Chapter 10: Another World,
The Value of Speculative Fiction

In the ancient world on the plains of Russia the Near East lived a group of people renowned for their abilities as horse archers. Born in the saddle, they could fire a volley while guiding the horse with their knees. However, they owed their success on the battlefield not just to their abilities but also to a single tactic they employed. After an unsuccessful assault, their entire force would suddenly turn and flee. Their opponents, sensing victory, would break ranks to pursue them. When the following force no longer chased in any organized fashion, the horse archers would suddenly turn a fire a single, devastating volley. They would follow and mop up their disorganized, dismayed, and defeated opponents.

Normally, our guard remains in place when we read fiction. When assailed by the unrealistic, we raise our critical shields and repel. We become the "resisting reader" unwilling to surrender to something that seems impossible or implausible. This puts pressure on the author, whether writing a psychological drama, a Western, or a piece of mainstream fiction to make plausible plots and believable characters, lest he reader stop reading.

Speculative fiction, however, turns and flees from the battlefield by presenting an inherently unbelievable world. While a Campbellian author might insist that such an unreality must obey its rules, the mere creation of a future or alternate world setting the tells reader that he need worry too much that such a setting does not exist in the real world. Indeed, the science fiction reader buys such a book primarily because he enters a world that cannot or does not exist, the allure of escapism. He metaphorically runs off in pursuit of a fleeing, alluring triumph that of the imagination over reality.

The best speculative fiction, including the works featured in this thesis, however, then, turns and faces its pursuers, its readers catching them totally off guard. Though the readers may simply run away from the field entirely, they learn something, at least about tactics, before they escape to reading something less challenging, less "real" a police procedural, a Western, or a less demanding space opera.

When a children’s author writes, "once upon a time," our judgment as to the reality of the situation goes into temporary suspended animation, to use an apt metaphor. The world of science fiction, as a mere glance at the back of any science fiction novel quickly shows, cannot exit. Except perhaps on certain very strong drugs, one simply cannot believe in Martian colonies, time travel, or galactic space rangers.

The people given as the example, though, really do exist. The Parthians horse archers inflicted on Rome one of its most embarrassing defeats allowing its king to symbolically step on the next of a prostrated Roman counsel. The Romans, for all their military experience, fell in the Parthian trap, which lives in language in the phrase "the parting shot," a variation on "the Parthian shot."

While composing this thesis, I began telling some of my friends the plot outlines of the works I read. It rather gave me the feeling of being a Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut's famously bad writer, a promise later fulfilled in The Plastic Tomorrow.

Their reactions took two different forms. Some immediately dismissed these works before I could finish even telling them the stories. They found them implausible, uninteresting, and even silly.

Others, however, experienced the Parthian shot. Initially they listened to what seemed like an amusing, often absurd, story. At the end, though, as Aldiss suggests in Crytozoic, they realized that the work did merely give them an escape. It was "realistic" in another sense of the word than the fiction they normally read.

By no means does speculative fiction enjoy a monopoly on this quality of bringing the reader to look at his own "reality" in a different way after an apparent "escape." Conrad, Melville, Kafka, and Swift all offer similar experiences and, as indicated above, often influenced these writers. Speculative fiction, still, enjoys a distinct advantage. One can always say about Conrad's Heart of Darkness: Is his Africa, or more specifically the Belgian Congo, realistic? Calling such a work "psychologically realistic," i.e. realistic within Conrad's personal experience, provides only a temporary retreat. The Freudian and Jungian critic would soon devise yet another set of standards by which to judge the plausibility of Heart of Darkness, and, sure enough, it does not take much imagination to see the connection between Conrad’s work and the Africa of Ballard’s The Crystal World, but no science fiction reader or critic would expect a similar level of "realism." An important strength of science fiction is that while few would pick up a Conrad volume for mere escape, many do that with the works of science fiction only to find that, as the previous chapter's featured authors might maintain, they've escaped to reality.

C. Conclusion: The Values of Speculative Fiction

The seeming lack of seriousness intent of science fiction as an art form ultimately forms one of its key strengths. Speculative fiction, and the writers portrayed here, realized that they possessed an unique advantage in that they never asserted the "realism" of their works or denied their escape value, yet they clearly intended something more than mere entertainment. This may also explain their occasional irritation with authors such as Ray Bradbury or Kurt Vonnegut whom the critics automatically took as serious artists or the critics who regarded the fact that these acclaimed authors wrote science fiction as accidental. The writers in this book decried the greater attention paid to a Bradbury or Vonnegut largely as it seemed to suggest that an author needed to leave the field to write a meaningful work. Ample examples from the previous chapters refute this assertion. They would maintain that Bradbury, or Vonnegut became formidable writers who wrote or perhaps because they wrote science fiction not in spite of the fact that they did.

They would further argue that the worlds of speculative fiction allowed for their own kind of symbols and metaphors. While some of the speculative fiction writers aspired to make their worlds self-consistent, in the Campbell tradition, others such as Brian Aldiss, did not even bother with those kinds of concerns. Hothouse works metaphorically and artistically for Aldiss, not literally; the science of the world makes no sense. The fact that an entire previous generation of science fiction spent so much time creating the "hard science" to support robots, galactic empires, Martian colonies, and alien societies meant that these writers, whether Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, or Thomas M. Disch, in contrast, could use these same objects for other purposes without needing to expend much creative energy proving the hard science. Thus, Aldiss can take a generational starship as a given, and Michael Moorcock can even mock the time travel concept by naming his device a "Chromnibus."

Behind the ruse of "escape" they felt the freedom to explore some genuinely challenging topics as challenging as any explored in mainstream fiction. For example, one can line a whole shelf with sixties speculative fiction novels containing homosexuality; in almost every case, the author's attitude shows tolerance, including Delaney's Dhalgren. Speculative fiction could portray situations as diverse as an atomic holocaust and a Marxian dictatorship of the proletariat. Mainstream writers, such as Orwell and Wells, of course, did this first, but the speculative fiction writers put this into seemingly "popular fiction" as well as introducing a new generation’s own concerns with colonial decay, alternative religions, sex, drugs, and even rock and roll, all of the latter present in just a single book of Michael Moorcock’s. Further, the freedom to manipulate reality itself, allows an author to explore subjects in their most undiluted, basic form. For example, only in speculative fiction can you explore the morality of creating technology to destroy all human life, as Disch does in Camp Concentration or in purest forms, the concept of imposing an ideology, an obsession of Dick’s work.

A second value of speculative fiction lies in the escape itself. Our society looks down upon the fairy tale and the ghost story. Mass production creates our music. Speculative fiction provides our escape. One needs only to read the box office figures of Star Wars [now a series] to realize the magnitude of the desire for freedom from our own most pressing problems. The best speculative fiction, like that of classic science fiction, can make this escape, provide the oft-quoted "sense of wonder," yet make it of value. Ballard's and Zelazny’s worlds resemble dreams, and Dick’s occasionally seem like drug-induced hallucinations, yet through these dreams we confront a part of our lives and ourselves we might otherwise ignore. Disch's 334 presents us with a city almost contemporary but viewed from an alienating, clinical perspective allowing us to take a good look at the sterility of our own lives. He forces us to see urban horror by presenting an everyday reality in a clinical, inhumanly objective fashion.

The ultimate value of speculative fiction comes to this: that it gives us another view we not otherwise enjoy. Science fiction told us we would go to the moon for so long that we came to believe it, and finally we went. My suspicion is we won’t return to the moon until we’ve read enough novels in which we see it accepted. Thus speculative fiction can encourage us towards the future while it changes our perspective on the present.

Through speculative fiction, explored, analyzed, and celebrated in the previous chapters, we see that the Strange New World is really our own and that a stranger world awaits us still...tomorrow.