LIGHTER THAN AIR
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enough for that), but being American they can hardly ever have felt
dire material need. They extend their experience, or lack of such, rather
blithely. Their spacemen don't worry where their next meal will be
coming from-in fact, they rarely worry where anything will be coming
from. Such insouciance does not reflect penetrating economic under–
standing on the part of their authors, but then, this is not the first time
that blindness to the economic foundations of our society has actually
been raised to the rank of a virtue.
The absence of love is something that gives more reason to pause
and think. Even sex hardly operates in those stories as a motive. It is
true enough that some of the space heroes have wives, some have girl
friends, and that as likely as not the hero will in the end marry the
heroine (usually in the brash and nonchalant manner which is so char–
acteristic of "popular" fiction). However, the reader cannot easily shake
off the impression that these heroes wear their sexual desires as they
wear their clothes: not because they need them but because it wouldn't
do to be seen in public without them. In the era of the Kinsey Report
it might attract suspicion
if
they were too openly asexual.
In a world kept going round by hunger and by love these space–
men would be misfits. But of course, our trusty intergalactic field drive
has taken us far away from such a world. The way current science fic–
tion reads sociology and psychology, the world is kept going round by
satiety and hate.
Future historians will perhaps refer to our era as the age of the
return of the gods of the underworld. Realism is a comparatively new
invention. In dealing with the riddle of Man, our science (psycho–
analysis; sociology, such as it is) and our art (surrealism; abstract paint–
ing) have left their earlier concern with faithful reproduction of the
surface far behind.
It
is the magma underneath which they are trying
to explore. Science fiction has similarly abandoned its former interest
in what is conventionally known as science, and has taken root directly
in that hot and ugly subsoil in which there is no grace, no smile, no
justice, and no reason-nothing but vitality.
The patterns of space travel literature are remarkably similar to
certain configurations of psychotic fantasies; and even more so to typical
aspirations and fears, which, unrecognized and unadmitted as yet, have
become important elements of our emotional climate.
The evidence to support the claim that science fiction is a reflec–
tion and an outgrowth of our present culture
is
not
found
where it
is
usually
sought-in the
alleged
predilection of science fiction for those
