Wizards of a Small Planet

the race for the moon is old stuff to the science-fiction boys

Man took his first step into space on October 4, 1957 -- a date which future encyclopedists are certain to rank above October 12, 1492, in the history of Earth.

And just about the only people who were not amazed were the handful -- maybe a quarter of a million -- who regularly read science-fiction.

Science-fiction readers have known that man has had the scientific knowledge and technical ability to leave this planet for over a decade. It's been essentially a matter of time, money, effort; so there was nothing inherently surprising in its final accomplishment.

And now that we are relatively unfazed by such an epoch-making event, general readers are beginning to look at us and wonder how much else we may know -- how many "crazy science-fiction ideas" may be just as crazy as the notion of earth satellites.

This isn't, of course, the first time science-fiction has been years or decades in advance of the news headlines; but people forget fast, and have mostly forgotten already how impressed they were a dozen years ago by science-fiction's foreknowledge of the atomic bomb.

There was, as you may have heard, one classic incident when the FBI cracked down on a science-fiction magazine for publishing the secret of the A-bomb -- a secret which was at that time known to nobody except the workers on the Manhattan Project, a few Communist spies, and anybody who could understand prewar technical articles on nuclear research.

This story is usually told as a startling example of science-fiction happening to hit upon a truth of real science. Actually, its moral is something else again: It's an example of a much rarer phenomenon -- a story so timidly elementary that for once science was able to catch up with science-fiction.

The story in question was Deadline, by Cleve Cartmill, and it appeared in Astounding Science-Fiction for March 1944 -- a year and a half before the general public had ever heard of atomic fission. But did it create a general stir (outside of the FBI offices)? Did readers recognize it as a brilliantly terrifying prophecy? Did they acclaim it as a fresh, exciting stroke of imagination?

Well, hardly. The editor did not think it worth mentioning in his advance announcements the previous month; and a reader vote rated it sixth place in an issue with six stories.

Cartmill was one of the best writers in what was probably the best science-fiction period yet (the early Forties), but this time he wrote -- as can happen to any of us -- a real clinker. It takes place on the planet Cathor (location and time unspecified), and is about a war between two forces named, with all the subtlety of Serutan, Seilla and Sixa. Our hero, Ybor Sebrof, is a Seilla agent sent into Sixa to destroy a bomb invented by their top scientist. He has troubles with the beautiful leader of the underground ("He was male ... put together with an eye to efficiency; and she was female, at the ripening stage"), and gets into the power of the scientist (who at least is not mad). When all seems lost, Ybor "whipped his short, prehensile tail (which has not so much as been hinted at -- unless by that obscure reference to male efficiency -- in the preceding 9,000 words) around the barrel of Dr. Sitruc's "gun" and everything comes out OK.

We -- the science-fiction readers of 1944 -- read this and shuddered. One letter-to-the-editor described it as "mediocre fantasy." And when we came to the passage that perturbed the FBI ("Now the explosion of a pound of U-235 ... releases as much energy as a hundred million pounds of TNT"; "Two cast-iron hemispheres, clamped over the orange segments of cadmium alloy ... the powdered uranium oxide runs together in the central cavity. The radium shoots neutrons into this mass -- and the U-235 takes over from there"), we thought, "Oh Lord, another atomic bomb story! Cartmill usually comes up with fresher ideas than that!"

Which was the point that John W. Campbell, Jr., then as now editor of Astounding, made to the FBI agents when they suggested a cease-and-desist order on stories about A-bombs. Atomic energy, for peace or war, was already a commonplace of science-fiction. Stop writing about it and you'd give enemy agents the perfect tip-off that a genuine A-project was under way.

For what matters, as concerns the prophetic nature of science-fiction, is not so much the occasional on-the-nose exactness as the broader education of the reader, inducing him to take advanced concepts for granted before their existence is suspected by the general public, or sometimes even by scientists.

A good example is this very theme of the earth satellite, which goes back in fiction the best part of a century, to Edward Everett Hale's The Brick Moon, serialized in The Atlantic in 1869 and 1870. Hale's moon was, as far as accuracy goes, terrible. Its material, its means of projection, its equipment -- nothing about it would work. But it did establish -- in fiction, long before it was ever discussed as a factual project -- that a man-made moon could be put in an orbit around the earth, and that much scientifically valuable data could be drawn from observing such a satellite.

The frequency with which the prophecies of science-fiction come true is the result of at least three factors. The simplest is that, by now, science-fiction has prophesied so very many, often mutually contradictory, futures that it's getting harder and harder for reality to come up with anything that hasn't been set down in fiction some time some where. Fire off enough prophetic shots and some of them are bound to hit the bull's-eye ... and you can afford to disregard the ones that don't. For instance, no matter what the surface of the planet Venus (which is hidden from our observation by permanent clouds) turns out to be like, from a water world to a desert, there'll be a science-story which has in advance described it exactly -- and usually on the basis of statements by orthodox astronomers, who also believe in the shotgun method of speculation.

Of course not everyone can be so lucky as Jonathan Swift, who in 1726 had Lemuel Gulliver meet astronomers who had discovered that Mars possessed two small moons (in 1877, by what Willy Ley has called "the purest coincidence known to the history of science," Asaph Hall discovered that Mars sure enough does possess two small moons). But a certain number of random guesses are bound to turn out to be "prophecies," purely by the odds.

Then a large number of science-fiction's accurate hits come about because writers and scientists (or technologists or manufacturers) are thinking along the same lines. Fastest example of fulfillment I know: In 1953 Ann Warren Griffith sold The Magazine of Fantasy and Science-Fiction a story Captive Audience about a miniature sound device which could be inserted in products so that they would continuously give off their own commercials, drawing the poor consumer's attention to their yummy goodness. Even before the story could be printed, Miss Griffith walked into a supermarket and was assailed by a jar of prunes equipped with a miniature sound device which, etc.

Often both writer and scientist are developing concepts which have been widely discussed and published, but which remain virtually unknown to the general public. Recently in a lecture I mentioned the fact that the word television first appeared in print in a radio magazine (Hugo Gernsback's Modern Electrics) in 1909. Afterwards a woman in her sixties wanted to assure me earnestly that there couldn't have been a radio magazine in 1909 because there wasn't any radio then; she was there and she knew. Radio as a mass medium of entertainment and advertising didn't, it's true, appear until almost 20 years later; but in 1909 there did exist "wireless telegraphy," as an important means of commercial communication. There were thousands of radio enthusiasts, to whom Gernsback's magazine was addressed, and it didn't take much prophetic insight to see the future potential. Gernsback himself foresaw it in 1911 in Ralph 124C 41+, which is the first, the best and the worst American science-fiction novel. The worst in that its writing is such as to make Tom Swift and His Electric Cottonpicker seem a work of high literary sophistication; the first and best in that it was the pioneer in thinking ahead logically from actual known data, and scored more accurate prophetic hits than any other single glimpse of the technological future: TV, nylon, plastics, tape-recording, helicopters, satellites and a host of other gadgets either realized by now or clearly in our immediate future.

This use of available but publicly ignored material accounts for science-fiction's successes with the A-bomb, as well as with peacetime atomic power (it was as far back as 1942 that Lester del Rey wrote the still impressive short novel Nerves, about the medical aspects of disaster in an A-plant), and now with the preliminaries to space flight.

And this same method should have enabled us to foretell Russia's headstart into space. In 1941 I was writing a mystery novel (Rocket to the Morgue) for which I needed a great deal of factual background on the history, past, present and future, of rocket research. At that time there existed precisely one popular book (P. E. Cleator's Rockets Through Space) in the English language on rockets and space flight. Counting privately published volumes and highly technical works, there had been five books published in English on the subject.

At that same time there had been 18 such books published in German ... and 31 in Russian! Willy Ley, the leading German (and now American) historian of rocketry, tells me that 30 years ago he was forced to teach himself to read Russian; there was no other way of getting at much of the most important theoretical writing. Konstantin Eduardovich Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) was unquestionably a world pioneer in ideas for using rocket propulsion to conquer space -- and was far more recognized and honored after the revolution than before.

All these data were available -- plus such items as the Russian announcements of a projected space platform three months before our much-publicized satellite announcement in 1955 -- and some science-fiction writer should have had the prophetic sense to write a serious story of the Russian space pioneers -- though partial credit must go to Steve Benedict for hinting at Soviet moon-conquest in his Stamp from Moscow (1953), if only as a caprice. But we (concluded on page 46)Wizards(continued from page 22) goofed ... probably because the Russians have claimed so many "firsts" that we don't believe them even when, as with Tsiolkovsky, they have an authentic one.

Some of science-fiction's most frighteningly accurate prophecies have been, not in the physical sciences, but in the fields of sociology and history -- and often when the author's intent has been the exact opposite of prophecy. It's a common device in imaginative fiction to write about a future that could happen if present trends continue, presenting it as a Horrible Example, with a prayer of "God, let it not be like this!" Brave New World, 1984, The Space Merchants, On the Beach -- all typify this approach.

In 1914 Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a short story, Danger!, explaining how England could be starved by the then unheard-of device of a submarine blockade. The admiralty thought the story foolish until the Germans instituted just such a blockade in World War I.

In 1915 Edgar Wallace -- who, like Doyle, wrote occasional science-fiction along with his mysteries -- published a novel called 1925: The Story of a Fatal Peace, in which Germany loses World War I but is tolerantly allowed to rebuild her military establishment until she is in a position to start the whole thing over again.

And back in 1907 Jack London wrote one of the all-time masterpieces of political prophecy in The Iron Heel: a precise step-by-step analysis of the coming of fascism, the economic and social reasons for its invention and the methods by which it would gain power. London's only serious error was in placing the phenomenon in America rather than Europe.

The hoped-against may turn out to be true prophecy; the hoped-for may prove to be false. Farthest from the target of any political prophecy yet made is one in Cartmill's Deadline: that the A-bomb would be developed by the Axis (or Sixa) because "we, the Seilla," though having the knowledge and skill required, "would not dare to set off an experimental atomic bomb" for fear of its incalculable damage to the world present and future.

The most interesting cause of accurate prophecies, however, is neither luck nor well-researched thinking; it is the fact that science itself is influenced by science-fiction -- often directly, sometimes at such a remove that the scientist himself may not know what's happening.

I. M. Levitt, director of the Fels Planetarium of the Franklin Institute, recently published an earnest ultra-scientific article on the opening of the Space Age. When he came to the possibilities of going beyond the solar system, he wrote: "Now the scientist begins a bizarre speculation that puts even the science-fiction writer behind the times. ... Cold-minded, sober scientists have an ingenious solution" -- which turns out to be the familiar science-fiction cliché of the "Noah's Ark of space," the ship which is a miniature world in itself, self-sustaining and self-perpetuating, so that the remote descendants of the original crew make planetfall centuries after the launching. This idea appeared first (as far as I know) in Don Wilcox' The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years (Amazing, October 1940) and received its definitive treatment in Robert A. Heinlein's Universe (Astounding, May 1941). It's still with us in fiction -- at least three stories on the theme appeared in the past year. Yet a scientist can, with no notion of its history, advance it cold-mindedly and soberly as a new idea beyond the reach of science-fiction.

But the influence of science-fiction on science is usually more direct. In 1897 Kurd Lasswitz, a mathematics professor at Cotha, published a novel called Auf Zwei Planeten (On Two Planets) which contained, among other attractions, the earliest detailedly accurate working out of the orbital problems of space flight. This ponderous but popular novel exerted great influence on actual German rocket research. Most of the members of the German Rocket Society (Verein fur Raumschifffahrt) were Lasswitz devotees who had been first attracted to space activity by this novel. These Verein members were the same men who went on to become the rocket experts of Peenemünde, who developed the V-2, and who were later divided, almost as spoils of war, between Russia and America -- working for either country, as they had worked for Hitler, on any military project as long as it was potentially a tool toward space flight.

In addition to nine technical works, the Russian writer Tsiolkovsky wrote a novel of space flight, Vne Zemli (Beyond Earth), which was his most popular book and the first to be reprinted after the revolution. There's no doubt that it's as familiar to Russian rocket enthusiasts as the Lasswitz novel is to Germans, or that the present German-assisted Russian space program is to a large extent a deliberate realization in fact of the science-fiction of Lasswitz and Tsiolkovsky.

Among American scientists, there is of course the "cold-minded, sober" type that will have nothing to do with any idea published outside of a professional journal; but the younger men, the scientists and engineers actually engaged on the projects of the future (such as atomics and space flight), are almost invariably readers of science-fiction -- and often took up their careers out of adolescent passion for the future depicted in the bright-covered magazines. Every science-fiction publisher knows that his largest per capita sales will be near universities with a major physics department (CalTech, MIT, California, etc.) or in highly classified government projects (Oak Ridge, Hanford, White Sands, etc.).

You know waldos? Those tiny remote-control mechanical "hands" that are used to manipulate radioactive material? They're named after the title character of Heinlein's Waldo, who invented them in 1942 -- and inevitably so named because everybody working with them was almost automatically a Heinlein reader.

From here on out in the Space Age, the prophecies of science-fiction may be fulfilled with even greater frequency, because space will be conquered by men who are steeped in those prophecies.

You will find in today's science-fiction -- particularly in the work of such realistic-imaginative writers as Heinlein or Clarke -- the step-by-step account of that conquest: from small satellites, such as the Sputniks and the Explorer, to a large habitable space station; thence to the moon and its conversion into a yet larger way-station to space; on through the exploration of our nearest neighbors, inhospitable Mars and unknown Venus, to the eventual complete knowledge of this small solar system and ultimately (in one of science-fiction's most worn but still thunderous phrases) To The Stars -- perhaps by the almost-as-fast-as-light photonic drive on which Russia is now working, and which has long been familiar in fiction.

Science-fiction's sternest and most persistent prophecy of the immediate future is this: a species which has attained atomic power and space flight can no longer afford the luxury of national and racial rivalries, but must unite or perish. "There are no nationalities beyond the stratosphere," writes Arthur C. Clarke in Prelude to Space (1951). "We will take no frontiers into space."

Which may well prove to be the most tragically incorrect of all science-fiction's prophecies.

We've had several United States Presidents who were well-publicized readers of mystery novels, and now one who is addicted to westerns. Maybe what we (and every nation) need, in the age we have entered, is a leader who reads science-fiction.