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Fantasy Commentator, v. 1, issue 7, Summer 1945

Page 148

148
FANTASY COMMENTATOR

If that's science, the people who hand out Ph.D.'s don't recognize it. Digest the entire existing files of science-fiction, decant away all the incredible monsters, the alien menaces, the foul villains, the resourceful heroes and the dizzy red-heads---and what is your residuum? Whatever it is, it isn't worth much. An I.C.S. course in high school physics would be much more to the point---it's acquired with a minimum of effort and is entirely dependable.

I have said that many fans do not mean exactly what they say, but just for the record, let's examine their words. To return to the gentleman quoted previously:

Whether the author consciously puts a modicum of real possibility in his work or not, the reader can usually find something in it the author didn't know was there.

Since I believe I know precisely what he's driving at, let me tinker with his sentence a little; I wish to clear up what to me are some ambiguities. Most important is the word reader. Let us modify that, for there are readers and readers. Let's say "an alert and intelligent fantasy reader"---or we might use the word fan, which presumably means the same thing.

Something is one of those omnibus words that has the sky for a limit. To pin the meaning down more clearly, I suggest the addition of "stimulating." Now let's restate the sentence my way: "Whether the author puts a modicum of real possibility in his work or not, and however pseudo- is his science, an alert and intelligent fantasy reader can usually find something stimulating in it."

Note that: "stimulating". That is the essence of the whole thing, and it does not mean 'instructive' or 'informative'. The apple that bounced off Newton's head was stimulating---but it told him nothing that every thinking animal has not known since the beginning of time. My thesis is that the science in science-fiction if garbled expertly, can be suggestive, provocative. It is like the reductio ad absurdam of logic---it jolts a fellow, makes him sit up and take notice. It calls his attention to things he knows, but has not realized. Also, it is like the spark of a firing circuit, and for that reason the quality of the reader is of immense importance. In his head packed with mud or dynamite? The spark's function is merely to initiate a reaction; the reaction itself is a reader-function.

When I was a kid and read Wells, I think it was the implications of his stories that steamed me up. They had the effect on me of dramatizing physics so that instead of being a dry technical subject, the text became a wonder-book. We had an old Natural Philosophy in the house---a relic of the 1880's---and I read every thing in it. Then I borrowed current physics books and studied them to such good effect that years later I was able to master an advanced course in the subject without ever having had any formal training of elementary nature. It was fun. It was fun. And it was far more fascinating than the comparatively useless cross-word puzzle solving that has been so popular for years.

To illustrate I shall speak of one item only from a single story, "The New Accelerator." In it, the characters soon observe that human voices become inaudible, and they can hear the shrill sounds of insects as the pitch of these latter lower---relatively speaking---because of the characters' change of sensory perception. That was eye-opening to me. I knew vaguely that sound was a wave motion, but I had never been able to visualize it, thinking always of water waves. I studied the subject, and made myself a set of musical glasses and a sort of xylophone; then, with some understanding of wave motion, I progressed to optics. Observe, please, that Wells taught me none of these things; he merely stimulated my interest in them---my curiosity, if you like---and I did the rest. 

Noteworthy is it also that Wells did not exhaust the latent possibili-

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148 FANTASY COMMENTATOR If that's science, the people who hand out Ph.D.'s don't recognize it. Digest the entire existing files of science-fiction, decant away all the incredible monsters, the alien menaces, the foul villains, the resourceful heroes and the dizzy red-heads---and what is your residuum? Whatever it is, it isn't worth much. An I.C.S. course in high school physics would be much more to the point---it's acquired with a minimum of effort and is entirely dependable. I have said that many fans do not mean exactly what they say, but just for the record, let's examine their words. To return to the gentleman quoted previously: Whether the author consciously puts a modicum of real possibility in his work or not, the reader can usually find something in it the author didn't know was there. Since I believe I know precisely what he's driving at, let me tinker with his sentence a little; I wish to clear up what to me are some ambiguities. Most important is the word reader. Let us modify that, for there are readers and readers. Let's say "an alert and intelligent fantasy reader"---or we might use the word fan, which presumably means the same thing. Something is one of those omnibus words that has the sky for a limit. To pin the meaning down more clearly, I suggest the addition of "stimulating." Now let's restate the sentence my way: "Whether the author puts a modicum of real possibility in his work or not, and however pseudo- is his science, an alert and intelligent fantasy reader can usually find something stimulating in it." Note that: "stimulating". That is the essence of the whole thing, and it does not mean 'instructive' or 'informative'. The apple that bounced off Newton's head was stimulating---but it told him nothing that every thinking animal has not known since the beginning of time. My thesis is that the science in science-fiction if garbled expertly, can be suggestive, provocative. It is like the reductio ad absurdam of logic---it jolts a fellow, makes him sit up and take notice. It calls his attention to things he knows, but has not realized. Also, it is like the spark of a firing circuit, and for that reason the quality of the reader is of immense importance. In his head packed with mud or dynamite? The spark's function is merely to initiate a reaction; the reaction itself is a reader-function. When I was a kid and read Wells, I think it was the implications of his stories that steamed me up. They had the effect on me of dramatizing physics so that instead of being a dry technical subject, the text became a wonder-book. We had an old Natural Philosophy in the house---a relic of the 1880's---and I read every thing in it. Then I borrowed current physics books and studied them to such good effect that years later I was able to master an advanced course in the subject without ever having had any formal training of elementary nature. It was fun. It was fun. And it was far more fascinating than the comparatively useless cross-word puzzle solving that has been so popular for years. To illustrate I shall speak of one item only from a single story, "The New Accelerator." In it, the characters soon observe that human voices become inaudible, and they can hear the shrill sounds of insects as the pitch of these latter lower---relatively speaking---because of the characters' change of sensory perception. That was eye-opening to me. I knew vaguely that sound was a wave motion, but I had never been able to visualize it, thinking always of water waves. I studied the subject, and made myself a set of musical glasses and a sort of xylophone; then, with some understanding of wave motion, I progressed to optics. Observe, please, that Wells taught me none of these things; he merely stimulated my interest in them---my curiosity, if you like---and I did the rest. Noteworthy is it also that Wells did not exhaust the latent possibili-