I didn't mean to say that it was bad that they were autodidacts, just that they were intellectuals operating well outside the institutions producing authoritative knowledge on the matters they were interested in. They were expressly interested in science and they were equally, but less overtly, interested in religion, right from the begi…
I didn't mean to say that it was bad that they were autodidacts, just that they were intellectuals operating well outside the institutions producing authoritative knowledge on the matters they were interested in. They were expressly interested in science and they were equally, but less overtly, interested in religion, right from the beginning. But if you try and locate their concerns in the actual science of the time, or the mainstream religions, their work makes no sense. You have to look at what was on the newsstand in the 1930s to know what counts as religion and science to them.
The generations after the "Golden Age" are more complex in this respect. They had varying degrees of attachment to the ideology of the founders, and varying degrees of participation in the mainstream intellectual culture of the time. Russ and Le Guin were highly educated women of letters, more than any of the men in the field of SF, and more than many of their contemporaries writing mainstream fiction. At the other end, there's the career of Phil Dick, an autodidact who goes from producing conventional science fiction to increasingly explicit meditations on Gnosticism. I suspect all of them recognized the inherent religious concerns of science fiction, but they had access to intellectual resources (formal for Russ and Le Guin, informal for Dick) beyond what Asimov, Heinlein, or Blish had access to.
My perspective here derives from an observation of Doris Lessing, that science fiction stories used a lot of ideas that are familiar from Hindu scriptures. It doesn't make sense to think that Campbell or Hubbard or Heinlein were reading the Vedas or the Puranas, but they wouldn't have been able to avoid Theosophy, whose writers were reading translations of Indian scriptures. Theosophy could also have provided Blish with the misunderstandings of Christianity in his work.
I feel like Theosophy is generally underestimated as a force on English-language culture of the first half of the 20th century. The full system is so obviously false, but it provided its audience with opinions on things like the failings of Christianity and the future evolution of the human race that seem plausible on their face. Certainly opinions good enough for the average consumer of SF media.
I didn't mean to say that it was bad that they were autodidacts, just that they were intellectuals operating well outside the institutions producing authoritative knowledge on the matters they were interested in. They were expressly interested in science and they were equally, but less overtly, interested in religion, right from the beginning. But if you try and locate their concerns in the actual science of the time, or the mainstream religions, their work makes no sense. You have to look at what was on the newsstand in the 1930s to know what counts as religion and science to them.
The generations after the "Golden Age" are more complex in this respect. They had varying degrees of attachment to the ideology of the founders, and varying degrees of participation in the mainstream intellectual culture of the time. Russ and Le Guin were highly educated women of letters, more than any of the men in the field of SF, and more than many of their contemporaries writing mainstream fiction. At the other end, there's the career of Phil Dick, an autodidact who goes from producing conventional science fiction to increasingly explicit meditations on Gnosticism. I suspect all of them recognized the inherent religious concerns of science fiction, but they had access to intellectual resources (formal for Russ and Le Guin, informal for Dick) beyond what Asimov, Heinlein, or Blish had access to.
My perspective here derives from an observation of Doris Lessing, that science fiction stories used a lot of ideas that are familiar from Hindu scriptures. It doesn't make sense to think that Campbell or Hubbard or Heinlein were reading the Vedas or the Puranas, but they wouldn't have been able to avoid Theosophy, whose writers were reading translations of Indian scriptures. Theosophy could also have provided Blish with the misunderstandings of Christianity in his work.
I feel like Theosophy is generally underestimated as a force on English-language culture of the first half of the 20th century. The full system is so obviously false, but it provided its audience with opinions on things like the failings of Christianity and the future evolution of the human race that seem plausible on their face. Certainly opinions good enough for the average consumer of SF media.