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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

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“Mind Partner” by Christopher Anvil

I’m trying to take a vacation from science fiction, but I can never escape its gravity. The pull of science fiction is as powerful as the “addictive drug” in “Mind Partner”. As much as I want to read something besides science fiction, I can’t stay away for long. However, to tempt me off the wagon, I need a science fiction story that’s different. Anvil blends a film noir detective encountering a cosmic horror invader. Unfortunately, Anvil is no Raymond Chandler or H. P. Lovecraft.

Finding a different kind of science fiction story is mighty hard for me, especially after reading thousands of science fiction stories. The other night, I pulled out a handful of Galaxy Magazines and started reading the August 1960 issue. (Follow that link and read the story before I spoil my analysis.)

“Mind Partner” was the first story I tried, and I hit pay dirt right away. It’s not a great story, but it is different. I checked ISFDB.org to see its reprint history and discovered “Mind Partner” achieved modest recognition. It was published in four editions of Galaxy, in four different countries, and it was selected for The Great SF Stories #22 (1960) edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg. Greenberg also included “Mind Partner” in the anthology Neglected Visions (1979) that he edited with Barry Malzberg and Joseph Orlander. Their goal was to rescue forgotten stories they thought should be remembered.

Imagine you are a science fiction writer in 1960 and you want to sell a story to H. L. Gold, the editor of Galaxy Magazine. You know his slush pile is full of crappy science fiction that’s recycling ideas that have been around for decades. Could you come up with a new idea?

Here is what Greenberg and Orlander say about Christopher Anvil in the introduction to “Mind Partner” in Neglected Visions. At best, I feel they are condemning him with faint praise. But this is also one of the reasons why this story intrigues me. If you’re a mediocre writer who cranks out formulaic work, how do you break out?

Years later, Greenberg was more emphatic about “Mind Partner” in The Great SF Stories 22 (1960):

Although Christopher Anvil is a mostly forgotten science fiction writer, Baen Books has been reprinting his work in ebook and audiobook editions, which are sometimes labeled “Complete Christopher Anvil” on Audible.com. Seven volumes are listed, and “Mind Partner” is included in Book 4, The Trouble with Aliens. (That audiobook is included in my Spotify subscription, so I might give it a try.)

I didn’t know all this on my first reading. I found “Mind Partner” intriguing but confusing. The story reminded me vaguely of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick.

Jim Calder is offered $10,000 to $99,999 if he can pull off an undercover police operation. We don’t know if Jim is a detective or a cop. Details later in the story suggest he might be a detective, but he could be a volunteer from the police force.

A new drug is in town. People go in the front door of a mansion, and the next day, they leave by the back door addicted to a mysterious substance. The police have raided two previous buildings and locations, but have never caught the dealers. However, between 800 and 1,200 addicts are left behind living near those two locations. The police learn nothing directly from the addicts. All they know is they go in the front and out the back door the next day. Then they all rent a room near the drug house.

The police investigator, Walters, asks Calder to visit the mansion once and then come back to him.

So far, not that unique, at least to readers of mystery magazines. It sounds like something Philip Marlowe would investigate. And like Marlowe and Sam Spade in early film noir movies, the investigator gets knocked out and wakes up mentally altered.

As a writer, what can this drug do that’s completely different? At this point in the story, I asked myself, “What would Philip K. Dick do?” As I got into the story, I wondered if Christopher Anvil had been reading about LSD in 1960.

Then, as I read a little more, I realized that “Mind Partner” could be considered one of the earliest examples of a time-loop story. A day didn’t repeat like in Groundhog Day (1993), but Jim Calder lives his life over and over like in Replay by Ken Grimwood. We also see something similar in the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation titled “The Inner Light.”

I consider the history of science fiction to be like one giant LLM (large language model). Writers consume science fiction and regenerate ideas. Did Anvil read about a character in a time loop before he wrote this story?

At this point in my reading, I remembered an intense experience I had over fifty years ago. I fell asleep in the afternoon after smoking some pot. I woke up and went into the kitchen. When I came back to the bedroom, I saw a monkey sitting in the window. I was hit by instant blackness. I woke up and thought, “What a weird dream.” I again went into the kitchen to get a Coke, and when I returned to the living room, I saw a chair I’d never seen before. Blam! I was hit with blackness again. I did this several more times. Each time I’d get up and walk around my apartment. It felt absolutely real. I felt absolutely awake. I started struggling during the blackouts. Somehow, I knew I wanted to wake up.

Then I woke up one more time. I went downstairs to sit outside on the steps. I kept waiting for the blackness. It never came.

Here’s where I explored in detail what happened. You really should go read it. I wonder if you have the reading skills to figure out what happened in one reading. I didn’t. I’m also curious how many SF readers are familiar with the obscure story?

The story got complicated, and I lost track of what Anvil was doing. I finished it and had several vague ideas about what Anvil might have intended. I even asked Gemini, Google’s AI, if it knew the story. It did. By the way, I was surprised by this. Months ago, I was asking AIs if they knew specific science fiction stories, and they’d say yes. But when questioned, I realized they had gotten what they knew from Wikipedia or blog reviews. This time, Gemini knew the story in detail and was quizzing me about it.

I decided I need to reread the story. Gemini asked if I saw the ambiguity of the ending, and I said I did. Then it asked what I thought about several scenes. The plot is more complicated than The Big Sleep. Unfortunately, Anvil lacks Chandler’s way with words.

Jim Calder goes to the drug house and talks with a mysterious, dark-haired lady named Cynthia. She tells him the first three visits will cost $1,000 each. The next three will be double that price. The price will double again after every three visits. Jim is drugged the first time.

When he awakens the next day, he reports back to Walters. Walters is so impressed with his intel that he pays Calder the full $99,999. Calder uses that money to start his own detective agency. The agency eventually grows to twenty-seven hired men. Jim also marries and has three children. His youngest son even goes into the detective business with him. Finally, he dies an old man.

Jim wakes up back in the drug house. He leaves, goes to Walters, and again gets paid the full amount. This time, he becomes a painter. Lives to be an old man. Dies.

Jim Calder lives six complete lives. Sometimes, he’s paid the minimum, $10,000, and doesn’t do well afterwards. He remembers each life in detail. The memories become painful. A burden.

After the sixth life, he complains to Cynthia that he wants to forget. She admits that’s why the price of the drug keeps doubling. What they’ve really hooked him on is the drug to forget.

Jim again goes back to Walters. They make an elaborate plan for him to break into the mansion. And they go into the details of the various lives, looking for clues. One clue is that sometimes shutters at the mansion are broken, and sometimes they aren’t.

Jim and Walters discuss the nature of the hallucinations and come up with various theories. Two of which deal with the distortion of time and how humans have learned to overcome their physical limitations. We can’t run as fast as cheetahs or fly like birds, but we can build cars and jet planes.

And what is time? A hummingbird thinks people are standing still. A powerful AI thinks a trillion times faster than we do. Jim and Walters wonder if they are dealing with a being from another dimension, one where time is much different. What if dreams and hallucinations happen at speeds far faster than reality?

Here’s the thing. Jim breaks into the mansion and finds an alien creature. The alien explains how all of the apparent events are happening. It has evolved the power to create detailed delusions in other beings. Its delusions alter humans’ awareness of time. Like humans using technology to extend their abilities, the alien uses mental abilities to overcome its limitations.

The range of the alien’s power is about four hundred feet. That’s why the drug addicts choose to live nearby; they need to stay close to the alien to tune into its power to forget. It’s also why the shutters appear broken sometimes, and other times are intact. Jim and Walters use remote TV cameras to check the alien’s power.

The alien agrees to be captured in exchange for its needs being met.

The end.

But really? Did Jim ever get back to Walters?

If he did, and the ending we are told is real, should we still believe everything? Could the alien have manipulated the police into providing a better living arrangement for its survival?

Christopher Anvil could have stretched this story into a novel. Just imagine what experiments humans would ask of the alien, and what the alien could trick us into giving it.

If Jim never got back to Walters, that could be another interesting novel.

James Wallace Harris, 4/23/26

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Taking A Vacation From Reading Science Fiction

After gorging on science fiction short stories for several years, I’ve finally got my fill of science fiction. At 74, aging is catching up with me. I was reading 52 books a year, and regularly posting on two blogs: Auxiliary Memory and this one, Classics of Science Fiction. My reading has slowed to about a fourth of what it was, and so has my blogging.

I’ve decided to post all my essays to Auxiliary Memory and put Classics of Science Fiction on hold. If I happen to write about science fiction, I’ll post it there. I’d rather look somewhat productive on one blog, rather than unproductive on two.

Also, I hunger for different kinds of reading. We’re now living science fiction. Reading about what’s going on now seems further out than speculation about the future. With AI, robots, space travel, climate change, astronomy, renewable energy, and so many other fields, it feels like we’re approaching a perfect storm of change.

One video I recently watched suggested that the amount of change humanity experienced in the 250-year history of the United States is enough to kill a person from future shock. If George Washington time-traveled to 2026, they speculated he would die of future shock. The guy also speculated that to generate that much future shock by bringing someone from before 1776 to 1776 would require going back 13,000 years. I have no idea how they calculated that, but it sounds right from all my history book reading. I believe society is breaking down now because the amount of future shock one person experiences in a lifetime is approaching what Washington would have felt.

I’m switching from science fiction to nonfiction to comprehend that future shock. Here are the books I’ve bought and plan to review at Auxiliary Memory. It will take me some time. Like I said, I’m slowing down.

  • I Am A Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter
  • Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson
  • Worldviews: An Introduction to the History of Philosophy of Science by Richard DeWitt
  • Why the World Doesn’t Make Sense by Steven Hagen
  • Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain by Antonio Damasio
  • A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness by Michael Pollan
  • Improbable Destinies: Fate, Chance, and the Future of Evolution by Jonathan B. Losos
  • Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson
  • Being You: A New Science of Consciousness by Anil Seth
  • Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief by Jordan B. Peterson
  • The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity–And Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race by Daniel Z. Lieberman and Michael E. Long
  • Sensation: The New Science of Physical Intelligence by Thalma Lobel
  • An Immense World by Ed Yong (reread)
  • Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain by David Eagleman
  • Ways of Seeing by John Berger
  • Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know by Adam Grant
  • The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture by Jerome H. Barlow, Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby
  • Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman (reread)
  • Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig (3rd reading)
  • The Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle by Neel Burton
  • The Idea Machine by Joel J. Miller
  • Thinking in Systems: A Primer by Donella H. Meadows
  • Your Brain Is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time by Dean Buonomano

This is far more ambitious than I’m capable of right now, but I’m going to try.

James Wallace Harris, 4/13/26

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What If Humanity Continues to Evolve for a Million Years?

In yesterday’s post, I claimed humans will never colonize the solar system or explore the galaxy. Whenever I express this doubt, I often get one excellent counterargument. This time, it came from P. F. Nel on my Facebook page.

I’d still read science fiction, but if I knew for an absolute fact that space exploration is going nowhere further than Mars and Venus, I’d probably prefer earthbound SF, where there is still enormous potential for imaginative futures.

But how are we ever going to know that “for an absolute fact”? The human race is only 300,000 years old. If we survive, what will the world look like a million years in the future? What about two million? I don’t think we can predict our technological future. Just look at those amusing predictions for the 21st century, made a hundred or more years ago. They’re nothing like the world of today.

So I can’t see how we can ever rule out interplanetary settlements or even interstellar trips. We still have millions of people who believe that nobody ever landed on the moon. We may be far wrong about how long things might take, but never say never.

This is a good argument, one I can’t counter. This argument is similar to those for God, Heaven, and the afterlife. Yes, these things are possible, but are they likely? It doesn’t hurt to believe in them as long as you don’t sacrifice anything in the here and now, in this existence.

We can never say anything for sure. Science is never 100% definite. We might invent some gizmo that takes us to the stars, but my main point yesterday was whether we’ll want to go if we could.

I can’t believe anyone who carefully considers the conditions on the planets and moons in our solar system would choose to live anywhere other than the Earth. But what if we discover Earth-like worlds orbiting distant stars? Would you really go if the trip lasted five to ten years? Would you go knowing that only your descendants would arrive? If you say yes, I think you need to psychoanalyze your motives. I would say science fiction has brainwashed you, and you need to think long and hard about your desires.

Let’s say we discover an FTL drive that can take us anywhere in the galaxy as fast as a plane trip from New York to Los Angeles. And you could pick destinations that are very Earth-like. Before you go, I suggest reading Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson. Our bodies are ecologies of bacteria, fungi, and viruses. It took our species millions of years of evolution to coexist with those tiny creatures. If you step onto a planet where the air is breathable and the temperature is comfortable, do you think your microbiome will survive the onslaught of your destination’s biome?

There is something else to consider. Why do you want to leave Earth? It’s a world that took billions of years of customization just for your body. Why would you risk your only body to a world that wasn’t designed for it?

Furthermore, what motivates you? Adventure? Boredom? Oppression? Dislike of people? Political freedom? If you’re dreaming of traveling to other planets, isn’t it because of reading or watching science fiction? Has it given us a truly good reason to leave Earth?

Up till now, I’ve only been questioning our desire to colonize the galaxy. Let’s explore the real question: can we do it, given enough time? Like Piet said, what is possible in a million years?

The potential of technology seems infinite. Is it? What if Einstein is flat out right, and nothing can travel faster than light? That won’t stop us. If we could travel at near light speeds, we could eventually go anywhere in the galaxy. Hopping from star to star, in five to ten-year jaunts, people could endure that. But we’re back to my first argument. Is there anywhere we want to go? 

Ethically, we shouldn’t visit any planet that has evolved life. Why steal someone else’s existential potential? We’re not very ethical, are we? Humanity has consumed the planet Earth like a cancer. Shouldn’t we evolve spiritually before we start spreading across the galaxy? Remember The Day the Earth Stood Still? If aliens exist, they would do well to stop us. If we were truly moral beings, we’d do well to stop ourselves.

After the Soviet Union collapsed, we had a couple of decades where it looked like we might finally get our act together and become a peaceful species. Globalization and cooperation grew. We even realized we were destroying our environment by using fossil fuels. Humanity could have done something. We didn’t. We went back to nationalism and strong men rule. We’re deevolving.

Yes, there are people rich enough now to build their own space programs. But doesn’t that say something when the richest among us choose to use their wealth to feed their egos rather than help the species?

Taxpayers and politicians stopped supporting the space program after Apollo 11 because they thought the money could be better spent elsewhere. Did we? We’ve spent trillions on weapons and war that could have colonized the Moon and Mars. But we didn’t. Why? The driving force of our species is greed. We compete with each other to consume more.

We can’t even stop ourselves from turning the paradise of planet Earth into the hell of planet Venus. Can we really survive another million years?

Poul Anderson often claimed in his science fiction stories that the human race was best suited to handle feudalism. In a recent article in The Atlantic, “Rod Dreher Thinks the Enlightenment was a Mistake,” a radical-right philosopher makes a similar case. Dreher believes humanity was better off before science, when religion and faith dominated. Ignoring the fact that before the Enlightenment, the vast majority of people were ignorant peasants, serfs, and slaves, is feudalism the highest level of order humanity can handle? That doesn’t say much about our species.

Let’s face it, if the Singularity produces AI minds greater than ours, maybe there’s a reason. Maybe Homo Sapiens have evolved as far as they can. That doesn’t mean AIs have to wipe us out. Here’s the thing: intelligent machines are perfectly suited for living everywhere in the solar system and beyond. They can “live” long enough to travel to the stars.

What about Fermi’s Paradox? Maybe it’s logical that we haven’t heard from anyone else if biology is the limitation. So, why haven’t we heard from intelligent machines? Maybe they are ethical enough not interfere with biological beings? Maybe they only talk to other intelligent machines. If the singularity occurs in the next few years, it should only take another decade or two for machines to evolve into space-faring beings. Maybe our AI minds will be contacted by alien AI minds.

As an old man, my doubt about humans colonizing Mars and the galaxy comes from two reasons. First, I don’t think anyone will want to live on Mars, and second, I believe our current global civilization is doomed. And I doubt we’ll leave enough natural resources for a future global civilization to prosper as we did.

We can only guess what AI minds will do. Who knows, maybe they will help us achieve a Star Trek future. Or maybe they will convince us to take care of Earth. But if we couldn’t do right on our own, could we become better with them? Or will humanity become a cargo cult waiting for the flying saucers to save us? 

James Wallace Harris

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How Would You Feel If You Knew Humans Will Never Colonize the Solar System or Galaxy?

A family sitting on a grassy Earth cliffside, looking at a glowing holographic bubble of Mars and the stars.

Science fiction writers can’t predict the future, but they love to imagine possibilities. For the most part, readers know they are just reading stories, but science fiction has given them certain concepts that they want to believe will come true. Three of the most popular memes that have been passed down over centuries are space travel, aliens, and robots.  

 Science fiction has also warned us about futures we want to avoid. The genre offers a spectrum of visions ranging from horror to hope. We don’t want War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells to come true, but many would find Carl Sagan’s vision in Contact to be wonderful.

Most science fiction fans know they read to escape ordinary lives, but a few hoped some of the things imagined by science fiction would come to be, even hoping in their lifetimes. Things like space travel, colonizing the Moon and Mars, first contact, robots, artificial minds, and life extension.

The robots and artificial minds of 2026 are almost like what we read about, and in the next few years, might catch up with science fiction. Many real robots surpass the abilities of the robots we saw in Forbidden Planet and Lost in Space. And real robots are way beyond the clunky robots we saw in The Twilight Zone. I’d even say modern robotics has evolved past most of the robots in early Asimov stories. We haven’t gotten Data or R. Daneel Olivaw yet. But I’d say they are within the realm of possibility.

For some reason, humans have long wanted to create intelligent companions. You can trace these desires back to folk tales and myths. But now that this dream is about to come true, will it make us happy?

Science fiction also dwells on aliens, alien invasion, and first contact. Again, this says something about our sense of aloneness in the universe. However, meeting aliens depends on science fiction’s prime hope, space travel.

With NASA and SpaceX, you’d think I’d give space travel an A+ too, but I don’t. I’m afraid I’m going to give science fiction a fail. It’s almost certain we won’t go to the stars. We might make it to Mars, but I doubt that we will stay there. My bet is we’ll screw around on the Moon for several years, maybe send a few crewed missions to Mars, and then decide space exploration isn’t very desirable at all. That is, at least for humans. 

All the nearby real estate outside of Earth is only suitable for robots. Robots don’t breathe or eat, and they don’t mind the extreme cold and heat of space, or even the radiation. Since they don’t need to carry a biosphere with them, it makes it much easier for them travel in space. More than that, they can handle voyages of years or even centuries. You have to wonder if evolution is working here. That robots are our evolutionary descendants.

Science fiction has glamorized outer space. Years ago, I was talking with a young woman who told me she was a science fiction fan. I asked her if she wanted to be an astronaut. She said, “No way!” But she went on to say she’d love to travel in space like Captain Picard and crew. I told her a spaceship like the Enterprise will probably never exist. She replied, “That’s depressing, so I don’t want to go, then.”

I’m pretty sure space travel, even the limited travel within the solar system that we see in The Expanse, is nearly impossible. The millions of would-be Mars colonists who put their faith in Elon Musk will beg to go home not long after they land on the Red planet.

I had Notebook LM collect a bunch of articles and videos about colonizing Mars and traveling to distant stars. Strangely, it found one of my blog posts that I had forgotten I had written. See “What If Science Fiction Is Wrong About Space Travel?” I often forget what I write, and the same inspiration often returns. I end up writing a new version of my thoughts. This post is one example.

I was inspired to start this research when several YouTube videos showed up in my feed. (See some of them below.)  

These videos made me contemplate why I didn’t want to believe them. A lifetime of reading science fiction made me assume sooner or later we’d colonize the solar system and then the galaxy. I thought that gave humanity an existential purpose. I justified this need by believing humanity needed to back up our species on other worlds.

For decades, I’ve known these hopes were naive and unscientific. They were my narrative fallacy. I always wanted to maintain these beliefs first acquired in childhood, using confirmation bias by finding supporting evidence.

A lifetime of reading science fiction has made me ignore the reality that Earth is our only home. I again come to the same final thought as I did in my first essay, and one Notebook LM latched onto: “Yet, reality suggests we’ll eventually bang into the glass walls of our aquarium. I wonder what science fiction will speculate on then.”

Can science fiction imagine possible futures where we stay home for millions of years and develop a healthy relationship with Earth and nature? Will such stories be as exciting and inspiring as current science fiction? Solarpunk and Hopepunk aim to offer hope, but they still see us as space-faring creatures. Is that real hope, or false hope? Should genuine hope be realistic?

Resources:

Notebook LM created a podcast from all the research articles it collected for me. It’s quite impressive, especially when you think an AI created it. It’s actually very science fictional.

Here are the three videos Notebook LM used.

James Wallace Harris, 2/27/26

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Did Science Fiction Brainwash You in Early Childhood?

Can you remember when you first encountered concepts such as aliens, space travel, robots, time machines, and the end of the world? If you read science fiction, you might think of specific books that introduced those ideas. Think hard for a moment. Didn’t you encounter all those ideas before you could read? It’s my theory that all the iconic themes of science fiction were well integrated into society by the 1950s. Anyone under 80 probably heard about space travel, robots, and aliens in early childhood and can’t remember when these concepts first entered their minds. 

I didn’t understand there was a genre called science fiction until the fall of 1964, just before I turned 13. That’s when I discovered the science fiction section at the Homestead Air Force Base Library. Before that, I just stumbled onto science fiction books in the Young Adult section of the base library or at my school library. They weren’t labeled science fiction.

From ages 0-5 (1951-56), I don’t remember television, books, or magazines. My cognitive awareness was limited to my parents, sister, and grandmother. I can only recall a few conversations, and I was struggling with some very limited ideas. My vocabulary was small, and I comprehended few abstractions. However, if I had perfect recall, I bet I heard people talk about rockets, space travel, aliens from outer space, and robots. I’m not sure about time travel.

From 1956 until the fall of 1964, I was exposed to science fiction on television. I didn’t know these shows about space travel, aliens, and robots were science fiction; I was just drawn to those ideas. However, if I study my memories of sitting in front of a television set, I don’t think I comprehended much before third grade (1959/1960).  

I turned five on 11/25/56. I have only a few dozen memories of that year. My view of the world was quite minimal. Unlike some kids today, I didn’t know my alphabet, I couldn’t count, or tell time. I didn’t learn those things until first grade, which began in September 1957, the month before Sputnik. I attended Kindergarten in the 1956/57 school year, but they didn’t teach us those things back then.

The first show I remember liking was Topper. All I can remember are the names George and Marion Kirby, the dog Neal. They were ghosts. I don’t remember any scenes or plots, other than the ghosts had to hide from everyone but Topper. I had no idea this show was a fantasy. I’m quite sure I didn’t even know the word fantasy.

The earliest TV show I can remember a specific scene from is Gunsmoke in 1957. Matt Dillon killed a guy in a gunfight. I remember thinking that guy was only pretending to be dead, and I started thinking what being really dead meant. It blew my little mind. As far as I can remember now, that’s the first time my mind got philosophical.

The first movie I remember seeing at the theater was in 1958. It was called Snowfire, about a white wild stallion that a little girl loved. That same year, I remember seeing my first movie on television, High Barbaree. There was a scene about a little boy and a girl. The girl’s family was moving away, and the boy was crying. I had already experienced that several times since we moved a lot. That might be the first time I identified with a fictional character.

The next TV show I can remember was Clutch Cargo in 1959. This show may have had plot elements and may have proto-science fiction. I don’t remember any plots or stories, just the visuals.

My first real introduction to science fiction was probably The Twilight Zone during the first season, 1959/1960. I was in the third grade. There were many science fiction shows on television before The Twilight Zone, but I don’t remember ever watching them. 

The only specific episode I can remember is “The Eye of the Beholder” (November 11, 1960). It was so creepy. I remember watching it with my mother and sister. I had started the fourth grade, and we were living in Marks, Mississippi. That September, I also remember going to a friend’s house to see the last showing of Howdy Doody.  

That first season of The Twilight Zone introduced me to robots, aliens, rockets, and Martians. I didn’t really comprehend what all of those concepts meant. I was eight years old when the season started.

Writing this essay has helped me understand the limits of the childhood mind. It is a time when we are quite impressionable and especially gullible. If you meditate very hard on this, you’ll discover that many of your beliefs go back to these early years. There is no other way to say it, but we are brainwashed as kids by popular culture.  

My earliest memories of going to church and hearing about God and Jesus were when we lived in Marks, Mississippi. My mother’s oldest sister lived in Marks, so I think we lived there because my father was stationed in Texas. He was training as a mechanic for the F-106. My mother’s family, as well as the people from Mississippi in general in 1960, were big on going to church. I didn’t like Sunday School or going to church. It wasn’t because I wasn’t religious; hell, I didn’t know what religion was when I was eight. I just thought being stuck in Sunday School class or sitting in a pew during church services was boring. But I do remember they taught us this little song, “Jesus Loves the Little Children,” which had these lyrics:

Jesus loves the little children

All the children of the world

Red and yellow, black and white

They are precious in His sight

Jesus loves the little children of the world

I didn’t know what racism was, but I felt it in Marks, in 1960. I have this distinct memory of being at the Piggly Wiggly getting a drink of water, when this giant of a man runs up, grabs me by the arm, puts his face right up next to mine, and starts screaming something at me. I was terrified. I don’t think I ever understood his words, but later my mother explained I had been drinking from the fountain for black people. 

This was the beginning of my doubt about Christians. They had me sing one thing, but they lived another. I didn’t know the word hypocrite then, but I felt it. Not consciously. I bring this incident up to illustrate how my mind was being shaped.

Here’s the thing: around this time, I was being told a lot of fantastic things. God and Jesus came along the same time as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. And then there was science fiction, with aliens, robots, rockets, and flying saucers. In the second grade, a girl humiliated me in class when I told the class that Santa had brought me a certain toy. She sat in front of me, our row was next to the left wall. My desk was third in line. She said very snotily, “What a baby, there ain’t no Santa, it’s your daddy.” I think that was the first time I realized that people could lie to me.

So in the third grade, I was disturbed that adults were talking about believing in God and Jesus, beings I couldn’t see. If they hadn’t tricked me with Santa Claus, I might have been more receptive. I didn’t challenge them. And I didn’t completely doubt them. I just thought maybe they could see things I couldn’t.

I admit I was a weird little kid. After hearing about robots, I wondered if adults were robots. Kids were real. I could relate to them. But adults didn’t tell me what they were thinking. They just ordered me around. I didn’t know about the Peanuts comic strip at this time, but my world was like Charlie Brown’s. I hardly saw adults. I was in school, playing with my friends, or watching television. Adults only gave orders: get up, take a bath, go to school, go outside and play, clean up your room, etc.

And I wasn’t too impressed with school. My friends were real. Television was real. School was boring. It was painful to have to sit at my desk all day. I wanted to be out playing in the dirt with my cars and trucks. I loved climbing trees. I loved walking around the neighborhood looking for treasures. I loved playing Cowboys and Indians. By the way, TV back then was dominated by westerns. The Twilight Zone shook up my world.

Looking back, since I turned fifty, I realized that during this period, instead of accepting what people told me about God, I chose to believe in what science fiction was telling me. Most kids were sucking down theological beliefs. I didn’t want to go to Heaven, I wanted to go to the stars. I wasn’t interested in God; I wanted to hear about aliens. Of course, kids didn’t talk theology or science fiction.

In 1960, I had no idea about geography, much less astronomy. Outer space was just up. I could see the Moon. Mars and Venus were just words like Heaven and Hell. My absorption of concepts from science fiction came at a murky time in my mind. I wasn’t really self-aware and conscious. 

There were certain Bible stories I was drawn to. Adam and Eve, and the Garden of Eden, Noah and the Flood, and the Tower of Babel. But think about it, those stories are very much like science fiction. In recent decades, I imagine they were written by guys who had minds like science fiction writers.

My theory is that we acquire fantastic beliefs in early childhood. That’s why ancient people embraced myths and religions. It’s why we embrace science fiction today. Our personalities meld with ideas we love, and we spend the rest of our lives believing in them. 

But there’s a problem. A huge problem. At that age, we have little cognitive ability to evaluate those beliefs. And once ingrained, they are almost impossible to reprogram.

By the eighth grade (1964/65), I decided I was an atheist. I didn’t know it at the time, but I believe now it’s because I had accepted science fiction instead. 

Why has it taken until I was in my sixties, retired, and collecting Social Security to challenge my belief in science fiction? Science fiction helped me challenge my faith in religion as a child, but why did I wait so long to challenge my faith in science fiction?

I am reminded of something Eric Hoffer said in his book The True Believer. He said to get a true believer to give up their beliefs, you have to give them something else to believe. That’s what I did with religion and science fiction. But for me to challenge my faith in science fiction, I would have to believe in something else.

In old age, I’m looking for something else. I’ve concluded that all the political turmoil since 2016 is caused by people having too much faith in their beliefs and not enough understanding of reality. I’ve decided everyone is delusional, and we need to give up faith in our beliefs. I’ve decided faith in anything is bad.

I’m reminded of a science fiction novel I discovered in my teens, Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany. In the story, a wise character tells a naive character that there are three modes of perceiving reality: simplex, complex, and multiplex. The beliefs we acquire in youth are a simplex view of reality. As we learn that our beliefs are only fantasies, perceiving the world becomes complex. It’s only when we can act on the multiple complexities of reality that our thinking becomes multiplex. 

Posted on by jameswharris · 5 Comments

When Science Fiction Goes Too Far

The Facebook group, Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction, was discussing “A Walk in the Sun” by Geoffrey A. Landis. The group had read the story before, and my previous comment was: “Good sole survivor story that reminded me of Kip’s journey across the Moon in Have Spacesuit-Will Travel. Unfortunately, it’s way too unrealistic. I did catch the magnificent desolation reference.”

This time, when I read “A Walk in the Sun,” I found it harder to get into the story. Landis asks us to believe that an astronaut stranded on the Moon, waiting 30 days for a rescue mission, could walk entirely around the Moon. It’s certainly a sense-of-wonder idea, but on this reading, I spent too much time thinking about the realistic problems Patricia Jay Mulligan faced. The story is moving because of Patricia’s will to live, and her imagined conversation with her sister, Karen. Patricia only has a spacesuit and enough extra equipment to keep it going for 30 days. Landis tries to address all our objections to realism, but this time the story was just too unbelievable.

“A Walk in the Sun” is well-liked. The story first appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction (October, 1991). It won a Hugo and came in first in a Locus annual Readers’ poll. It’s often reprinted. I don’t mean to pick on it, but it does serve as a useful example of when science fiction goes too far.

Now, going too far is relative. Science fiction explores a limited number of themes, and new writers often take an old theme and push it a bit further. While reading “A Walk in the Sun,” I thought of Have Spacesuit-Will Travel, where Kip and Peewee make a dash across the Moon’s surface only in spacesuits. It’s quite dramatic and realistic. At least, it’s always been realistic to me. Heinlein worked with a team designing pressure suits during WWII, and he wrote two books in which spacesuits were a significant part of the story. The other being Starship Troopers.

Have Spacesuit-Will Travel was first serialized in the August 1958 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. By 1958, real spacesuits were being designed and tested. I feel the science fiction from the 1950s tried much harder to stick to realistic speculation because writers knew manned rocket travel was just a few years off, and travel to the Moon wasn’t much farther.

However, Heinlein took science fiction too far in Have Spacesuit-Will Travel. By the end of the story, Kip and Peewee traveled to the Lesser Magellanic Clouds. Even though I dearly love Have Spacesuit-Will Travel and have reread it more than any other book, I do know that Heinlein was satirizing science fiction in it.

In one of the comments on this discussion of “A Walk in the Sun,” Frank Policastro mentioned H. B. Fyfe’s “Moonwalk” as a more realistic story. (Space Science Fiction, November 1952.)

I loaded that issue on my iPad and read it. “Moonwalk” was indeed a much more realistic story about an astronaut walking across the lunar surface. I wondered if Heinlein had read it. Here was a case of science fiction not going too far. The story is about the first major scientific base on the Moon near the crater Archimedes. The base houses fifty people. It has two tractors that explore the surrounding area. They lose contact with Tractor Two, which was heading towards the crater Plato, and aren’t sure what to do. Radio is limited to line-of-sight. They figured something bad could have happened, or the tractor had gone behind the wall of a crater. They decide to wait.

However, Tractor Two has been destroyed in a landslide, but one astronaut, Hansen, has been thrown free. He has the air tanks of his suit, and one large oxygen tank from the tractor. Hansen decides to start walking back towards base, hundreds of miles away, figuring base will eventually assume something is wrong and send out Tractor One to rescue him.

It’s interesting to compare the descriptions of walking across the Moon by Fyfe, Heinlein, and Landis. Two writers were speculating, and one had the accounts of twelve American astronauts who walked on the Moon.

When I was younger, I enjoyed science fiction stories that went too far. In fact, the further out the better. Now that I’m older, I prefer science fiction that stays close to what might be real. This time around, I preferred “Moonwalk.” It was a basic adventure story, but I enjoyed how Fyfe imagined what it would be like working on the Moon. While researching “Moonwalk” on ISFDB.org, I came across an Ace Double.

“Moonwalk” was anthologized in Men on the Moon. I’m looking forward to reading it, but I started reading City on the Moon by Murray Leinster first. I haven’t been in the mood to read science fiction for months. I just got burned out. However, I’m enjoying all these 1950s stories about early explorers of the Moon. I’m enjoying them because they don’t go too far.

Except for odd alternative-history stories, we don’t get science fiction about early exploration of the Moon. We get a fair amount of science fiction about established lunar colonies, but for the most part, I think they gone too far. I believe establishing bases on the Moon will be extremely difficult, so there’s plenty of room for speculative fiction. Establishing self-sufficient lunar colonies will be next to impossible. Science fiction has seldom explored that territory. Most science fiction today about the Moon leaps too far ahead. I want to read the nitty-gritty of building the first bases and what it would take to make permanent colonies.

I think I’ll dig into the past and see how science fiction writers handled the subject who stayed close to reality. If you know of any, please let me know.

JWH