PROBLEM IS…?
Where will new Science Fiction readers come from?
Given how hyper-saturated modern popular culture is with the (stereotypical) trappings of science fiction, it is doubtful that the average adult will ever feel any need to seek out Science Fiction as literature. Simply channel-surfing through the stations available on any cable or satellite affiliate in the country, at any time of day, will provide the average man or woman with his daily dose of robots, monsters, spaceships, exotic beings, futuristic or horrific settings, and what have you. Nowadays, science fiction (lower case), in some form or other, is impossible to escape.
This isn’t a bad thing. I’ve wanted to see The Lord of the Rings brought properly to the big screen for a long time, and Peter Jackson and company have pretty much done this. Purists may complain, but for the average Joe who never read the books in the first place, the movies are a wonderful means to be exposed to Tolkien’s vision. Problem is, most of those viewers will never go on to read the books. Also, I find it delightful that the various science channels can transport me through time to science-fictional worlds loaded with dinosaurs fighting and biting each other better than I could ever have imagined in my youthful fantasies. Problem is, why would anyone read stories about dinosaurs when he can watch what looks like the real thing on TV?
Now don’t go running off to send me an indignant e-mail answering that last question–I already know the answer. Problem is, those of us who already know the answer are already readers of SF, and have been since we were kids. We discovered that Science Fiction filled a void in our lives that "real life" couldn’t, and we discovered this early on. But how is the child of today to even recognize such a void, or for that matter, can such a void even exist today, when cartoons and video games and the movies are so soaked in the stage props of science fiction?
We’ll get to that in a minute.
My biggest self-indulgence of late has been to collect old library copies, usually hardcovers, of the Science Fiction books I read as a kid. Sometimes I prefer the paperback if it has special significance (like the Groff Conklin anthology discussed below). The idea is to recapture the experience of that first reading. I like the smell of those old library books; I don’t care if some pages are a little ripped, or if the call numbers are still on the spine. (I will admit to being annoyed by seeing "Discard" stamped inside the front cover–what fools were responsible for discarding such treasures?) Though I can’t relive the original sense of wonder those books brought, I can enjoy the memory of it.
So what are some of these books that forever made me a fan, not just of things science-fictional, but also of Science Fiction itself?
The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Eleanor Cameron first caught my eye sometime around fifth grade, I think. I remember that a girl in my class did an oral book report on it, and once I heard the words "flight to" and "planet," I knew this was my kind of book.
Mushroom Planet is actually the first in a five-book series, the others being (in both publication and timeline order) Stowaway to the Mushroom Planet, Mr. Bass’s Planetoid, A Mystery for Mr. Bass, and Time and Mr. Bass. I only knew about the first two when I was a kid, and having reread them just recently, I think these two carry the lion’s share of the magic. (I did discover the third book when I was still technically a kid, but I only discovered the last two books last year. Don’t get me wrong–the last three are still each an interesting read. They’re just not as wonderful as the first two.)
Mushroom Planet is as delightfully improbable as a great deal of ’30s and ’40s era SF. It begins with an ad in a newspaper asking for a boy to build a rocket and bring it to one Tyco M. Bass at 5 Thallo Street. This fires the imaginations of David Topman, age eight, and his friend Chuck Masterson, and they build a rocket, or at least its shell. Now, anyone who has had access to eight-year-old boys knows the chances of them completing anything on their own are about nil. But Eleanor Cameron had an eight-year-old of her own once, and so she adds in some "magic" that has the boys work harder than ever before and with a sense of urgency the likes of which they’ve never known.
They bring their rocket to Mr. Bass’s house, a round home with an observatory on top, which makes it look rather like a mushroom. Mr. Bass turns out to be a quintessential lone-genius-type scientist. He is ecstatic with the rocket the boys bring him. Indeed, due to that magic, it is far better than anything real boys would have produced. He goes about installing the engines (which run on a secret fuel he made himself), and paints the rocket with a special sealant (made from a formula only he knows), and makes the rocket spaceworthy.
Mr. Bass has a mission for the boys. He’s discovered a new planet, or rather, another moon of the Earth, which he has named Basidium. How did it go unnoticed all these years when it only orbits 50,000 miles out? Well, to see it, Mr. Bass needed to invent the Stroboscopic Polaroid Filter, and once he did, he found the Mushroom Planet right away. He needs for the boys to visit the planet immediately, for he has an intuition that the people who live there are in dire straits. He’s confident that David and Chuck, somehow or other, will go there and save the day.
And they do, but I don’t want to give the whole thing away. Suffice to say, though, that I checked that book out quite a few times–the Mushroom Planet was one place I wanted to revisit again and again.
Another book I remember vividly, and eventually tracked down once used book searches on the Internet became easy, is The Beyond by Jean and Jeff Sutton. This is something of a mystery story. The Federation police have rounded up the telepaths in the galaxy and exiled them to various concentration planets, one of them Engo. But a rumor springs up that amongst the telepaths of Engo is a "beyond," a person who can do telekinesis. Alek Selby goes to investigate this rumor, and finds out along the way that he is a telepath himself. He eventually helps the exiles on Engo as they escape to a planet in the Magellanic Clouds via teleportation.
What originally attracted me to the book was its garish cover. A huge orange moon hangs in the sky, and there are people being chased by others along a cracked, Monument-valley landscape, as a really, really cool spaceship hangs in the sky. The ship had a pointed ellipsoid main body, some short wings attached to the stern, and on the ends of the wings, cigar-shaped outrigger rockets even longer than the main body of the ship. On the ship were glass domes and blisters through which you could see people watching the activity below.
But the story itself contained deeper mysteries. In Mushroom Planet, the reader is left with the mystery of just whom this Mr. Bass really is–he blows away into the sky at the end of the story. The Beyond has wheels within wheels, with people who are not whom they seem to be, discovering they can do things even they never suspect they could.
One glorious day in Junior High, my English teacher Mrs. Frens got in a shipment of paperbacks. No treasure chest ever held gold or jewels enough to equal the value of that box of books. It contained a wide assortment of titles from most genres, but there was Science Fiction in there. There was H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. There was The Mysterious Island by Jules Verne. And there was a Groff Conklin-edited anthology called Great Stories of Space Travel.
With the possible exception of Alfred Bester’s The Stars, My Destination, nothing science-fictional means more to me that that little Tempo Books paperback, with the title printed against a purpley-pink background on top, and a rather puffy-looking rendition of the Milky Way on the bottom. Inside were stories by Lester del Rey, Jerome Bixby, Ray Bradbury, Jack Vance, A. E. Van Vogt, Murray Leinster, Damon Knight, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, and Eric Frank Russell (and, I might add, seven of those stories were from the pages of this magazine, back in her Astounding days). The one glaring omission from this list is Heinlein, but by the early ’70s, he was pretty hard to miss elsewhere, so it was an omission easily made up for.
And what stories they were. The puns in Bixby’s "The Holes Around Mars," and the shaggy-dog humor of Russell’s "Allamagoosa." The mind-expanding vision of Van Vogt’s "Far Centaurus," and the air of the utterly alien in Knight’s "Cabin Boy." The creepy horror of Clarke’s "A Walk in the Dark," and the poignancy (unworkable orbital mechanics notwithstanding) of Bradbury’s "Kaleidoscope" (wherein an astronaut returns to Earth as a shooting star, which I couldn’t help but recall as I watched the disastrous reentry of the Space Shuttle Columbia).
Ahhhhhh . . . the memories, the memories.
Was there something extra special about these particular books that made me a fan? No, they were just good. Would they still have done the trick if I’d been born thirty years later? I think so, and here’s why.
It’s not like my own youth wasn’t saturated with science-fictional props. I had several battery-operated robots. I had a spaceman set with guys in spacesuits operating missile launcher trucks. My lunch box was covered with spacemen and spaceships. My favorite toys were the Major Matt Mason toys. I had model dinosaurs, and futuristic toy guns, and a plastigoop mold set for making miniature monsters.
Science fiction was also prevalent on TV. One of my favorite TV shows was Lost in Space (Okay, it had a flying saucer in it, and the first episode premiered when I think I was six). Almost every episode of Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea was science fiction. There was Star Trek. For time travel buffs, there was The Time Tunnel. Anthology SF was available to all on TV via The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits. There was Bewitched. There was I Dream of Jeannie. For cartoons, I always watched Space Ghost, The Fantastic Four, and Jonny Quest.
Nevertheless, I found Science Fiction, or maybe it found me. Us fans always were a pretty select lot, not to be grouped with average Joes or Janes. So where will new Science Fiction readers come from? Same place as always. They’ll gravitate toward good Science Fiction if we make it available, and they, too, will make memories to last a lifetime.
