The Pleasures of Reading Science Fiction

This talk is a result of attending last year’s Annual General Meeting of Spaced Out. During that meeting I became aware that many of those attending did not seem to realise that there was any science fiction before Star Trek hit the airwaves in the late 1960s.

My experience is entirely different from that of ‘media SF’ fans. I did not live in the same house as a TV set until I was 33 years old, and even now I am completely unfamiliar with such series as Babylon 5, Blake’s 7 and Dr Who. In 1973 I did see five episodes of re-runs of the first series of Star Trek. Since I haven’t seen these series, I won’t make any judgements about them. I’ll just relate what science fiction means to me.

I’ll take you back to 1952, the year before I began school. I’m listening to The ABC Children’s Session, as it was called then. A radio serial begins. It is called The Moon Flower, and is written by G. K. Saunders. In that serial, a group of what sound like fairly ordinary people take off in a rocket and travel to the moon. After much exploring, they find, at the very bottom of the deepest cave on the Moon, one tiny flower. We know now that that is unlikely; but in 1952 scientists still thought there might be some form of life on the Moon.

It is hard to describe the impact that that serial had on me. For a start, it was presented as being based on ‘real science’. The serial was often slowed down for little lectures on travelling in free fall in space, or the extreme temperatures on the Moon, and stuff like that. It was all new to me. And then it offered at its end that thrill of discovering a tiny piece of life on the Moon - in an era when few people expected humans to travel in space until the year 2000.

So my first meeting with SF was via the greatest medium of them all - radio. That’s how the situation stayed. I could find almost nothing in print that gave me the same thrill except for further G. K. Saunders serials on the ABC during the 1950s. In one of them, its main characters make the first trip to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, and there find a planet filled with people much like ourselves - who have never invented music. I’ve never met this idea in any other SF story. Again I felt the thrill of coming across ideas that nobody around me would ever have considered - that the world, our civilisation, might be entirely different from the way we expect it to be.

I suspect that my enjoyment of science fiction has changed little from my first impulses towards it.

By travelling into the future, one could imagine life to be better, or at least very different, from the present day. Since I found ordinary life, and school, and church, and home, very boring, science fiction offered a great imaginary playground.

By travelling imaginatively into outer space, I could encounter endless varieties of experience that could never occur on Earth. One of the few media that offered this insight was a comic strip, long since discontinued, called Brick Bradford. Brick Bradford lived in a top-shaped machine called the Time Top, and travelled not only throughout the universe, but backwards and forwards in time. Brick Bradford appeared in the The Sun comics supplement on Fridays, and was one of the few highlights of my childhood, except for the books of Enid Blyton. Today, Blyton’s children’s books are thought of as very oldfashioned, but many of her books were fantasies of the ‘what if?’ variety.

When my sisters and I were children, we were very lucky in our supplies of books. We joined one of the last of the commercial lending libraries, the Claremont Library in Malvern, and every few weeks took out a stack of books to read. When I was about nine, I took out a book called A Princess of Mars, by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It had been written early in the twentieth century. It had ‘Mars’ in the title, so maybe it was the sort of book I was looking for. I was rather puzzled by its beginning. John Carter looks upward to Mars with great yearning, and somehow miraculously travels from Earth to Mars. Very unscientific, I thought, but I kept reading anyway. For a few years after that, I was convinced that Mars actually did consist of ancient dried-up sea bottoms and great cities protected by vast domes, and that beautiful princesses and mighty warriors flew in their airships across the red deserts, pursued by strange creatures. Reading A Princess of Mars for the first time is a frustrating experience. It ends with a cliffhanger. I found the sequel to it, Thuvia, Maid of Mars, and the fourth in the series, but it was many years before I came across a paperback of the third in the series. You had to read each one as soon as you had finished the previous book. Series novels are not an invention of J. R. R. Tolkien.

I still hadn’t discovered what I was really looking for. The nearest I came to it, other than the Mars books, were some films shown at our local church. Each film had the advertisement for God at the end, but most of the content of the films were good solid science, well illustrated with cartoons or documentary photography. I wanted to become a scientist - but soon discovered my mathematics were hopeless, so I had to give up that ambition.

In 1959, when I was 12 years old, I made a momentous decision. Bored with what was left in the children’s section of the Claremont Library, I crossed from side of the library to the other, to the Adults Section. And where better to start than the Science Fiction shelves? I picked a book called World of Chance, by Philip K. Dick. This, I learned much later, was the British cut version of Dick’s first novel, Solar Lottery. I was blown off my feet. Here were more ideas than I could handle, about politics, power, telepathy, predestination, and all sorts of subjects I had never encoutered before.

The next two books I borrowed extended my notions even further. They were Jack Williamson’s The Humanoids, a 1940s SF classic that featured not only all-knowing, all-caring robots but a rebel group that operated by telekinesis; and Fury, Henry Kuttner’s novel about the remnants of Earth’s people. Having been forced to leave Earth, they spend their days in domed cities deep in the oceans of Venus, and try to clear outposts in the wild Cretaceous jungles of Venus’s land areas so that human civilisation could get started again. Fury had wonderful characters as well as vivid landscapes; and it had (to me) quite new ideas about heroic effort and the nature of civilisation.

1959 also saw me do something very important for the first time: out my limited weekly pocket money, I placed the princely amount of 2/6 (2 shillings and sixpence) on the counter of McGill’s Newsagency in Melbourne and bought my first science fiction magazine.

I knew nothing about the science fiction magazines, except that they seemed to be the only regular source of SF that I could afford. British paperbacks were 4 shillings each, and the few American paperbacks that appeared in McGill’s were 5 shillings each. The two magazines I could afford were the English monthly New Worlds and bimonthly Science Fiction Adventures. I liked the latter better, as it featured two novellas (long stories) each issue, whereas New Worlds featured a novelette, several short stories, and an episode of a serial.

Nevertheless, my mind was again blown away by the first serial I read in a magazine, Philip K. Dick’s Time Out of Joint, which was serialised in New Worlds rather than any of the American magazines. The main character, Ragle Gumm, appears to live in a sleepy coastal town in the year 1959. Unemployed, he sits around all day solving the ‘Find the Little Green Man?’ puzzle in the daily newspaper. Each night, he sends off his solution in the mail. As he wanders around the small town, he becomes uneasy. Nothing quite adds up, and he begins to suspect that some of his neighbours are not who they claim to be. He finds a copy of Time magazine, dated 1999, with a picture of himself on the cover. He escapes by hiding in the back of a truck leaving town. When he gets out at the end of the journey, he finds himself in the world of 1999. He finds that humans have travelled to the moon, and are now in revolt, firing rockets at targets on Earth. When he was solving the Little Green Man puzzles, Gumm was actually predicting where the next group of rockets would fall. He could never have done this if he had known what he was doing; hence the fake town (a town that, incidentally, resembles the coastal town Phil Dick was living in when he wrote the book).

Here, then, was the mightiest theme in science fiction, the theme that still keeps me interested: that not only is the world and the universe more interesting than mundane society believes it to be, but it could well be utterly different from anything we believe it to be. Carry this one point further, as Philip Dick did in his later novels, and science fiction becomes the main sceptical device for undoing all our most cherished beliefs about society and reality. A friend of mine called this ‘testing ideas to destruction’.

I’m not sure whether film screen writers or TV writers are willing or able to ‘test ideas to destruction’, but the recent film Minority Report, for instance, based on a short story by Philip Dick, has the authentic flavour of science fiction. I still find the exciting ideas I crave in the best of the current SF novels and short stories, especially those by Greg Egan, who lives in Western Australia, and Stephen Baxter, in novels such as Titan and Voyage. I read much else besides science fiction, and much of it is much better written than SF, but SF novels and short stories still have ability, every so often, to slam you up against the wall and make you say ‘I never thought of that before!’

For more information about Bruce:
http://home.vicnet.net.au/~sfoz/bruce.htm

He was Guest of Honor at Aussiecon 3. Here is a quick bio at their pages:
http://www.aussiecon3.worldcon.org/bruce.html

Here is SF Commentary, downloadable in pdf format:
http://www.efanzines.com/SFC/

Bruce has great admiration for Philip K. Dick. Here is a link to an interview with him about that great author's work:
http://www.philipkdick.com/frank/gillespie.htm