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PARTISAN REVIEW
Why should science fiction have forsworn "gadgetry" since 1945?
There is one plausible explanation: For people who are sincerely con–
cerned about the fate of mankind-as many of these writers, for all
their antics, certainly are-science has changed its role since that fateful
year. Its centuries-long honeymoon with mankind is over. Science is
again, as in the day of the alchemists and the necromancers, awesome,
threatening, uncanny, sinister. Bards of old sat in the shade of sacred
trees for inspiration. Those who sing the epic of today sit in the vast
shadow cast by the toadstool of Hiroshima.
It is as pathetic as it is fascinating to see these writers forever
circling, like Lady Macbeth, around the fact that it was the United
States which dropped the first atomic bomb. All the perfumes of the
planet New Arabia in Galaxy X will not sweeten their little hands.
Writers of other nations, naturally, do not have these special qualms.
Ernst Juenger, the distinguished German writer, has perfected fantasies
which contain quite a bit of science fiction (even a little space travel)
and which are replete with horrors. His unlaid ghosts are not atomic
bombs but civil wars, torture chambers, tyrannical government with all
its deviltry-- It is thus that History lays a different burden on each
man's conscience.
Science could help to carry it, but science in the traditional sense
of the word has become a potentially hostile power, never again to be
trusted. Its prestige, however, is far from diminishing. So science it
must be, and if the interest has shifted, it must be shifted in the name
of science-to psychology, sociology, parapsychology, anything, as long
as it is science and the stories that reflect it can be called science fiction.
A body of fiction which would "extrapolate" psychology or soci–
ology, which would stand in the same relation to these sciences in which
Jules Verne's work stood to physical science, would not be a bad idea
at that. The trouble is that the tenets of that special psychology or so–
ciology are peculiar ones.
Schiller, considering "Man's proper relationship to Man and the
Universe," wrote that until the philosophers take over, Nature keeps
the world going round
durch Hunger und durch Liebe.
He meant to
state an axiom, a commonplace; little did he know that a century and
a half later his famous epigram would sound like a new, but doubtful
discovery, that systems would be erected in which hunger and love are
unusual phenomena.
That hunger plays so little role in the imagined spaces should sur–
prise no one. Modem science fiction is after all an American develop–
ment. The writers may not be affluent (their magazines scarcely pay
