LIGHTER THAN AIR
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the motif and the fact that real space travel is now presumably around
the comer. Even if we disregard a Greek forerunner as well as those re–
ligious works in which space travel was imagined to operate by super–
natural rather than by presumably scientific means, the idea is not as
new as it is often believed to be. Cyrano de Bergerac used it three hun–
dred years ago. Bishop Francis Goodwin did so even a little earlier
(The
Man in the Moone,
1638).
Furthermore, it is hard to see why science fiction any more than
other fiction should be looked at as a forecast. There are indeed some
science fiction stories to which this criterion cannot possibly be ap–
plied--e.g., stories of trees that walk, talk, or attack people. The chance
that we shall find or develop such trees is, to say the least, remote. The
case for the hypothesis that science fiction zooms through space because
we all will soon do so in fact, is singularly weak.
The shrinking of the Earth is not a very compelling reason either.
Writers who want to do so are still able to find recondite spots on the
surface of this globe where odd happenings can be presented as going
on (think of Shangri-La) ; to say nothing of the chance of escape into
a subterranean location and the truly limitless possibilities of projecting
a plot into the future, if all that is wanted is an abstruse time or place
in which fantasy can have its play, in which an unrealistic plot can
unfold.
But
is
that all that is wanted? Here the "closing of the frontier"
comes in. This is indeed a new situation. Civilized countries through–
out history have been surrounded by areas of different or lesser civiliza–
tion with which they have been in a relationship of war or of slightly
more peaceful penetration. As late as in the Victorian Era, a young
European who drank too much, fought too much, got a "nice" girl
pregnant, or had taken too much out of the safe, could be sent to
somewhere east of Suez. Adventurous spirits from countries that did not
own colonies could be packed off to America. In America, it was, Go
West, young man. The only West we have left is Hollywood where sci–
ence fiction thrives. A recent book (R. B. Robertson,
Of Whales and
Men)
has pointed up how "psychopaths" (as the author calls them–
i.e., men suffering in their souls) may go whaling to the Antarctic. These
things are drops in the bucket. No frontier on a large scale has existed
since 1914.
Our generation, with heads swimming from so many "firsts," is
also the first that has to face the Herculean task of keeping civilization
in balance without the safety valve of a frontier through which human
steam can escape. It can hardly be said that we have made a good job
