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Is Science Fiction Dead?

The April 8, 1966, cover of Time Magazine asked in large letters: Is God Dead? I would have answered yes, because starting in late 1963, when I turned twelve, I began to struggle with the idea of believing in God. Before I turned fourteen in late 1965, I had decided I was an atheist. It wasn’t an easy decision. Decades later, I realized that I had given up God and had embraced science fiction as a substitute for religion.

If someone had told me that at the time I would have vehemently denied it because I passionately believed I couldn’t be fooled by make believe concepts. I was for science all the way. Of course, when you’re thirteen years old you’re a dumb ass but don’t know it. I couldn’t see I was substituting one set of wishes for another.

If you look at the concept of God as a hypothesis to explain reality, then we would have to say that concept has been rejected long ago by well educated people thinking in complex and multiplex terms. That doesn’t mean that people have stopped believing in God. Nearly every concept every imagined still has its believers. For explaining reality, science surpassed religion a long time ago.

I believe science fiction as a concept that emerged in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s proposed a central hypothesis. That humanity was destined to explore the solar system, the galaxy, and even the universe. Science fiction has proposed many possible concepts that may or may not exist or will exist, but space travel is its big idea.

I believe science fiction’s core belief is space is the final frontier, that space travel is humanity’s manifest destiny, and our existential purpose. I was a true believer in that assumption for most of my life. I now doubt it. I’m becoming an atheist to my chosen religion, science fiction.

If you study science, intergalactic travel will be almost impossible. And even the colonization of the solar system really isn’t practical or in the end, desirable. The claim that we need to get all our genetic eggs off one planet really isn’t practical either as we learn just how adapted humans are to Earth.

Science fiction also proposed another hypothesis, that we will build intelligent machines. That looks like it will be proven correct. And it’s obvious that intelligent machines are suited to explore the solar system and even the galaxy.

Like God and religion, there will always be believers because they’re beliefs that appeal to people. I think the Star Trek/Star Wars type believers will keep the space travel belief and the genre alive. However, I think science fiction’s core concept of humanity conquering space is dead for a growing number of once believers.

Where does that leave readers who love reading science fiction? It makes science fiction about zooming around the galaxy into fantasy, and people still love reading fantasy novels. There will always be simplex true believers who refuse to give up their belief in the final frontier, and there will be complex thinkers who argue the pros and cons. But for some, like people who have rejected God as the cause of reality, there are a growing number of people who consider science fiction about space travel dead.

Ever since the French revolution, the idea of creating a society rejecting God and religion has been considered. I think it’s time for the science fiction faithful to consider a future where humans never colonize the planets or go to the stars. I think it’s time to clean out many cherished science fictional concepts. Space travel and time travel appear to be dead or dying. We’ll probably make it to the Moon again, and even Mars, but we’ll discover that neither place is what science fiction promised. It won’t be a big adventure. Religion promised heaven, while science fiction promised the stars as a substitute. Neither will come true. Neither will be our existential purpose. Everywhere we can go in the solar system is just rocks existing in extremely harsh environments unsuitable for humans.

We need to ask: What can we do best in reality? More than likely that means staying on Earth. Ironically, we’re doing everything we can to make it uninhabitable for humans.

The other big hypothesis of science fiction is first contact with aliens. That might happen via SETI and observational astronomy.

The oldest science fictional concept is surviving an apocalypse. That’s a possibility. Science fiction has frequently explored the idea of civilization collapsing, or humans mutating. Since our species has a history of evolving, that’s a practical consideration.

Religion evolves and mutates. Science fiction will too. But I think the core concept of each has died. Religion and science fiction offer comforting beliefs to people who need them. But that doesn’t mean they are realistic or part of reality.

I don’t think most modern readers of science fiction consider it being anything other than entertainment. Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell, and Robert A. Heinlein didn’t think that. They believed science fiction was a kind of philosophy, an approach to understanding reality. That belief is dying out.

I feel like a Jesuit who rejects God and religion late in life.

James Wallace Harris, 7/20/24

The 55th anniversary of Apollo 11 landing on the Moon

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“Another Word for Map is Faith” by Christopher Rowe

“Another Word for Map is Faith” by Christopher Rowe first appeared in the August 2006 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can read it here and listen to it here. I’m not sure if I would call this story science fiction or fantasy, but it’s a “What if the power of faith in Jesus were real and scientists from different scientific disciplines were disciples” kind of story. The story attempts, I believe, to surprise us like “The Nine Billion Names of God” or “The Star” by Arthur C. Clarke, and Philip Jose Farmer’s “Sail On, Sail On.” However, the surprise was a letdown for me, yet the story does have a neat religious take on things.

“Another Word for Map is Faith” is about a young geography professor named Sandy and a group of her graduate students who are out in the field studying cartography. Their faith in Jesus tells them that Jesus wants geography to match the maps they have in old books. That is a neat metaphor for those who believe in the literal interpretation of The Bible.

Evidently, society has suffered some kind of collapse. It doesn’t seem to be from war or disease, in fact, it might be due to the balkanization of Christianity, where diverse groups feel that Jesus intended something different. I don’t know if “Another Word for Map is Faith” is an antireligious story, or just a religious idea expressed in a story.

This story is all about its speculative ideas with little characterization, setting, or worldbuilding. I wish Rowe had fleshed out the conflicts between the different believers in Jesus rather than depending on a surprise ending. I’m surprised our current society isn’t more segmented by what the faithful believe — just remember all the religious wars of history.

I wanted “Another Word for Map is Faith” to be more literary to make the story more valuable. The ideas are good, but the presentation isn’t strong enough to make it memorable. Contrast it with “Servants of the Map” by Andra Barrett. Unfortunately, I can’t link to that story to read online. However, you can use the “Read sample” feature at Amazon to read the first several pages to get an idea of how the writing differs from “Another Word for Map is Faith.”

Here are samples of how each story opens. First “Another Word for Map is Faith” and second “Servants of the Map.” Both stories are about surveyors in an exotic location. Both are concerned with maps. Both involve a mystery. Rowe’s prose is nice enough but lacks the richness of Barrett’s. Barrett has more concrete details, and that makes an enormous difference. I don’t mean to be too hard on Rowe. My main complaint about science fiction is it focuses too much on a science fictional idea and not enough on giving the story the texture of reality. Both stories are a kind of fantasy. However, Barrett makes her made up tale more realistic with the increased density of significant details.

I read this story because my science fiction short story group is going to discuss it soon. Unfortunately, “Another Word for Map is Faith” only reinforces my current dissatisfaction with science fiction. The story isn’t bad at all for what’s being published within the science fiction genre. It was anthologized in three of the best-of-the-year anthologies. But it is no match for literary work like “Servants of the Map.”

There is nothing wrong with science fiction, but if you only read science fiction and fantasy, you’ll miss the full spectrum of what fiction can produce.

James Wallace Harris, 7/15/24

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The Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing

What would it be like to experience living through an emerging apocalyptic crisis? Forget about sinister aliens conquering the Earth, or silly zombie invasions, or even biker gangs running around in their skimpy S&M outfits. No, what would it be like if civilization collapsed, and you had to live in an emerging dark age? Reading The Memoirs of a Survivor by Doris Lessing will make you think about it.

It’s what the English call a cozy catastrophe. An unspecified crisis happens, and England slowly unravels. An unnamed narrator, of unspecified gender writes in their memoir about living through such an event. They eventually take in a twelve-year-old girl named Emily, and her pet named Hugo. Hugo is sometimes described as looking like a cat or dog, and it sometimes purrs and other times whimpers. Lessing likes to explore both gender and species identity.

The memoirs narrate two story threads. The more interesting of the two involves the narrator watching society fall apart while Emily grows up. The second thread is episodes in the narrator’s fantasy life, which might be called exploring inner space. This is a science fiction novel that was published in 1974, when Ursula K. Le Guin was becoming famous as a women science fiction writer. Lessing’s style is much different from other women writing science fiction in the 1970s. Imagine Virginia Woolf writing a post-apocalyptic novel.

Doris Lessing (1919-2013) was a British novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. She also wrote several science-fiction novels, including the five-volume Canopus in Argos (1979-1983) series as well as The Memoirs of a Survivor. She was most famous for her novel The Golden Notebook (1962), which is considered a story of inner space written at the dawn of exploring outer space. Lessing was born in what’s now called Iran and grew up in what was called Rhodesia. She moved to England as a young woman, becoming a writer, and radical.

Lessing’s birth was one year before Isaac Asimov’s, so if she had been considered a science fiction writer, she would have been among the Heinlein-Clarke-Asimov generation. However, her science fiction reminds me of the Ballard-Brunner-Aldiss generation. The Memoirs of a Survivor came out in the era of the best-selling nonfiction books about threats to civilization: The Limits of Growth, The Population Bomb, Future Shock. Those same books inspired John Brunner’s novels Stand on Zanzibar, The Jagged Orbit, The Sheep Look Up, and The Shockwave Rider. The 1970s felt like a pre-apocalyptic time, like our 2020s.

The Memoirs of a Survivor is a very British post-apocalyptic novel, far cozier than American novels covering the same theme. American male writers like to imagine life after the apocalypse as a new wild west. American female writers picture things a good less violent but acknowledge our violent heritage. British writers of both genders often write about characters getting along after the collapse. Their novels do have violence, but it’s not all kill-or-be-kill. The Memoir of a Survivor has a small amount of violence, even some guns, but it’s very minimal.

The setting is a city where the lights and water still work, but the economy is coming undone, and refugees from other parts of the country that have totally collapsed, are streaming through on their way north. The unnamed narrator, presumably an older woman because of how she characterizes people and things, watches the slow unfolding of the collapse from her window. The story become more interesting when a man abandons Emily and Hugo to her care.

Lessing is rather ambiguous in The Memoirs of a Survivor. The gender of the narrator isn’t clear, but the narrator’s personality feels like an old woman. Emily is quite well-defined by the narrator, who spends most of her time observing her and Hugo. Lessing had taken in a young adolescent girl, Jenny Diski, for a while in her life, and I assume much of the novel comes from that experience. Although, Lessing had three children of her own, so she had plenty of experience observing children growing up.

There are two parallel stories within the novel. The one I liked best was about Emily, her growth, and her fascination with the hordes of young people streaming through the city. In the other thread, the narrator stares at a wall, and fantasizes about exploring other apartments in the city, where she cleans, repairs, and paints. Lessing has said this is an autobiography of dreams. I felt it was a metaphor for repairing society because the narrator is always trying to renovate the rooms. However, these fantasies are important for the ending.

What’s beautiful about The Memoirs of a Survivor is it describes the early days of an apocalypse. Young people are on the move, anxious to build a new society, while older people huddle in their houses and apartments, trying to maintain and remember the old society. Since I feel we’re in the early years of a slow decline, The Memoirs of a Survivor is an interesting read for our times. Sadly, this book isn’t well known. There’s no ebook or audiobook edition, although it’s still available in trade paper. I looked everywhere for an audiobook edition because the writing is lovely and serene. I wanted to hear this story, rather than read it because I prefer listening to literary writing.

The growth and transformation of Emily is described in psychological detail that is realistic for most young girls of any time. When Emily first saw the refugees, she desperately wanted to join them but felt rebuffed. She decided to make her own clothes, which the narrator and I felt was a way of creating her own identity. At first, her outfits sounded like something Stevie Nicks would have designed for the bedroom, witchy lingerie, but Emily never even wore them outside. Next, her designs seemed like Madonna’s outfits from the early 1980s. Finally, Emily designed something close to punk and grunge. Remember, this novel was written in the early seventies.

The story is noticeably quiet, and the details of Emily’s relationship with her pet, Hugo, are heart wrenching. Emily wants to run away with the young people but can’t go because she knows they will eat Hugo. Obviously, Hugo is her emotional anchor after losing her parents, but she’s moving into the boy-crazy years. Emily, and many of the city girls fall in love with the various young men who are the leaders of the various roving bands, and these young men take advantage of their attractive powers to create harems of little adoring girls. I wonder if that’s how things were in our cave dwelling days — all the young women wanting the alpha male.

Like I said, The Memoirs of a Survivor is not a Mad Max post-apocalypse. Lessing tells us some people have guns, but guns aren’t part of the story. When you read this story it’s not hard to think about people living in Haiti or Sudan, or the many other countries in the world with failing economies, decaying infrastructures, gangs, which send out hordes of refugees into countries with more civilization.

This novel will make you think about what you would do if things fell apart. What if the electricity stopped working and water stopped flowing from your taps? What would you do? Would you join a group marching north to better economies? Or would you hunker down, learning to live with less, giving up money to barter, accepting violence and mob rule? Would you learn how to grow food and make things?

The Memoirs of a Survivor is like Earth Abides by George R. Stewart in that it assumes the young will quickly invent new ways out of the old, while the youngest children, who were never educated, will become feral. Gerald, a young leader whom Emily loves, does everything he can to save these feral children. What would you do with them? Ish, in Earth Abides, had a tremendous insight into their future survival, but I think Lessing’s take was more cynical, and maybe realistic.

I doubt current generations of science fiction readers will find this novel very appealing. I think it’s becoming a forgotten novel. And I tend to feel Lessing is becoming a forgotten writer, even though her name continues to show up now and then, such as this recent piece “10 of the best Booker Prize-nominated books with a political slant” that includes Lessing’s novel, The Good Terrorist.

I would have rated The Memoirs of a Survivor 5-stars if it had only been about Emily and the collapse. The inner space sequences dragged the story down. However, if I reread this book in the future I might like those part better. For now, 4-stars.

James Wallace Harris, 7/8/24

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“The Alley Man” by Philip José Farmer

I’ve been trying to lay off science fiction for a while, but I haven’t gone completely cold turkey. Every once in a while I’ll open an anthology and try reading a story to see if any are worth returning to my addiction. Time after time I’ve only found watery beer and went back to literary fiction and nonfiction. Today I read “The Alley Man” by Philip José Farmer. That story is pure SF heroin, you can shoot it up here.

“The Alley Man” is a masterpiece. What’s ironic is it may not even be science fiction or fantasy. Like most great fiction, it’s ambiguous. Old Man Paley may or may not be a Neanderthal. He may or may not be immortal. He is one ugly dude who lives in a shanty at a dump with two old women way past their prime. The June 1959 cover illustration of the story in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction is misleading. Paley only has one arm, having lost the other arm in an epic battle with Cro Magnon men, or a railroad accident.

“The Alley Man” is lovely character development and storytelling. The story has a prose density that most science fiction stories lack. There is great complexity in Old Man Paley. I remember reading this story decades ago, when I was a science fiction true believer, so I assumed Old Man Paley was immortal. But with this reading I realized that Farmer had something far more multiplex in mind. I consider “The Alley Man” on par with “Fondly Fahrenheit” by Alfred Bester, “Coming Attraction” by Fritz Leiber, and “The Moon Moth” by Jack Vance.

Why did I like this story so much, when so many other science fiction stories have been a disappointment to me? I really enjoyed the characterization and prose. But I also liked the fact it was set on Earth and in the present. Even though it was published in 1959, it still felt like it could have happened in 2024. It wasn’t about the future, space travel, aliens, or robots, which I feel are themes that have been over-explored in SF.

“The Alley Man” makes me want to read more short fiction by Philip José Farmer.

But for now, I’m going back to the short novel I was reading, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes by Anita Loos, a 1925 comic novel. I’m not ready to go back to a steady diet of science fiction just yet, but I will sample it from time to time.

I got the idea to read Gentlemen Prefer Blondes from this YouTuber.

James Wallace Harris, 7/3/24

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After London by Richard Jefferies

There are certain science fictional concepts that are worth a lifetime of contemplation. The apocalypse is one of the oldest. It often involves humanity facing a population collapse, usually along with the fall of civilization, and on rare occasions it explores the idea of the extinction of homo sapiens. Thinking about apocalypses is older than history, with God or gods usually being the cause, but since the Enlightenment we’ve speculated more often about nature destroying us and our societies, and in recent times, we’ve imagined self-destruction on a global level.

I’ve been wondering when the idea of humanity dying off and life marching on without us was first imagined. Humans have always been rather egocentric and assumed we were the crown of creation, and the center of the universe. But 20th century science fiction has sometimes pictured Earth without people. Maybe we’re replaced by mutants, post-humans, robots, intelligent animals, or even imagining life on Earth without sentience.

After London by Richard Jefferies was first published in 1885 that comes near to imagining life on Earth without us in its first five chapters. You can read After London online, download an ebook edition, or listen to an audiobook edition. After London is one of the earliest examples of a post-apocalyptic novel. Set in England hundreds of years after the collapse of civilization, it imagines nature and human society transformed.

Over the past few months, I’ve been reading books about the history of reading. I’m currently listening to Pamela by Samuel Richardson which was first published in 1740. It’s considered by some to be the first English novel. It was the first novel published in America, by Ben Franklin no less, in 1745. This study makes me want to study the earliest examples of science fiction and its major concepts.

The novel has evolved over the centuries, but also, what readers want from novels has evolved too. Before fiction was popular, reading religious texts was popular. Then came what might be called speculative moralizing, which blended storytelling with moral instruction. Eventually, writers and readers dropped most of the sermonizing, and went to straight storytelling.

However, there were writers who liked to speculate about society and the future, which often included philosophy and morality. Utopian novels became a vogue, especially in the 19th century. Some of these novels we’d call science fiction today, but that term didn’t exist when they were written. My theory is science fiction evolved out of certain kinds of fictional speculation in the 19th century.

Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) was a nature writer and novelist, who liked to focus on rural life, and had a bit of a mystic streak. He was also fascinated by catastrophes, which inspired After London. And I assume he read Charles Darwin. Jefferies didn’t like what industrialization was doing to nature so it might be obvious that he fantasized about a world without it. Jefferies could have read The Last Man (1826) by Mary Shelley or read earlier poetry on the subject, especially Le Dernier Homme by Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville, or “Darkness” by Lord Byron.

I’d love to see a history of the idea of the last man on Earth. Even more, I’d love to see a history of speculation about life on Earth after humans are gone. If you know of any, leave a comment below.

Part I (chapters 1-5) of After London is called “The Relapse into Barbarism,” and is the most profound part of the novel. In this section Jefferies imagines what will happen to plant and animal life after the collapse of civilization. He comes close to describing a world without people, but ultimately brings in humanity so he can tell a traditional story. Part 1 is quite detailed about how nature will react when people leave.

By the thirtieth year there was not one single open place, the hills only excepted, where a man could walk, unless he followed the tracks of wild creatures or cut himself a path. The ditches, of course, had long since become full of leaves and dead branches, so that the water which should have run off down them stagnated, and presently spread out into the hollow places and by the corner of what had once been fields, forming marshes where the horsetails, flags, and sedges hid the water.

You can listen to more of this elegant description with the audiobook reading on YouTube:

The first part of After London reminded me of The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, a 2007 nonfiction work that imagined what life on Earth would be like if suddenly all humans disappeared. The book inspired three television series: Life After People, Aftermath: Population Zero, and The Future is Wild. All are available to watch on YouTube. Or read more from the book online.

“Part II: Wild England” is twenty-eight chapters that tell a story set in this future world. It’s about a young man named Sir Felix who goes on an adventure, allowing Jefferies to describe an aristocratic feudal society in a post-apocalyptic England. It’s a fun story, but not philosophically great. Felix is a nerdy guy in a macho society. However, chapters 22-24 have Felix exploring the remains of a decayed city from our civilization. Again, this has become a standard feature in modern post-apocalyptic science fiction. I assume this was inspired by 19th century explorations of ancient Egypt.

Descriptions of dead human or alien civilizations are among my favorite themes in science fiction. There’s something about walking through ancient dead cities that creates a profound sense of wonder in me. I believe that’s why “By the Waters of Babylon” (1937) by Stephen Vincent Benet was so evocative and why “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Ray Bradbury is so beautiful. Of course, Bradbury was inspired by Sara Teasdale’s 1918 poem “There Will Come Soft Rain.” It was composed at the end of WWI and the beginning of the Spanish Flu.

“There Will Come Soft Rains”

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

I find it utterly serene to meditate on images of Earth without us, which is why I liked the beginning of After London so much, and why I love the book The World Without Us and all the documentaries made from it. If we self-destruct it will be our own fault, and I think we are in the process of doing away with ourselves. I doubt we will go extinct anytime soon, but I do think science fiction should imagine what we might become more realistically. We need more post-apocalyptic novels that moralize, philosophize, and instruct rather than use after-the-collapse settings for adventure stories.

When I was younger, I pictured humans spreading out across the galaxy. I realize that’s as naive as imagining we’ll all go to heaven or flying reindeer. We might get as far as Mars, but I doubt we’ll ever go further. I can imagine us creating a new sentient species of intelligent machines that will explore space. Machines are perfect for space, we’re not.

Richard Jefferies just couldn’t imagine Earth without people. He pictures us regressing to a feudal society. We can read After London and use Sir Felix as a stand in for modern man, or even the average science fiction fan trying to live in that new world. Poul Anderson often wrote about how he believes humanity couldn’t handle complex societies, and that feudal societies were about as complex as we could manage. We’re certainly heading there. It’s a shame we couldn’t build a sustainable global humanistic society.

Richard Jefferies pictures us falling back toward medieval England. If you look around the world right now, just examine what’s happening to the poor in failed states. That’s our future. It’s rather scary. You’d think we’d try to do more to avoid such a fate.

Like I said at the beginning of this essay, contemplating apocalypses is a worthwhile pursuit for a whole lifetime. It’s a shame we’ve turned contemplating the apocalypse into silly escapisms, such as imagining civilization being brought down by zombies, vampires, and sightless aliens. Sure, such stories are fun, but we’re all sitting in deck chairs on the Titanic, shouldn’t authors write stories about how to avoid icebergs? We don’t need to think about zombies getting us, but to live with extreme heat, killer storms, and economic collapses. (Just imagine the United States without home insurance.)

Before people started reading fiction, they read religious speculation that advocated moral living. The earliest forms of fiction included lessons in how to live properly. We might need to go back to that. In the early days of novels, some people wanted to ban frivolous storytelling for the same reason people wanted to keep kids from playing on smartphones. But having fun won out, and fiction jettisoned the instructive element. When I was young, I used to think it absurd that fiction could be considered bad for people. But getting old living in a self-destructive society, I’m changing my mind.

If you know of any science fiction stories that imagine life on Earth without humans leave a comment. Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men imagined several post human species. Many science fiction writers have imagined robots replacing us. Clifford Simak’s City uses conversations between intelligent dogs and robots to introduce stories about our species who is no longer on Earth.

Also, if you know of any histories of speculation about the end of the world or human extinction, let me know in the comments too.

James Wallace Harris, 6/22/24

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Taking a Vacation from Science Fiction

I’ve realized that I’ve been overindulging in science fiction, so I’ve decided to take a vacation from the genre. Science fiction has been a life-long addiction that I don’t think I can ever give up, but I do need to go into rehab for a while. I don’t know for how long.

I’ve read about fifteen hundred science fiction short stories in the last five years, and I feel like a kid who has snuck off with a whole bag of Oreos. To continue the comparison, science fiction is mostly dessert, and I need to fill up on some real food for a while.

I’m not sure how much I will be posting here in the coming months. I’ll probably still think about science fiction as a topic, and who knows, I might fall off the wagon from time to time.

I’ve been hoping to find a new kind of science fiction. Science fiction is geared to the young, and I’m getting old enough where I can’t pretend that I’m young anymore. I need to find science fiction aimed at people in their social security years. I’ve even thought about trying to write a science fiction novel that’s age appropriate for myself.

Looking back, I rediscovered science fiction in 2002 when I joined Audible.com. It became all too apparent I was reliving my youth by listening to all my favorite science fiction stories I read growing up. Then about five years ago I got into short science fiction and collecting old science fiction magazines and fanzines. Hell, I was then trying to relive my past.

In my youth, science fiction was about the future. Now in my old age, science fiction is about the past. But I’ve burnt out on nostalgia. Living in the 2020s, the future has become hyper-real. There’s too much going on. Reading old science fiction is like being an ostrich sticking its head in a hole in the ground. For years now I’ve been trying to find new science fiction that was relevant to now, but it’s just not there. Modern science fiction merely recycles old science fiction or recapitulates old science fiction. The genre really needs another New Wave.

I’ve thought about creating a taxonomy of science fiction themes and writing a history about how each theme has been rediscovered many times over the last two centuries. But I need some vacation time even before I consider that project.

I own over a thousand nonfiction and literary novels I haven’t read. That’s where I’m heading for my vacation. I’ll report on them at Auxiliary Memory blog.

Too much is happening in the real world right now. Strangely, life is more science fictional than science fiction. Between AI, a shakeup in cosmology, climate change, robots, space exploration, wars, fascism, sexual revolutions, and many possible apocalyptic scenarios, who needs to read science fiction anymore?

Things are about to get heavy in the next few decades. I’m guessing science fiction and fantasy are so damn popular right now because they are a great hideout from reality.

James Wallace Harris, 6/19/24

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I Was Interviewed About the Classics of Science Fiction List for a Podcast

I was interviewed by Alex Howe for A Reader’s History of Science Fiction podcast about the Classics of Science Fiction List. I was surprised by how much I learned about myself from the process. I wrote about that on my blog.

Alex’s podcast has a lot of great interviews with people who love science fiction, and he’s going to interview Robert Silverberg next, one I’m anxious to hear.

However, I thought I would mention something else I learned while answering questions for a podcast. I don’t think I’ve ever been able to easily explain, verbally or in print, how we produce the list. I believe it’s because I don’t have the right term to describe our list-building method. One may exist, but I just don’t know it.

Our system collects any reasonably authoritative list that remembers science fiction books and creates a resultant list by selecting the books which were on the most lists. Is that a frequency distribution? A meta-list? A tabulation list? An accumulation list? I don’t know. If you know, leave a comment.

I wish this system of compiling a list had a name that people knew and understood. No matter how often I explain our system I get people accusing me of personally picking the books for the list, especially when their most cherished read isn’t on the list.

Two wonderful examples of this system of list making are The Greatest Books of All Time that currently builds from 305 lists, and the Ultimate Reading Lists by Literary Hub, especially their end of the year list. For 2023 Emily Temple used sixty-two lists from forty-eight publications, resulting in a final list of ninety-four books that had been on at least five of the sixty-two lists. For example, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Story by James McBride had been on twenty best-of-the-year lists in 2023. I read that novel because of that recognition.

My assumption is, “Why read any book when you can read a great book.”

James Wallace Harris, 6/18/24

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Which Was the Best Method to Discover the Best Science Fiction Short Stories?

When I began this blog years ago, I theorized that there were three ways to identify all the best science fiction short stories. The first was to read all the science fiction magazines and decide for yourself. The second was to read all the annual best-of-the-year volumes and see if you agreed with those editors. And finally, I suggested just reading a handful of retrospective anthologies that collect the best science fiction of all time. It was all about how much you wanted to read. There are thousands of magazines, between a hundred and two hundred annual volumes, or you could get by with maybe just a handful of retrospective volumes.

After collecting over a thousand issues of old science fiction magazines, most of the annuals and most of the major retrospective anthologies, and reading thousands of stories, I think I can answer the title question.

Just read the retrospective anthologies. But there’s a problem. They still haven’t done the best job of identifying the best stories, and they are mostly out of print.

I’ve loved science fiction magazines my whole life, but the sad truth is they seldom contain classic level stories, and you’re damn lucky if you find one story you love. Usually, you’ll find a couple stories you like, and the rest will be so-so or DNFs. For me, I generally find four or five standout stories in an annual anthology, and the rest are okay. If I’m lucky, there will be one or two great SF stories in a year. Even with the best retrospective anthologies, it’s hard to like every story, but if you find the right editor, maybe half the stories they pick will be your favorites too.

The Classics of Science Fiction Short Stories v. 2 list at CSFquery has been the most effective overall at identifying the most remembered science fiction short stories, 110 stories in all. I’ve had the best luck with this list compared to any other method.

However, v. 2 leaves off a lot of my favorite stories. Using the List Builder function and setting the minimum citations to six creates a list of 220 stories. Many of those extra 110 stories do identify stories I love, but also identify more stories I don’t like. But if we use List Builder to set the cutoff to ten citations, it produces a list of 50 stories. Anyone who reads those fifty stories should have a solid feel for the history of the SF short story. If you click on “Show Citations” you’ll see which anthologies collected those stories.

Szymon Szott wrote a computer program to analyze all the retrospective anthologies we used to create CSFquery to find the minimum number of books to buy to read the most stories from v. 2 of the list. See “The Science Fiction Anthology Problem – Solved” which identifies twenty-two anthologies needed to read all the stories on the original list. The list has been updated with additional stories, so it’s no longer perfect.

The trouble is most of these retrospective anthologies are now out of print. Mark R. Kelly has a wonderful history of science fiction anthologies that’s worth studying. I’ve collected most of them. They aren’t hard to find used, nor are they particularly expensive. The problem is finding just three to five that have most of the stories from v. 2 of the list.

And there’s another problem. Science fiction stories don’t always age well, even the classics. So many of these anthologies will have stories that modern readers will find clunky. For example, Sense of Wonder edited by Leigh Ronald Grossman has thirty-six of the stories on the v. 2 list, the most of any anthology, but it has over a hundred more stories that may not have aged well. (Definitely don’t get the physical book, it’s too heavy to hold and has extremely tiny unreadable print.) The Kindle edition is $29, and that might be too expensive for most people.

You can look at the list of citations we used to create the Classics of Science Fiction Short Stories v. 2 list, and it gives the number of stories that make the final list for each citation. As you will see, anthologists don’t have a great hit rate. We correlate the best with fan polls like SF Lists (98 stories) or Locus 2012 All Century (88 stories). The Hugo award process identified 80 stories on our list, and the Nebula process identified 59.

All this suggests that retrospective anthologies aren’t the best way to survey the classic short stories of the science fiction genre. I wish we could publish an anthology of the top 50 stories from our list, but I have no idea how to go about doing that.

Luckily, many of the stories on the v. 2 list are also available for free online. It takes work to find them, and the online versions aren’t always easy to read. If you really want to find these stories, use our list, and click on the titles. That will take you to the story’s ISFDB listing, which will show all the places the story has been reprinted. With some effort you should be able to track down all the stories.

James Wallace Harris, 6/11/24

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“A Toy for Juliette” by Robert Bloch

I was going to take a break from reading Dangerous Visions because it was depressing me, but I found “A Toy for Juliette” a fitting inspiration for a sermon I wanted to write. I’ve been reading Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States by Frank Luther Mott, which inspired me to buy and start reading The Sentimental Novel in America 1789-1860 by Herbert Ross Brown. Both books give impressions about how Americans, and I presumed other people around the world, got into reading fiction.

Printing began in the 15th century at a time when most people didn’t read. Storytelling has been around since we lived in caves. Although there were works in Japan and China that could be called novels long before the printing press, in Europe and America, the novel seemed to emerge with Don Quixote in 1605. What we think of as the modern novel matured in the 18th century.

Frank Luther Mott’s book, Golden Multitudes describes the kind of books people read in America before Ben Franklin printed Pamela by Samuel Richardson in 1745. Some considered Pamela, first published in England in 1740, to be the first English novel. Before this novel, Americans mostly read books on morality. The colonies were settled by various religious groups, so that’s kind of logical. Mott says the first American bestseller was The Day of Doom by Rev. Michael Wigglesworth. It was written in verse, and it was all about the horrible things that would happen to people in hell. The excerpts and quotes Mott gave from this poem made me think early Americans were fixated on horror.

To keep this sermon short, I need to cover the following decades quickly. Fiction slowly emerged out of all this moralistic reading. Another bestseller was The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come by John Bunyan in 1678. This book is an allegory that begins with a dream. But the point is, Bunyan spiffed up moralizing with a story and characters.

Pamela became a huge bestseller in America and Europe after 1740 because Richardson made moralizing every more entertaining. One reason Pamela is given credit for being one of the first English novels is because Richardson invents a lot of storytelling techniques we use today. After the success of Pamela countless imitators began producing similar type stories, and the focus on moralizing became less, and the shift to pure storytelling became common.

At that time, many intellectuals began protesting, claiming fiction was corrupt and corrupting. Magazines and newspapers ran articles about how fiction was ruining young people’s minds, especially young girls. That made me think about how people worry about smartphones and video games corrupting young people today. But those fiction protesters were crushed by bookworms wanting more fiction.

By the time the 19th century rolled around, especially after Edgar Allan Poe, many stories became free of moralization. Kids and adults devoured fiction about violence, horror, the supernatural, and other evil things in the world. Which is why Robert Bloch is a popular writer, and why people enjoy stories like “A Toy for Juliette.”

The problem is I don’t. I don’t like horror. And I can’t understand why other people do. Although Susan and I are currently watching Why Women Kill, which could be described as comic horror. Fiction writers have a tough time producing stories that don’t involve the horrible aspects of life. Fiction is often an art form about the ugliness of humanity, but isn’t the best fiction about transcendence of those horrors?

I quite enjoy reading Pamela. I’m only about half finished, but then the book is over forty hours long on audio. I admire Richardson for embedding his moral lessons into his story. The story is about 15-year-old girl servant efforts to avoid being raped by her employer. On one hand, the novel could be considered a handbook for girls warning them about all the ways guys will trick them into having sex. On the other hand, it’s rather entertaining to read about all the schemes Mr. B used to seduce Pamela. The novel is also entertaining because I’m watching Richardson invent plotting and characterization.

When reading “A Toy for Juliette” I was seeing the refinement of centuries of storytelling. But Bloch completely ignores moralizing. He returns to the purity of telling gruesome stories around a campfire. However, I miss moralizing. Bloch makes no effort to explain the psychology of Jack or Juliette. He makes no moral judgments on their actions. He just accepts that those kinds of people exist.

Sociologists claim there is no correlation between the consumption of violent entertainment and committing violence, but I find that hard to believe. But then, from Harlan Ellison’s introduction about Robert Bloch, he seems like a very nice guy — kind, considerate, and generous.

Maybe, “A Toy for Juliette” depresses me because it reminds me that there are people like that in this world. And it bothers me that people find stories about such people entertaining. But as I admitted, Susan and I found a comedy about murder fun. And even the Puritans, with all their emphasis on living a pure life, sure did love to read about the gruesome aspects of going to hell.

Back in the 1960s, I learned from health food nuts, “You are what you eat.” And from computer school I learned GIGO – garbage in garbage out. I can’t help but wonder if those 18th and 19th century pundits who attacked fiction weren’t right. Why should we pollute our mind with a story about a sadist being sadistically killed by another sadist? I guess I could claim Bloch was preaching that we reap what we sow, but I don’t think it’s true. I think people enjoy seeing Juliette get ripped by the Ripper.

Still, I find “A Toy for Juliette” a virus in my mind. I find reading nonfiction about the horrors of humanity enough of an education about the reality of humanity. Why do we want reminders of such horrors in our escapism? But we do. Think about all the fiction you consume. How much of it involves acts we’d be terrified of if they happened to us? Why do we dwell on the horrible?

James Wallace Harris, 6/9/24

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How Valid are Science Fiction’s Political Insights?

We can often find political opinions in science fiction, but in terms of political philosophers, how useful are science fiction writers? I just read “The Last of the Deliverers” by Poul Anderson from the February 1958 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can read it here. Or find it in these anthologies. It was revised in 1976, but I don’t have a copy to evaluate.

“The Last of the Deliverers” is set after the collapse of the United States and the Soviet Union, in a small village in Ohio. It’s told from the point of view of a nine-year-old boy. The boy describes an old man of one hundred, who the village kids call Uncle Jim, and the day a stranger shows up, another old man named Harry Miller. The two men take an instant dislike to each other because Jim is a capitalist and Harry is a communist. Both men hate the way the village is run and criticize it.

Poul Anderson is well known for believing that feudalism was about the most complex form of government humanity could handle. In this 1958 tale, written in the middle of the cold war between America and Russia, Anderson predicts that both systems would fail. The residents of the small town are quite happy getting by with what they can grow and make themselves, and they share the use of land and some technology. Jim thinks these Americans have become degenerate because they don’t want to get ahead and want more. But the village is happy. Harry thinks there should be more collectivism, but the villagers don’t see the point. These two longest paragraphs by the mayor explain their community.

Anderson isn’t promoting a utopia. His ending is rather cynical and bleak. He knows humans can’t find happiness. Of course, Poul Anderson is no political scientist. He’s using his own opinions about how he thinks things should work. Robert A. Heinlein ruined a lot of his fiction by doing this.

On one hand, I admire Anderson’s speculation and extrapolation. On the other hand, why should I trust his insights? I don’t imagine many readers get their political opinions from science fiction writers, but I do imagine they enjoy stories and writers whose opinions resonate with their own. I do think “The Last of the Deliverers” resonates with 2024.

We do know that George Orwell had brilliant insights about politics in his science fiction novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four. They are very respected. However, do they have objective validity? I don’t know. I’m impressed with the many ideas Orwell presented in his novel, and I can use them to reference real world events, but how useful is that? Many people have trouble today recognizing fascism even when endless experts with all kinds of degrees and political experience lecture about it constantly. Anderson doubted people could maintain a complex society. I doubt whether we can understand any kind of complexity.

I think the average person wants to believe they understand the world around them. That their opinions are valid. And some of those people, including some science fiction writers, want to promote their beliefs in their stories. But should we listen to them?

I feel that both conservatives and liberals get their beliefs from other believers. That all concepts are memes that spread through society. Are there any ways to validate these memes? Science can study certain aspects of reality by experimentation. They get no 100% sure answers, but they do find answers with statistical weight. I’ve not sure political theories can be disproved by the scientific method.

I do agree with a lot of what Poul Anderson says in this story. And I think he knows his wishes for creating a harmonious society are just wishes, because of the ending. World building is easy for science fiction writers, futurists, and political theorists but are their ideas ever more than just sand castles?

Sometime in the recent past I read a story very much like “The Last of the Deliverers.” However, it was set in a village in Russia. They had an American scientist studying collective farming when WWIII happened. He had to stay on. The village got by and found a similar kind of simple harmony that Anderson’s story describes. But then a communist party official finds his way to the village and wants to take over. Like the Anderson story, it allowed capitalism and communism to duke it out in a fictional setting. I wish I could remember that story. I may have even reviewed it. I used to believe my blogs were a form of external memory, but not anymore. Like my regular memory, access is poor, and getting poorer.

James Wallace Harris, 6/8/24