SF Lit-Critterdom and Political Correctness as a Means of Temporal Tariff

"SF Lit-Critterdom and Political Correctness as a Means of Temporal Tariff"

© 2014

by

Jordan S. Bassior

Introduction

I was recently looking through the Table of Contents of Weinberg, Dziemianowicz & Greenberg's excellent anthology 100 Wild Little Weird Tales (© 1994) and reflecting upon the fact that almost all these stories were now in the public domain owing to the expiration of copyright.  And I thought that I was fortunate to live in an age where so many really excellent old stories were now available for free.  (In fact, I got the anthology as a present from someone who bought it at a library book sale, so it was close to free for both me and my benefactor).

Then (as I tend to do, because I take a relative and historical view of Time) it occurred to me to ask myself:  would the same thing be true if I were in the world of 40 years ago, when my 10-year-old self started to become seriously interested in science fiction, fantasy and horror?  And the answer is "No," and the reason for this answer is interesting.


I. The Science-Fictional Conversation

Before the 1920's, science fiction did not self-consciously exist as a separate genre.  Though the pioneering work in the field had been done by Jules Verne in the last half of the 19th century, and by H. G. Wells in the 1890's through 1910's, and some science fiction and science fantasy series of great later importance had already been started (Edgar Rice Burroughs had already written the first John Carter and Tarzan novels, and L. Frank Baum the early Oz books), there was no explict concept of "science fiction" or "science fantasy" as distinct from general adventure fiction or straight-out fantasy.  Science fiction stories were published in mainstream literary or adventure magazines.
 
In 1923 J. C. Henneberger founded Weird Tales, and in 1926 Hugo Gernsback founded Amazing Stories.  This was the start of the explicit genres of science fantasy and science fiction, and what this meant was that a lot of people who liked such stories were all reading the same magazines and writing letters to the editorial columns.  This meant that the start of the conversation of science fiction, the trading of ideas which allowed the genre to build upon its past achievements.  It had been a big imaginative step for Verne to conceive of projectiles round the Moon or Wells of super-technological alien invasion, but now every new concept was digested and used as the basis for even-better concepts by the authors who filled the pates of these magazines (which of course included some Verne and Wells reprints, the more so because some of Verne's stuff had already become public-domain).

As a result the Interwar Era stories -- those from the 1920's through 1930's -- feel "modern" in a way which earlier science fiction does not.  This is due not so much to cultural assumptions shared with the present day as it is to intellectual assumptions shared by the writers and transmitted to later science fiction and fantasy by the medium of the old stories.  Every science fiction and fantasy author grows up reading the work of his predecessors, and this is a good thing, because one sees farther when one stands on the shoulders of giants.  Knowledge of the work of the past helps keep one from re-inventing the wheel -- and more importantly, it lets one use the already-invented wheel to serve as components in one's own vehicles of the imagination.


II. Upon the Shoulders of Giants

Of course, there's a downside to this, particularly when a would-be author is simply not all that imaginative.  If I'm not aware that hitching a ride on a comet is a concept that has been done before, I'm liable to write my own off-on-a-comet story in total ignorance of the work of Jules Verne in 1877, Raymond Gallun in 1953, or Gregory Benford and David Brin in 1986.  And I'm going to look pretty silly in the eyes of knowledgeable fans when I hop up on my dunghill and crow the credit for being the first ever to come up with the idea.

Does that mean that I must avoid the topic like the plague?

No!  It does mean that I should be aware of the work of those who have preceded me, so that (1) I don't just wind up rewriting their stories with characters typifying today's ephermal cultural fads, and (2) I can use their work as a basis atop which to build my own story.

For instance, a lot of Benford and Brin's novel hinges on the problems caused by social and political change in any decades-long duration space mission.  The colony planted on Halley's Comet suffers serious social fissures and even small but violent civil wars, and change that in part comes from the life forms they discover within the comet.  At the same time, the Earth they left behind changes in ways that render them intolerant of the cometary colonists.

So, if I want to write my own story about colonizing a comet, I can take the existence of such social and political problems as a given, and proceed from there.  Perhaps the cometary colonists have also read The Heart of the Comet, and institute safeguards designed to prevent civil wars or estrangement from Earth.  Perhaps these safeguards work.  Perhaps they fail.  Perhaps the safeguards themselves pose additional dangers to the colonists, or the Earth.  Perhaps what they find in the comet is far more disruptive than mere alien parasite / symbionts.

This was once not a problem, because up until the 1970's - 1990's, science fiction writers and fans were led (to the extent that anyone can herd cats) by writers and publishers and editors and fans who actually knew the history of science fiction.  This occurred for two reasons:  (1) science fiction's history as a genre was much shorter, and many of them had been fans during the Interwar Era; and (2) science fiction was not yet trying to be "literary" and written to impress those with lit-critter standards (the New Wave was experimental, mostly a failure, and the parts of it which succeeded were primarily just good stories).


III.  Margaret Atwood and The Handmaid's Tale

The first sign of the Doom That Came To SFWA was the appearance of a pretentious little hen by the name of Margaret Atwood, who in 1985 laid a book called The Handmaid's Tale.  This was in many ways a rehash of themes familiar to science fiction dating all the way back to the 1940's, most obviously Robert A. Heinlein's If This Goes On (1940), which probably pioneered the concept of an American fundamentalist Christian religious dictatorship, complete with its leaders enjoying harems.

This was not what made Atwood, or her book, so objectionable.  The objectionable part was that, having written a fairly normal and cliche (though unusually boring) science fiction novel, Atwood both claimed originality for its premise and complained to everyone who would listen that the novel was being considered "science fiction."

In the process, she demonstrated so complete an ignorance of the nature of science fiction that it ironically gave credence to her claim of originality, since it's hard to see how she could say things like this for publication if she had really read much science fiction.  As she told the Guardian.

I like to make a distinction between science fiction proper and speculative fiction. For me, the science fiction label belongs on books with things in them that we can't yet do, such as going through a wormhole in space to another universe; and speculative fiction means a work that employs the means already to hand, such as DNA identification and credit cards, and that takes place on Planet Earth.

That is a fair statement of the difference between "soft" and "hard" science fiction, though it's a sign of Atwood's parochialism that she obviously believes that Only Earth Is Real.  Even more importantly, it would classify Atwood's story as science fiction in her own terms, since as far as we know a decline in fertility due to pollution and sexually-transmitted diseases as extreme as the one in her story is outright impossible -- meaning that some sort of new and especially virulent pollutants and STD's must have been introduced between then and now.  Which is to say this has "things" in it "that we can't yet do."

She. on a separate occasion and referring to a different book, said to New Scientist:

Science fiction is when you have rockets and chemicals.

Now, aside from the hilarious assumption that "chemicals" and "rockets" are purely science-fictional subjects (when chemistry and rocketry are both centuries-old fields of intellectual endeavor, something it is perhaps too much of which to expect a lit-critter to be aware), again The Handmaid's Tale is "science fiction" by Atwood's definition, since the whole setting, and future society postulated, hinges on widespread female sterility caused in part by chemical pollutants!
 
These two excerpts demonstrate Atwood's inability to reason clearly, since presumably she's thought about her own book in terms of her own definitions before -- unless she's a total airhead.  But then, of course, her definition was made-up to absolve her of the sin of writing "mere" science fiction.

The problem of course, was not that Margaret Atwood was pontificating upon a subject of which she was laughably ignorant.  The problem was that the science fictional professionals treated it as an honor that One So Great as Margaret Atwood (who had been almost unknown outside Lit-Critterdom before this) had deigned to bestow a work of Speculative Fiction upon their unworthy little genre ghetto, and started taking her criticisms to heart.

Science fiction began to morph into a more literary genre.


IV. Invaders From Below

Why is this a bad thing?  Because, for a very long time now (at least since the 1950's) literary fiction has become increasingly a denizen of the academic and literary hothouses, and one which actively scorns the clear writing of good stories in favor of incomprehensibly-dense allusions and the exploration of immortal themes in favor of tooting the trumpet of whatever current cause has seized the limited imaginations of political activists.  What's more, current Political Correctness holds that Western Civilization and even Science and Technology as a whole are Evil, and science fiction is a creation of the West which explores Science and Technology as its main subject matter.

So when science fiction accepts the opinions of ignorant lit-critters over its own professional writers, and tries to subordinate itself to the whims of modern academia, what it does is to turn against its own nature and write stories in which all it can do is mock and despise its own heritage.  What's more, this results in identically boring and depressing futures:  "Due to __X__, civilization has fallen and the survivors struggle amid the ruins / all die helplessly / become enlightened and adopt a grim and endless but sustainable non-technological way of life."

Also, this has all been done before.  The global disaster novel is one of the earliest forms of science fiction.  None other than Mary Shelley, one of the founders of science fiction, essayed such a tale, in The Last Man (1826).  And one could make a case that John of Patmos' Revelation (written ~ AD 60-90, and included in the canonical New Testament of the Bible) was such a work.  Which is to say that this "new" direction in science fiction, recently called "Mundane" (and dissected by none other than myself on Fantastic Worlds), is either almost 200 years old, or almost 2000 years old, depending upon which inspiration one assumes.

What's more, because lit-critters pretending to be science fiction writers rarely know much real science, the reasons for the catastrophes are often laughable.  The Handmaid's Tale, for instance, involves a heck of a lot of Artistic License for biology, chemistry, biochemistry and demographics -- and even its sociology is also more than a little dubious.  When reading global disaster novels written a half-century or more ago this is often obvious; and it's often the case today with such works not written by the scientifically-conversant, from the point of view of someone familiar with real science.

In contrast, consider Stephen Baxter's Flood (2008) and Ark (2009), which actually manages to come up with a scientifically-plausible reason for a global flood of Biblical proportions -- and then examines the consequences.  Somewhat pessimistically, to my mind -- but then Stephen Baxter's always been a certain kind of pessimist (he tends to posit great catastrophes which due to human political stupidity cause tremendous loss of life and culture, but which due to human courage and tenacity Mankind winds up surviving anyway).  Stephen Baxter, of course, is both a real science fiction writer and an actual scientist.

Of course, the works by the lit-critters are rarely very good -- they have flat characterization and depressingly-illogical settings in the pursuit of boring and tendentious themes, leading to hackneyed plots written in the most opaque imaginable style.  This translates to "poor sales figures," despite all the efforts of politically-biased editors to promote them by including them or excerpts from them in "Best of" annual anthologies, or politically-biased activist fans to vote them Hugos and Nebulas.

So why do the editors, writers and fans do it?


V. The Time Patrol

Many fans will have noted that one big difference between the supposedly-great science fiction stories of the past -- from before the Invasion of the Lit-Critters -- and those of the present, is very simple.  The older stories are plainly and simply better.  Some may have wooden characters, or stilted plots, or recycled settings (though the last is something of an illusion, as in many cases these are the stories that pioneered ideas which later science fiction reused); but what they have in common is that they are good stories.  They engage the reader's attention, thrill him with wonders or horrors, and expand his mind with meditations upon the strange and unknowable depths of space and time.

This bothers the lit-critters pretending to be science-fiction writers, because it means that they are facing superior competition.  Who would bother to read Yet Another Boring Story Where the Global Economy Collapses and We All Live on Dungheaps Forever Until We Miserably Die, when one can read The Wizard of Oz, A Princess of Mars, At the Mountains of Madness, The Legion of Space, Galactic Patrol, Red Planet, The Demon Princes, Mirkheim, The Chronicles of Amber, Ringworld, or pretty much any major science-fiction story from before 1990?

Or, for that matter, modern greats such as Gregory Benford's Galactic Center Saga, or Alastair Reynolds Revelation Space series, or John Wright's Golden Oecumene trilogy, or ... (insert favorite here).  Actually, we're living in a Golden Age of Science Fiction, despite all that the lit-critters can in their spite and envy of better writers do to damage the field.

So why the rejection of the past?  Because, if fans read the earlier stories, they will both see how much better they are than are the lit-critter droppings that now win Hugos and Nebulas, and that writers like Benford, Brin, Wright, and Reynolds are far more writing to that superior tradition, continuing a more interesting science-fictional conversation, than are the lit-critters.

By choosing as a standard for acceptance that stories conform to the political fads of today, no matter when they were written, the lit-critters are in effect prohibiting the importation of ideas from earlier times, and any ideas of today which are in any way based on the importation of said ideas.  By furthermore enforcing these restrictions in a cliquish and inconsistent fashion (their favorite writers get away with astonishing degrees of racism and sexism, provided that they don't attack the editors' Sacred Cows) they ensure that they can limit the field to that fiction which does not challenge or threaten them -- they cut down the tall poppies before they can reach too dangerous heights.

If successful, the consequences would be terrible.  The tremendous quantity of thought and effort devoted to imagining the possibilities of the future would be thrown aside, to be replaced with boring and depressing predictions of unavoidable doom.  Science fiction as a genre would perish:  who would bother to write or read stories in entirely-fictional settings which weren't even any fun?


VI. Free Minds and Free Markets

In classic fictional fashion, the lit-critters are being defeated by that which they scorned:  the power of free minds in (mostly) free markets.  They failed to monopolize the executive posistions in science-fiction publishing -- the success of Baen Books has doomed their hopes in this regard.  And now, increasingly, they are being circumvented by the ability of electronic publishing and increasingly cheap forms of physical self-publishing to ignore their gate-keeping.

They fulminate and foam against this, but of course it was inevitable.  Even had they managed to control the publishing houses, new ones would have emerged; and, offering the readers the kinds of stories they wanted to read, outcompeted them.  Even had neither computer, word processor nor internet been invented, readers would have bought these stories.  Barring some sort of totalitarian political control over the press, they had no hope of making their literary embargo practical.

Since they are socialists, they respond with rage.  It's the fault of saboteurs and wreckers, of foolish fans who didn't appreciate "true" quality and of traitors within their own ranks.  We are now witnessing the fall of the whole rotten lit-critter establishment, and its purging from our field, by the processes of the market.


Conclusion

Science fiction is the most imaginative, highest and most extensive form of human literature.  It embraces within it as subgenres all mundanity.  Its fall would have been terrible; thankfully, because we do still live in a free society, it shall not fall.

A century from now, fans will still be enjoying the fun and exciting fictional settings great science fiction writers create today, and those which they created a century ago.  And, of course, new science fiction writers will be creating stories beyond our present imagination.

And the lit-critters will be, deservedly, forgotten.

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.

How To Make a Family Conspiracy Theory

How To Make a Family Conspiracy Theory

by Jordan S. Bassior

(c) 2006, 2011

Introduction

I knew someone at work who was convinced that the Rockerfellers and Rothschilds are the Root of All Evil in History. This has led me to consider the basic method of constructing a "family" centered Conspiracy Theory. Here are my conclusions.


Pick A Family

You can't have a good family conspiracy theory without a family to make the conspiracy. So pick a family, any family.

Well, it works best if they are a rich and influential family. This is because a rich and influential family actually will be near the levers of power and hence they make more plausible scapegoats on which to blame bad events. Besides, there's more of a cachet in speculating about the, say, Adams' (the family that gave America two Presidents and several notable intellectuals) or Talbots (the family that produced Prime Ministers Salisbury and Balfour) than about the, say, Bassiors (the family that produced me).

Call them the Family Of Evil (FOE for short). Now that you've decided who the FOE is, you are ready to construct your conspiracy theory.


Degrees of Connection

Now play "degrees of connection" between the FOE and various historical events. If you read any decent biographies of any notable members of the FOE (or even better a biography of the FOE as a whole) you should be able to discover numerous major historical events that members of the FOE actually were directly responsible for. This usually won't be anything openly evil, at least not by the standards of the day (you may get lucky and find a Nazi-trading Prescott Bush or someone like that), but keep track of them. They are the grist for the mill of your Conspiracy Theory.

But go a step farther. Try to determine who the friends, associates, close acquaintance, in short the connections of the FOE are. If you've picked a prominent family to be the FOE, you should be able to find rather a large number of historically important individuals with whom they had some contact. (For instance, with John Adams and John Quincy Adams, your list would include many international figures, every American statesman and virtually every political or literary individual in the state of Massachusetts).

Now, what did these people do? You will probably find that, without going beyond one degree of connection / separation, a good chunk of the elite of the human race is connected to the FOE; take it to two or three degrees and you will have the whole elite. Write down some of the important things that these people did.


The Family Rules

If we were writing real history, we would simply note that the family was connected to these important historical persons and events. But this is a Conspiracy Theory and they are the FOE, so you must keep in mind that in fact any important historical event that any member of the FOE or anyone they knew was connected with was in fact done at the command of the Family of Evil.

Did Arthur Balfour help out Winston Churchill at some stage of his political career? Obviously this was not some mere alliance such as is common in politics. Obviously, the Talbots, FOE, was pulling the strings and Churchill was their mere puppet. In fact, this means that every single thing that Churchill did was actually at the behest of the Talbots! And if we add in all the people who Churchill knew ... it's easy to see that the Talbots secretly manipulated the whole history of the 20th century!!!

One nice thing about this mode of causative "reasoning" is that it is reversible. If we have decided to make the Churchills the FOE, we can decide that it was the Churchills who were callling the tune and the Talbots who were dancing to the music.


The Family Is United

In any real family, there will be disputes. Even in fairly patriarchal cultures, like medieval Europe, members of the family will disagree with the nominal patriarch and insist on doing their own things; perhaps rebelling against the family. (Look at the history of the Norman Kings of England). In less patriarchal cultures, like Victorian England, members may straight out ignore the wishes of their family. Today, family members will often act in complete disregard of family wishes.

Well, not in the FOE.

You must understand that in a FOE, the normal state of affairs is that anything that any member of the family (by blood, adoption or marriage) does is all part of the FOE's gigantic Evil Conspiracy. Choices of college, spouses, and friends are all elements of the Master Plan. No one in the FOE simply hangs out with someone because they are roomies in college and become lifelong friends. It's always a calculated component of the Conspiracy.

Unless they are Rebels, of course. You can tell when someone is a rebel from the FOE because something bad happens to them or their friends. If the bad thing happens to them and is fatal, end of story, and chalk up a remarkable lesson of the FOE's malign power. If the bad thing happens to a friend or is not fatal, either they continue to Rebel (turning away from their Family Evil) or they are chastened and return to the fold.

The merits of this approach is that it makes the personal political. Everything that any member of the FOE does can now be connected to the FOE's overarching design. Bonus points for a family that actually does do something nasty to a troublesome family member, such as the way that Joe and Rose Kennedy handled their horny retarded daughter. For triple bonus points, imply that the nasty thing was somehow directly connected to the evil plan (maybe the Kennedys were experimenting with unholy antediluvian genetic biomancy and it went wrong on the girl?).


Oh, they KNEW

In real life, many of our actions have consequences which are not predictable to us at the time we do them. This is how we get into a lot of trouble, or at least embarassing situations.

But we are not the FOE. The FOE knows the exact consequences of anything they do, generations into the future. Thus if any bad consequences flow from anything they do, they must have been part of the Evil Conspiracy.

To take the Talbots, one thing that Arthur Balfour is famous for is his partition of Palestine and the Transjordan after World War One, which formed the basis of the later UN plan that created the states of Israel and Jordan, and which (thanks to Palestinian diplomatic incompetence) failed to create the state of Palestine. Now, one might reasonably wonder whether a statesman acting around 1920 could have been aware that this would result in a permanent and contested division which would in turn lead to six wars and be used as an excuse for Islamic sociopaths almost a century in the future, right?

Shame on you! This is a Conspiracy Theory! Of COURSE the Talbots knew exactly what they were doing! It was all a cunning ruse to ... [insert goal here] ... and the whole history of the 20th century has been a protracted working-out of their Sinister Design.

The usual rationalization for this sort of thing is that, because the FOE either is part of or is connected to the Secret Masters of the World and of All History, they have special knowledge regarding long-term trends. For instance, the Talbots, being a FOE, would have been well-aware by (say) 1919 of the fact that there was going to be a Second World War, which side would win, and what the rough shape of the world would have looked like in 1948 ... since, of course, the Secret Masters were already planning to make things turn out that way.


History All Happened at Around the Same Time

This is really a more general case of "They KNEW." If we were writing real history, we would watch out to make sure that we were keeping our events in the proper chronological relationship, and in particular avoiding anachronistic motives. For instance in reality it is very unlikely that Prescott Bush, when he was drilling for oil in the 1930's, had the goal of dominating Lunar tri-helium reserves anywhere in his mind, given that flights to the Moon were deemed impossible and both nuclear fusion and tri-helium's importance as a fuel for same were unknown in that era.

But when it comes to the FOE, toss those rules aside! The Talbots probably had some idea of fomenting the Arab-Israeli Wars back when they were serving Queen Elizabeth in the 16th century! How? Um, John Dee (mumble-mumble) Necronomicon (mumble-mumble) Knights Templar. FOE's have truly amazing resources


Pick a Goal

You might be surprised that I'm putting this last, when logically it should be first. But remember, you are uncovering part of the Secret History of the World. You don't know what the goal of the FOE is when you set out -- it's not as if they print it up in little brochures and give it away at free seminars, now is it?

What you do is you look at the most important historical events that you can blame on ... heh, I mean connect to the machinations of the FOE, and then decide what their effects on the world were. And then this was obviously the goal of the FOE from the very start, from the moment that Sam Adams began brewing beer or Prescott Bush drilling for oil or Joe Kennedy running rum, or whatever it is that the FOE did to first become rich enough that you noticed them.

There is bound to be some goal that makes sense, once one remembers that History All Happened At The Same Time, and when one considers just how much history a family prominent for even a few generations is likely to be directly connected to.

Conclusion

I hope I've shown just how easy and fun it can be to construct a Family Conspiracy Theory. I also hope I've shown people just how silly the whole idea actually is.

One last note: I've assumed a Family of Evil because most people choose to imagine Conspiracies seeking Evil ends. But actually the logic works basically the same for a Family of Good (FOG), or simply a Family of Influence (FOI). You can even have multiple families, playing something like the Steve Jackson Illuminati card game with the whole world!

I'd tell you more, but the agents of the Rockefellers are coming to take me away ...

END.