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What Will Happen To Science Fiction When We Realize Interstellar Travel Is Nearly Impossible and Interplanetary Travel Is Impractical?

I asked my friend Mike the other day, “What’s going to happen to science fiction when readers realize that interstellar travel will be next to impossible, and no one will want to live on the Moon or Mars?” He answered back, “Nothing will happen to science fiction; it’s only stories.” But I replied, “But some people read science fiction because they believe that someday humans will colonize the solar system and eventually the galaxy.” And he replied, “Nobody really believes that. It’s just fun stories.” I thought for a few seconds, “Don’t you think Star Trek fans believe in their hearts that the final frontier is humanity’s future?” Mike said, “No, I don’t.”

I think Mike is far more realistic than most people. For most of my life, I’ve believed humans would colonize the Moon and Mars. I wasn’t sure about going further than that. When I was younger, I believed we’d find some way, maybe with generation ships, to reach the stars, but that was very iffy.

The reason I brought this conversation up with Mike is that I’ve been watching several documentaries on YouTube that argue interstellar travel will be so difficult it just won’t happen. I’ve also seen many videos that claim colonizing Mars will be so impractical that it won’t happen.

I assume the U.S. and China will return to the Moon and attempt to set up permanent bases there. But both countries will quickly learn that it’s too expensive and doesn’t offer enough returns. Plus, people will discover that living on the Moon will be miserable. I’ve always had a romantic notion about humans colonizing Mars, but when I study Mars, I realize that it would be a shitty place to live. Given enough time, I think humans will learn that space sucks for biological beings.

I’m not saying the U.S. and China won’t return to the Moon, or that Elon Musk’s Starship won’t reach Mars. I’m saying that the most gungho space enthusiast with the maximum amount of the Right Stuff living on the Moon or Mars will eventually say, “I want to go home.” That Mars will never be like Heinlein’s Red Planet, or even Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars.

Belief in the final frontier was imprinted early in my life, as religion is for most people. I’ve always believed that after I die, I will cease to exist, but humanity will go on for millions of years and spread out to other worlds. But as I’ve gotten older, I realize that’s just a childhood fantasy that I wanted to believe, like how some people believe they have everlasting life and will go to heaven. Human beings have a difficult time giving up cherished beliefs they embraced in childhood.

Science fiction has over-romanticized space travel. When people actually get to live on Mars or the Moon, they will discover that reality just doesn’t match their fantasies.

What will that revelation mean to humanity? What will it mean to science fiction? Can science fiction start imagining different futures for us? More realistic ones? AI is everywhere today. Can science fiction writers imagine futures where we coexist with intelligent machines? Space is perfect for machines. Will we resent our robots when they conquer the final frontier, and we don’t get to go?

Are Americans trapped in old, outdated science-fictional dreams? Science fiction has become a form of escapism from our decaying society. China is quickly transforming its present, which looks like science fiction to us; do their science fiction writers have better visions for tomorrow? Be sure to watch the last video below.

Star Trek always felt hopeful. Star Wars always felt like another Middle Earth, just a fantasy playground. The final frontier was always our highest aspiration. But if it’s unrealistic, what will new positive aspirations involve? It was a mistake to call it the final frontier. What we need are new frontiers that make us feel positive about the future. We will always need new frontiers. But more importantly, we need doable frontiers.

Personally, I think we need to come up with a form of capitalism that’s not so completely greed-driven. If we can’t, every society and civilization will repeat the past. We need to invent societies that coexist with the environment. We waste so much of our wealth on wars. If you think about it, humanity doesn’t really think about the future all that much. We thought science fiction was doing that, but it’s been consumed by too many black holes of fantasy.

James Wallace Harris, 8/20/26

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If I Could Travel Back in Time, What I’d Tell My Younger Self About Reading Science Fiction

If I could travel back to 11/25/64, the day I turned 13, to talk with myself, I’d warn him about the dangers of reading science fiction. In the Fall of 1964, I became addicted to science fiction after discovering Robert A. Heinlein. I wouldn’t try to convince my younger self not to read science fiction, because I’m quite sure he wouldn’t listen.

This morning I listened to “What Is It Like to Be a Cucumber?” on AppleNews+. It’s a profile of scientist Michael Levin in the Intelligencer section of New York Magazine. Levin read science fiction when he was young, but he mostly read science books. Over the years, I’ve realized that was my mistake too.

Future historians might claim Levin is the kind of maverick scientist whose radical insights were as paradigm-shifting as the Copernican Revolution. Just go watch a few of these YouTube videos to see what I mean, or read Michael Pollan’s new book A World Appears.

When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up and become a scientist because of reading science fiction. But instead of studying science, I just kept reading more science fiction. Throughout my life, whenever I’ve read a biographical piece on a scientist who mentions they read science fiction, I’ve identified with them. But I’ve also wondered why I didn’t become a scientist like them. It’s my biggest regret.

Looking back, I remember I had plenty of opportunities. Teachers often encouraged me and tried to help. But I ignored them. All I wanted to do was to get back to reading science fiction. This morning I also listened to “The Cities That Said Yes to Drugs” about dealing with the problem of drug addiction (from The Atlantic). Many cities have enacted laws to protect the rights of drug users, but they only created problems for other citizens. There is so little that can be done to help a determined addict.

But is it fair to compare my love of science fiction to drug addiction? Wasn’t it more like a religion? Science fiction gave my younger self something to believe in. Could I have gotten young Jimmy to read the 1951 book The True Believer by Eric Hoffer?

Hoffer concluded the only way to get someone to give up a belief system was to replace it with another. Could I tell Jimmy about enough science books to divert his interest?

I did read some popular science books, but for every science book I read, I read ten science fiction novels. If I could go back in time, I’d try to convince young Jimmy to reverse that ratio. If I could convince him that I was he, but at the other end of life, and I wanted to give him some good advice. Would he accept it? People don’t normally accept advice. If I had a time machine, my current theory to alter my personal evolution would be to convince 13-year-old me to read 10 science books before reading 1 science fiction book.

But what science books? Have I thought this through?

If I told Jimmy to go to the library and get From Dream to Discovery: On Being a Scientist by Hans Selye, which was published in 1964, could he have read it and understood it? In 1964, I was reading all the Heinlein juveniles. I could point out to young Jimmy that in every one of the Heinlein juveniles, Heinlein advocated studying science and mathematics.

Were there science books at Homestead Junior High library that could have changed the direction of my life if I had read them? I don’t think I’m smart enough to have discovered or invented anything great. But I could have had a more inspiring life if I had worked as a scientist. I do remember thinking back in the 8th grade that I wanted to be an astronaut, or astronomer, or marine biologist. But I also know computers were the subject that fascinated me most once I got older.

I started studying computers in 1971. But the focus was business, not science. I think things would have been much different if I had studied computers for science. I wonder if any of these books had been in my school library. Realistically, they might be too advanced for a 13-year-old.

Maybe asking my younger self to read 10 science books for every science fiction book is too ambitious. Looking at those titles makes me rethink this fantasy. Maybe I’d plead with him to read one science book for every science fiction novel. Or even simplify it to promise to faithfully read Scientific American every month.

I did read some nonfiction books at that time, but nearly all of them were about astronomy, space travel, or rockets. I really did have space on the brain. This is long before Tom Wolfe coined the term “The Right Stuff.” I was a four-eyed, geeky kid who did not have the right stuff. Even if I did have a time machine, I couldn’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

Ever since I turned 50, I’ve had this fantasy about going back in time and warning my younger self about our future. In nearly all versions of this fantasy, it ends when I conclude my younger self wouldn’t have listened to me. I know that I couldn’t change much. People don’t. But could I have been a little bit different?

Over the years, I’ve seen many successful people brag on television that they wouldn’t have changed one thing in their life. I always thought that was weird, because I would have changed countless things. But little things.

The most consistent thing I wished I had done differently was to read less science fiction. I loved the stuff. I still do. However, I overindulged. I keep thinking of all the other kinds of books I could have read, and how reading them might have made me a wiser or more creative person. That’s fascinating to fantasize about.

By the way, whenever I indulge in this fantasy, I also realize that I could change how I read right now. I have veered away from science fiction some, but I’m like a gyroscope that always returns to its original position.

James Wallace Harris, 8/4/26 (Happy Birthday, Janis)

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TIME AND AGAIN by Clifford D. Simak

Time and Again by Clifford D. Simak has the distinction of being the first story in the first issue of Galaxy Magazine back in October 1950. It was serialized in three parts as Time Quarry. (All three issues can be found here.) It’s currently in print as a paperback, Kindle edition, and audiobook on Amazon.

I started reading Time and Again when I decided to read the first issue of Galaxy. I had the silly urge to try and read Galaxy from the very beginning. But I didn’t feel like reading a serial before the short stories, so I switched to an audiobook. Now that I’m finished, I can return to the magazine to begin reading “Third From the Sun” by Richard Matheson. The first issue of Galaxy has quite a lineup.

When I opened that issue of Galaxy, I tried to imagine myself as a reader back in 1950. Since I was born in November of 1951, that’s a little hard to do. On the other hand, I loved old movies my whole life, so I can picture 1950 from watching them.

What’s kind of fascinating is that outside of science fiction movies, movies about real people in 1950 never mention science fiction. This always makes me ask: What was the first character in a movie who was a science fiction fan?

Offhand, I thought of George McFly in Back to the Future (1985) might be the first. Gemini AI suggested young David MacLean from Invaders from Mars (1953) or Eugene Fullstack from Artists and Models (1955). But also mentioned Eliot Rosewater from Slaughterhouse-Five (1972).

In other words, I can safely say that science fiction in 1950 had a poor reputation (if any). Eugene Fullstack was played by Jerry Lewis – so you can imagine how they saw us. By the way, I highly recommend the vividly colorful Artists and Models because it is a fun look at pulp and comic book fans.

But back to Time and Again. If I had read it without knowing the author or even when it was published, I might have guessed very early Philip K. Dick. The story is out there. Way out. Time and Again begins six thousand years into our future with Christopher Adams. Adams has a visitor from five hundred years in his future warning Adams that Archer Sutton is returning from a long-lost space mission, and it’s important to humanity that he be killed.

Would Simak and science fiction fans in 1950 be shocked that it wouldn’t take six thousand years to develop intelligent robots? I’d love to time travel back to 1950 and show people YouTube from 2026. How many citizens back then would want to ban science fiction and computer technology?

Clifford Simak has always had a sentimental take on robots and dogs. However, I wonder if his view isn’t really an overly kindly view of faithful servants, like we see in Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey? In Time and Again, at least Simak is wise enough to know they will one day want emancipation.

Returning to the story, Sutton does arrive, but in a wrecked spaceship that can’t hold air, has no fuel or food, or working engines. Sutton is barefoot and is wearing rags. He went to 61 Cygni twenty years previously to a world that had always shunned any outside contact. Something radical happens to Sutton on 61 Cygni, something like what happens to David Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Like Clarke would do in Childhood’s End in 1953. Simak imagines aliens uplifting humans.

Most of the reviews of the 1951 hardback edition of Time and Again were quite positive. See attached reviews below.

However, I’m not sure I can recommend the novel. I don’t know if it holds up for modern readers. Yet, I remember seeing a YouTuber reviewer claim Time and Again was his favorite Simak novel. Two 1951 reviewers claim Time and Again is a mature work of science fiction, that is carefully plotted, and deals with serious ethical issues. Archer Sutton does come across as something between Christ and Abe Lincoln in advocating equality for robots, androids, and all animal life.

As Groff Conklin points out in his August 1951 book review in Galaxy Magazine, the hardback’s ending is not the ending in the serialized magazine version. I’m not sure that either ending is philosophically different from the other. But both endings are troubling and ambiguous. It’s the kind of ending Philip K. Dick would have liked.

I recently read A World Appears by Michael Pollan about consciousness. Pollan claims, with support from cited scientists, that all life, even non-living things, might have a degree of consciousness. I don’t think many people in 1950 thought like this, so, surprisingly, Simak made it a focus of a science fiction novel. Nor could people in 1950 have imagined the AIs we live with in 2026. I wonder how 1950 science fiction readers took Simak’s mysticism?

Not only is Simak advocating for equality for all conscious beings, but he appears to be protesting science fiction’s true believers who think it’s humanity’s manifest destiny to spread across the universe. Years ago, I read a story whose title or author I can’t remember that suggested two kinds of intelligent species emerge in the galaxy. The first wants to spread across the galaxy as the dominant species. And the second, and I’m less sure of my memory here, wants to study the galaxy to understand the nature of reality. Most science fiction writers suggest humans will be of the first type. I think Simak, in this novel, is advocating we be of the second type.

In Time and Again, agents from the future fight a war across time. They want to make sure humans are the superior species for a million years, time enough to spread across the entire universe. Archer Sutton is the Jesus of the opposition movement. Like in The Terminator, humans from the future come back in time to snuff him out.

All of this might sound terrific, but I should warn possible book buyers: Time and Again is a rather talky novel. On the other hand, it’s full of ideas.

ISFDB.org lists many reprint editions and nineteen reviews for Time and Again. Most of the reprint reviews were too short to bother reprinting. However, in 1992 Algis Budrys writes fond memories of Galaxy’s first issue, and Simak’s novel.

Galaxy Magazine (August 1951) – Groff Conklin

Astounding Science Fiction (December 1951) P. Schuler Miller

F&SF (Sept. 1992) – Algis Budrys

James Wallace Harris, 7/25/26

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How Would You React If An Alien Spaceship Showed Up in Earth Orbit?

Let’s imagine an alien spaceship parked itself in orbit within view of the International Space Station. Let’s also assume the aliens announce themselves by transmitting television signals to every nation on Earth. We’ll also assume they have the technology to use the appropriate Earth language for each nation.

How soon would everyone on Earth know about the alien visitors? I’d guess 99.9% of Earthlings would know within an hour with our current technology.

How would you react? Like the Moon landing or 9/11, I picture everyone glued to their TVs for days. But in the days following the big event, how would you really react? Do you think alien visitors would drastically change our global society?

If the alien spaceship never lands because they worry about our microbes infecting them, or they worry about their microbes infecting Earth, will the event ever feel that real? We’ve consumed countless stories about alien visitors. Have science fiction books and movies prepared us for every possibility?

Let’s rule out alien invasions. Let’s assume the space visitors stay for a year and leave, but they hook us up with the galactic internet that uses an advanced protocol we’d never discover on our own. So now we get video feeds from several alien planets, and we’re allowed to broadcast video feeds from Earth. Of course, transmissions are at the speed of light, so news from elsewhere is no faster than starlight.

It turns out there is very little intergalactic travel. Our visitors were AIs that maintain an existence for thousands of years. It’s just not practical for biological beings to travel interstellar distances, nor is it practical for them to visit alien ecosystems.

Would humanity stop fighting wars, polluting the environment, or change in any significant way? Would people give up their religion? Would people become addicted to watching video feeds from other planets? Would they embrace religions, philosophies, or fads from other planets? Would academics study the history and arts from other worlds?

Would people stop reading science fiction? Except for alternate histories, science fiction writers stopped writing stories about the first missions to the Moon.

I would be tremendously excited if an alien spaceship visited us. I might stay glued to the television for days. But eventually, I’d go back to my old interests. I might pick a planet and watch its feeds every night for an hour. I could watch feeds from every country on Earth now, but I don’t.

I’m pretty sure I’d stop reading science fiction, although I might enjoy sampling alien science fiction for a while. In my old age, I tend to like stories and shows set in the 19th and 20th centuries. Right now, my wife and I are watching a 1968 miniseries based on Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady. I do like watching short YouTube videos after my morning walk. I assume I’d subscribe to some feeds from the stars, but I like short videos.

My attention span isn’t that great. I assume watching aliens and their worlds would be like watching PBS Nature. I used to find that show compelling, but after a few seasons, I had enough of watching animals in their habitats.

I tend to doubt that aliens would reveal any big secrets of existence. I believe technology has limits. I expect different aliens will perceive different aspects of the electromagnetic spectrum, and we’d learn a lot more about the spacetime, but it too will have limits.

People have little ability to control their human nature now. I don’t expect we’ll change. I’ll even predict that our current technological civilization will eventually collapse, and humanity will revert to an earlier stage. We’ll forget how to maintain the intergalactic feeds, and eventually aliens will become myths.

If I had a talent for writing fiction, I’d make this post into a science fiction novel.

JWH

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Reviewing the Reviewers

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I thought it would be fun to look at old book reviews of the two books I just read and reviewed. I’ll start with The Fittest, which I liked, and then go to Ruler of the World, which I didn’t. Follow the links if you want to read my reviews.

The Fittest

Astounding Science Fiction (December 1955)

by P. Schuyler Miller

Miller made the same connections I did to The Day of the Triffids and Brain Wave. However, Miller tells too much of what happens. The scenes of when Don’s brother and sister are killed are quite shocking, and they come late in the novel. Plus, a good portion of the story is Don trying to get to his older sister’s place in England, and Don doesn’t even know if she’s still alive. This destroys a lot of the mystery in the middle of the book. The book does leave you with odd memories, and the scene where the mice are terrorizing Gloria stayed with me, too. However, it’s at the very beginning of the story.

Miller likes the book, but he’s not very specific about how much. He merely says it’s a good book. If I were reading this review in 1955, I probably would have ignored this book. In the same review, Miller covers an Ace paperback reprint of McIntosh’s One in 300. He’s more telling about this book, saying, “It’s a very good book and I’m beginning to wish I had rated it higher in the International Award poll.” That kind of tidbit makes me take notice.

How much of the story should a reviewer reveal to get a potential book buyer to buy? Miller doesn’t really explain the core threat. Animals with increased intelligence are killing humans and destroying civilization.

Authentic Science Fiction (August 1955)

This unnamed review calls The Fittest a masterpiece and recommends it most highly. Authentic was a British publication, and McIntosh was Scottish. This reviewer doesn’t give many details about the story, but does cite the core conflict.

Fantastic Universe (October 1955)

by Hans Stefan Santesson

Santesson is rather emphatic in warning readers that this is an adult novel, that it’s serious, and not like most gosh-wow science fiction. I would agree with that, especially for 1955. British science fiction from the 1950s and 1960s seemed more like literary novels than American science fiction.

However, Santesson gives no details about the story. Do book review readers need them? Or does just saying: “This is a sober portrait of men and women, stripped of the veneer of the last generations, fighting for their survival as a race.” is good enough of a recommendation?

Galaxy (November 1955)

by Floyd C. Gale

So far, Gale has written the most concise and enticing summary of the core conflict that we’ve read yet. Gale is selling the book right up front. For a review, the size of a long cover blurb, Gale does a great job. He reviews eight books in six pages; we can’t expect too many details.

Science Fiction Stories (January 1956)

by Damon Knight

Damon Knight, in both fanzines, genzines, and books, was notorious for slicing and dicing books in his reviews. Knight is particularly nasty here. If I had read only this review, I would not have read the book. Luckily, I didn’t, because I liked this novel. I think Knight is completely unfair. I wonder if he hated it because it wasn’t like the kind of science fiction published in Galaxy. Knight is out of step with the other reviewers.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (January 1956)

by Anthony Boucher

Boucher’s review is quite succinct, and one I agree with. The story is warmly readable and intimate, but it’s not as good as The Day of the Triffids. Triffids is still in print, still widely read and recommended, and The Fittest and J. T. McIntosh are forgotten.

Imagination (June 1956)

by Henry Bott

Bott is quite positive about The Fittest, but he gets the core conflict wrong. Not all animals are uplifted, just mice, rats, cats, dogs, and horses.

None of these reviewers comment on the details of civilization’s collapse and what the characters do to survive. The Fittest isn’t as thought-out as Earth Abides, but it covers many of the issues that post-apocalyptic novels need to cover. The core conflict is with the animals. However, a good deal of the novel is about dealing with death and grief, and forming new relationships. Don Paget’s wife dies at the very beginning of the novel, and for the rest of the story, Don is concerned with picking a new mate. Because life is now different, making relationships is different. That’s a strong thread of the novel, and one that reviewers missed.

Ruler of the World

The next book is the one I found disappointing. I should have stopped reading it.

It’s telling that I could find no prozine reviews of Ruler of the World. ISFDB.org lists reviews in three fanzines. I could only track down one.

Paperback Parlour #3

by Philip Stephensen-Payne

This review uses the English title for Ruler of the World, published by Corgi.

Stephensen-Payne liked it way more than I did, using phrases like “pleasantly amusing tale” and “immensely engaging.” And the few details he gives about the story are misleading.

Just because I didn’t like the story doesn’t mean that other people will dislike it too. We now have two opinions. I guess there’s a chance that more people could have liked it. But without other reviews I won’t know.

James Wallace Harris, 7/3/26

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The Survival of the Fittest: Books About Survival of the Fittest After the Collapse

After being thoroughly disappointed with Ruler of the World, one of J. T. McIntosh’s later works, I decided to try one of his earliest novels. One from his prime. I chose The Fittest when I read that it was about animals with enhanced intelligence. It was his fourth published novel, from 1955. I love science fiction tales set just as civilization is collapsing. I have a strong affinity with Robinsonades, which are closely related to post-apocalyptic fiction. I especially love the cozy ones, about a small group of people struggling to survive.

My gold standard for judging such stories is Earth Abides by George R. Stewart and the television series Survivors (BBC 1975-1977). If these are 5-star efforts, then The Fittest is only a 3-star work; however, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It was a quick page-turner that I finished in less than 24 hours. The Fittest touched upon many of the essential elements of both Earth Abides and Survivors, but not as deeply.

The setup for The Fittest also puts it into another sub-genre of science fiction, one about uplifted animals. The story begins with a young woman being killed by mice and a cat. Over time, we learned that the intelligence of mice, rats, cats, dogs, and horses was increased in scientific experiments. Not enough for them to talk or think like humans, but enough to give them a greater ability to thrive and compete. Eventually, they could breed true, escape the laboratory, and spread across the world. For some reason, these uplifted animals saw humans as competition, with each species working to kill humans when they could. The uplifted horses were quickly eliminated because of their long gestation period, but the smaller animals bred faster than we could exterminate them. Over time, mice, rats, cats, and dogs found savvy ways to destroy our crops, infrastructure, and technology. They were simple methods, like chewing through wires, hoses, wooden structures, and so on, but effective in bringing down our civilization.

I have to assume that J. T. McIntosh was inspired by Sirius (1944) by Olaf Stapledon, Earth Abides (1949), The Day of the Triffids (1951) by John Wyndham, and Brain Wave (1954) by Poul Anderson. Sirius was an uplifted dog, but it could talk. Triffids were plants with more intelligence. And Brain Wave imagined all life on Earth with increased intelligence. Earth Abides and The Day of the Triffids dealt with small communities forming after civilization collapses.

Stories about humanity recovering from apocalyptic events were common in the 1950s and 1960s. Often they were inspired by the Cold War, pandemics, or environmental catastrophes. In 1956, John Christopher imagined a virus killing variously related grasses in The Death of Grass. I thought Wyndham was quite creative when he invented triffids. I give McIntosh credit for speculating about how increased intelligence in animals might threaten our apex position.

However, for me, how individuals cope in an apocalypse is the key rubric to score post-apocalyptic novels. I’m afraid Don Paget from The Fittest is no Isherwood Williams from Earth Abides. However, the characterization in The Fittest is closer to the characterization in the television series Survivors. Both stories are set in rural England, so that wins points with me.

Read my essay, “What Would You Do If You Were Among the Last Humans on Earth?” I think books about survivors of an apocalypse challenge readers to imagine themselves in a similar situation. Most post-apocalyptic novels deal with human vs. human conflicts, and The Fittest does cover this. But McIntosh creates a unique kind of horror when he pictures us fighting intelligent mice, rats, cats, and dogs. It’s not as scary as The Quiet Place, but if you think about what McIntosh imagines, it’s pretty scary.

Mice are particularly threatening to women. At the beginning of the book, three mice terrorize Gloria simply by stalking her. McIntosh points out that women hate the thought of mice touching them. While Gloria is terrorized by the mice, a cat attacks her. It’s not strong enough to kill her, but its vicious scratches scare Gloria into trying to flee out a window, and she dies from a fall.

Rats attack in waves of hundreds. Dogs attack in packs of dozens. Their movements suggest they have developed intelligent cooperative strategies. Not that they can talk or communicate ideas, but that they learn together. All four species learn that humans depend on technology to survive, so they begin sabotaging us in crude but effective ways. These modest increases in intelligence make The Fittest far more realistic.

The real story here is how humans react. Paralleling this story is Don’s relationship with Ginette and other women. It’s hard to choose a life partner during an apocalypse. Don is still swayed by good looks, but he realizes that having a personality with survival traits is the new measure of hotness.

I’m torn between rating this book 3 or 4 stars on Goodreads. My desire to keep reading was definitely 4 stars, but because of memories of more famous books, I think I should only give it 3 stars. My main criterion for rating a book 4 stars is having the feeling I’ll eventually want to reread it. I don’t think I will. I’ve read Earth Abides three times, and will probably read it again someday. That’s because the characters have depth, and the book puts me into philosophical contemplations. Earth Abides is almost twice as long as The Fittest.

It’s a shame McIntosh didn’t put more into The Fittest. Science fiction writers have always cranked out books to get quick paychecks. Earth Abides has always stayed in print. That’s not true for The Fittest. Still, I’m fascinated by the forgotten Scottish science fiction writer. I’ve now read three novels by him, two of which I liked.

Countless books have been published about survivors of apocalypses. Few stay in print. Earth Abides abides. That’s also a kind of survival of the fittest.

James Wallace Harris, 7/2/26

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Should We Intentionally Read Bad SF?

Recently, on the YouTube channel Pulpmortem, I viewed Jake’s video “9 So Bad, they’re Good Science Fiction Books you’ve probably never heard of.” Jake, evidently, is a connoisseur of bad science fiction, and the nine novels he reviewed indeed sound dreadful. Since Jake claims that bad books still can be fun to read, I gave The Red Planet by Russ Winterbotham a try. It was a quick, fun read that wasn’t badly written, but was essentially a minor, forgotten work.

I picked The Red Planet because it was free to Kindle Unlimited subscribers. It’s only $1.99 if you’re not a subscriber. This novel is also available for free on Project Gutenberg.

There are hundreds of better science fiction novels for $1.99 on Amazon, so why should anyone read it? Shouldn’t we always seek out the best possible novel to read? Why read a crappy book when you could be reading something great?

Well, readers don’t think that way. Even though we’re warned never to judge a book by its cover, how often have you bought one just because the cover was so cool looking? How many people have a secret fondness for watching old episodes of Perry Mason instead of streaming the trendiest show on Apple TV? People tend to develop a fondness for a particular type of story and storytelling. They don’t prejudge its quality.

But the question is: Should we seek out books (and movies and TV shows) that popular culture has forgotten? Regarding science fiction, I can think of a few reasons.

  1. We’re searching for forgotten gems.
  2. We like the author.
  3. We like the period.
  4. We like studying the evolution of the genre.
  5. We enjoy playing genre historian.

The Red Planet is about the first manned mission to Mars. The crew consists of five men and one woman. The driving conflict of the plot is that all five men want the woman sexually, and the woman, Gail Loring, wants to be left alone and treated as an equal, an astronaut, not a woman. This is quite progressive for 1962, since The Feminine Mystique wasn’t published until 1963.

Concurrent with the plot conflict is mutiny and murder. Dr. Sparten, the crew commander and rocket scientist, wants all the fame for being the first man on Mars. He also plans to be the man who ends up with Gail Loring. Sparten is Machiavellian and psychopathic. The other four men are dedicated astronauts, but they can’t stop thinking about Gail. After reading The Red Planet, I couldn’t help but wonder about the Artemis 2 mission and the sexual tensions on the International and Chinese space stations.

Even though The Red Planet was probably written in 1961 and published in August 1962, it’s not completely dated. Although it is dated regarding Mars, because the third conflict in the story regards Martians.

Russell Robert Winterbotham (August 1, 1904 – June 9, 1971) published books in several genres, comics, comic strips, and big little books, all the while working at a newspaper. Sixteen of his stories are reprinted at Project Gutenberg. Winterbotham was reasonably prolific and mostly forgotten.

Whenever I stumble upon an old science fiction story by a forgotten writer, I get curious about them. I snoop the internet for any clues about what they were like. I found this short biographical piece written by Russ in 1956, for the apazine Pooka #2. He ended the piece with:

I have no idea now much I’ve written. I expect I hold rights on about 50 to 100 short stories, but there were many many more that I sold outright and reserved nothing and I have no record of these. During my peak, I remember one year in thich I produced two million words. Usually I wrote about a million words a
year, counting my newspaper and comic strip work, Now I write less than a quarter of a million and very little of it, except comics, is fiction, I’m pecking away at a novel which should be finished before 1960. Then I hope to die with my boots on. Later, if I can help it, than 1960.


I authored some historical strips last fall, dealing with frontier characters, “Daniel Boone,” “Kit Carson,” and “Wild Bill Hickok,” These brought more fan mail, including letters from descendants of Boone and Carson, than anything I ever wrote.


My family never reads my stories because they share the opinion of a vast number of others, that they are not literature. But I like my work, I’m my greatest fan. And I’ll keep writing them, by God, as long as I live,

Fanencylopedia 3 quotes Winterbotham just before he died: “The science fiction market doesn’t seem to demand my talents, whatever they are, and I need the rest.”

The old cliche is that writers write for immortality. Sadly, most are quickly forgotten. One reason I like reading old forgotten novels is to wonder about why and how they were written. For a guy born in 1904, The Red Planet is an interesting read.

Winterbotham was around 58 when he was writing that novel. He’s obviously keeping up with science and science fiction. His story features NASA. His astronauts use a Saturn rocket to get to orbit, where the Mars rocket waits. Unfortunately, he has his astronauts get onto the Saturn with a cherry picker. A cherry picker was on hand for Alan Shepard in case of an emergency exit. The Saturn 1 rocket made its maiden flight in October 1961, and it was unmanned, so Winterbotham probably didn’t know the Saturn was too big for that method.

I have a thing for Pre-NASA science fiction, and have written about it several times. The Red Planet is on the cusp of this era. Winterbotham uses NASA in his story, but imagines Mars inhabited by intelligent beings. Even though we know this isn’t true, I’m still fond of stories that feature Martians.

Science fiction changed after the Space Race began. Robert A. Heinlein, who was the leading science fiction writer of the 1950s, made an abrupt change in direction in 1961 with Stranger in a Strange Land. Before that, Heinlein was a head cheerleader for space exploration. Once NASA got going, Heinlein began thinking about new territory for the genre. I don’t know why science fiction historians don’t consider Stranger in a Strange Land as early New Wave. Cause it’s certainly not Old Wave. Heinlein was Old Wave politically, but Stranger was definitely an experiment in fiction on many levels. There are many reasons why Stranger has lost popularity, and one of them is that fans quickly turned against New Wave SF.

Frank Herbert took science fiction on a new wave, too, with Dune, around the same time. Herbert anticipated the long SF novel, with many sequels that explored complex world development, characters, and plotlines. The kind that is popular today.

Winterbotham was trying to be new, too, with feminism. Gail Loring is an interesting character in 1962 science fiction. But then, so were Heinlein’s female characters. Just because Heinlein wasn’t enlightened by 21st-century attitudes didn’t mean he wasn’t changing, too.

Look at the other top novels from 1962. I’d certainly recommend reading these better SF novels before The Red Planet.

But I’m not sure if The Red Planet is a significantly lesser read than these other SF novels from 1962.

I haven’t read Jake’s other eight SF books that he reviews. They are much harder to find. I’d probably have to spend $5-20 to acquire copies used, and I’m not going to do that right now. It’s a shame all old science fiction isn’t available as cheap ebooks or put into the public domain.

James Wallace Harris, 5/22/26

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BLINDSIGHT by Peter Watts

On the surface, Peter Watts’ novel Blindsight is a space adventure about first contact, but it’s mostly a series of lectures on the nature of consciousness. Watts works to convince the reader that space-faring intelligent aliens can exist without conscious self-awareness. The aliens in Blindsight are far scarier than the xenomorph creatures in the Alien movie franchise. Blindsight is science fiction horror.

It’s much easier to accept Watts’ main premise in 2026 than in 2006 when Blindsight was first published. Billions of people now converse with intelligent chatbots that have no conscious self-awareness. At least we hope they don’t. Reading Blindsight in the 2020s should make us more paranoid about AI.

Peter Watts is known for writing hard science fiction. He received a Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia, from the Department of Zoology and Resource Ecology. Writers of hard science fiction have an opportunity to present a hypothesis and test it in a novel. How seriously we should take these hypotheses depends on many factors. It’s not real science, but in some cases, both the writer and readers want to accept the fictional hypothesis as being provable scientifically in the future.

Watts makes a case that self-aware consciousness is a fluke of evolution. That intelligence could evolve more efficiently without it. Watts presents a convincing case in Blindsight, but should we believe him? With all hard science fiction, we must ask ourselves: Is this plausible or just good storytelling? Most science fiction writers don’t try as hard as Peter Watts in Blindsight, so it’s easy to just say, “Wow, that’s cool,” and let their work go unexamined. Watts presents so much interesting evidence (infodumps) that I feel demands evaluation.

I’ve tried several times over the years to read Blindsight. I never could stick with it. Blindsight just didn’t grab me, and learning that it featured a vampire completely turned me off. Recently, a reader left a comment on my post “Why Do We Read Science Fiction?” recommending Blindsight because it featured “creatures with very advanced intelligence but no self-awareness.” I’ve been doing a lot of reading on consciousness, so this did grab me.

Again, I struggled to get into the story. Several times, I considered quitting. The novel often presented ideas that got me thinking, but Watt’s style just wasn’t working. It’s probably a case of that old breakup line, “It’s not you, it’s me.”

Since we’re going to talk about the nature of consciousness, I should admit that I’m 74, and I often struggle with 21st-century science fiction. The SF books my mind was trained on came from the 1950s. They were often fewer than 200 pages, told in a linear plot, and had likable characters whom I could identify with. Blindsight is 384 pages, told in a convoluted plot, and there isn’t a single likeable character in the whole story. Fantasizing about being on the crew of the Theseus would be like wanting to be on the crew of the Nostromo? The entire time I was reading Blindsight, I thought about Alien. There are many similarities and parallels between the two stories, and their endings have much in common.

More than that, 1950s science fiction portrayed an overall positive philosophy regarding space exploration. Blindsight is a horror novel about the possible dangers we might find in outer space. Back in the 1940s, John W. Campbell, Jr., allowed Robert A. Heinlein and a few other writers to present stories with aliens so overwhelmingly terrifying that they put humanity on the level of a cargo cult. Heinlein even had Lazarus Long and companions run home to Earth after encountering one alien species. In the 1950s, Campbell and Heinlein switched gears and promoted humans as the badasses of the galaxy. Reading Blindsight makes me think humans need to stay on Earth and hide.

I accept that Blindsight is a masterpiece of 21st-century science fiction, and I even admire the story. I’m already thinking I should reread it because I’m sure I missed quite a bit of what Watts was trying to accomplish. However, there are many ideas raised in this novel that I want to discuss and even argue over. So this isn’t a review. If you haven’t read it, you might want to go read it before continuing. Blindsight has inspired many positive reviews on YouTube.

I should also mention that I almost didn’t finish Blindsight this time either. I was about a third of the way into the story and found the characters and plot confusing. So I read its Wikipedia entry. Even though it gave away the entire plot, it helped me enjoy the rest of the novel. I believe my problems were due to another difference between 20th-century SF and 21st-century SF. Science fiction has become more baroque in its complexity and storytelling techniques.

This YouTube video by the Feral Historian gives away the entire story. It’s not a review, but a synopsis of the story’s philosophical speculation. It’s strikingly eloquent, and I’m envious of his writing and speaking style. (By the way, the Feral Historian uses video clips from a short film based on Blindsight.)

I believe Peter Watts wants his readers to take his science-fiction speculations seriously because of his infodumps and Socratic dialogues. The infodumps cover a wide range of studies and theories about consciousness. I often wondered why Watts just didn’t skip the story and present his ideas as a collection of popular science essays.

There are two hierarchies for disseminating scientific ideas.

Genuine Science

  • Science (peer reviewed)
  • Mentors
  • Popular Science Books
  • School Science
  • Science Documentaries
  • Popular Science Articles
  • Science Fiction?

Pretend to Plausible Science

  • Science Fiction
  • Pseudoscience
  • Social Media
  • Crackpots
  • Comic Books

Watts bases his main hypothesis on the Chinese Room thought experiment first proposed by John Searle in 1980. The link is to a Wikipedia entry that I highly recommend reading to fully understand Blindsight. Searle proposed the Chinese Room thought experiment to refute the idea that if a computer could do everything a human could, it would also be self-aware and conscious.

When the crew of Theseus finally tracks down the alien spaceship, they are surprised by this message:

RORSCHACH TO VESSEL APPROACHING 116°AZ–23°DEC REL. HELLO THESEUS. RORSCHACH TO VESSEL APPROACHING 116°AZ–23°DEC REL. HELLO THESEUS. RORSCHACH TO VESSEL APPROACHI …

She’d decoded the damn thing. Already. She was even answering it:

Theseus to Rorschach. Hello Rorschach.

HELLO THESEUS. WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD.

After quite a bit of back-and-forth communication between the two ships, Szpindel suggests that the aliens don’t actually understand English, but are using the technique suggested in the Chinese room thought experiment. If Watts had written Blindsight in 2026, would he have suggested the aliens understood English because they were a large language model (LLM)? Anyone with much experience communicating with ChatGPT would make the assumption.

Many current AI researchers are hellbent on creating a conscious, self-aware AI. If humans are biological machines that evolved to have self-awareness, then AI researchers believe it’s possible to build self-aware machines. Searle proposed the Chinese room thought experiment as proof that it’s possible to create a machine that appears self-aware but isn’t. Philosophers and computer scientists eventually concluded that the Chinese room thought experiment wasn’t conclusive.

Anyone who meditates or studies the science of the mind knows that intelligence and awareness are two separate aspects of our being. Throughout his novel, Watts hammers home to his readers that humans are not what we think we are. Just consider the title of the novel, Blindsight. Read the Wikipedia entry. Throughout the novel, Watts chronicles conditions where our senses fool us. At times, I wonder if Watts had been reading too many Oliver Sacks essays.

Watts suggests that conscious self-awareness may be an illusion, and suggests that many humans are no more than zombies.

At some point in the story, I believe readers should be asking: Is Watts wrong? If we combine LLMs with robots and those mechanical beings learn to interact with reality, will conscious self-awareness spring up? Will robotic consciousness be just as soulful as human consciousness? The scientific study of minds doesn’t leave room for the soul, although many religious researchers would like to find it. Christians will have to decide if robots and aliens have souls. Watts suggests that nobody has souls, that immensely intelligent beings could exist without consciousness, and that even those who do claim to have conscious self-awareness might be delusional.

Blindsight is an incredibly bleak book. But then it’s a horror novel. Several factors in Blindsight make me distrust any idea Watts proposes. The main one is resurrecting vampires. In the fictional world of Blindsight, vampires did exist, but became extinct. They are resurrected to learn about their longevity and ability to hibernate. The crew of the Theseus is enhanced by these genetic discoveries, allowing them to survive the long voyage to the edge of the solar system. I’m sorry, but this is comic book-level science.

The crew is supposed to be transhuman, or posthumans. Science fiction often imagines posthumans with longevity, immortality, and psychic abilities. I find such speculation to be weak, boring, and trite. Those ideas seem to have been swiped from Greek mythology. I thought the film Gattaca did a good job of imagining posthumans being humans with genetic modifications. Many science fiction writers like to imagine posthumans with all kinds of body modifications. That also seems rather comic-booky to me.

Watts offers several possibilities, but none of them were developed with much conviction or detail. The main one is Jukka Sarasti, a vampire. Vampires are genetically resurrected from their extinction in the Pleistocene. Probably inspired by Jurassic Park, but much like how current-day Colossal Biosciences wants to bring back the Woolly Mammoth.

The whole time I was reading Blindsight, I thought of that old saw: if a gun is introduced in the first act, it must be used by the final act. In my mind, I kept thinking: if a vampire is introduced at the beginning of a story, it’s got to kill before the story is over. That anticipating messed up Blindsight for me. Watts, in the very end, does fire off his vampire. However, it undermines the seriousness of his original hypothesis. I must admit I have a great prejudice against vampires. I thought vampires were perfect in Dracula, Bram Stoker’s famous novel, and their continued use has been all downhill since then.

The Gang of Four is merely a body with multiple personalities. I saw no advantage to this. I’ve had enough of this idea after seeing The Three Faces of Eve and reading the book.

Siri Keeton is our protagonist. He had had half his brain removed in childhood, which created a unique perspective for studying consciousness. Watts portrays him as the ship’s “synthesist.” I never felt Siri had any significant insights. Watts seems to use Siri to think out ideas to help move the story along.

However, I’m not going to ding Watts for these criticisms. Many modern science fiction stories try to jam in as many ideas as possible. It makes for an epic science fiction impact. For an old fart like me, it’s just tiring, but I do understand that younger, more energetic minds feed on this kind of science fiction speed.

We still need to decide on the novel’s main hypothesis. Can advanced intelligence exist without self-aware consciousness? The internet is full of stories about the initiative that Openclaw agents are taking. Watts didn’t know about LLMs and agentic AI, but both are convincing evidence for his case.

We only know of one species in the universe that we consider conscious and self-aware. The concept of the soul has existed for thousands of years, complicating this discussion. We have to assume there might be an infinite number of kinds of consciousness. It’s almost impossible to imagine anything that’s not like us. But then Einstein imagined relativity, proving the human mind can conceive of something vastly different.

Humanity is now spending hundreds of billions of dollars developing AI. Far more than we spent on the space race of the 1960s. More than likely, we can create robots that can function independently in this reality and become far more intelligent than we are. But will we ever know if they have self-aware consciousness like ours? Throughout Blindsight, Watts asks if we’re as self-aware as we think we are.

I’m not sure if Peter Watts ever asks if vastly intelligent beings without conscious self-awareness feel they do have it? Maybe the creatures on Rorschach experience existence no different than us. Maybe both the concept of the soul and conscious self-awareness are illusions.

Personally, I think my sense of awareness is one thing, and my fast and slow thinking abilities are two other mechanisms in my brain. That my sense of umwelt comes from an integration of sensory inputs, a sensorium. And that my thoughts come from another biological mechanism that works much like an LLM. Why shouldn’t it? LLMs are based on neural networks.

Because of a TIA, I know my awareness can exist without my thoughts. I also know that my awareness can disappear, and my biological LLM can generate dreams with all kinds of weird logic and intelligence. Watts mentions in the novel that sleepwalkers can drive cars or pursue various other activities without waking up.

The reason Blindsight makes such an impact on readers is not because of scary aliens but because it makes us think about our own minds, and that can be very scary.

By the way, the part of my being that watched me write this can’t explain how the part of my being thought it up.

James Wallace Harris, 5/20/26

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Could You Have Thought Up Time Travel On Your Own?

I didn’t discover the concept of time travel until September 25, 1965, when the 1960 film version of The Time Machine was shown on NBC Saturday Night at the Movies. That was two months before I turned 14. It blew my mind. The next day at Cutler Ridge Junior High, kids excitedly talked about the movie. Sometime after that, I read the H. G. Wells novella, but I’m not sure when.

I consider The Time Machine by H. G. Wells the most science fictional of all science fiction stories. Not only did it introduce me to the concept of a time machine, but it also introduced me to social evolution, Homo sapiens evolving into different species, the extinction of humankind, the end of the Earth, and the death of the Sun. That’s epic for a 13-year-old in 1965.

I’m pretty sure I’d never have imagined time travel on my own. I think if I had learned about astronomy before discovering science fiction, I could have thought, “Wouldn’t it be neat to go to the Moon or Mars?” on my own. But time travel was a much bigger conceptual breakthrough, one I don’t think I would have made.

Now, I had been a watcher of The Twilight Zone since 1959, when it premiered, and it often played with time. This video lists ten episodes involving some form of time travel.

The episode I remember best is from April 7, 1961, “A Hundred Yards Over the Rim,” where a man from a 19th-century wagon train walks over a hill into the 20th century. Most of the episodes were fantasies about people thrown through time. There was one episode where Buster Keaton had a helmet that let him time-travel, but I don’t remember seeing it as a kid. (Here’s another list that covers 13 episodes featuring some form of time travel.)

On January 13, 1964, I saw “Controlled Experiment” on The Outer Limits. It was the series sole comic episode about two Martians studying humans. They had a machine that could roll back time and replay it. That might be my first inkling of time travel. But I didn’t make the jump to using a machine to travel in time.

How often do we imagine original ideas? Readers and writers sometimes claim that one writer stole an idea from another, but is that fair? Don’t all writers use concepts built up from a long line of previous writers? Like Newton standing on the shoulders of giants. Was the time machine original with H. G. Wells? His ideas about evolution and cosmology came from the popular science of his day. There’s probably no way to document the evolution of the idea of time travel.

I believe that science fiction is a conceptual tool for generating ideas through literary evolution. For every far-out idea you encounter in science fiction, there’s a long history of previous stories that helped evolve that idea. I’d love to have a book, database, or website that creates taxonomic ranks of all science fiction concepts and shows how each evolved over time.

We like to think that science fiction has infinite possibilities, but I have a hunch that it’s finite. If we studied science fiction and developed a classification system for SF story ideas, we’d discover its limitations.

Take time travel. There’s only so much you can do with the concept. I’m currently rewatching the old TV series, The Time Tunnel, from the 1966/1967 television season. The same season that Star Trek premiered. The Time Tunnel, like Quantum Leap, allowed its protagonists to jump around in time. But in both treatments, you quickly realize how limiting time travel is as a plot device. Most time travel stories end up being about their destinations, not the concept itself. H. G. Wells milked the idea for most of its worth in The Time Machine.

Time travel stories generally produce historical or romance fiction.

Robert A. Heinlein knew this, so he published “—All You Zombies—” in 1959, a fantastic satire on the concept. Heinlein pushed time travel to its limits. Just look at this plot diagram.

Another brilliant example of imagining the nature of time is “Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang. Wikipedia quotes Chiang as having several sources of inspiration. I interpreted the story to mean that the heptapods perceive time all at once, and Louise’s learning their language affected her awareness of time. This reminded me of Heinlein’s first story, “Life Line,” where the protagonist invents a machine to see a person’s life as one long being, letting him know when it ends. Great science fiction about time has to constantly push the envelope, but like these two stories, is any idea a singular, isolated event in time?

Most science fiction is set in the future. That makes most science fiction essentially a time travel story. History is a well-established academic pursuit. That’s why time travel to the past, like stories by Connie Willis, is really a kind of historical fiction. And stories about going to the future allow writers to speculate and extrapolate. But most writers do that by just setting their stories in the future.

Today, science fiction that uses time travel often uses the concept to play with entertaining plot ideas. Most of what I really admired about The Time Machine, Olaf Stapledon explored in Last and First Men and Star Maker. Wells invented the time machine as a gimmick, a plot gimmick. And if you think about it, a time machine is always a plot gimmick. Just watch all those episodes of The Twilight Zone.

The mind-blowing parts of Wells’ story explore the evolution of humanity, the fate of the Earth, the solar system, and the galaxy. This is the real meat and potatoes of science fiction.

James Wallace Harris, 5/11/26

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Why Do We Read Science Fiction?

by James Wallace Harris, 5/2/26

Why did so many Baby Boomers embrace science fiction back in the 1950s and 1960s? We were all playing Cowboys and Indians, wearing cowboy hats and shooting our cap pistols at each other, and watching westerns all the time on TV. Then we switched to space helmets and ray guns, and changed the channel to watch old 50s Sci-Fi flicks, The Jetsons, My Favorite Martian, and Lost in Space.

I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know about space and space travel. Nor can I remember my first exposure to rockets. My guess is it was from television. I remember my 4th-grade class listening to Alan Shepard’s 15-minute Mercury flight on Freedom 7 over the classroom’s PA system. That was May 5, 1961 (65 years ago). I assume I had seen movies or television shows with spaceships before that, but I have no memory. I watched The Twilight Zone before then, so it might have been on that show.

It seems like dinosaurs, spaceships, and robots have always been part of my conscious mind. Maybe Carl Jung was right about the collective unconscious. I knew about space travel before I learned about astronomy. And that doesn’t make sense, does it? How could I know about traveling in space before I knew what space was?

I do know that by 1962, I was reading Tom Swift, Jr. books. But I was also reading nonfiction books about NASA. We lived on base at Homestead Air Force Base, and I used the base library. The Moon and Mars were frequently mentioned in NASA’s goals, but this was before I started reading astronomy books. My young mind must have been told about the solar system in elementary school.

Concurrent with my discovery of science fiction in the mid-sixties were the flights of Project Mercury and Project Gemini. I slowly came to believe that science fiction was preparing me for the future. That was my rationale for reading science fiction. In reality, science fiction was my coping mechanism for a stressful childhood. By the time I learned what the term “science fiction” meant in 1964, I had attended at least seven different schools in four different states. The constant moving, as well as my parents’ marital problems and alcoholism, should have made my life miserable. But I loved those years because I loved science fiction.

During childhood and teen years, even into college, I really believed reading science fiction prepared readers for the future. Then, around 1975, I realized the futures I expected weren’t going to unfold, and reading science fiction was only entertainment. I gave up science fiction, got a real job, got married, and finished college. Then, in 1985, I returned to science fiction. I then treated it like an English major studying literary history. It was no longer about the future, but storytelling.

Any well-told story about any time or place, real or imaginary, can capture a reader’s attention. So the question becomes: Why do we read science fiction? It gets weird when you think about it. Why did we want to leave Earth? No sane person would want to live on the Moon or Mars, and you have to be tripping if you think Titan is a wonderful destination. Anything further is no more realistic than Oz or Narnia.

The question “Why am I reading science fiction?” struck me particularly hard recently, while reading stories by Christopher Anvil in The Trouble With Aliens. Christopher Anvil is a mostly forgotten science fiction writer who regularly sold short science fiction to John W. Campbell, Jr. for Astounding and Analog.

I’m enjoying the stories, but just barely. They just pass muster. I do enjoy them, but I’m enjoying them at the level of watching anything on television when you’re bored, and the show is just good enough not to change the channel. Anvil’s stories feel like I’m resonating with the archetypes of science fiction in my unconscious mind.

I keep asking myself: why don’t I read something better, something more rewarding, something that is cutting-edge? The stories are military science fiction, a sub-genre that I normally find boring. Reviewers don’t have much positive to say about Anvil, but they often praise him for his satire. Satire implies a target. Is the military Anvil’s target, or military science fiction? Anvil’s stories remind me a bit of Eric Frank Russell and Harry Harrison.

But are these stories really satire? Satire is usually driven by absurdity, and I don’t think Anvil believes his science fiction situations are absurd. I get the feeling Anvil is just trying to keep up with the other Astounding/Analog writers churning out what Campbell wants to buy and readers want to read.

Anvil’s stories epitomize how I once saw science fiction.

Anvil’s stories are entertaining enough that I look forward to returning to my audiobook. His stories aren’t great, but they are pleasant. I wonder if I’m using them to cope with getting old, like how I used science fiction to cope with adolescence?

I feel his stories touch what’s very basic about science fiction. If I could understand that, maybe I could understand why I started reading science fiction as a kid.

Anvil’s stories also remind me of Project Hail Mary, the bestselling novel by Andy Weir, which is also currently a hit movie. Weir’s appeal is that his stories are about solving problems, and that’s what Anvil focuses on too. However, Anvil’s prose is functional, but far from Weir’s level of entertaining.

I have to wonder if such escapist science fiction doesn’t function like dreaming at night. They might be a diversion for our consciousness when we want to turn off reality, and maybe symbolically play out some kind of existential purpose.

Baen Books has collected Anvil’s stories in several volumes, which they sometimes label the Complete Christopher Anvil. They are available in audiobook, which is my preferred format for consuming old science fiction.

John W. Campbell, Jr. frequently published Anvil stories, but he seldom made them the cover story. Anvil published two novels, according to ISFDB.org, although many of his short stories were republished as a few fix-up paperback novels. Overall, Anvil appears to have published over a hundred stories, and much of that work has been collected in eight volumes by Baen Books.

Back in the 1950s, science fiction imprinted on my mind, and I’ve been following it around like a little duckling ever since.

JWH