is the result of increasing geographical knowledge. The less known the real world is, the more plausibly your marvels can be located near at hand. As the area of knowledge spreads, you need to go further afield: like a man moving his house further and further out into the country as the new building estates catch him up. Thus in Grimm’s Märchen, stories told by peasants in wooded country, you need only walk an hour’s journey into the next forest to find a home for your witch or ogre . . . . By the eighteenth century we have to move well out into the country. Paltock and Swift take us to remote seas, Voltaire to America. Rider Haggard had to go to unexplored Africa or Tibet; Bulwer-Lytton, to the depths of the earth. It might have been predicted that stories of this kind would, sooner or later, have to leave Tellus altogether . . . .

In this kind of story the pseudoscientific apparatus is to be taken simply as a “machine” in the sense which that word bore for the neoclassical critics. The most superficial appearance of plausibility—the merest sop to our critical intellect—will do. I am inclined to think that frankly supernatural methods are best. I took a hero once to Mars in a spaceship, but when I knew better I had angels convey him to Venus. Nor need the strange worlds, when we get there, be at all strictly tied to scientific probabilities. It is their wonder, or beauty, or suggestiveness that matter. When I myself put canals on Mars I believe I already knew that better telescopes had dissipated that old optical delusion. The point was that they were part of the Martian myth as it already existed in the common mind . . . .

In all these the impossibility is, as I have said, a postulate, something to be granted before the story gets going. Within that frame we inhabit the known world and are as realistic as anyone else. But in the next type (and the last I shall deal with) the marvelous is in the grain of the whole work. We are, throughout, in another world. What makes that world valuable is not, of course, mere multiplication of the marvelous either for comic effect (as in Baron Munchausen and sometimes in Ariosto and Boiardo) or for mere astonishment (as, I think, in the worst of the Arabian Nights or in some children’s stories), but for its quality, its flavor. If good novels are comments on life, good stories of this sort (which are very much rarer) are actual additions to life; they give, like certain rare dreams, sensations we never had before, and enlarge our conception of the range of possible experience. Hence the difficulty of discussing them at all with those who refuse to be taken out of what they call “real life”—which means, perhaps, the groove through some far wider area of possible experience to which our senses and our biological, social, or economic interests usually confine us—or, if taken, can see nothing outside it but aching boredom or sickening monstrosity. They shudder and ask to go home. Specimens of this kind, at its best, will never be common. I would include parts of the Odyssey, the Hymn to Aphrodite, much of the Kalevala and The Faerie Queene, some of Malory (but none of Malory’s best work) and more of Huon, parts of Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen, “The Ancient Mariner” and Christabel, Beckford’s Vathek, Morris’s Jason and the prologue (little else) of the Earthly Paradise, MacDonald’s Phantastes, Lilith, and The Golden Key, Eddison’s Worm Ouroboros, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, and that shattering, intolerable, and irresistible work, David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus. Also Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan. Some of Ray Bradbury’s stories perhaps make the grade. W. H. Hodgson’s The Night Land would have made it in eminence from the unforgettable somber splendor of the images it presents, if it were not disfigured by a sentimental and irrelevant erotic interest and by a foolish and flat archaism of style. (I do not mean that all archaism is foolish, and have never seen the modern hatred of it cogently defended. If archaism succeeds in giving us the sense of having entered a remote world, it justifies itself. Whether it is correct by philological standards does not then matter a rap.)

I am not sure that anyone has satisfactorily explained the keen, lasting, and solemn pleasure which such stories can give. Jung, who went furthest, seems to me to produce as his explanation one more myth which affects us in the same way as the rest. Surely the analysis of water should not itself be wet? I shall not attempt to do what Jung failed to do. But I would like to draw attention to a neglected fact: the astonishing intensity of the dislike which some readers feel for the mythopoeic. I first found it out by accident. A lady (and, what makes the story more piquant, she herself was a Jungian psychologist by profession) had been talking about a dreariness which seemed to be creeping over her life, the drying up in her of the power to feel pleasure, the aridity of her mental landscape. Drawing a bow at a venture, I asked, “Have you any taste for fantasies and fairy tales?” I shall never forget how her muscles tightened, her hands clenched themselves, her eyes started as if with horror, and her voice changed, as she hissed out, “I loathe them.” Clearly we here have to do not with a critical opinion but with something like a phobia. And I have seen traces of it elsewhere, though never quite so violent. On the other side, I know from my own experience, that those who like the mythopoeic like it with almost equal intensity. The two phenomena, taken together, should at least dispose of the theory that it is something trivial. It would seem from the reactions it produces, that the mythopoeic is rather, for good or ill, a mode of imagination which does something to us at a deep level. If some seem to go to it in almost compulsive need, others seem to be in terror of what they may meet there. But that is of course only suspicion. What I feel far more sure of is the critical caveat which I propounded a while ago. Do not criticize what you have no taste for without great caution. And above all, do not ever criticize what you simply can’t stand. I will lay all the cards on the table. I have long since discovered my own private phobia, the thing I can’t bear in literature, the thing which makes me profoundly uncomfortable: the representation of anything like a quasi love affair between two children. It embarrasses and nauseates me. But of course I regard this not as a charter to write slashing reviews of books in which the hated theme occurs, but as a warning not to pass judgment on them at all. For my reaction is unreasonable: such child loves quite certainly occur in real life and I can give no reason why they should not be represented in art. If they touch the scar of some early trauma in me, that is my misfortune. And I would venture to advise all who are attempting to become critics to adopt the same principle. A violent and actually resentful reaction to all books of a certain kind, or to situations of a certain kind, is a danger signal. For I am convinced that good adverse criticism is the most difficult thing we have to do. I would advise everyone to begin it under the most favorable conditions: this is, where you thoroughly know and heartily like the thing the author is trying to do, and have enjoyed many books where it was done well. Then you will have some chance of really showing that he has failed and perhaps even of showing why. But if our real reaction to a book is “Ugh! I just can’t bear this sort of thing,” then I think we shall not be able to diagnose whatever real faults it has. We may labor to conceal our emotion, but we shall end in a welter of emotive, unanalyzed, vogue words—“arch,” “facetious,” “bogus,” “adolescent,” “immature,” and the rest. When we really know what is wrong, we need none of these.

“On Science Fiction,” Of Other Worlds

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