Future Grok

By R.I. Sheppard

In Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, our drunken hero crashes a convention of science-fiction writers. "I love you sons of bitches," he says. "You're the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what tremendous misunderstandings, mistakes, accidents and catastrophes do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distances without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell."

Star-Schlock. Rosewater feels the same way when he is sober, although he finds it necessary to note that most science-fiction writers can't write "for sour apples."

A fairer estimate lies somewhere between drinks. Although writers from Poe and Hawthorne to William Burroughs, Anthony Burgess and Doris Lessing have written what could be called science fiction, professional science-fiction writers have rarely been encouraged to be good stylists as well. This is partly because SF publishing and marketing methods make little distinction between the kind of star-schlock in which intergalactic cops battle hypothyroid blobs, and a well-wrought literary work in which far-reaching concepts and social problems are dramatized with intelligence, wit and verbal skill. Even the better SF writers often find it necessary to clutter their prose with spectacular appliances and baptize their earthlings with names full of such Siamese vowels and miscegenated consonants as in Tklook and Klaarv.

More important, critics and reviewers who confer literary status rarely know much about science or technology. Most science-fiction writers, however, browse knowledgeably through specialized journals where many of them find the metaphorical seeds of their novels and short stories. Some, like Isaac Asimov and Arthur Clarke, are trained scientists. Even journeymen practitioners of SF are likely to know more about literature than most novelists and critics know about science. And in the 20th century, ignorance of the fundamentals--and social implications--of physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics constitutes an embarrassing form of illiteracy.

Despite much misunderstanding over the past half-dozen years, SF has undergone an explosive growth in both production and consumption, particularly among the members of the pot-rock generation. In perspective, the interest in SF can be seen as part of the natural anxiety about the future of the planet, the same concern that is expressed in such popular songs as In the Year 2525, even Bob Dylan's Talking World War III Blues. Yet many of the most popular SF titles were first published before most of their young readers had cracked Dick and Jane. Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy--about the death, rebirth and struggles of a universal civilization--appeared in the early '50s. Arthur Clarke's Childhood's End, a finely tuned tale of the mystical reconstitution of the human race, has gone through 18 printings since 1953. Walter M. Miller Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz, an extraordinary novel even by literary standards, has flourished by word of mouth for a dozen years. Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan and Cat's Cradle, and Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles continue to lead long lives in their publishers' backlists.

Unlike many bestselling popular novelists who squint at headlines for topical book ideas, SF writers often prove to be commercially farsighted. Two of the most spectacularly successful SF novels of recent years, Frank Herbert's Dune and Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, are good examples of how public concerns and infatuations catch up with the science-fiction imagination. Both books have been extremely popular with youth, which is greatly involved with the power of mysticism and the impieties of earthly industrial civilization.

Stranger, first published in 1961, and Dune (1965) both star messianic heroes who are charged with psychic abilities and Christlike symbolism. Heinlein's Valentine Michael Smith is a 22nd century human born on Mars to space-pioneer parents. He descends to earth, where Heinlein puts him through a Voltairian gavotte full of broad satire at the expense of organized religion, and teaches him strychnic cynicism about human nature. But what makes V. Michael so groovy, outasight, oh wow! etc., is his powers of clairvoyance and telekinesis.

Through a Martian form of megaempathy known as "grokking," Smith comprehends people and situations instantly in all their sensuous complexity. It makes for exceptionally intense religious and sexual experiences. One sophisticated though unsuspecting beauty, who is asked why she fainted after kissing Smith, replies, "When Mike kisses you he isn't doing anything else!" Esalen T-groups frequently use the term grokking in their touch therapy, and Charles Manson seems to have based his "family" on Valentine Michael Smith's circle of friends. He even named an illegitimate son after the Heinlein hero.

Paul Atreides, the hero of Dune, is also well equipped. A superior thought-hypnotist, swordsman (of the old school) and ecologist, he is descended from an ancient line of space migrants whose antitechnology religion is summed up in the commandment, "Thou shalt not disfigure the soul." Set on the nearly waterless planet of Arrakis thousands of years in the future, Dune is a swashbuckling account of how human civilization, as it is now known, is reborn in a desert.

Like most science fiction, Stranger and Dune are conceptually rich. This is especially true of Dune, which has 541 pages crammed with the canned fruits of Herbert's researches into ecology, desert cultures and history. There are even extensive appendices outlining the soil growth and planting schedules that Atreides projected for his centuries-long ecological project to make Arrakis bloom.

Heinlein, 63, is generally acknowledged to have revolutionized American SF more than 30 years ago, by raising both its idea quotient and its writing level. At the time, the field was mainly influenced by the hard-core gadget stories made popular in Hugo Gernsback's magazine Amazing Stories. In 1956, Heinlein suggested that the term science fiction should be changed to speculative fiction in order to include its new dimensions. Today, though, a growing number of younger SF writers are insisting that a post-Heinlein period is long overdue.

One of the best of the younger SF writers is Samuel R. Delany, a 28-year-old New Yorker whose novels, The Einstein Intersection and Babel-17 won Science Fiction Writers awards in 1966 and 1967. Together with last year's Nova, a space saga that suggests Moby Dick at a strobe-light show, they are not only admired by his professional peers but are also popular successes. Delany has a grasp of the evolutionary nature of mythology, a subtle comic touch and a lyric sense of the outsider making his unorthodox way in the world--or worlds--that give his work a dimension unusual in science fiction.

Comparable qualities can be found in Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, Ursula LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, John Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, Thomas M. Disch's Camp Concentration, James Blish's A Case of Conscience and Robert Silverberg's Night Wings, as well as Joanna Russ's And Chaos Died, an amusing tour de force about a sophisticated homosexual encounter with a telepathic civilization. Miss Russ, incidentally, teaches science-fiction writing at Cornell University, one of the 70 colleges across the country that now offer such courses.

The upswing of academic interest in the subject has lately tended to give science fiction a new "literary" class in much the same way that the movies became cinema and jazz graduated from speakeasies to the Philharmonic, where it is now parsed by critics. In theory, this development should delight SF writers. But Judy-Lynn Benjamin, managing editor of Galaxy, an SF monthly, sees a certain resultant deterioration in the tools of the SF trade. "Young writers," she says, "are often more interested in symbols than in stories. Plot is out. Characters are out. All they want is the Big Experience."

Still, the demand for science fiction is creating a sellers' market and attracting more and more young talent. By the law of averages, some of these new writers will be good enough to make the terms science fiction and speculative fiction irrelevant.

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