Twitter user @Thiago posts the following mega-đ (3750) words. I reproduce it as text below to allow quoting passages in comments. Click the title line to view the original on đ.
The history of modern SF is one of five attempted revolutions â one success and four enriching failures. Iâm going to offer you a look at them from an unusual angle, a political one. This turns out to be useful perspective because more of the history of SF than one might expect is intertwined with political questions, and SF had an important role in giving birth to at least one distinct political ideology that is alive and important today.
The first and greatest of the revolutions came out of the minds of John Wood Campbell and Robert Heinlein, the editor and the author who invented modern science fiction. The pivotal year was 1937, when John Campbell took over the editorship of Astounding Science Fiction. He published Robert Heinleinâs first story a little over a year later.
Pre-Campbellian science fiction had bubbled up from the American pulp magazines of the 1910s and 1920s, inspired by pioneers like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells and promoted by the indefatigable Hugo Gernsback (who had a better claim than anyone else to have invented the genre as a genre, and consequently got SFâs equivalent of the Oscar named after him). Early âscientifictionâ mostly recycled an endless series of cardboard cliches: mad scientists, lost races, menacing bug-eyed monsters, coruscating death rays, and screaming blondes in brass underwear. With a very few exceptions (like E.E. âDocâ Smithâs Skylark of Space and sequels) the stuff was teeth-jarringly bad; unless you have a specialist interest in the history of the genre I donât recommend seeking it out.
John Campbell had been one of the leading writers of space opera from 1930, second only to E.E. âDocâ Smith in inventiveness. When he took over Astounding, he did so with a vision: one that demanded higher standards of both scientific plausibility and story-crafting skill than the field had ever seen before. He discovered and trained a group of young writers who would dominate the field for most of the next fifty years. Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Poul Anderson, and Hal Clement were among them.
Heinlein was the first of Campbellâs discoveries and, in the end, the greatest. It was Heinlein who introduced into SF the technique of description by indirection â the art of describing his future worlds not through lumps of exposition but by presenting it through the eyes of his characters, subtly leading the reader to fill in by deduction large swathes of background that a lesser author would have drawn in detail.
(Many accounts have it that Heinlein invented SFnal exposition by indirection, but credit for that innovation may be due to none other than Rudyard Kipling, whose 1912 story With The Night Mail anticipated the style and expository mechanics of Campbellian hard science fiction fourteen years before Hugo Gernsbackâs invention of the âscientifictionâ genre and twenty-seven years before Heinleinâs first publication. Heinlein professed high regard for Kipling all his life and included tributes to Kipling in several of his works; it is possible, even probable, that he saw himself as Kiplingâs literary successor.)
From World War II into the 1950s Campbellâs writers â many working scientists and engineers who knew leading-edge technology from the inside â created the Golden Age of science fiction. Other SF pulpzines competing with Astounding raised their standards and new ones were founded. The field took the form of an extended conversation, a kind of proto-futurology worked out through stories that often implicitly commented on each other.
While space operas and easy adventure stories continued to be written, the center of the Campbellian revolution was âhard SFâ, a form that made particularly stringent demands on both author and reader. Hard SF demanded that the science be consistent both internally and with known science about the real world, permitting only a bare minimum of McGuffins like faster-than-light star drives. Hard SF stories could be, and were, mercilessly slammed because the author had calculated an orbit or gotten a detail of physics or biology wrong. Readers, on the other hand, needed to be scientifically literate to appreciate the full beauty of what the authors were doing.
There was also a political aura that went with the hard-SF style, one exemplified by Campbell and right-hand man Robert Heinlein. That tradition was of ornery and insistant individualism, veneration of the competent man, an instinctive distrust of coercive social engineering and a rock-ribbed empiricism that that valued knowing how things work and treated all political ideologizing with suspicion. Exceptions like Asimovâs Foundation novels only threw the implicit politics of most other Campbellian SF into sharper relief.
At the time, this very American position was generally thought of by both allies and opponents as a conservative or right-wing one. But the SF communityâs version was never conservative in the strict sense of venerating past social norms â how could it be, when SF literature cheerfully contemplated radical changes in social arrangements and even human nature itself? SFâs insistent individualism also led it to reject racism and feature strong female characters decades before the rise of political correctness ritualized these behaviors in other forms of art.
Nevertheless, some writers found the confines of the field too narrow, or rejected Campbellian orthodoxy for other reasons. The first revolt against hard SF came in the early 1950s from a group of young writers centered around Frederik Pohl and the Futurians fan club in New York. The Futurians invented a kind of SF in which science was not at the center, and the transformative change motivating the story was not technological but political or social. Much of their output was sharply satirical in tone, and tended to de-emphasize individual heroism. The Futurian masterpiece was the Frederik Pohl/Cyril Kornbluth collaboration The Space Merchants (1956).
The Futurian revolt was political as well as aesthetic. Not until the late 1970s did any the participants admit that many of the key Futurians had histories as ideological Communists or fellow travellers, and that fact remained relatively unknown in the field well into the 1990s. As with later revolts against the Campbellian tradition, part of the motivation was a desire to escape the âconservativeâ politics that went with that tradition. While the Futuriansâ work was well understood at the time to be a poke at the consumer capitalism and smugness of the postwar years, only in retrospect is it clear how much they owed to the Frankfurt school of Marxist critical theory.
But the Futurian revolt was half-hearted, semi-covert, and easily absorbed by the Campbellian mainstream of the SF field; by the mid-1960s, sociological extrapolation had become a standard part of the toolkit even for the old-school Golden Agers, and it never challenged the centrality of hard SF. The Futuriansâ Marxist underpinnings lay buried and undiscussed for decades after the fact.
Perception of Campbellian SF as a âright-wingâ phenomenon lingered, however, and helped motivate the next revolt in the mid-1960s, around the time I started reading the stuff. The field was in bad shape then, though I lacked the perspective to see so at the time. The death of the pulp-zines in the 1950s had pretty much killed off the SF short-fiction market, and the post-Star-Wars boom that would make SF the second most successful fiction genre after romances was still a decade in the future.
The early Golden Agers were hitting the thirty-year mark in their writing careers, and although some would find a second wind in later decades many were beginning to get a bit stale. Heinlein reached his peak as a writer with 1967âs The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and, plagued by health problems, began a long decline.
These objective problems combined with, or perhaps led to, an insurgency within the field â the âNew Waveâ, an attempt to import the techniques and imagery of literary fiction into SF. As with that of the Futurians, the New Wave was both a stylistic revolt and a political one.
The New Waveâs inventors (notably Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss) were British socialists and Marxists who rejected individualism, linear exposition, happy endings, scientific rigor and the U.S.âs cultural hegemony over the SF field in one fell swoop. The New Waveâs later American exponents were strongly associated with the New Left and opposition to the Vietnam War, leading to some rancorous public disputes in which politics was tangled together with definitional questions about the nature of SF and the direction of the field.
But the New Wave, after 1965, was not so easily dismissed or assimilated as the Futurians had been. Amidst a great deal of self-indulgent crap and drug-fueled psychedelizing, there shone a few jewels â Brian Aldissâs Hothouse stories (1961, retrospectively recruited into the post-1965 New Wave by their author) Langdon Jonesâs The Great Clock (1966), Phillip JosĂ© Farmerâs Riders of the Purple Wage (1967), Harlan Ellisonâs I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream (1967), and Fritz Leiberâs One Station of the Way (1968) stand out as examples.
As with the Futurians, the larger SF field rapidly absorbed some New Wave techniques and concerns. Notably, the New Wavers broke the SF taboo on writing about sex in any but the most cryptically coded ways, a stricture previously so rigid that only Heinlein himself had had the stature to really break it, in Stranger In A Strange Land (1961) â a book that helped shape the hippie counterculture of the later 1960s.
But the New Wave also exacerbated long-standing critical arguments about the nature of science fiction itself, and briefly threatened to displace hard SF from the center of the field. Brian Aldissâs 1969 dismissal of space exploration as âan old-fashioned diversion conducted with infertile phallic symbolsâ was typical New Wave rhetoric, and looked like it might have some legs at the time.
As a politico-cultural revolt against the American vision of SF, however, the New Wave eventually failed just as completely as the Futurians had. Its writers were already running out of steam in 1977 when Star Wars, rather obviously patterned on Edmond Hamiltonâs The Star Kings (1949), took the imagery of pre-Campbellian space opera to the mainstream culture. The half-decade following (my college years, as it happened) was a period of drift and confusion only ended by the publication of David Brinâs Startide Rising in 1982.
Brin, and his colleagues in the group that came to be known as the âKiller Bsâ (Greg Bear and Gregory Benford), reasserted the primacy of hard SF done in the grand Campbellian manner. Campbell himself had died in 1971 right at the high-water mark of the New Wave, but Heinlein and Anderson and the other surviving luminaries of the Campbellian era had no trouble recognizing their inheritors. To everyoneâs surprise, the New Old Wave proved to be not just artistically successful but commercially popular as as well, with its writers becoming the first new stars of the post-1980 boom in SF publishing.
Before getting back to the Killer Bs and their Campbellian revival, I need to point out an important bit of background. Besides helping spawn the New Wave, the Vietnam War broke open a long-standing fissure in the ârightâ wing of American politics. One kind of right-winger was the cultural conservative, frequently with both religious and militarist beliefs. The other kind was the âclassical-liberalâ or small-government conservative. These two very different tendencies had been forced into alliance in both the U.S. and Great Britain by the rise of the socialist Left after 1910.
The aftermath of Barry Goldwaterâs failed presidential campaign in 1964 had strained the alliance between these factions almost to the breaking point. The Vietnam War broke it, at least for some. A mixed group of dissident classical liberals and anti-war radicals formed the Libertarian Party in 1971, repudiating both the rightâs cultural conservatism and the leftâs redistributionist statism.
This is worth noticing in a history of SF because the platform of the Libertarian Party read like a reinvented, radicalized and intellectualized form of the implicit politics of Campbellian hard SF. This was not a coincidence; many of the founding Libertarians were science-fiction fans. They drew inspiration not merely from the polemical political science fiction of Ayn Rand â The Fountainhead (1943); Atlas Shrugged (1957) â but from the entire canon of Campbellian SF.
Something rather similar had happened in the late 19th century, when Edward Bellamyâs Looking Backward From The Year 2000 (1887) and various other works of utopian fiction now forgotten had helped shape the thinking of early Socialists. But this time the connection was more two-way and intimate; novels like Heinleinâs The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress (1967), H. Beam Piperâs Lone Star Planet (1958, originally as A Planet For Texans), and Poul Andersonâs No Truce With Kings (1963), among many others, came to be seen retrospectively as proto-libertarian arguments not just by their readers but, often, by the authors of the novels themselves.
The new hard SF of the 1980s returned to Golden Age themes and images, if not quite with the linear simplicity of Golden Age technique. It also reverted to the anti-political/individualist values traditional in the field. This time around, with explicit libertarianism a feature of the political landscape, the split between order-worshiping conservatism and the individualist impulse was more marked. At one extreme, some SF (such as that of L. Neil Smith) assumed the character of radical libertarian propaganda. At the other extreme, a subgenre of SF that could fairly be described as conservative/militarist power fantasies emerged, notably in the writing of Jerry Pournelle and David Drake.
Tension between these groups sometimes flared into public animosity. Both laid claims to Robert Heinleinâs legacy. Heinlein himself (increasingly erratic as a writer but still the Grand Old Man of the field, immensely respected by fans and even more by other authors) maintained friendly relationships with conservatives but described himself as a libertarian for more than a decade before his death in 1988.
Symbolically, Heinlein was the first among equals in a study commission of SF authors formed by Ronald Reagan to consider the feasibility of an anti-ballistic missile defense. Commission member Gregory Benford later described President Reagan as âa science fiction fanâ, and the vision that emerged as the Strategic Defense Initiative was startlingly SFnal. Reaganâs threat to build SDI at the Reykjavik summit with Gorbachev in 1986 triggered the collapse of Soviet strategic ambitions as Mikhail Gorbachev realized that the Soviet Union could not match the U.S.âs raise in the geopolitical poker game. The Berlin Wall fell three years later and the Soviet Union collapsed three years after that; science fiction saved the world. Somewhere, Campbell and Heinlein were probably smiling.
Heinleinâs personal evolution from New Deal left-liberal to Goldwater conservative to anti-statist radical both led and reflected larger trends. By the time of the Soviet Unionâs collapse in 1992, depictions of explicitly anarcho-libertarian future societies had begun to filter into non-political SF works like Vernor Vingeâs Realtime sequence (1985) and Joe Haldemanâs Buying Time (1989). Haldemanâs Conch Republic and Novysibirsk were all the more convincing for not being subjects of polemic.
The 1980s also brought us a quasi-politicized movement pulling in the opposite direction â cyberpunk, the third failed revolution against Campbellian SF. William Gibson, who is generally credited with launching this subgenre in his Neuromancer (1984), was not a political writer. But Bruce Sterling, who promoted Gibson and became the chief ideologue of anti-Campbellianism in the late 1980s, called cyberpunk âthe Movementâ in a self-conscious reference to the heady era of 1960s student radicalism. The cyberpunks positioned themselves particularly against the carnographic conservative military SF of Jerry Pournelle, David Drake, and their lower-rent imitators â not exactly a hard target.
Despite such posturing, the cyberpunks were neither as stylistically innovative nor as politically challenging as the New Wave had been. Gibsonâs prose has aptly been described as Raymond Chandler in mirror-shades. Cyberpunk themes (virtual reality, pervasive computing, cyborging and biosculpture, corporate feudalism) had been anticipated in earlier works like Frederik Pohlâs Day Million (1966), Vernor Vingeâs hard-SF classic True Names (1978), and even further back in The Space Merchants (1956). Cyberpunk imagery (decayed urban landscapes, buzzcuts, chrome and black leather) quickly became a cliche replicated in dozens of computer games.
Neal Stephenson wrote a satirical finis to the cyberpunk genre in Snow Crash (1992), which with Bruce Sterlingâs Schismatrix (1985) and Walter John Williamsâs Hardwired (1986) was very close to being the only work to meet the standard set by Neuromancer. While most cyberpunk took for granted a background in which capitalism had decayed into an oppressive corporate feudalism under which most individuals could be nothing but alienated and powerless, the future of Snow Crash was a tellingly libertarian one. The bedrock individualism of Campbellian SF reasserted itself with a smartass grin.
By the time cyberpunk fizzled out, most fans had been enjoying the hard-SF renaissance for a decade; the New Wave was long gone, and cyberpunk had attracted more notice outside the SF field than within it. The leaders of SFâs tiny in-house critical establishment, however (figures like Samuel Delany and David Hartwell), remained fascinated by New Wave relics like Thomas Disch and Philip K. Dick, or anti-Campbellian fringe figures like Suzette Hadin Elgin and Octavia Butler.
While this was going on, the readers voted with their Hugo ballots largely for writers that were squarely within the Campbellian tradition â Golden Age survivors, the killer Bs, and newer writers like Lois McMaster Bujold and Greg Egan (whose 1997 work Diaspora may just be the single most audacious and brilliant hard-SF novel in the entire history of the field).
In 1994, critical thinking within the SF field belatedly caught up with reality. Credit for this goes to David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer, whose analysis in the anthology The Ascent of Wonder finally acknowledged what should have been obvious all along. Hard SF is the vital heart of the field, the radiant core from which ideas and prototype worlds diffuse outwards to be appropriated by writers of lesser world-building skill but perhaps greater stylistic and literary sophistication. While there are other modes of SF that have their place, they remain essentially derivations of or reactions against hard SF, and cannot even be properly understood without reference to its tropes, conventions, and imagery.
Furthermore, Gregory Benfordâs essay in The Ascent of Wonder on the meaning of SF offered a characterization of the genre which may well prove final. He located the core of SF in the experience of âsense of wonderâ, not merely as a thalamic thrill but as the affirmation that the universe has a knowable order that is discoverable through reason and science.
I think I can go further than Hartwell or Kramer or Benford in defining the relationship between hard SF and the rest of the field. To do this, I need to introduce the concept linguist George Lakoff calls âradial categoryâ, one that is not defined by any one logical predicate, but by a central prototype and a set of permissible or customary variations. As a simple example, in English the category âfruitâ does not correspond to any uniformity of structure that a botanist could recognize. Rather, the category has a prototype âappleâ, and things are recognized as fruits to the extent that they are either (a) like an apple, or (b) like something that has already been sorted into the âlike an appleâ category.
Radial categories have central members (âappleâ, âpearâ, âorangeâ) whose membership is certain, and peripheral members (âcoconutâ, âavocadoâ) whose membership is tenuous. Membership is graded by the distance from the central prototype â roughly, the number of traits that have to mutate to get one from being like the prototype to like the instance in question. Some traits are important and tend to be conserved across the entire radial category (strong flavor including sweetness) while some are only weakly bound (bright color).
In most radial categories, it is possible to point out members that are counterexamples to any single intensional (âlogicalâ) definition, but traits that are common to most of the core prototypes nevertheless tend to be strongly bound. Thus, âcoconutâ is a counterexample to the strongly-bound trait that fruits have soft skins, but it is sorted as âfruitâ because (like the prototype members) it has an easily-chewable interior with a sweet flavor.
SF is a radial category in which the prototypes are certain classics of hard SF. This is true whether you are mapping individual works by affinity or subgenres like space opera, technology-of-magic story, utopian/dystopian extrapolation, etc. So in discussing the traits of SF as a whole, the relevant question is not âwhich traits are universalâ but âwhich traits are strongly boundâ â or, almost equivalently, âwhat are the shared traits of most of the core (hard-SF) prototypesâ.
The strong binding between hard SF and libertarian politics continues to be a fact of life in the field. It it is telling that the only form of politically-inspired award presented annually at the World Science Fiction Convention is the Libertarian Futurist Societyâs âPrometheusâ. There is no socialist, liberal, moderate, conservative or fascist equivalent of the class of libertarian SF writers including L. Neil Smith, F. Paul Wilson, Brad Linaweaver, or J. Neil Schulman; their books, even when they are shrill and indifferently-written polemical tracts, actually sell â and sell astonishingly well â to SF fans.
Of course, there are people in the SF field who find this deeply uncomfortable. Since the centrality of hard SF has become inescapable, resistance now takes the form of attempts to divorce hard SF from libertarianism â to preserve the methods and conceptual apparatus of hard SF while repudiating its political aura. Hartwell & Kramerâs 2002 followup to The Ascent of Wonder, The Hard SF Renaissance, takes up this argument in its introduction and explanatory notes.
The Hard SF Renaissance presents itself as a dialogue between old-school Campbellian hard SF and an attempt to construct a âRadical Hard SFâ that is not in thrall to right-wing tendencies. It is clear that the editorsâ sympathies lie with the âRadicalsâ, not least from the very fact that they identify libertarianism as a right-wing phenomenon. This is an error characteristic of left-leaning thinkers, who tend to assume that anything not âleftâ is ârightâ and that approving of free markets somehow implies social conservatism.
Is the âRadical Hard SFâ program possible? Partly this is a matter of definition. I have already shown that the SF genre cannot be culturally or politically conservative; by nature it must be prepared to contemplate â and implicitly advocate â radical change. So either the partisans of âRadical Hard SFâ are just terminally confused, pushing against an open door, or what they really object to is hard SFâs libertarian connection.