Things To Come

     I plan on delving into some fairly heavy matters over the next few postings, so now is as good a time as any to take a breather, and turn our thoughts to matters of far less import. Specifically, science fiction.

     I’ve been an avid reader of the stuff ever since.. well, since ever. I believe that the first science fiction novel I ever read was Revolt on Alpha C, which my parents bought for me through Scholastic Books, a company that sold cheap paperback novels to school kids by sending home "wish lists" which were distributed in class. (We were a most willing captive audience.) It was always a thrill when the big box arrived a few weeks later with everyone's orders. I can't believe that I can still remember the plot after all these years. (I think I got the book in 1961, but I'm not sure.)

     Around the same time, I remember devouring the adventures of Tom Swift and his fantastic inventions. I can’t recall for certain which birthday I was given Tom Swift and the Visitor from Planet X (I suspect it was for my 10th, in 1962) as a present, but for years afterwards I was hooked, spending a good deal of my hard-earned money on more and more books in the series (they cost the then extravagant sum of one dollar per volume). But it wasn’t long before I graduated to more “adult” works in the field. Early favorites were anything by Andre Norton and Edmond Hamilton, eventually moving up to Arthur C. Clarke, Clifford D. Simak, and Isaac Asimov. But towering over them all were the over-the-top space operas of Edward E. (“Doc”) Smith – the Skylark and Lensman series. Literally nothing could compete with Smith’s extravagant prose, with the sheer scale of his ideas, with the brain boggling super science that drove his plots. I had no idea at the time that they had been written decades earlier, way back in the 1920s and 30s. Learning this afterwards only increased my admiration for the books.

     Just sit back and take in this descriptive passage of space combat in Galactic Patrol:

     “[The space pirate] thrust out tractor beams of his own, and from the already white-hot refractory throats of his projectors there raved out horribly potent beams of annihilation; beams of dreadful power which tore madly at the straining defensive screens of the Patrol ship. Screens flared vividly, radiating all the colors of the spectrum. Space itself seemed a rainbow gone mad, for there were being exerted there forces of a magnitude to stagger the imagination; forces to be yielded only by the atomic might from which they sprang; forces whose neutralization set up visible strains in the very fabric of the ether itself.”

And all without a single exclamation point.

Or this gem, from Second Stage Lensmen:

     “A million beams, primaries raised to the hellish heights possible only to Medonian conductors and insulation, lashed out almost as one. Screens stiffened to the urge of every generable watt of defensive power. Bolt after bolt of quasi-solid lightning struck and struck and struck again. Q-type helices bored, gouged, and searingly bit Rods and cones, planes and shears of incredibly condensed pure force clawed, tore, and ground in mad abandon. Torpedo after torpedo, charged to the very skin with duodec, loosed its horribly detonant cargo against flinching wall-shields, in such numbers and with such violence as to fill all circumambient space with an atmosphere of almost planetary density.”

     Oh, I can’t help myself. Just one more, from Children of the Lens:

     “Thus no attempt will be made to describe what happened when the planet from Nth space struck the Boskonians' sun. It was indescribability cubed.”

     That last rather reminds me of Dante’s repeatedly bemoaning the fact in the Paradiso that he lacks the poetic ability to adequately describe what he is seeing in Heaven.

     Although I no longer read such stuff with the avidity of my youth, I cannot deny that it still exerts a considerable influence on The Way I View the World. Although I (alas) no longer believe in the possibility of faster than light travel, galactic empires, and a galaxy cram full of Earthlike worlds just waiting for us to explore and colonize, not a day goes by in which I do not at some point contemplate our place in the universe, and wonder about our ultimate fate as a species.

     And there remains tremendous wisdom to be found within the pages of some of SF’s best works. I find it significant when an author demonstrates the power of our deepest myths by accident, as it were – not consciously reworking them as James Joyce did in Ulysses, but unthinkingly, as I plan to demonstrate in the near future with E.E. Smith’s Skylark novels.

     But for now, I will leave you with a very idiosyncratic list of what I consider to be the ten most important English language science fiction novels ever:

1.       The War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells

2.       First Men in the Moon, H.G. Wells

3.       The first three Skylark novels, E.E. Smith (they form a continuous, unbroken narrative)

4.       The Space Trilogy, C.S. Lewis (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, That Hideous Strength)

5.       Last and First Men/Star Maker, Olaf Stapledon (considered as one book)

6.       City, Clifford D. Simak

7.       1984, George Orwell

8.       Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein

9.       The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury

10.   A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.

     There were a large number of “near misses” that could easily have been on that list (such as Clarke’s Against the Fall of Night, Charles Harness’s The Rose, or Heinlein’s The Past Through Tomorrow). So don’t take it that seriously.