The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction

PAUL A. CARTER. The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction. Pp. x, 318. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. $12.95.

Carter, a historian at the University of Arizona, starts his book in a revealing way: "Science Fiction in recent years has suffered a fall into respectability. Its new status was dramatized the morning after the moon landing of Apollo 11 (July 1969) when CBS interviewed several science fiction writers-Ray Bradbury, Arthur Clarke, Robert Heinlein-and listened to them with the same respect accorded by television that day to Henry Steele Commager, Norman Mailer, and sundry scientists, military men, and theologians. For writers like these, such deference was a new experience" (p. 3). One fantasizes fruitlessly about Shakespeare resenting his groundling audiences, or Dickens waiting expectantly for reviews of his novels in the conservative reviews. In short, the inferiority complex that plagues so many science fiction fans is much more than the jockeying for prestige that is a commonplace in the changing ecology of genres we call literary history.

After having carefully scrutinized Science Fiction: Contemporary Mythology, an anthology put together by the Science Fiction Writers Association and the Science Fiction Research Association to establish the literary legitimacy of their genre, I have come to the conclusion that the genre has a lot to feel inferior about. Even two "mainstream" literary scholars, Brown's Robert Scholes and Michigan's Eric S. Rabkin, in Science Fiction: History. Science. Vision, have only convinced me that their subject is grist for the mill of the cultural historian. Students urged me to read the "best"- Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land. I couldn't finish it: sophomoric philosophizing vied with a tawdry style to alienate me. Ursula Le Guin, O.K. But a few fine swallows do not a migration make.

But the issue is not whether I am corrigibly blind to the value of science fiction as literature, but why do they whine so?

To the delight of science fictionists-and to the disdain of some "liberal arts"-minded persons, who take positive pride in their own ignorance of such vulgar matters as mathematics-[Poul] Anderson in his best work brilliantly fuses vivid romanticism with hard-headed realism (p. 72).

A session on science fiction at the 1968 annual meeting of the Modem Language Association brought writers like Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, and Frederick Pohl before an audience of English professors, many of whom had not been accustomed to taking either science or science fiction very seriously (p. 269).

Paradoxically, therefore, the science fiction magazine, which began as an outcast from American literature, has become one of the few places where the craft of imaginative writing can still be practiced, enjoyed, and paid for (p. 277).

This messianic advocacy is a shaky reed on which to build a historical essay. I remain convinced that most "sci fi" (I'm futilely warned never to use that locution on p. x!) is to serious literature what chewing gum is to nutrition: it may make the digestive juices flow, but there's mighty little nutrient involved.

Carter has divided his analysis into ten chapters plus a useful "Genealogy of Magazines Cited" and a valentine to the university's order librarian called "Vault of the Beast, Science Fiction in the Library."

1. Extravagant Fiction Today-Cold Fact Tomorrow
2. What's It Like Out There? Rockets to the Moon, 1919-1944
3. Under the Moons of Mars, the Interplanetary Pastoral
4. The Fate Changer, Human Destiny and the Time Machine
5. The Phantom Dictator, Science Fiction Discovers Hitler
6. Alas, All Thinking! the Future of Human Evolution
7. The Bright Illusion, the Feminine Mystique in Science Fiction
8. Paradise and Iron, After Utopia, What?
9. By the Waters of Babylon, Our Barbarous Descendants
10. The Dwindling Sphere, the Finite Limits and the Spirit of Man

Some of the material is plot summary, some of it critical effusions on long past ideological squabbles among the science fiction cognoscenti, some of it self-congratulation about the predictive power of the genre (this is a "no lose" situation inasmuch as only the handful of prophecies come true are cited). I found chapter seven most interesting, given that the genre seems to have been crew-cut macho from the start.

The data he presents is in fact of value for the social historian trained to interpret it. But as it stands it is either unconvincing or uninterpreted. The "art" that illustrates the genre (and this book) is appallingly grotesque or crude or both, including the color book jacket which in the author's description inside the book jacket (with a straight face, I'm afraid) "is from the very first science fiction magazine Mr. Carter ever read." "Most of the manuscript was read, in five-minute chunks, over the University's radio station, in a twice-weekly program 'Science Fiction Scrapbook' . . ." (p. 301). I hope it does not appear mean to conclude that it reads more like discontinuous entertainment than analytical history.

Source: Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, Vol. 445, Contemporary Issues in Sport (Sep., 1979), pp. 191-193 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. in association with the American Academy of Political and Social Science