The Wooden Force—Escape With SF

First published in Phlogiston Twenty-Five, May 1990.

Science Fiction is often accused of being an escapist literature and its readers are sneered at for running away from reality into the fairy tale world on their bookshelves. In a sense, there is a lot of justice to that accusation. The dead sea bottoms of Barsoom and the semi-mystical powers of the Grey Lensman don’t, on the face of it, have very much to do with every day living.

I’m quite sure that there really are people to whom SF is a safety valve, an escape, a world to hide in away from the nasty realities of life the universe and everything. But you can say the same sort of thing about all the genre literatures. Phillip Marlowe is no more real than Kimball Kinnison and the seedy streets he inhabits are just as much a figment of the imagination as are the streets of Helium where John Carter roams. So why should SF bear the brunt of the escapist accusations? Probably because it self-avowedly deals with unrealities, things that never were and (probably) never will be. It does not claim to have connections with reality—indeed, often it glories in the lack of such claims. Other generic forms are much more familiar to us and no matter how distorted the picture they present, it is still recognisably home.

But I’m not sure that such surface trappings are really important. I think the very nature of the unreality that SF portrays is still deeply rooted in the contemporary reality that produced them in the first place. I think it is facile to dismiss the exotic, alien landscapes of SF as escapist. The truth is much more subtle than that. Let me tell you why.

I suppose the idea first occurred to me when I was in my early teens. I was reading a lot of historical fiction at the time and among my favourite books were the Hornblower novels of C. S. Forester. The books were grittily realistic depictions of life aboard ship in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century and they were enormously popular. However the viewpoint character, Horatio Hornblower himself, was somewhat odd. Forester used him to analyse the making of a man, and followed his career from midshipman to admiral. We as readers shared Hornblower’s thoughts and feelings. We knew the deep insecurity of the man, his hopes, his fears and his worries. That, in a large measure, explains the popularity of the books—it was the character of Hornblower which was so attractive; he was everyman. All of Forester’s readers could identify with him (we all feel just as insecure inside ourselves). And that is where, to some extent, Forester cheated because Hornblower was a twentieth century man. Many of the ideas he espoused and the feelings he had were quite alien to the time in which he lived (particularly his views on shipboard discipline). I’m not sure that Forester could help it—every writer puts a little of himself into his works—and it certainly made the books much more interesting to a contemporary audience. Nonetheless it detracted from the realism and it anchored the books much too firmly into the twentieth century, into Forester’s reality rather than Hornblower’s.

I suspect it is almost impossible to divorce yourself so completely from your surroundings that you don’t put anything of yourself into the things that you write. Whether the novel is set in the past or the future is not really relevant. The important thing is that it is created in the present.

Once I’d spotted that fact about Hornblower, I started to keep my eyes open for similar sorts of things in other books. It was almost invariably there. No matter how weird, other-worldly, science fictional or escapist the book was, there was always a firm grounding in the contemporary here and now.

Many books, of course, do it on purpose. The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and Cyril Kornbluth is a perfect case in point. The book is principally concerned with satirising twentieth century American advertising practice and the science fictional trappings are there mainly to prop up the satire, rather than the other way around. It would be hard to imagine a less escapist book (unless the satire bypasses you entirely—but if you’re that dim you probably don’t live in the real world anyway).

The same effect is visible even in books that deliberately set out to be “futuristic”. It is probably most noticeable in space operas of the Doc Smith variety. Kimball Kinnison’s moral code is a direct reflection of the boy scout mentality of E. E. Smith’s youth. Smith has (probably deliberately) set Kinnison up as an icon by giving him these admirable characteristics. We identify with the hero (that’s why he’s a hero for heaven’s sake) and so we have to be able to relate to him. If he was too outre we couldn’t do that.

These examples are the most blatant ones, of course. Often the effect is much more subtle, but it’s usually there. If it wasn’t there at all, we probably wouldn’t be able to understand the story anyway because we wouldn’t have anything to hang our mental perceptions on. In his critical study In Search of Wonder Damon Knight discusses the book Murder in Millenium VI by Curme Gray in which the writer has deliberately attempted to tell the story without contemporary references. In Knight’s words “…there is not a word in the book that might not logically have been written by the narrator for the edification of his own posterity”. Some of the background can be worked out from the context, but a lot of it is never explained at all, and because we lack the referents, there is absolutely no way at all that we will ever understand it. This may well explain why most of you have probably never heard of the book. In a very real sense, it is incomprehensible. So why bother reading it in the first place? It didn’t sell well and has never been republished. The only place you find it now is in rare book stores where it sells for vast amounts of money.

In order properly to understand a book you must ask yourself “What is this book about?”. Only the most naive reader will answer that question by saying words to the effect that “It’s about this bug-eyed monster which invades the earth and eats up people”. A simple catalogue of the events of the plot gives little insight into the things the book is talking about, provided it really is talking about something, of course. In the better books there is usually quite a lot going on under the surface. If there is nothing going on then the book is often unreadable; at least as far as I am concerned. I simply cannot read books which are all surface—they bore me to distraction. Again, Damon Knight coined a beautiful phrase to sum this up. Talking about a particular writer, he remarked that “all his depth was in shallow places”. As an aside, I feel that this aspect is one which often lets role playing down—there is so much concern with the surface glitter and gloss that too many times there is a failure to realise that underneath the glitter is nothing at all. In cases like this my major reaction is to ask plaintively—what is the point? The point (in literature as well as gaming) is generally trivial. So why bother?

If you extend this analysis too far you run into the very real danger of being called an intellectual snob. (I have been called exactly that by my father, among other people) and I suppose that I have to admit to it. I seem to look for things that other people barely notice—and even if they do notice, they often consider them unimportant. However to me these are very real concerns and all the space opera derring-do in the universe can’t attract me if the whole point of it is simply itself, its own values, the “reality” of a false space-time continuum. That’s simply science fictional navel gazing. To that extent therefore I reject the charge of escapism. To me SF is not escapist (and the SF that is escapist is shallow and I don’t read it).

If we accept that the subtext of a piece of literature is concerned with contemporary twentieth century living (because it was written by a contemporary twentieth century living person) then escapism becomes a non-issue since it simply doesn’t exist, at least not in the derogatory sense that the word is often employed.

Nevertheless, the dead sea bottoms of Barsoom continue to haunt me. Doubtless you have your own favourite places, your own spine-tingling delights. It is that experience, the good old-fashioned sense of wonder, which keeps us reading the stuff isn’t it? Given the things that I’ve been saying in this essay, how can I possibly justify the fact that I still read Edgar Rice Burroughs? Why am I currently reading a book whose major villain is a Nazi mind-vampire? (Carrion Comfort by Dan Simmons; if you are interested.)

I could get very Jesuitical here and point out the satire which Burroughs buried in his earlier books (it surfaced again in his later works—Tarzan and the Ant Man is a masterpiece of social comment). It is really only the works of his middle years that are dull and boring, a total waste of time. I defy anybody to read Tarzan and the Leopard Men without falling asleep round about chapter four.

I could talk about the way Dan Simmons’ novel examines the morality of violence and poses (and attempts to answer) the question of how corrupting absolute power really is. How would such feelings express themselves? What motivates a man who has total control?

I could be accused of casuistry. Perhaps I am attempting to justify my liking for these essentially escapist works after the fact. I like these books therefore they must have merit because I don’t like books which do not have merit. The syllogism is obvious. On the surface, they really do seem to be exactly the sort of escapist trash which I have spent most of this essay denying the existence of (except in a minority of cases). Aren’t I trying to have my cake and eat it too? Another person could deny that the subtext exists. Isn’t it just subjective?

I like to believe that I’m not that intellectually dishonest.

To say that the distinctions which I have attempted to draw do not exist seems to me to deny also the existence of any yardstick by which to measure the merit of a book. To lump it all together and call it escapist rubbish makes it impossible to distinguish between E. E. “Doc” Smith and Cordwainer Smith. I chose those examples quite deliberately because I used to know someone who, quite literally, could not tell the difference between works by these two writers. For someone as brain-dead as that, it probably is true that SF is just escapism because that sort of person simply cannot see beneath the surface. Subtlety is not a word in their vocabulary.

The fact that I deliberately choose to read books by particular writers is just as important as the fact that I deliberately choose not to read books by other writers. My reasons for making the choice are the ones I’ve spent the last umpteen hundred words attempting to justify. But I must emphasise that it is a conscious and deliberate choice which is not based on feelings (“I don’t like it” or “It’s boring” or “I’m frightened of purple monsters”).