How will the events surrounding the Sept. 11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center affect speculative fiction? This will be among the topics that will be discussed when I appear WBAI-FM’s Hour of the Wolf, the longest running radio program dedicated to science fiction and fantasy.
The show will run from 6 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. on Saturday, Nov. 24, and will feature host Jim Freund and a discussion about the future of science fiction.
Science fiction has always been affected by current events. The shape of the perceived future changes as the world changes. Donald Kelly, an Hour of the Wolf listener, pointed out that science fiction changed radically when Americans first landed on the moon.
"We found we didn’t have to [write about] that any more," he said.
Yet trends of space exploration and future predictions have often reflected contemporary social trends. In the mid-1900s, Jules Verne’s works were often commentaries on conditions of his times. His villain in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Mysterious Island (as well as others) objected sharply to the slaughter inflicted on American Civil War and other battlefields around the world. His trips to the moon were often speculations about what might happen if humanity shifted its focus and used forces previously dedicated to violence towards a positive end.
H.G. Wells developed much of his fiction out of his revulsion of Socialism, as the influences of Karl Marx’ writing marched across Europe in what he saw as an inevitable revolution. Perhaps the most prophetic of writers, Wells projected in his masterpiece The Time Machine the division of labor that would later haunt urban society, while at the same time, speculated on the effect of socialistic society’s ability to overwhelm existing social structures in War of the Worlds. Even Mark Twain’s fantasy novel Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court predicted the inevitable trench-like warfare World War I would become from his observations of late 19th Century conflicts.
World War I, indeed, shaped science fiction in a way few single social events did, playing into the hands of the Futurists social movement, whose love of technology led directly to the German concept of Fascism. In the 1920s and 1930s, fiction focusing on supermen atop super machines dominated speculative fiction, as characters such as Doc Savage and Flash Gordon appeared. World War II and the Nazi use of technology altered this worldview and created a trend of suspicion in the science fiction community. Technology could not be trusted completely. When left to its own resources, it produced evil. This is no better reflected than in films like Star Wars.
Science fiction was also altered by an even more significant event: the atomic bomb. Instead of creatures of horror emerging out of nature as reflected in the pre-bomb films such as King Kong, humanity’s unleashing of unnatural forces brought us new monsters in the shape of giant ants and such. Combined with the Cold War hysteria and the threat of communism, a new thread emerged during the 1950s that showed colonies of creatures similar to those predicted by H.G. Wells. Environmental deterioration led to even more speculation, creating a new wave of negative future speculation, the most prominent of which was John Brunner’s classic: Stand on Zanzibar.
Moon landings, successful shuttle flights and other positive realities in space exploration lightened the cloud over science fiction, but suspicion of technology and changing social conditions refused to allow us to return to the innocent hopefulness of pre-World War II. William Gibson’s Necromancer and other examples of the technological punk movement in science fiction created an underground society out of the 1980s, pitting criminal/revolutionary questionable heroes against social forces that would steal their identity.
As a writer and reader of science fiction, I have evolved with many of these trends. My own speculative fiction – closer to reality than most – painted a world of gated communities, in which the wealthy and the privileged are pitted against the poor and the criminally oriented – a thread to which the World Trade Center disaster may lend credence. There are those who believe the World Trade Center will change nothing, because the tragedy confirms many of the dark predictions modern science fiction writers have previously shaped. There are other avenues of thought, and these will be explored in the two and a half-hour program.
Since over the years I have become a minor scholar of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, we will also discuss the upcoming release of the long awaited film, The Fellowship of the Ring. We may also even find time to talk about my recently published non-fiction book from Rutgers University Press: Everyday People: Profiles from the Garden State. WBAI-FM can be found at 99.5 on the dial.
Photo by James Garland