G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936) loved to debate. Among his interlocutors at public forums were George Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow, and H. G. Wells; he also enjoyed engaging over ideas as a recreational virtue. He wrote 80 books and 4000 newspaper columns. Today, he is best known for the Father Brown mysteries that stream on BritBox. (Originally, the books presented 51 stories in five volumes over three decades.) Chesterton supported liberal and even progressive social reforms but as a convert from Unitarianism to Anglicanism and finally Roman Catholicism, he was essentially conservative. Therefore, Chesterton condemned science fiction as “fear of the past.”
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| Chesterton writing from www.chesterton.org |
To me, his literary style was “confectionary.” He wrote for people who have time to enjoy reading, for whom being in your own living room in an overstuffed chair with a book or newspaper is relaxing and refreshing because it is intellectually stimulating. So, he takes a long time to make a point. There are no punchy aphorisms here.
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| Gilbert Keith and Frances Blogg Chesterton from www.chesterton.org |
“The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen--which is (apparently) much easier. The modern man no longer presents the memoirs of his great grandfather; but is engaged in writing a detailed and authoritative biography of his great-grandson. Instead of trembling before the specters of the dead, we shudder abjectly under the shadow of the babe unborn. This spirit is apparent everywhere, even to the creation of a form of futurist romance. Sir Walter Scott stands at the dawn of the nineteenth century for the novel of the past; Mr. H. G. Wells stands at the dawn of the twentieth century for the novel of the future. The old story, we know, was supposed to begin: “Late on a winter’s evening two horsemen might have been seen--.” The new story has to begin: “Late on a winter’s evening two aviators will be seen--.” The movement is not without its elements of charm; there is something spirited, if eccentric, in the sight of so many people fighting over again the fights that have not yet happened; of people still glowing with the memory of tomorrow morning. A man in advance of the age is a familiar phrase enough. An age in advance of the age is really rather odd.
[…]
Now this same primary panic that I feel in our rush towards patriotic armaments I feel also in our rush towards future visions of society. The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. It is propelled towards the coming time; it is, in the exact words of the popular phrase, knocked into the middle of next week. And the goad which drives it on thus eagerly is not an affectation for futurity. Futurity does not exist, because it is still future. Rather it is a fear of the past; a fear not merely of the evil in the past, but of the good in the past also. The brain breaks down under the unbearable virtue of mankind. There have been so many flaming faiths that we cannot hold; so many harsh heroisms that we cannot imitate; so many great efforts of monumental building or of military glory which seem to us at once sublime and pathetic. The future is a refuge from the fierce competition of our forefathers. The older generation, not the younger, is knocking at our door. It is agreeable to escape, as Henley said, into the Street of By-and-Bye, where stands the Hostelry of Never. It is pleasant to play with children, especially unborn children. The future is a blank wall on which every man can write his own name as large as he likes; the past I find already covered with illegible scribbles, such as Plato, Isaiah, Shakespeare, Michael Angelo, Napoleon. I can make the future as narrow as myself; the past is obliged to be as broad and turbulent as humanity. And the upshot of this modern attitude is really this: that men invent new ideals because they dare not attempt old ideals. They look forward with enthusiasm, because they are afraid to look back.”
(“Fear of the Past” in What’s Wrong With the World, 1910. (Scanned and archived by Project Gutenberg and also Wikisource).
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| In those days of cold type before photo-offset, books were reset by hand. I found a discrepancy between two printings: in this essay the word "brave" (Cassell, London) appearing as "braver" (Dodd Mead, New York). "The charge of the Crusades was a charge; it was charging towards God, the wild consolation of the braver." |
Since my first professional sale in 1973, I have written three stories, two science fiction, one horror. Fiction is hard to write because you have to create people, and their actions must make sense because their universe is understandable. It is much easier to report on what I find: pet groomers, political lobbyists, computers, restaurants, stars, coins, robots, airplanes. I take the people as I find them and usually publicize the best side of them. I also read science fiction and participate in the culture of it through ArmadilloCon here in Austin.
Before I could read, I watched Captain Midnight on television. The first science fiction book I read was The Magic Ball From Mars by Carl L. Biemiller (Curtis Publishing, 1953; website here: https://biemiller.com/bchapt1.htm.) I was nine. As wonderful as it was in two books to meet a boy from outer space, those were stories no different than Paul Bunyon and Davy Crockett. What changed was my library card. Entering the 9th grade, I traded my juvenile card for an adult card. After a few fruitless visits to the adult stacks and a last brief walk along the juvenile stacks, I asked the librarian for help. She gave me two books in one: When Worlds Collide and After Worlds Collide by Edwin Balmer and Philip Wylie.
I knew end-of-the-world stories as matinee movies about World War III and I knew The Day the Earth Stood Still. But this was different. I could see myself in the story. If we are going to another planet with the smartest people around, I knew some girls I would like to have gone with, especially once we arrive on Bronson Beta. This was a planet with an indoor pool! (It also had troublesome commies and fascists.) (Book and movie reviewed here: https://necessaryfacts.blogspot.com/2021/01/when-worlds-collide.html)
Closer to this decade, I read and enjoyed The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice. They are also invented worlds where the reader can find a place. Fitzgerald and Austen are compelling. But their worlds are static, not merely unchanged but unchangeable. Elizabeth Bennett does not perceive the canals and steam engines that are reshaping her world.
Gatsby is close to science fiction but unintentionally so. The plot hinges on an automobile accident. A generation earlier it could have been a horse-drawn carriage or any other happenstance for which people refuse to accept responsibility. But it was not. It was a new invention that they could not control.
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| by Alexandra Samuel, Ph. D. on JSTOR Daily February 19, 2019 https://daily.jstor.org/can-science-fiction-predict-the-future-of-technology/ |
Chesterton’s complaint is valid when people are taken out of their social context. He is concerned with eternal moral problems. Those never change. But the external world and our society within it all do change, especially now. And we believe that we have some control over those changes.
Our choices are greatly consequential. Ivanhoe could help King Richard but he could do nothing about feudalism, even though Walter Scott (1771-1834) lived in a time of rapid and powerful changes.
The Thomas Theorem of sociology says, “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” Science fiction gives reality to unreal situations: colonies in space; plastic-eating bacteria; computer programs you can live inside of; artificial super humans with a four-year lifespan.“I’ve seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” Like rockets into outer space, robots, and cloning, plastic-eating bacteria are now real. It is not that science fiction predicted those and multiverses more but that it allows us to model them, test them, plan our responses to them, and prepare for the changes we cannot predict and do not expect.
For Chesterton, the most important problems were moral, and so they remain for us.
Science fiction is not a set of engineering drawings—though you can buy the plans to the starship Enterprise—it is about the moral problems that people will solve in new circumstances. That is the "science" in the fiction as defined by Steven Weinberg who identified the experiment as an unnatural arrangement designed to test a hypothesis.
Previously on NecessaryFacts
Anthropocene: A Bad Name for a Good Thing
Psychohistory from Asimov's Foundation to Big Data
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