Don Webb writes...

about Writing on the Tide

Don S., you’re right that science fiction has been around for a very long time and is unlikely to go away. As I suggested back in the original Discussion, the pre-scientific cultures of antiquity and the Middle Ages wanted — even needed —science fiction, but they wrote it as what we would now call fantasy. They did so simply because science — let alone science fiction — did not exist at the time.

What is a “good story”? You’ve cited some sound and time-tested recipes. And by including the “sense of wonder” you open the door to another question: What is a great story, one that becomes a “classic”?

A “sense of wonder” sounds ineffable, and it’s easy to laugh at. Indeed, being personal, it can take as many forms and have as many causes as there are people who experience it. However, if it does exist, it can be explained. For example, I try to communicate it when I fancifully call Cyrano de Bergerac a “time traveler.” The term expresses a combination of admiration and surprise at discovering his startlingly modern science fiction novel, which seems to have come out of nowhere almost four centuries ago. As a result, Bewildering Stories is now the home of The Other World: Voyage to the Moon, the only complete version in English on the Net.

But The Other World did not come out of nowhere. It had lesser-known contemporaries and precursors (cf. episode 20, “That Monkey is a Spanish Physicist”). But the “sense of wonder” remains undiminished: many national literatures are the descendants of a great epic that appeared very early in their history. Likewise, science fiction can claim a founding epic in The Voyage to the Moon ; written in the post-Renaissance era, it practically gives us a blueprint for the dawn of the Enlightenment and the formation of modern science.

What’s the point? There are two:

We face the basic question of history: do great men cause change or is it all a “tide in the affairs of men”? Obviously, I think, the answer is: both. Cyrano — though unjustly neglected — was the right man at the right time, and he captured both his time and the future by writing a rattling good story.

The Roman poet Horace was right: great literature both pleases and instructs. In modern parlance, it’s fun, and we learn something, too. It does not and cannot tell us how to travel in time or faster than light, although it may describe how we might fly to the Moon; rather it tells us something about ourselves and our world.

The celebrated Canadian author Tom King says that stories are all we have. He’s right, you know: we humans are not distinguished by the use of tools or even by language or sentience; we’re story-telling animals. Everything we are and do acquires meaning only in the context of stories. And those stories are all chapters in one that has a beginning and ending we cannot see.

Now, how shall we use that unique gift? What “time traveler” can write the epic of our time and future? We all contribute our part to that epic every day, even if we don’t think of it in those terms. But writers do think in those terms, and the science fiction writers of today must, in their own ways, make their own voyages of discovery to the “Other World.”

Please share your ideas with us!

Return to the Readers’ Guide
Return to the issue index