Science Fiction and Sanity In an Age of Crisis

by PHILIP WYLIE

PHILIP WYLIE is widely known as a philosopher and psychologist; his criticisms of contemporary man and his society have appeared in such hooks as Generation of Vipers.

He is also a writer of fiction and science fiction as well as science fantasy; with Edwin Balmer, he wrote When Worlds Collide, recently made into a motion picture; his end-of-the-world story, "Blunder," originally printed in Collier's, has appeared in many anthologies; others of his science-fiction novels are The Murderer Invisible, Gladiator, and in a recent hut more fantastic vein, The Disappearance.

Part I

IT HAS BECOME trite to point out that, when an atomic bomb was detonated over Hiroshima and the news was spread abroad, the only considerable group of Americans who understood what it meant consisted of kids. The kids were held to be those who read science-fiction magazines, books and so-called comic books. To be sure, science-fiction magazines have been in existence for a long while, and the "kids" who read the early ones, like myself, are in their forties or fifties. And science-fiction novels, in a sense, are older than civilization. Even modern science fiction has quite a history.

Jules Verne is long dead; shortly after Einstein made his first formulations, the brilliant H. G. Wells produced a book based on atomic bomb warfare. Still, the assumption was that only young people currently engaged in reading about imaginary atomic marvels were able to comprehend the marvel of the Manhattan Project.

In any case, it is certain beyond any doubt that most adults, including nearly every single member of Congress, hadn't the foggiest idea of the meaning of such terms as

"nuclear fission" or "chain reaction." It is also axiomatic that, wherever a subject with vast emotional content comes to public notice, and whenever the public lack realistic or scientific data on the subject, a mythology is created by the people as a substitute for truth. That is not even a subjective assertion; visible behavior demonstrates it every day.

If something is seen in the sky that nobody appears able to explain that "something"

begins to "appear" all over the world, in countless forms, doing different things.

Nevertheless (since the "something" is unknown and hence frightening in a very alarming epoch) a myth is immediately created--it is a "flying saucer," extra-terrestrial, inhabited by nonhuman "people" with superhuman intelligence--and so on, through the whole, silly and familiar event.

Yet the need to know every factual detail about every object or scientific concept likely to be emotion-packed and of wide public concern is not merely evident but forms the basis of the idea of democracy. In a dictatorship, of whichever hand, the need of the people to know is not great. If what they do not know alarms them, the State can punish enough of them for panicky behavior to calm the rest or at least to make the rest assume the outward semblance of calm. But in a democracy, the people must know--or the democratic process dissolves, by its very definition.

For we hold that a majority of any people properly informed will reach appropriate decisions. On that assumption rests our form of government. Without it, there can be no political freedom--hence no actual freedom of any sort. This great idea was evolved principally in Greece, following the reforms of Solon and Clisthenes. It died out under the dogmatic pressures of the early Christians which, in turn, produced the Dark Ages. It was restored by the Renaissance, revolutions in industry, and so on, a few hundred years ago and reached its full flourish in numerous nations in the eighteenth century.

At that time, any citizen and voter with a mere decade of current education had a reasonable comprehension of nearly all the main lines, and all the relevant lines, of contemporary knowledge and speculation. He (or she) was, indeed, "properly informed."

He (or she) was therefore, by democracy's basic assumption, capable of making realistic and forward-looking decisions upon all matters of public import. The democratic idea was then workable and men enjoyed unparalleled measures of personal liberty.

The formula of freedom does not apply today. In the last century, mere factual knowledge has piled up so rapidly that men, including the very scientists who have piled it up, hold it to be impossible for any solitary person to have a good general knowledge of all the fundamental facts and processes in all the sciences and their branches.

Furthermore, science proceeds in two fashions: by blind pragmatism and by speculation followed by careful checking. If the pragmatic facts cannot be poured into any Single human head--the speculations that outreach facts will be far beyond individual competence; for all such speculations about the Unknown rise from the Known.

The result is that we live today (and most of our savants agree we will be henceforward forever obliged to go on living) in a world where it is impossible to have a completely informed minority-- let alone a thoroughly knowledgeable majority. It follows as inevitably as freeze in zero weather that the people are incapable as a whole of making appropriate decisions. It follows, too, that even the scientists are incapable of invariably making appropriate decisions on all topics for all men: they are specialists. They have confessed and even asserted the principle of general uneducability based on the thesis that there's too much to learn. Hence the judgments of any particular astrophysicist, for instance, in a matter of, say, public health, may be as irrelevant, as uninformed and as mistaken as an opinion on the same subject offered by an uneducated baseball player.

And the vote of a great surgeon on, say, a matter of Hood control, may fall as stupidly, as asininely, as the ballot of a moron.

The near-total ignorance of Congress in the matter of the structure of the atom in the year 1945 is a case in point. Brien McMahon, Chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy and Senator from Connecticut, once told this author that, on the day the announcement was made of the use of the atomic weapon, he had no lucid understanding of the technical aspect of the bomb. All he had was an intuition--an emotional sensation--that the bomb was of the utmost importance. However, unlike most members of Congress, he refused immediately to plan on the basis of mere emotions, loyalties, prejudices and so on. Instead, since his vacation began that day, he accompanied into the Maine woods a chemist of his acquaintance. He took along books.

For a month, he "briefed" himself intensively on nuclear physics and related topics, with the result that when he returned to Congress he had a powerful grasp of the subject, and more than that: he had a plan for dealing with atomic problems which he opposed to the then-existing scheme: the May-Johnson Bill, which would have turned over atomic science, lock, stock, and barrel, to the military. The McMahon Bill--because of one intelligent man's effort to learn--became the law of our land.

It was undoubtedly as "good" or as "liberal" a piece of legislation as the American citizens in Congress could be made to accept at that time. Why? The correct answer to that "Why?" is, today, self-evident to many persons and becoming plainer to more as time passes. But it was evident to very few in 1945 and 1946. So far as this writer is aware, he, alone, was the only American author who argued (in Collier's magazine and in syndicated newspaper columns) for measures utterly different from any Congress had in mind and who, at that early date, predicted the current era of terror and peril in the event that the notions of Congress became law. For those "notions" were of the "flying saucer"

variety. They were not evidence of thinking at all. Their content was emotional. Their interpretation was mythical. The Congressmen were not able to take into consideration the principle upon which democracy depends for the simple reason that they did not understand physics as a science, science as a method, and the atomic

detail.

Congress (you will remember) assumed that the atomic bomb was "secret" and the knowledge by which it had been created was a "military" secret. (So did the generals and admirals in the Pentagon, who knew no more about nucleonics than the senators and representatives.) Congress, in 1945, assumed that the Soviets would be unable to "solve the riddle of atomic energy" for another twenty or fifty years. In vain, the atomic scientists argued that all this was balderdash. In vain, they pointed out, beginning with Smyth in his famed Report, that Russia had access to the basic data, and brilliant physicists besides. Congress decided to "keep atomic energy secret." Of course, we have since learned that the Soviets were hard at work on the development of A-bombs by the middle of the war and Congress was as near to nutty in its speculations and beliefs as men can get without chewing rugs.

What Congress did, in essence, was to try to remove a large branch of simple, physical knowledge and science from general human cognizance. Atomic physics was thus ordained by law an official secret of a few men of science and a few military men--

to keep Russia and Russians ignorant. Of course, the Russians already knew--the whole world of science already knew--most of the facts which Congress suddenly proclaimed secret. And the Soviets swiftly managed, through Klaus Fuchs and others, to penetrate further secret details--by espionage--a certainty Congress ignored, since it acted as if the passage of its fiat would prevent such crime. But the bitter fact that, by legislation, Congress had for the first time denied to the people of the American democracy access to abstract knowledge did not occur to Congress or--if it did--failed to alarm Congress.

Thus, in 1946, through ignorance alone, the representatives of the American people set aside the fundamental process of democracy and, in a real sense, junked the Constitution. The Supreme Court was not asked to test the law but it is likely the Court would have failed, also, at that time, to see what had happened. Overnight, the American kids studying arithmetic could pursue it only so far. Beyond the point where it concerned physics, it was no longer knowledge entitled to free expression--it was secret. Overnight, the youngsters working with chemistry apparatus in laboratories found they could no longer learn all that science. The opportunity to become "properly informed" was taken away; thousands of years of effort to emancipate the human mind were, once again, crushed under a tyranny--in the American case, of "defense."

It was obvious to the very few who were willing and able to think rationally of the situation that other parts of other sciences would gradually go under the federal ban. They did. It was plain to the right-reader of human history and behavior that a vast and growing secrecy in government would continually expand into lesser (and even into irrelevant) areas, for secrecy is a cancer among free men, always. The cancer grew. As these lines are written, the President of the United States, in Bat contradiction to the expressed sense of our Constitution, has implied he has the power to seize the press. At this same time, newspaper editors in annual convention are worrying over a sickly spread of censorship, closed meetings, and secrecy into such doings as the conversations of the selectmen in village councils and the meetings of small town school boards. Meantime in Washington, a presidential edict has given every bureau the power, in the diffuse name of

"security," to withhold from the electorate any facts any bureau chooses to withhold.

All this should and could have been foreseen in 1945 and 1946, when the original matter of scientific "secrecy" was discussed. For the United States of America could not then, or ever, become a nation where science, or any part of science, was put under lock and key--without abandoning both democracy and liberty. The refusal of the Soviets to enter into a free, open and inspected world of science should have been regarded as a direct, hostile and intolerable blow to American liberty--one to be met with ultimatum if other means failed. The very few who saw that need were tarred as "warmongers" by the ignorance-ridden and fear-driven majority and even the physicists (!) failed to see that our national philosophy was being throttled. They regarded any thought of using force, not as the final, absolute necessity for a people wishing to stay free, but as a sicklier thing they called "preventive war." In the glare of the atomic blast, all USA was blinded to its history, its meaning and its ideals.

Today, as a direct result, the nation in which we live is no longer "governed by the people"--or even by their elected representatives. For Congressmen do not have the

"clearance" which entitles them to the facts--and even if they had the clearance, they would not have the intellectual capacity to assimilate and assay the facts. We are no longer permitted to know for what purposes the gigantic tax assessment upon us all is spent. We do not know what our government knows of the arms and plans of our potential battlefield enemy. We do not know what the foreign policy is--or if one exists worthy of the name--or on what new ideal (since democracy no longer prevails) it may be based. In many vital areas we, the American people, are as uninformed as the citizens behind Russia's Iron Curtain. Indeed, from the practical and actual viewpoint, USA is nowadays a quasi-dictatorship. For it so happens that only one elected American can be told all the facts: the President. Without a fight, without knowing what we did, we Americans abandoned freedom as a philosophy. It is not surprising the direct result is that we live in terror or insecurity, in anxiety or in a fatuous state of apathy, according to our personal knowledge and private nature.

For, by voluntarily cutting ourselves off from science we have left no modus vivendi for ourselves save by the invention of fables and myths--fables like flying saucers and myths like the notion that the Soviets couldn't crack the "atomic secret" for twenty--

or fifty--years. Thus the dawn of the atomic age is coincident with the greatest social blackout since the descending Dark Ages closed down on the knowledge of the Greeks and Romans.

Again, why? Even though most Americans can never expect to understand, say, the mathematics upon which the atomic bomb is based, there is a vast difference between (a) having such information publicly available and known to anyone who wishes to learn it and possesses the ability to learn it, and (b) outlawing such data for the general public.

Under the former condition, a people is potentially and theoretically free; under it, even an uninformed population gets intellectual and reassuring impressions of proper means for deciding political problems through open and public discussions on the part of those who do understand every matter in detail. But under the latter condition, which now prevails, the public--accustomed to liberty or its constant potentiality, absolute freedom of knowledge--suddenly realizes freedom has vanished. For now, even the people who do understand can't talk. No sensible impression of situations can be gathered by the naive from the debates of the learned. The philosophy that was the mainstay not just of liberty but of human individuation and self-assurance is gone. The era that will follow must be one of constant crisis--and negative crisis--since the positive sensations as well as positive facts have been taken away. That is what has happened--a tragedy of fantastic magnitude, all the worse for not being generally and consciously perceived--to a nation in which only "the kids" had any inkling of atomic facts so soon put under the steel wraps of military security. It is a deluded, objective kind of security, gained at the expense of the very foundations of the intellectual and emotional security of the American people--and, just incidentally, as a result, of all the peoples of Earth.

Part II

It may be asked what all this has to do with science fiction-- and even with science fiction and sanity. Obviously, the majority of the American people are not science-fiction buffs; neither are the majority of Americans Congressmen. Besides--though less obviously--it does not follow necessarily that even if the whole population read and understood and enthused over science fiction, the attitudes connoted above, which cost us our freedom, would have been altered in any fashion. For the fact cited at the opening of this argument-that only kids, in the main, understood the A-bomb--does not signify that their elders, given the same understanding, would have made a wiser, braver and more far-sighted resolution of the great crisis that rose when the Soviets blocked all hope of scientific freedom without war, or, at least, our willingness again to go to war to stay free.

The children and young people referred to here understood the mechanics of atomic bombs, more or less, and far better than the grownups, by and large. That is all. They had not been prepared by science fiction to contemplate the responsibilities at stake and the ideals involved. Hence, the fundamental questions of this essay are the following: Is science fiction truly educational? Does it, so to speak, present not only facts, and logical extrapolation therefrom, but tend to augment the reader's ability to reason?

Or does science fiction, by muddling fact with fancy, tend to delude and addle the mind?

Has science fiction any sort of obligation, aside from the task of entertaining anybody in any fashion the author deems profitable for himself? Or--put another way: does science fiction owe anything to the exalted standards of science itself? In short, does science fiction augment or aberrate human sanity in this age?

It will be held here that science fiction potentially can abet human wisdom but that the bulk of its present production has the opposite effect.

We have come to realize that mere factual knowledge is worthless by itself. Facts, however penetrative and productive, will serve the Hitlers and Stalins of this world as readily as free peoples. Yet the orientation of our public and our higher education for many decades has steadily tended toward the erroneous direction that comes from the assumption that specialization in one field of multitudinous facts constitutes "education."

This is hardly the case, as has been indicated here by the statement that an accomplished physicist may be no more able to appraise a problem in public health than a baseball player who, perhaps, never got past the fifth grade. We have produced, through the means of what we consider very high education, a large group of persons who are ultra-knowing in one or two special fields and--often--ultra-ignorant in the remaining hundreds of fields.

In that process, we have lost all sight, educationally, of the most fundamental teaching of all--the inculcation of an understanding of the principle upon which our national entity (and all our past national "success") has been founded. And science fiction has played its ancillary part in the tragedy.

Long ago, before there was any real science or any awareness of the nature of

"fiction," men compounded tales of heroes and gods who achieved nth-degree extensions of their sensory faculties. The strength of Hercules was as the strength of modern machines. The speed of Mercury was as the speed of the plane and the telegram. The ability of Circe to see things happening far away might have been owing to the witch's possession of a television set. Thor's hammer was like an A-bomb. A hundred old heroes and gods could fly--many disastrously, like Icarus and Phaethon. Legendary heroes could hear things going on at a distance of vast leagues, even as you and I hear over the telephone. The list is literally endless--a list of magic tricks invented by every barbaric people and every ancient nation--a list of mythological characters who could "do"

miraculously what we have later on so painfully learned to do, each man for himself, with machines, but in actuality.

These old myths were the substance or the personification of what corresponded in ancient peoples to what is today religion. But science, as we know, has not itself been of religious value to the devout and doctrinal. It has not yet found "God" amongst the galaxies. It has not touched any Heaven with radar or beamed communications to any angels or demons. Nevertheless it has built up, through science fiction, a vast body of legend that corresponds to those old legends which are, as the psychologists have shown, still the hidden substance of so much of modem religious doctrine. The venerable myths were merely an imaginary picturization of all that the various ancient peoples hoped to do or yearned to do--or, of course, feared might be done to them! Science fiction, by exactly the same process, takes what we know for certain, or for a reasonable certainty, and, by going on from there, expresses what we hope and yearn to achieve, as well as what we dread in the light of the things we now know.

This process--the teleological yearning from what is merely wanted toward what is not yet known or not yet available--was surely the basis of the start of religious thought. Out of it, step by step, man evolved his whole philosophy. And if the contributions of idol-worshipping pagans were horrendous and shocking, they nevertheless played a part by leading on to later, magnificent contributions, such as, for instance, the Golden Rule. Science itself is religious in form, though not in content: it hews steadfastly to the highest subjective principle man has so far been able widely to adopt: absolute inner honesty toward outer objects. This is, essentially, a mere transposition of the subjective teachings of Jesus to the outer world. Many authors have said, rightly, in the opinion of this one, that true science was impossible before the teachings and ideals of Jesus had been disseminated.

It is, therefore, the quasi-religious, the certainly philosophical aspect of the

"modern mythology" that is science fiction, which leads many commentators to assume its function is ipso facto for the general good. That assumption does follow, providing the example of science fiction in question actually represents at least some part of a formulation, process or philosophy that stands for what at is "best" or "truest" or

"highest" or "most complete" in all of science. The early myths were certainly both effective and affective: you can hardly find one that we have not turned into steel, vacuum tubes and whizzing electrons today. Hence the presumption that present "myths"

will automatically lead men onward--and upward.

There is, however, a difference between the two. The old myths formed a complete although naive grouping of the natural and real hopes and fears of everybody.

But our latter-day, self-conscious science fictions rarely exhibit a comparable inclusiveness. Early man proceeded to imagine from his feelings and his yearnings.

Modem imaginers proceed, as a rule, not from the total needs or total dreads of their societies, but, simply, from their private hankerings and alarms. Early man had, as the

"scientific" basis for his "science fiction," nothing more than a knowledge of his body: his running feet, lifting back, hearing ears, throwing arm--along with the capacities of the bodies of animals and the behavior of the elements seen in the incomprehended raw. But modem men have at their disposal a body of knowledge (which they regard as unassimilable for anyone person) but, as has been suggested here, no guiding, general principle.

Thus, to the ancient Scandinavian, it would have been wonderful to have a hammer like Thor's. But, because the old Nordics were close enough to instinct to remember its workings, they knew there were no absolutes in human nature and no unopposable, solitary forces. Thor therefore had his weaknesses--as when he failed to wrestle Death to the earth--as did the other mythological powerhouses. Achilles' heel is the Greek parallel.

To the modern writer of science fiction, however, these psychologically valid factors are unknown. Save when such writers intuitively copy the ancient myth-makers, they have no sense of the importance of myth as allegory--or of the balance required by all such extrapolation, if it is to remain congruent with human nature past, present and future. Hence the bulk of their offerings, unlike the old legends, contains no germ of human truth whatsoever. So it is a great mistake to identify science fiction with mythology and from the identification to deduce the deep benefit of the former. Indeed, as shall be suggested, the intellectual aegis under which most current science fiction is written suggests that its very depersonalization represents a kind of insanity--a loss of contact with reality . . . in this case, with human reality.

There are some exceptions, to be sure. H. G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come perceived that man's first greeting to the atomic age would be one of frenzy--that fear would lead to war--war to catastrophe--catastrophe to civilized rout--and only after that, would the wise among the surviving few endeavor to put together the human fragments on a basis of a philosophy loftier than the raging terrors of the interim. (As a

"civilization" we are starkly and plainly well into this dire expectation and exhibiting the emotional build-up that went before Wells' calamity.)

Even more strikingly, Olav Stapledon, in Odd John, has sensed how modern,

"scientific" man has failed to develop (by the same means of integrity and painful, slow empiricism) a science of himself and his motives adequate to match his objective science and so to conduct him securely through such crises as the present imbalance. In Odd John, the very few "superior" people who did possess that much sense, imagination, knowledge and insight were first forced to find each other in a world of comparative nitwits, next obliged to set up a truly rational and scientific society on a remote island, and, finally, under attack by a battle fleet dispatched from a stupid and interfering world (which they could easily have destroyed) these superior but still entirely human beings became so discouraged that they gave up their intention to create and promulgate a paradise for all men--and destroyed themselves. The book was written long before groups of busybodies publicly attempted to call a ten-year "moratorium" on scientific research. It was composed a very long time before the Congress of the United States (for all practical purposes and democratic aims) actually did call such a moratorium for the entire Earth.

As we sit in our urban homes today--and tonight--the lack of philosophy expressed in Odd John has loaded the engines of destruction foretold in The Shape of Things to Come. One small blunder, or one rageful afternoon in Washington or in the Kremlin, involving only a few men, could bring the world awake tomorrow morning with its hundred greatest cities smashed flat, aflame and radioactive and tens of millions of the burned, mad, horrified, starving and hysterical, surging on defenseless countrysides the world around. All the cities might follow in the ensuing weeks. This situation grows more homicidal with each passing year, in a ratio almost geometrical, and there is not a sign or symptom of its abatement, anywhere.

Certainly, if science fiction plays any large part in leading the minds of men toward new goals, the goals toward which it has led most of its addicts to date are more evil than those of their less well-informed forebears. Even among those authors of current science fiction who assert that, for a quarter of a century or more, science has been their passion, one does not find a deep and new insight, based on any science. Rather, their orientation leads most frequently to wild adventure, wanton genocide on alien planets, gigantic destruction and a piddling phantasmagoria of impossible nonsense. One needs only to read the contents of half a dozen representative magazines and anthologies to recognize the fact. The fiction is of a perverse order in that it departs from what is scientifically known of man's nature. The science is most commonly employed either ignorantly or for sadistic melodrama. Thus the very writers who claim a long and philosophical intimacy with science and pronounce themselves leaders of the developing future and inspirers of youth, do not know sciences enough to take their privilege with any sense of real responsibility.

They are nearly all ignorant of one area of science as large as all the rest: psychology. They have neither factual knowledge nor insight into that science which deals with subjectivity. Their factual knowledge--even when they have any real knowledge whatever (and some of the writers are renowned men of science)--is limited to a square or two of the universe, a category or two of gadgets, a few cross-sections of objective data. Their own motives, fears, hopes, temper, values and imaginings remain unweighed and obscure. Yet, without a science of such matters, what they write is irresponsible, in the sense that it pretends to be "modem" whereas it is contemporary in detail only--and inevitably, in meaning, archaic. What they are attempting to accomplish, then, is not what the Greeks or the Norsemen or the Indians accomplished for themselves in their time and their frames of reference--although they claim it to be, often enough.

They but create a new and sinister folklore, in which the latest facts from Massachusetts Institute of Technology are superimposed on a human insight hardly more developed than that of Bushmen.

Part III

It is for that reason Superman and Buck Rogers have given as frequent and severe nightmares to America's youth as the hoods and assassins who infest another area of American entertainment. Science fiction as a whole has made it possible for millions of adult Americans uncritically to accept the idea that the earth is being visited by men from outer space in dish-shaped ships. Books, magazines and aggregations of individuals, all representative of presumptively sober and responsible citizens, have been emboldened to give the lie to the Air Force, on their private recognizance. This psychologically toxic effect has been the most conspicious, so far, of science fiction. It has undoubtedly led many a young boy into scientific fields (where, as has been said, he possibly remained an undisturbed bigot in all areas save his own); but science fiction has contributed little information to the general public concerning humanity. On the contrary, under the reckless outpouring of purple exploit, it has probably made the public more credulous and befuddled than ever. And it has certainly destroyed much of the stable skepticism once present in the population--as was shown years ago by the Jersey panic which Orson Welles and his radio Martians so absurdly precipitated. Now, with the air-raid sirens of every big city in America set to sound warning, at a moment's notice, of the approach of atomic bombs, of the bacteria of a new sort of war, of nerve gases, of fusing hydrogen isotopes and heaven alone knows what else--the average citizen, oriented in the irresponsible myths of science fiction, can be thrown into a tizzy by an odd glimpse of Venus, a high balloon, or, likely, flyspecks on his walls--if he's told the Russians precipitated them there.

Our judgment of things and situations has been shattered. To be sure, seven years of federal secrecy in science have added a huge quantum of fear and credulity to that nation-wide neurosis. But the roots of the disease lie in the modern mythology of science rather than in scientific information itself--or even in the withholding of such information. The average person knows "a lot" could happen any time. He has no appropriate way, any longer, of determining what is possible and what is not--what is likely--and what is not, although "secrecy" has not yet, at least, alienated him from reality to any such degree. The myths of science fiction produced the alienated condition by their irresponsibility, their psychological wantonness and their abuse of logic and reality.

Most science fiction is trash, ill-conceived and badly written. Little distinction is made between stories that are scientifically probable (or, at least, conceivable) and stories called "pure fantasy" that have no purity as such. Every fantasy, impossible though it may be from the standpoint of "happenability," has an effect. And unless fantasy either consciously or intuitively states a complete philosophical hypothesis or truth, its only effect on the reader will be one of shock--like the shock occasioned by hearing a horrid account of a nightmare from someone else. Readers who consider themselves beyond the point at which they can be "shocked" in that sense, usually are unaware that their unconscious minds respond, often enough, in a way opposite to the fashion in which they think. All those (few) readers who do understand the subconscious, will see in the savage, silly amorality of the usual science-fiction fantasy a symptom of our general, mental disorder.

For whenever the imagination is allowed full play by a contemporary mind too naive to see the implications of the plots, situations, characters, action and symbols it conjures up, what is produced is merely a sample of the neurotic personality almost universal in this age. By all such process, the brain is deliberately detached from reason.

Most brains, furthermore, lack instruction and education in the vast knowledge of mind and personality that lies, largely unused, in the files of modern science. The story planner who works in that now-obsolete fashion therefore has recourse to nothing save archaic and subaware material, such as bad dreams are made of. To clap a "happy ending" on a tale in which (say) whole planets-full of hostile Zoogoos have been radioactively exterminated by an aggressive American hero, is merely to set ringing echoes of our primitive hatreds and the inevitably accompanying creep of primordial fears.

To our common American way of "thinking" (since the lowest denominator of the most popular tales reflects that way) the universe is ninety or more per cent dangerous and hostile. Most space ships plunge across their abysses into combat with, or captivity, menace or torture by, brainy beasts of fathomless indecency. (We appear to trust brains less than knives in our own hands!) And where the universe is seen as benign, the quality is paternal: i.e., some mighty superman (as in the recent motion picture, The Day the Earth Stood Still) lands on earth (or is joined afar by "earthlings") and sets aright everything that galls, frightens, worries or enrages the author. So, we have not individuated as persons or as a species. We either battle madly and without asking why, against a world we hate and resent, or else we maintain through adulthood an infantile attitude--expecting a "deity" of some sort--or a Man from Mars to fix things up the while we do as we damned please.

Such is a sampling of the "psychology" of the ordinary science-fiction story.

There are, it must be repeated, a few exceptions and all of them, if written articulately enough, have become classics.

Men like Freud, Adler, Jung, Toynbee and many more have shown the nature and the overwhelming importance of the myth to man. To Freud (if some oversimplification may be permitted here) random myths are infantile efforts to recapture situations that have no place in the mature mind. Often compulsive, always, in such cases, symptomatic, fantasies carry the lusts and hates of the cradle into the grown-up years. To Adler, invented legends attempt to compensate for a sense of insecurity, doubt of self, and inferiority feelings. To Jung and to Toynbee, myths are the philosophical stuff upon which whole societies are built; and when a given set of myths decays or becomes obsolete in the face of reality, it is a sign the believing and practicing society is doomed.

Our science fiction, as has been indicated, shows a regressive mythological bent; as has also been suggested, where it evades the rules of science and draws on the imagination without regard to logic or knowledge, it is obsolete. The fact that hardly a handful of science-fiction authors have any knowledge of the discoveries of the psychologists indicts the rest as obsolete for this age of crisis. It indicts, equally, the physical scientists themselves, for their pronunciamentos concerning everything but their sciences are as unlearned, the reader will recall and perceive, as the cosmic opinions that used to be uttered for the press by the late, great Babe Ruth.

So--all unconsciously--the majority of us who write from time to time a fiction of science, have devoted ourselves to the science of things and stayed kindergarten--

ignorant of the science of human beings. It is not a timely or intelligent functioning, in a world where data for a more contemporary performance is available.

The proper function of the science-fiction author--the mythmaker of the twentieth century--would be to learn the science of the mind's workings and therewith to plan his work (as many "serious" writers do) so it will represent in meaning the known significance of man. Logical extrapolations from existing laws and scientific hypotheses should be woven into tales congruent not with our unconscious hostilities and fears but with the hope of a subjective integration to match the integrated knowledge we have of the outer world. Pure fantasies should be rendered truly pure--and every ending, "happy"

or ironic, ought to describe a process of personality and conform to facts of inner experience.

For the reader not only projects himself into each tale he encounters, but he considers it, whether he is aware of the fact or not, from the allegorical standpoint. It becomes a parable to him and even though he forgets the detail, its lesson (implication) remains in him as a "feeling." If the lesson be no more than that the universe, including man, is a great zoo of horrible beasts, his subsequent responses will be such as we see on every hand, these days: fugue, flight, aggression, and panic like the one Orson Welles precipitated, or a slug-nutty apathy such as overcomes pigs in mazes too difficult for their insight-"hysteria," in short, the kind that characterizes most Americans this very day. For while we know our cities can be swept away overnight and may be, few of us will even prepare for the onslaught, or make ready to defend ourselves or pick up our wounded and bury our dead. We prefer to take a mocking or guiltily recessive view of our own "Civil Defense"!

We science-fiction writers--most of us--have taught the people a little knowledge, but such a little and in such a blurred and reckless fashion that it constitutes true and factual information in the minds of very few. More than that, we have taught the people to be afraid--because most of us are afraid, and do not realize it. That man is a positive force, evolving and maturing, responsible for his acts and able if he will to deal with their consequences, we have not said.

The Greeks and all the others had no means of appraising their myths or of evaluating the religion founded on those myths. Yet their myths add up to a concept more civilized, more mature, more positively inspiring than the mythology of our times. And we are the more barbarous because of our relative decline. We might be able to set ourselves and the clock of our evolution some thousands of years ahead, if the mythmakers took upon themselves the responsibility for learning the science of the mind and the personality. Indeed, after thumbing through several bookfuls of their efforts, this author feels that most of them should commence the procedure by submitting to psychoanalysis! Alas. . . .

Many will take umbrage at what has been said here; let them. Let the case rest on the future, on, say, the approaching atomic war. If it comes, we shall see how far our decerebrated rashness will carry us back toward primordial behavior. Then we shall see what men are made of. And afterward, as the survivors collect the pieces, they will perhaps be obliged to study man inside and discover how paranoid and how schizoid he has been for how many, many, many battling, tedious generations, simply because he has stubbornly gone on trying to conquer himself by conquering others and trying to conquer the world instead of trying to comprehend it.

This one author, however, believing as he does in liberty and above all else in freedom of knowledge (since all other liberties, by democratic definition, rise from an informed majority) would compel no one to rearrange his mind in a fashion suitable to his era. Men cannot be compelled to behave intelligently; any effort in that direction leads to madness. They can only be urged or advised or offered the instruction, in such matters as a deepening of their consciousness and a reforming of their ideals. . . .

Not long ago, standing on Frenchman's Flat, I watched an atomic bomb unfold its awesome surge of intolerable, white light. With such a glory in our hands I thought it time to stop acting like painted Indians. Time to restore freedom of knowledge on the face of the earth by whatever measures and sacrifices are necessary. Time, with freedom restored, to go out to learn and woo the universe--not lob hot metal at it. And the first step in this engaging adventure, this beginning of maturity in our species, would be to correct the myths, to bring them up-to-date, to discover in the front part of our brains the meaning of that old instinct of evolution which has brought life the long way from amoebas to you and me, and then to write down the discovery in allegories which would fill men with justified hope, rather than ignorant, personal fear.

Until now, men have always first employed their new discoveries as methods to injure their fellow men and only after one or more wars, adopted them to creative purposes. Would to God we could avoid the process this time!

It's our problem, I believe, and we could solve it if we but would!

Table of Contents

Part I

Part II

Part III