Robert Plank
LIGHTER THAN AIR, BUT HEAVY AS HATE
An Essay on Space Travel
In the brief span of time since the end of World War II,
science fiction has carved out a place for itself as a category of literature
in its own right. Not a respectable place perhaps: This literary fad,
if
such it may be called, is usually disregarded, often ridiculed, rarely
analyzed. Yet it now enjoys a great and increasing vogue.
It is still a long way from the popularity of the "Western" and
the crime story, of course. The appeal of fiction which presents itself
as scientific cannot be that universal. It is more or less limited to one
segment of the population; but a fairly broad and quite important seg–
ment: men, from their teens to their thirties and forties, of urban back–
ground and average or higher educational level; students, technicians,
the ambitious fellows who feel that they are the new middle class-these
seem to be the bulk of the readers. In a large group of that description,
science fiction has supplemented, and to an extent even replaced, its
older competitors as the type of literature which obviously provides a
recreational outlet and less obviously satisfies an emotional need.
The reader who wants to understand and enjoy the leading science
fiction magazines needs a nodding acquaintance with such words as ex–
trapolation, mutant, entropy, astrogation, extra-sensory perception, es–
cape velocity, hydroponics, interstellar, hypnotherapy. It is not necessary
for those who read or even those who write those stories to know the
precise meaning of these or similar terms or to be able to use them
operationally. Since technology has so widely replaced the classics in
their function of providing the veneer which makes it possible to mistake
the schooled for the educated, many people nowadays possess the edu–
cational requirement.
It is under the aspect of space travel that science fiction has come
to be accepted by nearly everyone as something that, like death and
taxes, will be with us. The assumption has been made that the space
travel motif springs from two roots:
It
is thought to foreshadow the
actual "conquest of space" by man; and to reflect the shrinking of
our world which has left us with no other "frontier."
History does not show much connection between the appearance of
