Introduction

This chapter opens with a study of Robert Heinlein, an author at once extremely patriotic and extremely critical, whose works often display a violent switch of direction: apparently because Heinlein’s core belief was that the American way, while often at fault, was inherently self-correcting. His work was carefully noted and built on by Kim Stanley Robinson, whose “Orange County” trilogy offers three views of a future America: apocalypse, dystopian capitalism, and utopian socialism. Two other works by Tom Disch and Geoff Ryman move the critique of America into the regions of fantasy and perhaps allegory. All the later works demonstrate science fiction’s increasing sophistication in terms of narrative structure.

Variations on Newspeak: The Open Question of Nineteen Eighty-Four

In a letter to The Times on 6 January 1984, Professor Bernard Crick, author of George Orwell: A Life (1980) and editor of the Clarendon Press annotated Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984), attacked The Times fiercely for having maintained in a previous editorial that the ‘principal message’ of George Orwell’s novel was ‘about the use and abuse of language for political purposes’. This was ‘body-snatching’, he replied (meaning that Orwell, safely dead, was being appropriated to stand for opinions and institutions he would never have tolerated); it led also to ‘a comfortable, distancing reading of the text’. Worst of all, it presented Orwell as a simple writer, ignored the true complexity of ...

The Golden Bough and the Incorporations of Magic in Science Fiction

Magic exists only in the mind. This is the belief that obviously underlies the Oxford English Dictionary’s authoritative definition, that magic is ‘the pretended art of influencing the course of events … by processes supposed to owe their efficacy to the power of compelling the intervention of spiritual beings, or of bringing into operation some occult controlling principle of nature’ (...

“People are Plastic”: Jack Vance and the Dilemma of Cultural Relativism

Jack Vance is commonly regarded as one of the most distinctive stylists of science fiction, a reputation which he indeed richly deserves.1 It is the purpose of this essay, however, to argue that Vance’s work should not be treated as merely whimsical or decorative, but should be seen as centrally preoccupied with one of the most acute moral dilemmas and major intellectual developments of our age: a dilemma and a development furthermore which tend to be avoided or left unfocused, to our detriment, in literature of the mainstream. The intellectual development is that of social or cultural anthropology, as presented to a wide English-speaking public in the middle years of this century. Marvin Harris says, in his ...

Introduction

The relativity of cultural values is effectively axiomatic in modern cultural anthropology. But if cultures are relative, can they not be compared, critiqued, and evaluated? Is there any basis for the belief that modern liberal democracy is the best solution for humanity as a whole? In this chapter science fiction is seen as presenting a series of test cases. In some stories, science is portrayed as another type of superstition. In apocalyptic stories, moral values are suggested to be inappropriate for changed circumstances. Most strikingly, in many stories the possibility is raised of social engineering to effect desired cultural changes, with in most cases undesired and unexpected consequences. Science fiction offers both self-assertion and self-questioning in ways more probing and more painful than commonly realised.

Introduction

This chapter argues that science fiction is hard reading because it requires the reader to process information at a level additional to that required for the reading of all fiction. The vital feature which distinguished the genre is the presence of the novum, a discrete item of information which the reader recognises as not present in the real world. Such items need first to be recognised and then collated to create an alternative vision of reality, the whole process having been described by the critic Darko Suvin as cognitive dissonance: the dissonance demanding recognition, the collation adding the cognitive element. Science fiction is a high information literature, information being used here in the technical sense of information theory.

Introduction

This chapter argues that Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four could well be seen as an example of the science-fictional sub-genre of the enclosed universe story. In these the reader is simultaneously aware of the wrongness of the narrator’s or hero’s views, and the fact that these views arise naturally out of the narrator or hero’s limited knowledge. Can they be disproved without input from outside the enclosed world, such as the captain’s log of a generation Starship, or in Orwell’s case, the hidden history revealed by Goldstein? It is argued that doublethink and Newspeak are Orwell’s vital concepts as agents of mind control. Two works by Ursula Le Guin are seen as further instances of mind control by language, with interestingly different results.

The Magic Art and the Evolution of Words: Ursula Le Guin’s “Earthsea” Trilogy

In chapter 13, part IV of C.S. Lewis’s That Hideous Strength (1945), the changing relationships between magic, science and religion are expressed in a conversation between Dr Dimble (a teacher of English) and his wife. Dr Dimble remarks: ‘if you dip into any college, or school, or parish – anything you like – at a given point in its history, you always find that there was a time before that point when there was more elbow-room and contrasts weren’t so sharp; and that there’s going to be a point after that time when there is even less room for indecision and choices are more momentous … The whole thing is sorting itself out all the time, coming to a point, getting sharper and harder.’...

Introduction

The relationship of science fiction to anthropological theory is further exemplified, in this chapter, by the work of Ursula K. Le Guin, herself the daughter of two famous anthropologists, Alfred and Theodora Kroeber. The first three volumes of Le Guin’s “Earthsea” trilogy once again place magic within the framework of her parents’ discipline. Her work moreover considers the relationship of magic to ancient myth, and also (as in Frazer’s Golden Bough) to religious belief and ritual, all of these considered with a mixture of criticism and sympathy. Le Guin manages the difficult feat of being at once iconoclastic and mythopoeic.

Cultural Engineering: A Theme in Science Fiction

As a form, science fiction conceals homogeneity beneath apparent diversity. The diversity can be seen by looking at the range of paperbacks in any bookshop. One finds lumped together ‘end of the world’ stories, galactic empire stories, stories of the near future and, via time travel, of the very far past, as well as stories that have nothing to do with science at all but depend on magic, or the fantasy type known as ‘sword and sorcery’. One might well think that the inclusion of all these under one heading is just a mistake, that the diversity is genuine. There are two reasons for thinking that is not so: that there is something holding all this diversity together. One is temporary and practical; the other is an element that regular readers recognise, something that forms a large part of the genre’s appeal....