In yesterday’s post, I claimed humans will never colonize the solar system or explore the galaxy. Whenever I express this doubt, I often get one excellent counterargument. This time, it came from P. F. Nel on my Facebook page.
I’d still read science fiction, but if I knew for an absolute fact that space exploration is going nowhere further than Mars and Venus, I’d probably prefer earthbound SF, where there is still enormous potential for imaginative futures.
But how are we ever going to know that “for an absolute fact”? The human race is only 300,000 years old. If we survive, what will the world look like a million years in the future? What about two million? I don’t think we can predict our technological future. Just look at those amusing predictions for the 21st century, made a hundred or more years ago. They’re nothing like the world of today.
So I can’t see how we can ever rule out interplanetary settlements or even interstellar trips. We still have millions of people who believe that nobody ever landed on the moon. We may be far wrong about how long things might take, but never say never.
This is a good argument, one I can’t counter. This argument is similar to those for God, Heaven, and the afterlife. Yes, these things are possible, but are they likely? It doesn’t hurt to believe in them as long as you don’t sacrifice anything in the here and now, in this existence.
We can never say anything for sure. Science is never 100% definite. We might invent some gizmo that takes us to the stars, but my main point yesterday was whether we’ll want to go if we could.
I can’t believe anyone who carefully considers the conditions on the planets and moons in our solar system would choose to live anywhere other than the Earth. But what if we discover Earth-like worlds orbiting distant stars? Would you really go if the trip lasted five to ten years? Would you go knowing that only your descendants would arrive? If you say yes, I think you need to psychoanalyze your motives. I would say science fiction has brainwashed you, and you need to think long and hard about your desires.
Let’s say we discover an FTL drive that can take us anywhere in the galaxy as fast as a plane trip from New York to Los Angeles. And you could pick destinations that are very Earth-like. Before you go, I suggest reading Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. Our bodies are ecologies of bacteria, fungi, and viruses. It took our species millions of years of evolution to coexist with those tiny creatures. If you step onto a planet where the air is breathable and the temperature is comfortable, do you think your microbiome will survive the onslaught of your destination’s biome?
There is something else to consider. Why do you want to leave Earth? It’s a world that took billions of years of customization just for your body. Why would you risk your only body to a world that wasn’t designed for it?
Furthermore, what motivates you? Adventure? Boredom? Oppression? Dislike of people? Political freedom? If you’re dreaming of traveling to other planets, isn’t it because of reading or watching science fiction? Has it given us a truly good reason to leave Earth?
Up till now, I’ve only been questioning our desire to colonize the galaxy. Let’s explore the real question: can we do it, given enough time? Like Piet said, what is possible in a million years?
The potential of technology seems infinite. Is it? What if Einstein is flat out right, and nothing can travel faster than light? That won’t stop us. If we could travel at near light speeds, we could eventually go anywhere in the galaxy. Hopping from star to star, in five to ten-year jaunts, people could endure that. But we’re back to my first argument. Is there anywhere we want to go?
Ethically, we shouldn’t visit any planet that has evolved life. Why steal someone else’s existential potential? We’re not very ethical, are we? Humanity has consumed the planet Earth like a cancer. Shouldn’t we evolve spiritually before we start spreading across the galaxy? Remember The Day the Earth Stood Still? If aliens exist, they would do well to stop us. If we were truly moral beings, we’d do well to stop ourselves.
After the Soviet Union collapsed, we had a couple of decades where it looked like we might finally get our act together and become a peaceful species. Globalization and cooperation grew. We even realized we were destroying our environment by using fossil fuels. Humanity could have done something. We didn’t. We went back to nationalism and strong men rule. We’re deevolving.
Yes, there are people rich enough now to build their own space programs. But doesn’t that say something when the richest among us choose to use their wealth to feed their egos rather than help the species?
Taxpayers and politicians stopped supporting the space program after Apollo 11 because they thought the money could be better spent elsewhere. Did we? We’ve spent trillions on weapons and war that could have colonized the Moon and Mars. But we didn’t. Why? The driving force of our species is greed. We compete with each other to consume more.
We can’t even stop ourselves from turning the paradise of planet Earth into the hell of planet Venus. Can we really survive another million years?
Poul Anderson often claimed in his science fiction stories that the human race was best suited to handle feudalism. In a recent article in The Atlantic, “Rod Dreher Thinks the Enlightenment was a Mistake,” a radical-right philosopher makes a similar case. Dreher believes humanity was better off before science, when religion and faith dominated. Ignoring the fact that before the Enlightenment, the vast majority of people were ignorant peasants, serfs, and slaves, is feudalism the highest level of order humanity can handle? That doesn’t say much about our species.
Let’s face it, if the Singularity produces AI minds greater than ours, maybe there’s a reason. Maybe Homo Sapiens have evolved as far as they can. That doesn’t mean AIs have to wipe us out. Here’s the thing: intelligent machines are perfectly suited for living everywhere in the solar system and beyond. They can “live” long enough to travel to the stars.
What about Fermi’s Paradox? Maybe it’s logical that we haven’t heard from anyone else if biology is the limitation. So, why haven’t we heard from intelligent machines? Maybe they are ethical enough not interfere with biological beings? Maybe they only talk to other intelligent machines. If the singularity occurs in the next few years, it should only take another decade or two for machines to evolve into space-faring beings. Maybe our AI minds will be contacted by alien AI minds.
As an old man, my doubt about humans colonizing Mars and the galaxy comes from two reasons. First, I don’t think anyone will want to live on Mars, and second, I believe our current global civilization is doomed. And I doubt we’ll leave enough natural resources for a future global civilization to prosper as we did.
We can only guess what AI minds will do. Who knows, maybe they will help us achieve a Star Trek future. Or maybe they will convince us to take care of Earth. But if we couldn’t do right on our own, could we become better with them? Or will humanity become a cargo cult waiting for the flying saucers to save us?
A family sitting on a grassy Earth cliffside, looking at a glowing holographic bubble of Mars and the stars.
Science fiction writers can’t predict the future, but they love to imagine possibilities. For the most part, readers know they are just reading stories, but science fiction has given them certain concepts that they want to believe will come true. Three of the most popular memes that have been passed down over centuries are space travel, aliens, and robots.
Science fiction has also warned us about futures we want to avoid. The genre offers a spectrum of visions ranging from horror to hope. We don’t want War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells to come true, but many would find Carl Sagan’s vision in Contact to be wonderful.
Most science fiction fans know they read to escape ordinary lives, but a few hoped some of the things imagined by science fiction would come to be, even hoping in their lifetimes. Things like space travel, colonizing the Moon and Mars, first contact, robots, artificial minds, and life extension.
The robots and artificial minds of 2026 are almost like what we read about, and in the next few years, might catch up with science fiction. Many real robots surpass the abilities of the robots we saw in Forbidden Planet and Lost in Space. And real robots are way beyond the clunky robots we saw in The Twilight Zone. I’d even say modern robotics has evolved past most of the robots in early Asimov stories. We haven’t gotten Data or R. Daneel Olivaw yet. But I’d say they are within the realm of possibility.
For some reason, humans have long wanted to create intelligent companions. You can trace these desires back to folk tales and myths. But now that this dream is about to come true, will it make us happy?
Science fiction also dwells on aliens, alien invasion, and first contact. Again, this says something about our sense of aloneness in the universe. However, meeting aliens depends on science fiction’s prime hope, space travel.
With NASA and SpaceX, you’d think I’d give space travel an A+ too, but I don’t. I’m afraid I’m going to give science fiction a fail. It’s almost certain we won’t go to the stars. We might make it to Mars, but I doubt that we will stay there. My bet is we’ll screw around on the Moon for several years, maybe send a few crewed missions to Mars, and then decide space exploration isn’t very desirable at all. That is, at least for humans.
All the nearby real estate outside of Earth is only suitable for robots. Robots don’t breathe or eat, and they don’t mind the extreme cold and heat of space, or even the radiation. Since they don’t need to carry a biosphere with them, it makes it much easier for them travel in space. More than that, they can handle voyages of years or even centuries. You have to wonder if evolution is working here. That robots are our evolutionary descendants.
Science fiction has glamorized outer space. Years ago, I was talking with a young woman who told me she was a science fiction fan. I asked her if she wanted to be an astronaut. She said, “No way!” But she went on to say she’d love to travel in space like Captain Picard and crew. I told her a spaceship like the Enterprise will probably never exist. She replied, “That’s depressing, so I don’t want to go, then.”
I’m pretty sure space travel, even the limited travel within the solar system that we see in The Expanse, is nearly impossible. The millions of would-be Mars colonists who put their faith in Elon Musk will beg to go home not long after they land on the Red planet.
I had Notebook LM collect a bunch of articles and videos about colonizing Mars and traveling to distant stars. Strangely, it found one of my blog posts that I had forgotten I had written. See “What If Science Fiction Is Wrong About Space Travel?” I often forget what I write, and the same inspiration often returns. I end up writing a new version of my thoughts. This post is one example.
I was inspired to start this research when several YouTube videos showed up in my feed. (See some of them below.)
These videos made me contemplate why I didn’t want to believe them. A lifetime of reading science fiction made me assume sooner or later we’d colonize the solar system and then the galaxy. I thought that gave humanity an existential purpose. I justified this need by believing humanity needed to back up our species on other worlds.
For decades, I’ve known these hopes were naive and unscientific. They were my narrative fallacy. I always wanted to maintain these beliefs first acquired in childhood, using confirmation bias by finding supporting evidence.
A lifetime of reading science fiction has made me ignore the reality that Earth is our only home. I again come to the same final thought as I did in my first essay, and one Notebook LM latched onto: “Yet, reality suggests we’ll eventually bang into the glass walls of our aquarium. I wonder what science fiction will speculate on then.”
Can science fiction imagine possible futures where we stay home for millions of years and develop a healthy relationship with Earth and nature? Will such stories be as exciting and inspiring as current science fiction? Solarpunk and Hopepunk aim to offer hope, but they still see us as space-faring creatures. Is that real hope, or false hope? Should genuine hope be realistic?
Resources:
Notebook LM created a podcast from all the research articles it collected for me. It’s quite impressive, especially when you think an AI created it. It’s actually very science fictional.
Can you remember when you first encountered concepts such as aliens, space travel, robots, time machines, and the end of the world? If you read science fiction, you might think of specific books that introduced those ideas. Think hard for a moment. Didn’t you encounter all those ideas before you could read? It’s my theory that all the iconic themes of science fiction were well integrated into society by the 1950s. Anyone under 80 probably heard about space travel, robots, and aliens in early childhood and can’t remember when these concepts first entered their minds.
I didn’t understand there was a genre called science fiction until the fall of 1964, just before I turned 13. That’s when I discovered the science fiction section at the Homestead Air Force Base Library. Before that, I just stumbled onto science fiction books in the Young Adult section of the base library or at my school library. They weren’t labeled science fiction.
From ages 0-5 (1951-56), I don’t remember television, books, or magazines. My cognitive awareness was limited to my parents, sister, and grandmother. I can only recall a few conversations, and I was struggling with some very limited ideas. My vocabulary was small, and I comprehended few abstractions. However, if I had perfect recall, I bet I heard people talk about rockets, space travel, aliens from outer space, and robots. I’m not sure about time travel.
From 1956 until the fall of 1964, I was exposed to science fiction on television. I didn’t know these shows about space travel, aliens, and robots were science fiction; I was just drawn to those ideas. However, if I study my memories of sitting in front of a television set, I don’t think I comprehended much before third grade (1959/1960).
I turned five on 11/25/56. I have only a few dozen memories of that year. My view of the world was quite minimal. Unlike some kids today, I didn’t know my alphabet, I couldn’t count, or tell time. I didn’t learn those things until first grade, which began in September 1957, the month before Sputnik. I attended Kindergarten in the 1956/57 school year, but they didn’t teach us those things back then.
The first show I remember liking was Topper. All I can remember are the names George and Marion Kirby, the dog Neal. They were ghosts. I don’t remember any scenes or plots, other than the ghosts had to hide from everyone but Topper. I had no idea this show was a fantasy. I’m quite sure I didn’t even know the word fantasy.
The earliest TV show I can remember a specific scene from is Gunsmoke in 1957. Matt Dillon killed a guy in a gunfight. I remember thinking that guy was only pretending to be dead, and I started thinking what being really dead meant. It blew my little mind. As far as I can remember now, that’s the first time my mind got philosophical.
The first movie I remember seeing at the theater was in 1958. It was called Snowfire, about a white wild stallion that a little girl loved. That same year, I remember seeing my first movie on television, High Barbaree. There was a scene about a little boy and a girl. The girl’s family was moving away, and the boy was crying. I had already experienced that several times since we moved a lot. That might be the first time I identified with a fictional character.
The next TV show I can remember was Clutch Cargo in 1959. This show may have had plot elements and may have proto-science fiction. I don’t remember any plots or stories, just the visuals.
My first real introduction to science fiction was probably The Twilight Zone during the first season, 1959/1960. I was in the third grade. There were many science fiction shows on television before The Twilight Zone, but I don’t remember ever watching them.
The only specific episode I can remember is “The Eye of the Beholder” (November 11, 1960). It was so creepy. I remember watching it with my mother and sister. I had started the fourth grade, and we were living in Marks, Mississippi. That September, I also remember going to a friend’s house to see the last showing of Howdy Doody.
That first season of The Twilight Zone introduced me to robots, aliens, rockets, and Martians. I didn’t really comprehend what all of those concepts meant. I was eight years old when the season started.
Writing this essay has helped me understand the limits of the childhood mind. It is a time when we are quite impressionable and especially gullible. If you meditate very hard on this, you’ll discover that many of your beliefs go back to these early years. There is no other way to say it, but we are brainwashed as kids by popular culture.
My earliest memories of going to church and hearing about God and Jesus were when we lived in Marks, Mississippi. My mother’s oldest sister lived in Marks, so I think we lived there because my father was stationed in Texas. He was training as a mechanic for the F-106. My mother’s family, as well as the people from Mississippi in general in 1960, were big on going to church. I didn’t like Sunday School or going to church. It wasn’t because I wasn’t religious; hell, I didn’t know what religion was when I was eight. I just thought being stuck in Sunday School class or sitting in a pew during church services was boring. But I do remember they taught us this little song, “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” which had these lyrics:
Jesus loves the little children
All the children of the world
Red and yellow, black and white
They are precious in His sight
Jesus loves the little children of the world
I didn’t know what racism was, but I felt it in Marks, in 1960. I have this distinct memory of being at the Piggly Wiggly getting a drink of water, when this giant of a man runs up, grabs me by the arm, puts his face right up next to mine, and starts screaming something at me. I was terrified. I don’t think I ever understood his words, but later my mother explained I had been drinking from the fountain for black people.
This was the beginning of my doubt about Christians. They had me sing one thing, but they lived another. I didn’t know the word hypocrite then, but I felt it. Not consciously. I bring this incident up to illustrate how my mind was being shaped.
Here’s the thing: around this time, I was being told a lot of fantastic things. God and Jesus came along the same time as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. And then there was science fiction, with aliens, robots, rockets, and flying saucers. In the second grade, a girl humiliated me in class when I told the class that Santa had brought me a certain toy. She sat in front of me, our row was next to the left wall. My desk was third in line. She said very snotily, “What a baby, there ain’t no Santa, it’s your daddy.” I think that was the first time I realized that people could lie to me.
So in the third grade, I was disturbed that adults were talking about believing in God and Jesus, beings I couldn’t see. If they hadn’t tricked me with Santa Claus, I might have been more receptive. I didn’t challenge them. And I didn’t completely doubt them. I just thought maybe they could see things I couldn’t.
I admit I was a weird little kid. After hearing about robots, I wondered if adults were robots. Kids were real. I could relate to them. But adults didn’t tell me what they were thinking. They just ordered me around. I didn’t know about the Peanuts comic strip at this time, but my world was like Charlie Brown’s. I hardly saw adults. I was in school, playing with my friends, or watching television. Adults only gave orders: get up, take a bath, go to school, go outside and play, clean up your room, etc.
And I wasn’t too impressed with school. My friends were real. Television was real. School was boring. It was painful to have to sit at my desk all day. I wanted to be out playing in the dirt with my cars and trucks. I loved climbing trees. I loved walking around the neighborhood looking for treasures. I loved playing Cowboys and Indians. By the way, TV back then was dominated by westerns. The Twilight Zone shook up my world.
Looking back, since I turned fifty, I realized that during this period, instead of accepting what people told me about God, I chose to believe in what science fiction was telling me. Most kids were sucking down theological beliefs. I didn’t want to go to Heaven, I wanted to go to the stars. I wasn’t interested in God; I wanted to hear about aliens. Of course, kids didn’t talk theology or science fiction.
In 1960, I had no idea about geography, much less astronomy. Outer space was just up. I could see the Moon. Mars and Venus were just words like Heaven and Hell. My absorption of concepts from science fiction came at a murky time in my mind. I wasn’t really self-aware and conscious.
There were certain Bible stories I was drawn to. Adam and Eve, and the Garden of Eden, Noah and the Flood, and the Tower of Babel. But think about it, those stories are very much like science fiction. In recent decades, I imagine they were written by guys who had minds like science fiction writers.
My theory is that we acquire fantastic beliefs in early childhood. That’s why ancient people embraced myths and religions. It’s why we embrace science fiction today. Our personalities meld with ideas we love, and we spend the rest of our lives believing in them.
But there’s a problem. A huge problem. At that age, we have little cognitive ability to evaluate those beliefs. And once ingrained, they are almost impossible to reprogram.
By the eighth grade (1964/65), I decided I was an atheist. I didn’t know it at the time, but I believe now it’s because I had accepted science fiction instead.
Why has it taken until I was in my sixties, retired, and collecting Social Security to challenge my belief in science fiction? Science fiction helped me challenge my faith in religion as a child, but why did I wait so long to challenge my faith in science fiction?
I am reminded of something Eric Hoffer said in his book The True Believer. He said to get a true believer to give up their beliefs, you have to give them something else to believe. That’s what I did with religion and science fiction. But for me to challenge my faith in science fiction, I would have to believe in something else.
In old age, I’m looking for something else. I’ve concluded that all the political turmoil since 2016 is caused by people having too much faith in their beliefs and not enough understanding of reality. I’ve decided everyone is delusional, and we need to give up faith in our beliefs. I’ve decided faith in anything is bad.
I’m reminded of a science fiction novel I discovered in my teens, Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany. In the story, a wise character tells a naive character that there are three modes of perceiving reality: simplex, complex, and multiplex. The beliefs we acquire in youth are a simplex view of reality. As we learn that our beliefs are only fantasies, perceiving the world becomes complex. It’s only when we can act on the multiple complexities of reality that our thinking becomes multiplex.
The Facebook group, Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction, was discussing “A Walk in the Sun” by Geoffrey A. Landis. The group had read the story before, and my previous comment was: “Good sole survivor story that reminded me of Kip’s journey across the Moon in Have Spacesuit-Will Travel. Unfortunately, it’s way too unrealistic. I did catch the magnificent desolation reference.”
This time, when I read “A Walk in the Sun,” I found it harder to get into the story. Landis asks us to believe that an astronaut stranded on the Moon, waiting 30 days for a rescue mission, could walk entirely around the Moon. It’s certainly a sense-of-wonder idea, but on this reading, I spent too much time thinking about the realistic problems Patricia Jay Mulligan faced. The story is moving because of Patricia’s will to live, and her imagined conversation with her sister, Karen. Patricia only has a spacesuit and enough extra equipment to keep it going for 30 days. Landis tries to address all our objections to realism, but this time the story was just too unbelievable.
“A Walk in the Sun” is well-liked. The story first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction (October, 1991). It won a Hugo and came in first in a Locus annual Readers’ poll. It’s often reprinted. I don’t mean to pick on it, but it does serve as a useful example of when science fiction goes too far.
Now, going too far is relative. Science fiction explores a limited number of themes, and new writers often take an old theme and push it a bit further. While reading “A Walk in the Sun,” I thought of Have Spacesuit-Will Travel, where Kip and Peewee make a dash across the Moon’s surface only in spacesuits. It’s quite dramatic and realistic. At least, it’s always been realistic to me. Heinlein worked with a team designing pressure suits during WWII, and he wrote two books in which spacesuits were a significant part of the story. The other being Starship Troopers.
Have Spacesuit-Will Travel was first serialized in the August 1958 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. By 1958, real spacesuits were being designed and tested. I feel the science fiction from the 1950s tried much harder to stick to realistic speculation because writers knew manned rocket travel was just a few years off, and travel to the Moon wasn’t much farther.
However, Heinlein took science fiction too far in Have Spacesuit-Will Travel. By the end of the story, Kip and Peewee traveled to the Lesser Magellanic Clouds. Even though I dearly love Have Spacesuit-Will Travel and have reread it more than any other book, I do know that Heinlein was satirizing science fiction in it.
In one of the comments on this discussion of “A Walk in the Sun,” Frank Policastro mentioned H. B. Fyfe’s “Moonwalk” as a more realistic story. (Space Science Fiction, November 1952.)
I loaded that issue on my iPad and read it. “Moonwalk” was indeed a much more realistic story about an astronaut walking across the lunar surface. I wondered if Heinlein had read it. Here was a case of science fiction not going too far. The story is about the first major scientific base on the Moon near the crater Archimedes. The base houses fifty people. It has two tractors that explore the surrounding area. They lose contact with Tractor Two, which was heading towards the crater Plato, and aren’t sure what to do. Radio is limited to line-of-sight. They figured something bad could have happened, or the tractor had gone behind the wall of a crater. They decide to wait.
However, Tractor Two has been destroyed in a landslide, but one astronaut, Hansen, has been thrown free. He has the air tanks of his suit, and one large oxygen tank from the tractor. Hansen decides to start walking back towards base, hundreds of miles away, figuring base will eventually assume something is wrong and send out Tractor One to rescue him.
It’s interesting to compare the descriptions of walking across the Moon by Fyfe, Heinlein, and Landis. Two writers were speculating, and one had the accounts of twelve American astronauts who walked on the Moon.
When I was younger, I enjoyed science fiction stories that went too far. In fact, the further out the better. Now that I’m older, I prefer science fiction that stays close to what might be real. This time around, I preferred “Moonwalk.” It was a basic adventure story, but I enjoyed how Fyfe imagined what it would be like working on the Moon. While researching “Moonwalk” on ISFDB.org, I came across an Ace Double.
“Moonwalk” was anthologized in Men on the Moon. I’m looking forward to reading it, but I started reading City on the Moon by Murray Leinster first. I haven’t been in the mood to read science fiction for months. I just got burned out. However, I’m enjoying all these 1950s stories about early explorers of the Moon. I’m enjoying them because they don’t go too far.
Except for odd alternative-history stories, we don’t get science fiction about early exploration of the Moon. We get a fair amount of science fiction about established lunar colonies, but for the most part, I think they gone too far. I believe establishing bases on the Moon will be extremely difficult, so there’s plenty of room for speculative fiction. Establishing self-sufficient lunar colonies will be next to impossible. Science fiction has seldom explored that territory. Most science fiction today about the Moon leaps too far ahead. I want to read the nitty-gritty of building the first bases and what it would take to make permanent colonies.
I think I’ll dig into the past and see how science fiction writers handled the subject who stayed close to reality. If you know of any, please let me know.
Back in the 1990s, I subscribed to a fanzine called Futures Past, written and published by Jim Emerson. Each issue covered one year of science fiction history, beginning with 1926. Unfortunately, the fanzine died after 1929. Then, a few years ago, as Emerson approached retirement, he decided to resurrect his project. Instead of publishing another issue of the fanzine covering 1930, he went back to 1926 and expanded it into a book (available in softbound, hardbound, and PDF formats). He has since expanded and republished 1927, 1928, and 1929 as books, too. See my reviews of 1926 & 1927, 1928, and 1929. (You can get 1926 as a free PDF as a sample of the series. However, it’s the shortest of the volumes, and doesn’t fully convey the potential of the series that we now see in volume 5, 1930. See the end of this essay for a comparison of all the table of contents.)
In other words, I’ve been waiting three decades for Jim Emerson to get to 1930.
If you study the table of contents above, you’ll see how the first 119 pages are devoted to 1930. For each story published in those magazines listed, Jim gives a brief description of the plot. He does the same for the books published that year. I’ve got to say, I hope in a hundred years, the science fiction of our day won’t sound as ridiculous. Although it’s big fun to laugh at these plot synopses, they also reveal something more serious: the mindset of readers. This is how science fiction people thought in 1930.
Reading these plot summaries is also a brilliant way to understand the evolution of science fiction. Here’s a sample covering stories from the October and November issues of Amazing Stories.
Since Astounding emerged as a competitor to Amazing, I thought I’d let you read a sample of what its stories were about.
1930 is the largest volume of Futures Past yet, at 236 pages. That’s about a hundred pages more than he devoted to 1926. 1930 was a pivotal year in the history of science fiction. Astounding Stories of Super-Science began publication with the January 1930 issue. Jim devotes 47 pages to the legacy of Astounding/Analog.
Beginning in the “Other Worlds” section of the book, Emerson strays away from 1930, both before and after. Not only does he chronicle the backstory of pulp publications and publishers that lead up to Astounding, but Emerson tracks the magazine’s history into the Analog days. I assume this means each volume of Futures Past will provide us with the complete history of every new SF magazine as they emerge.
Jim Emerson follows the footsteps of Sam Moskowitz and Mike Ashley, becoming another historian of the genre. I hope he lives long enough to cover the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, my favorite decades of the genre. Now that Jim is retired, he has promised to produce new volumes more quickly.
The unexpected bonus of this issue is Emerson’s history of dime novels and boys’ books titled “The Edisonade: Dynamo of American Imagination.” It chronicles how technology inspired proto-science fiction in the 19th century, and follows it into the 20th and 21st centuries, covering the Tom Swift books. I have read brief histories of all the publications that Emerson covers before, but this is the most detailed account I’ve read. This section, at 134 pages, could be a book itself.
I’m sure I’ve seen the term Edisonade before, but I don’t recall it now. I assume it has the same implication as Robinsonade for Robinson Crusoe, but was inspired by Thomas Edison. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia has an extensive entry for Edisonade. Wikipedia has a much shorter entry. Google Scholar offers several tempting citations, but they aren’t available to read. As far as I can tell, Emerson’s essay is the most extensive on the subject.
There’s a tremendous amount of reading in this volume. I can’t imagine how Jim could be so organized to research and write it. I’m sure it wouldn’t be possible without the internet.
I’ve always wanted to know what kids in the 19th and early 20th century thought about reading these books and magazines. Jim does have a section on fanzines, but 1930 was their starting year. Reading this section on Edisonades helps me to imagine what growing up back then might have been like. I wonder if I could find copies of these publications to see if they had letters from readers.
Have you ever read a novel or biography from the 19th century that mentions dime novels or boys’ books?
If you love science fiction, there’s much to contemplate in Futures Past 1930. Nowadays, young science fiction readers find SF from the 1950s as weird and antiquated. When I discovered science fiction in the 1960s, I thought stories from the 1920s and 1930s were painfully dated. These Edisonade stories are decades older. The DNA of SF concepts is a strange genealogy to track. It’s very psychologically revealing to us lovers of the genre.
I accomplished a task last night that I’ve been hoping to finish for months. It made me exceedingly happy. My goal was to create a digital library of all my scanned pulp and digest science fiction magazines so they could be accessed from any of my computer devices. I have three computers (Windows, Mac, Linux), four tablets (two iOS, two Android), and an iPhone.
Last year, I bought a UGreen DXP2800 NAS. NAS stands for network-attached storage. Think of it as a big hard drive that all your computers can access. Over the years, I’ve collected scanned copies of nearly every science fiction magazine published in the 20th century. The Pulp Magazine Archive at the Internet Archive is a great place to search for them, but there are many others on the net. When I was young, I wanted to collect pulp magazines, but it’s not very practical unless you want to fill every room of your house with old magazines. I’ve known people who have. Even collecting digital copies is a pain because collecting them eventually overwhelms the latest big disk you’ve bought.
I have a librarian gene. I worked for six years in the periodicals department of a university library in my twenties. Pictured above is just the top portion of my magazine directory on the NAS. Here’s how I see the same directory with the YACReader Library:
Here’s what it looks like when I select a year.
YACReader is by far the best CBR/CBZ/PDF reader I’ve found. And combining it with the YACReader Library is by far the easiest way to get pulp magazines on my tablets.
I can sit at any of my computers and, within seconds, look up any magazine. My previous ease-of-use success was putting all my magazines on a microSD card and loading it onto my Android tablet.
This new method is great when I’m researching an essay for this blog. I often use ISFDB.org or Wikipedia to look up a detail about an old story, and it will mention a magazine. Or I can be in my La-Z-Boy using a tablet and find a story to read. I can even be on my phone and look up a detail. YACReader runs on all my devices. YACReader users can access files via several networking methods or from several major cloud providers. However, there is also the YACReader Library. On a single-user machine, it’s just a nice graphical interface for looking at magazine covers. However, it offers a port for remote clients.
I wanted to put the YACReaderLibrary Server on my UGreen NAS, but after weeks of agonizing over how to set it up with Docker, I gave up. (I don’t know Docker or Linux well enough.) YACReader and the YACReader Library were a breeze to install on a Mac. Since I leave my Mac on all the time, I decided it was just simpler to install YACReaderLibrary on my Mac. Everything worked perfectly. I quickly went through all my devices, making sure they could access my magazine library — and I could.
You know that old saying, “Be careful what you wish for?” I woke up this morning anxious to play with my new system, and a revelation came to me. I had created the perfect system for reading, researching, and writing about 20th-century science fiction, but at 74, do I still need all that science fiction?
I could just pig out on sci-fi. The best analogy I can think of is to picture yourself in a beautiful bakery, looking at all the cases of cookies, cakes, and pies. You’d want to eat everything. And you might be willing to spend every bill in your wallet. But how many sweets should you actually take home? How many should you eat each day? I know my younger self could have spent 24/7 inside my new library.
This morning, I feel like Henry Bemis, when he was organizing piles of books he planned to read for each month of the rest of his life. I have enough science fiction for every minute I have left to live.
However, if we labeled reading science fiction on a pyramid diagram of healthy reading, where would it sit? Would it be an essential life-affirming activity shown as a large solid base, ot would it be an occasional sweet, illustrated as a tiny tip at the top of the pyramid?
When I watch the news, it makes me feel like withdrawing from the world to read science fiction and watch the old TV shows I’ve collected on my Jellyfin server. I confess, I’ve spent most of my life escaping into fiction — either by reading or watching. That troubles me. In old age, I wish I had been more active in my youth, when I had the energy. I wish I had created things, rather than consuming them. It’s too late to change my spots now.
Science fiction was my artificial reality.
Science fiction, as a genre, began one hundred years ago when Hugo Gernsback published the April 1926 issue of Amazing Stories. There is an alternate reality in these magazines that I prefer over actual reality. I get a big kick out of having this reality at my fingertips. My computers are like a time machine; I can jump to any location in its space and time.
I’ve collected enough. Now that I’m old, and real reality presses in, I mostly read about here and now. My fiction addiction is wearing off. But I can’t give it up completely. It’s strange, but there are moments during the day when I just dip into an old science fiction magazine for a few minutes, and my science fiction craving is satiated.
I turned 74 last Tuesday and I’m starting to feel old. My body has been problematic for years and it’s starting to affect my mind. That includes the kinds of science fiction I choose to read and how frequently. It’s also affecting how often I write these blog posts.
When I retired in 2013 I thought I had all the free time in the world. But as the years progressed my sense of time has changed. It now feels like I have less free time than when I worked. My basic day to day routines fill up all the hours.
For many years I read on average 50+ a year. Roughly one book a week. This year I’ll be lucky to finish 33. And they were mostly audiobooks.
For many years I read one science fiction short story a day because of a Facebook reading group. That has fallen away.
I’m mostly reading nonfiction articles in magazines like The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Harper’s, and New York Magazine. I find the present more fascinating than the future.
I still feel the desire to read science fiction but my taste has changed for what kinds of science fiction stories I like. I’ve lost all interest in the far future or space opera. The Moon and Mars is about as far as I’m willing to travel in my reading. And even interest in those destinations is waning.
I like science fiction that’s set close to the present and on Earth. I enjoy science fiction that has something to say about now or the near future.
Getting old has made me enjoy here and now. When I was young I loved exploring possibilities, especially far out possibilities. Now, not so much. I felt science fiction was extrapolation and speculation. Now it feels like fantasy.
I’ve never been a big fan of fantasy, but when I enjoy fantasy fiction today it’s when it’s set in the here and now and is very gentle on the fantastic.
Kids embrace the unbelievable in fiction. I feel aging has made me crave realism.
Humans have created artificial realities long before computers. I define artificial realities as cognitive models that claim to describe reality that have no basis in reality. In crude terms, it’s shit we make up, believe to be true, act like it’s real, but isn’t. I like Philip K. Dick’s definition of reality: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.”
Science fiction has created a number of artificial realities we hope will become real. One desire is for a galactic civilization, or galactic empire. Often with artificial realities we try to make them real. For centuries traveling to the Moon was an artificial reality. Then it became real on July 20, 1969.
When I read “Foundation” by Isaac Asimov I wondered if he was ground zero for the idea of a galactic empire? I knew there was earlier science fiction stories that imagined the galaxy occupied by other intelligent beings. And there were stories about humans exploring the galaxy, and even having wars with other intelligent beings. But had any writer imagined humans colonizing the entire galaxy?
Today, that idea firmly exists as an artificial reality in our culture. Many people assume in the future humanity will spread across the Milky Way. It’s a kind of faith. We see it especially in Star Trek and Star Wars, but also in books like the Culture series by Iain Banks.
Like any artificial reality, I assume one person got the ball rolling. Was that Isaac Asimov? Like all the famous explorers looking for the source of the Nile, I wonder if I can find the source of galactic civilizations or galactic empires.
The oldest surviving artificial realities are myths and religions. Artificial realities start in one mind as ideas, and are spread as memes. Each person who spreads the memes mutates the artificial reality slightly. That’s why there were many forms of Christianity in the first century, and why they are so different from all the forms of Christianity in the twenty-first century. Reading books about the origins of Christianity or how the Old Testament came into being is a black hole of fascinating research.
In 2015 and 2025, I tried to reread The Foundation Trilogy. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I just hated that much-loved science fiction classic. In both attempts, I couldn’t get past the first book. All I could focus on were its flaws.
That bothered me. Was I being unfair to the book? What was I missing that so many readers found in this story? When Paul Fraser came up with a great idea for a group read at the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction Facebook group, I decided to give the trilogy one more chance.
Paul suggests we read The Foundation Trilogy as it was originally published in Astounding Science-Fiction back in the 1940s. That gave me an idea. I would read the stories in the order they were published. I would seek to enjoy them as the fans originally did, as they were published one by one in Astounding Science-Fiction. Furthermore, I would try my damndest to get what Asimov was doing.
Wikipedia nicely lays out the publication history of the Foundation Trilogy in this table:
Collections
Astounding Science Fiction
Published
Book title
Story retitle
Original title
Published
Original trilogy
1951
Foundation
“The Psychohistorians”
—
“The Encyclopedists”
“Foundation”
May 1942
“The Mayors”
“Bridle and Saddle”
June 1942
“The Merchant Princes”
“The Big and the Little”
August 1944
“The Traders”
“The Wedge”
October 1944
1952
Foundation and Empire
“The General”
“Dead Hand”
April 1945
“The Mule”
“The Mule”
November 1945 December 1945
1953
Second Foundation
“Part I: Search by the Mule”
“Now You See It…”
January 1948
“Part II: Search by the Foundation”
“…And Now You Don’t”
November 1949 December 1949 January 1950
In the 1960s, I read The Foundation Trilogy when I bought the one-volume edition from the Science Fiction Book Club. At the time, I was unaware that many of the classic science fiction stories I was reading in book form were first published in magazines. Nor did I know about the concept of the fix-up novel. I didn’t question what I read. I just consumed it. (I recently wrote about this in “Reading at 13 vs. 73.”)
I can remember how thrilled I was by the first story, “The Psychohistorians,” which was set on the planet Trantor. And I liked all the pseudo-encyclopedia intros. The other stories didn’t stick with me. I remember the trilogy as an epic idea and visualized Trantor and Terminus existing in a galaxy with humans living on twenty-five million worlds.
In 2015, I reread Foundation, the first book in the trilogy. By then, I knew all about pulp magazines and fix-up novels. Foundation was obviously five separate, standalone stories. The first story was again impressive, the second was still interesting, but the rest were tedious. I was shocked that this famous book was so annoying to read. I gave it one star on Goodreads. I didn’t go on to reread the other two books.
Over the years, I’ve talked to so many science fiction fans who loved The Foundation Trilogy. It was the first series to be given a special Hugo Award. Recently, I watched a YouTube video about the Top 20 SF Series, and The Foundation series came in fourth. (Really, it was second after Dune. #1 were Star Wars books, and #2 were Star Trek books, and I don’t consider them a proper SF series. The host said that 20 million copies of The Foundation series have been sold.
So, why don’t I like it? And why did so many people love it? Was it because it first instilled the artificial reality of galactic civilization into their minds? This made me wonder if I could put myself in their shoes as they read the Foundation stories.
To get into the character of a 1940s science fiction fan, I intentionally skipped the first story in the book. I began my reading with “Foundation” from the May 1942 issue of Astounding Science-Fiction. I wanted to feel like I was living back in 1942, encountering the series for the first time. To see if Asimov rewrote the story for the hardback, I read the magazine with my eyes, but listened to the story with an audiobook edition.
In creative writing classes, we’re urged to start our stories in the middle of the action to avoid boring the reader with introductory material. This is exactly what Isaac Asimov did. However, when Asimov published Foundation as a book, he wrote an introductory story, “The Psychohistorians.” Out of the nine short stories, novelettes, and novellas in the Foundation Trilogy, “The Psychohistorians” was my favorite.
Asimov opened “Foundation” with this introduction on the first page. This is how we learn about Hari Seldon and his plan. This is how the series began in 1942, in just thirteen short paragraphs. We never see Trantor or meet Gaal Dornick. Our first real character is Salvor Hardin. In the book form, “The Psychohistorians” replaced this intro.
Most readers assume Asimov had just become a better writer by the time he wrote “The Psychohistorians” for the hardback. I’m not so sure. I feel I loved “The Psychohistorians” so much more because the Empire was more interesting than Terminus. Trantor is far more fascinating than any other setting in the trilogy. Asimov has claimed that the series was inspired by his discussions with John W. Campbell, Jr., and reading The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. But be honest, don’t most people love reading about Rome in its glory days?
As a young reader in the 1960s, I remember being blown away by the idea of a galactic civilization. But the stories of its fall didn’t make a lasting impression on me. I’m not sure, but I believe I read The Foundation Trilogy before seeing Star Trek in 1966. It might have been my first introduction to the idea of a galactic civilization. Was it to readers back in the 1940s?
To get into the spirit that I wanted to achieve, I need to forget all of this. I need to put myself back in 1942. I’d be reading the May issue of ASF just five months after the U.S. declared war on Germany and Japan. Let’s imagine I’m in the golden age of science fiction, and I’m 12 years old. How would “Foundation” WOW! me?
If you read Hari Seldon’s speech above, we don’t get what the empire is like. We only learn that it’s collapsing. The only empire I might have known about at that age in 1942 was the British Empire, due to watching Gunga Din. I doubt I would know anything about Rome.
I guess that I, and other readers, would have gotten a strong sense of wonder rush thinking about the galaxy being populated by humans. But was that a new idea? Is there any way to find out? I thought I’d poke around and see.
With this issue, Isaac Asimov launched his monumental “Foundation” series with the appearance of the initial novelette of the series, “Foundation.” After tens of thousands of years the Galactic Empire had spread to millions of worlds throughout the galaxy, its power all but absolute, its influence all pervading. The Empire, however, was on the brink of collapse and, with the impending collapse, the universe could be expected to be plunged into at least thirty thousand years of anarchism and barbarism. Hari Seldon, through the application of psychohistory which enables him to predict the future course of history by the interpretation of statistical laws as derived from the inconceivable mass of humanity, foresees this imminent fate of civilization and takes measures to insure the survival of civilization and knowledge through the long dark ages ahead and, if possible, shorten the period of barbarism. He does this by establishing two Foundations at opposite ends of the galaxy: the First Foundation of the Encyclopedists at Terminus, a small system on the edge of the galaxy, the Second Foundation — hidden even from the First — at “Star’s End,” at the “other end of the galaxy.” “Foundation” introduced the basic elements of the plot of the series and recounted the successful resolution of the first of the critical crises predicted by Seldon which the Foundation must surmount in order to carry on the Seldon Plan.
Rogers’ book remembered Astounding issue-by-issue. I had hoped his entry for “Foundation” would have given me his initial reaction, but I feel this quote is heavily influenced by reading the trilogy.
Next, I found the July issue to see how “Foundation” did in The Analytical Laboratory feature, where readers vote for their favorite stories. Evidently, “Foundation” didn’t make much of an impression, since it came in a distant fourth. Nor did it get mentioned in a letter to the Brass Tacks second.
I thought about looking through fanzines at Fanac.org, but I fear what I want might be looking for a needle in a haystack.
My next stop was The World Beyond the Hill by Alexei and Cory Panshin, my favorite book about Astounding during the Golden Age of Science Fiction. It can be checked out from the Archive.org, or ordered from Amazon for the Kindle for $9.99.
“Chapter 17 – An Empire of Mind” covers how Asimov developed the Foundation series on pages 520-566. If I had read this chapter before rereading “Foundation,” I would have approached the story with far more enthusiasm. Alexei and Cory Panshin describe Asimov’s inspiration and writing process for starting the series. I have read The World Beyond the Hill twice, but I didn’t remember any of this. I especially didn’t remember how Asimov was influenced by “After World’s End,” a short novel by Jack Williamson, which he read in the February 1939 issue of Marvel Science Stories. It also influenced Asimov’s take on robots.
The Panshins got most of details about Asimov working with John W. Campbell from Aismov’s biography, In Memory Yet Green. That book can be checked out from Archive.org.
The Panshins cited “After World’s End” and others as proto-stars that would evolve into galactic empire science fiction.
I wish I could reprint the 46 pages from this book because it describes in great detail how Asimov got the idea for a galactic empire. The Panshins showed that Asimov had already started on the idea in earlier stories.
Panshins have this to say, despite the fact that we know E. E. “Doc” Smith, Edmond Hamilton, and John W. Campbell had been publishing stories about humans speeding around the galaxy since the 1920s.
I would love to copy more of the Panshin’s book, but I don’t know if that’s proper. I highly recommend The World Beyond the Hill to anyone interested in learning about the evolution of science fiction in the 1940s.
I haven’t read Gibbon’s six-volume history, but reading the Wikipedia entry, it’s considered lacking in accuracy, and scholars disagree with his thesis that Christianity is to blame for Rome’s decline. The Panshins explores how Asimov’s used religion in the series. They felt Asimov saw it as a positive tool, while Heinlein saw it as a manipulative tool in his stories at the time.
The Panshins go into great detail Asimov’s collaboration with Campbell and how the first two Foundation stories were written, edited and published. Both were finished and sold to Campbell before December 1945. The Panshins then go on to deeply analyze “Foundation” and “Bridle and Saddle.”
I admire this chapter immensely. This is the kind of writing about science fiction history that I’ve always fantasized of achieving myself. I can’t come close. This chapter does give one excellent account of the origins of the idea of galactic empire. However, is it correct? Is it the only one. Many explorers thought they found the source of the Nile only to be proved wrong.
While reading the five stories that make up Foundation, I didn’t find much serious speculation about how a galactic empire would collapse. All of Asimov’s speculations seem rather superficial to me. It’s such a wonderful idea that I’m always disappointed when the individual stories in the first volume don’t live up to the grand vision.
If I studied the series and analyzed it as deeply as the Panshins, I probably would see far more than I have. I know I’m not being fair to the series. I fear my dislike of Asimov’s prose keeps me from enjoying his ideas. The Panshins found many layers of ideas to explore that I missed. I’m sure a scholarly work the size of the trilogy could be written on the Foundation series.
I believe America is beginning its decline. Predicting the future is impossible. We can’t even foretell one year, much less a thousand. But let’s say you’re a science fiction writer and want to set a story one hundred years in our future. How would you set up your story to convey a big picture of how the United States will change? Having a series of short stories is one possible solution.
Each time I read Foundation, I’ve been disappointed that it has no continuing characters. Let me provide an example to make a point. My wife loves TV shows, but I also want to watch movies. Switching between the two formats, I must admit that TV shows, with continuing characters, are far more addictive than movies. Not having characters that last the entire book hurts Foundation. That’s why the miniseries changed the story so drastically.
In 1968, John Brunner published Stand on Zanzibar, envisioning the world of 2010. This was far less ambitious than Asimov. The Foundation series attempts to portray a thousand years of a galactic empire featuring twenty-five million inhabited worlds. I never felt the immensity of such a setting while reading Asimov’s classic. However, Brunner’s technique of combining a novel with continuing characters, interspersed with short stories about people around the world, with samples from newspapers, television shows, radio broadcasts, and journals, and the regular commentary of a shock jock, does give us a complex picture of 2010.
For me, and I mean just me, because I know this series is so beloved, Asimov promised us a trip to Mars but took us on a suborbital flight. The original trilogy never delivers what it promises.
“Foundation” – Astounding (May 1942)
“Foundation,” the story that readers first learned about the Foundation series, didn’t get the cover. Evidently, John W. Campbell, Jr. wasn’t impressed enough. Readers preferred Heinlein, van Vogt, and Bester over Asimov’s story in the July readers’ poll. Not an auspicious beginning. Yet, the series is still admired today, and is even the basis of a television miniseries. And I believe the Foundation stories must have influenced the creation of Star Wars.
For some reason many people love the idea of the galaxy populated by humans. I see that as a growing artificial reality that will continue to build. Whether we make it reality is a whole other issue. I tend to doubt it. I think a future reality with humanity spread across the galaxy is no more real than the past artificial realities of the history of religions.
Note:
Normally, I try to keep my blog posts to 500-1,000 words. Even that is uncommonly long for most blog posts. That’s because internet readers don’t like to spend a lot of time reading any one piece. The internet is a browsing medium.
This piece kept going and going. I finally just had to quit. I feel I could write an entire book just on searching for the origins of specific science fiction concepts. I could have also written a whole book just on the Foundation Trilogy.
I’m old and I have trouble focusing my mind. I also lack the energy to keep working at any one task for long. I’d love to be able to write a book like The World Beyond the Hill but that is impossible at 73. More than likely, I never had the brain power to write such a book at any age. I need to learn how to convey a major insight in a few words.
In the 1960s, we often thought about what life would be like in the 21st century. We’d speculated about fantastic inventions. One that frequently came up was having the Library of Congress in a device we could hold in our hands. In a way, a smartphone is that device. However, we didn’t anticipate networking. We just imagined all the works in the Library of Congress copied onto a small device.
We’re close to having that invention now. It’s not like how we imagined. We don’t think about the future as much today as we did back in the 1960s. Change is happening so fast that every day seems like the future. However, can we speculate what a fantastic invention we might have in another sixty years?
I did something fun the other day, something even science fictional. I put all my scanned science fiction magazines and books on a teeny-tiny 1 TB microSD card and loaded it into my old Amazon Fire 10 HD tablet. That tiny library contains 7,266 magazines and fanzines, as well as 3,570 fiction and nonfiction books. I’ve assembled this collection from the internet. Many items can be found on the Internet Archive or the Luminist Archives. Although some come from DVD-R disc collections I bought on eBay.
The Internet is a gigantically large library itself, but not one that’s always easy to use. When I was young, I worked in libraries. I always loved special collections. Special collections can contain material of any type, but they often house personal libraries donated by famous people. These donated libraries frequently focus on a single subject or type of work that’s been collected over a lifetime. I have a lifetime love for science fiction and science fiction magazines.
My microSD card is a special collection on a tiny chip that, back in the 1960s, we would have considered a marvel of the future. They are not so special today. I keep several in an old orange plastic pill bottle.
For fifteen years, I’ve collected digital copies of books and magazines on Dropbox. I had almost filled my two terabytes of cloud storage when I decided to buy a NAS. NAS stands for network-attached storage. I purchased a Ugreen DXP2800 and two Seagate 12 TB drives, which I mirrored. Now my digital library can expand to six times its previous size.
There is a major problem with leaving the cloud. If something bad happened to my DXP2800, such as the house burning down, my library and years of work would disappear. I have copies on external drives, but I need to find a way to keep regular copies off-site. My first thought was to take an external drive to a friend’s house, but then I remembered the microSD card.
Years ago, I bought a 128 GB card (pictured above) to test with my Amazon Fire 10 HD. That didn’t work out well because the card was too small, and larger capacity cards were too expensive.
Up till now, I have read my digital library with an iPad Mini, accessing my files from Dropbox. It didn’t matter that my old iPad only had 64 GB of storage. Each time I downloaded a magazine, it took about 30 seconds.
When I first considered backing up to a microSD, I checked current prices, and a 1 TB card was $67. That’s when I got the idea to see if I could copy my science fiction library onto a single 1 TB microSD. Copying just science fiction-related magazines, fanzines, and books, I used up just 650 GB.
I loaded that microSD into my Amazon Fire HD 10 and ran CDisplayEX. It saw the files. It even displayed them beautifully. And it was fast. Pulp magazines loaded instantly. Here’s the directory page for Astounding Science-Fiction 1942.
I realized I held in my hands what I had dreamed about sixty years ago. I had the ultimate pulp magazine reading machine. The tablet also allowed me access to thousands of Kindle books and Audible audiobooks. It wasn’t The Library of Congress in my hands, but it was amazing. I could kick back in my La-Z-Boy and browse through decades of magazines. That’s quite cool.
This got me thinking. How can I best use this resource? How can I integrate it into my work routines? Normally, as I create posts for this blog, I read and think in my La-Z-Boy, but I get up and write at my computer.
Being the lazy person that I am, I’ve long wanted to write anywhere and at any time. I spend a lot of time with my eyes closed, thinking. I compose essays in my head, but they are vaguely formed. After a point, the pressure of keeping all those ideas in my head gets too great, and I have to jump up and start writing.
I’ve always wanted to read, think, and write simultaneously. I’m now wondering if I can combine my new reading machine with a note-taking app and a word processor? Combining CDisplayEX with Obsidian and Jetpack goes a long way towards that idea. It occurs to me there’s more needed.
A large library isn’t useful without a card catalog. Before computers, this was called a card catalog because it was contained in drawers of index cards. However, special collections usually had their own index. Most people use Google and the Internet as their card catalog, but it is becoming more problematic every day.
I depend on two indexes to explore science fiction: Wikipedia and ISFDB.org. For example, here is the ISFDB.org page that indexes the history of the magazine Astounding/Analog. Here is the Wikipedia entry that describes the history of that magazine. And although ISFDB.org will eventually link you to the Internet Archive to read a particular issue, it would be cool if it linked to my copy of the magazine. It is possible to download copies of Wikipedia and ISFDB.org, but it’s not practical to integrate them into my tablet library of science fiction.
Certain things should stay in the cloud. Realistically, that should include the magazines and books. What we didn’t imagine back in the 1960s was a better version of The Library of Congress. Why should everyone own a NAS and build their own special collection?
The only advantage I have for messing with this tablet is speed. If my access to everything on the Internet were instant, would I need any storage at all? No, I wouldn’t. Currently, Internet speeds are fast, but not quite speedy enough. The real speed bump is how everything is organized. It’s finding what you want that’s really slow.
Here’s where AI comes in. I’ve discovered it’s quicker to ask CoPilot to find something than to ask Google. Unfortunately, when CoPilot can’t find what I want, it makes shit up.
You might be wondering by now where this essay is going. At first, I only wanted to describe the delight I found in my science fiction library on a tablet. But along the way, I began to imagine other science-fictional possibilities of taking the idea further.
Writing this essay has made me realize that what I really want to build is an annotated science fiction library. My blog is a disjointed attempt to write an annotated history of science fiction.
Here is my speculation for an awe-inspiring future device. Instead of having a Library of Congress we can hold in our hands, I’d like a handheld device that saves a copy of every artwork that inspires me, with a lifetime of my annotated thoughts about them. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Shakespeare had such a gadget? I wish my parents had left me such memory cubes.
I’m not sure I can recommend The Dragon in the Sea by Frank Herbert, even though I enjoyed reading it. If Herbert had not become famous for Dune, I’m not sure it would be in print today. The story, written in the early days of the Cold War, portrays a future where the United States steals oil from the Soviets using submarine tugboats. Most of the novel takes place in one of these four-man subtugs. The plot feels more like an early political techno thriller than science fiction. It’s the kind of adventure story aimed at male readers that was usually published in men’s magazines in the 1950s. Those old nudie mags ran a lot of fiction.
The Dragon in the Sea is terribly dated on several levels. That’s ignoring the silliness of a submarine towing a giant plastic bag that holds millions of gallons of crude oil. However, the characterization was intriguing. The primary point-of-view character, John Ramsey, is an undercover psychologist studying the captain, who also knows there’s a Soviet sleeper agent aboard. Because the crew suspects the psychologist is the spy, the story is driven by paranoia.
I read The Dragon in the Sea because of a review at Science Fiction and Fantasy Remembrance (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3). Herbert’s novel was titled Under Pressure when it ran as a serial in Astounding Science Fiction (November & December 1955, January 1956). I didn’t want to read another science fiction novel at the time because I had several nonfiction books I was anxious to read. But Brian Collins’ review intrigued me. Collins is one of several bloggers who review old science fiction. His focus is on reviewing stories from science fiction magazines, something I also do. We’re part of an extremely tiny subculture that remembers a rather obscure art form.
The way Collins described the conflict between the four men in the submarine made me think of Rogue Moon by Algis Budrys. Rogue Moon is a compelling read because of the tense conflict between two ego-driven men. However, Rogue Moon is solid science fiction, dramatizing the bizarre consequences of using a matter transmitter to explore an alien artifact that killed every living thing that entered it. In other words, Rogue Moon had more than just the battle of alpha males; it had some heavy-duty sci-fi.
I can feel y’all asking, “Why are you even reviewing this book? You’re damning it with faint praise.” Well, that brings me to the theme of this essay. Why do we choose the science fiction books we read?
Most people buy The Dragon in the Sea because they loved Dune and want to see what else Frank Herbert wrote. That’s one of my main reasons. The Dragon in the Sea is Herbert’s first published novel, so it’s an interesting place to start. Dune was the breakthrough SF novel in the 1960s. How did Herbert get there? I liked The Dragon in the Sea well enough that I now want to read one of Herbert’s novels that he wrote after Dune.
I’m also the kind of science fiction reader who prefers older science fiction, even if it’s dated. It’s not that I dislike current science fiction. I just enjoy the science fiction I grew up with more. Especially, from the era when science fiction books were under 300 pages. I don’t like trilogies and series, or giant novels. I love a standalone story that paints a great science-fictional idea quickly. I read this sentiment fairly frequently online.
I have two other reasons for reading old forgotten science fiction that are less commonly expressed. I love reading old science fiction because I enjoy exploring the history of science fiction. And I love searching for old science fiction I missed in my youth, that might turn out to be a forgotten gem.
The Dragon in the Sea is no lost masterpiece. Brian Collins said he’s never seen a Frank Herbert novel for sale that wasn’t part of the Dune series. I have seen many over the decades, but have never tried reading one before. I’ve read Dune twice but not the sequels. It’s hard to imagine the man who wrote The Dragon in the Sea writing Dune. I will say that Herbert has a flair for drama and dialogue that was uncommon in science fiction in the 1950s. His first novel showed no talent for the kind of sense of wonder that made science fiction famous. To have an overabundance of that talent ten years later is amazing.
Interestingly, Herbert makes religion an essential aspect of his first novel. Religion made Dune epic. Herbert portrays Captain Sparrow in The Dragon in the Sea somewhat like Captain Ahab. The plot has the crew facing death time and again. They must kill or be killed. Captain Sparrow sees God as guiding and protecting them. The other two crewmen, Bonnett and Garcia, have become true believers because Captain Sparrow has always brought them home. Ramsey has a religious upbringing, but is not a believer. Yet, even though he’s a psychologist, Sparrow starts to get to him.
The story kept me reading because of the conflict between the characters and how Ramsey slowly became one with the crew. You end up liking all the men, even when they do unlikable things.
The men are under tremendous pressure. The previous twenty missions have failed. They expect to die unless they can uncover the secrets of the sleeper agent. But how can there be a spy among the three men who have worked together for years and are so dedicated to each other? They all profess to love their wives, but in reality, they love their job, their ship, their captain, and each other.
Now that I’m writing this, I realize how much more I liked this novel. It has many flaws, but I still found it entertaining to read. So did Brian Collins. Like Collins, I struggle to write reviews. He writes about his struggle in a post published after reviewing part 1 and before part 2, Under Pressure. (Remember, the links to all three parts of his review are above.) Collins does a much better job than I of describing the story.
It takes a lot of mental work to pinpoint why you like or dislike something. It’s easy to say, “I hate this” or “I love this,” but those statements are meaningless. You have to say why, and that’s hard, especially when you have to cite the context.
I could list a hundred novels and say, “If you haven’t read these yet, don’t waste your time on The Dragon and the Sea.” It’s not that good. But if you’re an old, jaded science fiction fan and are looking for something that might feel like good old-timey SF, then The Dragon and the Sea might be worth giving a try.
Checking our database, The Dragon in the Sea received five citations, the second most of Herbert’s novels. The citations were from:
Classics of Science Fiction 