Science-Fiction Story

Introduction

Although the term “science fiction” did not come into common usage until the late 1920’s— having been briefly preceded by other terms that never quite gained currency, including “scientific romance”—it is possible to identify many earlier works to which the label might be applied.

The Origins of Science Fiction

It was in the eighteenth centurythat the word “science” acquired its modern meaning. The scientific method and the discoveries it produced were key elements of what is now looked back on as the Enlightenment. The new definition of science represented the realization that arguments from authority are worthless and that reliable knowledge is rooted in the evidence of the senses, carefully sifted by deductive reasoning and the careful testing of generalizations. As soon as the new image of science was established writers began producing speculative fictions about new discoveries and new technologies that might come about as a result of the application of the scientific method.

The earliest short fictions of this kind were accommodated within the ready-made narrative frameworks of the anecdotal traveler’s tale, the dream story, and the moral fable, sometimes embedding painstaking attempts to dramatize philosophical propositions within frameworks that had usually been employed for more frivolous endeavors. The argument in favor of the Copernican theory of the solar system advanced by Johannes Kepler’s dream story Somnium (1634; English translation, 1965) includes an ingenious attempt to imagine how life on the moon might have adapted to the long cycle of day and night. Voltaire’s Le Micromégas (1752; Micromegas, 1753) employs a gargantuan native of Saturn to pour witty but devastating scorn on human delusions of grandeur.

Early American Science Fiction

The potential of science fiction as an imaginative tool for repeated and varied use was first tested by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s early poems include “Sonnet—to Science” and the cosmic vision “Al Aaraaf,” and his career culminated in Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848), an extraordinary poetic essay on the nature of the universe revealed by astronomical telescopes. In the meantime, the visionary thread connecting these works was woven into in a number of tales, including “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” whose protagonists recall the destruction of Earth by a comet and “Mesmeric Revelation.” Although the prefatory essay on verisimilitude that Poe attached to the lunar voyage story “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall” is not intended to be taken too seriously, it constitutes the first tentative manifesto for science fiction. Poe’s interest in hoaxes also led him to experiment with tales cast in the mold that eventually produced the modern “scientific paper,” including “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.”

Poe’s contemporary Nathaniel Hawthorne also imported scientific experiments into some of his moral tales. Whereas Poe was only slightly ambivalent about the wonders of science, Hawthorne was deeply suspicious of its firm exclusion of ethics and aesthetics from the realm of reliable knowledge. His tales in this vein—especially “The Birthmark” and “Rappaccini’s Daughter”—are among the foundation stones of a skeptical tradition that has always seemed to literary men to be the worthiest kind of science fiction because it rails against the presumed excesses of what is now stigmatized as “scientism.”

Most of the science-fiction stories to be found in the canons of American writers influenced by Poe and Hawthorne belong to this suspicious subspecies. The most notable include Fitz-James O’Brien’s “The Diamond Lens” and Ambrose Bierce’s “Moxon’s Master.” Several nineteenth century U.S. writers of science fiction who continued in Poe’s footsteps, in the sense that they wrote for locally circulated periodicals and newspapers, never contrived to collect their work in book form. It was left to the science-fiction historian Sam Moskowitz to assemble works from the 1870’s and 1880’s by Edward Page Mitchell in The Crystal Man (1973) and works from the 1880’s by Robert Duncan Milne in Into the Sun, and Other Stories (1980). Some writers who did contrive to collect their work remained equally obscure; W. H. Rhodes’s Caxton’s Book (1876) was consigned to obscurity for a century before Moskowitz reprinted it.

Another strand of nineteenth century American science fiction emerged from the strong tradition of utopian speculation. Although formal utopian design is ill-fitted to short fiction, utopian thought involves philosophical speculations that can easily be embedded in moral tales and brief satires. Edward Everett Hale produced “The Brick Moon” and “Hands Off!,” the former being the first story about an artificial satellite and the latter the first significant alternative history. Edward Bellamy produced capsule accounts of exemplary societies in “The Blindman’s World” and “To Whom This May Come.” Most of Mark Twain’s contributions to the genre—many of which remained unpublished in his lifetime—are also affiliated with the utopian tradition, albeit skeptically. They include “The Curious Republic of Gondour” and “Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven.”

Early European Science Fiction

Poe’s works were translated into French by Charles Baudelaire, and this helped to ensure that his influence in France outweighed his influence in the English-speaking world. The most important pioneer of French science fiction, Jules Verne, loved Poe’s work, but he wrote only a handful of short stories. Poe’s influence is more obvious in the work of J. H. Rosny the elder, whose best short stories include “Les Xipéhuz” (“The Shapes”) and “Un Autre Monde” (“Another World”).

British speculative fiction received its first important boost in 1871 when Blackwood’s Magazine published George T. Chesney’s account of “The Battle of Dorking.” This provoked the establishment of a genre of future-war stories that remained prolific until the outbreak of the World War I in 1914. Growing awareness that the advancement of military technology would utterly transform the business of war made accounts of the coming conflict increasingly lurid, but relatively few of them were couched as short fiction, even when the explosive growth of new middlebrow magazines like The Strand in the 1890’s opened up vast territories of literary space ripe for colonization.

It was while these new magazines were in an experimental mood—a mood which lasted little more than ten years—that the British genre of “scientific romance” first appeared. It was foreshadowed in the work of Grant Allen, in such stories as “Pausodyne” and the utopian parable “The Child of the Phalanstery,” but its most important pioneer by far was the young H. G. Wells, who quickly realized that the ideas in the brief speculative essays he was writing for the Pall Mall Gazette could be milked for a second time.

Although Wells was an enthusiastic utopian and one of the most clear-sighted contributors to the future-war genre, the exuberant adventures of his imagination, which he undertook in a spirit of pure inquisitiveness, set the most important precedents. It is a great pity that he virtually gave up on them—in order to set his mind to more serious tasks—after the turn of the century.

Wells’s most important short science-fiction stories include numerous encounters with strange life-forms, which range from the relatively trivial “Aepyornis Island” and “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” to profound lessons in humility, such as “The Sea Raiders” and “The Empire of the Ants.” Other attempts to dramatize the folly of human delusions of grandeur include “The Star” and his two most famous moral tales, “The Man Who Could Work Miracles” and “The Country of the Blind.” Two of his anticipations of future technological development, “The Argonauts of the Air” and “The Land Ironclads,” were soon overtaken by history, although the more daring thought-experiment in “The New Accelerator” was not. Wells’s visionary fantasies include “The Remarkable Case of Davidson’s Eyes,” “Under the Knife,” and “The Crystal Egg.”

Where Wells led others followed, but not to anything like such wondrous effect. The writer whose career flourished most abundantly in the new magazines was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, but scientific romance was always a minor strand in his canon, although it did include the notable science-fiction horror stories “The Los Amigos Fiasco” and “The Horror of the Heights.” The most extravagant writer of future-war stories, George Griffith, wrote a number of Wellsian short stories, including the political fantasy “A Corner in Lightning” and “From Pole to Pole,” but none is of much distinction. C. J. Cutcliffe Hyne was far more prolific, under his own name and the pseudonym Weatherby Chesney, but many of his science-fiction stories recycle a standard formula in which a new invention proves troublesome and has to be destroyed.

William Hope Hodgson and J. D. Beresford were far more serious in their endeavors than Griffith or Hyne but had the misfortune to arrive on the scene after the turn of the century when the wave of fashion had left science fiction adrift. Both struggled to find publishers for their work, although Hodgson’s “The Voice in the Night”subsequently became one of the most widely reprinted science-fiction horror stories. The decline of scientific romance became a sharp fall when World War I broke out, and its fortunes did not revive until 1930.

Pulp Science Fiction

The first pulp magazines appeared in America in the 1890’s. They were so named because they took advantage of new technologies that produced cheap paper from wood pulp. After Frank Munsey converted The Argosy to an all-fiction magazine in 1896, the kind of fiction most typical of the pulp magazines—garish melodramas aimed at unsophisticated readers—attracted the dismissive name of “pulp fiction.” Much early pulp fiction consisted of serial novels, and the first kind of science fiction to gain a firm foothold in the pulp arena was the extraterrestrial adventure story pioneered by Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1912.

The pulp magazines proved far more hospitable to science fiction than more respectable U.S. magazines like Harper’s and Cosmopolitan, as well as offering far more space, but the heavy emphasis they placed on action/adventure stories made it difficult for writers to develop science-fiction ideas in short fiction. The short forms most readily assimilated to pulp fiction were tales of rapidly aborted inventions, travelers’ tales, and horror stories using science-fiction motifs. Moral tales were considered too highbrow and dream stories too unsophisticated.

The U.S. pulps imported a certain amount of British scientific romance, including work by Griffith, Hyne, and Hodgson, but much of it was fiction by writers best known as writers of “boys’ books.” These included Francis H. Atkins, who wrote as Frank Aubrey and Fenton Ash, and George C. Wallis, whose The Last Days of Earth”was perhaps the most extravagant of all the early British scientific romances. Home-grown pulp writers who began to work in the same area included the astronomer Garrett P. Serviss and George Allan England. Burroughs’s success attracted many others, including Ralph Milne Farley and Ray Cummings, but the pulp magazines published hardly any short science fiction of note before 1920. Although Weird Tales (launched in 1923) initially published a good deal of science fiction, and subsequently played a major role in the evolution of the science-fiction horror story, the first pulp magazine specializing in science fiction was Amazing Stories, founded in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback.

Gernsback had been publishing short “scientifiction” stories in such popular science magazines as The Electrical Experimenter and Science and Invention for some years. Although scientifiction was extremely crude in literary terms, it was significant because it was forced to develop its own distinct forms in order to fulfill its didactic purpose, which was to advertise and dramatize new technological possibilities. The form its writers found most useful was the tall tale, as featured in Gernsback’s own accounts of “Baron Munchhausen’s New Scientific Adventures” and Clement Fézandie’s Doctor Hackenshaw series. These series paid little attention to matters of plot and style, but they established a method of using a playful mask for the earnest exposition of extravagant ideas that was carried forward into Amazing Stories.

The Evolution of the Idea-as-Hero Story

The emphasis of the early science-fiction pulps was as firmly placed on novels and novellas as that of any other pulp fiction magazine, but the environment provided by a specialist magazine allowed writers of short fiction to take far more for granted than they had been able to do in the general fiction pulps. General readers had had to be carefully introduced to the notion that a story was to be set in the future or an alien world, and the narrative labor required to establish the world-within-the-text could easily cripple the pace and economy of the story. Readers of specialist magazines not only expected exotic settings but also could be assumed to be familiar with a series of basic templates, thus relieving the short-story writer of the necessity to begin explanations from scratch.

This benefit was balanced by the cost that much science fiction written for “connoisseur readers” became quite opaque to readers unfamiliar with the genre’s basic templates. It was probably inevitable that the science-fiction magazines would become isolated from the remainder of the pulps in a kind of ghetto and that science-fiction fans would acquire a reputation for weirdness. The pulp ghetto did, however, provide an ideal environment for the evolution of the kind of short story that was to become typical of modern science fiction.

Many of the most effective short stories published in Weird Tales and the science-fiction pulps during their first decade were visionary fantasies, conspicuous early examples being “Twilight” and “Night” by “Don A. Stuart” (a pseudonym of John W. Campbell, Jr.). It was not long, however, before attempts to cultivate briefer and brisker versions of the planetary romance began to bear fruit, paradigm examples being established by Stanley G. Weinbaum during a hectic career which lasted only from 1934 until his death in 1936 and whose work is collected in A Martian Odyssey (1962). The most profitable development was, however, the gradual evolution of the kind of didactic tall tale pioneered by Gernsback’s early magazines into a cleverer and more overtly earnest kind of story.

Although the newer stories of this kind remained tightly focused on some central novelty glimpsed through the lens of scientific or technological possibility, they employed careful ingenuity in extrapolating those ideas in logical but unexpected ways, using the element of surprise to formulate more satisfactory plots. Such stories became increasingly common, and by the time the pulps finally gave way to the far less gaudy digest magazines they had already displaced action/adventure novels and novellas at the core of the genre. Kingsley Amis, looking back from the vantage point of the 1950’s—by which time the form had attained a slick optimum—labeled this kind of tale “the idea-as-hero story.”

The extrapolation of the pivotal idea of a science-fiction story in such a way as to produce seemingly inevitable but unexpected consequences became a literary game akin to the planning of ingenious murder mysteries. Whole subgenres of such stories quickly became established, notably the time paradox story, in which writers used the basic hypothesis of time travel to tie ever-more-complicated knots in patterns of cause-and-effect. Early exponents of the idea-as-hero story tended to write stories that seemed even cruder, stylistically speaking, than the general run of pulp fiction, but they had a special imaginative appeal that seemed to many readers to be uniquely fitted to their era. Such stories as Edmond Hamilton’s “Evolution Island,” David H. Keller’s “The Revolt of the Pedestrians,” and Miles J. Breuer’s “The Captured Cross-Section” are barely readable today, but they paved the way for the development of more sophisticated variations on their basic themes: the relentlessness and profligacy of progress, humankind’s increasing dependence on technology, and the difficulty of negotiating sudden encounters with the unexpected and the alien.

The Campbellian Crusade

Science fiction crossed an important threshold in 1938 when the best-selling science-fiction pulp Astounding Stories was delivered into the charge of John W. Campbell, Jr. Campbell believed that science fiction had the potential to become an important medium for the conduct of socially valuable thought-experiments. He wanted writers to be much more careful than they had previously been to make certain that their stories were scientifically consistent, but he saw that as a beginning rather than an end. The narrative thrust of any science-fiction story, in his view, had to involve the extrapolation of its speculative ideas, as well as the projects and troubles of its characters.

Campbell’s editorial prospectus firmly established the idea-as-hero story as the primary template of science fiction, and he insisted that it ought to be employed as a means of intellectually disciplined inquiry. His cause was immediately taken up by a stable of young writers whose imaginations had already been schooled by pulp science fiction and who were eager for further education. The stable included L. Sprague de Camp, Lester del Rey, Theodore Sturgeon, Clifford Simak, Henry Kuttner, C. L. Moore, and A. E. van Vogt, but its most important members were Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov.

Heinlein’s “Blowups Happen,”which examines the social and psychological stresses associated with the establishment of an atomic power plant, now seems remarkably prescient—as does del Rey’s “Nerves,” which describes the struggle to contain a meltdown in a nuclear reactor before it causes an environmental disaster—but such anticipatory hits were not the point of the exercise. In order to promote a new consciousness of the multitudinous possibilities that the future contained, and to emphasize that the adaptations that individuals and societies would have to make to future change would be complicated and problematic, it was necessary to write about all possible futures and all imaginable worlds. Forecasting the actual shape that the future would take was not necessary and certainly could not have been sufficient to fulfill the most elementary ambitions of Campbellian science fiction.

In the two years before Heinlein was recalled to military service in the wake of Pearl Harbor he provided a series of paradigmatic examples which revolutionized the science-fiction story, setting new standards in narrative realism. “Requiem”is a Hemingwayesque tale gushing with understated sentimentality in which the weak-hearted man whose entrepreneurialism first made space travel economically viable finally makes his own fatal voyage to the moon. In “The Roads Must Roll,” public transport in an overcrowded metropolis is paralyzed by a labor dispute. “Coventry”describes life in a reservation to which dissidents from a formal social contract called the Covenant are banished; the inhabitants have stubbornly reproduced all the ideological divisions and violent conflicts that the new contract has negotiated away.

Isaac Asimov’s moral tale “Nightfall,”about a world with six suns where darkness falls only once in two thousand years, remained the most popular pulp science-fiction story for at least two decades after its appearance, providing a key encapsulation of the science-fiction myth of “cosmic breakthrough.” More typical of his subsequent work, however, was a series of stories exploring the logical and moral puzzles generated by not-too-obvious applications of the Three Laws of Robotics built into future machinery as safeguards. The extension and gradual philosophical complication of this series continued throughout Asimov’s exceptionally busy life, its highlights including “Reason,” “Little Lost Robot,” “That Thou Art Mindful of Him,” and “The Bicentennial Man.”

The bedrock established by Asimov’s robot stories underlies many other robot stories by other writers, including the City series and “All the Traps of Earth” by Clifford D. Simak, “With Folded Hands” by Jack Williamson, “The Quest for Saint Aquin” by Anthony Boucher, and “Second Variety” by Philip K. Dick. Viewed as a collective, these stories constitute a wry and perceptive commentary on the problem of humankind’s evolving relationship with machinery. Their literary method was, however, far more flexible; Asimov was later to apply it even more prolifically to the writing of scientific essays, becoming the past master of the idea-as-hero science nonfiction story.

The idea-as-hero story offers a unique combination of intellectual and artistic challenges, demanding in its purest form that a writer should not only be able to extrapolate the possible consequences of an imaginary discovery or technology but also be able to set them out in such a way that the climax of the story reveals something that is not obvious but is profound. Perfect examples of the format are rare; the most famous examples include “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes and“Light of Other Days” by Bob Shaw.

Beyond the Pulp Ghetto

Campbell’sAstounding Stories became a “digest” magazine in 1943 but its competitors clung as stubbornly to the larger pulp format as they did to the norms and values of pulp fiction. None of them recovered fully from wartime economies, and the next phase in the evolution of magazine science fiction was led by a new wave of digest magazines, headed by The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and Galaxy. The smaller format encouraged more prolific use of short forms, and these diversified rapidly in the 1950’s in directions of which the increasingly narrow-minded Campbell did not approve.

The first science-fiction writer to break out of the magazine ghetto to achieve wider fame was not Heinlein or Asimov, although Heinlein did his utmost to avoid the down-market magazines when he returned to science fiction after the war, concentrating his efforts on slick magazines, television, and juvenile fiction, and Asimov established himself as a significant popularizer of science. The first science-fiction writer to win any real literary acclaim was Ray Bradbury, who paid no attention at all to matters of scientific plausibility in the tales collected in The Martian Chronicles (1950; revised, 1997),and flatly refused to celebrate the march of progress, preferring to indulge in heavily sentimentalized nostalgia for the world that progress had obliterated and which the atom bomb now threatened to destroy. His tales were certainly idea-as-hero stories, but they celebrated the idea of space travel as an escapist dream rather than a social project.

Literary critics found it far easier to love Bradbury than any writer interested in the increasingly esoteric world of scientific theory and technological development—and in fairness, even committed science-fiction readers found it difficult to get on with writers such as Hal Clement, who were so obviously the best players of the game of reasoned extrapolation that their work tended toward relentless exposition and painstaking abstruseness. The task of developing an idea based in real science while keeping explanatory exposition to a minimum is very difficult, and the few writers who eventually mastered it, including Poul Anderson, Larry Niven, and Gregory Benford, have rarely received appropriate critical recognition for their achievements. Time and Stars (1964) is one of many collections displaying Anderson’s expertise, while Niven’s most archetypical collection is Tales of Known Space (1975), and Benford’s early work is assembled in In Alien Flesh (1986).

The literary people who loved Bradbury were equally delighted, in a later phase of science fiction’s development, to discover the work of Philip K. Dick, whose work expressed the suspicion—and, ultimately, the conviction—that the entire world of empirical experience (and therefore everything science might have to say about it) was a cruel delusion. With admirable cunning, however, the critics began to heap praise on Dick only once he was safely dead, thus avoiding the risk of increasing his confidence in material rewards.

Dick’s posthumous fame allowed his short fiction, initially published between 1952 and 1982, to receive the ultimate accolade of comprehensive assembly in The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick (1987). Another who received similar posthumous treatment was Theodore Sturgeon, who began writing for John Campbell but did not hit his stride until the 1950’s. Sturgeon’s work required ten volumes, which began to appear at yearly intervals in 1994. The emotional intensity of Sturgeon’s work was even more exaggerated than Bradbury or Dick’s, and he too focused on the desperate need to preserve human identity and human integrity in a world doubly threatened by imminent atomic destruction and the slow erosion of individuals’ capacity to put themselves in the shoes of others by the supposed demands of objectivity.

Satire and Social Commentary

Another element shared by the work of Bradbury, Dick, and Sturgeon was a ready wit. All three were more accomplished tragedians than comedians, and their humor was often rather black, but each had a well-developed sense of irony. The same was true of many of the other writers who rose to prominence within the genre in the 1950’s, although the only really prominent writer of outrightly humorous science fiction in that era was Robert Sheckley.

Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth were singled out for particular praise by Kingsley Amis because of their accomplishments in “satire,” although the idiosyncratic kind of social criticism they practiced in their work is sufficiently distinctive to resist ready subsumption under that label. Their best early novels were written in collaboration, but they wrote their best short fiction solo, classic examples including Kornbluth’s “The Little Black Bag” and “The Marching Morons” and Pohl’s “The Midas World” and “The Tunnel Under the World.”

Pohl and Kornbluth were core members of a group styling themselves the Futurians, which had originally included Asimov. They constituted a younger generation determined not to pay more reverence than was due to their Campbellian forebears. The group’s senior member, Donald A. Wollheim, became an editor who played a leading role in guiding science fiction out of its magazine ghetto into the brave new marketplace of paperback books, and Virginia Kidd became a leading agent within the field, while other members who became successful writers included Judith Merril, James Blish, and Damon Knight.

Judith Merril was the second notable female science-fiction writer to emerge from the magazine genre, although her predecessor, C. L. Moore, had written most of her work in collaboration with her husband Henry Kuttner and had hidden the bulk of it behind a bewildering assortment of pseudonyms. It was not until Donna Haraway published her “Cyborg Manifesto” that Moore’s “No Woman Born” was recognized as a significant protofeminist work, although Merril’s outlook was obvious from the outset in such masculinity-questioning stories as “Dead Center.” The best-of-the-year anthologies that Merril edited from 1956 to 1968 played an important role in defining the range and ambition of the science-fiction story. Katherine MacLean, whose oft-anthologized “Pictures Don’t Lie” offers a perfect example of the manner in which idea-as-hero stories can be used to set up surprise endings, was also peripherally associated with the Futurians; another influential female science-fiction writer, Kate Wilhelm, subsequently married into the group.

James Blish was the most earnest of the Futurians and the one who adapted himself most easily to Campbell’s cause. He wrote several significant philosophical tales, including “Beep” and “A Work of Art,” although his most popular story was “Surface Tension,” a parable of conceptual breakthrough to rival Asimov’s “Nightfall,” in which microbe-sized humans discover that what they think of as the sky is only the first and narrowest barrier separating them from their universal heritage.

As a writer of dark, socially critical science fiction Damon Knight was overshadowed by Frederik Pohl, although “The Country of the Kind” is an outstanding example of that kind of story. Knight set a more significant precedent with the apocalyptic comedy “Not with a Bang,” which appeared in one of the earliest issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. It added a slyly cynical gloss to an idea that Fredric Brown’s “Knock” had borrowed from Thomas Bailey Aldrich and launched a whole series of variations on the theme whose tone and manner became characteristic of an important subset of the magazine’s product, equipping it with a veneer of urbane sophistication that other science-fiction magazines conspicuously lacked. Like Pohl, Knight went on to be a zealous editor of short science fiction, but his most enduring influence was in importing the methods of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop into the annual “conferences” he hosted (later in association with Kate Wilhelm). In the late 1960’s, these conferences became the inspiration of the Clarion workshops and many similar enterprises, which gradually hammered out an analysis of the special problems involved in constructing science-fiction stories and the best methods of solving them that is now virtually canonical.

British Science Fiction

American science fiction flooded into war-devastated Europe after 1945, overwhelming native traditions of speculative fiction that had already been enfeebled by World War I. British speculative fiction had revived in the 1930’s but it consisted almost entirely of doom-laden prophecies of a renewal of conflict that would complete the demolition of civilization. There was no room for such dark material in the popular magazines, so those new writers of scientific romance who dabbled in short fiction—including Neil Bell and J. Leslie Mitchell—quickly gave it up and concentrated on novels. The only significant science-fiction story collection published in the United Kingdom between the wars was S. Fowler Wright’s vitriolic The New Gods Lead (1932).

Several British writers had become familiar with the U.S. pulps before the war (out-of-date copies were sold cheap in department stores, having allegedly been used as ballast by transatlantic liners) and had become frequent contributors in the 1930’s, most notably Eric Frank Russell and John Beynon Harris (who later became famous as John Wyndham). Others, however, especially after World War II, became disenchanted with the quasi-imperialist vision of galactic conquest that had become enshrined in the magazines as a broadly consensual image of future history.

It is arguable that the real reason for the establishment of galaxy-wide cultures at the heart of the science-fiction enterprise was its utility as a framework for the location of any and all imaginable hypothetical societies, and new British writers like Brian Aldiss were perfectly happy to use it in that way, but others were enthusiastic to take up a slogan coined by J. G. Ballard to the effect that “Earth is the only alien planet.”

As a teenager Ballard had been interned by the Japanese during World War II and had been a helpless witness to the collapse and obliteration of what had passed for civilization in the international enclave of Shanghai. The science fiction he began writing in the late 1950’s was saturated with images of collapse and creeping desolation dispassionately observed by helpless onlookers. Ballard was fascinated by surrealism and the avant-garde writing of William Burroughs, which seemed to him to offer useful insights and methods for the analysis of this kind of process, and he began to borrow from them in such mold-breaking stories as “The Voices of Time” and “The Terminal Beach.” His casual denial of everything that American science fiction espoused was at its most subversive in “The Cage of Sand,” which looked forward—seven years before the first moon landing—to the day when the space program would be a forgotten folly and Cape Canaveral a graveyard of dreams.

By 1974 Ballard’s assertion that the space age was over and all its dreams of conquest lost began to seem far more plausible. By that time, however, the “new wave” of science fiction he had inspired, which had obtained an outlet when Michael Moorcock took over the editorship of the British science-fiction magazine New Worlds in 1964, had also begun to seem like a thing of the past. Moorcock’s declared intention to import modern literary methods and values into science fiction, and to banish the lingering echoes of pulp that still infected it, attracted far more attention than sales. New Worlds was relaunched in a glossier format with the support of an Arts Council grant, but its commercial fate was sealed when Britain’s largest distributor, W. H. Smith, refused to handle it because of its use of offensive language. Ironically, the four-letter words in question were deployed by one of several American writers attracted by the magazine’s subversive ambitions, Norman Spinrad.

Spinrad and his fellow Americans Samuel R. Delany, John T. Sladek, and Thomas M. Disch all went on to enjoy more successful careers than Moorcock’s domestic protégés, who included Barrington J. Bayley, Langdon Jones, David I. Masson, and M. John Harrison. Christopher Priest and Ian Watson also published early work in Moorcock’s New Worlds, while Josephine Saxton made her debut in its companion Impulse and Keith Roberts also published his finest work there. These writers did, however, produce a good deal of first-rate short fiction, displayed in such collections as Masson’s The Caltraps of Time (1968), Roberts’s Pavane (1968), Bayley’s The Knights of the Limits (1978), Priest’s An Infinite Summer (1979), Watson’s The Very Slow Time Machine (1979), and Saxton’s The Power of Time (1985). Such writers as Priest and Roberts actually had stronger links with the venerable tradition of scientific romance than the new wave, and the fading out of the avant-garde coincided with the emergence of the even more traditionally inclined Richard Cowper—the pen name of the similarly named son of the famous literary critic John Middleton-Murry—who published three stylish collections of short science fiction, beginning with The Custodians, and Other Stories (1976), under pseudonym Richard Cowper.

Avant-Garde Science Fiction

The British new wave was enthusiastically supported in the United States by Judith Merril, but Harlan Ellison created a home-grown version with his pioneering anthology of “taboo-breaking” stories Dangerous Visions (1967, 2002). Ellison had put his early days as a prolific hack behind him when he broke through into writing television scripts in the early 1960’s, and from then on his literary output was concentrated on intense, vivid, and surreal short fiction. “`Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” won him the first of many awards, with “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream,” “The Deathbird,” and “A Boy and His Dog” all adding to the list.

Dangerous Visions called attention to the fact that there were American science-fiction writers who had been producing avant-garde science fiction for some time, mostly in the obscurity of minor magazines. Fritz Leiber had begun to produce stylistic and taboo-testing science fiction as long ago as the early 1950’s, in such tales as “Coming Attraction,” “Nice Girl with Five Husbands,” and the early items in the ground-breaking series collected in The Change War (1978). David R. Bunch’s bizarre fables of a world in which human beings forsake their “fleshstrips” for mechanized bodies were collected in Moderan (1971). Another highly distinctive fabulist, R. A. Lafferty, enjoyed a brief moment of success before he became the first of many science-fiction writers to be relegated to the uncommercial world of the small presses. Fabulists working in the margins of the science-fiction genre, like Kit Reed, or wholly outside it, like Donald Barthelme, made such good use of science-fiction motifs in the 1970’s that the critic Robert Scholes was moved to suggest a new expansion of the acronym in Structural Fabulation (1975).

Several U.S. writers centrally or peripherally related to the new wave wrote brilliant short fiction while under its partial influence, although they did not all continue breaking new ground thereafter. After writing “Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones” Samuel R. Delany decided that his efforts would be more profitably devoted to novels, and Roger Zelazny gradually retreated from the startling virtuosity of such stories as “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” and “The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth” to the production of commercial sword-and-sorcery books, but Thomas M. Disch blurred the bounds of the genre even more effectively than Ellison in the excellent Getting into Death (1973) and its successors. The blackness of Disch’s humor and the scathing quality of his sarcasm did not endear him to all readers, but he became the deadliest and most brutal of the genre’s satirists (in the truest sense of the word). Barry N. Malzberg also contrived to combine a keen satirical eye with a stylistic verve all too rarely seen within the genre, although only a fraction of his short fiction was ever assembled into such volumes as The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady (1980). The more orthodox Robert Silverberg, by contrast, managed to collect almost all of his more polished short fiction, the most admirably intense of which is to be found in The Reality Trip, and Other Implausibilities (1972) and Beyond the Safe Zone (1986).

It was within the context formed by the new wave that some American interest was developed in science fiction from Eastern Europe, much of which was based in local satirical traditions. The leading beneficiary of this interest was the Polish writer Stanisław Lem, whose most notable short fictions were the “robot fables” collected in Cyberiada (1965; The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age, 1974) and Bajki robotów, 1964 (partial translation in Mortal Engines, 1977), although the Czech writer Josef Nesvadba—a sampler of whose short works was issued in the United States as The Lost Face (1970)—is equally ingenious.

The Contemporary Scene

Science fiction ceased to be a magazine-based genre in the 1960’s, when paperback books became its primary commercial engine. Attempts to shift science fiction’s magazine culture into the new medium, involving such paperback anthology series as Damon Knight’s Orbit, Terry Carr’s Universe, and Robert Silverberg’s New Dimensions, flourished briefly but died out as conventional editorial wisdom embraced the theory that because novels always outsold collections of short stories there was no point in publishing any short fiction except for the occasional collection by a best-selling writer.

By the beginning of the 1990’s, most people who identified themselves as science-fiction fans were mainly or exclusively interested in television and cinema science fiction, and the most commercially successful books carrying the label were television and film tie-ins. The meaning of the term—which is routinely diminished to “sci-fi”—has shifted dramatically, giving rise to “science-fiction shops” that sell videos, games, comics, toys, and “collectibles” but carry no books at all.

In view of these developments, it is perhaps surprising that short science-fiction stories still exist at all, and it is a remarkable testimony to the hardihood of the form that several commercial science-fiction magazines still exist in a world from which all-fiction magazines have all but disappeared. The last surviving monthly fiction magazine in the English language is the British Interzone, although several U.S. science-fiction magazines are still in existence.

Most of the leading names in modern science fiction have done their best work in novel form, but there are a number of them who seem more comfortable working at shorter lengths and who have produced outstanding work of the idea-as-hero kind. Moral fables and philosophical tales have become increasingly common, widely featured in the work of such prolific short-fiction writers as Michael Bishop, whose best work is collected in One Winter in Eden (1984) and Close Encounters with the Deity (1986); Gene Wolfe, whose best collection of enigmatic futuristic fables is Endangered Species (1989); and James Tiptree, Jr.,—the principal pseudonym of Alice Sheldon—the best of whose mischievously garish futuristic visions can be found in the sampler Her Smoke Rose Up Forever (1990). Ursula K. Le Guin has found short formats ideal for many of her exercises in imaginary anthropology, which are among the finest philosophical tales ever written; they can be found in a series of collections ranging from The Wind’s Twelve Quarters (1975) to Four Ways to Forgiveness (1995). Ardent feminist Joanna Russ also found short science fiction ideal for didactic accounts of routes to political and psychological liberation in such tales as those collected in Extra (Ordinary) People (1984).

The pioneers of the “cyberpunk” movement, which was taken up with great enthusiasm by postmodernist critics and philosophers, produced some exceptionally fine short fiction, a representative selection of which is assembled in Bruce Sterling’s best-selling anthology Mirrorshades (1986). Sterling’s own reputation was sealed by the “Shaper/Mechanist” series of stories included in the collection Crystal Express (1989), while William Gibson laid the groundwork for Neuromancer (1984) in the short stories collected in Burning Chrome (1986). Other writers central to the movement were John Shirley and Pat Cadigan, while mathematician Rudy Rucker was co-opted even though his short fiction—collected in Transreal! (1991)—is highly idiosyncratic. The same might be said of Howard Waldrop, the coinventor of “steampunk,” a curious subgenre of stories which employs an ultramodern sensibility to reassess—and often to rewrite—history; his early work is assembled in Strange Things in Close Up (1989).

The persistence of Interzone has provided a useful forum for the latest generation of British science-fiction writers, including Stephen Baxter and Paul McAuley. One especially fine writer of short fiction is Ian McDonald, whose Empire Dreams (1988) is an outstanding collection. Interzone also served as an important market for the Australian writer Greg Egan, who is undoubtedly one of the most perceptive and most versatile contemporary writers of stories based in cutting-edge science. His second collection Luminous (1998) features the sharp moral tale “Cocoon” and the brilliant philosophical tale “Reasons to be Cheerful.”

Another writer whose work first appeared in Interzone is Charles Stross. His collection Wireless (2009) includes an introduction in which the author discusses the advantages and disadvantages of short versus long fiction. “Rogue Farm” is set in a future England that has suffered massive depopulation, and the main characters are a couple attempting to keep their farm operating. Using a completely different tone, Stross spoofs both the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the Nigerian Internet e-mail scam in “Maxos.” “Snowball’s Chance” takes place in a future in which global warming has disrupted the Gulf Stream, causing the British Isles to experience a severe climate change. “Trunk and Disorderly” is a humorous look at the idle rich in the twenty-second century. The main character pet-sits a mammoth for his sister, surfs from orbit to a parachute landing on Earth, and rockets to Mars for a party. “Palimpsest” features a time- traveling organization that is repeatedly changing history and is engaged in a long-term project to prevent, or at least delay, the extinction of the human race until the end of time.

Four American writers who are still writing in the Campbellian tradition in the twenty-first century are Connie Willis, Mike Resnick, Ted Chiang, and Vernor Vinge, who is also a mathematician and computer scientist. Willis is best known for her humor, but the title story of The Winds of Marble Arch, and Other Stories (2007) is a serious one. In this story, a contemporary American tourist is riding the London Underground, the city’s subway system, when he feels a strange wind that leads him to think that he has travelled in time to World War II. A late twenty-first century historian actually travels in time back to London during that period in “Fire Watch.” Willis salutes her own favorite science-fiction writer, Jack Williamson, in another time-travel story “Nonstop to Portales.” Several stories in the collection do display her humor: “Blued Moon,” in which an attempt to restore the ozone layer by shooting hydrocarbons into the stratosphere has strange side effects; people who wish for a white Christmas get more than they bargain for in “Just Like the Ones We Used to Know,” when a worldwide snowstorm strikes on Christmas Eve; and “Newsletter” spoofs alien-possession films and stories, such as Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Willis satirizes modern education in two stories: “Ado” concerns an English teacher in the future who has a hard time teaching William Shakespeare because all the plays offend someone somewhere; and an educational consultant preys on a university’s paleontology department “In the Late Cretaceous.” Willis has fun with feminism in a future in which a drug has made menstruation optional in “Even the Queen.” Her best combination of serious and satirical themes is “The Last of the Winnebagos,” which is set in a future in which water and gasoline are scarce, dogs and other animals are extinct, and people fear the Humane Society.

Resnick pays homage to Lewis Carroll and his poem “The Hunting of the Snark” in the title story of his collection Hunting the Snark, and Other Short Novels (2002). The title story concerns a futuristic safari on an unexplored planet in which the characters encounter a predator which they call the “snark,” who then hunts the members of the safari. “Redchapel” is an alternative history in which Theodore Roosevelt solves the mystery of Jack the Ripper. “Bwana” is one of the stories in Resnick’s Kirinyaga series, in which a group of Kenyans settle on a planet and attempt to reestablish their society as it existed before the Europeans colonized their land. “Seven Views of Olduvai George,” Resnick’s most critically acclaimed story, is set at the site in Africa that many anthropologists believe is the birthplace of the human race. The seven point-of-view characters include an alien surveying the site when human beings are just another species of ape, a nineteenth century African slave trader and ivory poacher, a twentieth century British army officer, an African who secretly dumps nuclear waste in the gorge, another African who dies of radiation poisoning from the waste, a twenty-second century American tourist, and finally another alien who is a member of an archaeology team investigating the site after human beings have become extinct.

In “Story of Your Life,” included in Chiang’s collection Stories of Your Life and Others (2002), the narrator, a female linguistics professor, tells her daughter how she learned to communicate with aliens in a conversational tone that relates her achievement with the events of her daughter’s life. “Tower of Babylon” is a variation of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel that is set in a world that resembles present-day reality, only with some different laws of physics. In “Understand,” the narrator is in a vegetative coma until he is injected with an experimental drug that turns him into a supergenius. In “The Evolution of Human Science,” metahumans have replaced human beings in fields such as science. The premise of “Liking What You See: A Documentary” is that a medical technique using nanotechnology can disable a person’s ability to distinguish between attractive and unattractive people; the story explores people’s reactions and the consequences of this treatment.

The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge (2001) includes “Bookworm, Run!” in which a surgically enhanced, superintelligent chimpanzee escapes from a research institute; “Win a Nobel Prize,” a spoof that was originally published in the science magazine Nature; and “Fast Times at Fairmont High,” a story original to the collection that is set at a future junior high school during finals week.

By the twenty-first century, readers could find science-fiction short stories on the Internet, but as a general rule, Web sites did not pay writers as well as magazines or sales of original anthologies, so the better stories were still found in print publications. Regardless of the medium, the flow of short science fiction continues, bearing moral fables focusing on the ethical issues raised by new technologies, visionary fantasies more elaborate and grandiose than any previously seen, and—perhaps most important—idea-as-hero stories which attempt to anticipate all the problems of social and psychological adaptation with which the rapid march of technology might confront generations to come.

Bibliography

Amis, Kingsley. New Maps of Hell: A Survey of Science Fiction. London: Gollancz, 1960. A slightly superficial study by a critic whose relative ignorance of the genre’s history is amply compensated by his insights into the distinctive forms and merits of short science fiction.

Ashley, Michael. The History of the Science Fiction Magazines. 4 vols. London: New English Library, 1974-1978. A comprehensive history of magazine science fiction; each volume covers ten years and includes representative samples of stories from the decade plus bibliographies of the works of leading writers.

Carter, Paul A. The Creation of Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Magazine Science Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977. An intelligent and well-informed history of the genre, which pays more careful attention than most of its rivals to short fiction.

Clute, John, and Peter Nicholls. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. London: Orbit, 1993. By far the most comprehensive guide to the genre’s history, practitioners, and themes.

Disch, Thomas M. The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of: How Science Fiction Conquered the World. New York: The Free Press, 1998. Survey of the genre by one of the leading writers of the New Wave.

Scholes, Robert. Structural Fabulation: An Essay on Fiction of the Future. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975. Scholes argues that fabular futuristic fictions are more pertinent to present concerns in a fast-changing world than any present-set fiction can be.

Wilson, Robin Scott, ed. Those Who Can: A Science Fiction Reader. New York: Mentor, 1973. An anthology of stories with attendant commentaries by the authors. Although primarily intended as a guide for would-be writers, it provides an excellent analysis of the ways in which short story formats need to be adapted for genre deployment.