Damon Knight and the Conceptual Ancestry of the Mundane SF Movement

"Damon Knight and the Conceptual Ancestry

of the Mundane SF Movement"

(c) 2011 by Jordan S. Bassior

Introduction

As those of you who've been following this blogzine may have noticed, I love both space opera and planetary romances, and have a deep contempt for the Mundane science-fiction movement.  In "The Fear of Boundlessness" and "The Promise of Boundlessness," I discussed the conceptual origins of the movement in an implicitly pre-Copernican cosmology, in which the Earth is the only "really real" place, eternal home to human actions, and the "Heavens" are a spiritual place, literally above gross human concerns; and discussed the fear of the true scale of the Universe in space and time, as revealed by modern astronomy and astrophysics.  In those articles, and again in "Selective Science for Mundane Fiction," I demonstrated in detail that the Mundane movement, far from being rooted in "hard science," operates by ignoring those aspects of "hard science" which would render the limitations they propose on the human future to be silly, short-sighted and absurdly parochial in a vast Universe. 

Recently, I discovered a forty-year old article, "Goodbye, Henry J. Kostkos, Goodbye," by Damon Knight (1922-2002), in Clarion II (1972), which demonstrated even older roots to this attitude, way back in the American branch of the late New Wave.  Knight shows in this essay both a greater grasp of science than the modern Mundanes (though he makes a major error in his understanding of cultural evolution) but also more nakedly displays the hatred of humanity which lies at the core of the Mundaniacs, and for this reason the article is highly interesting.

I. Donald A. Wollheim's Cosmogony of the Future

Damon Knight starts by explaining that he no longer can take the old space operas and planetary romances seriously and thus cannot derive as much pleasure from them as was once possible.  He says that the reason why is that there has been a fundamental shift in the attitude of science fiction, in which he has shared, from what we would today call one paradigm of the future to another.

The "old" view, as he terms it, was famously outlined by Donald A. Wollheim (1914-1990) in The Universe Makers (1971).  Summarized, Wollheim's "Cosmogony of the Future" divides the likely human future, as explored by science fiction, into a number of "stages," as follows (reprinted and summarized by James Gunn and Thomas Seay here:


First we have the initial voyages to the moon and to the planets of our Solar System. In this sequence we also include stories of the contact of man with intelligent species elsewhere in this system—Martians, Jovians, Venusians, if any. Stories of the first efforts to set up terrestrial bases on such planets. Stories of the first colonies of such worlds, their problems internal and external, their conflicts with the parent world, their breakaway or interplanetary commerce, spaceship trade lanes, space pirates, asteroid mining, the weird wonders of the Outer Planets, and so forth.

Second, the first flights to the stars. The problem of whether science can ever exceed the speed of light: a very important one where the problem of colonization is concerned. Starships, ships that must travel centuries and contain generations, descended from the original crews. Other planets of other stars. Intelligences on such planets and our problems with them or against them. Human colonies on other starry systems. Contact with Mother Earth, independence or dependence. Commerce, exploitation or otherwise.

Third, the Rise of the Galactic Empire. The rise of contact and commerce between many human-colonized worlds or many worlds of alien intelligences that have come to trust and do business with one another. The problem of mutual relations and the solution, usually in the form of treaties or defensive alliances. Implacable aliens in the cosmos who must be fought. The need for defense. The rise of industrial or financial or political powers, the eventual triumph of one and the establishment of a federation, a union, an alliance, or an autocratic empire of worlds, dominated usually from Old Earth.

Fourth, the Galactic Empire in full bloom, regardless of what form it takes. Commerce between worlds as established fact, and adventures while dealing with worlds in and out of the Empire. The farthest planets, those of the Galactic Rim, considered as mavericks. The problems of aliens again outside the Empire, and outside our own galaxy. Politics within the government setup, intrigues, and dynasties, robotic mentalities versus human mentalities. "Terra-forming" worlds for colonization. The exploration of the rest of the galaxy by official exploration ships, or adventurers, or commercial pioneers.

Fifth, the Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire. Intrigue and palace revolt. Breakaway planets. The alliance of worlds strained beyond its limits by rebellion, alien wars, corruption, scientific inability to keep up with internal or external problems. The rise of restless subject worlds. Decline, then loss of contact with farthest worlds, crumbling of commerce, failure of space lanes, distrust, finally worlds withdrawing into themselves as the empire/alliance/federation/union becomes an empty shell or is destroyed at its heart.

Sixth, the Interregnum. Worlds reverting to prespace-flight conditions, savagery, barbarism, primitive forms of life, superstition. Worlds taking to barbarian raids on defenseless isolated planets, hastening the downfall of knowledge. Fragments of space flight, fragments of empire, some starships, some efforts to revive. Thousands of years of loss of contact. Humanity in this period becomes indigenous to most of the habitable planets of the galaxy, forgetting origins. Evolutionary changes may take place. Alterations of form to fit differing world conditions—giant men, tiny men, water-dwelling men, flying men, mutations.

Seventh, the Rise of a Permanent Galactic Civilization. The restoration of commerce between worlds. The reexploration of lost and uncontacted worlds and the bringing them back to high-technology, democratic levels. The efforts to establish trade between human worlds that no longer seem kin. Beating down new efforts to form empires, efforts which sometimes succeed and revert to approximations of the previous period, with similar results. The exploration of other galaxies and the entire universe.

Eighth, the Challenge to God. Galactic harmony and an undreamed-of high level of knowledge leads to experiments in creation, to harmony between galactic clusters, and possible explorations of the other dimensions of existence. The effort to match Creation and to solve the last secrets of the universe. Sometimes seeking out and confronting the Creative Force or Being or God itself, sometimes merging with that Creative First Premise. The end of the universe, the end of time, the beginning of a new universe or a new time-space continuum.

(from Wollheim. The Universe Makers. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.)

Now, there are a few points I would make about this outline.

A.  It is very generic, as it has to be to fit many different science fiction universes.  For instance, it specifies neither the sorts of technologies being used for interplanetary, interstellar or intergalactic flight or colonization, nor does it specify the governments which administer these future human polities.  It merely states what technologies and governments and situations might appear at the various stages.  It also says nothing about how long each stage lasts, save for the occasional "centuries" or "thousands of years."

B.  It makes one very big assumption:  namely, that the human race will survive long enough to colonize the other worlds.  In general, science-fiction futures may be divided into "optimistic" or "pessimistic" based on whether or not they assume that high-tech humanity will survive long enough to colonize other worlds.  (The third option, that high-tech humanity will simply live on Earth and only Earth forever, makes very little sense, unless "forever" is a very short time even on a species timescale).

C.  Given the assumption that high-tech humanity survives long enough to colonize other worlds, it is difficult to argue against the fundamental premises of this "cosmogony of the future," because they are firmly rooted in historical reality.  Humans do expand into any and all available environments, they do found colonial empires, and their civilizations do rise and fall with some regularity.  Of course, this sequence could at any point be aborted by the extermination of the human race at any stage, as mentioned under "B" -- though the human race would be the more difficult to exterminate the more widely they colonized, for obvious reasons.

So, given the strong logic underlying Wollheim's outline, what logical arguments does Knight advance against this scheme?

He doesn't.  Instead, he advances a set of feelings:  and feelings of a nature highly-relevant to the later Mundane SF Movement.

II.   Knight's Feelings About the Cosmogony of the Future

Knight first points out that Wollheim analogizes humanity to mold in a petri dish.  Wollheim had written:

Let us watch what happens next ... The several spots grow.  They begin to touch each other's borders.  There is a brief period of stasis, then they grow around and into each other.  In time the petri dish is one solid surface of mold life and no untouched part of the nutriment can be seen.  The mold flourishes.  It grows dense.  It grows tall.  It then flowers -- it begins to form spore balls.

Assume that the lid of the dish is taken off.  The spore balls reach maturity -- they burst and send out into the atmosphere millions and millions of new spore seeds to float away.  After this flowering the mold forest begins to diminish.  The nutriment of the dish is being exhausted.  Some of the mold begins to dry up, to die away ...

Knight considers this analogy somehow detrimental to Wollheim's point, but actually it's an excellent one:  this is a good description of how self-replicating entities (like life forms, or cultural entities) behave.  They expand until they encounter an obstacle, then (if this obstacle is somehow surmounted) expand further.  An area which they have thickly inhabited for long tends to die, because the local resources have been exhausted.

This is of course, an argument against trying to live on Just One Earth forever.  The longer we live in only one tiny spot in the Universe, the greater the risk of local resource exhaustion.  The mold culture would not have benefitted had the lid of the dish remained on forever -- it would have died.  Likewise, a humanity confined to one world, for the rest of its existence, will die out sooner than if it expands to many worlds.

Knight then asks:

But what is the basis for this almost universal belief that it is good for us to explore, colonize, and annex new worlds?

He clearly considers this a rhetorical question, because he never answers it.  But the question is answerable.  We believe this for two cultural-evolutionary reasons, one Darwinian and the other Lamarckian in nature. 

The Darwinian one is that cultures which do not "explore, colonize and annex new worlds" are very quickly relegated to the sidelines in competition with other cultures, if they do not wind up so weak in comparison with other cultures that they are casually and with ridiculous ease "colonized" and "annexed" by those other cultures.  Consequently, we inherit our beliefs overwhelmingly from cultures which do so expand.

The Lamarckian one is that humans, being sapient, are quite capable of seeing that cultures which fail to grow will die, and thus want their own cultures to keep on growing, that they may last as long and rise as high as possible.  Consequently, save in very sick cultures, most thinkers consider expansion and growth to be good things in and of themselves.

Knight then parenthisizes:

(I call it "almost universal," because there are some few non-believers -- the American Indians, for example, the black people of Africa, etc.) 

which is a hilariously-condescending and historically-ignorant statement.  In point of fact the American Indians and Black Africans did consider expansion and growth to be good things, and repeatedly demonstrated this by producing and trading things and warring against their rivals.  These native peoples simply lost out in competition to Western cultures.  Today (and in 1972 for that matter), they are rising again, in part because they have adopted superior Western attitudes and in part because the West is no longer hostile to them.

Knight again asks rhetorically:

Wouldn't it perhaps be better to stay on this planet, clean it up a little, and reduce our numbers to some reasonable figure, so that we don't have "to dry up, to die away?"

Again, this is a question that is far from rhetorical, but instead deserves some analysis and answer.

First, note that this is a clear "false dichotomy."  Knight assumes that we must either overpopulate the Earth and then spill out to other worlds, leaving a ruined planet behind us, or utterly avoid expansion beyond the Earth's surface.  He ignores the obvious possibility that we might "clean up" the Earth while colonizing other worlds, which would of course be a more desirable outcome than either of Knight's offered choices.  Even more fundamentally, he ignores the possibility that access to the resources of other worlds might make it easier to "clean up" the Earth, rather than the effort of such colonization making it more difficult.

Secondly, the implicit assumption underlying this false dichotomy is the belief that, if we have the OPTION of colonizing other worlds in our future, we will be much more likely to ruin the Earth.  And, of course, this is one of the exact assumptions of Mundane SF, namely:

That this dream of abundance [from colonizing other worlds] can encourage a wasteful attitude to the abundance that is here on Earth.

But it's also interesting to examine the dichotomy on its own terms.  If we were limited to the choice between ruining the Earth and expanding outward, or not ruining the Earth but also not expanding outward, which would be better for the human species?  Logically, the first one (ruin the Earth while expanding to other worlds) because that would render us as a species independent of the fate of any one planet.  (Of course, wrecking the Earth would be stupid, but I did specify limitation to the false dichotomy for the duration of this paragraph).

But Knight misses an even larger point.  There is no one leader which can decide for the whole human race whether or not we will stay home or expand outward.  Just because (say) America, or Russia, accepts Knight's argument does not mean that (say) China, or India, or for that matter Lockheed-Martin, will accept this argument.  Inevitably, those human groups which choose to expand offworld will gain control of greater energies and territories and consequently wealth and power than those who remain at home.

And even if such a leader existed, he could not make the decision for all time.  Leaders are mortal, ideologies are mortal, civilizations are mortal.  If, for instance, China became the Universal State of the Global Civilization, and decided to not only not expand outward but to violently prevent everyone from doing so, then Man would be confined to the Earth -- for the duration of the dominance of the Chinese Global Empire.  But the Chinese Global Empire would be unlikely to rule humanity forever, and a successor state might very well adopt a different policy. 

Even an immortal Emperor could not hold on to power forever.  All things pass, and the only way in which the decision could be truly final would be if the human race was annihilated at the same time that the Emperor fell from power.  This is of course possible, but hardly necessary, or even likely.

Knight then says that Wollheim

can't see that the same goofy idealism that made us welcome the atomic bomb (because it would lead to the world state and Utopia), urbanization, the federal highway program, and so on (Progress) will lead us to still greater triumphs of stupidity and greed if, God forbid, the program of interstellar conquest he cherishes should ever be carried out.

(emphasis mine)

To begin with, it is hardly "goofy idealism" to welcome any or all of the list of technological advances.  The "atomic bomb" was part of the general unlocking of the power of the atom, which among other things has given us nuclear energy.  Even the specifically-explosive aspect of nuclear energy turned out to be beneficial:  it ended the Pacific War and prevented the Cold War from developing into World War III.

"Urbanization" (which began thousands of years ago, and is thus hardly a recent development even from the POV of 1972) has enabled craft specialization, the development of markets and intellectual cross-fertilization on a very large scale.  Were it not for urbanization, we would not have developed general literacy, and there would be no forum within which Damon Knight could make this argument!

It is debatable whether the US Federal Interstate Highway System (which is of what Damon Knight speaks here, at the time of writing the enabling Act was only 16 years old) was an optimum solution to the problem of interstate cargo transportation and passenger travel (in point of fact it was meant as a solution to the problem of interstate military mechanized mobility, but like the Roman roads of two millennia earlier turned out to have many other useful applications), but it certainly was a solution.  The interstate highways make long-distance personal travel much easier, and today carry about 24 percent of all our highway traffic.

So all three strike me as mostly-good things, and if these be "stupidity and greed," make mine a moron miser sandwich!

But the real money line is

 if, God forbid, the program of interstellar conquest he cherishes should ever be carried out.

Aside from the assumption that human expansion through the Universe would necessarily constitute "conquest" in some evil militaristic sense, which is debatable and would also obviously depend on the motives and actions of some undetermined number of alien civilizations we might encounter, note that he's saying here that he doesn't WANT humanity to expand beyond the Earth.

And here we've arrived at the meat of the later Mundane SF Movement.  Damon Knight, coming from a more intellectually-rigorous era (and one with a fandom who on the average had a far better understanding of science), accepted the inevitable technological possibility of interplanetary and interstellar expansion:  it's built into the laws of physics.  Knight's error is that he imagines that the human race can decide not to do something, and make this decision stick for all humans and all time.  Geoff Ryman, who lives in a less intellectually-rigorous era and is dealing with far less well scientifically-educated fans, imagines expansion beyond the Earth to be made impossible by his personal fiat:  he does not understand that (and indeed gets cranky, in both senses of the word, when) the laws of physics do not support his emotionally pre-Copernican worldview.

There is also a general hatred of humanity at work here.  Why does Knight assume that human expansion to other worlds would logically be worse than those worlds remaining uninhabited, or inhabited by aliens, or expanded onto by aliens (the other options)?  The assumption operating here is that Nature Unspoiled is better than human colonization, and that alien colonization is better than human colonization, and at no point does he explain why, other than that we have been known to make mistakes.  Why should he assume that aliens wouldn't make the same mistakes -- or different and worse ones?

Damon Knight then goes on with a rant in support of "the new science-fiction writers" against the presumed assumptions of "old guard" science fiction, which is not well-justified either by the actual literary corpus or the logical demands of extraterrestrial expansion:

What the new science-fiction writers are telling us is precisely that a culture can't keep on growing geometrically forever; that Bigger isn't necessarily and always Better; that the quality of life is more important now than the quantity,

I have, in fact, read rather a lot of the "old" science-fiction, and I can assure you that not all (or even most of it) argues that a culture can "keep on growing geometrically forever" (indeed, much of it is precisely about the way in which growth is limited by available habitat, namely colonizable worlds), nor that "Bigger is necessarily and always Better" (more commonly, it argues that smarter is necessarily and always Better), nor that the quantity of life is more important than the quality.

and that we are faced with a whole congeries of unanswered and mostly unasked question about ourselves:  who are we?  where have we come from?  where are we going?  what is a man?  and how should he live?

Science fiction has mostly been primarily about just such questions since H. G. Wells modified it into its present form, some seventy-five years BEFORE Knight penned this critique.  Indeed, in part Wollheim's "cosmogony of the future" was written in answer to such questions.  Just because Knight didn't like the answers doesn't mean that the question hasn't been posed and answered many times already.

Conclusion

Well, we all know what happened.  The New Wave ended, and space opera came back strong, especially in science fiction novels.  To some extent the "new writing" dominated the magazines, though, and I believe that it is partly in consequence of this that the short story format has been dying out. 

I've noticed a prevalence, especially since 2000, of self-consciously "literary" short stories in the annual anthologies.  These stories tend to have gaping logical or scientific flaws and (in the worst cases) no discernable plot or even point to them, and it's easy to see why they are unloved by the fans.  So in this venue the "New Writers" indeed did win, though they don't seem to be having much joy in their triumph.

Meanwhile, space opera grows as a genre and spawns multi-book series and doorstopper books.  Among the practicioners who rose to prominence after 1972 have been Alan Dean Foster, Alastair Reynolds, Peter Hamilton, Stephen Baxter and David Weber.  Also, among the "Killer B's," Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, and David Brin, all of whom had important publications before or around 1972, but whose careers didn't really take off until the 1970's and 1980's.  All of these have written futures which can clearly be fit into Wollheim's cosmogony, and all of them are wildly popular.

It may be relevant here that Damon Knight was one of the founders of, and Geoff Ryman a product of, the Clarion Writers' Workshops.  In a very real sense the Mundane SF Movement was founded to try and revive Knight's dream of a science-fiction future without space colonization -- and thankfully, it seems to be going the same way as the movement of the "new writers."

And science fiction marches on.

Selective Science for Mundane Fiction

Checking out the most recent Mundane SF Blog, we see a nice little rant which, to my mind, exemplifies the very selective use of "science" in Mundane science-fiction.  The author, frankh, is reviewing Welcome to the Greenhouse, an analogy of stories about global warming, and he says:

What a welcome relief from all the wish-fulfillment and thumb-twiddling bullshit that regularly gets published as SF -- never mind the straight fantasy that now dominates.

During the Golden Age of SF, there was a consensus that atomic power and rocketry were big things in our future. It was just a matter of how the science and society would play out. Well, that has all pretty much played out, and sorry, we do not have a libertarian space age with unlimited resources. Now, as then, we need to make do with scientific reality. That reality now includes "climate change."

He's arguing that "atomic power and rocketry" have both "pretty much played out," which is a rather silly thing to say given that controlled nuclear fusion hasn't yet been achieved, plain nuclear fission reactor designs are still being greatly improved, and we're very obviously at the start of a major boom in both manned and unmanned spaceflight, with a dozen major national and private players in the field and several new types of spacecraft being launched a year.  But, nope, despite all the evidence "scientific reality" decrees that both these fields are "played out," and we have to agree with him because he's all Mundane and literary, so why would we want to listen to a lot of nasty grotty investors and planners and engineers and (ugh) scientists on the issue?

Furthermore, we don't have "a libertarian space age" (it's telling that he appends the political label to a human movement that crosses many political boundaries -- were the Soviets being "libertarians" 50 years ago when they launched Yuri Gagarin into space?  Are the Chinese "libertarians" now when they launch taikonauts?) with "unlimited resources."  And if we don't have it by now, we won't have it ever, because -- ooh, look, shiny metaphors and irony, pay no attention to the scope of history!  So we're going to have to deal with real issues, such as "climate change," which apparently science-fiction has never dealt with before (1).

Of course, a stickler for physical scientific reality might point out that if we decide that "atomic power" has "played out," we might find "climate change" coming a bit sooner rather than later, and in the direction of the Paleocene climatic maximum, since barred by Mundane edict from gaining energy from a chemically-neutral process such as uranium fission, we will instead have to gain it from the combustion of coal, oil and methane, all of which put significant amounts of carbon dioxide (and nastier things) into our atmosphere as part of their normal operation.  But hey, then frankh can crow about how he was right all along.  What's a little drowned real estate compared to the joy of going "I told you so?"

The larger issue here, of course, is that the Mundane science-fiction "scientific reality" is based on a very selective subset of "science."  Atomic power and rocketry are verboten, for no real reason other than that the Mundaniacs say that they are (and, truth be told, the banning of atomic power as a topic for discussion was neither stated nor even implicit in the original Mundane Manifesto, which shows how this sort of negativism naturally expands to blot out all light and happiness in one's futures).  For that matter, the original Mundane Manifesto didn't try to ban spaceflight, merely limit it to the Solar System (I suspect it's expanded to anti-rocketry because some slightly more astute Mundaniacs realized that if we can cheaply access the whole Solar System then we don't have "limited resources" from the POV of anything but the very far future).

It's not about being scientifically-realistic, because if it was then the Mundaniacs would happily herald the aspects of scientific and technological progress which promise to bring us precisely the "libertarian future" of "unlimited resources" about which frankh is complaining.  It's about being depressing (2), which is why the Mundane science-fiction writers and fans carefully pick and choose only those aspects of scientific reality which are unpleasant, rejecting those which offer felicitious solutions.

So it is that we must give up fossil fuel power generation, but not adopt atomic energy in its place, because if we did then we'd have lots of cheap energy which would get cheaper and cheaper as we developed more and more advanced and capable reactors.  No, we have to choose between any number of cackbrained, impractical systems (3), so that our power is expensive and unreliable, the better for us to suffer and mourn the passing of the old days of plenty  (4).  "Of what use is a newborn infant," Benjamin Franklin famously said of electricity, and the Mundaniacs add "... if we cut off its arms and legs!"

So it is that, if chemical rocketry won't give us the stars (and it, in fact, won't -- one needs nuclear or antimatter rockets for interstellar travel) we must settle for Just One Earth, forever.  The other planets of our Solar System are mysteriously useless to us, even though in real life we're discovering more and more resources on them.  Furthermore, we can never have anything better than chemical rocketry, even though in real life we're developing various kinds of ion and plasma drives, nuclear power plants, and the superstrong materials required for space elevators.  These technologies will never ever get anywhere, no matter how many decades and centuries and millennia we work on them.

What's especially stupid and insulting about the Mundane Movement is its denial of anything but the shallowest sort of time.  They assume that anything that we can't build out of off-the-shelf components, right NOW, can never be built.  We actually have the science, and most of the technology, needed to colonize Luna and Mars, right now, but we just haven't deployed it yet in the form of actual spacecraft.  Thus, we never can in the future -- but if you read the Mundane Movement's "futures," you'll find that they are either (1) just a few decades into the future, or (2) set after civilization has permanently fallen to a lower level of technology.  These assumptions are necessary to the Mundane vision-- even a very slow level of technological and economic progress, compounded over (say) five centuries, would be enough for us to plant thriving human settlements all over the Inner System out to at least the Asteroid Belt, if not farther.

You'll notice this if you discuss the possibilities of space colonization with them.  They'll start off by saying something like "We will never ..." (colonize the Moon, colonize Mars, develop cheap orbital launchers, etc.), but if asked to explain now, they will proceed to produce arguments to the effect that we can't do so NOW (or at best, within a decade).  And if called on their sudden shift of tense, they will either ignore one's argument, or condescendingly explain that it's "unscientific" or "immature" to speculate about anything other than the deployment of existing technology, or technology very similar to existing technology.  Which, if true, would of course negate the whole point of science-fiction.

I've discussed this issue at greater length in my "The Fear of Boundlessness" and "The Promise of Boundlessness" on this blog, but I'm glad I located the Mundane Blog.

It gives me something to laugh at, and my audience can share in the general merriment :)

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(1)  What, do you protest Last and First Men or Fallen Angels?  "Climate change" does not imply "soon" or "hotter," it just implies a changing climate, in some direction over some period of time.  Not being a Mundaniac, I'm able to think flexibly in terms of deep time.

(2) I won't dignify Mundane SF with the term "tragic," because "tragedy" should be reserved for unavoidable collisions between hubris and nemesis.  This isn't Achilles meeting his fate in battle, this is Achilles deciding to beat his head aganist a rock until he suffers irreversible brain damage, just "because."

(3) Some of which are perfectly practical as auxiliary power systems, granted.  It's just that they don't work well as primary grid sources, because they are either low-density, intermittent, or geographically very limited.  Which is why the Mundaniacs love them.  Brownouts are good for the soul!

(4) Think I'm exaggerating?  Here, from the wiki summary of the Manifesto: "

• That this dream of abundance can encourage a wasteful attitude to the abundance that is here on Earth.

In other words, we must not even dream of "abundance," lest this tempt us to waste what we have.  Right.  And when you send a kid to college, you drum it into him that he's preparing for a minimum-wage job at McDonald's.  That will make him work hard and take like seriously, won't it?

Oh, and by "abundance that is here on Earth," they mean "sufficient for everyone to live like a Third Worlder, for at least a few centuries."  Apparently the future will consist of meals of Ramen noodles with vitamin supplements, forever.

The Fear of Boundlessness: Explanation for the Mundane SF Movement

1. The Mundane SF Movement

As some of you may know, Julian Todd and Geoff Ryman have created what they have called the "Mundane SF" movement. The full list of premises underlying this movement are available here.

To summarize them, the governing assumptions are that:

1) Due to a lack of plausible FTL drives, interstellar travel is fantasy,

2) Travel to alternate worlds is even more fantastic, and thus

3) We have Only One Earth and had better make the best of it.

Or, in their terms:

That the most likely future is one in which we only have ourselves and this planet.

Furthermore:

Geoff Ryman has contrasted mundane science fiction with regular science fiction through the desire of teenagers to leave their parents' homes.[2] Ryman sees too much of regular science fiction being based on an "adolescent desire to run away from our world." However, Ryman notes that humans are not truly considered grown-up until they "create a new home of their own," which is what mundane science fiction aims to do.

(from http://mundane-sf.blogspot.com/2007/09/take-third-star-on-left-and-on-til.html)

Now, let's consider the rationality of the Mundane SF assumptions, because I don't want to do what so many critics often do and simply call an idea I don't like "irrational" based on my not liking it.

First of all, they equate the practicality of interstellar travel with the practicality of FTL travel. Leaving the issue of FTL open (as physics currently does allow FTL under certain circumstances, but we're not sure if these circumstances are humanly replicable, or even really possible in this Universe), what does limitation to STL ravel mean?

Well, it means that (1) the fastest you can move mass asymptotically approaches 300,000 km/sec, or 1 LY per year; and (2) it takes a lot of energy to do this.

This does not preclude interstellar exploration, or even colonization -- as numerous futurists and science fiction writers, starting with Tsiolkovsky and Goddard, pointed out as early as the 1900's and 1910's, interstellar operations were possible provided that one was willing to engage in very long-term planning (decades to millennia). Science fiction picked up on this starting in the 1930's and 1940's, with Murray Leinster's "Proxima Centauri" (1935) and Robert Heinlein's "Universe" (1941). These are both very well-known stories of those eras, repeatedly anthologized, and STL starships have been used in numerous SF stories to the present day. Indeed, the Fermi Paradox is largely based on assumptions involving the construction of such starships by hypothetical advanced alien civilizations.

Hence, the Mundane SF advocates cannot reasonably claim ignorance of this possibility -- one which is not referenced at all, however, in their "manifesto." They simply ignore the real possibilities of STL interstellar expansion, because it doesn't fit their model of mature Only One Earthers versus immature SF escapists.

To be fair, Geoff Ryman allows for STL interstellar travel, but points out that popular SF -- by which he means mostly TV and movie SF -- avoids it because of the inconvenience to plotting. He doesn't seem to see why this pokes a huge hole in the claim that we are limited to Only One Earth, though.

He says:

"Very fast sub-light speed would still impose a horizon on how far we get."

Really? Personally, perhaps, but what prevents humanity from spreading out in "stepping-stone" fashion, from one exploitable or habitable world to the next, building a civilization at each point and then, when that civilization is mature enough, launching starships from it? Indeed, because one of his limitations is:

It depends how long you think a starship can keep going without risking major malfunction and how fast an anti-matter driven starship could be. I reckon 30 years in its own time-frame, you may think more.

he is implicitly disallowing even fuel or maintenance stations!

In an apotheosis of selfishness, he says:

For most of us whose descendants will not be among those specially selected interstellar crews, for our children, for humankind as whole, the future is here on Earth.

Really? First of all, even in genetic terms this is a dodgy statement -- it would already be technologically possible (though economically impractical) to record the genotype of every living human being, and, having done that, send it across interstellar distances. Secondly, I prefer to think of "humanity" in more memetic terms, and it is certainly possible for Earth to play a part in the creation and transmission of ideas across interstellar distances as part of an interstellar civilization.

He also explicitly disallows immortality/downloading, based on what are I consider fairly specious arguments: in particular

Immortality? Suns die, galaxies die, the universe dies. Nothing is immortal outside of God’s heaven. We will all die one day. Leaving Earth won’t stop it.

It's quite true that no immortality scheme would be perfect, but merely being able to live (say) a few hundred or few thousand years would be perfectly adequate to permit a small interstellar civilization with considerable cultural and political unity. And, of course, if you're concerned about the fate of humanity in general, unity isn't necessary -- a galactic-scale balkanized STL civilization, or even Sagan's cooperative "Galactic Federation," would require little political unity yet would ensure the survival of Man and many of his memes into the indefinite future.

Brain downloads: transferring something that has four switches (up and down in both directions) to a system works through binaries?

(from http://mundane-sf.blogspot.com/2007/09/take-third-star-on-left-and-on-til.html)

This is so scientifically illiterate that I am astounded he said this in public. There are some fairly serious obstacles to brain downloading, though these are mostly because we don't yet know how the human mind works and is supported by the physical structure of the brain at the nuts-and-bolts level. However, the system he describes could be easily mapped to binary by using two bits per switch ("00"="not present", "01"="inactive," "10"="up" and "11"="down"), as anyone who's taken an Introduction to Computer Science course would instantly realize. Hence, each unit could be represented by a sixteen-bit "word," well within the capabilities of even existing computers!

Again, there are obstacles to this technology (for one thing, it's much more complex than Ryman describes), but this isn't one of them!

Secondly, and even more devastatingly, they dismiss interplanetary expansion by, without even discussing their reasoning, assuming that we can only colonize planets which are "habitable like Earth." He dismisses colonizing worlds within our own Solar System, such as Mars, with:

Terraforming Mars may be a better bet than travelling those vast distances to terraform a rocky, radioactive wilderness. Both efforts would take tens of thousand years. What human endeavour has lasted tens of thousands of years?

which implies that we must terrfaorm to colonize. But we already, in theory, know how to create self-sustaining life support systems, assuming that we are allowed to import energy (and some quantity of replacement volatiles to compensate for leakage) into the loop. The technology enabling us to do this in practice is not far off, certainly not far off on the time horizons of science fiction.

And why "tens of thousands of years" to terraform Mars? That's pessimistic even in terms of present-day engineering capabilities. Wouldn't both the technology and the engineering capabilities increase, even a bit, after even a few decades to centuries of attempting the project?

By the way, this techno-pessimism has a trap that Ryman hasn't seen yet. If we're so totally limited to present-day science and technology, forever, how are we to prevent the Earth's ecosystem from collapsing? We don't yet know how to do this, and the technologies that we would have to develop to do so are essentially similar to the ones which we would need to terraform another planet.

Indeed, there is a general assumption that we are forever limited to the technology we have now running all through his speech, as in

Will cramped, smelly spaceships full of people who have been trapped with each other for twenty years, with terrible food, no light, drugs and entertainment only so long the computers hold out, is that really the most exciting thing we can imagine?

which I've heard variants of from many techno-pessimists, many times before.

Take a moment, look at this statement, and think about what Ryman's saying here. He's talking about STL starships, but similar comments are made about spaceships and habs in general.

He's saying, basically, that we can never improve the comfort level of any off-world habitation!

Why must it be "cramped?" (depending on the energy available to the launching civilization, a starship could be quite massive and hence quite large).

Why must it be "smelly?" ("Smelliness" is not a mystical property of enclosed systems, it is a reaction between our olfactory apparati and molecules physically present in the environment, hence meliorable).

Why is there "no light?" (this is the weirdest one of all: one envisions a Regency spaceship where they can't keep the candles lit because it would use up the oxygen supply)

Why "drugs and entertainment only so long the computers hold out" ...? Oh, I can see why "the computers" would be important, but why are they running down? Surely spare circuitry would be one of the easiest things to ship?

Applied to a hab, which could actively produce more minerals and volatiles from nearby celestial bodies, this critique is even stranger.

Indeed, though early colonies in space or on other worlds would be quite spartan, in the long run they might be luxurious. If one is, for instance, hollowing out cavern complexes under the Lunar or Martian surface, one's work is cumulative, which means that once the colony has been established for a while there could be vast amounts of space in which the population was living. Far from "cramped," such colonies would eventually offer their inhabitants more room than they would be likely to have on an overpopulated Earth.

Finally, though this is a trivial point, Ryman ignores the fact that "fantastic" SF actually created most of the ideas and perspectives that inform his concept of focusing on creating an ecologically sustainable future on the Earth. For instance, the notion of a beautiful, comfortable and yet non-industrial civilization "close to Nature" was greatly popularized, in the 1950's and 1960's, by the man who most argued in favor of "escapist" fiction, J. R. R. Tolkien. The very concept of the Earth as a unified system was grasped only by a specialized few until expeditions to space brought back pictures of the Earth from outside.

And much of the data with which planetary ecologists form their theories and plans come from a source every detail of which was "fantastic" science fiction a mere century ago -- man-made moons with electronic cameras operated by artificial brains, launched into orbit by rocket ships!

This illustrates a crucial point. Consider how much progress we've made in a hundred years. Ryman is essentially assuming that this was a once-in-a-species event -- that we will not make an equivalent amount of progress in the next century, or even the next millennium, or (if you take his Mars statement seriously) the next tens of millennia.

2. The Real Future

Obviously, we could fantasize about any technology or event we wanted to have exist in the future, but this would be unrealistic (although, based on the historical evidence, numerous events and technologies that we now deem fairly improbable will probably be realized over the next century). So I'll limit myself to developments and technologies based firmly on known physics. I will assume no catastrophic civilizational collapse, nor the extinction of the human species by any means other than transformation into a post-human form: obviously the first would greatly delay, and the second prevent the expansion of our civilization.

The total amount of energy, and hence wealth, available to humanity will increase at a rate roughly equivalent to compounded interest (because the process of accumulation is quite similar). Over the next century, fossil fuel power generation systems will be replaced by nuclear fission with solar and other passive systems as auxiliaries; over the centuries thereafter, nuclear fusion and perhaps more exotic power generation systems will replace nuclear fission, and space-based solar will replace ground-based solar in the auxiliary role.

Why is this inevitable? Because the drive to produce wealth is fundamental to human nature, and energy is the ultimate source of wealth. And there is no scientific, or even technological obstacle to the "next century" projection: the farther-future projection implies technological but not necessarily scientific progress.

An increase in the amount of energy and wealth available to Mankind will accelerate the human expansion into space. This is a bit less certain a prediction, because over a mere century some social movement might prevent this from happening, but it is very certain over many centuries, because social movements are transient, while technological capabilities last for as long as our species survives.

Among the ways in which increased energy and wealth will accelerate the human expansion into space:

A. The wealthier humanity as a whole, the wealthier each subunit, hence the smaller the size of the subunit required to make space ventures. We can see this happening right now: the first space race involved only two superpowers, while the current one involves America, Russia, China, Europe, India, Japan, and over a dozen private corporations. A century from now, even small corporations will probably be able to participate in extraterrestrial ventures, and many centuries from now, we may reach a point where the average human family has the resources to emigrate from Earth, if they choose to do so.

This is inevitable assuming anything short of complete civilizational collapse. All regimes politically benefit by possessing greater general wealth, and even command economies consider costs when deciding upon whether or not to launch space ventures.

B. Technological progress offers improved launch technologies. We currently only launch spacecraft by means of chemical rockets, but magnetic catapults and laser launchers are also technologically and space elevators, skyhooks, and ion-beam acclerators are scientifically possible. All offer significant energy advantages and dramatic payload advantages over chemical rockets. It is likely that within a century electromagnetic and laser launch systems will be common, and within centuries the other named systems will be common.

This is fairly inevitable because any or all of these launch systems would also improve military and scientific space capabilties: furthermore, a private launch system operator would realize considerable commercial advantages from being able to sell cheaper launch capabilities. It is difficult to see any social movement, short of the complete collapse of human civilization, preventing the emergence of such technologies, since even fairly anti-space expansion regimes would want to be able to loft satellites as cheaply as possible.

C. Technological progress offers improved spacecraft construction. Most of the cost of spacecraft operations today is maintenance and repair work: because the physical demands stress the capabilities of existing materials severely, spacecraft have to be in near-perfect conditions to launch or re-enter safely. As improved materials -- iridum and osmium based steel alloys, and fullerene based plastics and composites -- become more widely available, spacecraft will be safely operable in far less perfect conditions, greatly reducing ground crew operational costs.

This is inevitable because improved materials technologies are not specifically "space" oriented applications -- they would also make many earthly operations, such as the construction of bridges, skyscrapers, and tunnels, and the operation of ships and aircraft, much cheaper and easier. Only the most rabidly anti-technological regime would oppose such materials, and it is difficult to see how it could maintain its dominion given this attitude (as its foes would have better military equipment).

D. Infrastructure improvements are cumulative. Improved infrastructure makes operations cheaper -- if you can simply order a launch system off the shelf, or rent space on an existing launch, rather than have to build a rocket from scratch to support your space venture, that venture has become a lot cheaper, and easier to organize. Furthermore, even if specific infrastructure is allowed to decay (the American abandonment of the Saturn V heavy-lift rocket is a case in point), the knowledge of how to do it is never completely lost, and still less the knowledge that it has been done.

Finally,

E. Once you're in orbit you're halfway to anywhere. This is cliche, but cannot be overemphasized. Something like half the difficulty of any space venture comes from launching and landing in Earth's deep gravity well. Once there are even a few functioning offworld habs, trade between them can be conducted far more cheaply than any of them can trade with the Earth. Since the initial habs need not be built for commercial purposes, but once they are built they can easily generate both supply and demand, this in part gets around the obstacle of initial profitability.

This is semi-inevitable over the next century: I could imagine a World Government both so anti-space that it would not found space habs and so anti-commerce that it would not let private organizations do so either. It is inevitable over centuries, since eventually the World Government would change its policies or be replaced by a more expansionist one. 15th-century China forbade oceanic exploration, but nevertheless over the ensuing centuries, the Chinese people did expand into Indonesia. Policies are never as eternal as their authors may imagine.

Given all this, the next century will see humanity plant its first outposts and colonies on and around the worlds of the Inner Solar System; we may succeed in getting farther (the revelation of the interesting features of the Galileian moons and Titan offer obvious incentives for manned exploration of the Jovian and Saturnian lunar systems). Over centuries, we will extensively colonize the Solar System: a millennium from now, the majority of the human species will no longer reside upon the Earth, due to the expansion over time of these colonies from both emigration and natural increase.

The question of interstellar travel is more difficult to answer. Electromagnetic ramscoops may turn out to be forever impractical, at least given the low density of the local medium. If ramscoops cannot be built, then we are limited to fusion and antimatter rockets, and to passive assists such as launch lasers pumping starsails. This keeps travel times down in the range of 0.10 to 0.25 C, which means that even for immortals, most travel will be one-way emigrations. On the other hand, if it proves possible to completely upload and download human minds, people could be transmitted (between existing bases) at a full 1.0 C, which is fast enough that immortals could regularly tour small to moderate-sized interstellar empires.

Energy considerations are limiting but mostly for near-future operations. Within the century, we may be able to launch unmanned interstellar probes. If we develop fabricator and nanobot technology to a sufficient degree, even an unmanned probe could construct facilities to receive a later manned expedition.

As our civilization grows in energy generation capabilities, large starships become increasingly practical. A large antimatter rocket, for instance, would require many current world-years of energy to accumulate the necessary fuel, but a civilization centuries from now will probably generate at least a few orders of magnitude more energy than does our own, and would find the launch of such an expedition a much lighter burden.

If you want my guess, I think we’ll launch an interstellar probe within a century, the first manned expedition within two centuries, and within a millennium will have planted at least one colony in another star system. This all assumes no FTL travel.

Even if we don’t make any concentrated effort at interstellar travel, we are likely to achieve it in time, anyway, in consequence of gradual progress in extended-duration spacecraft and colonization of the extreme outer Solar System, especially the Oort Cloud (which extends out halfway to Alpha Centauri). Over time, successive waves of colonization of Oort iceteroids and other interstellar bodies will lead men to other star systems, even if their ancestors never intended to go out that far. Within, say, ten thousand years, we might colonize near interstellar space (within 10-50 LY) in this fashion.

3. The Rejection of Boundlessness

From this discussion, it is easy to tell that I think the rejection of a human future containing expansion to other worlds is an essentially irrational one. Current science already supports the capability to colonize other worlds. Existing technology is up to the task of, at least, Lunar colonization; and technology already on the drawing boards to the colonization of the rest of the Inner System. Readily predictable technology is adequate to the colonization of the Middle and Outer Systems, and probably the stars beyond.

You will also note that the Mundane SF movement is actually friendly, however, to other forms of change. Superintelligent computers are allowed – as long as humans can’t be uploaded into them (because that would make space travel too easy). Posthuman intelligent life is allowed – as long as it can only live on the Earth (because if it could then interplanetary colonization would be too easy). Indeed, Ryman goes on about the “new wonders” he wants to substitute for the old – provided that they all remain firmly on Only One Earth.

Part of the clue lies in the way in which we have traditionally thought about “the Earth” as the realm of “mundanity” (naturalness worldliness, normality) as opposed to “the Heavens” as the realm of transcendence (supernaturalness, unworldliness, literal “unearthliness.”) Yes, the Scientific Revolution that changed our world view is four centuries old – but the essentially Mesopotamian concept of “the heavens” that preceded it is over forty centuries old, and it has not yet completely departed our way of thinking.

Notice how many scientists decry manned space exploration as a distraction from the “real work” of scientific study of other planets, and are positively horrified at the notion of commercial or military activities in space? Science is abstract and sacred, suitable for the “pure” spheres above the Mundane, spheres dominated by quintessence rather than the vulgar four elements known on Earth. Commercial and military endeavors are tainted by worldly ambitions. This is not their explicit argument, but it constantly peeks through the rationalizations.

Notice how resistant most people are, even after a century of science fiction and half a century of actual space travel, to the notion that the future in space can really be a human one, with human concerns? Repeatedly, politicians are cheered for arguing that we should put “human concerns” before the space program – implying that the space program is esoteric, beyond normal human interests, and irrelevant to the practical future.

The new religion of environmentalism feeds into this attitude. To their credit, this has not been the case for most of the scientists who have advocated the Gaia Hypothesis (but, then, to them it was never a religion) – they, instead have pointed out that human colonization of other worlds would fulfill Gaia’s evolutionary promise, by spreading Earthlife beyond the globe of its origin. But many on the Left have taken environmentalism to mean that one must demonstrate loyalty to the Earth by manfully resisting the call to expand beyond her confines.

This is close to Ryman’s reasons. He argues that the science fiction dream tempts us to “burn through” the Earth in the assumption that there are other potentially habitable planets for us to move to when we’ve used up our homeworld.

This is, still, irrational. There is nothing about the ability to colonize other worlds that means that one should logically destroy one’s homeworld – a world that, in any case, will be the most habitable one for Man for countless centuries to come, probably even if we developed FTL interstellar travel! Must the owner of a mansion who buys some other houses therefore trash his ancestral residence? The idea is ridiculous, when translated into more familiar terms.

No, what I think is operating here is something deeper.

We evolved on the Earth, and our perceptions of space and time are adapted to the limitations of life on her surface. Indeed, they are adapted to much smaller areas than the surface of the whole Earth – notice how many science fiction stories treat whole worlds as if they consisted of one town and some countryside around? The scales of space and time in the Solar System, let alone the Galaxy or the Universe, are dizzying to our minds. Some find them awesome and beautiful – others, I suspect , find them frightening.

To those who want a planned, controlled future, the implications of the size of the Universe are terrifying. What happens to the hopes of a tidy little back-to-nature utopia if the amount of energy available in just a single planet-sized solar orbital collector array utterly dwarfs that available to the “sustainable” planetary civilization, condemning that civilization to the status of quaint backwater? Posthuman superminds can be kept cozy and manageable if limited to Earth-surface renewable energies – what happens if they can burn sizable fractions of gas giant atmospheres as fusion fuel for their unguessable purposes? What is the glory of a united World Government, when that World Government is a speck on the vast dapple of the Cosmos?

To paraphrase H. G. Wells, fantastic science fiction makes what they think great seem small, what they think strong seem weak, and they don’t like it at all. They have a point – change is dangerous, and if we handle it wrong we may get not progress, but destruction, on an unimaginably vast scale. But what they don’t get is that change is unavoidable.

Boundlessness is frightening. We stand suspended across immensity and we fear to fall. But we may also fly, and we will never fly until we have the courage to spread our wings and hop off the edge of the nest.

There is also a strong Sour Grapes effect. The Silent and Boomer generations grew up with the promise of science fiction, promises which have taken longer to come about than was first hoped in the 1950’s and 1960’s. The generations which will be colonizing the Inner Solar System will not be theirs: it is the Millennials and those who come after them who will reap the glory which the earlier generations sowed. This is normal in human affairs, but the Boomers in particular imagine themselves a special generation, and consider it very unfair that such normalcy should limit themselves. Their pessimism has strongly influenced the Slackers, who are also just a bit too old to participate.

They would rather have it that it be final truth that the dream of space was a lie, that they were the first ones sophisticated enough to realize it, and that all future generations live within the prison that has restrained their own ones. What they don’t get is that future generations will not consider themselves bound by this, any more than the generations who first had the benefit of antibiotics refused to use them out of sympathy for the sufferings of their elders in childhood. When they can, they will stride boldly forth to colonize the planets, and the stars.


Conclusion

In the end, I think it is H. G. Wells who best expressed why I think the inexorable march of history will roll over, plow under, and pass by the smoking wreckage of the Mundane SF dream:

“Rest enough for the individual man - too much, and too soon - and we call it death. But for Man, no rest and no ending. He must go on, conquest beyond conquest. First this little planet with its winds and ways, and then all the laws of mind and matter that restrain him. Then the planets about him and at last out across immensity to the stars. And when he has conquered all the deeps of space and all the mysteries of time, still he will be beginning” (Things to Come)