My friend Mike told me that he and his wife Betsy were watching The Twilight Zone, one episode each evening. I told him I would do the same. We’ve been texting every morning about the previous night’s episode. Day before yesterday we watched “The Lonely,” from season one, episode seven. I think I’ve seen this episode three times over the last sixty-plus years, but this time I thought more about the story. I think texting with Mike is pushing me to analyze the story in ways that casual watching never did.
The Twilight Zone tended to set its audience up for a surprise ending, often ignoring logic, or even other possibilities for how the story might go. Rod Serling wanted us to get involve and then surprise or shock us – but do it quickly. He treated his stories like a magic trick, and I don’t think he expected us to ask too many questions.
In “The Lonely,” Corry (Jack Warden), convicted of murder, has been sentence to solitary confinement on a deserted asteroid. He is visited four times a year by a supply rocket. The captain of the supply ship, Allenby (John Dehner), has taken pity on Corry and tries to bring him something each time to occupy his mind because he knows Corry is going crazy with loneliness. This time he brings him a large box. Allenby tells Corry not to open until he leaves. It turns out its a robot that looks, acts, and talks just like a beautiful woman. (It’s Jean Marsh who will star in Upstairs, Downstairs in the 1971.)
The robot is named Alicia. At first Corry is offended by thinking his loneliness could be eliminated by the companionship of a machine. But, Alicia is hurt by his rejection, and Corry takes pity on her. They become close.
Then Captain Allenby shows up again and tells Corry he’s been giving a pardon and has twenty minutes to get ready to leave. Corry assumes he can bring Alicia, but Allenby says there’s a weight limit because of limited fuel and he only has room for Corry. Corry can’t believe Allenby could be so cruel as to leave Allicia. To quickly convince Corry he is serious, Allenby shoots Alicia in the face, revealing all her mechanical parts.
This makes “The Lonely” a cold equations story. “The Cold Equations” by Tom Godwin was a controversial story from 1954. It set up a problem where the only solution was killing a teenage girl. A lot of readers hated “The Cold Equations” and over the decades they have protested that the author should have found a way to save her. They completely missed the point of the story. Godwin set up the story so the girl had to die. And that’s what Serling did in “The Lonely.”
Not only that, but they solved the plot quickly by having Captain Alleby shoot Alicia. I accept all that. That’s the point of the story. But here is where in 2024 I took a different path thinking about the story.
Why didn’t people talk about Corry falling in love with Alicia? In 1959, I wonder if the audience assumed Alicia was just a machine, and that Corry’s loneliness overcame the fact, that his love was a delusion. That when we see the mechanical parts of Alicia that we undertand why Alleby shoots her.
Over the decades, we’ve had a lot of stories that might be called robot liberation stories where many readers believe that a machine that looks and acts like a human is just as human as a biological person. I wonder if the ending shocks modern readers who have come to love robots. If someone shot C-3PO in the face and killed him, wouldn’t we be shocked and mourn his death?
If I remember right, there were a couple of Asimov robot stories where Susan Calvin kills a robot. I was always shocked by that.
In 2024 we don’t want robots murdered. Accepting the logic of the story that Alleby can only take one person back, how could we change it to work with modern audiences?
Rod Serling wrote this episode. He didn’t give the audience or Corry a chance to think about the options. His stories are setup to only work one way. When I was watching the episode I had forgotten the ending, and I wondered how Serling was going to solve the problem. Having Allenby shoot Alicia was a tidy way to end the story. After he shoots Alicia Alleby tells Corry that the only thing he’s leaving behind is his loneliness. Corry says, “I must remember that,” and “I must remember to keep that in mind.”
There’s a problem. We don’t get to decide and neither does Corry. I wish Serling had ended the story differently. I wish Allenby had handed Corry the gun and said, “I can take one person back, the ship leaves in fifteen minutes no matter what,” and then walks off.
The story could end there. We don’t really need to know the ending, because the story has shifted to thinking about all the possibilities. We should accept that the rocket only has fuel for one person. We should also assume there will be no future supply runs so if Corry stays, he will eventually die. We might also assume Alicia runs on radioactive pellets and will live a long time.
But let’s say the TV show had to reveal an ending. The camera in the very last scene could be aimed at the rocket’s hatch from the inside waiting to see who shows up. We could see Corry’s face climb into view, Alicia’s face climb into view, or Allenby say, “Time to go, shut the door.”
Each possible ending would imply so much still.
Corry shows up and we think he shot Alicia
Corry shows up and we think he didn’t shoot Alicia but left her to be lonely
Alicia shows up and we think Corry shot himself
Alicia shows up and we think Corry volunteered to die alone
Neither show up and we think Corry decided to stay with Alicia
Neither show up and we think Corry decided to stay with Alicia but kills her before he dies so she won’t be alone
Neither show up and we think Corry decided to stay with Alicia but gives her the gun to make her own decision when he dies
It’s unfair to change an author’s story after the fact. But in this case, I’m suggesting my idea because it illuminates how people might have thought about the story in 1959 would be different from how we like to think about stories in 2024.
Greybeard is a 1964 post-apocalyptic novel by Brian W. Aldiss. It was reprinted as an audiobook by Trantor Media on October 15, 2024, read by Dan Calley. The ebook version is currently available for the Kindle for $1.99 in the U.S. Greybeard has an extensive reprint history. I heard about this novel back in the 1960s, but I’ve only become an Aldiss fan in the last few years, so I was excited when the audiobook edition showed up on Audible.com. Greybeard was one of the novels David Pringle admired in his Science Fiction: The 100 Best Novels (1985). That book is available for $1.99 for the Kindle too.
Greybeard is set in the 2020s, and is about the aftermath of atomic bomb testing in space in 1981, when the explosions altered the Van Allen radiation belt. Eventually, people learned “the accident” caused the human race to become sterile, along with certain other animals. In the story, everyone is old, waiting to die, and wondering what will happen after humanity is gone. This is a different premise for a post-apocalyptic novel, but Aldiss uses his tale mostly to toss out a ideas. The story lacks a compelling plot.
The characters are never developed to the point where you care about them. That’s a common problem of older science fiction, where characters were created mainly to present far-out science fictional thoughts.
The story’s main focus is on Algy and Martha Timberlane as they travel around England after the collapse, along with flashbacks of how they got together. Algy, short for Algernon, is called Greybeard because of his long beard. After the accident, during a period when kids were born with genetic defects, but before they stopped coming altogether, the world economies collapsed, which led to wars. As Aldiss points out, a lot of consumerism is targetted to babies, children, and young people, so certain businesses quickly went bust. But also, as people realized they had no future, many gave up on their ambitions, or even committed suicide.
The book is divided into seven chapter, each a different time and setting:
Chapter 1 – The River – Sparcot
Chapter 2 – Cowley (flashback)
Chapter 3 – The River Swifford Fair
Chapter 4 – Washington (flashback)
Chapter 5 – The River – Oxford
Chapter 6 – London (flashback)
Chapter 7 – The River – The End
The novel begins with rampaging stoats (ermine, short-tail weasel). This setting of England being taken over by nature reminded me of After London by Richard Jefferies, but Jefferies did a much better job describing how nature would overrun decaying cities, towns, and roads. After London is a superior post-apocalyptic novel, and one of the earliest
We first meet Greybeard and Martha who have been living for years in a tiny village, Sparcot, ecking out an existing through fishing and gardening. They live near a river surrounded by a barrier of brambles. When two boats arrive with refuges from another village, they hear about how the stoats are attacking everything including people. This reminded me of the stobors in Heinlein’s Tunnel in the Sky. Algy, Martha, and a few friends, flee in a boat Algy had hidden. They plan to float down the river to the sea.
The novel is about what they see along the way. It might be called a picaresque novel. Algy/Greybeard is a bit of a rogue, and we follow his episodic travels. At each stopping place along the river they meet folks living under different conditions. Swifford Fair seemed like something out of the Middle Ages. When they get to Oxford, they find a certain level of civilization has maintained itself around the old university. But in every location, there are wild beliefs about how things are, including lots of charlatans, thieves, and con artists preying on ignorant people. Rumors abound about children still being born, strange mutant beings living in the woods, or even fairy creatures of old returning.
Algy and crew meet a crazy old man on the river who tells them to find Bunny Jingadangelow in Swifford Fair because he can make them immortal. Bunny Jingadangelow shows up several times during this novel running different scams, including one as a messiah.
Greybeard isn’t a bad science fiction novel, but it’s not that great either. If I had read it back in 1968 when I first heard about it, I would have been impressed. But over the decades I’ve read a lot of post-apocalyptic fiction, and Greybeard just isn’t up to the standard of Earth Abides by George R. Stewart or The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I’d say The Hopkins Manuscript by R. C. Sherriff as one of the great post-apocalyptic novels about England to read first. In other words, there are a lot of post-apocalyptic novels you should read before spending time on Greybeard.
It’s a shame that Aldiss didn’t spend more time writing Greybeard because his premise is so good. I just finished the four-volume novel series by Elena Ferrante that begin with My Brilliant Friend. This is a true masterpiece, and future classic. Greybeard and most science fiction feel like starvation rations compared to that novel. Of course, Ferrante used 1,965 pages to tell her story, and Aldiss only used 237 on his story. Aldiss tried to develop the characters with flashbacks, but those flashbacks were mainly used to describe the world during the initial stages of collapse.
Ferrante created a compelling novel by showing how two girls evolve psychological and intellectually over a lifetime. That anchored the novel and gave it a page-turning plot. Aldiss never moors us in the story with anything we can anchor our attention. Richard Jefferies handled his post-apocalyptic London by using the first part of the book to explore ideas around the collapse, and then used the second half with a well-plotted adventure story. I enjoyed Greybeard enough to read it, but just barely.
I wish Aldiss had expanded his story to 400-500 pages and developed Algy and Martha, and found something to give the book a clear purpose. I can only recommend Greybeard to folks who read a lot of post-apocalyptic novels and enjoy studying them.
Aldiss imagines radiation causing a world of only old people. But we’re currently facing a depopulation crisis because most countries around the world aren’t producing enough babies. A country needs every woman to have 2.1 children to grow. Many women don’t want to have any, and one child is common. Theoretically, countries like South Korea can become like the world of Greybeard by the end of this centry. I wonder if any current writers are exploring that idea?
Ron Goulart didn’t like the story in his F&SF (Dec. 1964) review.
P. Schuyler Miller liked it a bit better, but not much, in his Analog (Feb. 1965) review.
Judith Merril in 1966, pointed out to F&SF readers that the original American hardback lacked some of the flashback scenes, and might like the story better in the Signet paperback, which included the full British edition.
How much do you know about science fiction? Where do you go to know more? The usefulness of Google is in decline, and that’s disappointing. Wikipedia is a great resource for researching science fiction, probably our single best resource, but it’s far from perfect. The ISFDB.org has the essential details, but not the understanding. There is a lot of academic content to be found on Google Scholar, but the sources it cites are often behind paywalls.
Artificial intelligence (AI) might be the answer. Wouldn’t training an LLM on all the published works about science fiction produce a resource that could answer any question? The ultimate Sci-Fi AI would have read every science fiction story and every book and journal about science fiction. We’re not there yet. I thought we might be close since I assume some LLMs have read all the internet.
Ever since I was a kid, I often fantasized about having a superintelligent robot for a sidekick. That dream could come true in a few years. I recently installed Ollama on my computer and downloaded several LLMs (large language models) to see how much they knew about science fiction. I don’t have a Nvidia GPU, so I’m limited to the smaller models that will run on a CPU. I do have 64GB of memory, so that helps.
I first asked Llama 3.2 3B:
What are the ten funniest science fiction short stories published before 1975?
This is Llama 3.2 3B’s reply:
“The Last Question” by Isaac Asimov (1956) – This story follows a mathematician who tries to solve an ancient problem that has puzzled humanity for centuries, with hilarious results.
“A Fishbone Detached” by Theodore Sturgeon (1949) – A fish’s perspective on life is the perfect comedy of errors in this witty and absurd tale.
“The Minority Report” by Philip K. Dick (1956) – This classic dystopian story features a group of police officers who are having trouble predicting crimes, leading to some hilarious misunderstandings.
“The Long Wait” by Robert A. Heinlein (1947) – In this humorous tale, a man is stuck on an asteroid for 300 years, and his attempts to deal with the isolation provide plenty of laughs.
“Rogue Moon” by Algis Budrys
Llama 3.2 can neither count nor does it know about comic science fiction.
I then asked Phi 3 3B the same question. The 3B in both models means three billion parameters, so they are about the same size. With large language models (LLMs) size matters. Phi 3 is from Microsoft. Here’s its reply:
“The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury – A chilling tale about a high tech home that turns against its family in South Africa during World War II.
“I Had to Have Sex with this Girl” by Robert Sheckley (originally published under the pseudonym Rex Baker) – An absurdly comical story of an alien race’s attempt at human sexuality, reflecting on 1960s cultural shifts and satire regarding social norms.
“The Roads” by Robert Silverberg – A humorous exploration of gender roles in a future where the sexes can switch personalities using special devices during road trips across America’s futuristic landscapes, originally published posthumously after his death but reprinted before 1975.
“The Immortal Cloud” by Isaac Asimov – A light-hearted tale about a cloud made entirely of immortal beings that accidentally disrupts the world’s population and environment while trying to expand their horizondating back from around 1968 when it was first published in “Amazing Stories”.
“Bread” by Philip K. Dick – A comical narrative about a man who creates an android with no understanding of food, reflecting on the absurdities and potential moral dilemmas of artificial intelligence without losing its humor during the early days of sci-fi exploration into technology’s impact on society in 1954.
“The Roommate” by Robert A. Heinlein – While primarily a serious story, this work includes humorous elements as it portrays two people living together under strange and absurd circumstances reflective of the era’s counterculture movements around 1948-50 when first published in Galaxy Science Fiction magazine.
“The Cosmetic Surgeon from Mars” by Henry Kuttner – A humorous take on a robot that undergoes cosmetic surgery, revealing societal perceptions of beauty and technology around 1940 when it was first published in Astounding Science Fiction magazine as part of the “The Iron Pair.”
“Snow Crash” by Neal Stephenson – This cyberpunk-inspired story, although notorious for being a bit controversial with its satirical take on corporate America and capitalism in contemporary society (published originally 1992), has often been cited as one of the funniest sci-fi stories when read retrospectively.
“The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury – While it was also listed first, this story is known for its darker elements and could be argued against here; however, some find humor in its ironic undertones relating to technology’s impact on family dynamics during the war era (1950 when originally published).
“The Cold Equations” by Joe A. Kamil – This 1954 piece from “Astounding Science Fiction” offers a humorous take through its moral quandary, wherein an emotionally-driven pilot must make a difficult and morbid decision under the pressure of scientific laws regarding space travel’s limited resources; however, it can also be interpreted as having comedic elements in how dire circumstances lead to unexpected actions.
This is truly bizarre. I think Robert Silverberg would be surprised he had died as well as written a short story entitled “The Roads.” The fact that the AI finds “The Veldt” so funny that it lists it twice, reveals that AIs have a weird sense of humor. “The Veldt” is a vicious story about two kids killing their parents. And who would think “The Cold Equations” was told for yuks? Several stories given are made up.
I decided to see if a larger model would be wiser, so I download Phi 3 14B and asked it the same question. It replied:
“The Velvet Touch” by Poul Anderson (published in 1 grove Press, 1948) – A story of a man’s peculiar encounter with an alien who offers him the touch of velvet as a form of communication. It explores themes of desire and longing through humorously surreal encounters.
“The Wish” by Robert Sheckley (published in Galaxy Science Fiction, November 1957) – This story revolves around an alien who wishes for a single human to become his bride but with unforeseen comedic consequences.
“The Long Wait” by Cory Doctorow (published in Asimov’s Science Fiction, September 2014) – An ex-government agent trying to retrieve stolen alien technology finds himself trapped in an amusingly absurd scenario involving time travel and mistaken identity.
“The Night” by Arthur C. Clarke (published in Playboy Magazine, May 1956) – An astronaut’s hilarious attempt to adapt Earth’s night cycle on the Moon leads him into a series of bizarre encounters with wildlife and unexpected predators.
“The Long Loud Silence” by Murray Leinster (published in Galaxy Science Fiction, April 1948) – A humorous exploration of miscommunication aboard a spaceship during an emergency results in comical misunderstandings and absurd consequences.
“Six Thirty-Seven to Nome” by Robert Silverberg (published in Galaxy Science Fiction, December 1958) – A humorous tale of human interaction with a telepathic alien named Jarmuth who finds Earth’s customs and technology hilariously confounding.
“The Big Time” by Fritz Leiber (published in Galaxy Science Fiction, April 1958) – A funny take on the butterfly effect as a small act of kindness leads to an uncontrollable chain reaction of events with humorous and unexpected outcomes.
“The Mask” by Philip José Farmer (published in Galaxy Science Fiction, May 1953) – A hilarious story where the protagonist can change his face at will but not without comedic misunderstandings and awkward situations.
“The Cure-All Menace” by Jack Vance (published in Galaxy Science Fiction, May 1954) – A humorous critique of overreliance on technology when a device that can cure all diseases creates ridiculous scenarios and misunderstandings.
“The Masks of God” by C.L. Moore (published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, February 1934) – A humorous tale where the protagonist discovers that his ancestors were alien gods who left behind masks with special powers, leading to a series of comedic mishaps and adventures.
This is just pitiful. Although, Phi 3 14B is great at faking it.
I then decided to ask a commerical LLM, CoPilot. Here’s what I got:
“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” by Douglas Adams (1978) – Although technically a radio series first, it was later adapted into a novel and short stories.
“Allamagoosa” by Eric Frank Russell (1955) – A humorous tale about a missing piece of equipment on a spaceship.
“The Ransom of Red Chief” by O. Henry (1907) – While not strictly science fiction, its humorous twist has inspired many sci-fi adaptations.
“The Trouble with Tribbles” by David Gerrold (1967) – Originally a “Star Trek” episode, it has been adapted into short story form.
“The Marching Morons” by C.M. Kornbluth (1951) – A satirical look at a future where the intelligent are outnumbered by the less intelligent.
“A Logic Named Joe” by Murray Leinster (1946) – A humorous story about a computer that becomes too smart for its own good.
“The Man Who Sold the Moon” by Robert A. Heinlein (1950) – A witty tale about a businessman who schemes to claim the moon.
“The Roads Must Roll” by Robert A. Heinlein (1940) – A humorous take on futuristic transportation systems.
“The Weapon Shop” by A.E. van Vogt (1942) – A story with a humorous twist about a mysterious weapon shop.
“The Little Black Bag” by C.M. Kornbluth (1950) – A darkly humorous story about a futuristic medical bag that falls into the wrong hands.
Okay, “Allamagoosa” is a funny SF story published before 1975.
Maybe the problem isn’t the LLMs, but the topic. At ISFDB they have three tags – comedy, humor, and humorous – that I checked. They are rarely used. Wikipedia has a short list at its entry List of Science Fiction Comic Works, but it fails to mention Robert Sheckley. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction lacks a heading for comedy or humor, but I was able to stumble upon Humour (that British spelling almost made me miss the entry). The SFE does a good job giving an overview of comic science fiction. I wonder if LLMs were allowed to read it.
Goodreads takes a crack at Sci-Fi Humor but failed me when it listed Ender’s Game. A Reddit thread makes a lame attempt that does better than Goodreads. Maybe my LLMs had to make up shit because they just never read anything worthwhile on the subject.
I assume I have stumble upon a theme in science fiction that’s mostly ignored. Just for grins, I thought I’d compose a list of funny science fiction stories. Please, if you’ve read some SF that’s tickled your funnybone that I haven’t listed, leave a comment. Anyone looking for a thesis or dissertation topic might consider SF humor, or even why SF humor hasn’t made much of an impact.
So I asked myself the original question:
What are the ten funniest science fiction short stories published before 1975?
Here’s my answer, mostly from memory.
1942 – “The Star Mouse” by Fredric Brown (Astounding)
1943 – “The Proud Robot” by Henry Kuttner (Astounding)
1951 – “… And Then There Were None” by Eric Frank Russell (Astounding)
1952 – “Sail On! Sail On!” by Philip Jose Farmer (Startling Stories)
1954 – “Martians, Go Home!” by Fredric Brown (Astounding)
1955 – “Allamagoosa” by Eric Frank Russell (Astounding)
1957 – “Time Waits for Winthrop” by William Tenn (Galaxy)
1957 – “The Language of Love” by Robert Sheckley (Galaxy)
1958 – “Poor Little Warrior” by Brian W. Aldiss (Venture)
1965 – “Mindswap” by Robert Sheckley (Galaxy)
By the way, here are some funny SF novels published before 1975 that I also remember.
1952 – The Rolling Stones – Robert A. Heinlein
1955 – Martians, Go Home by Fredric Brown
1957 – Earthman’s Burden by Poul Anderson and Gordon R. Dickson
1965 – Bill, The Galactic Hero by Harry Harrison
1966 – Mindswap by Robert Sheckley
1968 – Dimension of Miracles by Robert Sheckley
1968 – Space Chantey by R. A. Lafferty
My mind struggled to remember these stories. I had to use ISFDB.org to find the dates and publications of the short stories. And I cheated a couple of times by using the novella version that was later expanded into the novel I remember reading.
In other words, it’s hard to remember. It’s also hard to distinguish which stories were funny. After doing all this research I can see why the LLMs have trouble answering the question. LLMs are great at answering well-documented information, like listing all the American presidents in order. But they cannot provide answers that aren’t clearly and repeatedly documented in what they read in training.
Most science fiction magazines published before 1975 are available on the internet. Let’s suppose LLMs could read them. And let’s suppose they have read thousands of scholarly articles and books on literature so they theoretically would know what we mean by the word humor. If they read all the science fiction stories before 1975 could they tell which were meant to be funny? Unless humans catagorize SF stories in clear documentation that’s widely repeated, I’m not sure current AI technology can identify stories intended to be comic.
Right now large language models work by a method of predicting the next word based on the knowledge of reading billions (or trillions) of sentences. Data scientists are working on ways for LLMs to fact check what they generate but these AI programs don’t really understand anything.
But how much do we understand? The current presidential race reveals that people often believe in false information. I’m not sure we process data that differently from AI programs. GIGO (garbage in garbage out) applies to people as well as computers.
The stories and novels I listed as being funny might not be funny to everyone that reads them. They made me laugh. But some people will laugh at almost anything. For AI to recognize humor in a SF story, that story needs to have been described as being funny in many citations. And from what I can tell, that hasn’t happened.
If you love reading about the history of science fiction, you should love reading Jim Emerson’s series Futures Past. I’ve previously reviewed the volumes for 1926 & 1927, and 1928. In the early 1990s Emerson started this project as a fanzine focusing on the history of science fiction, and published four issues: 1926, 1927, 1928, and 1929 before he had to stop. Then a few years ago when he retired Emerson started over with 1926 and expanded each fanzine issue to a softbound book. The latest volume, 1929, is 222 pages. The largest volume yet. Jim says 1929 should be ready to ship in mid-October. You can order pdf, softbound, and hardbound editions here.
Jim writes all the content, and I’m jealous of his knowledge of science fiction’s history. Each volume contains a Year in Review section that covers science fiction books, magazines, plays, and movies of the year, while documenting the people and events related to that year. But more than, that, Emerson includes in each volume a handful of long articles about the history of specific science fictional subjects that lead up to that year.
For example, the 1929 volume has a ninety page overview of women science fiction writers from 1666-1925. I’ve read a lot of SF history and I didn’t know about most of these books or their writers. Our collective culture forgets so much – why did they forget all these women writers?
Other significant articles include the “Evolution of the SF Name” which unearthed far more old examples of the term than I’ve previously known about. In the “Gernsback Bankruptcy” Emerson explains how Hugo Gernsback lost control of Amazing Stories and immediated create Science Wonder Stories. Hugo was a wheeler-dealer, and somewhat shady. Besides his magazines he had a radio station, and was an early broadcaster of TV. It blew my mind that Gernsback was paying himself $50,000 a year. That was a tremendous salary in the 1920s when the average worker was proud to make $25 a week.
I’ve always been fascinated by the history of science fiction. We tend to live in an awareness bubble that extends from decade or two before we start reading science fiction to when we lose contact with the genre as we age out. I grew up in the 1950s, starting to read science fiction in 1962, but I was reading stories that were mostly published in the 1950s, and some from the 1940s. I’m in my seventies now, but I’ve mainly lost contact with what’s going on in the genre in the early 2000s. Futures Past portrays the genre in the 1920s, and very early 1930s, and it’s very different. Have you ever thought about what being a science fiction fan in the Roaring Twenties?
One reason I like reading about the history of science fiction is discovering what science fiction fans and writers were like before my bubble of awareness began. The genre has changed several time over the course of my reading lifetime. And reading Futures Past shows how science fiction changed several times before it became the science fiction I knew as science fiction in the 1960s. Reading through the descriptions of the SF books of 1929, or the descriptions of the SF books written by women from 1666 to 1925 reveals that people have always had a fascinating with the fantastic and they’ve always speculated about the possibilities. But how they speculated depended on the common knowledge of the day. In 1929, people still thought there were things and places on Earth still to be discovered, including other intelligent beings.
Well, 1929 was also when the first science fiction clubs and fanzines were formed. Fandom arose concurrently with the early days of rocketry clubs, which were sprouting up around the world, and Emerson has articles covering the histories of both. All of that is fascinating to me. The 1920s and 1930s were when my parents grew up. I wonder if they even knew about science fiction.
For most science fiction fans this history will be too far in the past. So far in the past that it’s an alien landscape. They might be shocked by the weird ideas writers used to create their science fiction, such as lost races, hidden species, about prehistory civilizations like Atlantis and Mu, rejuvenation, utopias, eugenics, future wars, spiritualism, the occult, strange mutations, and so on. They just didn’t have the science we do now. And they believed that all the planets of the solar systems and their moons could harbor intelligent life.
With the aid of the internet, The Internet Archive, and YouTube, you can read the futures past science fiction in old books, magazines, fanzines, and watch the old movies. Emerson summarizes every issue from six SF magazines from 1929: Amazing Stories, Amazing Stories Quarterly, Science Wonder Stories, Air Wonder Stories, Science Wonder Quarterly, and Weird Tales, and quickly covers several general pulp magazines that featured science fiction. He also reviews the science fiction books that came out that year too. 1929 will go into public domain in January, but most of the magazines are already available online at the Internet Archive. Just search on the magazine’s name plus 1929. Search for book titles on Google and the Internet Archive. Search for the films on YouTube.
By the way, the YouTube channel, Mars Wants Movies, is running a history of science fiction films, and is currently up to the year 1948. It covered the 1920s in six episodes, and devoted a whole episode to 1929. This makes a great supplement to Futures Past with links to those old movies you can watch on YouTube.
Also, you can read the early fanzines at Fanac.org, including The Comet v. 1 n. 1. mentioned in Emerson’s article on the first science fiction clubs.
Here’s Volume 4’s Table of Contents:
I subscribed to Futures Past when it was a fanzine back in the early 1990s. I was disappointed when it stopped publication at 1929. Jim tells me he’s hard at work on 1930 already, and plans to cover many more years in his retirement. I’m really looking forward to the 1930s. I used to think of the 1930s as the early days of science fiction, but Futures Past shows that the origins of science fiction go way back. Emerson’s etomological search for the origins of the phrase science fiction reveals it began way before Amazing Stories.
Unless you’ve recently become a fan of Kim Stanley Robinson, it’s unlikely you’ll be thinking about reading The Wild Shore. It was Robinson’s first published book back in 1984. The Wild Shore was impressive enough to be the first volume in Terry Carr’s third series of Ace Science Fiction Specials. But still, why would you choose to read a 1984 paperback original in 2024? I can’t claim it’s become a science fiction classic or it’s a highly distinctive take on its theme, which is post-apocalyptic, but it is a worthy read.
I’m a great admirer of Kim Stanley Robinson’s 21st century work because he explores the forefront of science fiction. However, his books don’t compel me to turn their pages. I seldom care for his characters, and I don’t get caught up in his plots. I like Robinson’s books for his insightful philosophical takes on our evolving genre. That was not the case with The Wild Shore. I did care for Henry and Tom, and I never stopped wanting to know what would happen. This book was different. Was it because it was told in first person? Or was it because it was a somewhat realistic post-apocalyptic novel, a favorite theme of mine?
I’m not sure if any post-apocalyptic novel is ever particularly realistic. I’m only separating the silly ones with zombies, mutants, aliens, and robot overlords with those novels which describe normal human life after things fall apart.
I had not planned to read another science fiction novel so soon after reading A Heritage of Stars. (I’m trying hard to read other kinds of books.) But two events intersected that led me to read The Wild Shore. Just as I finished Clifford Simak’s 1977 novel about a post-apocalyptic America, when I caught a YouTube review of The Wild Shore, a 1984 novel about a post-apocalyptic America. I immediately wanted to compare the post-apocalyptic vision by a writer born in 1904, near the end of his career, with the post-apocalyptic vision of a writer born in 1952 publishing his first novel.
Even though the novels came out just seven years apart, they are significantly different. Simak’s book is a science fantasy, not much more sophisticated than an Oz book. Robinson’s story is a literary coming-of-age in a post-apocalyptic world tale.
I’m becoming a connoisseur of apocalyptic fiction. I’ve read so many that I divide them into works covering different time periods. These are some of my favorites:
Stories that begin before the apocalypse
One in Three Hundred by J. T. McIntosh
The Death of Grass by John Christopher
The Last Man by Mary Shelley
Stories that begin during apocalypse
“Lot” by Ward Moore
Survivors (BBC TV)
Stories that begin days after the apocalypse
The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham
The Quiet Earth (film)
The World, The Flesh, and The Devil (film)
Stories that begin weeks or months after the apocalypse
Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
Stories that begin years after the apocalypse
Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel
The Postman by David Brin
Stories that begin generations after the apocalypse
The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett
The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson
Stories that begin centuries after the apocalypse
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr.
A Heritage of Stars by Clifford D. Simak
After London by Richard Jefferies
Stories that begin in the far future
Hothouse by Brian W. Aldiss
I think we should contemplate why post-apocalyptic stories are so popular. If I listed all the ones I knew about from books, movies, and television shows, it would be a painfully long list. Shouldn’t we psychoanalyze ourselves over this? It’s my theory that we’re attracted to post-apocalyptic settings because we feel like we’re living in pre-apocalyptic age.
There’s a telling point about most post-apocalyptic stories – the cause of the apocalypse usually kills off most of the population. Doesn’t that suggest we want to live in a world with fewer people? I believe we’ve been living through a slow developing apocalypse our whole lives caused by overpopulation. People laugh at The Population Bomb, a 1968 book that predicted famine that didn’t happen. However, back in the 1960s I remember reading about experiments with rats and overpopulation. As rats were forced to live with more of their own kind, they started going crazy, attacking each other, and causing universal stress.
Most of the problems we face today that will shape our future are due to there being too many of us. Of course, economists are freaking out now because of dropping birth rates, but that’s only because capitalism is a Ponzi scheme they desperately need to keep going. But this book review is not the place to go into details about all the detrimental effects of overpopulation. Let’s just say that the emotional appeal of reading stories where there are fewer people resonate at a deep psychological level. Just look at all the people who want to return to the 1950s, when the population was less than half of what it is today. Or they dream of rebooting society without all the people they dislike.
This begs the question: What will society be like if we had to start over? Most post-apocalyptic novels are merely action-oriented stories that let readers vicariously run wild in a lawless society. They don’t address societal collapse seriously. I think novels like Earth Abides by George R. Stewart, Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, and The Wild Shore by Kim Stanley Robinson do – to a small degree.
The Wild Shore describes growing up in a small community of about sixty people in San Onofre, California, about halfway between Los Angeles and San Diego. The story is told from the point of view of a young man, Henry “Hank” Fletcher, and his friends. The setting is a small pastoral valley near the ocean where people live off small-scale fishing and farming. The year in 2047. Back in 1984, the United States was mostly destroyed by thousands of neutron bombs, which produced low radiation but caused lots of destruction. Survivors creates thousands of little communities each finding their own unique way to survive.
Henry and his teenage friends are third generation post-apocalypse, who admire an old man, Tom, who was born before the apocalypse. Tom claims to be over 100. He has become their mentor and teacher. The young men mainly fish, while the young women farm. It’s demanding work during the day, but they study with Tom after work. He has taught them to read and tells them tales about the old days. Henry’s best friend Steve Nicolin is desperate to get away from home and his domineering father. Steve pushes Henry into actions that propel the plot.
Tom is an unreliable mentor, but Henry and friends don’t know that, and neither do we at first. For example, Tom tells Henry and his friends that Shakespeare was an American, and England was part of the United States. Tom knows there were both good and bad things about the pre-apocalyptic world, but he has glorified American life before the bombs. Henry and Steve, want to rebuild that America, but don’t know how. Like most young men they are anxious for adventure, and resent the grueling work required for daily survival.
Then one day a group of men from San Diego, led by Jennings and Lee, show up and invite people from Henry’s small community to visit their large one in San Diego. They tell Henry’s community they came by train. It turns out their train is two handcars, those little cars that are people powered. In San Diego they are shown many marvels of reconstruction.
Henry is impressed with what the San Diegans have created for themselves. San Diego’s success is due to a strong man named Danforth who his followers call the mayor. Danforth even has a political slogan: Make America Great Again. (I kid you not.)
The mayor tells Henry and Tom he wants their small community to join his resistance movement. We learn that America was bombed by several countries, but not Russia, who resented our world dominance. The rest of the world have put the United States into quarantine, working to keep Americans from regrowing their power. Japan guards the west coast, Canada the east coast, and Mexico the Gulf Coast. The Japanese command is stationed on Catalina Island off Los Angeles. The mayor wants to get as many Americans as possible to fight them.
Now, this world building is not the true focus of The Wild Shore. In fact, I considered it unrealistic speculation. However, Robinson needed a reason for Henry and Steve to want to leave their community and join a big cause. The book is about growing up in a post-apocalyptic world, and to a degree it realistically speculates about such a life. For example, Robinson imagines that some people would try to survive off what was left in the cities, and others would fish, farm, herd, or ranch, and there would be a conflict between the scavengers and the back-to-the-land folks. I think that’s realistic. He also imagines that strong men like Danforth would consolidate power. And I think that’s realistic too. But the whole plot conflict with the Japanese is not something I bought.
The real value of this story is how the boys grow up. And it’s especially about how they learn from Tom. Eventually they discover that Tom doesn’t know everything, but that’s part of the story too. I feel the mentoring relationship was realistically developed, and what I admired most in The Wild Shore. However, in the end, the novel never achieved the impact of Earth Abides or Station Eleven. At least not with my first reading. It might be in the same league as The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett, but I haven’t reread that one in decades.
Robinson does a lot of speculation and extrapolation that I need to think over. For example, people return to whaling because they use whale oil for lighting. We find whaling repugnant, but whale oil made a significant impact on 19th century America because it was a superior lighting source over candles. Robinson has his America with no form of mass communication. The San Diegians dream of repairing a radio, but so far can’t. Would such technology disappear in 60 years? In the story, much of what we use disappears. In this story, printing is just starting to make a comeback.
One of the most important insights from Earth Abides is we won’t be able to teach the next generation everything they need to rebuild a technological civilization immediately. Isherwood, a former university professor and the Tom of Earth Abides, realized that teaching literature and mathematics to kids who had to work hard just to eat would be nearly impossible. In the end, he understood that he had to teach the next generation things they could readily assimilate and use. So, he taught them how to make bows and arrows to help them hunt food.
Robinson tries to explore what useful knowledge Tom could convey to Henry and his friends, but that theme gets sidetracked by the boys chasing after the anti-Japanese resistance movement. I felt that plot was unrealistic. Robinson could have just kept the conflict to just between the larger San Diegan community take over Henry’s smaller community, and that would have been realistic enough for me. Or the conflict could have been between those who lived by scavenging and those who farmed and fished. He did need a larger conflict for his plot, but I thought the resistance theme too big.
One of the fascinating things about post-apocalyptic stories, is how people live without news organizations and communication systems. To suggest that most of the world was keeping America at a tribal level to protect themselves is hard to believe. But if global civilization has collapse, it’s easy to believe that we could return to a tribal society. It all depends on how many people die in the apocalypse. Europe recovered from the Black Death, which killed up to half the population in many cities, but it survived and thrived.
Realistically, unless we were hit by an asteroid, or a plague with ten percent survival rate, we’re not going to drastically reduce our populations in single apocalyptic event. We could slowly fall apart until we de-evolved into a tribal state, but that might take centuries. A realistic post-apocalyptic world might be the one that’s emerging now as countries return to authoritarian rule, economies collapse, and weather ravages everything.
The Wild Shore is about how young people adapt to a post-apocalyptic world. The book might offer some insight into how things might be if the apocalypse was overwhelming, killing off 99% of the population. What happens when the apocalypse is slow-acting, and reduces the population slowly, which slowly forgets all the technology? We can see this is many countries around the world right now. So far, they have been smaller countries like Sudan, Colombia, or Afghanistan. But Russia and China don’t look too healthy right now.
If people are reading post-apocalyptic novels because they unconsciously feel we’re approaching apocalyptic times, shouldn’t they consciously start reading realistic apocalyptic novels that might help them anticipate new ways of living? The Wild Shore isn’t that realistic, but it does explore some issues about growing up in a post-apocalyptic world that might make it a worthwhile reading. I do recommend giving it a try.
Some preppers have written post-apocalyptic novels, but they are generally about guns and surviving in the early days after the collapse. I don’t think we should expect a Mad Max society. Iraq, Syria, Haiti, El Salvidor. and Afghanistan are great examples to study if you want to write a truly realistic post-apocalyptic novel, or you want to become a prepper. Being a lone wolf with a AR-15 is as much of a fantasy as a zombie apocalypse.
Novels like The Wild Shore and The Long Tomorrow, or a TV series like the 1975 Survivors have more of a realistic ring to them, but only slightly so. The fall of Rome took centuries. A truly realistic post-apocalyptic novel would deal with a slow declining society and the apocalypse wouldn’t be so dramatic as an atomic war.
“Earth for Inspiration” is a comic science fiction story by Clifford Simak set millions of years into the future about a science fiction writer and his robot visiting a forgotten Earth. The pair go there hoping to find inspiration to write new science fiction stories. You can read it online in the April 1941 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories.
I read “Earth for Inspiration” by Clifford D. Simak because I read When the Fires Burn High and the Wind is From the North: The Pastoral Science Fiction of Clifford D. Simak by Robert J. Ewald. I bought that book after I read and reviewed A Heritage of Stars by Simak which made me want to know more about Clifford D. Simak. I mentioned my interest in Simak on the Clifford Donald Simak Facebook group and the Ewald book was one of two books about Simak that was recommended. I forgot I already owned the second book, Clifford Donald Simak: An Affectionate Appreciation by Francis Lyall. I haven’t read that one yet because I leant it to my friend Mike who had recently read the twelve volumes of Simak’s short stories. Mike is who got me to read A Heritage of Stars in the first place. I guess that puts me into some kind of inspiration loop.
A Heritage of Stars involved a post-apocalyptic America with few humans and some robots. In that story, most robots had been destroyed except for their brain cases which were saved as trophies after a war with the robots. Unknown to the humans, the robots continued to be conscious inside their brain cases for a thousand years. That idea of a conscious mind without outside sensory data intrigued me. Then I read in the Ewald monograph about “Earth for Inspiration,” involved a dying Earth, robots, and isolated robot brain cases. I had to read it. The story is also included in Simak’s collection Earth for Inspiration and Other Stories: The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak Volume Nine. Amazon now sells 14 volumes in the complete stories. Audible.com now offers ten of those volumes in audiobook editions.
Version 1.0.0
Most of the famous science fiction short stories we remember from the 1940s were first published in Astounding Science Fiction. Thrilling Wonder Stories was aimed at younger, less educated science fiction fans, and we seldom see reprints from that pulp magazine. For the most part, its stories are less sophisticated with far more action. And that’s true for “Earth for Inspiration.” I thought it was a funny story, but somewhat simple and hyper paced. It has an old fashion voice because of all old-timey colloquialisms. Simak is known for his pastoral prose and midwest settings.
“Earth for Inspiration” was more fun than I expected to find in Thrilling Wonder. Usually, when we think about robots in science fiction, we think of Isaac Asimov, but I’m seeing how important robots were to Simak stories.
When I read it with my eyes, “Earth is Inspiration” felt like cliched pulp science fiction from the 1930s. However, when I listened to the story after buying the audiobook edition, I thought the writing was much better than my first impression, except for all the saidisms. (I think the worse was — “Look at that, will you!” he jubilated.) The second reading with my ears made me notice how many ideas Simak was using to develop the story. It’s a satire on writing science fiction, maybe even the first example of recursive science fiction.
However, “Earth for Inspirations” gives us a few clues about how Clifford D. Simak thought when comparing them to his other work. The more Simak I read, the more I spot common ideas, characters, and elements that he used and reused.
The Ewald monograph has a few pages of biographical information, almost just a list of dates. Most of the 155 pages describe Simak’s stories and novels. I was hoping to find a biography of Simak, something like William H. Patterson did for Heinlein, but such a book doesn’t exist as a far as I can tell for Simak. Second to that, I was hoping to find an analysis of the impact of Simak’s stories, like what Alexei and Cory Panshin did for Heinlein, Asimov, and van Vogt in The World Beyond the Hill. It’s not that either. When the Fires Burn High and the Wind is From the North, is a standalone journal, volume 73 of The Milford Series: Popular Writers of Today. The content is like Alva Rogers A Requiem for Astounding, which is a description of the stories in all the issues of Astounding Science Fiction in chronological order.
I thought it fascinating that Simak was thinking of robots in the same way in 1941 and 1977. He obviously had a fondness for the idea of robots and had developed an idea of what they would be like early in his career and stuck with it until he died. Robots were faithful servants who were also friends. Simak imagines them with bodies that can break down, but with nearly indestructible brain cases. I assume those brain cases have an internal power supply that could last for millions of years. A couple years ago I read a collection called The Complete Robot by Isaac Asimov. I wonder if Simak has enough robot stories to warrant such a collection?
Reading Simak, we can assume he didn’t like cities or corporations and had a low opinion of mankind’s ability to survive in the long run. Although, “Earth for Inspiration” is set millions of years in the future after humans have colonized the galaxy, but long after we’ve used up Earth’s resources and abandoned it.
The first scene of “Earth for Inspiration” opens with a short tale about a robot named Philbert who became inert after his body rusted up. Eventually, his body rusted away and Philbert lived inside his braincase for millions of years. This reminds me of the Tin Woodsman of Oz.
The second scenes jumps to Jerome Duncan, a once successful science fiction writer who is again getting rejection slips after a successful career. Duncan lives millions of years from now. It’s amusing that Simak thinks science fiction will last that long.
Anyway, Duncan’s robot Jenkins suggests going to Earth to get inspiration for writing a new story. Jenkins is also the name of the robot in City, Simak’s most famous book, a fix-up-novel. Duncan is famous for writing Robots Triumphant. I won’t tell you what it was about because it becomes part of the story.
The next scene has Duncan and Jenkins arriving on Earth with a lot of camping equipment and meeting an old-timer, Hank Wallace, who has been waiting for new tourists for over a thousand years. He manages the Galactic Trainsport station, but no one informed him that the line had been shut down a thousand years earlier. Duncan and Jenkins had hired a private rocket. This points to another idea that Simak loved, that humans would eventually have very long lives. In this story, we last for ten thousand years. And his second most famous novel, Way Station, is about an old-timer who manages a transport station and who doesn’t age. By the way, the old-timer in that novel was named Enoch Wallace.
Should we assume that Simak had been thinking about writing his most famous novels for years?
I don’t think I should tell you any more of “Earth for Inspiration.” It’s a fun enough story so that I shouldn’t spoil it for you. I’ll just hint at a few more scenes. Earth in the far future is dry, and has lost most of its air. There’s a confrontation with humans living in primitive tribes in dry deep sea canyons where the air is thicker. That makes it a dying Earth story. There are slapstick scenes with a crazy robot and another confrontation with horde of runaway robots.
“Earth for Inspiration” has decent humor, although not sophisticated. It would make a great humorous episode for Love Death & Robots. The humor is slapstick Sheckley with a touch of Frederic Brown’s ironic weirdness. I’m not sure if Simak intended it to be entirely comic, although, he probably did, but I bet a lot of young readers in 1941 took it straight realistic action.
Today I read “The Cartesian Theater” by Robert Charles Wilson for our discussion group. That Facebook group is reading one story every Sunday from Science Fiction: The Best of the Year: 2007 edited by Rich Horton. I got a big kick out of “The Cartesian Theater” and wanted to hear it on audio. But when I went looking for an audiobook that included it, I couldn’t find one. Bummer.
My inner reading voice is nothing compared to the professional narrators who read audiobooks. I read “The Cartesian Theater” in Horton’s 2007 best-of-the-year anthology which I own in paperback. When I write about a story I like I want to help people find a copy to read. It’s always great when I can put a link to where it can be read or heard online. You can read the Horton anthology at Archive.org if you have set up a free account. You can read the Jonathan Strahan anthology for free if you subscribed to Kindle Unlimited. It’s $11.99 to buy that anthology for the Kindle. The one Wilson story collection shown above is a French edition. All those other editions will require tracking down used physical copies. For most people, this won’t be an easy story to find.
Most bookworms don’t read short stories, and short stories don’t make much money for publishers either. Short stories are a kind of training ground for novelists. Often when a writer becomes a success their short stories are collected, and even kept in print. And sometimes those collections have audiobook editions. If there was The Best of Robert Charles Wilson audiobook I would have bought it today. I would have also bought The Best of Charles Sheffield this week if it existed on audiobook. I did listen to my audiobook copy of The Best of Connie Willis twice this week to read “Even the Queen” and “Death on the Nile.” The narration was perfect for each, and I got so much more out of the story than when I just read them on paper.
The best narrators do voices for each character. That highlights the dramatic quality of stories that my inner voice doesn’t generate. But more than that, audiobooks are read much slower than my inner reading voice, sounding out every word, and that makes an enormous difference. When I read, I read too fast, often skipping words. I can’t help myself, I read too fast. I miss clues to what’s happening. Listening makes me pay attention to every word. And I’m very disciplined in my listening. If I miss something I hit the jump back button.
“The Cartesian Theater” is about a world where everyone lives on a guaranteed income and economic activity is driven by robots. People still make extra money, usually from creating something entertaining. (Picture everyone being a YouTuber or something like it.) In the story an anonymous rich person hires Lada Joshi to track down an elusive artist, Jafar Bloom, and offer to back a showing of his work with no strings attached. Joshi hires Toby Paczovski, an operative skilled finding people living on the dole who don’t want to be found. And then she had Toby find Philo Novembre, a retired philospher, to get him to attend the first showing of the “Cartesian Theater.” What Bloom has create is a device that proves something philosophical, something that science can’t prove. I don’t want to say too much.
Beside coming up with a nice gimmick for the premise of the story, Wilson creates an interesting setting, a setting that our world seems to be heading towards. AI and robots do most of the real work, pushing people onto the dole. The robots aren’t considered sentient. That’s the trouble with AI robots. If they ever become sentient we can’t make them our slaves. In Wilson’s society they seem to be on the cusp of awareness. Humans in this story also have a lot of smart technology that supplement their bodies. And in Wilson’s world, a certain amount of brain activity can be duplicated in machine. Toby’s grandfather is dead, but enough of his memories hang around so Toby can still talk to him. The whole story is a Cartesian theater. And it has a nice surprise ending I didn’t guess.
Is this story worth keeping in print? Should it be available for the Kindle and on Audible? I don’t know. Such publishing might be a money loser. Which short stories should be preserved? And which should we forget?
We also read “Georgia On My Mind” by Charles Sheffield which won the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novelette back in 1994. You’d think every award winner should be preserved. It is in a collection called Georgia On My Mind and Other Places which can be read on Archive.org or bought for the Kindle for $5.99. But no audiobook. It was originally published in the January 1993 issue of Analog.
I loved “Georgia On My Mind” even more than “The Cartesian Theater.” Sheffield uses a narrative structure that was common in the pulps before WWII, where a mystery is discovered in a far distant place on Earth. In this case New Zealand. The story is set in modern times. We seldom believe such mysteries are possible anymore. But in the old days, readers loved these setups where the story felt possible. In this case, in a rundown tool shed to an old farm house in a remote part of New Zealand, Bill Rigley finds pieces of Charles Babbage’s computer from the 19th century, along with old letters, and information about programming. The mystery is how did Babbage’s work get to New Zealand and why.
If you like a Weird Tales type of story, computers and computer history, and even a bit of recursive science fiction, then you should like “Georgia On My Mind.” I think Sheffield rush the story at the end. He should have kept the slow pace and followed through on the setup and made this story a novel. I dislike the title, but it fits the cutsy ending. However, I didn’t want a cutsy ending. Obviously, Sheffield didn’t want to write a whole novel, and wrapped up the story with a direct appeal to science fiction fans. I wanted a Weird Tales ending. Still, I got a big kick out of this story.
It’s sad to think these two stories will be forgotten. They just aren’t easy to find. I think what’s needed is for Audible to publish all the best-of-the-year anthologies, from 1939 to the present. That would put most great short SF in audiobook print. At least do the Asimov/Greenberg/Silverberg books covering 1939-1964. Then Wollheim from 1965 to 1990. The 14 Carr anthologies, and all the Gardner Dozois anthologies. Or get some young editor to create new anthologies for each year.
If Audible doesn’t want to keep best-of-the-year anthologies in print, I think they should at least put all the Hugo and Nebula winners and finalists in audiobook print. That would catch “Georgia on My Mind” but not “The Cartesian Theater.”
JWH
p.s. I haven’t been blogging as much lately. I’m just getting old and running out of energy. Finishing this short blog gave me a sense of accomplishment.
My friend Mike and I decided to pursue the same reading goal separately, probably because we each discovered book YouTuber Benjamin McEvoy on our own. We both concluded we wanted to become better readers, diving deeper into the books, to develop a note-taking system, and remember more of what we read. Mike brought it all up with me when he told me about reading A Heritage of Stars by Clifford D. Simak. I told him I would read the same book, develop a note system, and then we could compare notes and methods of taking notes when I finished.
Mike also told me about different videos he was watching about taking notes while reading. One covered writing notes in the book while you read. I could never do that. Another suggested stopping at the end of each page you’ve read and jotting down some notes. That’s too much for me. Another suggested making notes after reading each chapter. That’s the method I’m trying here.
A Heritage of Stars came out in 1977, near the end of Simak’s career, and it’s one of many of his forgotten novels. Simak is most famous for his award-winning books City and Way Station. A Heritage of Stars is currently available on Amazon as a $1.99 ebook, but there’s also an audiobook edition on Audible.com. I don’t recommend you buy either until you’ve read some of my notes. A Heritage of Stars is not a worthy read unless you have the right reading background.
I discovered I already owned the Kindle and Audible edition, but I don’t remember reading either, but my reading log says I’ve listened to it twice, first on 12/1/15 and again on 6/1/16. That’s damn weird that I’ve listened to it twice, just six months apart, and don’t remember it at all.
This makes it a perfect book for this experiment in deep reading. One of my goals for becoming a better reader at age 72 is to at least remember that I read the book, and to remember at least one significant detail about the book. My ambition for developing a note taking system is to write down enough to trigger the memory of reading the book.
Starting this goal at 72 is probably a bad idea since I obviously have a memory problem, but that’s also part of my ambition to improve my memory. I want to read fewer books but get so deeply into them that I remember something about them. I’m tired of remembering reading books in the same way I remember each potato chip I’ve eaten.
What’s even crazier, after doing a web search I discovered I wrote a long review of A Heritage of Stars for the Worlds Without End website. This changes the whole deep reading project. If I can’t remember what I read, then note taking becomes more important. I’ve thought in recent years that maybe I need to make a wiki of my thoughts as an external memory. I’ve started using Obsidian, a note taking program that hyperlinks ideas, but I’ve only piddled with it. Obviously, I need to get serious and use it faithfully. This is not the first time I’ve discovered I read a book and wrote a review and completely forgotten both. It’s not even the second or third time. I’ve lost count.
My plan for this essay is to read A Heritage of Stars and take notes chapter by chapter giving a synopsis, my reaction, and maybe some quotes. I’m going to use screenshots for quotes to say me typing. I wish I could write concise synopses like I see in Wikipedia, but that’s going to take some time to train myself.
A Heritage of Stars
Chapter 1
This sets up the story as a post-apocalyptic novel. It also zeroes in on the theme that our civilization is long gone and we’re mostly forgotten. What people know of us is more like the histories of Herodotus or myth.
The image of pyramids of robot brain cases is quite striking. It suggests the collapse might have been due to a war with robots, making this novel a little more appealing to today, since real robots are just around the corner.
Chapter 2
We’re introduced to Thomas Cushing, who farms potatoes. Times are tough, he must fight potato beetles by hand and worries that roving bandits will steal his crop. Food is limited.
Thomas Cushing is also a writer and scholar, who studies Wilson’s history, which was written in ancient times. Cushing has access to Wilson’s notes and contemplates a myth that Wilson left out of his history, one about “the Place of Going to the Stars.”
Cushing is at a university and has access to the library stacks. It might be the last university left, and it’s protected by fortified walls and geography.
Thomas was sponsored by Monty and Nancy Montrose, becoming their unofficial adopted son. As Cushing became a scholar he became obsessed with Wilson’s history, especially about the Place of Going to the Stars.
This chapter reminds me of A Canticle for Leibowitz. Cushing lives a kind of monastic life, doing subsistence farming while also working as a scholar by candlelight reading ancient books. This is one of my favorite themes in science fiction, where people thousands of years in the future try to figure out what our civilization was like.
Chapter 3
We learn that Wilson’s first name is Hiram, and he started his history on the first day of October in 2952 at the University of Minnesota. That’s a thousand years into our future, but our civilization had collapsed five hundred years earlier. Hiram Wilson writes this in his introduction to his history:
We also learn that nearly all texts concerning technology, and any references to technology in other books were destroyed. Wilson is piecing together from scant sources what our technology must have been like. He says the censorship over technology came from extreme fanaticism and hatred. He figured the collapse was due to the depletion of non-renewable resources, pollution of the environment, and massive unemployment. He also deduces that our civilization got too big to manage, especially the corporations and governments. Evidently automation and robots were involved, and there was a revolt. The rebellion destroyed the robots and technology. This caused the collapse that killed billions, and mankind went back to subsistence farming, simple villages, and nomadic raiders. Isolated communities survive behind walls while chaos ruled beyond the walls. Wilson struggles to survive at the university. Evidently some universities were able to create protected communities so mankind could survive the new Dark Ages. Often the universities were the target of attacks and they were destroyed or reduced to tiny enclaves.
This reminds me of The Stars Are Ours by Andre Norton, which was about a post-apocalyptic religious society that hated all science. It also reminds me of The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett.
Chapter 4
We learn that Monty’s full name is Dwight Cleveland Montrose. That Monty and Nancy’s dead son would have been the same age as Thomas Cushing, but he had died of measles, along with sixteen other people in the enclave.
The three talk about the Place of Going to the Stars. We learn that our civilization had gone to the Moon and Mars, and maybe to the stars. Monty and Nancy let Thomas know they understand why he wants to leave and search for the Place of Going to the Stars.
The old couple say they wanted Thomas to stay with them but could see he was restless to find out about the Place of Going to the Stars and suggests he get it out of his system.
Thomas tells the old couple about how he grew up where the farming, fishing, and hunting was good, and he lived in a small community. It’s very prosaic. It describes a way of life that I imagine Clifford Simak did growing up in Wisconsin where he was born in 1904. But we eventually learn that Tom’s family all died. From stories his grandfather told, Thomas learned of the university enclave. After his grandfather died, Thomas traded the farm and left, taking to the road, and leading a life of “woods runner” at age sixteen. But finally remembered the university and went there. Now, he was ready to go roaming again. I figure Thomas is about 21-23.
Chapter 5
The point of view shifts to two aliens, #1 and #2. They refer to the Ancient and Revered (A and R) who is a robot. #1 insists that humanity has reached a decline that it will not recover from. #2 says there might be more than meets the eye because of their interviews with the robots on Earth. #1 replies the Earth’s robots are not reliable because they are incoherent telling meaningless stories.
Of course this reminds me of Simak’s classic fix-up novel, City, where dogs and robots remain on Earth after humanity has gone off to the stars.
Chapter 6
Thomas Cushing is on the move. He silently travels at night across a river, and up a stream to an abandoned city. There he follows a road until he is almost killed by an arrow shot from a device set off by trip wire. After that Thomas must travel over the rough land of decayed houses, fallen trees, and worry about the pits of old basements.
Thomas hears drumming and sounds of a tribal celebration. He sneaks up on their fires and sees primitive dancing around a pyramid of robot skulls. This scares Thomas and he backs off, sneaking away as fast and far as possible. He takes shelter in a depression hidden by a thicket of trees near an abandoned mansion, one that had obviously been looted many times long ago.
I think it’s significant that the city is collapsed and decayed. Simak often writes science fiction about people who live away from cities. In the first City story, written in the 1940s, Simak predicted that our society would spread out and abandon cities because of the helicopter.
There is a common thread in post-apocalyptic stories, a fantasy to live without people, or at least many people. That for readers who love this sub-genre, they have a secret desire for civilization to go away.
When Thomas leaves the thicket the next afternoon an old woman is waiting for him. She calls herself “Ole Meg, the hilltop witch.” She claims she sensed Thomas sneaking through the woods. She tells him he has the mark of greatness. Meg informs Thomas that she is coming with him, along with her horse Andy, and Thomas adamantly refuses. But as we learn in chapter 7, they all go off together to avoid the approaching horde. Meg knows a lot, and has powers.
Chapter 7
We are now in The Wizard of Oz territory. Thomas Cushing is off to see the Place of Going to the Stars and he’s acquired company for his quest, a witch with magical powers and friendly horse.
Chapter 8
This reminds me of all the young adult science fiction I read as a kid that was first published in the 1950s, the Heinlein juveniles, all the early science fiction of Andre Norton, and the Winston Science Fiction series. Of course, it also recalls The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell about the hero’s journey in storytelling.
Again, this story reminds me of The Wizard of Oz. Thomas is Dorothy, Meg is the Scarecrow, Andy is nothing yet. Soon we will meet the Tins Woodsman.
Simak would have been around seventy-three when he published A Heritage of Stars, around my age right now. Who was he writing for? Is it an escapist fantasy he thought readers wanted, or was it a daydream that he enjoyed himself?
Chapter 9
Thomas scouts ahead leaving Meg and Andy hidden. There’s a nice scene of Thomas observing nature including a fox, deer, and a badger. He also spots a band of twenty riders heading east. This scene is one of two in the book that I thought was well described. For the most part, Simak doesn’t spend much time describing scenes or developing his characters.
Thomas Cushing knows the raiders are heading towards the town where he saw the dancers, figures they plan to sack them. Returning to Meg and Andy, Thomas hears a voice call him for help. It turns out to be a robot named Rollo trapped under a fallen tree because of a tornado. This really is getting into The Wizard of Oz territory. Rollo even has rust problems and has survived for hundreds of years because he’s learned to make lubricant from bear fat. Simak was known for his robots, and this paragraph recalls old science fiction stories. Is Simak trying to recapture his own past?
Like Baum’s Tin Woodsman, Rollo didn’t want to kill humans or animals. But to survive, he defended himself in a bear attack and broke his programming when he killed the bear.
Chapter 10
This chapter is from the perspective of trees. Simak is mystical here.
We’ve had one chapter with two aliens observing us, and now we have a chapter with trees. Civilization is gone. Technology is gone. Humans are roaming bands of plunderers, tribes of living off the land like Native Americans before Europeans, and monastic enclaves of scholars.
Chapter 11
In this chapter Rollo tells us about his past. He was a yard robot before the fall, but he has lived for centuries by avoiding humans for the most part. Rollo is excessively talkative, from all the loneliness. Rollo confirms the stories Thomas has heard about a Place of Going to the Stars. He’s able to give a few additional details, that it’s out on the Great Plains atop Thunder Butte.
Chapter 12
This chapter is another excerpt of Wilson’s History. It’s about psychic powers. ESP was a cherished topic of 1950s science fiction. It was equated with evolved humans. Wilson suggests that our scientific society suppressed psychic abilities, and now that our technological civilization is gone, they have reemerged.
Chapter 13
Rollo tells us about the collapse, how after the collapse humans started destroying the robots, and eventually how people started collecting robot brain cases. He even carries a brain case he’s found. Here we learn something special.
Where is Simak going with the story? Is it just a book he’s thrown together to make another sale, one which is assembled from standard off the shelf parts? Simak dies in 1988, eleven years after this book was published. He’s essentially living in the last decade of his life. Is Simak making a philosophical statement about science fiction in this novel? Or was he like Robert A. Heinlein, who would also die in 1988, writing personal fantasies for his own pleasure? Heinlein’s last books recycled all his old favorite characters he had created. It seems like here, that Simak is recycling all his favorite science fictional concepts. Or do old writers get to a place where they can’t create anything new?
Cushing, Meg, Rollo, and Andy must hide from marauders, about forty strong. After the horde leaves, Cushing finds a leather pouch left behind. It contains some knives, a children’s book, and four maps. One of them shows where Thunder Butte lies, the place Rollo believes is where the Place of Going to the Stars is located. This is another hard-to-believe coincidence in this story, and they eventually stack up.
Chapter 14
The group is crossing some rough land without water. At one point Cushing offers his buckskin pants to make water bags, but the others say he shouldn’t risk weather exposure on the chance they could carry some water. This chapter is about hardships, dealing with heat, drought, rattlesnakes, lack of food, and so on. The Shivering Snake that follows Rollo stays with them now, and they are trailed by shadowy shapes they start calling the Followers who Meg says will eat their souls and minds. Rollo’s bear grease is running out and he hopes to find a grizzly bear. This chapter is full of woo-woo stuff.
Then they come across an old man and his granddaughter. They find the old man, Ezra, standing in a hole staring at sunflowers. It turns out the old man talks to plants, and his granddaughter, Elayne, is some kind of weird psychic. So the motley crew grows to seven.
I have to wonder if Simak was influenced by the New Age book called The Findhorn Garden that came out in the 1970s. I remember people back then talking about plants having consciousness.
Chapter 15
This is another transitional chapter where we mainly learn more about Ezra and Elayne. We also learn that Rollo only wants grizzly bear fat, and now black bear or deer. Thomas tells him all animal fat is the same, but Rollo seems to prefer grizzly bear because they are fierce fighters, and he feels killing an animal should involve some risk to himself.
The Tin Woodsman in The Wizard of Oz did not eat meat and wouldn’t kill animals, or even insects.
Chapter 16
The group finally reach Thunder Butte by are met by five wardens who guard it. The wardens believe for centuries they are the designated guardians of Thunder Butte where strange beings sleep. The sleepers are destined to take over the world from men, so they don’t want anyone to awaken them. The wardens say Thunder Butte is also guarded by intelligent trees and rocks that can move.
Ezra tells the wardens that he can talk to the trees, and they will let them though. It’s quite a coincidence that Cushing and comrades found a person that spoke tree. I wonder if Simak was into plant consciousness. In the 1970s, there were lots of New Age theories about that.
By luck (or coincidence) a grizzly bear attacks the wardens and their horses, and they run off. Rollo, Cushing, and Andy kill the bear, and head towards the trees guarding the Butte.
Chapter 17
They make it the trees that block their way, and the living rocks circle behind our troop of characters. Ezra can talk the trees into letting them pass, which disturbs the wardens who have regathered back a way to watch. There is a bit of mystical mumbo-jumbo. Makes me wonder if Simak was a New Ager himself, or was he just using these ideas because they were popular with young people and the counter-culture.
Chapter 18
This is another transitional chapter where our characters talk philosophy amongst themselves and ponder what has happened to them so far.
Then they discover cylinders hovering above them. They have lots of eyes, but no mouth, yet they broadcast strange speeches to the group.
This is weird gobbledygook. However, it will make more sense when it’s explained in a later chapter. But what is your guess now? Our heroes suffer from all this machine chatter, and again do a lot of speculation amongst themselves.
Chapter 19
Next, our heroes head up the butte towards the buildings they’ve spotted.
Our group finally meets the aliens #1 and #2 that we encountered in that early chapter. They call the aliens collectively, The Team. The aliens tell our humans how they are explorers studying collapsed technological civilizations. One of them believes such civilizations never recover, and the other wonders if it might be possible. They mention the Ancient and Revered, a robot that’s been teaching them about Earth. Our group asks about meeting the A & R, but the aliens tell them it’s hard to get an audience with him. Do I have to say it again? (The Wizard of Oz.)
Chapter 20
Our group explores the outside of the city trying to find a way in. There is a lot of speculation about the city, and history. Cushing finds an immense door. He goes in a way and finds hundreds of shining snakes. He tries to go further in, but can’t. Elayne comes up behind him and tells Cushing that they are standing on the edge of eternity.
This reminds me of Methuselah’s Children by Robert A. Heinlein. At one point, Lazarus Long and gang meet aliens that are so far ahead of humans that meeting them directly face to face causes humans to go insane. Back in the 1940s and 1930s, some science fiction writers worried about meeting advanced beings. But that stopped for the most part in Astounding in the 1950s. Various writers have said that John W. Campbell, Jr. didn’t like the idea of any aliens being superior to humans. Simak, in 1977 hasn’t given up on that idea.
Then a cylinder appeared and informed the group that A and R would like to meet them.
Chapter 21
Three days later, we still haven’t got to meet the Wizard. The Ancient and Revered. But first the group has another conversation with the aliens, #1 and #2. The aliens want to know how humans could imagine being replaced by a later evolved species. The aliens haven’t found that to be a common realization.
This is one of my favorite science fiction themes, but it’s seldom explored in SF.
This chapter goes on with more effort to explore the city, and more conversations with the aliens. Ezra learns that the guardian trees are from outer space. I had already assumed that. The group ponders that. And the living rocks. A lot of this pondering is things I’ve already assumed. Did Simak think only people who didn’t know much about science fiction would be reading this book?
Chapter 22
This chapter involves a long psychic session by Elayne trying to break into the city. She fails. Then Meg tries. She makes psychic contact that she describes as a million little bugs.
Can you guess what this is? I did. I won’t say yet.
At one point, Rollo gives Meg the robot brain case he owns to act as her crystal ball. The robot inside the case combined with Meg’s psychic ability finally contacts the Ancient and Revered. He invited them in.
Chapter 23
The A and R explains everything. The cylinders are space probes returned from the stars, each reporting what they found. Their findings are stored in a giant database, which is what Meg had contacted. The A and R has no machines left that can retrieve information from the database. However, the group figures with more psychics like Meg and Elayne, each with a robot brain case, they could mine the data and start rebuilding civilization.
We learn about the fall of civilization. Our efforts to explore space. And the state of the world. We learn that the A and R has a library that hasn’t been censored of technical information. The group decides they also need to find people who can read.
Chapter 24
Short chapter where Cushing argues he alone must confront the wardens.
Chapter 25
This is a nice chapter. It’s also the second example of good description that I mentioned earlier. Simak also wrote westerns, and you get a feel for that here as Cushing walks into the camp of the wardens. It’s a shame this story didn’t have more of this kind of writing.
There’s a lot of action in this chapter, but ultimately, they fail to convince the wardens to help.
Chapter 26
Everything wraps up here, and it’s incredibly positive and gung-ho. They return to Cushing’s old university to get people who can read. But they still worry about technology.
Most of Simak’s science fiction had an anti-technology feel to it. The Heritage of Stars is an interesting book to read today since civilization is heading towards a collapse just as we’re about to give birth to AI and intelligent robots. This novel is relevant to today, but I also think it might be too dated. The New Age died back in the 1970s. There are esoteric believers still around, but they aren’t common.
Final Thoughts
This novel touches on many of the themes in science fiction. It’s almost like a New Testament of science fiction because of its faith in science fictional ideas. But it’s also transcendental, suggesting there’s more to outer space than stars and planets. There’s a lot of woo-woo in the book.
I’ve read all the Oz books when I was a kid. Back in the 1950s some libraries started banning Oz books because librarians felt those books gave young people unrealistic expectations about life. I completely agree because I embraced those unrealistic expectations when I read the Oz books. And I believe science fiction also promotes the same unrealistic expectations.
I believe The Heritage of Stars is Clifford Simak’s version of Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast. Both books are flawed. Both books are personal fantasies by fantasy writers that reference their own work and the formative fiction they read as kids growing up.
James Wallace Harris, 9/10/24
p.s.
I reread my original review and its very similar to what I’ve written here. I did make at least one mistake. I thought #1 and #2 were robots. On this reading, I don’t think they are. I also thought I’d remember this book, but I didn’t. I did predict I would return to it someday, so I was right on that account.
My last essay, “Will Humanity Ever Give Up Its Faith in Irrational Beliefs?” generated a good discussion on Facebook. It showed that science fiction readers regard the concepts promoted by science fiction in diverse ways. To some, science fiction is only entertaining stories, no more or less. For others, science fiction explores possible inventions and events that fans want to come about in the future.
I was surprised when my friend Mike texted me the following statement:
Mike later said, “I’ve always thought that if I was a fantasy writer and someone started talking about what separates fantasy from science fiction I would have to call bullshit.”
This surprised me. I’ve known Mike for forty years and we’ve always talked about science fiction. I assumed he was like me and thought some of the concepts in science fiction might be plausible someday.
It was then I realized that I had been a science fiction true believer. If you haven’t read The True Believer by Eric Hoffer, I highly recommend it. It came out in 1951, the year I was born and is about the kind of people who cause mass movements. I’ve always thought of science fiction as a mass movement, and not just escapist literature. True believers are often seen as fanatics, but any person who believes in a philosophy or cause with complete faith. I always thought science fiction promoted certain futures and warned us against other futures.
I assume that ardent science fiction fans were also true believers in the possibilities that science fiction explored. The discussion on Facebook made me realize that there are many SF readers that aren’t true believers. I used to be a science fiction true believer and Robert A. Heinlein was my prophet and guru.
I started first grade the month before Sputnik went into orbit and graduated the 12th grade the month before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. I also grew up with science fiction, rock music, the counterculture, and mind-altering drugs. We thought it was both the dawn of the Age of Aquarius and the dawn of the space age. Maybe I was a dumbass, but I grew up believing that the following things would eventually come true:
We would colonize the solar system, especially the Moon and Mars
We would eventually colonize the galaxy given enough time
We would create self-aware sentient robots
We would create human clones
We would meet other intelligent species from other star systems
We would create a sustainable ecological society
We would expand our lifespans dramatically
We would develop suspended animation
We would uplift other species like dogs, chimps, and dolphins
We would build self-sustainable space colonies
We would develop faster-than-light travel
We would send off generation ships
We would create artificial life
We would create virtual worlds
We would copy our personalities into robots, clones, and digital worlds
We would evolve into posthumans and transhumans
We would make SETI contact with aliens
We would accelerate our IQs
We would have artificial eyes
We would become cyborgs
The list could go on and on. I say if you think that many of the items on this list are possible then you’re probably a science fiction true believer too. I didn’t believe in time travel or matter transmitters would ever be possible, but I’d guess there are those who did.
The trouble is, as I got older, I believed in less and less, until I’m an atheist to my own beliefs. The young me was full of hope, and the old me is full of doubt. And what I’m realizing from the Facebook discussion is many science fiction fans never were true believers. I’m surprised at that.
Years ago, when an early experimental rocket from SpaceX took off and landed on its thrusters, science fiction writer Jerry Pournelle said, “It’s the way God and Heinlein intended rockets to land.” And that resonated deeply because people who grokked that quote were fans of Robert A. Heinlein and grew up reading his books believing that the technology described in his stories could be invented someday.
I discovered Heinlein in 1964 and read the twelve Scribner juveniles that year. By the end of 1965 I had read nearly all his adult work. I was twelve and thirteen and I thought over my lifetime I would see many of Heinlein’s science fictional visions come true. I’m now seventy-two, and I’ve seen a few things come true, but I don’t hold out for much more anymore. I don’t know if my skepticism is caused by old age, or just learning more about science and the way the world works..
Evidently, my buddy Mike wasn’t as gullible as I was.
Am I wrong in assuming that other science fiction fans were true believers too? Are you a true believer, or were you a true believer?
I consider the story of Noah’s Ark one of the oldest science fiction stories because it uses theoretical technology to solve a problem imagined from speculation. That famous story from Genesis was a retelling of an even older story. Well-educated people know that the story of Noah’s Ark is fiction, that the concept is beyond reason, but that doesn’t keep millions of people believing it happened as described. It’s a belief that a certain percent of humanity won’t reject, despite all the logic against it.
The history of our species includes a lengthy list of bullshit concepts that some people continue to embrace no matter how much proof they are given to disprove what they believe. Why is that? And why am I bringing it up on a site devoted to science fiction?
I believe science fiction fans are just as irrational about their beloved beliefs in irrational concepts. And their defense of their beliefs comes down to the same rationale as people who want to believe in religious concepts: faith. We have faith in futures we want to become reality, in the same way that some believers have faith in heaven. We might even be atheists that deny everything metaphysical, but we can’t give up on faster-than-light travel, galactic empires, downloading minds, living in virtual worlds as digital beings, transhumanism, and various methods of achieving immortality, among other things.
We rationalize our faith by embracing the idea that science and technology will evolve to give us everything we want, that they have no limits. We cling to theoretical scientific papers that claim that wormhole travel and warp drives are possible. We love our science fiction novels and movies and can’t bear the idea that the future would be so dull as not give us everything we hope for. We are like the faithful who want eternal life so bad that they can’t imagine anything else is possible.
We cling to our cherished desires for two reasons. First, and foremost, we can’t let go of what we want. We won’t let hope die. We embrace faith in beliefs like we cling to life itself. But second, we believe in the power of the mind. We might not consciously understand this, but we embrace the idea that reality is constructed from thoughts, and like Dorothy’s lessons in The Wizard of Oz, it’s only a matter of believing.
Yesterday, I read a wonderful science fiction story based on this idea, “Hesperia and Glory” by Ann Leckie. You can listen to an audio reading here. Leckie recreates the flavor of Weird Tales, telling about a Martian on Earth who wants to go home. The structure of her narrative, a letter, with eye-witness testimony, was a common technique used in the 19th and early 20th century fiction to convey a sense of “this was real!” But the story is explicitly about the power of thought. Listen to the story. (It’s doubtful, you’ll be able to find a copy to read since it hasn’t been widely reprinted.)
This story reminds me of a personal decision I made over fifty years ago. I was into Eastern religions, esoteric beliefs, New Age psychologies, and hallucinogenic drugs. Many of which promoted the power of the mind. I had some very intense experiences, some of which were quite powerful and scary. I gave up chasing esoteric knowledge because of that fear, with the decision to reject the belief in the power of thought. I decided there was only one reality, and my mind could not alter it. That’s also the decision of the narrator of “Hesperia and Glory.” Like the narrator of this story, I have wondered if my success involves the power of the mind. I can scare myself by contemplating there isn’t a consistent external reality, but infinite realities generated by thoughts.
But see, that’s the thing. It is, or it isn’t. If an external reality exists, and it is described by science and not a creation of thought, then it’s important to give up all the bullshit concepts we keep trying to bring about with our thinking. If people continue to act on believing in their illogical beliefs, we can never construct a truly workable society because we can’t work together. We’re like people living in The City & The City by China Miéville, where there was two realities in one physical location. But that was only two. Imagine the complications of over eight billion realities competing for existence.
And if reality is a construction of thought, then anything is possible, and you really don’t want that. If you think you do, then you haven’t gone very far into thought driven reality. If it’s not madness, we’re in big trouble.
If you study history, you’ll know that societies aren’t stable. Nothing lasts. And it’s because we have too many conflicting beliefs, especially beliefs in bullshit concepts. Even if reality is a consistent externality, it doesn’t mean it can’t be corrupted by false beliefs.
I believe science is the only cognitive tool we’ve developed to consistently explain reality. Myths, religions, philosophy, magic, thought power, esoteric and New Age concepts, etc. all fail. Science if far from perfect, has a tremendously learning curve, and doesn’t give clear easy answers. But we need to become more scientific. I also believe science fiction needs to become more scientific.
Einstein didn’t like quantum physics because of its spooky qualities. Be careful rationalizing your beliefs on quantum physics. Just because observation appears to affect the quantum world doesn’t mean that it does. It might suggest a limitation to observation, or that the quantum world works very differently. We have to be careful with even what science theorizes, because we’re very good at making shit up even when we’re trying not to.
Take for instance warp drives. A recent scientific paper has given a lot of people hope that traveling faster-than-light is possible. But as Sabine Hossenfelder pointed out by close examination of the mathematics of that paper, that the math requires a mass equal to 0.667 mass of the Sun to generate a one kilometer warp field. Watch these two videos and tell me if you really believe warp drives are possible.
Sabine Hossenfelder, a theoretical physicist who has been among a group of scientists recently who have criticized physics for chasing too many theoretical mathematical models. It seems that modern physics, especially partical physics, have gotten a long ways away from experimental science, and they believe that’s dangerous.
I feel science fiction has gotten too far away from science. That science fiction has become a generator of bullshit ideas. Even worse, it’s converting millions to its beliefs in these bogus concepts, and that’s corrupting minds in the same way religion is holding us back. Hardcore science fiction fans bitterly complain about the intrusion of magical fantasy in their genre but they fail to recognize that most of what they call science fiction is science fantasy.
Believing that we’ll invent faster-than-light travel is very close to believing you might find a magic lamp with a wish granting genie. And thinking warp drives are theoretically possible is like defending the idea that all plant and animal life on Earth came from those preserved by Noah in a big boat four thousand years ago.
Just because you’re an atheist regarding religion, and subscribe to The Skeptical Inquirer to debunk pseudo-science, doesn’t mean you’re all scientific and rational when it comes to science fiction.
You may think there is no harm in pretending that our future might lead to something like the Culture novels, but how do you feel about people who claim the Earth is flat, or believe everything they’re told when visiting the Creation Museum? Look what belief in religion has done to us.
Watch these two videos. They are timelines of the evolution of esoteric ideas. Like a snowball rolling downhill growing bigger, these concepts over time have gathered a growing number of believers, and sometimes making huge impact on history.
Classics of Science Fiction 