In the Problem Pit

Science fiction is fun, otherwise it wouldn't exist at all. But sometimes, I think, it is more than fun, it is a way of looking at the world that cannot he duplicated in any other way, or improved on in some very important respects. And this short essay tells why I believe that.

My late collaborator, Cyril Kornbluth, once wrote a story called "The Only Thing We Learn." He didn't think it necessary to complete the quotation, or indeed to attribute it. He was, after all, writing for a science-fiction audience. Ess Effers are usually cynics and always time-binders. The message that the only thing to be learned from history is that no one ever learns anything from history is not news to them. In fact, the only quarrel an sf writer or reader might have with the statement would be that it is incomplete, and should properly read: "The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history—unless we view history, both past and present, as a science-fiction story."

In order to see why this statement is true we must first explain what we mean by a "science-fiction story." This isn't easy, since the defining of the term "science fiction" has never been done in a really satisfactory fashion. Science fiction may be a story about the future, or a story about space travel, or a Japanese monster movie, or a political parable. It may also be none of those things. It may be about anything, anything at all, because that quality which most clearly distinguishes sf from non-sf writing has to do not with content but with method.

This is true, of course, not only of science fiction but of its collateral relative science. Most of us rather hastily and thoughtlessly regard "science" as a sort of collection of linear accelerators and space vehicles and organic chemistry models. In fact it is not any of these things; it is only a systematic method of gathering and testing knowledge, involving certain formal procedures: gathering information, forming a theory to explain the information, predicting certain consequences of the theory and performing an experiment to test the prediction. If you investigate any area of knowledge (whether it is stellar physics or the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin) by this method, you are doing science. If you use any other method, you are doing something else.

In the same way, science fiction has to do with methodology, and "the science-fiction method"¹ is that quality in the creative process of the science-fiction writer which describes the parameters within which he can speculate. The sf method is parallelistic, universal, and antideterminisdc. If we throw dice and see a six come up, the layman sees only a six; the writer using the sf method sees that a six has come up, but that any of five other possibilities might have come up.

I do not pretend, of course, that all sf writers consciously view the universe in this way, or even that sf stories do not exist in which this feature is minimal if it exists at all. What I do think is that it is this feature which gives sf the special qualities which make it more interesting than any other kind of fiction. I think it is what Arthur Clarke meant, for instance, when he said that he wrote sf in preference to other kinds of fiction "because most other literature isn't concerned with reality."

Science fiction makes good propaganda literature, and there have in fact been times when the freedom to think and say unorthodox sentiments was severely repressed outside of science fiction. Probably that is why Jonathan Swift chose (or innovated) the sf form for Gulliver's Travels; he could not compare France to England to the disadvantage of England in open terms without running risks to his livelihood, but he could say the same things without fear as long as he used the science-fiction disguises of "Blefuscu" and "Lilliput." In

America a decade or two ago, when Joseph McCarthy reduced journalists, academics, and even statesmen to terrified silence, sf magazines went right on talking about anything and everything as though the Senate Permanent Investigations Subcommittee had never existed.

The existence of sf-as-agitprop has obscured the to-my-mind far more important feature of sf-as-analysis. But it is the analytical powers of the sf method that make its effectiveness as propaganda great; an sf story not only makes a statement about a particular imaginary world but carries the broad general implication that an infinite number of differing worlds are possible, and that small random changes in causal factors may produce overwhelming changes in social structures, kinds of morality, and even "human nature."

For one example, consider religion. Theologians are just now beginning to catch up with science-fiction writers in thinking about the religious implications of possible non-human life on other planets. Few if any of them have yet faced the problem of wholly alien theologies. Nearly every human society stipulates One True God, a Heavenly Father who rewards and punishes. Clearly this is biology-related; humans have two sexes and a helplessly dependent infancy, requiring a family structure for survival. But what would be the theology of a sexless race, or one hatched from eggs laid and abandoned like the sea turtle's? Nor has any theologian that I know of approached the question raised in Brian Aldiss's The Dark Light-Years. Most humans, Aldiss argues, attach sacramental importance to such biological functions as sex (ritual marriage) and eating (saying grace at meals, ingestion of bread and wine at mass, etc.). But why should some other race not attach equal sacramental importance to such other biological functions as, for instance, excretion?

It is this systematic investigation of what causal factors are possible and what social consequences may follow them that makes science fiction a splendid tool for social analysis. To be sure, it need not be done exclusively within the pages of Analog or Amazing Stories, or even in the form of a story at all. Think tanks like the Rand Corporation, the Hudson Institute, the Institute for the Future in Connecticut, Bertrand de Jouvenel's "futuribles" panels in Paris, and many others do in fact use these techniques in nonliterary ways. But science fiction taught them all how, and science fiction is still the most pleasurable way of doing these things.

In essence science fiction reduces the entire continuum of human knowledge to a sort of board game, and by systematically changing the rules of the game one or a few at a time investigates the possibility of alternate societies. Is this an important thing to do? No, not just important; it is transcendental, for there can be no hope of making a change in any condition we deplore until we know what alternatives are open to us. Science fiction gives us a sort of catalog of possible worlds. From the wish-book we can pick the ones we want. Without it we can resent and deplore, but our capacity to change is very small.

One of the great personal satisfactions of living in the world of science-fiction readers and writers is observing how game-playing reduces partisan tensions. Our uptight "real" world affects science fiction, too. Some sf people are right-wingers and some are left; some are deeply religious, some not at all; some battle for women's lib or black power or the freedom of the drug scene and some are firmly for the Establishment; and yet all of them are able to join in the game.

In a real world that every day seems more partisan, more grimy, more sullen, and more violent, this is a source not only of pleasure but of hope. Perhaps The Method can spread. Perhaps the world at large can learn from sf. And perhaps then the ants won't have to replace us after all.