By
John Barnes
Who'll Save the Torchbearers?
Last time around I offered you one kind of story about the present straits of science fiction — fundamentally that it just got old, and when genres get old they go into a sort of lingering twilight existence. This time around, let's try another kind of story...it's not flourishing as it once did because its habitat has changed. Those two stories aren't mutually exclusive, and for all I know I'll have another one for you next time. (You may have to wait a very, very long time if you want a story about how it's dying off because nobody is writing the Real Stuff the way they used to, or because of Today's Dang Kids).
To catch things up for the newcomers, when I say "genre" I mean commercial genre, a marketing phenomenon; hence small coterie literatures (like fantasy before Tolkien) do not seem to me to become full-on genres till something breaks them out into the mass market, though that boundary is pretty fuzzy; classic and hardboiled detective fiction probably ought to count as two genres, except that the overlap between the readerships seems to be well over one half of each. Perhaps the simplest definition is that a commercial genre is a kind of book that is bought by at least a substantial minority of its readers for being what it is (rather than for what it's about or who it's by), and which is sold to them by using a mixture of signs and signals in the advertising, marketing, and especially the covers that say "This is that X sort of book, X readers please purchase."
All right, now let's wade into the next story, and begin with one of those "period bullet" lists that seem to be in vogue for would-be-highly-dramatic stories these days. You know the kind:
A broken sword.
A torn gown.
An ancient bell.
That was all that remained at Gorgonzola when Baldric at last reached it...
I used that trick a couple times myself, in my younger days, but I got better. The last real writer I can think of who made it work was O. Henry, in "The Gift of the Magi."
All right, put on your Overwrought False Drama Shades, here we go:
The Hundred Years' War.
The Thirty Years' War.
The Frontier.
The Age of Colonialism.
The Seventy-Five Years' War.
I suppose I could ask you what all these things have in common but you know I'm going to tell you, anyway, right? In roughly chronological order, it's a list of particularly ghastly eras that were usually called something else by people living through them. They're the dark tunnels on the long railroad of Western civilization; the generations when things went absolutely to solid shit across some sizable area for longer than a single adult lifetime.
Since the printing press, there seems to be no era so awful that it does not produce some sort of pop lit. Apparently stories are up there with food and having babies for things human beings won't give up. Some literature doesn't live out its era (e.g. the captive narratives of the Frontier and the missionary martyr tales of the European Colonial Era); other stuff lives on for quite a while after — most notably the Western (some of them nowadays do mention genocide), but more to the point, there is still a certain market out there for pith helmets, stiff upper lips, and hordes of oncoming natives. (There are still not many popular novels that feature the genuinely grim aspects of that era; there were more around 1900 than now).
That last example is instructive; King of the Khyber Pass, She, Kim, and so forth were produced toward the end of the age of the European Empires; they had a relatively long life in pop lit, well after the point where British boys were going out to paint the map red, and indeed are still read with pleasure by some older people. Westerns persist even more so. So there is an afterlife to at least some of the literature of some of the world's dark periods, and in that afterlife, some genres continue for a time mostly on nostalgia, but others seem to find new life and new roles, at least for a time.
So let's consider whether science fiction might be a particular literature of the Seventy-Five Years' War, and might now be persisting in an era to which it is less suited, and what its prospects are if that is true.
The term "Seventy-Five Years' War" isn't yet popular but I'm doing my best to popularize it. It has a sort of science fictional aspect to it, anyway. Put on your chrono-opticon goggles, set your time machine for 2350, and peer back at the twentieth century, and I think what you will see will be a period of never-really-ceasing conflict from the summer of 1914, with the eruption of general fighting between the big powers in Europe (though you might fairly start with the Mexican and Chinese Revolutions in 1911), and ending in the fall of 1989 with the escape of the last Soviet satellite nations and the dismantling of the Warsaw Pact (though you might stretch it a year or two into the 1990s). If you want dramatic markers, the Seventy-Five Years' War begins at Sarajevo and ends in the dismantling of the Berlin Wall.
Just as in those other dark and bloody eras, there were periods and places of apparent peace — but everywhere was tied into the global war economy. People thought they fought for dozens or hundreds of causes, but future historians will point to a couple of the big consequences of the war and say "that was the underlying purpose" just as they do for the Thirty Years' War or the Frontier era. (My guess: the historians of 2207 will say that the Seventy-Five Years' War was about reducing the number of superpowers to one, from between eight and ten candidates in 1914; or the establishment of the supremacy of the multinational corporation; or just as plausibly the principle of one nation, one state, but there may be some other consequence, less evident to me, that will loom larger to them.)
At any rate, I expect that eventually it will be perceived that it was one big war and it took the world from machine guns, railways, and the telegraph to nuclear bombs, spaceflight, and the internet.
And after about the first decade of the Seventy-Five Years War, science fiction emerged, grew, and flourished, continuing to do well and gain ground right up till the end. Since the end of the Seventy-Five Years' War it has suffered a decline, like ice-age mammals when the interglacial hits.
This may be entirely a false correlation, like the way that the monthly count of Olympic gold medals awarded goes through a brief peak a few months before most changes of U.S. President, or the neat graph Michael Flynn has showing the strong correlation between women in the work force and sales of Japanese cars. But for the sake of the story, let's ask: what about the Seventy-Five Years' War was good for sf? How did it create the audience and conditions for the genre?
To begin with, it was an age of rapidly rising literacy rates in general and increasing technical literacy in particular; more working people knew more science and math than ever before, and were more likely to seek reading material for amusement. It was a good era for literary escapism in popular literature, for the very good reason that an age that gave us the Somme, Coventry, and the gulag was an age any reasonable person might want to escape from. The escape was of a particular kind — an escape through time (usually into the future, but sometimes sidewise or backward), an escape from the intractable issues of the day into the simpler ones of the stories, perhaps most of all an escape into a world where understanding things and being able to explain them gave you power over your environment.
That last point bears a certain amount of elaboration. The Seventy-Five Years' War was an era in which the goons took the nerds' toys and turned them into tools of horror. There was plenty of money around for science, engineering, and the expansion of knowledge, but the money flowed in great measure because that knowledge could be turned into instruments of slaughter, destruction, and torture. Technically sophisticated people were simultaneously astonished at progress and revolted by its uses; the grim truth was that the scientists were allowed to play until a literal "killer app" came along, and then the bullies rushed in to take it and use it on the weak. But in the pages of the science fiction pulps, frequently, the ability to explain the science (whether bogus or real) would often turn the tables and allow the hero to triumph, marry the girl, and rejoice that he'd stayed awake in chemistry class. What nerd wouldn't rather live there, mentally?
Then too, fiction is a vehicle of hope and fear, both within the story and overall, and the Seventy-Five Years' War was an era where hope was in short supply and fear much too abundant. It is interesting to note that from the beginnings in the 1920s, science fiction put forth both utopian societies with just enough trouble to be adventurous (Doc Smith can serve as an exemplar here) and post-apocalyptic stories in which all the fears had come to pass. Perhaps the hope tended to be negative — a world without war, a world without want, etc. — and the fear tended to be positive — "it really could get that bad, and the survivors would be such heroic beings." Nonetheless, science fiction uniquely focused on social hope and fear, at a time when most other escapist literature simply escaped into action and the more sentimental kind of character.
Wartime is the time when there is money to do anything that is at all technologically feasible. In a war lasting generations, certain technologies that are infants at the start will be giants at the end (gunpowder in the Hundred Years' War, aviation, robotics, radar, rockets, and nuclear power in the Seventy-Five Years' War). It was a time when it seemed utterly plausible that a new gadget could change the face of the world within a few short years, and that people in the future would have devices unimaginable to us in the present.
It was also an age in which there were periodic upheavals around the globe against social strictures and against the very idea of war itself. The little boy in short pants, sentenced to look like Buster Brown, sitting glumly between Ma and Pa in the buggy going to church, was still young when, back from the war in Europe, he went to the dance hall with his flapper girlfriend and copulated with her in the backseat of his flivver. The dutiful little girl with the Dale Evans lunchbox, crouching under her desk to hide from the atom bombs, was bumping and grinding ecstatically and passing around a joint at Woodstock a few years later. In 1958 plenty of people thought racial segregation would last forever; in 1968 it was supposed to be gone. In some places, being gay went from being a literally unspeakable sin to being a mental illness to being "like being blonde or brunette" in less time than it takes a guy to lose his looks.
So was anything unbelievable? Twenty years from now, cities on Mars where homosexuality is mandatory? Next week, beings from Alpha Centauri arrive and invite us into the Galactic Alliance, so that kids in grade school now are 80,000 light years away talking to four-headed grasshopper-men by the time they're twenty? The global population is down to 100,000 in a vast wrecked desert, and an evil cult leader arises to take control, before a fourteen-year-old turns twenty? No problem in believability. No tougher than believing 1943 would have been from the standpoint of 1927, or 1972 from 1956.
But nowadays, and with close to twenty years of experience, it genuinely appears that the Seventy-Five Years' War was really only about that long and it's really over. We're in an era of quarrelsome, difficult, confusing relations between nations, continuing rapid technical change, and rapid economic innovation, but even the nations at war don't have war budgets compared to the war budgets of 1914-89.
There may be big conflicts but they are unlikely to go "total" in the all too literal sense that they once were. The current candidates seem to be Islamic terror and China among the fretting classes, but if they'd really listen to each other, they'd get a little perspective. The liberals are right that Islamic fundamentalist terrorism is too small a problem to aim vast armies at, and the conservatives are right that anyway, no matter what size problem it grows to, we are capable of knocking it down. The conservatives are right that China is so tied into the global economic system that they'd have to be crazy to kick it all over in military adventures; the liberals are right that the ideological/political walls leak like sieves and the Communist Party cannot hold on there forever. In both cases, the solutions will be messy, partial, and enough; there is simply no equivalent of the Germans of '38 or the Russians of '49.
Another difference in our present, post-75YW era, is that there's less apparent technical convergence (although I think there's probably more real convergence). By convergence I mean the marriage of developing technologies to produce bigger effects than any of them could alone — for example, at the end of World War II, it was easy to imagine what kind of world there might be if bigger V2s carried atom bombs and were guided like homing torpedos or glide bombs but much more cleverly because they had a miniaturized Sperry-Univac machine on board. (Even if it was hard to see how you'd fit in the vacuum tubes and the Hollerith card reader). Radios and air conditioning in cars, television plus satellites plus transistorized cameras, helicopters plus freeways plus radio, all these combinations had clearly explicable consequences that might be most simply summed up in William Gibson's celebrated comment that "The Street finds its own uses for things - uses the manufacturers never imagined." Even in the 1980s, it was trivially easy for the cyberpunks to trace connections and show consequences to make their fictional worlds plausible; it seemed obvious enough that the growth of crime syndicates and the dropping cost of personal computing, for example, would lead to a new kind of smart-guy underground.
But in our era, though it's clear that technology is melding and mixing faster than ever, the effects of the convergences are harder to judge. Is podcasting going to be like the CD-ROM market of the mid-1990s, or will it be with us as long as music videos? Are small robotic aircraft going to change warfare as much as the rifle did, or only as much as the hand grenade? Will the combination of text generation, internet, rapid demographics, and desktop manufacturing result in a world of infinite spam or one where consumers always get just what they want? The old "as you know, Bob"/newspaper-of-the-future exposition seems oddly unable to handle such problems, perhaps because there are fewer and fewer people who really want an old-fashioned explanation, so it's hard to believe that in 200 years there will be anyone to listen to one.
Science fiction, then, was a natural response of pop literature to the Seventy-Five Years' War. It offered at least the plausible chance that the world would someday be different. It provided a kind of a Stoic release of hope and fear — that is, once something happens you no longer hope for it nor fear it is going to happen, so you are free from concern. ("The Cold Equations," "Nightfall," Starship Troopers, and Childhood's End are all about as Stoic as stories can be, and if it were not for their tacked-on endings, I'd happily point to Alas, Babylon, Speaker for the Dead, and The Forge of God as more examples.) The Stoic release always strikes me as being a much better approach if you're hoping/fearing about humiliation or money than it does if you're hoping/fearing about pain, and it should be noted that the Stoics logically concluded that therefore there was nothing to worry about as long as you were prepared to kill yourself. But as T.S. Eliot said of Seneca, Stoicism is a perfect way of talking yourself into cheering up when there is no good reason to — and what else was there to do in the Seventy-Five Years' War?
And so we talked ourselves into cheering up — even when we did it by facing the imaginary worst of A Canticle for Leibowitz or The Sheep Look Up. We created a little brightness in the long darkness. In the world of sf it mattered that some people were smart and it was better if people listened to them. Science fiction reassured readers that they could stay on their feet through the tidal wave of change, warned them that there might be tough times ahead, argued that their destinies were the effects of causes being laid down now and thus to some extent within their control.
Science fiction was a torch in the darkness for a certain kind of sensitive, technically minded person; an invitation to speculate for another kind of large mind; a dream for those who quite sensibly wished to wake up in a better century.
We carried our torch to the end of the cave, and now here we are holding it in the daylight. Perhaps night will fall. Perhaps we will enter another cave. Perhaps after running about for a bit in the air and sunshine, people will find new hopes and fears that draw them back to the old torch. The world is still a scary enough place, and there are still enough good and bad dreams, that I do not think we will simply let it go out and drop it.
But certain features of science fiction will undoubtedly drop away, and it's not easy to say which ones yet. My guess is that in the future, fiction about the future will explain less (and I'll admit that makes me a bit sad; as a kid reading Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke, I used to skip over the dull action scenes to read the exposition, which may explain more than I would like it to). There may be fewer tropes in common between stories, forcing writers who want readers to know what is going on to invent substitutes for the exposition that they can no longer use. The hopes may be more positive (hopes for things to come into the world rather than for things to pass out of it) and the fears may be more negative (fear of returns from the past; so far there haven't been nearly as many stories of returning horrors from the Cold War, but on the other hand there are plenty of tales of toxic waste resurfacing).
In short, there will be a literature of the future in the future, but it probably won't feel like sf to all us survivors of the Seventy-Five Years' War, and it might not even be labeled science fiction. I'm still looking forward to reading it.
