Science and Fiction

The talk Olaf Stapledon prepared on science and fiction — apparently for a book exhibition at Lewis's in Manchester, about 1947 — re-set as an essay. The argument, structure, and emphases follow his manuscript notes sheet by sheet; the prose is editorial — connective sentences and asides in his manner that the notes do not contain. For exactly what is his, word for word, see the source-bounded reading edition; for his notes beside the reconstructed prose, the side-by-side reconstruction.

What fiction is for

Let me begin with a warning: science fiction is not everyone's cup of tea. Some people are simply not interested in it; others suspect it of a rather base materialism. And there is, heaven knows, a great deal of bad science fiction — a canal to Mars, a piece of teratology, some hippopine monster paraded for its own sake. It is not enough to manufacture strange creatures; the whole art lies in fitting one's creatures to their environments.

What, then, is the aim of fiction in general? I should say it is to construct imaginary situations that are, in some sense, true in spirit — situations that interest, delight and stimulate, that epitomize aspects of life, that serve as symbols quickening both the mind and the feelings. At its best, fiction creates a new awareness; it opens windows, and lets us see something significant that we might never otherwise have clearly seen.

Within that aim there are several kinds. The straight novel accepts the current background of science and puts personal relations in the focus; it is "about" people, and the author's imagination plays upon human character and events and makes them concrete. The historical novel — if I may use these rather barbarous labels — combines history and fiction to make a past society live again. And the propaganda novel uses fiction to carry ideas, whether social, religious or political; Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress is the classic case. But if propaganda is to be genuine art, the propaganda must be subordinated to the art: the imagination must play upon the idea and make it concrete.

Science in fiction

Any fiction, to be art, must fuse its materials into a whole — must attain a unity of form and some harmony of emotion. And yet we must beware of the tyranny of a convention. The novel critic's demand — too poetical, I think — is for "pucker" novels, as strictly formed in their own way as sonnets. There is a place for such novels; but there is also a place for other kinds of fiction.

Consider science in fiction generally. Any fiction must do one of two things: either assume the current scientific view of the world, as Galsworthy does, or deliberately violate it for a purpose, as David Garnett does in Lady into Fox and Orwell in Animal Farm. Science in this broad sense entered fiction early. Dante's Divine Comedy accepts the science of its age and consciously employs it for a religious purpose — but the focus, observe, is God and man. The old fairy stories and the voyages of Sinbad accept the ordinary world and add magic, a sort of science beyond science: Sinbad is lifted by a bird far too large, by our mechanics, to fly, and unicorn, griffin and dragon could once enter the accepted picture of nature. Milton accepts old and new science together. The angels were plausible to the Middle Ages, but they are not plausible to us; taken as mechanics their anatomy is bad, the centre of gravity wrong. What was once plausible has become impossible.

Once we admit such fiction, orthodox novel standards no longer apply: there may be no people, no heroine, no love, no tale in the ordinary sense. The interest lies instead in a new scientific possibility. As physics passes from Newton to relativity, fiction begins to play with travel into the timeless and back; the interest moves from physics to biology, and from biology, perhaps, toward the paranormal — telepathy, precognition. Haldane, in Possible Worlds, offers suggestions of the kind: specious presents linked together, or lives that are in some sense circular. Priestley, in Berkeley Square, plays with time under an influence one might compare with Ouspensky's.

Doodling, and the serious kind

As science becomes more precise, fiction must keep pace with it. Swift's Lilliputians did not violate the science of Swift's own day, though they would violate ours — such creatures, taken literally, would not be viable. We forgive him because we adopt his convention, and we too may break our conventions for a purpose, as Orwell does. But the truer a fiction is to current science, the more plausible it will be.

In the special case of "science fiction," where scientific ideas are themselves in the focus, I think we must distinguish two very different things. The first is imaginative doodling, which is simply escapism — much of the matter in the science-fiction magazines belongs here. It is the modern equivalent of the old fairy story: robots, giant spiders, sheer marvels, often scientifically poor and humanly atrocious; and there is the love theme. The second is serious science fiction, of which the early stories of Wells are the great examples. Their aim is mind-stretching — to give concrete life to abstract possibilities: think of The Star, of the tripod Martians of The War of the Worlds, of Star-Begotten, of The Time Machine, or of the pill that made a man light.

There are, I suggest, three rules in the game. First, the fiction should conform to current scientific ideas enough to be plausible. Secondly, it should imaginatively explore further possibilities — imaginative exploration, mind you, not serious prophecy; it must create, but create within the framework it has accepted. Thirdly, it must be humanly plausible and significant, so that the imagined world becomes a symbol for present-day man. The best work of this kind may become a myth for a scientific age.

Notes on some masters

Wells I have dealt with. Jules Verne gave us the voyage to the Moon and Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas. Haldane wrote what he called stories for children — the Mr Leakey tales, with their rats — and played with such notions as the abolition of pain and its reversal. Karel Čapek's War of the Newts, like his Insect Play, uses fantasy as an anti-capitalist symbol. Régis Messac offers La Cité des Asphyxiés and Quinzinzinzilli; M. P. Shiel, The Purple Cloud. In John Gloag's Tomorrow's Yesterday there are flaws — intelligent cats that would never have evolved; his Manna imagines a food that makes people lazy; there are also The New Pleasure, The Pendulum with its post-death experience, and 99% with its inherited memories.

We must contrast all this with fantasies that are not primarily scientific. David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus is a science poem — the yellow water, for instance — but one of high aesthetic value and spiritual symbolism. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet, with its war of Satanic and angelic powers, and Perelandra and the rest, are frankly anti-scientific; and the Screwtape Letters — overtones! — are witty and psychologically shrewd, though their fundamental assumptions are false. There are many more on the border: Morland Bishop's The Star Called Wormwood; Anatole France's Penguin Island and The Revolt of the Angels; Balzac's La Peau de chagrin; J. C. Powys's Morwyn, anti-scientific and magical; Samuel Butler's Erewhon; Murray Constantine's Proud Man and Swastika Night. T. H. White's The Sword in the Stone is anti-modern in temper, yet contains a fine play with time — Merlyn's extraordinary collection, the cigarette cards among it, the hat incident, and the boy Arthur seen against the King Arthur he is to become.

The artificer at work

How does the artificer set about such a fiction? He consults his scientific friends; he learns the rules of the game — a process I have elsewhere called the vital art. Let me speak, then, of my own attempts. Last and First Men began with a vision on Anglesey and with the figure of the stout Cortes, and grew into an attempt to present successive human species — first a superman, then various extravagances: the Great Brains, the flying men, the Martians and the Venusians. I missed the time-scale — two million years; I missed Hitler, though not atomic power; and there was the attempt to suggest a transcendence of time, and spirit. In Star Maker I took a larger canvas and a more philosophical intention, imagining many types of being — plant-men, the "Other Man" — and societies of worlds, cosmical progress and cosmical death, with the fiction of the Maker as artist standing behind them all. In Odd John the aim was a plausible superman, reached first by extrapolating known human powers and then by hinting at powers qualitatively new. In Sirius there was the original vision, and Waddington's story of an experiment upon rats; the problem was to endow a non-human mammal with human intelligence and work out the consequences — which meant choosing the beast, and its environment, and facing the conflict of natures.

L. H. Myers commented on Last and First Men, and Rebecca West said of Star Maker that it was as though Milton had handed Paradise Lost to the author of Bradshaw to rewrite. My own aim throughout has been to write modern myths — which will no doubt seem very crude to a later age. I have tried to make them scientifically plausible, to work out possibilities and possible futures, to juggle with time; to make symbols, true in principle if not in detail, of man-in-the-cosmos; to relate science to religion; and to explore the potentialities of man as a vessel of the spirit. The themes shift from book to book: man's vicissitudes in Last and First Men; spirit and the other in Star Maker and again in Death into Life; a glimpse of a superhuman being in Odd John — my best science fiction, perhaps; human intelligence lodged in a dog in Sirius; and in Flames a wild biology that is, once more, really about spirit. Among the special devices are the use of atomic power, the Great Brains, the Flying Men, the Martians, the vegetable world, and the long-legged race that follows the sun.

And always there is the psychological exploration — the effects of person upon person; and always the labour of inventing environments, for normal environments breed only normal creatures. That was some of the hardest work of all: the queer environments — a world without gravity, a world of great gravity, a world of fire.