To members of the science fiction community, the phrase, the golden age of science fiction
describes the 1940s, and more specifically, the science fiction published during that
decade by editor John W. Campbell Jr. in his magazine, Astounding Science Fiction, and,
to a lesser extent, its sister magazine, Unknown, or Unknown Worlds.
Certainly, there are many good reasons to regard these works and their successors in the 1950s
as particularly significant and admirable, justifying the decisions of most science fiction
historians to make them their focus of attention. But two other bodies of work in the 1940s and
1950s, often neglected by historians, are arguably just as significant, even if their
literary qualities are not quite as admirable. And, as a scholar who frequently defies conventional
attitudes, I would also like to draw attention to these contemporaneous works that were outside,
sometimes far outside, of the Campbell tradition. However, before discussing what I am not
expected to discuss, I will first discuss the science fiction I am expected to discuss.
The standard story of the golden age begins with Campbell, who assumed control of the magazine
Astounding Stories sometime in 1937 or 1938. Scholars debate precisely when he actually
started editing, though the March 1938 issue was the first one officially credited to Campbell,
and the first bearing the new title, Astounding Science Fiction.
Campbell as a writer had initially specialized in expansive space adventures, but by the time he
became an editor, he was better known for the more variegated and sophisticated stories he was writing
using what was widely known to be his pseudonym, Don A. Stewart, such as his evocative vision of
a future humanity in decline, Twilight, and the unusual mystery of a shape-shifting alien
found in Antarctica, who goes there, which inspired three films entitled The Thing.
As a result, he had a reputation for seeking to innovate that might attract
writers wanting to move beyond the formulaic space epics then featured in science fiction magazines.
Thus, Clifford D. Semach, who had previously abandoned science fiction, began writing again
when he learned that Campbell was editing The Sounding, telling his wife,
I can write for Campbell. He won't be satisfied with the kind of stuff that is being written.
He'll want something new. For those unfamiliar with his reputation,
Campbell announced in early editorials that he wanted new types of stories.
He labeled exemplary departures from convention as nova stories, and he published a special
mutant issue devoted to purportedly innovative works. But it was more happenstance than design
that soon brought him, in 1939, precisely the contributor he craved in the form of Robert A.
Heinlein, who sent Campbell his first story only because another magazine had launched a
contest for new writers, and Heinlein truly thought he would face less competition from
other neophytes if he submitted his work someplace else. Heinlein's stories immediately stood out
for several reasons. As a man in his thirties who would work as a United States Navy engineer,
real estate agent, and aspiring politician, Heinlein could bring a knowing attitude and
real-world experience to his stories, unlike the science-obsessed nerds and professional
pulp writers that were dominating the genre. He hit upon the idea of developing a common
background for many of his stories, as displayed in his famous Future History chart, which conveyed
his unique concern for careful extrapolation and maintenance of consistency in creating
science-fiction morals. He mastered the art of conveying this background information by means of
casual comments and indirect references, in contrast to the didactic info-dumps that slowed
the pace of other science-fiction stories. And perhaps most significantly, he resisted all the
common patterns of pulp storytelling, offering readers a stimulating variety of characters,
settings, and adventures that grew from his many singular ideas. One of Heinlein's early masterpieces,
The Roads Must Roll, employed the background of massive moving highways to describe an administrator
who employs canny psychology to thwart a workers' strike. But even more dazzling was
by his bootstraps, a tour de force in which every character is the same person
at different times in his life, brought together by journeys through time.
And this hero's evolution from the wilderness newcomer to the future's dictatorial ruler
represents a fascinating critique of the notion of the self-made man.
As a variation on this theme, his later story, All You Zombies, involved a similar time traveler
who, by changing his gender, not only interacts with himself but has sex with himself and gives
birth to himself. Other Heinlein stories raised provocative questions about our perceptions of
reality, like Universe, where a man learns that his world is actually a generation starship,
and the unpleasant profession of Jonathan Hope, about a man who discovers that as part of his
true job, a critic of worlds, he has been assigned to evaluate the Earth, constructed as a work of art.
While he became Campbell's most popular and influential contributor, Heinlein was hardly
the only major writer who first appeared or matured in his magazines. A young Isaac Asimov,
patiently nurtured by Campbell, developed his three laws of robotics in the stories later collected as
a robot, used one of Campbell's ideas to offer a striking picture of a world where nighttime
only came once every thousand years in nightfall, and garnered praise for a series of novel edits
about the collapse of a future galactic empire, later assembled as his foundation trilogy,
which emphasized sociological speculation as much as technological speculation.
Simak developed his signature style of pastoral science fiction in a series of stories assembled
as City, describing how humans gradually surrendered control of the Earth to robots
and intelligent animals. The most famous of these stories, Huddling Place, features a future man who
was so paralyzed by agoraphobia that he cannot bring himself to leave his home to save the life
of a friend. Another writer, Theodore Sturgeon, offered his own sort of sensitive character-driven
science fiction in notable stories like Microcosmic God, involving a scientist who creates a race of
miniature beings who worship a master god, and Thunder and Roses, wherein a compassionate man
saves the human race by refusing to retaliate after a nuclear attack. The oddest writer in
Campbell's table, A. E. Van Vogt, briefly rivaled Heinlein in popularity with dazzling, fast-moving
adventures like Slam and The World of Null A, which, following a pattern Van Vogt had learned
from a How to Write book, strived to introduce a brand new idea every 800 words. Some of his
stories for Campbell are still remembered today, like Black Destroyer, one of many precursors to
the film Alien, and The Weapon Shop, describing a future world where the sale of weapons becomes
a tool against tyranny. Yet closely examined, Van Vogt's frenetic improvisations never made
any sense, as first noted in a scathing review by Damon Knight in 1945, and he soon faded from
prominence, his helter-skelter approach eclipsed by the superior methodology of Heinlein.
Still, a later writer would figure out how to offer readers Van Vogt's sort of strange,
unsettling ideas in a somewhat more controlled manner, eventually earning recognition as one
of science fiction's greatest writers. His name was Philip K. Dick. As one sign that Campbell's
writers were indeed the best that the decade had to offer, when the science fiction writers of
America voted on the best science fiction stories of all time to include in the anthology the
Science Fiction Hall of Fame, nine of their ten stories from the 1940s had first appeared in
Campbell's Astounding, and I've mentioned five of them. A conventional history of science fiction,
then, after focusing almost exclusively on Campbell writers of the 1940s, would proceed
to discuss the 1950s as the era when those writers fully matured and blossomed, escaping
from Campbell's increasingly idiosyncratic control to light for other magazines, as well as lucrative
new markets like hardcover and paperback books, juvenile fiction, and film and television.
During that decade, veterans of Campbell's magazine produced some of their best works,
like Heinlein's Have Space Suit Will Travel, Asimov's The Caves of Steel,
Simax, Ring Around the Sun, and Sturgeon's More Than Human. These were joined by memorable text
from other noteworthy authors like Dick, Alfred Bester, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clark, and
Corin Wainter-Smith, who in their own distinctive fashions continued to fulfill Campbell's agenda
with unique and innovative works of science fiction, even though they had not emerged
from Campbell's magazines. Unfortunately, by this time, Campbell himself had largely abandoned
his original enthusiasm for groundbreaking science fiction to instead prefer stories
that promoted his own peculiar scientific and political beliefs, most notably the
positing emergence of psychic powers as society's dominant force, and it was left to other editors
to further expand the boundaries of science fiction. The magazine, H.O. Gold's Galaxy,
focused on the satirical approach, while Anthony Belcher and G. Francis McComasons,
a magazine of fantasy and science fiction, emphasized literary quality. In the field of
books, small presses like Martin Greenberg and David Kyle's Noam Press led the way in
republishing the science fiction classics of earlier eras and some new material to be
succeeded by mass market publishers like Ian and Benny Ballantyne's Ballantyne Books,
which among other works first published Clark's thought-provoking Childherds End.
However, anyone researching science fiction can find many detailed histories of science fiction
in the 1940s and 1950s which will emphasize Campbell's influence in Campbell's writers,
rendering further discussion of them superfluous. Furthermore, I believe that this standard
picture of science fiction history is unfairly neglecting other traditions of this era which
are just as important and which might be cited to make an entirely different argument about why
the 1940s should be considered science fiction's golden age. In the standard histories, the type
of science fiction that Campbell purportedly replaced was the routine melodramatic adventures
set in outer space or on other planets that were sarcastically christened by Wilson Tucker in 1941
as space opera or the hacking, grinding, stinking, outworn spaceship yarn. As an aside,
one should note that Campbell did not entirely abandon such stories since he continued
astounding policy in publishing the Linzmann novels of E.E. Doc Smith, generally regarded
as the progenitor of the form. But even if Campbell was otherwise declining to publish
the sorts of exciting space stories that previous editors had preferred, they did not vanish from
sight in the 1940s. In fact, they were readily available in a magazine launched in 1939 that
was expressly devoted to space opera, Planet Stories. Though it was a successful magazine
that lasted for 16 years, students will be hard pressed to find much information about planet
stories in most histories of science fiction. If it is mentioned at all, it is solely because
the magazine published a number of stories by two excellent writers, Lee Brackett and Bradbury,
whose works were ill-suited for Campbell's astounding science fiction. And one should
indeed celebrate a magazine for publishing Brackett's haunting planetary romances,
like The Walls of the Endless Night, wherein descendants of a spaceship crew and the pirates
who attacked them unknowingly carry on their ancient feud on a barren planet, or The Jewel
of the Boss, featuring a pair of thieves captured by a bored, immortal, and his robot. Bradbury's
contributions to the magazine include Mars is Heaven, a tale of explorers on Mars who had
congruously encountered old friends and relatives, later incorporated into the Martian Chronicles,
and Frost and Fire, a stunning tale of mutated humans on another world who only lived for eight
days, bizarrely retitled the creatures that time forgot for its appearance in planet stories.
But everyone acknowledged that such polished, original creations did not represent the usual
contents of the magazine. For a picture of what the readers of planet stories were typically getting,
one might more fruitfully examine the contents of one randomly chosen issue,
the one dated fall 1942. War Gods of the Void by Henry Kupner, Space Oasis by Raymond Z. Gallon,
Vampire Queen by John Russell Fern, Stellar Showboat by Malcolm Jameson, City of the Living
Flame by Henry Haas, Quest of Hig by Basil Wells, The Thought Men of Mercury by R.R. Winterbotham,
Prison Planet by Wilson Tucker. To be sure, a few authors appearing in this issue, like Kuttner,
Gallon, and Tucker, have been praised for other works, though not for these stories,
and the example of Bradbury illustrates that one cannot always judge a pulp magazine story
by its title. Still, it seems evident that planet stories will not offer contemporary readers
a treasure trove of undiscovered science fiction classics, but rather a mostly dreary series about
outlandish, juvenile adventures. Even worse from the standpoint of literary connoisseurs,
the magazine quickly spawned a sister publication, Planet Comics, which offered its younger readers
comic books-based adventures that were even more outlandish and even more juvenile.
Its standout series, The Lost World, chronicled the endless efforts of heroic Hunt Bowman to resist
the alien Volta-Men who had conquered the planet Earth, but its other series usually featured
adventurers in outer space. Some were male, like The Space Rangers and Star Pirate,
while others were voluptuous women, like Mista of the Moon and Futura, probably the most
fondly remembered character from the comic. As one needn't say, their melodramatic stories
foregrounded handsome men and beautiful women battling against ugly villains and loathsome
aliens, employing weapons ranging from fisticuffs to atomic blasters.
At this point, my exasperated colleagues might ask, why are you wasting your time on such material,
when you couldn't be saying more about Heinlein, Asimov, and Bradbury? But my interest here,
I would respond, is the history of science fiction. And one primary purpose of history,
after all, is to study the past in order to better understand the present.
And if one wishes to understand the books on display in the science fiction section of a modern
bookstore, or the innumerable manifestations of science fiction now found in films, television,
and video games, planet stories and planet comics are far more useful than Heinlein, Asimov,
and Bradbury. I am dissatisfied, then, with the conventional view that space opera was entirely
created in the magazines, comic strips, and serials of the 1930s, only to be temporarily
suppressed by Campbell's more mature science fiction until it later sprang into life again
in the form of countless works inspired by the earlier classics. Instead, one must recognize
that after its initial emergence, space opera never really went away. And while Campbell's writers
understandably command more critical attention, space opera actually remained a dominant variety
of science fiction in the 1940s. In this respect, planet stories and planet comics are only the tip
of the iceberg, so to speak, because even if their titles did not announce a focus on space opera,
all of the other science fiction magazines of the decade, like Amazing Stories, Thrilling Wonder
Stories, Astonishing Stories, Startling Stories, Super Science Stories, Fantastic Adventures,
and Captain Future were dominated by adventures in space. Comic books as well regularly provided
space opera. Superworld comics and target comics featured space heroes like those in
planet comics, and when science fiction editor Mort Weisinger assumed control of the DC Comics
characters Superman and Batman, even those iconic superheroes began traveling into space
and encountering alien visitors on Earth. While all of these stories built upon examples from
the 1930s, the larger number of space adventures in the 1940s and their usual focus on continuing
characters meant that the previously incohesive conventions of space opera were now being
honed and polished to perfection, so that by the times new markets opened up for science
fiction in the 1950s, a reader-tested model was available to be successfully shifted into new
territories. Thus, with the sex and violence toned down for younger readers and inquisitive
parents and librarians, space opera became a staple of the new field of juvenile science fiction.
Led by Dom Day Walheim's Ace Books, Recycled and New Space Operas became the main genre of
paperback science fiction. The early days of television brought several series for children
featuring intrepid space pilots battling human and alien villains like Space Patrol
and Tom Corbett's Space Cadet. And while small budgets include special effects
limited most science fiction films to planet Earth, there were occasional films like This
Island Earth, Forbidden Planet, The Angry Red Planet, and Journey to the Seventh Planet,
telling stories that could have easily appeared in planet comics or planet stories.
Later, of course, would come the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises along with countless
imitators and ubiquitous space operas in film, television, computer games, and video games.
While the fantastically popular series of Star Trek novels, soon followed by the equally popular
Star Wars novels, brought space opera back to its original home, The Printed Word,
where it has since become, again, the most common form of science fiction literature.
And all of these works do not be properly appreciated without an understanding of the
role that the innumerable space operas of the 1940s played in inspiring and shaping their contents.
Still, since I am perfectly happy to upset my colleagues and since this discussion so far has
probably not been upsetting enough, I must now take this argument even further to examine a
third form of science fiction in the 1940s and beyond that is even more neglected and even more
reviled than the colorful space operas of the era. Indeed, most people would say that I will be
describing a body of works that is not really science fiction at all. But their attitude,
as I will discuss, reflects only their preferences, not realities.
Since Campbell's high-paying magazine consistently attracted the best writers of the 1940s,
one would assume that his astounding science fiction was the most popular science fiction
magazine of the year. And for much of the decade, that was the case. Yet in 1945, another science
fiction magazine actually started to sell more copies by introducing another new approach to
science fiction, which was able to attract even more readers than Campbell's staple of writers.
I am referring to amazing stories. Once the flagship of Hugo Gernsback's science fiction
empire before declining in the 1930s under the control of his elderly successor, T. O'Connor
Sloan. But in 1938, a new editor named Ray Palmer revived its fortunes with a different group of
writers based in Chicago and, predictably, an initial emphasis on thrilling space adventures.
But the magazine's content soon changed because, in 1943, Palmer began receiving letters and
manuscripts from a man named Richard Shaber, who had a very unusual story to tell. According to
Shaber, Earth had once been inhabited by members of an advanced alien civilization, who had been
treated either to other worlds or to underground cities, where these now degenerate entities,
termed devos or detrimental robots, though they were organic, not mechanical beings,
caused various problems for humanity by means of monitoring devices and telepathic projections.
Considered to science fiction stories, Shaber's writings had little merit at
literature, and even their ideas were not particularly remarkable, varying a vague
resemblance to the true-of-you mythos of H. B. Lovecraft. The novelty was that Shaber,
unlike Lovecraft, insisted everything he said was absolutely true. Whether Palmer believed
him or not is still debated today, but he shrewdly discerned that his readers might find this
material very interesting indeed. And after some extensive revision, Palmer began publishing
Shaber's stories about his Shaber mystery, beginning with I, remember Lemuria, in 1945.
All of them were said to represent true accounts, though they were being promulgated in the form of
fiction. Soon, other writers began making their own contributions to the evolving mythos of
Shaber's devos, so much so that they almost took over the entire magazine. As evidenced by the
critical letters that Palmer published, and heated discussions and fanzines, most members of the
science fiction community utterly despised the magazine's new emphasis on these observed
concoctions presented as facts, and they even organized letter-writing campaigns demanding an
end to all Shaber-related publications in the magazine. Yet the circulation of amazing stories
was also rising dramatically. The only possible explanation was that Palmer was discovering an
entire new audience of readers, outside of the science fiction community. People with a unique
interest in fantastic stories that might be true, fantastic stories that might provide more appealing
explanations for aspects of the real world that conventional beliefs could not satisfyingly
address. Thus, a man experiencing a number of personal setbacks might begin to discern a pattern.
These misfortunes were not near a happenstance, but rather the work of those devilish duos.
As it happens, Shaber had been treated for psychological problems,
and as many have noted, it is easy to discern signs of paranoid schizophrenia
in his elaborate theories. In any event, if material like the Shaver mystery stories
was popular with many readers, but not with science fiction readers, there was only one
logical response to the situation which played out in this series of events.
Amazing stories stopped publishing Shaver stories in 1948. Palmer resigned as the magazine's editor
a year later, and he then launched a new magazine, Fate, expressly devoted to supposedly
factual articles about various paranormal phenomena. Now, Palmer could profitably appeal
to the new audience he had discovered without alienating science fiction readers who would
never pick up a magazine like Fate. The magazine's first issue, unsurprisingly,
featured a cover story involving the variety of science fiction purporting to be factual
that was becoming far more popular than Shaber's unusual scenario, a report on the flying saucers
then being observed in Earth's skies, usually regarded as the vehicles of advanced aliens
who were secretly spying on human civilization, occasionally kidnapping people, and engaging in
other mischief. Soon, many other magazines, books, and documentaries would appear that presented
alleged evidence of these mysterious visitors, a tradition that has continued to the present day.
Granted, as long as such writings restricted themselves to eyewitness accounts of flying
saucer sightings and noted consideration of possible explanations, one might justifiably
regard them as non-fiction. But some examples of the form were unquestionably science fiction
being published under another name. Consider the book Flying Saucers Had Landed,
by Desmond Leslie and George Adamsky, which I encountered as a child at a time when libraries
would still place such items on their shelves of science fiction. It began soberly enough with a
history of sightings of strange objects in the sky, but it then turns its attention to Adamsky's
account of how he was driving down the highway one day and just happened to spot a flying saucer.
Coming to a landing nearby. He approached the vehicle and met its passenger, a friendly
humanoid from Venus who proceeded to engage Adamsky in a long conversation in English about the
foibles of humanity. Even at the age of 10, I realized that I was reading the work of fiction.
In the later encounters with works of a similar nature,
I know that such transparent fabrications are still being published.
Decades later, for example, while visiting a bookstore, I grasped through a book,
whose title I do not recall, that purported to contain translations of captured alien documents.
In one passage, the alien authors scornfully noted that we primitive humans were still
seeing the world in terms of dualities, having not yet recognized that in reality
everything breaks down into threes. I'm sorry, but if you want to persuade me that you are
presenting the wisdom of an advanced alien civilization, you'll have to do better than that.
Yet when such material does not extend to such outright fraud, it can serve as palatable
entertainment. Like another book in that section that I actually bought and read,
Don Wilson's Secrets of our Spaceship Moon, which earnestly argues that our moon is actually an
enormous alien spaceship parked in Earth orbit and abandoned many millennia ago.
What Palmer launched with his Shaver stories in later magazine then has grown into a vast
body of writings about secretive aliens now monitoring our planet, and other related subjects,
the Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, the Lost Continent of Atlantis, Eric Von Donikin's Ancient Aliens,
and so on, which are effectively forms of science fiction, since no reasonable person
can believe what they are saying, yet present themselves as factual accounts of real,
though officially unacknowledged, phenomena. Since most readers of science fiction are poor,
this dubious pseudoscience, such texts cannot be placed alongside science fiction books
where they arguably belong, so they must be shelved in another category, new age perhaps,
or paranormal literature, along with books about more venerable but similarly discredited subjects
like astrology, palmistry, and witchcraft. Granted, none of this material has any literary
value, but if one attraction of science fiction is its myth-making power, any observer must admit
that this extensive body of works is collectively presenting an intricate and fascinating portrait,
and we world much like our own, which is inhabited by various strange beings
lurking just out of sight, prominently including intelligent aliens who have covertly shaped
human history, and continue to influence our destiny. The television series The X-Files,
one of the few works of science fiction that draw upon this constructive mythology, provides one
small sign of its embocative of the word, and suggests that these works merit more critical
scrutiny than they have previously received. We find then that there are actually three reasons
to regard the 1940s as the old age of science fiction. There are the noteworthy writers of
Campbell's astounding science fiction, who crafted the form of science fiction that remains most
admired by connoisseurs and critics, the lesser writers of the 1940s space opera, who perfected
what has now become the most popular form of science fiction in all major media, and the even
lesser writers like Richard Shamer, purporting to reveal hidden truths, who engendered another
very popular form of science fiction that happens to go by another name. Only works in the first
tradition are likely to be praised in histories of science fiction or assigned as weans in a
science fiction class, which is perhaps as it should be. But I still feel that the other two
traditions are important as well, and will reward the few people who choose to examine them.
It is interesting to consider, for example, the very different attitudes toward human abilities
and proclivities that are embedded within these three traditions.
In classic works of science fiction, one typically finds that humans in the future can both control
and change their worlds, which is simultaneously uplifting and disturbing. It is exciting to imagine,
for example, that a person might create a tiny race of beings who would look up to their creator as a
god, as in sturgeon's microcosmic god, but that a man might leave behind his mundane job and instead
employ time travel to transform himself into the dictator of a future world,
as in Heinlein's By His Bootstraps. But if people are someday able to completely transform
themselves and their world, the results may also be disquieting and disheartening,
as is perhaps best conveyed by Clark's childhood's end,
where alien overseers help humanity evolve into a form of group intelligence which a surviving
human perceives as repugnant and incomprehensible. In another Clark story from this period,
The Sentinel later inspired another unsettling tale of future human transformation,
the film and novel 2001, The Space Odyssey.
Second, in the space operas that have dominated science fiction from the 1930s to the present,
humans are easily able to control their future worlds, but they seem unable to change
those worlds. They may have faster-than-light spaceships, force fields, and ray guns. They may
travel to other solar systems and interact with various aliens, but they still seem to talk,
think, and act precisely the same way that people talk, think, and act today.
And they face the same sorts of problems that people face today, like cunning criminals,
violent assailants, unsympathetic bosses, impetuous youth, malfunctioning equipment,
and natural disasters. By taking typical conflicts from westerns, detective fiction,
war stories, and romance novels, and transplanting them into futuristic settings,
space opera thus provides a very comforting and familiar form of entertainment, which helps to
explain why it is always the form of science fiction that is most appealing to a mass audience,
if not to critics and scholars. Finally, in the literature of flying saucers
and related paranormal phenomena, we encounter an anticipated future world
which humans will both be unable to control and change. Rather, as in the past and present,
humans will always be subject to the unseen aliens and their human co-conspirators,
who covertly dictate all important developments. After all, as various books solemnly testified,
these aliens helped the Egyptians build the pyramids, destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah,
evicted the statues on Easter Island, and killed Marilyn Monroe. They meet with every new American
president to ensure his complicity in their secret mastery over the earth, and with their
magically advanced technology, they will surely maintain their grip on humanity for decades or
centuries to come, which may after all be for the best, given our uneven track record in managing
our own affairs. Indeed, perhaps it is not the crudity and absurdity of these theories,
but their assertion of essential human impotence that is most offensive to readers of science
fiction. For they, like Heinlein, would rather believe that ordinary humans will always be able
to prevail in any conflict, and they therefore are destined to conquer the universe, overcoming any
obstacles in their way, including mischievous heroes or domineering aliens. They embrace,
in other words, the doctrine most delightfully expressed at the end of Heinlein's have space
simple travel. The boy defiantly tells the advanced aliens who are threatening to destroy
Earth's sun. All right, take away our star. You will if you can, but I guess you can.
Go ahead. We'll make a star. Then someday we'll come back and hunt you down, all of you.
That's Talon and Kip, his friend enthusiastically responds,
and most science fiction readers I suspect would echo her enthusiasm.
As it is interesting to contemplate what divides these three forms of science fiction,
is equally worthwhile to consider what they all share, which I believe would include the
following. A belief that humans are not alone in the universe, that there exist countless other
intelligent species that we will someday meet and interact with. A confidence that human technology,
if not human nature and human society, will keep advancing to higher and higher levels in the
future, and a conviction that things are going on right now and things will be going on in the
future, that most people today are unable or unwilling to discern. In viewing all science
fiction readers with a slight sense of superiority over those people who opt for more mundane
diversions. For now, at least, I've given up the game of trying to define science fiction,
but I've criticized other definitions for focusing exclusively on the works of science fiction
their creators admire. That is, texts that fulfill Campbell's desire for provocative,
innovative science fiction. Yet, while one might reasonably describe the works of Robert E.
Heinlein and Philip K. Dick in Darko Suven's words as a literature of cognitive estrangement,
this appellation is nonsensical when applied to, say, the contents of planet stories or flying
saucers have landed, which are cognitively reassuring, not strange. Some critics are
perfectly happy to assert that such texts and others not meeting their high standards
are not really science fiction at all, but it is surely more reasonable and productive to instead
see the broader definition of science fiction, which would apply to all of its texts.
So, while my own scholarly pursuits keep moving in peculiar directions of their own,
I hope this survey might inspire some scholars and students to examine not only the works of
science fiction they are expected to examine, but also the works of science fiction they are not
expected to examine. Like other explorers who stray from the beaten path to go where no one
has gone before, they are likely to be surprised and enlightened by what they might find.
Thank you.