There is no Golden Age

The BBC has a new documentary series dealing with British Science Fiction and it's broader socio-cultural impact. The first episode of the Martians and Us deals with the concept of Evolution as used by H.G. Wells in the Time Machine and War of the worlds, and all the writers that followed in his footsteps. This one is about J.G. Ballard, though.



The first episode also reviews the Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham, later filmed as the Village of the Damned. A perfect example of why science fiction can run circles around fantasy. It exemplifies 1960's parent's fears. Now that they could afford a better education for their children, they ended up with smart-assed kids. A little bit too smart even. They keenly felt, like their parents had, that their generation's era was over and that their replacements would tear everything they believed in to shreds. Not that they aren't experiencing something similar right now. All of the kids in the world chatting with pedophiles from space, their parents still unable to get bonzibuddy from their computers.



Fantasy on the other hand, never really gets beyond good v.s. evil as a plot, and overblown nostalgia as a unifying theme. Constantly hankering back to a past that never was, a charming bucolic fantasy. It's no coincidence that the hero is always a lowly farm lad, thrust into the hustle and bustle of things through some magic agency. No writer has managed to surpass J.R.R. Tolkien's initial idea in any significant way. Even in the book itself, every character is longing for the past or some of it's trappings. Ancient objects, battles thousands of years in the past, long lost loves, homes that don't exist anymore.



According to recently deceased author Robert Jordan, "....Fantasy is an area where it is possible to talk about right and wrong, good and evil, with a straight face. In mainstream fiction and even in a good deal of mystery, these things are presented as simply two sides of the same coin. Never really more than a matter of where you happen to be standing." - CNN chat December 2000
In other words, in Fantasy, Men are Men, Women are Women, Good is Good and Evil is Evil, no nuance required.

Arthur C. Clarke ends the Martians and Us episode by stating that the purpose of Science fiction is to map out all possible futures, so that we can pick the one we want. Clarke is widely respected, not just for excellent novels, but for some actual science as well. For instance, he suggested that geostationary satellites would be ideal for global communication in 1945. To me, this pretty much sums up the difference between the two genres.

So why is it that there is such wide-spread contempt in literary circles for Science Fiction, but escapist sword and sorcery is a main stay of bestseller lists? It's a little better in cinema, but that's mostly due to Star Wars. Before that film, Science Fiction was guaranteed b-movie fodder.

The answer is both simple and disquieting. Fantasy demands nothing from it's viewers, they are transported to a simplified world full of whimsy and presented with a morality play with a happy end. Science Fiction presents complicated concepts and a deep abiding pessimism about humanity's motives and competence, post-apocalyptic wastelands, police states and the generally deleterious effects of technology on society, often foregoing even tying up loose ends in the final act.

It is Science Fiction's nature that it is frequently overtaken by real science, and the futures that we imagined in the past begin to look charmingly naive to cynical modern eyes. Fantasy is beholden to no standards of accuracy whatsoever, not even those of historical fiction. Both genres have horrible writing in books and ridiculously bad films. But, where badly executed Science Fiction has the underlying ideas that it is trying to communicate, bad Fantasy has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.