Science Fiction, Your Kids, and You Tuesday, May 4, 2010

In an effort to catch up on all the science fiction reading I did not get to when I was thirteen--we're not counting the Marvel family of comics, here--I've recently picked up the Science Fiction Association of America's Hall of fame picks. That's the short stories in Volume A and the two books worth of novellas represented by Volume B, everything the mostly male members of the newly-formed SFWA voted in as foundational when the Nebula Awards were begun in 1964.

Reading through the first hundred or so pages of the first volume, it's much easier to see why science fiction got its reputation among the general public as a vast garbage barge of adolescent sexual and political philosophies, written in great hacking strokes by its practitioners.

Based just on this sample, the wizened twenty-something grandmasters of science fiction chose, as the work best representing them, some damnable stuff indeed. The scenarios sound like an International ANSWER leaflet produced under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs. A trio of spacefaring adventurers steal a Martian blood diamond. A pair of bachelors accidentally create a robotic housewife whom they threaten to "shut down" lest she relinquish her feminine illogic. "Negroes" are praised for their "primitive musicianship." Most extraordinary is the Heinlein story, "The Roads Must Roll," in which a John Galt-like figure rolls around on a little wheelie-tron beneath a massive moving highway and busts up a striking union with fatal (but fun!) results. In Heinlein's world, as in Ayn Rand's and Rick Santelli's, "parasites"--the word is used in this story--are never those with the power to siphon massive public resources, but are instead those people who democratically organize in order to make them accountable.

But that's kid's stuff. There are stories I've yet to read in this collection by Sturgeon, Vance and Bester, and I expect more from them. Rather, it's important to realize that the reason science fiction is avoided these days has little to do with any of this. The difference between Science Fiction in 1964 and Science Fiction in, say, 1970 is vast, and those changes have remained with us permanently. The level of writing still is likely often to flub it (yet nowhere else can you find technical jargon elevated to the level of art), and now and again a book will begin with a loving quote from Milton Friedman, yet since the seventies the gatekeepers of written SF have broad responsibilities and sharper eyes than they did in the past. Ignoring all of it denotes a lack of curiosity bordering on self-imposed illiteracy.

Adults have to work long hours these days; the vast commercial cosmology of Star Wars has a lot more thought put into it than does the cosmology of your average libertarian. Only an adolescent has time to poke through the Lucas timeline, or the timeline of Dune, or invent the sort of ongoing scenarios your average Dungeons and Dragons game requires. The threat is not that our adolescents are swimming in a purile sea of sex and republicanism--it's that our adolescents are smarter than any clockpuncher can let herself become. Kids want their Batmans self-critical and their histories operatically vast. We want to punch out mentally after 40-plus hours of work.