Welcome to the Roundtable Perspective. I'm your host, Tom Roach. I'm joined today by my guest, Dr. Ada Palmer. Ada is a historian and musician and author of science fiction and fantasy. She's an associate professor at the University of Chicago, a member of the History and Classics departments. She is also an award-winning science fiction writer and critic, and she's here to talk to us today about three books that she's working on. Thank you for joining me.
Thank you, Tom, for having me.
One of your books, the one that I'd like to get started with, it's called Trace Elements: Conversations on Science Fiction and Fantasy, coming out later this year. So you talk in there about the letters that were being exchanged by readers of these early science fiction publications as far back as the 1920s, right, and how these letter writers were kind of helping to define the genre. Can you, can we get started with that? Tell us a little bit of that background.
Sure. We're familiar with the fact that there were stories in the 19th century we think of as science fiction, like Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, but there was no name for that kind of fiction. It was just alongside other fiction, mixed in with novels that people were writing. And somebody might write something that had robots in it, but all of their other stories wouldn't. There was no genre.
And it's in the 1920s when there's the innovation of these giant pulp presses that make magazines incredibly cheap, and a huge range of new magazines on everything from fishkeeping to fashion to science fiction start coming out.
Now I remember these little paperback books with very yellow pages, because they decayed early. So we were talking about magazines that predate the stuff that I was reading in the 1950s, '60s, slightly predated, but those books were printed with the same technology, the same cheap paper.
Yes, they were. And so they were caused by the same innovation, which was now a book can cost a kid's pocket money, so that you can buy a book instead of a chocolate bar, as opposed to a book being a more expensive object. So that led to a huge proliferation of how much reading everyone was consuming because it was suddenly affordable in the USA. Not that this was a big technology in the USA, very different developments in the UK and other places. But it meant that there were these magazines, the magazines had names, and it was in the 1920s that an editor called John Campbell started having these letter columns in the back of the magazines where people could write in and comment on stories or share ideas, and he encouraged that and then would write replies to people and encouraging them to write their own stories. And he self-consciously developed a generation of readers to turn into writers. This was something that no editor had sat down and intentionally done before.
So this wasn't a case where they were getting more manuscripts than they knew what to do with.
It was the opposite. They had more pages to fill than they were getting manuscripts.
Interesting. A heyday in which they had enough of this stuff. It lasted until World War II disrupted things in terms of how much paper is available. And so, but that's a long enough period for the development and naming of a genre. One of the things that is relevant here is that science fiction and fantasy kind of changes our understanding of what we know and what we don't know, right, and it expands our empathy towards other humans because of the way their things are portrayed in these books. Let's talk about the impact science fiction has for a minute here.
I mean, it has a lot of impacts. It means that every one of us compares our world to dozens of other ways our world could be, and we have lots of them thought through with second-order consequences and third-order consequences. What if this happened? What if society was set up differently in this way? What if government worked this way? People a couple hundred years ago didn't do that. They mostly lived in their own world and then comparing it to descriptions of other real ancient places, contemporary places. People in the Renaissance are comparing their world to what they know about ancient Rome, but they're not comparing it to 20 other or 50 other versions of their own reality.
Yeah, I guess in that sense one of the advantages of college a hundred years ago or whatever was that it exposed you at least to other cultures, which got you to look at things and to a few other worlds.
But we hold our reality to a higher standard than any other age has, because it has to hold up to hundreds of imagined versions of itself.
I see. And that leads to a lot of demand for change. There's a great phrase, speculative resistance, or even imagining what if the world were different in X way, what if X were more equal, is the sort of thing that begins people thinking, wait a minute, maybe we should demand that. So science fiction makes people take seriously ideas that wouldn't necessarily get explored and then start asking for change with a new kind of vocabulary. To what extent were these early readers aware of that?
It was always a mind-opening experience, but there wasn't a self-awareness of exactly how much the diversity and proliferation of worlds would be powerful. And the shapers of SF between the 1920s and 1950s did have a kind of social engineering agenda, and that one of the goals of science fiction was to educate young readers about science so that the next era of humankind would be directed and ruled by this sort of scientifically educated intellectual elite that they thought they were raising. So it had a social engineering, very actually utopian vision of a technocratic future that would bring about a golden age.
That makes me think of Star Trek, because that really was the extension of that, right? But that's an exception now, isn't it? I mean, most of the science fiction we have now is not showing us a bright future, is it?
No. A lot of our SF, especially since the year 2000, is very grim. There are a number of reasons for that. Of course, there was grim stuff during the Cold War as well for different reasons. But there was a kind of interesting trauma that affected the whole society, especially through science fiction, around the year 2000. When we got to the year 2000 and we didn't have flying cars and we didn't have robot butlers and we weren't taking field trips to the Moon. We don't even have a moon base. But we could talk to our watches. I think we can talk to our watches. But all these promises that were made in Golden Age science fiction weren't kept.
Right. Well, it's interesting. They look at, you know, this book called 1984, which is supposed to be about the future. Well, it didn't look like that when we got there. And many other movies you see now and you look at and you realize, I think, Blade Runner. I think we've already passed the year for Blade Runner, right?
Yeah, we just passed the year for Blade Runner. We're close to when we're supposed to have contact with the Vulcans and break the light barrier and found the Star Trek Federation. And in reality it's taking a lot longer than that. Space turned out to be harder. And if you look back at the '60s and '70s you can't find very many examples at all, I mean there's maybe three, of a book in which we are in the 22nd century and we're neither bombed back to the Stone Age or deep out in space. Right, either we were in the Stone Age or we're deep out in space. That was just going to be true by the year 2000. And so here we are in 2000, we're not deep in space, we have a toe hold in space. It's harder, and there's a kind of mourning that the world goes into for that, you know, that world of tomorrow. And instead we have this world, and this is a world of tomorrow from the perspective of many things. The fact that information flows through our pockets in our magic mirrors is revolutionary, right? And you know, I have the entirety of the Diderot encyclopedia on my phone trivially. That's amazing. But it isn't amazing the way we thought it was going to be. And so there's a kind of mourning and a coming to terms with, all right, space isn't easy, we're not going to be living on Mars in 20 years. If we're living on Mars it's going to be in 100 years.
Well, when you think about it, there's no real good reason for us to live on Mars, is there? It's just something we wanted to do. It's just a goal, right?
Yeah, humans do lots of things because we want to do them, not because we have to. What are the Olympics? Right. I would say that living on Mars and the Olympics are exactly the same spirit. We want to do it because it's hard, and what that means to change the world, right.
So if we look at the major themes: utopias, dystopias, alternative societies, alien encounters, robots. Wasn't there a debate once about whether or not robots were going to be able to juggle? Did I read something about that?
Yeah, and there's amazing moments when, for example, Asimov thought that it would be harder to make a robot that could speak than it would be to make a robot that would be fully self-aware and intelligent and able to move around and have relationships. We're really starting to worry about that now.
So artificial intelligence, space travel is another area, and time travel like I mentioned, and just advanced technology, right?
Yeah. I mean, these are what I and my co-author in the collection, Joe Walton, call the furniture of science fiction. You know, the things that populate the room of science fiction. And you look around to tell if it's science fiction: does it have an alien, does it have a spaceship? But often those are the furniture, they're not the essence of the genre.
Science fiction tends to have, you know, messages and questions about how powerful is human reason and human ingenuity, what kinds of problems can it solve, what kinds of problems can't it solve, can good overcome evil? Well, that's a larger theme that you'll see in all sorts of other genres, whereas saying these are unique to science fiction, these are rarely absent from science fiction. It's like, you know, to tell if something is science fiction it'll almost always have a 'what are the limits of what human ingenuity can accomplish', for example, as one of the questions that's being asked.
And how much does a society change, how quickly, and can we make it change intentionally, whether for better or worse, will almost always be in there, whereas in other genres of literature, romance, mystery, whatever, they may be in there, they may not. Just as a mystery always has questions about what makes people choose evil, science fiction sometimes has that but doesn't always have that.
Well, if we go back to this utopian vision that was more prominent early on in the history of this, that kind of takes its last stand with the Star Trek episodes. Does that reflect that maybe we've sort of given up some of our hopes for the future? And I also think of Dick Tracy. I mean, you know, there was never anything negative about the future in the Dick Tracy stories, but they were always introducing this new technology, and things somehow, that comic strip and that watch, right, became the symbol of everything in the future. Any thoughts on why that was and what happened?
I think there's an important difference between a good future and a utopia, okay? Because lots of stories will depict, here's a future that is kind of cooler than the present, and it has these things that are good about it, but these other things that are still wrong about it, and it's still dynamic and changing in this way, which is very different from a utopia where the author is saying, you know, here's an ideal future and this is the way we should do things, not the way, you know, the future could look. And utopias, you know, originate well before science fiction originates, with Thomas More and before that with Plato, and they were usually somebody lecturing on their ideal social mores and social structure. Many of them are famous, but if you go to the 17th and 18th century there are dozens and dozens of wacky utopias written by like weird fringe Calvinist religious movements about exactly how to set up the world. That's a utopia. And movements of people forming communes and things like that.
Right, whereas what you're talking about is what I would call a future worth having, or a future worth living in, a future where we envision that the future is better than the present but also still complex and dynamic and needing work. You don't see those as often now as you did before, but you do see them. In particular, there's a movement within science fiction right now called Hopepunk.
Hopepunk? Yes, Hopepunk, okay.
The idea being that when we are saturated with grim narratives and dystopia and post-apocalyptic things and grimdark, which is a very fashionable style in science fiction and fantasy, hope and depicting a future actually worth living in that you don't have to blow up and replace is a radical act. And people underestimate how saturated we are with these things. But a couple years ago I asked my friend in the creative writing program at my university how many of your students are writing science fiction, and he said 90% of my students are writing dystopia.
Oh, not science fiction, dystopia.
