My last essay, “Will Humanity Ever Give Up Its Faith in Irrational Beliefs?” generated a good discussion on Facebook. It showed that science fiction readers regard the concepts promoted by science fiction in diverse ways. To some, science fiction is only entertaining stories, no more or less. For others, science fiction explores possible inventions and events that fans want to come about in the future.
I was surprised when my friend Mike texted me the following statement:
Mike later said, “I’ve always thought that if I was a fantasy writer and someone started talking about what separates fantasy from science fiction I would have to call bullshit.”
This surprised me. I’ve known Mike for forty years and we’ve always talked about science fiction. I assumed he was like me and thought some of the concepts in science fiction might be plausible someday.
It was then I realized that I had been a science fiction true believer. If you haven’t read The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, I highly recommend it. It came out in 1951, the year I was born and is about the kind of people who cause mass movements. I’ve always thought of science fiction as a mass movement, and not just escapist literature. True believers are often seen as fanatics, but any person who believes in a philosophy or cause with complete faith. I always thought science fiction promoted certain futures and warned us against other futures.
I assume that ardent science fiction fans were also true believers in the possibilities that science fiction explored. The discussion on Facebook made me realize that there are many SF readers that aren’t true believers. I used to be a science fiction true believer and Robert A. Heinlein was my prophet and guru.
I started first grade the month before Sputnik went into orbit and graduated the 12th grade the month before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. I also grew up with science fiction, rock music, the counterculture, and mind-altering drugs. We thought it was both the dawn of the Age of Aquarius and the dawn of the space age. Maybe I was a dumbass, but I grew up believing that the following things would eventually come true:
- We would colonize the solar system, especially the Moon and Mars
- We would eventually colonize the galaxy given enough time
- We would create self-aware sentient robots
- We would create human clones
- We would meet other intelligent species from other star systems
- We would create a sustainable ecological society
- We would expand our lifespans dramatically
- We would develop suspended animation
- We would uplift other species like dogs, chimps, and dolphins
- We would build self-sustainable space colonies
- We would develop faster-than-light travel
- We would send off generation ships
- We would create artificial life
- We would create virtual worlds
- We would copy our personalities into robots, clones, and digital worlds
- We would evolve into posthumans and transhumans
- We would make SETI contact with aliens
- We would accelerate our IQs
- We would have artificial eyes
- We would become cyborgs
The list could go on and on. I say if you think that many of the items on this list are possible then you’re probably a science fiction true believer too. I didn’t believe in time travel or matter transmitters would ever be possible, but I’d guess there are those who did.
The trouble is, as I got older, I believed in less and less, until I’m an atheist to my own beliefs. The young me was full of hope, and the old me is full of doubt. And what I’m realizing from the Facebook discussion is many science fiction fans never were true believers. I’m surprised at that.
Years ago, when an early experimental rocket from SpaceX took off and landed on its thrusters, science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle said, “It’s the way God and Heinlein intended rockets to land.” And that resonated deeply because people who grokked that quote were fans of Robert A. Heinlein and grew up reading his books believing that the technology described in his stories could be invented someday.
I discovered Heinlein in 1964 and read the twelve Scribner juveniles that year. By the end of 1965 I had read nearly all his adult work. I was twelve and thirteen and I thought over my lifetime I would see many of Heinlein’s science fictional visions come true. I’m now seventy-two, and I’ve seen a few things come true, but I don’t hold out for much more anymore. I don’t know if my skepticism is caused by old age, or just learning more about science and the way the world works..
Evidently, my buddy Mike wasn’t as gullible as I was.
Am I wrong in assuming that other science fiction fans were true believers too? Are you a true believer, or were you a true believer?
James Wallace Harris, 9/4/24
Classics of Science Fiction 
I enjoy how science fiction can speculate about our possible futures, both good and bad. And I believe that we humans have the potential to achieve much of the more optimistic ideas, if we can pull ourselves together and get past our pettiness. But I do not feel too optimistic and fear we will realize the more pessimistic speculations.
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I enjoy how science fiction can speculate about our possible futures, both good and bad. And I believe that we humans have the potential to achieve much of the more optimistic ideas, if we can pull ourselves together and get past our pettiness. But I do not feel too optimistic and fear we will realize the more pessimistic speculations.
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We have the knowledge to achieve many of the dreams science fiction imagines. I just don’t think we have what it takes to cooperate and to make it happen.
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I *was* a True Believer in the Hoffer sense, until I, like Mike, did some costing. Then I went agnostic…hoping, not expecting. As I forge my path through my seventh decade, I’m gradually drifting into atheism here, too. My faith in humanity’s goodness is dwindling from slim to none.
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You and I think alike. I don’t think we’ll ever spend the trillions it will take to set up a colony on the Moon or Mars, nor do I think our civilization will survive to build one. I expect things to fall apart in the coming decades. I don’t think humanity will go extinct, but I do expect a regression.
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Interesting piece with lots of personal resonance. Here in the UK we had a show called Tomorrow’s World, showcasing technology every week, and promising us a brave new world led by tech. I suppose I was close to your believe in the ’70s, but now see science fiction as both allowing discussion about the future we’d like to aspire to, giving warnings and simple entertaining.
Older now we still don’t live on the moon, holiday on Mars or most other things we had expected back then. Science has taken its own direction, and humanity at large seems incapable of pulling together. I suspect at heart we aren’t a rational species
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We had a history show about the 20th century hosted by Walter Cronkite, then in the late 1960s, he had a show about the 21st century that imagined future technology and society.
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I think I always read SF as romances in the old fashioned meaning of the term; adventures in exotic lands. I certainly believed that the future would be something like the SF I was reading, but I always read it as fiction, an exercise in imagination, for entertainment. Clearly not a true believer. But here we are in the future, and I find that I have no desire anymore to read about the future. I think it’s the lack of flying cars that has killed SF for me.
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I used to fantasize about flying cars as a kid before I read science fiction. I remember holding my hand out the window as my father drove, and felt the air lift my hand or push it down. And I imagined the whole car taking off.
But as I got older, I never wanted flying cars because I couldn’t imagine how they’d control the airborne traffic. I was afraid wreck cars would always be falling out of the skies.
The future to me when I was growing up was always about colonizing the Moon and Mars, building intelligent robots, and making SETI contact with aliens. I thought those things could happen. I also worried that a nuclear apocalypse could happen too.
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Agreed about flying cars. Given the mayhem that people commit with cars in two dimensions it’s hard to imagine the carnage in three.* I wasn’t a true believer in the specifics of SF prediction, but I did think it was pacing humanity’s progress towards a more rational society. Well, so much for that.
* I look with trepidation on plans for deliveries by drone for much the same reason, though at least the carnage could be on a smaller scale. Imagine stepping out of your front door to go shopping at the same time a good-sized machine with whirring propellers at multiple angles was descending to leave something on your doorstep.
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Hey, my flying cars use an anti-gravity drive – no jets or blades – and had collusion avoidance systems. The “flying cars” of today are a joke. Dream big or go home:)
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Many thanks for this fascinating discussion. I’ve never been a science fiction true believer in the sense you describe. I’ve always loved science fiction as a branch of fantastic literature, so in a sense I’m more of a fantasy buff than a science fiction buff. I love the theme of space travel in SF, but I’ve always been at best ambivalent about it in real life, regarding both its feasibility and desirability.
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I find it fascinating that people could be enchanted by fictional space travel and not real space travel.
I’m also fascinated by the idea that space travel could just be a modern myth that people enjoy.
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Yes, I’m more fascinated by fictional space travel than real space travel, and enjoy SF space travel on the level of literature, myth, or however one describes it. I have a heretical idea (heretical for some SF writers and readers) that the true home of space travel is in SF, and that it should never have left the pages of Astounding/Analog, Galaxy, etc., and the episodes of Star Trek.
I also find it interesting that space travel became less central as a theme in SF in the sixties–the same time that the space program developed in real life.
By the way, Isaac Asimov wrote an essay “The Dreams of Science Fiction” (in his 1981 book of essays Asimov on Science Fiction), in which he described at length various “dreams” of SF similar to your list above. He found some of them to be either unlikely or possibly undesirable in practice, but concluded, “Nevertheless, what is life without dreams?”
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I don’t think I’ve ever been an SF true believer, despite reading it for my life — possibly because of most of my SF was Star Trek novels, and I didn’t start getting into “real” SF until my twenties, and even then it took me a while to start viewing it as a distinct category. For me an adventure novel was an adventure novel, whether it was in space or in history. Most of my preferred SF is near-future, meaning it’s dealing with the aftermath of things that are infantile now — genetic modification, drones — but are in these novels far more developed, so the consequences of things like life-run-by-algorithms are being explored. There was a brief moment in my early twenties when I was full of optimism and such, but I’ve long since lapsed into believing that humanity is a flawed creature who will grow and stumble, stumble and grow.
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