Sometimes, when I write an essay here, I know I’m holding back for the purposes of making another point. In my piece last week, “On zero-sum versus positive-sum thinking”, I brought us to the gentle revelation that maybe, just maybe, we’d do well to think about old works of political theory as a kind of science fiction, too.
But there was a level of slyness to this conclusion, because this is only a revelation when writing within a culture with a highly commercial view of science fiction. Ever since the 1920s, when Hugo Gernsback hustled with magazines, conferences, and a personal history of progenitors in the form, we’ve viewed the genre—the market, to be precise—in a way that often shrouds deeper, richer histories of speculative literature.
It might even be fair to say that it is much rarer for a work not to be speculative—and across all modes of writing: sermons, poetry, songs, chivalric romances, histories, biographies, theories of the Earth and all who roam upon it. The body of human literature that aspires to a rigorous adherence to the facts, in a strictly “realist” manner that prioritizes observation and inductive reasoning over all else, is much smaller than we might imagine, or want to. We have always been dreamers first.
Even the affection of “hard” science fiction, so often the topic of silly arguments in my commercial-genre communities, is more aspirational than grounded in canon.
Science fiction of Gernsback’s era, for instance, had two major threads: work that explored an ostensibly plausible scientific concept in a fantastical setting, and work that manifested Western settler culture—Cowboys and Indians!—in a whole new frontier. Often, the aliens depicted in stories of his time blatantly coded for Native Americans and other non-white peoples, as if “red men” from Mars were going to steal Earth’s women, land, and resources just the same as other, earthbound “savages”, if something wasn’t done by the “civilized” set soon.
But for all the fantasy-westerns that filled these pages, there was also this idea—especially through Gernsback—that science fiction needed a level of scientific fact to be legitimate. To this end, he read back through parts of the 19th Century and early 20th Century, plucking out the names of writers he felt best embraced the importance of “hard” science in their narratives. Here’s how he put it, in the very first issue of Amazing Stories, almost a century ago in 1926:
There is the usual fiction magazine, the love story and the sex-appeal type of magazine, the adventure type, and so on, but a magazine of “Scientifiction” is a pioneer in its field in America.
By “scientifiction” I mean the Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, and Edgar Allan Poe type of story—a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision. For many years stories of this nature were published in the sister magazines of Amazing Stories—Science & Invention and Radio News.
But with the ever increasing demands on us for this sort of story, and more of it, there was only one thing to do—publish a magazine in which the scientific type of story will hold forth exclusively. Toward that end we have laid elaborate plans, sparing neither time nor money.
Did you catch that final paragraph, though?
It’s one of those fascinating details that slips through the cracks in our histories of individual genius. The same way that we’re often taught the Gutenberg Press is what created mass literacy, so too is Gernsback configured as someone who crafted the genre whole-cloth. Not so, though. In the case of the press, its development was a response to an already increasing demand for books, thanks to the growth of universities, clerical institutes (hermitages, churches, schools), and book fairs—yes! book fairs!—in the preceding century. Did the press make a huge difference? Absolutely. But the momentum for change was cultural before it was technological—and that’s an important nuance to keep in mind, when writing about the world.
Likewise, in the case of “scientifiction”? Gernsback himself noted, in his introductory mission statement, that the demand preceded his product. There were already publications sharing these sorts of stories, happily mixed in with other tales.
His invention, then, was the distillation of “scientifiction”, and the curation of the form at a distance from other literature. This most certainly served US markets, which would have a splendid time in subsequent decades, further compartmentalizing and categorizing every imaginable literary “subgenre”… but we might do well to consider what was also lost, in this way of thinking about our literary inheritance.
The 19th Century was rich in speculative works—new inventions, new diseases, space adventures, and alien species hidden here on Earth.
The piece we’re going to look at today, for paid subscribers, is part of a continuum of alternate-society fictions that existed in the 19th Century. But we’re going to look at it the same way we looked at Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations in my last essay—because, yes, William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890) is easy to read as political theory, an exciting bit of early utopian socialism.
However, as with Smith, Morris was also writing in a context, in response to a heaving mass of ideas circulating in his time—and the way that Morris shapes ideas about utopia tells us something important about the work of imagining utopia in any era: namely, that it is always confined by the anxieties of its present.
When we learn how to identify the hangups in past dreaming of better worlds, maybe—just maybe—we can better manage the inevitability of similar in our own.
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