(This paper was delivered as one of the keynote addresses at the annual conference of the Southern Humanities Council, at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, February 1993. The theme of the Conference was Inner Space, Outer Space: Humanities, Technology, and the Postmodern World. It has been reprinted in LOCUS and THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF SF.) SCIENCE FICTION AND THE POST-APOLLO BLUES / Terry Bisson I am honored, pleased, and privileged to be here, and to be part of this discourse. Privileged because we fiction writers are not often invited to be part of the debates that are raging through the academic world. And because a writer always likes to get out of the house. Let me begin by saying something that is not very original, but bears repeating every generation or so--literature is not an individual but a collective enterprise. Literature is storytelling and you have to have stories to tell. It is a myth--another form of storytelling--that we writers make these stories up. In fact, we find them. They are the work of whole civilizations, not of individual men and women. The myth of the artist as an alienated, deracinated individual is a valuable one at times--if art is private property, creativity must be also; indeed we slice off our ears to prove it--but today as the arts become increasingly fragmented and commoditized it is important to reclaim the artist as a social being--in fact, a uniquely social being. It was Marx who said--in the 18th Brumaire, I believe--that men and women make history but they don't make it exactly as they please; they must make it out of the materials at hand. The same is true of literature, which is just history written from the ground. And it is especially true of that grubby little stepchild of literature, science fiction. And so we come to the relationship between technology (certainly a socal creation) and the imagination (equally social, I would argue). Lately it has become fashionable to see the imagination as the wings of civilization, and technology as its feet, often feet of clay. It is is just as valid, and sometimes more helpful, to see technology as giving wings to the imagination. Try and imagination Melville without whaling ships, Willa Cather without the railroad and the plow, Kerouac without cars, Mark Twain without steamboats or Bobbie Ann Mason without television. As a writer and as a reader--and all writers were once and are still readers--I want to focus on a particular relationship between a particular technology and a particular imaginative realm. Space travel and science fiction. Science Fiction and Huntsville go way back. Even before Huntsville was Huntsville. To when it was Peenemunde. I recently came across an interesting story in an old science fiction magazine published during World War II. The article was written by Willy Ley, a German who had the good taste and good politics to be exiled and come to America before the Nazi era. He was Secretary of the German Rocket Society during the Weimar Republic. He was made a refugee by the Nazis--perhaps he was a Jew, perhaps a Communist, perhaps a humanist, I don't know. At any rate, he watched events in his native Germany from the US with great interest. And I might add, with great insight. His article was in a science fiction pulp but it was non-fiction. It had the quaint and awkward title-- "V-2--Rocket Cargo Ship." It begins: The full and complete story of the German rocket research laboratory near Peenemunde on the Baltic coast will never be written. There will be nobody alive who can write it. Most of those who know the full story are dead already; those that are still alive will die before the war is over. This may have been wishful thinking on Willy Ley's part. At any rate, we know now that he was wrong. The scientists from Peenemunde not only survived but were honored and protected by their former enemies. They founded both the US and Soviet space programs. Werner von Braun's role is well kmown. Hermann Oberth, who is credited by some with developing Peenemunde, and certainly had a hand in running it, was at Cape Kennedy for the launch of Apollo 11. Willy Ley speculates in his article about the possible futures of solid versus liquid fuel rockets (like most knowledgeable scientists of the time, he preferred liquid fuel) and he concludes that the only obstacle to building a long range (or high altitude) liquid fuel rocket was the development of a high volume fuel pump. He then recalls a conversation he had with Oberth back in 1929, when they were colleagues in the German Rocket Society, and there was a plan, or at least a proposal, to build rockets to carry mail. The dictates of design called for a rather large rocket, in order to get a range of at least three hundred miles, and Ley noted that this would provide for a payload of a thousand pounds. Which seemed excessive for a mail rocket in 1929. In the course of that 1929 conversation, Ley asked Oberth: "Do you think, Herr Professor, that there will be a need for rockets carrying a thousand pounds of mail over five hundred kilometers?" Oberth looked at me (says Ley) with the smile which old-fashioned pedagogues reserve for people they call "my dear young friend" and said after a while: "There will be a need for rockets which carry a thousand pounds of dynamite over five hundred kilometers." Oberth was speaking, of course, whether he knew it then or not, about the V-2. The first V-1 (not exactly a rocket; more a jet-powered cruise missile) appeared over England a week after D Day. Altogether some two thousand of these "buzz-bombs" fell on London killing some 6,000 persons. It was, like the US bombing of Baghdad, or the allied bombing of Dresden, an imprecise terror operation aimed at civilians. Like many of us, Willy Ley had mixed feelings about all this. When he first heard of the V-2, described by Winston Churchill from intelligence reports as forty feet long, about fifteen feet around, and taking off straight up (as opposed to the V-1 which was fired from a ramp) Ley knew immediately what it was and what it meant. He wrote: Like Arthur C. Clarke of the British Interplanetary Society, I found myself torn. As far as the war was concerned, Clarke wanted the rumors to be propaganda. But as far as the future of rocket research was concerned, a twenty ton rocket with a range of a hundred miles or better would be a definite trump card. One would be able to point at it and say, "Yes it can be done." The V-2 was even less precise than the V-1, and less effective as a weapon of terror. But it carried more portent. Ley concludes in his article (written in about 1945) that-- "The first space ship has been built already, only it is not used as such. Yes, we might as well admit it, V-2 is the first space ship." The magazine's editor added in an introductory aside: "Based on Mr. Ley's startling information, we predict that the first attempts to reach Luna will be made within a decade. And how would you like to make the trip? He was off, but only by ten or fifteen years. Willy Ley's article appeared in a magazine that was itself a bit of a cargo ship pointed starward, Astounding, edited by John Wood Campbell, who combined in one person the weaknesses and strengths of what we call the "Golden Age" of science fiction. The technological roots of this literature lay back in the twenties and thirties, and its social roots lay even further back, in the Victorian age. It was a literature in which men were men and women were--well, they weren't. It was a literature in which the achievements and the future of humankind were unashamedly and even eagerly associated with white, male, western culture. It was a literature in which science was regarded with a religious awe. Science fiction's writers and readers had, for the most part, a naive and all-consuming belief in the power of technology; they believed that any problem that technology created could be solved by greater and more massive technology. The stories of this era were often indifferently and even poorly written, usually thin in characterization, the novels usually constructed out of strings of short stories (recalling the early English novel which had to pretend to be letters or travel memoirs)--in other words, deformed. The literature of science fiction's so-called "Golden Age" had all these defects and more, but it had one great virtue. It had at its heart a great dream. The dream of space travel. Now SF is more than just this era--it begins according to most critics (and who could not agree?) with Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's still-living masterpiece, Frankenstein. It includes the Fabian social criticism of Wells and the mad Victorian machine-dreams of Jules Verne. And it has always brought together many tropes and themes and images---robots, computers, time travel, ray guns, other dimensions, nuclear holocaust, and as they say on the cereal boxes, much much more. But at the heart of it all was the dream of space travel. This was what Brian Aldiss called SF's major chord. And a beautiful chord it was. It sang with the certainty that humankind's destiny--our destiny--lay beyond this tiny planet (made small in the previous century by science's adventurers), out among the stars. By the 1950s the dream of Willy Ley and Arthur C. Clarke, of Tsiolkovsky and Goddard--was shared if not by millions of Americans, by tens of thousands of eager boys. Let me speak for a moment as one of those boys, for it was not as a critic or a writer that I first dreamed this dream. It was as a boy. I came to Clifford Simak and Arthur C. Clarke and Ray Bradbury by way of the Oz books, powerful dream-makers in their own right. Let me recommend the real thing to anyone who knows only the Hollywood Oz of the movie with Judy Garland; Frank Baum's OZ--the real Dorothy's OZ-- had lots of dark corners and a wide mean streak, which is what kids look for in a book. But the Oz books were definitely kid's stuff and by the time I was twelve or thirteen I was ready for more serious fare. I found it in science fiction. Not space opera but the high, singing stuff of the Golden Age. By that time (the mid-fifties) it was out of the magazines and into the paperbacks, the literary covered wagon of my generation. Which still didn't mean it was all that easy to find. I was in a symposium this morning about the Fugitives and Lee Smith and Bobbie Ann Mason and what it means to be Southern. One thing it has always meant to be Southern is that you have to go somewhere else to find what you are looking for. I started this process in a small way in my pre-teens, hitchhiking with my friends to Evansville, Indiana, all the way across the muddy Mason-Dixon line, to scour the used book stores for the Boucher and Merril anthologies that were not available in a small Kentucky town. We were not bibliophiles. We read these books, marked them up, traded them, passed them around, wore them out. If we collected them it was only for a while. We composted them. What we liked about them was that they were not kids' books but not grown-up books either. They were like comics or weeds; they were like rock and roll before rock and roll. They were not respectable, and they were definitely not literature. That is why it seems ironic when I hear SF writers (including myself) complain because they are not taken seriously. Hey, wasn't that the whole idea? Science fiction belonged personally to every kid who discovered it. It was transformational stuff because it transformed how we thought about what it meant to be human. It was revolutionary in its way. We learned a little science from it. I think it was Campbell (or maybe his predecessor, Hugo Gernsback) who said that one function of science fiction was to teach science to boys. (Girls presumably either didn't need it, or already knew it.) I learned that things in zero G have no weight but still have mass; I learned that spaceships don't need wings and can coast forever in a vacuum. I learned that the stars are lifetimes away. I learned enough to ruin Star Trek and Star Wars for me, that's for sure. What I learned is all wrong of course; I still think in the old Newtonian paradigms; unfortunately there is no Astounding now teaching quantum physics and relativity to boys and girls, probably because there is no one who understands it. We learned a little about science. But oddly enough, we learned a lot about literature. Even from this scorned sub-literature. We learned what literature could do. That it could lift the heart. That it could teach and tell and signify. That it could sing. That it could soar. That I ever wanted to become a writer, and ever did, I owe to science fiction. One of the unique virtues of that kind of science fiction, of what we might call classical science fiction, is that (at its best) it is made up of stories you can tell long after the characters have dropped away like leaves. These stories weren't about characters; they were about ideas. I remember the first time I read the conclusion of Clarke's Childhood's End, where the children of Earth all leave for the stars, and their parents watch them go. Never to return! (Does anyone wonder why teenagers loved this stuff?) I remember Simak's City, when a man and a dog, bio-transformed into a life-form that can survive on Jupiter, refuse to be changed back. The dog because he no longer wants to be a dog; the man because he no longer wants to be a man. I remember the story in Bradbury's Martian Chronicles about the father who hears on the radio that nuclear war has broken out back on Earth. He takes his children, who have always wanted to see the "real" Martians, and shows them their reflections in a canal. That could have course been a story about Kenya, or California. Even written by liberals like Bradbury, classical SF and its dream of space travel had roots in the past, in colonialism and manifest destiny. It has been accused of being escapist, and what could be more grandly escapist than leaving your world? Yet it was more than just Kipling dreams and Burroughs fantasies. It was the glass in which we not only looked for but created our tomorrows. Our imaginations were given wings by technology. There was no doubt among those of us who read it, or I think those who wrote it as well, that we were going to other worlds. In our lifetimes. And we did! But classical, Golden Age SF had more sombre tones also. In CITY humankind colonizes the solar system, but it is robots and genetically-altered dogs that inherit this empire. Humans have developed agarophobia and are afraid to travel. Toward the end, a doctor allows his best friend to die because he will not, cannot travel to Mars to save him. Clarke takes up the same theme in Against the Fall of Night . People have forgotten why they ever traveled to the stars. Only an adolescent--the first new human in centuries (a boy, of course)--wonders what is out there, waiting for us. He must go alone. "In this universe night was falling..." Clarke wrote, in the first poetry that ever stirred my soul. The fear was that, having taken our first steps, we would falter. That we would develop space travel and then lose the nerve or the will or the capacity for it. That Earth would become our huddling place. It was as if after rounding the Cape of Good Hope and crossing the Atlantic, the caravels--those revolutionary long-distance sea-crossing devices--had been converted into floating hotels or coastal vessels. Or as if after landing on the moon we had turned our Saturn rockets into theme park displays and lost the plans to the great F-1 engines that lofted us into space, and never gone back again. That's a science fiction story no one wrote because, in the fifties at least, it was unimaginable. And yet, isn't that exactly what happened? 1959 saw a sharp decline in the circulation of the science fiction magazines, which continued on up through the 1960s. There are those who say it was because the dream had been stolen: starting with Sputnik and Gagarin, and continuing on up through Mercury and Apollo, space travel had ceased to be the property of the dreamers and had entered the public--or even worse, the government--domain. It was now in the workshops in Hunstville and Pasadena, and on the front pages of the newspapers. The science was still there but the fiction was gone, and with it the myth. It had moved from the pages of ASTOUNDING to LIFE magazine, with the Chevrolet and Frigidaire ads. There is some truth to this, but I don't think it was the whole story, or even the biggest part of it. Even in the early sixties--and the transformational sixties didn't begin until the second half of the decade--the smell of change was on the wind. We were entering a new age, and the kids--those canaries--were the first to realize it. Those who saw (or smelled) it coming long before it arrived, were the very ones who had been the readers of the SF magazines, the dreamers of the SF dream. They--we--started dreaming other dreams. This was when I stopped reading science fiction and moved into "serious" literature. In my case it was the Beat generation that turned me onto a subculture that had to do more with jazz than with rocketry, one that was often at odds (or perceived itself as being at odds) with technology. The sixties were when we went to the Moon. When Apollo was born, flourished, and grew old and died (for the 1960s lasted into the 1970s). Apollo was the greatest but not the only technological triumph of that era. There was Pioneer and Mariner, Viking and Voyager. Because of those voyages, what science fiction had only imagined, I have seen with my own eyes--the rings of Saturn, the Moons of Jupiter, even the very stones and sands of Mars. It is ironic that the same 1960s were the decade in which the limitations of technology were at last fully realized. It was the decade that saw the end of the arrogant, white supremacist, eurocentric and yes, male centered belief in our own omnipotence. The historically-sanctified but aberrant and cruel dream of westerm white world domination died in Vietnam. Killed by the heroism and sacrifice of the Vietnamese. Here at home we were at war with ourselves, as Black people and women fought for the right to define and more importantly be themselves. The limits of growth became painfully apparent with everything from pollution to urban sprawl. But I don't need to describe the 1960s. Every one of us at this conference was shaped, one way or another, by that transformational and pivotal decade. As was science fiction. Space travel was associated in many minds, and not entirely unrealistically, with war and domination. NASA called itself the world's largest non-military organization. Yet Apollo was clearly a part of the cold war. And how non-military is an enterprise with mostly military contractors? The astronauts (with the notable exception of Armstrong) were military men; and how civilian is a civilian test pilot for military aircraft? This is not to denigrate Apollo, which was I think one of the great human achievements (human--not simply male, western, military, or quasi-religious) of this or any other century. I'm just telling you how we saw it then. I was disappointed by the Moon landing. What the hell was Richard Nixon doing there? It was a drag, not only because I regarded him (and still do) as a war criminal, but because he would have cancelled the whole thing if he could have, and everybody knew it. And yet I was thrilled. I watched it, knowing exactly what it meant when we--humans, not just men, not just Americans--took our first steps on another world. I knew we had taken a step that wouldn't be taken back. And let's don't forget, the 1960s were not entirely anti-technology. We weren't simple-minded luddites. We were complex luddites. The cover of the Whole Earth Catalogue was the picture of earthrise on the Moon taken by Apollo Eight. The Whole Earth vision was a NASA vision. Science fiction reflected this ambivalence. It had to. Writers and readers alike, we were part of the times. Many of the SF writers of today came of age, like Bill Clinton, in the 1960s. We were formed and transformed by the same forces. Plus, we inhaled. Science fiction in the 1960s had new agendas. It was no longer a boys', or even exclusively a men's literature. Ursula LeGuin and Joanna Russ brought a new feminist consciousness; there had always been a few women writers but they had written under men's name. Black writers such as Samuel Delany and a new generation of white writers made sensitive to racism, not only brought a better understanding of diversity--they added Black people to the literature. All these plus writers like Disch, Malzberg, Bester, Dick, Ellison (many with one foot still in the Golden Age) began to explore what happens with science fiction when you add such literary values as complex character and good writing; when you do a second and third draft. In spite of the protests (and people are still complaining about SF getting "too literary") the genre didn't explode; or implode; or die. For the first time science fiction writers were not scientists first. They were writers first, and scientists (if they had any science at all; for science was becoming like Latin and Greek for an English gentleman in the 19th century, honored mainly in the breach) second. In the 1960s SF spawned its first literary movement, the New Wave, modeled in part the Beat Generation--the last successful self-conscious literary movement in Western literature--with closer links to the humanities than to the sciences, and with more in common with the kids in the streets and the guerrillas in the mountains than with the scientists in Houston, Pasadena and Huntsville. I say this without apology. I think it was a good thing. And yet, as with every step forward, something was lost. In the case of science fiction, what was lost was the major chord. The dream of space travel. All that was a quarter of a century ago, and I would argue that since then both halves of my interface, science fiction and space travel, have fallen onto hard times. The Post-Apollo Blues. The hard times are more obvious in NASA and the scientific community. As the sixties drew to a close the US was losing its first war and trying to buy off a rebellious population at home with expensive social programs. Even though it was he (and not Kennedy) who had first envisioned the Moon voyage, Lyndon Johnson didn't want to hear (and assumed the Congress didn't want to hear) about more programs for space. The Moon shot became just that, a Moon shot. After Apollo we never went back. NASA trimmed its sails to concentrate on a shuttle program that Arthur C. Clarke hoped might become "the DC-3 of space"; even before the Challenger disaster this gentlest of critics called it "the DC-1 1/2." Instead of reaching for the stars we were making ball bearings and launching spy satellites. Meanwhile the Soviet space program which had seemed so daunting, and had been in fact so leading, was found to have been choking on its own vomit all along. The state, or fate of science fiction today looks, at first glance, better. The book market has expanded dramatically, some might say grotesquely, to 1200-1500 titles a year, filling entire walls in the Daltons and Waldens. But more than half of it is not science fiction at all but fantasy, now marketed with SF as a single supercategory. Even the SFWA has become the SFFWA. I'm not knocking fantasy (well, perhaps I am)--at least I shouldn't be. At least half of my own work is fantasy. But much of today's fantasy is product, very predictable stuff, warmed over Tolkein imitations or Moorcock reprises, looking not to possible futures but to magically impossible pasts, inhabited by perky fairies and elves, dreary dwarves and demented trolls; where King Arthur clones pick their way between steaming piles of unicorn and dragon dung. It is not a literature of new ideas. In SF "proper" (if I may use the word) the changes the 1960s wrought have been permanent. It is no longer a men's literature--at least half of the most award-winning writers are women. It is no longer afraid or unwilling to explore social issues. The general level of the writing is much higher (though it has at times a certain sameness, almost like mainstream.) The most recent science fictional movement, the Cyberpunks, includes some fine writers--Bill Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Pat Cadigan are as good as we've got. But it is telling that they explore inner rather than outer space--a dystopian, computer-generated virtual reality. And the "hard" SF authors like Bear and Benford generally treat space travel as a past accomplishment and not as a new adventure. SF is big at the movies but it's pretty shabby stuff, at least compared to the grand old days of 2001, which at least attempted to capture the emptiness, silence and coldness of space. What was "Star Wars" but just the Battle of Britain in high vac, complete with wings and sound effects, with Alec Guiness playing Churchill? But no cigar. What is "Star Trek" but a Motel Six in space, going where no Motel Six has gone before, with a weirdly politically correct crew wearing NBA warmup suits, in a social organization that echoes the British navy of Nelson's time? And each generation as dreary as the last. It is surely pointless to rail against all this. I'm only revealing myself as a curmudgeon who remembers the trash of his childhood with fondness, and looks on the trash of today with scorn. It's not as if Sturgeon's Law, which says that ninety percent of everything (including SF) is crap, was ever repealed. Yet I do think there is a point to be made. Science fiction is no longer subversive even by accident; it is not where people look for possible and exciting new futures. I think that without its major chord of space travel, SF has suffered an identity crisis. It is one that I hope we are about to come out of--for I am hopeful about the future, not only of science fiction, but of the space program as a whole. Several years ago, after writing three novels, two of them fantasy and one an alternate history, and finding myself accepted to some extent by both readers and my fellow writers, I decided to write a conventional, old fashioned, real if you will, science fiction novel. What about? A trip to Mars. What else? My novel, Voyage to the Red Planet, has certain satirical elements. NASA and the US Navy have been sold off to service the national debt, and the first Mars voyage is undertaken by a Hollywood movie studio, hoping that a good box office can make the voyage pay off. But the book has serious elements. The ship they use is a US-Soviet vessel left over from an earlier cancelled voyage. The story grew more serious as it went along, the characters as well as the author getting into the trip--teaching me first hand what it was that I cared most about and missed most in SF. Voyage is on one level at least an actual science fiction adventure about the first steps onto another planet. Now interestingly enough (for I don't claim to have started a trend) the past few years have seen an explosion of trip-to-Mars novels. Some good, some bad, some indifferent, and one great. We have Fred Pohl's Mining the Oort Cloud; Robert Forward's ??????; Jack Williamson's Beachhead; Ben Bova's Mars. And the best of them all, Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars. Robinson bears a little discussion here. He's one of the best of the "literary" science fiction writers; he's academically trained (he has a PhD in English); and he is repeatedly, indeed almost invariably (and almost always unfairly), attacked for being Not Really SF. Yet it is Robinson, I would submit, who has begun the work of restoring SF's "major chord" with a mammoth new undertaking of three novels about the colonization of Mars. The first, just published by Bantam, is called Red Mars. It concerns the First Hundred, the carefully-selected group of settlers sent to Mars at the beginning of the next century; and it presents a fascinating look at the political contradictions that develop between the settlers and the countries and corporations that sent them, and between those who want to preserve Mars and those who want to exploit and terrform it. Green Mars and Blue Mars will carry the story forward. Robinson brings to this monumental task the transformed sensibility of which I spoke: he's a humanist, a feminist, a Marxist. He's enough of a scientist to be painstakingly accurate to the real Mars, and enough of a writer to be dazzlingly faithful to the landscape. He's great with character--but then lots of SF writers can create character these days. Robinson is our W.H. Hudson who can bring exotic landscapes alive. To love this book is to love Mars. I think--I hope--it will reawaken a lot of the sleepers in SF, and put us all back to work. So I am encouraged. At my most hopeful I think that in these few robins there is a spring; and that the technological and imaginative infrastructure that we have allowed to fall almost into ruin will be rescued and rebuilt; and that we will have a space station, an optical observatory on the Moon, a workable and truly reusable shuttle; robot tours of the outer and inner planets; and that Mars will make it happen. I agree with Michael Collins--the best writer who ever went to the Moon; the Francis Parkman of the lunar plains--that Mars will pull everything else in its wake. That a giant step will prompt the smaller ones. In fact I fully expect it to happen. And in my lifetime. I would hope it would not be an exclusively American enterprise--that we have outgrown that stage. We science fiction writers can't make it happen, but we are a legitimate part of the dream. I think I can say, looking at the new spate of Mars books, that we are beginning to get over the Post Apollo Blues. We have learned some lessons, and are committed to a new kind of literature, more inclusive, more intelligent, more sophisticated, but still visionary. And still pointed up. Toward the Stars. Thank you.</PLAINTEXT>