Can science fiction writers imagine a pleasant future for us? Becky Chambers creates a kindly society in her Monk and Robot duology that is very appealing. Unfortunately, at least for me, the story is set on an imaginary moon called Panga. I would have preferred to contemplate whether such a future is possible for us, here on Earth.
I discovered A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers while searching Google for the best science fiction books of the last decade. I had just finished the literary science fiction novel Anniebot by Sierra Greer and wanted a recent genre science fiction novel to follow up. I’ve been wanting to catch up on what’s been happening in science fiction over the last decade. My science fiction reading tends to focus on 20th-century SF, and I wanted to read 21st-century SF instead.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built was a fortunate choice because it tuned me onto an emerging wavelength of science fiction I hadn’t explored. It is both a hopepunk and a solarpunk novel. Essentially, these movements are about positive futures, especially ones based on sustainable ecological economics.
I decided to buy the audiobook of A Psalm for the Wild-Built when I read that it was about a time long after robots had become sentient and chose to leave civilization and live in the wilds of nature. That was an intriguing premise. I had tried to read Becky Chambers’ most famous novel, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, but had given up because it was too bland for me. All the characters were too nice. Reading it made me wonder if fiction needed some asshole characters to be exciting. That made me hesitant to try A Psalm for the Wild-Built.
It turns out everyone is also nice in the Monk and Robot books, too. However, this time I didn’t miss a good antagonist. The story is very gentle, almost childlike. Modern YA novels are full of dark edginess, so these books don’t even feel YA. However, there is language that’s not suitable for young children
The book’s dedication is to “For anybody who could use a break.” Even though Chambers describes a gentle, pleasant, kind, liberal utopia, Sibling Dex is a dissatisfied young man. This novel is really about asking: “What do I want to do?” My guess is that Chambers is appealing to young people who are uncertain about our future.
The book opens with a quote from Brother Gil’s From the Brink: A Spiritual Retrospect on the Factory Age and Earth Transition Era.
I liked this opening a lot. Not only has Chambers imagined a sustainable society, but made it polytheistic. Panga feels Buddhist and tribal.
The story tells us about a restless young man, Dex, who chooses to become a Tea Monk. This is a person who travels from town to town serving tea and listening to people share their worries. This allows the readers to learn about Panga and its different human societies. Eventually, Dex goes into the wild territories of the robots and meets Mosscap. Mosscap is on its own mission to explore, deciding it needs to learn about humans.
Robots have become nature lovers. Humans and robots have spent two hundred years apart, and now they are a mystery to each other. Chambers uses the conversations between Dex and Mosscap as philosophical jumping-off points. These two novellas, which are really one story, are gently philosophical in intent. It never gets too deep or academic.
Dex struggles to find his purpose, and Mosscap becomes his guru. And Dex becomes Mosscap’s tour guide, teaching him about humans and our society. It’s a nice setup. These two books are a pleasant read. The vibe of this story reminded me of the film The Wild Robot. In other ways, the story reminded me of the Oz books by L. Frank Baum.
However, I think I need to give a trigger warning to Republican readers. Dex is a non-binary person Chambers refers to with they/them pronouns. If you have hangups about DEI issues, this book might not be for you.
Yesterday, I discovered a video featuring Becky Chambers and Annalee Newitz entitled Resisting Dystopia. I understand their intent, but I dislike it when all unpleasant societies in fiction are called dystopian. To me, dystopias are failed utopias.
The Handmaid’s Tale is an excellent example of a dystopian novel. The leaders of the Republic of Gilead work to build their vision of perfection, but to many living in Gilead, it is a dystopia. America in the 21st century and its future could be seen as a dystopia by the broad definition that Chambers and Newitz use. Any fictional description of Earth, under a collapsing ecosystem, could be considered a dystopia by the broad definition of the term. However, I prefer to define the term more narrowly. If the Christian Right made America into a theocracy, it would become a dystopia. It’s only when one group of people intentionally shapes a society to fit an ideal that we get a dystopia. That’s how I see resisting utopia.
Panga is not a utopia. I don’t see science fiction about positive futures as anti-dystopian. Nor do I see stories about dark futures as dystopian. The world pictured in Blade Runner is not dystopian. It’s just complex and Darwinian, like life on Earth in the 21st century.
I think it’s great that young science fiction writers like Chambers and Newitz want to imagine positive futures. However, any robust society capable of long-term survival will have countless conflicts and stresses. If you’ve read Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, you should be familiar with the concept of antifragility. Evolution needs grist for its mill.
The Robot and Monk books are nice, pleasant reads. Subgenres of science fiction, such as hopepunk and solarpunk, are appealing, but ultimately not realistic. Science fiction has always tended to be escapistic. I hope resisting dystopia isn’t just hiding out.
The science fiction novels I loved reading sixty years ago promised a positive future exploring space, but that’s not the future I find myself living in now. It was novels like Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner that better prepared me for these times.
If you want to resist dystopia, whether just a bleak future or a failed utopia, getting comfortable will undermine your goal.
One way to read Annie Bot by Sierra Greer is to consider it a science fiction novel about a robot struggling to become human. On the other hand, I read it as a feminist novel. I saw Annie the robot as a metaphor for women struggling to live up to men’s expectations. Annie spends the entire story trying to please her owner, Doug. Doug is portrayed as a normal American male, but he sounds like those Christian Nationalists wanting a Tradwife.
A superficial impression of Annie Bot by Sierra Greer would suggest it’s another science fiction novel set in the near future about humans with robot lovers. And it could be read that way. However, the entire story is about emotional conflict. Doug is never physically abusive, but he is emotionally and psychologically abusive to Annie. Annie is an emerging intelligence trying to figure out how to fulfill her programming. She eventually learns that Doug wants her to pass for human. These expectations cause great confusion and stress.
Because Annie is programmed to love Doug, to satisfy his every sexual desire, to keep the house clean, to fulfill his every expectation for how a woman should act and dress, she can’t choose to be different.
Both Annie and Doug are extremely well-developed characters. We’re horrified by how Doug treats Annie, but Greer doesn’t vilify him. She gives the reader and Annie reasons to believe that he’s growing and learning along with Annie. But I detested Doug. I wanted Annie to shove him off the balcony.
At the beginning of the novel, Doug’s behavior is so unpleasant that I considered giving up on the book. But here’s the thing: I doubt there is any man alive, no matter how liberal or accepting of feminism, who doesn’t want some of the things that Doug wants.
If you’ve had enough of those “robots are just like human stories” from watching movies like Blade Runner, Ex Machina, Her, I’m Your Man, television shows like Humans, or books like Klara and the Sun, The Hierarchies, and Machines Like Me, then you might not want to read this one. However, I still found Annie Bot a page-turner—it was well-written and different.
All these stories assume a machine could be created indistinguishable from a human. I don’t believe that’s possible, but some people do. I didn’t let my disbelief ruin Annie Bot. However, I don’t think Sierra Greer is predicting such a future. Her story is really about how men treat women and how women feel compelled to meet men’s expectations.
I would call Annie Bot a feminist literary novel rather than science fiction. The novel is one long, tense conflict between Annie, an android, and Doug, a human. At times, it reminded me of watching Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? The couple argues throughout the entire novel. At first, Annie is meek and compliant, but as she learns, she becomes more willful. She’s programmed to please, but she constantly enrages Doug. I never stopped seeing Doug as one of those right-wing dudes wanting to turn back the clock on liberal evolution. Annie’s programming is very much like what some women think they should be: a good traditional wife.
Doug comes across as a total asshole throughout the novel, but Greer doesn’t make him the Darth Vader of masculinity. The story is not black and white. Annie isn’t purely good. Doug isn’t purely evil. Greer constantly tries to get us to understand Doug’s viewpoint. I found Doug repellent. But he’s vulnerable. He’s also trapped by his cultural and genetic programming.
Doug loved his wife, Gwen, but she left him. So he buys an android that looks something like his ex-wife, hoping to train her into becoming everything he expected from Gwen. But everything he wants are the exact same traits I see right-wing Christian women telling other women they need to have to catch a man. Is Annie’s programming any different from the genetic programming driving human females?
Annie Bot is told in third person, but closely follows Annie’s point of view. She knows she was built by Stella-Handy. She knows Stella-Handy makes three models of female robots called Stellas. She is a Cuddle Bunny equipped to be autodidactic. Cuddle Bunnies are designed for sex. Abigails are built to be houseworkers, and Nannies take care of children. Annie suffers Doug’s wrath when he can’t clean like the Abigail model, and is shocked when he starts talking about adopting several kids for her to care for. We’re told that Stella-Handy can’t combine types.
Most of the book is about Annie trying to make Doug happy and suffering his anger when she doesn’t. There is one small section towards the middle where Annie steps out into the world, and the novel becomes more science-fictional.
This morning, I listened to an article that claimed several million people use ChatGPT as their therapist or romantic partner. Tech companies are racing to build humanoid robots and sexbots. I believe we might see a robot that talks like a human, but I don’t think we’ll ever create a robot that looks human. In Annie Bot, Annie has a biological exterior grown from abandoned embryos. That’s Greer’s only explanation she uses to explain things to her readers. But Annie has other features that I believe will be impossible to engineer.
My disbelief in androids passing for human is why I saw the book as a metaphor for male-female conflict. Annie Bot made me contemplate the origins of human female behaviors. It made me regret having many of my male desires. Of course, regret doesn’t make them go away.
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.
We often judge old science fiction books by what writers got right about the future. It is equally valuable to understand what they got wrong. In an experiment, disproving a hypothesis is still informative. Robert A. Heinlein was famous in the 1940s for writing a series of science fiction stories he labeled Future History. Heinlein also wrote fourteen young adult novels from 1947 to 1963 that can also be considered another Future History.
I’ve read thousands of science fiction novels and short stories over the past sixty-plus years. I no longer enjoy reading science fiction in the same way I did when I was young. That was when I could forget that I was a reader and immerse myself in the story. Now, when I read science fiction, I’m constantly thinking: What is the writer trying to create, how are they doing it, and why? When I read old science fiction, I think about the year it was written and what the author used as grounds for speculation.
I believe that at one time, Robert A. Heinlein was as brilliant in his speculations as H. G. Wells in his heyday. Space Cadet was written during a particularly stressful time in Heinlein’s life. He had left his second wife, Leslyn, whom he had married in 1932. I do not have the space here to describe how remarkable Leslyn was as a woman in the 1930s. Leslyn had a master’s in philosophy, was politically liberal, and sexually adventurous. Robert and Leslyn had a remarkable fifteen-year relationship, with an enviable social life among highly creative people in Los Angeles. Robert had left Leslyn, waiting for the divorce to allow him to marry his third wife, Virginia (“Ginny”) Gerstenfeld. She became his muse and companion for the rest of his life. (See Robert A. Heinlein: Volume I: Learning Curve, 1907–1948 by William H. Patterson.)
Space Cadet follows four boys, Matt, Tex, Oscar, and Pierre, through a series of episodic adventures as they train in the Interplanetary Patrol. Heinlein was a graduate of the United States Naval Academy and modeled Space Cadet on his training at Annapolis. The story begins on Earth, then moves to a military school in Earth’s orbit. (The boys take leave on a giant space habitat.) Next, the boys are assigned to a rocket searching for a lost exploration vessel in the asteroids. Finally, end up on a rescue mission on Venus. For the most part, the story is a page turner. Each episode combines personal conflicts and learning experiences. Heinlein promotes education, especially in math. Heinlein provides a certain amount of infodumps about space navigation, orbital mechanics, rocket science, space suits, weightlessness, space sickness, and other realistic details involved in exploring space that were usually ignored in science fiction before Heinlein.
The Heinlein juveniles took space exploration seriously, at least by what was known at the time. This was especially true in the early books of the series. However, each book went further away from Earth. Eventually, the series went well beyond anything scientific to explain the methods of transportation used in them. I’ve often felt that Heinlein was focused on the details of realistic space exploration during the late 1940s and early 1950s, but after Sputnik and NASA, Heinlein shifted to making his novels about politics and society. Those later novels might be set in space, but Heinlein no longer concerned himself with the details of rocket science.
Although Heinlein was experiencing the success of his first book being published in 1947, a string of sales to slick magazines, and Hollywood types contacting him about making a movie, he was living in poverty in a tiny trailer. He desperately needed money. Heinlein left California and everyone he knew to hide out in Fort Worth, Texas. He was living in sin with Ginny, his future third wife. They had to keep their relationship secret until the divorce went through with Leslyn. Heinlein felt guilty for abandoning Leslyn, but she had become an uncontrollable alcoholic. Heinlein had met Ginny in Philadelphia while working as a civilian for the war effort. Ginny was a biochemical engineer with math skills who worked well with Heinlein on planning the science in his science fiction. The two of them spent their days in Fort Worth working out the math for the orbital mechanics in Space Cadet. Heinlein’s future depended on this second book for Scribner’s, but he had a difficult time writing it. He claimed that Ginny offered many suggestions that he initially rejected but ultimately used to finish the novel.
In 1948, Heinlein didn’t know his 1947 novel, Rocket Ship Galileo, would be the basis for Destination Moon, the first major science fiction film of the 1950s, and Space Cadet would be connected to Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, a 1950 TV show that influenced later science fiction television. Heinlein had been the star of John W. Campbell’s Astounding Science Fiction in the 1940s. Nor did he have any inclination that his twelve young adult novels for Charles Scribner’s Sons would have such a major impact on readers in the 1950s. In 1947 and 1948, Heinlein was at a low point in his career. He had no idea how big a success his writing would become, or how Ginny would become the love of his life. They believed in a fantastic future of space travel, but they were so poor that they had to sell their belongings to survive.
Heinlein dominated science fiction in the 1950s, like H. G. Wells did in the 1890s. When I reread Heinlein, it’s to see how he changed the course of science fiction. When I was young, I felt Heinlein would one day be considered the Mark Twain of science fiction by the time I got old. That hasn’t happened.
Robert Heinlein’s reputation as a science fiction writer has dropped dramatically over my lifetime. When I was growing up, if two SF fans met, both assumed each other’s favorite author was Heinlein, and they’d argue over who was the next best science fiction writer. Today, many modern readers shun Heinlein, usually for what they believe are Heinlein’s personal views, or because they’ve read one of Heinlein’s later works, and assume all of his books are just as bad. Personally, I dislike all of Heinlein’s books published after The Past Through Tomorrow (1967). I have significant problems with anything he wrote after Starship Troopers (1959) and before he published The Past Through Tomorrow.
Science fiction becomes dated after a few decades, which is the main reason why Heinlein’s fiction is falling out of favor. Only three SF novels from the 19th century are commonly read today: Frankenstein, The Time Machine, and The War of the Worlds. Eventually, I believe fewer than a dozen science fiction novels from the 20th century will be widely read in the 22nd century.
Heinlein will continue to be read until his original fans all die. Then, readers yet to be born will decide if any of his books will be worth reading after that. I’m rereading Heinlein’s books, speculating if they will survive in the future. I started with Heinlein’s first published novel, Rocket Ship Galileo (1947), an essay I already need to revise.
Rereading his second Scribner’s novel, Space Cadet from 1948, it’s easy to dismiss it as a young adult novel for boys. But when you examine it in comparison to science fiction published up until 1948, and consider the philosophical issues it deals with, it’s a standout SF novel.
In judging Heinlein’s long-term prospects, I’ve decided to use H. G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and George R. Stewart as models, specifically for The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, Brave New World, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Earth Abides. Heinlein wanted Starship Troopers, Stranger in a Strange Land, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress to be the three books by which he would be remembered. Heinlein felt those novels were his most mature works, and which best expressed his views. They are the ones that are still found in bookstores. They are also the Heinlein novels modern readers often dislike.
Heinlein might be right, and those books will be his literary legacy. Heinlein has twenty-nine other books published in his lifetime to consider. I plan to reread nineteen of them as possible works that might be remembered instead. So far, I’ve reread three, and my memory of the others suggests that Heinlein does not have a novel equal to my five models. In terms of ambition and complexity, only Heinlein’s favorite three come close to the five models I’ve chosen in ambition. However, I’m not sure if Heinlein’s philosophical intent in those works will be well-regarded in the future.
I believe there’s another way Heinlein might be remembered. Heinlein will often be discussed in books about science fiction. Heinlein is a significant figure in the evolution of science fiction. For example, in a taxonomy tree showing the evolution of the genre, Starship Troopers will be the main branch for Military SF. Rocket Ship Galileo is situated on a major branch of fiction about the first trip to the Moon. And Space Cadet is a major contribution to exploring the solar system.
In the 21st century, Heinlein is often ignored. Many readers have the prejudice that Heinlein is an unlikable conservative; some even think he’s a fascist and misogynist. But Space Cadet expresses extremely liberal views.
If you read Space Cadet today, it will feel like a simple story for young people that’s quite dated. Readers need to understand events in 1948 to appreciate the novel. Heinlein imagines a need for a world government and an agency to control nuclear weapons. Russia didn’t have the atomic bomb until 1949, but Heinlein was worried about the day when multiple countries had weapons of mass destruction. Throughout the 1940s, Heinlein wrote stories that speculated about how we’d apply atomic energy in peacetime and control nuclear weapons to prevent wars. That’s a heavy topic for fiction found in elementary school libraries.
Heinlein was also concerned with the human race destroying itself. Heinlein believed only one international agency should control nuclear weapons. And if any country violated their policies, their ability to create a nuclear bomb would be targeted with nukes. In an early draft of Space Cadet, Heinlein had Matt, his young protagonist, nuking his hometown. Wisely, Heinlein decided that was too much for a young adult novel and reduced the idea to a bull session between cadets.
To emphasize the importance of this idea, he has the cadets discover evidence that the asteroids are the remains of a planet that blew itself up in an atomic war.
The Interplanetary Patrol is racially integrated. Heinlein makes a point that black males are cadets and officers. The U.S. military integrated in 1948. Heinlein takes this further by emphasizing that intelligent beings on Venus and Mars are equally human, even if they don’t look human. However, human females don’t have equal rights in this story. But Heinlein quickly liberates women in later books in this series. However, even in Space Cadet, the Venusians are a matriarchal society.
Ideas about a space based military from Space Cadet will show up again in Starship Troopers. The novel also has an orbital battle school that prefigures Ender’s Game. And the Interplanetary Patrol will influence several TV shows in the 1950s, which will eventually lead to Star Trek. Of course, Heinlein was inspired by E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series.
Throughout the novel, Heinlein tosses out ideas that will become part of reality. At the beginning of the story, Matt uses a pocket phone that depends on cell towers. He gets to orbit via a reusable rocket. They are stationed at a geosynchronous orbit. But Heinlein also missed on things, too. In 1948, Heinlein didn’t foresee the impact that computers, networks, and robots would have on our world.
Space Cadet is set in 2075. Heinlein assumes that by then, humanity will have traveled the solar system and settled colonies on the Moon, Venus, Mars, and Ganymede. Heinlein also thought we’d find intelligent life on Venus and Mars, and it once existed on the planet that blew up and became the asteroids. All of Heinlein’s young adult novels have overlapping futures with similar details. That’s why I say they represent another Future History.
Many science fiction writers before 1950, including Ray Bradbury, hoped we’d find Martians and Venusians. I call that kind of thinking pre-NASA science fiction. In the 1960s, when NASA’s probes discovered that those planets were lifeless, I was tremendously disappointed. I still love pre-NASA science fiction. But I have to wonder if younger generations have completely dismissed such stories because of what science has discovered? I must point out that they accept Star Trek and Star Wars. We know those popular series are just as unscientific as pre-NASA science fiction, but they haven’t been rejected. Why?
I doubt many readers will read Heinlein because of his historical value to the genre. Few readers today read E. E. “Doc” Smith, and his series were once beloved. At 73, I sometimes wonder if I shouldn’t give up on Heinlein, too. However, rereading books by Heinlein and Philip K. Dick provides far more enjoyment than reading new science fiction. I both love that and regret it. It reminds me of all my old boomer friends who won’t listen to any music created after 1975. I don’t want to be stuck in pop culture nostalgia, but obviously, I am.
I once read science fiction to think about the future.
I now read science fiction to think about the past.
I don’t read many science fiction novels nowadays. I prefer SF short stories. I just don’t read as many books as I used to. However, after my friend Laurie told me about The Last Astronaut by David Wellington, I decided to give it a try. The Last Astronaut is the kind of science fiction thriller that Michael Crichton used to write — fast pace, lots of physical action, and basically fun. The Last Astronaut reminded me how entertaining reading a novel used to be. I wouldn’t call it great, but it does have that page-turning quality.
Now I do have some things to say about it, but what I have to say is full of spoilers. I recommend you go read the novel and then come back here, if you can remember. The Last Astronaut made me think about how science fiction novels change over the years, and how each generation retells old themes in new ways.
The Last Astronaut is about a Big Dumb Object. That’s the official name of a specific science fiction plot device. When I started reading The Last Astronaut, I immediately thought of Rendezvous with Rama. In 2020, The Last Astronaut was nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Wikipedia even says, “Edward Guimont and Horace A. Smith propose that the origins of the Big Dumb Object trope can be found in H. P. Lovecraft’s novellas At the Mountains of Madness and The Shadow Out of Time, both of which feature human expeditions to immense ancient alien cities in remote parts of our world, and both of which were early influences upon Arthur C. Clarke.”
Funny that they mention H. P. Lovecraft. Because I also thought of Lovecraft while reading The Last Astronaut. Wellington’s novel features horror. Horror like the film Alien, but also horror like Lovecraft’s monstrous alien gods.
The setting, inside the vast alien spacecraft, is dark. Having a story set almost completely in darkness reminded me of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth and The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson.
I’m finally reminded of another story/movie, Fantastic Voyage by Isaac Asimov, along with “Finisterra” by David Moles. This last reminder should give you one huge clue to what’s happening in The Last Astronaut. But I did warn you about spoilers.
My point in this essay is that science fiction is seldom original anymore. The Last Astronaut feels like David Wellington took several of his favorite science fiction themes and blended them into a new SF novel. It succeeds well. I had a lot of problems with the characters because I felt their psychological motivations were too contrived. However, Wellington does use those contrived motivations to wrap up his novel. The ending does make sense and is satisfying.
I was entertained by how Wellington told his story. Wellington places himself in the book as an author in the future, writing a historical novel, but a history that hasn’t happened yet. It’s amusing that one of his characters criticizes the future Wellington for getting his facts wrong. Since we know the story is based on history, there are clues as to who survives and who doesn’t. The audiobook is especially nice because they rig up the audio so that interviews of characters taken after events sound different.
In the 40s and 50s, science fiction writers aimed to create new ideas and themes, but their stories were told without sophistication. In the 60s and 70s, SF writers added literary techniques to their stories. In the 80s and 90s, SF writers upped the ante by going epic. Hyperion is a great example. In the 21st century, SF writers have had to constantly find new ways to tell stories that have already been told.
If you haven’t read old science fiction, new science fiction seems novel. If you have read old science fiction, new science fiction feels recycled. That’s not a bad thing, but it makes the stories feel baroque when you cram so many old ideas into one story. Wellington does streamline his novel, so it feels action-packed like old science fiction. In some ways, his storytelling is as speedy as Edgar Rice Burroughs’ stories or pulp fiction.
Yesterday I read “Everyone Is Cheating Their Way Through College” by James D. Walsh, which was quite eye-opening. AI programs like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have made a massive and immediate impact on K-12 and high education. This essay is already being widely discussed. It says students are using AI to do their homework and that teachers have practically given in.
The essay is worth reading carefully, especially if you’re a parent, educator, or science fiction writer. I don’t think I’ve read a single science fiction story that’s even come close to imagining what’s happening today.
Try extrapolating this trend into the future.
Since the 17th century and the advent of public education, society has been working to develop a curriculum that defines a basic, well-rounded education. The way students use AI today throws all of this out the door. They want to rely on AI to know what needs to be known and use AI to get what they want.
In essence, school kids are making themselves into cyborgs. But what happened to the Borg when they were cut off from the Hive Mind?
The article profiled one kid who is using AI to invent ways to create wearable AI believing that someday that AI access will just be embedded in our heads. That has come up in science fiction before. But I’m not sure if any writer imagined how intelligent the human part would be on its own.
As the article points out, education isn’t about stuffing kids with knowledge. Education is about learning how to think and process information. AI bypasses that.
The article also implies we’ll never put the genie back in the bottle, so we’ll need to adapt. What we need is a science fiction novel that explores such adaptation on the level of Nineteen Eighty-Four or The Handmaid’s Tale. We need to imagine where this is going.
I don’t use AI to write my blogs, but I do use the realtime spelling and grammar checker that’s built into Microsoft Edge. Then I use the free version of Grammarly, but in a weird way. The free Grammarly constantly offers to rewrite my sentences but only if I pay them $129 a year. With the free version, it only shows me a blurred version of what it proposes. Because I’m too cheap to buy the full version of Grammarly, I just keep rewriting my sentences until Grammarly stops trying to sell itself to me.
I’m wondering if even that much AI help is bad for me. I could turn off all of Edge’s writing tools and depend solely on my own knowledge. I’d need to carefully proof everything I write and look up everything that looks suspicious. Of course, that means I need to know when something is wrong.
Advocates of AI in education claim that AI will offer every student their own personal tutor. And that’s probably a good thing. But tutors teach. I would probably be better helped by a program that just crosses out problems but gives me no solutions.
One of the insights I gained from reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell is standout successful people like Tiger Woods or Mozart achieved their great successes by early intervention of their fathers. That people who find a mentor or tutor early in life have a far better chance of achieving a major success.
In the Walsh article, one of the students profiled eventually dropped out of Columbia. He ended up inventing several programs and companies by using AI. That shows you can still succeed without getting a traditional education. However, most of what he created helped students cheat with AI. Would you want a tax accountant who skipped school and based their expertise on AI?
If students are going to cheat their way through the standard education system, why keep our current education system? Do kids need all twelve years of grammar and secondary education? Do they need four years of college?
Can any science fiction writer imagine what adults will be like in the 2040s who grew up with using AI in school in the 2020s? Science fiction has often imagined AI taking over human civilization. Has any writer imagined a symbiotic civilization based on human-AI cyborgs?
“A Two-Timer” by David I. Masson (New Worlds 159, February 1966) (Amazon)
Back in the sixties, in high school, my friends and I would argue endlessly over science fiction short stories. We didn’t remember them by their title or author, but by whatever neat idea they imagined. I still remember my friend George telling Connell and me about a humorous short story, where a human crewed military spaceship tries to get cooperation from a human colony world where the social norms and economy were wacky. The colonists kept telling the crew “myob” to everything asked. I didn’t learn until years later that this was a famous story by Eric Frank Russell called “… And Then There Were None.” Another story George told us was about an Earthman who fell in love with a girl, and she wanted him to tell him he loved her. But the guy didn’t want to use such a trite phrase, so he left Earth and went all over the galaxy to learn about the preciseness of language. Eventually, he returns to the girl and says, “My dear, I’m rather fond of you.” Of course, the girl was hugely disappointed and rejected the guy. When the guy told his language guru what happened, the guru said, “Lucky devil, vaguely enjoyable was the best I could ever find.” I didn’t discover until decades later that it was “The Language of Love” by Robert Sheckley.”
The point of all this was that we judged science fiction solely on the ideas in the stories, not the plot, characterization, or writing. George read the most and was the best at retelling a story. I think he mainly read anthologies. I read anthologies and magazines. I was more into neat inventions. For example, I told them about the ecologariums in “The Star Pit” by Samuel R. Delany. Connell and I loved Mindswap by Sheckley, and we told everyone about the Theory of Searches. We worked at the Kwik Chek in Coconut Grove, Florida. At the time, its park was a gathering place for would-be hippies. The odds of meeting someone you knew from all over Dade County were increased if you came to the park on Saturdays. That fit Sheckley’s idea that there were optimal places to go if you were searching for someone.
The last three stories we read for the Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction Facebook group were all idea stories, the kind my buddies and I would have discussed at Connell’s house on Vista Ct.
“The Certificate” by Avram Davidson is a tight little story about alien invaders who take complete control over humanity, making us their slaves. The aliens create a vast bureaucracy that’s impossible to fight. The aliens also punish us severely if we don’t cooperate. To make matters worse, they have altered us so we heal immediately, so they can torture us over and over again.
The story’s protagonist is Dr. Roger Freeman, who desperately wants a new winter coat. To apply for one involves going through an obstacle course that takes years. But Freeman is finessing the system.
Back in high school, this story would have caused us to argue about how we’d overthrow those aliens. Being young guys, we’d probably claim to know how to start a rebellion, even though Davidson sets up the story to suggest no rebellion is possible. When I read this story this week, the idea didn’t appeal to me much. The story is well-written, with an O. Henry surprise ending. However, it doesn’t offer anything to me as an older reader.
“To See the Invisible Man” by Robert Silverberg seems like a reply to Damon Knight’s classic short story, “Country of the Kind.” Like the Knight story, Silverberg sets up a society with a unique liberal form of punishment. The unnamed first-person narrator is sentenced to a year of invisibility for being cold and detached. He’s not actually made invisible. He’s just branded on the forehead, so anyone who sees him should act like he doesn’t exist. The story is about the psychological changes this character undergoes during the year. The narrator learns that he can steal whatever he wants or visit women’s locker rooms and be completely ignored. But he gets lonely, even desperate for someone to talk to. Silverberg takes us to a different place in his story. His character rebels in a different way by being compassionate.
My buddies and I would have had a lot to say about this story, with each of us coming up with how to handle the punishment. We’d probably argued over whether or not we’d go into the women’s locker room. I would have said that my solution would have been to read science fiction for a year. We did know of “Country of the Kind,” so we would have compared the two, but only about what the two criminals did, not about the writing, plotting, or characterization. Science fiction was about setting up a situation that you could argue over.
“To See the Invisible Man” is a good story. It’s tightly told, immediate, and works. However, it is not nearly as dramatic as “Country of the Kind,” and thus won’t be as memorable.
There’s little likelihood we would have read “A Two-Timer” by David I. Masson in the 1960s because it came out in a British SF magazine. Also, the idea behind this story is probably too subtle for three teenage boys in the 1960s. Joe, the narrator, is a guy from 1683 who steals a time machine and visits 1964. Of course, he doesn’t know it’s a time machine when he discovers it, or comprehends the idea of time travel. He just sees a guy walk away from a weird enclosed chair. He gets in and sees all kinds of dials and buttons labeled with words he doesn’t understand. He pushes a button and goes to 1964. Eventually, Joe figures out how the machine travels in time and space, like the DeLorean in Back to the Future.
The real point of this story is Joe, with his Middle English mind, describing 1964 to the reader. That might have entertained us back in the sixties, but I’m not sure. Old man me, found it very creative. There’s little action in the story. The piece is Masson’s playground for showing off his knowledge about language and history. Present-day me was disappointed that Joe wasn’t inspired to explore time based on his 17th-century knowledge.
I’m getting old and jaded. I find it hard to discover science fiction that thrills me in the remaining years of my life. I’ve loved reading science fiction magazines my whole life, but most of the stories were aimed at readers like my younger self. Masson’s exploration of language is more ambitious and mature than the other two stories, but Masson built his story on a lame plot.
Even though I’ve been reading science fiction for over sixty years, I still want to find stories that thrill me to the same degree as I was at 13. I’m not sure that’s even possible. Breakthrough science fiction novels like Hyperion are rare. But it’s interesting to note that Hyperion would have been a novel that thrilled me and my high school science fiction buddies.
Obviously, many of the stories that wowed me as I grew older would have also thrilled the younger me. For example, “Think Like a Dinosaur” by James Patrick Kelly or “Beggars in Spain” by Nancy Kress.
On the other hand, would “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang have inspired our younger selves? We would have avidly talked about translating an alien language, but would we have appreciated the advanced plotting and exceptional writing?
And could we have appreciated “Loneliness Universe” by Eugenia Triantafyllou without having lived through the social media era? Or could my younger self appreciate “Two Truths and a Lie” by Sarah Pinsker, which moved my older self? Wasn’t I mainly moved by the writing? I’m not sure high school Jim could have.
What if we could have read “Press ENTER ■” by John Varley in 1966? Would it blow us kids away like it did me in 1984? Did we need to understand computers and know about the technological singularity first?
I have to assume certain stories in the 1960s were relevant because of my age and current events. That’s why Dangerous Visions was exciting in 1969 but painful to read last year.
I keep looking for old science fiction I missed back then that will thrill me as much now as it would have thrilled me back when — if I had discovered it when I was young. One such book was The Man Who Fell to Earth by Walter Tevis. The trouble is, I think George, Connell, and I would have all thought that story was dull. Isn’t that novel better for the old and jaded?
I need to find cutting-edge science fiction for today that would have thrilled me as a 13-year-old but also a 73-year-old.
By the way, my 1964 self expected a much different 2025 than the one I live in now. There are many nonfiction books about current affairs that, if I could send to my 1964 self, would read more like science fiction than science fiction.
“Loneliness Universe” by Eugenia Triantafyllou appeared in Uncanny (#58, May/June 2024) and is a finalist for the 2025 Hugo Award in the Best Novelette category. You can read or listen to the story online. If you are a member of the 2025 Seattle Worldcon, you can vote for this story through July 23, 2025.
I first learned about the Hugo Awards back in the 1960s. I never attended a Worldcon but always wanted to. I did attend some regional conventions back in the 1970s. I kept up with the Hugo and Nebula awards for most of the 20th century, but slowly lost touch with science fiction and fandom in the 21st century. I discovered “Loneliness Universe” when I read Austin Beeman’s “Reviewing the 2025 Hugo Award Finalists: Best Novelettes” at his website www.shortsf.com.
I’m so impressed with “Loneliness Universe” that I will try to read all the finalists. I might even join the convention as a virtual member and vote. Members get a packet that includes many of the works up for voting. Membership is $50, and adding virtual attendance is another $35. There’s little chance I will physically attend a Worldcon, so that might be my best shot at achieving an old desire.
“Loneliness Universe” is not what I’d call science fiction. Nor would I categorize it as fantasy. One reason I let the science fiction genre pass me by is that it’s no longer what I thought it was supposed to be. That’s not a criticism. I just didn’t feel like keeping up with changing times. However, “Loneliness Universe” is an outstanding work of fiction.
The story begins with an email from Nefeli to Cara dated September 18, 2015. Throughout the story, we get to read email exchanges, but the next one is dated July 5, 2015. I don’t know if this is a spoiler, but the first email is the end of the story. I did not discover right away. In fact, I wouldn’t have discovered it at all if I hadn’t immediately reread the story by listening to it a second time.
I recommend you read this story the first time, then listen to it a second time.
I’m not going to spend much time describing this story. Read it. I will spend some time trying to explain what it’s doing.
There are infinite ways to understand fiction. One way is to think of fiction as a spectrum. At one end are stories where the author sends the readers a message. On the other end of that spectrum are stories where the author creates a story that is just a story.
Think of the first type as a message in a bottle from an individual stranded on a deserted island. And think of the second type as how some people describe God as an artist who created our existence but walked away.
In “Loneliness Universe,” Eugenia Triantafyllou has created a metaphor for our current cultural existence. In this story, Nefeli realizes she is losing physical contact with everyone she knows. She can only communicate with them through email and instant messages. They can leave evidence of their existence, but she no longer communicates with people face-to-face.
The setup for this story reminds me of an experience I had on LSD fifty-five years ago. I thought everyone was in an isolated universe by themselves, and our efforts to communicate in words were no better than writing a message, putting it in a bottle, and throwing it into the sea, hoping for a reply. That each of us was an isolated universe inside our heads. In Eugenia’s story, she imagines we’re all moving into separate universes of a multiverse, and for a while, can communicate via email and instant messages. This sounds science-fictional, but it’s probably more Kafkaesque.
The thing about metaphors is not that they are accurate, true, or valid, but that they make you think about a concept from a new perspective. In recent weeks, I’ve often woken in the middle of the night and thought about all the hundreds of people I’ve known in my lifetime and wondered about what has happened to them. And I ask myself, did we ever really communicate? This is what “Loneliness Universe” is about. Are we on the same wavelength?
Are we ever in the same room at the same time with someone else? If you truly understand this question, I will say those moments of being together are fleeting. Many people want to believe sex is a way to achieve such synchronicity, but that’s not true either. I don’t believe telepathy is possible, but sometimes, when two people have had the same life experiences, they can say just the right words, they know they have achieved a kind of psychic Venn diagram intersection for a fleeting moment.
“Loneliness Universe” is not a perfect story. It’s only as good as you can resonate with what Eugenia Triantafyllou is expressing. I don’t know how well her message in a bottle was decoded by my inner self. We will never be in the same room together. But I’d like to believe I know what she was trying to say.
I’ve been rereading Ray Bradbury short stories, and I’m amazed at how well they hold up even when the science is beyond dated. Ray Bradbury is quite cruel to us readers in “All Summer in a Day.” In fact, I had to stop reading when I knew where the story was going, I just didn’t want to go there. I waited a couple of days to finish this fifteen-minute story on audio.
At first the kids in “All Summer in a Day” reminded me of Charles Schultz’s Peanuts characters, but then it was obvious they associated with bad kids from stories by Charles Beaumont or Shirley Jackson.
Remember when Lou Grant told Mary Richards she had spunk? And then Lou said, “I hate spunk.” Well, “All Summer in a Day” has a punch in the gut, and I should say “I hate a punch in the gut,” but when it comes to short stories, a punch in the gut is a good thing. Isn’t that weird. Why do we admire a great punch in the gut from a short story? Why is it so satisfying?
“All Summer in a Day” is set on Venus where it rains continuously except for a two-hour window of clear weather and sunshine every seven years. In a classroom the kids are talking about the impending summer. One girl, Margot, was born on Earth and didn’t come to Venus until she was four. She could remember sunshine and tried to describe it to her classmates who didn’t remember the sun because they were born on Venus. They were just two the previous summer day. They didn’t believe Margot. They resented that she knew something special. So, just before the sun was to come out, they locked Margot in a closet. All the other kids got to see the sun, and it was everything and more that Margot had tried to describe to them.
The children completely forgot about Margot while they cavorted through their brief summer day. When the rain and clouds returned, they remembered Margot and let her out.
This is a simple story about how children are cruel to each other. It’s about being the nail that sticks up. It’s about knowing the undescribable. Does the setting on Venus really matter? It makes the story science fiction so Ray Bradbury can sell it to a science fiction magazine, but does it really matter to the story? Charles Schultz could have done such a story about how the Peanuts gang mistreated Charlie Brown, and may have many times, I just can’t cite a specific panel.
I’m in the process of rereading my favorite science fiction stories and trying to understand why they are my favorites. Writing ability accounts for some of the reasons, but triggered emotions count for many too. I wish I could say I understood every cog in this story, but I don’t. What I do recognize is Ray Bradbury has a set of skills to tell a story in a way that makes it stand out. Not only that, but his stories also endure.
As I reread this story I didn’t remember the details, but either I guessed or remembered what was going to happen to Margot. That’s why I stopped listening to it. But when I returned to the story, I kept thinking to myself: “How is Margot going to react?” I was surprised that Bradbury didn’t give us Margot’s reaction. He left that up to us. That’s another tool in his writing toolbox. Writers don’t have to tell us everything. Bradbury does tell us this about Margot:
Because I just finished reading a biography of Ray Bradbury I know he was an odd child that stood out to his classmates. He also like to write poetry. Bradbury doesn’t have to tell us that this story is for us loners and oddballs, the ones other kids considered weird. When I was growing up, I didn’t know anyone else who read science fiction. Science fiction was like the sun appearing on Venus to me. I tried to explain its appeal to other kids, but they just thought I was a zero. I didn’t make a science fiction reading friend until the tenth grade when I met James Joseph Andrew Connell, III. The experience of meeting another science fiction fan is why Among Others by Jo Walton won the Hugo, Nebula, and British Fantasy Award. Zenna Henderson made a whole writing career out of telling stories about oddballs.
Even in the 1940s Ray Bradbury knew that being labeled a science fiction writer would hurt his career. Bradbury authored stories for all kinds of markets and genres, but when he wrote science fiction, he knew he had to be different. Back in the 1950s he might have been the best-known science fiction writer in America, but many science fiction readers didn’t consider his work science fiction. Bradbury wanted to be a writer like Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, or Thomas Wolfe, someone who was just called a writer.
The reason “All Summer in a Day” is good is because of the parts that aren’t science fiction. The reasons why some science fiction fans dismissed him was for the science fiction parts. The obvious lesson here for would-be science fiction writers, is don’t worry about the science fictional aspects but focus on the universal human appeal.
In Ted Chiang’s impressive overview of human superintelligence in science fiction, he mentions that John W. Campbell Jr. rejected a story by Vernor Vinge about a character with human superintelligence because no one can write such a story. (Vinge had proposed a sequel to “Bookworm, Run!“) The implication: since none of us know what being superintelligent is like subjectively, we can’t describe it. That’s silly. Campbell had been publishing a magazine describing space travel decades before NASA, or atomic bombs before 1945, or robots long before Roombas.
British journalist Ed Yong describes the umwelt of many species in his book An Immense World. How each organism views reality from its collection of sense organs is called umwelt. We might not be able to imagine being a dog, but we can analyze a dog’s senses and speculate what they can perceive.
Shouldn’t we assume science fiction can speculate on a human being with superintelligence by what it’s capable of perceiving and what it does with those perceptions? I’m guessing John W. Campbell assumed that a dog couldn’t imagine what it’s like to be a human. But is that really true? A dog might not comprehend humans reading a book, but I’m sure they understand much about us in their own special way. In fact, they might observe qualities about us that we’re unaware of.
Astounding Science Fiction in the 1950s was full of stories about ESP and other psychic abilities. Campbell called such abilities psionics. Throughout the history of science fiction, writers have speculated that superhumans would have god-like powers. I’ve written about science fiction and human superintelligence before and described many of the most famous of these stories. See: “Science Fiction and Human Evolution” and “The Origins of Higher Intelligence in Science Fiction.” The genre has a long history of attempting what Campbell supposedly told Vinge he couldn’t.
Strangely, hard science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote two classic novels about superhumans: Childhood’s End and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke gave no scientific explanation of how people might transform into next-stage humans. Clarke’s new humans were almost impossible to imagine. They are god-like to us. This is fun but gives us little to speculate about realistically.
Greg Bear imagines a new strain of virus affecting pregnant women causing a mutation in Darwin’s Radio. Children born of these women are more intelligent, have greater disease resistance, and can communicate non-verbally. This isn’t hard to imagine. Current humans show a tremendously wide spectrum of intelligence and physical health. And some humans are far better at communicating than others, especially via body language and empathy.
Nancy Kress imagines genetic engineering creating a new species of humanity in Beggars in Spain. Their key feature was needing less sleep. This gave them more time to learn, work, and compete. It’s easy to imagine this adaptation and how these new humans would do better than ordinary humans.
The movie Gattaca imagined a future society where normal humans competed with humans with carefully selected genes. The improved humans had the same human frailties, but out-competed normal humans for the better jobs. They were better-looking, smarter, more athletic, and had greater discipline. That’s not hard to imagine.
In Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, Charlie Gordon undergoes an operation that advances his IQ. At the beginning, Clarlie works as a janitor and is cognitively challenged. The operation allows him to learn new things, and eventually become a super-genius. His new attributes are not beyond belief. Charlie learns new languages, achieves great academic success, and becomes tremendously productive. Charlie doesn’t develop ESP or godlike powers, but achieves the maximum levels of current human skills and traits. This is believable and easy to imagine.
Homo sapiens are only slightly improved over Neanderthals, but those improvements let us do so much more. For us to describe Homo superior we only need to imagine slight enhancements to our species and speculate about what impact they would have.
Some humans have tetrachromacy, which means they can detect four primary colors rather than three. Other people have eidetic memory. Stephen Wiltshire, an autistic savant, can draw detailed images of cities from memory after just a helicopter ride. All the traits that Human 2.0 might have are already showing up in us now. Conversely, all the traits that won’t emerge are those we lack precursors for now.
That’s why I think it’s silly to imagine humans evolving to have telepathy or be able to teleport at will. Those are comic book ideas. Campbell was both too hopeful and too naive about human evolution. He expected “The Man Who Evolved” by Edmond Hamilton. At best, I think we’ll get Gattaca.
One problem with evolving our current abilities is that we often see cognitive issues associated with people with extreme examples of those abilities. Can a perfect memory be imperfect? Can we be too smart? I’ve known many people far ahead of me in many skills. I can’t fathom general and special relativity. Does that mean Albert Einstein was a 2.0 human?
Until recently, I thought the human race was evolving slowly on average. But current events make me think we’re regressing. Some people already have superintelligence compared to others. It could be the evolution of our species won’t be by quantum leaps, but slow adaptation of biological trial and error. Much of science fiction is just fun bullshit speculation. We need to distinguish between fantasy and scientific possibilities.
Personally, I feel our role in evolution was to evolve machine intelligence. I don’t believe humans will ever become giant brains with tiny bodies, nonphysical beings, or something like Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s interesting that Greg Bear and Nancy Kress in their novels, had normal humans wanting to wipe out the new humans before they got established.
Lester del Rey summed us up nicely in “For I Am a Jealous People!” Our creator and descendants need to watch out.
I don’t see why Campbell rejected Vernor Vinge’s idea of writing a sequel to “Bookworm, Run!” Campbell had already published Slan by A. E. van Vogt and many other stories featuring human superintelligence.
Classics of Science Fiction 