The problem of science fiction's relationship to actual science and actual religion as institutions is an interesting one. SF comes into its own in the '30s, in an era where science advancement is widely experienced and widely publicized, and in which scientific education is moving into the mainstream, but where the institutions that can employ the people who would be interested in having scientific careers are constrained by the economic emergency. You end up with a lot of writers who have less education and less opportunity for employment than they would like, so they need to take what jobs are available and learn about whatever they're interested in on their own.
In practice, this means learning about technology through popular science magazines, and learning about religion from various popular outlets descended from the Theosophical Society. The idea that the science of the future will involved the development of latent human powers like telekinesis and telepathy is one of the three declared objectives for the formation of the TS, and it's the point of contact between classic products of SF like Scientology, "Stranger in a Strange Land", and Clarke's "Childhood's End".
In other words, it's not surprising that, despite a desire to write about science and religion, SF writers write about both of them so badly. Being a research scientist or clergy in a mainstream religion requires a lot more education than the pioneers of science fiction were able to obtain. An interesting test case is Asimov, who earned a PhD in chemistry, but who considered his most important contributions to science fiction to be his Three Laws of Robotics (arguably pertaining to electrical science, but really a matter of philosophical ethics) and the Foundation books (arguably sociology or economics), neither one of which has anything to do with chemistry. In other words, while Asimov was not an autodidact in his professional life, he made a point of writing fiction about matters in which he was an autodidact.
One interesting exception is Claude Shannon, who was one of the greatest scientific minds in human history and was plugged into SF fandom. He describe himself as an avid SF reader, was neighbors and friends with Campbell, quoted Robert Silverberg in at least one of his papers.
Most infamously, he wrote a letter of introduction for his "friend" Hubbard to his associate Warren McCullough (one of the originators of artificial neural networks) to set up a conversation about Hubbard's interesting new therapeutic techniques.
This is mentioned briefly in "Astounding" as well as the fantastic Shannon biography "A Mind At Play". The actual full letter (on Bell Labs letterhead!) is online, just in a public Facebook group which is hard to link to.
One of the things that's hardest to grasp about Dianetics/Scientology is how it would play to people who had no experience of actual Scientologists. Actual Scientologists are unpleasant in the same way as people who belong to multi-level marketing operations. They're a little too hyper to be enjoyable, and a little to eager to monetize your acquaintance with them.
But Hubbard seems like he was a fun guy to be around, and his theories about how to optimize human functioning seem like the kind of thing that ought to work. They're not that different from Cognitive Behavior Therapy or Prolonged Exposure Therapy for PTSD. If they had been developed by someone who had an interest in actually working with people who were mentally ill, they could have been turned into a workable therapy.
Greg Bateson's theory of the double bind origin of schizophrenia was just as unworkable in its original state, but his co-authors (who had the patience for actual therapy that Bateson didn't) turned it into family therapy. Unlike Bateson, who just left the field of clinical psychology, Hubbard, when his alleged therapy technique needed more development to actually work, turned the technique into a high-control group for people without mental illness.
Clinical psychology is almost an anti-science. There are a number of ways to help people recover from mental illness that are effective, except not in all cases, and the theories of how they work run the gamut from merely wrong to thoroughly unbelievable. This is aggravated by the fact that working with the mentally ill is particularly appealing to narcissists who like manipulating people, and who are willing to announce that a particularly manipulative form of treatment is really a miracle cure.
Strongly agree. I kind of see Hubbard as fitting nicely into the general soup of California nonsense. Weird secularized meditation practices, est, sales guy motivational seminars, encounter groups, "circling", holotropic breathwork... This stuff all "works" in that it really will make you have some kind of altered experience. I don't doubt that Scientology practices do too, although I don't care to find out.
Today's Bay Area AI weirdos are clearly the heirs to this. They do a lot of drugs, they are into science fiction, among them are actual practicing technologists alongside autodidacts, and they love secularized meditation self improvement practices. And they keep spinning off into cults.
I have plenty of experience of "general soup of California nonsense" and agree with putting Hubbard in there, and it does seem like "Bay Area AI weirdos" are the latest iteration, although I have no real experience of them.
One thing that I find disconcerting about the AI folks is the tendency to treat skill in coding as a pre-requisite to doing ethical philosophy well. I never had a sense that the people I shared California nonsense with thought of themselves as particularly ethical people, or were trying to persuade me that that they were especially good people in their moral lives. They just had the normal amount of self-deception that they were good people in spite of behaving very badly in certain aspects of their lives.
The AI folks seem to believe that there is a right answer to the dilemmas of ethical life, and that it is possible to figure out that answer in the abstract, without evaluating one's relationships with others. As with trying to develop a mental health treatment in the abstract, this seems like a Very Bad Idea.
One of the things which made Campbell a bit sad to me in Nevala-Lee's book was the way he would label himself things like a "nuclear physicist"—which of course… he wasn't even if he could see what was going to happen with nuclear energy before a lot of people. This level of insecurity feels like part of what made him such an easy mark for a guy like Hubbard. I can't really have much against autodidacts, since I basically am one, but you need to cultivate a certain internal humility I think. (On the other hand maybe you couldn't accomplish what these guys did if you did cultivate such humility…. Who knows!)
Oddly, it's not a main theme of hers but I think Joanna Russ's use of religious themes is good when she picks it up. A big thing in The Two of Them is that the society is a fake Islamic society—everything's made of plastic and the colony is disavowed by actual Muslims because it's basically a sort of Orientalist self-parody. In We Who Are About To… the narrator is a member of a futuristic Christian sect and it's clearly very important to her. And then there's Souls but I haven't reread it recently so I don't want to venture too much about it.
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.
This is so great. Re: Stranger in a Strange Land -- My dad has always read tons of sci-fi, but SIASL is one of very, very few specimens he has also convinced my mom to read. For that reason it is alluded to with disproportionate frequency in their household. Good family fun.
Re: Heinlein, I do think there is a difference between a straight man who likes women but is not a feminist and a straight man who resents women for the hold they have on his libido. How much of a difference that makes I don't know.
Heinlein is another one for my “it’s possible to be very, very sexist and not particularly misogynist” file. Though my go to example is always Anthony Trollope, who clearly believes that women have special qualities and a special job, but also is constantly arguing on behalf of them against an imagined male reader who thinks it’s stupid to care about dances and dresses.
I meant to put this in the post but couldn't find the video but there's this tiktok video of how to handle sharks and you just kind of boop em on the nose: https://www.tiktok.com/@mermaid.kayleigh/video/7219713298458053934 this represents my current feelings about heinlein
“Likes women/is sexist”: Heinlein, Trollope, most evangelical women writers up to about 2012, arguably Valerie Solanas except in practice she didn’t like anyone
“Doesn’t like women, is not sexist”: arguably this is Shinji, at least if we swap in “is deeply conflicted about“ for “doesn’t like”
“Likes women isn’t sexist”: Samuel R Delany
“doesn’t like women, is sexist”: Saul Bellow, that guy who wrote those Gor novels, the current political leadership of this country
A couple other sub categories: “likes women, thinks women are equal to and not essentially different from men, is uncontrollably horny for them, and is therefore sexist if you assume that there is no such thing as a healthy male desire for women, but otherwise it’s arguable”: Crumb, Philip Roth
“Same as previous category, but keeps it professional”: Jack Reacher
“Not sexist, not misogynist, but is fixated upon misogyny to a degree that it starts to become as offputting as sexism”: Alan Moore (I would also argue that this is how DFW reads if you don’t know about the abuse)
There's something about Alan Moore's imagination that involves completely mastering the ideological framework of a particular popular literary genre, and then setting out a scenario in which that ideology is subverted in a way that is profoundly disturbing, but often unobtrusive. A simple example is his subversion of the classic superhero costume, which is skin-tight, but shows no presence of any male genitals protruding - In Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan is completely naked with his genitals exposed.
Given how much popular culture works to paper over the social complications of gender and human reproduction, this aesthetic is bound to produce a huge amount of material that can be read as misogynistic.
I think Alan Moore has conflicting mandates which occasionally created mixed messages in his work. One is "sexual abuse is so commonplace its really in the background of all our personal histories and therefore its part of our collective experience and should be brought to the forefront," which is me paraphrasing a defense he gave in an interview once where he was bitching about Grant Morrison (the whole interview is a classic read).
But another is "human beings are weird, kinky creatures who have nonconsensual fantasies, those tropes are part of our literary history and if we are presenting art where that subtext is part of the appeal, its okay to make the subtext text because understanding the distinction between fantasy and reality is one of the most important parts of being a fully-realized person and something only art can really facilitate.
Because those two ideas both inform each other but conflict with each other, you get these weird moments of cognitive dissonance in his work, where sometimes sexual assault is treated quite seriously as an act of transgression, and sometimes it feels kind of like the punchline to a joke, or the beginning of an erotic fantasy where everyone ends up enjoying themselves, and this can happen in the same work so you are left feeling kind of...icky. And the question becomes, is this feeling a part of the intended experience or is Alan Moore just biting off more than he can chew?
But anyway the way he portrays women and sex never bugged me the way Gaiman's portrayals of such subjects bugged me, even before the recent allegations came out.
I'm increasingly coming around to the idea that Moore is generally aiming at leaving the reader feeling icky. That if you are reading his work and not feeling icky, the problem is that your thinking has bought into the genre conventions so fully that you overlook their subversion.
I think Gaiman fully grasps this aspect of Moore's work, and identifies with it, while recognizing that a lot of the audience was that bought into the genre conventions. For him the fact that fans continued to buy into the genre conventions in spite of all contrary evidence was an opportunity to exploit. (This is a feeling more than anything - I need to do more work to explicate in in his work.)
Morrison is a fan who buys into all the generic conventions, regardless of how fully they are subverted. Superheroes just are better, more hopeful beings than the characters of any other form of narrative.
I think my pick for "doesn't like women, is not sexist" would be somebody like MR James who prefers to inhabit a world in which women basically do not exist. When they do exist they're kind of annoying but mostly it's like: "what if they just weren't around?"
nobody asked but Richard Yates would be a "misogynist who can hang" for me. Tolstoy a misogynist who cannot hang for the most part, though Anna Karenina is of course an exception.
The problem of science fiction's relationship to actual science and actual religion as institutions is an interesting one. SF comes into its own in the '30s, in an era where science advancement is widely experienced and widely publicized, and in which scientific education is moving into the mainstream, but where the institutions that can employ the people who would be interested in having scientific careers are constrained by the economic emergency. You end up with a lot of writers who have less education and less opportunity for employment than they would like, so they need to take what jobs are available and learn about whatever they're interested in on their own.
In practice, this means learning about technology through popular science magazines, and learning about religion from various popular outlets descended from the Theosophical Society. The idea that the science of the future will involved the development of latent human powers like telekinesis and telepathy is one of the three declared objectives for the formation of the TS, and it's the point of contact between classic products of SF like Scientology, "Stranger in a Strange Land", and Clarke's "Childhood's End".
In other words, it's not surprising that, despite a desire to write about science and religion, SF writers write about both of them so badly. Being a research scientist or clergy in a mainstream religion requires a lot more education than the pioneers of science fiction were able to obtain. An interesting test case is Asimov, who earned a PhD in chemistry, but who considered his most important contributions to science fiction to be his Three Laws of Robotics (arguably pertaining to electrical science, but really a matter of philosophical ethics) and the Foundation books (arguably sociology or economics), neither one of which has anything to do with chemistry. In other words, while Asimov was not an autodidact in his professional life, he made a point of writing fiction about matters in which he was an autodidact.
One interesting exception is Claude Shannon, who was one of the greatest scientific minds in human history and was plugged into SF fandom. He describe himself as an avid SF reader, was neighbors and friends with Campbell, quoted Robert Silverberg in at least one of his papers.
Most infamously, he wrote a letter of introduction for his "friend" Hubbard to his associate Warren McCullough (one of the originators of artificial neural networks) to set up a conversation about Hubbard's interesting new therapeutic techniques.
This is mentioned briefly in "Astounding" as well as the fantastic Shannon biography "A Mind At Play". The actual full letter (on Bell Labs letterhead!) is online, just in a public Facebook group which is hard to link to.
One of the things that's hardest to grasp about Dianetics/Scientology is how it would play to people who had no experience of actual Scientologists. Actual Scientologists are unpleasant in the same way as people who belong to multi-level marketing operations. They're a little too hyper to be enjoyable, and a little to eager to monetize your acquaintance with them.
But Hubbard seems like he was a fun guy to be around, and his theories about how to optimize human functioning seem like the kind of thing that ought to work. They're not that different from Cognitive Behavior Therapy or Prolonged Exposure Therapy for PTSD. If they had been developed by someone who had an interest in actually working with people who were mentally ill, they could have been turned into a workable therapy.
Greg Bateson's theory of the double bind origin of schizophrenia was just as unworkable in its original state, but his co-authors (who had the patience for actual therapy that Bateson didn't) turned it into family therapy. Unlike Bateson, who just left the field of clinical psychology, Hubbard, when his alleged therapy technique needed more development to actually work, turned the technique into a high-control group for people without mental illness.
Clinical psychology is almost an anti-science. There are a number of ways to help people recover from mental illness that are effective, except not in all cases, and the theories of how they work run the gamut from merely wrong to thoroughly unbelievable. This is aggravated by the fact that working with the mentally ill is particularly appealing to narcissists who like manipulating people, and who are willing to announce that a particularly manipulative form of treatment is really a miracle cure.
Strongly agree. I kind of see Hubbard as fitting nicely into the general soup of California nonsense. Weird secularized meditation practices, est, sales guy motivational seminars, encounter groups, "circling", holotropic breathwork... This stuff all "works" in that it really will make you have some kind of altered experience. I don't doubt that Scientology practices do too, although I don't care to find out.
Today's Bay Area AI weirdos are clearly the heirs to this. They do a lot of drugs, they are into science fiction, among them are actual practicing technologists alongside autodidacts, and they love secularized meditation self improvement practices. And they keep spinning off into cults.
I have plenty of experience of "general soup of California nonsense" and agree with putting Hubbard in there, and it does seem like "Bay Area AI weirdos" are the latest iteration, although I have no real experience of them.
One thing that I find disconcerting about the AI folks is the tendency to treat skill in coding as a pre-requisite to doing ethical philosophy well. I never had a sense that the people I shared California nonsense with thought of themselves as particularly ethical people, or were trying to persuade me that that they were especially good people in their moral lives. They just had the normal amount of self-deception that they were good people in spite of behaving very badly in certain aspects of their lives.
The AI folks seem to believe that there is a right answer to the dilemmas of ethical life, and that it is possible to figure out that answer in the abstract, without evaluating one's relationships with others. As with trying to develop a mental health treatment in the abstract, this seems like a Very Bad Idea.
One of the things which made Campbell a bit sad to me in Nevala-Lee's book was the way he would label himself things like a "nuclear physicist"—which of course… he wasn't even if he could see what was going to happen with nuclear energy before a lot of people. This level of insecurity feels like part of what made him such an easy mark for a guy like Hubbard. I can't really have much against autodidacts, since I basically am one, but you need to cultivate a certain internal humility I think. (On the other hand maybe you couldn't accomplish what these guys did if you did cultivate such humility…. Who knows!)
Oddly, it's not a main theme of hers but I think Joanna Russ's use of religious themes is good when she picks it up. A big thing in The Two of Them is that the society is a fake Islamic society—everything's made of plastic and the colony is disavowed by actual Muslims because it's basically a sort of Orientalist self-parody. In We Who Are About To… the narrator is a member of a futuristic Christian sect and it's clearly very important to her. And then there's Souls but I haven't reread it recently so I don't want to venture too much about it.
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.
This is so great. Re: Stranger in a Strange Land -- My dad has always read tons of sci-fi, but SIASL is one of very, very few specimens he has also convinced my mom to read. For that reason it is alluded to with disproportionate frequency in their household. Good family fun.
are you saying your parents grok each other in fullness
Hopefully not while the kids are present
Re: Heinlein, I do think there is a difference between a straight man who likes women but is not a feminist and a straight man who resents women for the hold they have on his libido. How much of a difference that makes I don't know.
There is a difference, though it's not always going to determine whether or not I like the art they make (Hitchcock is definitely type two, and yet).
Heinlein is another one for my “it’s possible to be very, very sexist and not particularly misogynist” file. Though my go to example is always Anthony Trollope, who clearly believes that women have special qualities and a special job, but also is constantly arguing on behalf of them against an imagined male reader who thinks it’s stupid to care about dances and dresses.
I meant to put this in the post but couldn't find the video but there's this tiktok video of how to handle sharks and you just kind of boop em on the nose: https://www.tiktok.com/@mermaid.kayleigh/video/7219713298458053934 this represents my current feelings about heinlein
(Adam Ant singing “Desperate But Not Serious” voice) “Sex-ist/ But not mi-so-gy-nist/ Your gender roles/ are dichotomous”
there's some sort of mental chart that's like
likes women / is sexist
doesn't like women / is not sexist
likes women / isn't sexist
doesn't like women / is sexist
that goes with my mental division of "misogynists who can hang" and "misogynists who cannot hang" lol
“Likes women/is sexist”: Heinlein, Trollope, most evangelical women writers up to about 2012, arguably Valerie Solanas except in practice she didn’t like anyone
“Doesn’t like women, is not sexist”: arguably this is Shinji, at least if we swap in “is deeply conflicted about“ for “doesn’t like”
“Likes women isn’t sexist”: Samuel R Delany
“doesn’t like women, is sexist”: Saul Bellow, that guy who wrote those Gor novels, the current political leadership of this country
A couple other sub categories: “likes women, thinks women are equal to and not essentially different from men, is uncontrollably horny for them, and is therefore sexist if you assume that there is no such thing as a healthy male desire for women, but otherwise it’s arguable”: Crumb, Philip Roth
“Same as previous category, but keeps it professional”: Jack Reacher
“Not sexist, not misogynist, but is fixated upon misogyny to a degree that it starts to become as offputting as sexism”: Alan Moore (I would also argue that this is how DFW reads if you don’t know about the abuse)
There's something about Alan Moore's imagination that involves completely mastering the ideological framework of a particular popular literary genre, and then setting out a scenario in which that ideology is subverted in a way that is profoundly disturbing, but often unobtrusive. A simple example is his subversion of the classic superhero costume, which is skin-tight, but shows no presence of any male genitals protruding - In Watchmen, Dr. Manhattan is completely naked with his genitals exposed.
Given how much popular culture works to paper over the social complications of gender and human reproduction, this aesthetic is bound to produce a huge amount of material that can be read as misogynistic.
I think Alan Moore has conflicting mandates which occasionally created mixed messages in his work. One is "sexual abuse is so commonplace its really in the background of all our personal histories and therefore its part of our collective experience and should be brought to the forefront," which is me paraphrasing a defense he gave in an interview once where he was bitching about Grant Morrison (the whole interview is a classic read).
But another is "human beings are weird, kinky creatures who have nonconsensual fantasies, those tropes are part of our literary history and if we are presenting art where that subtext is part of the appeal, its okay to make the subtext text because understanding the distinction between fantasy and reality is one of the most important parts of being a fully-realized person and something only art can really facilitate.
Because those two ideas both inform each other but conflict with each other, you get these weird moments of cognitive dissonance in his work, where sometimes sexual assault is treated quite seriously as an act of transgression, and sometimes it feels kind of like the punchline to a joke, or the beginning of an erotic fantasy where everyone ends up enjoying themselves, and this can happen in the same work so you are left feeling kind of...icky. And the question becomes, is this feeling a part of the intended experience or is Alan Moore just biting off more than he can chew?
But anyway the way he portrays women and sex never bugged me the way Gaiman's portrayals of such subjects bugged me, even before the recent allegations came out.
I'm increasingly coming around to the idea that Moore is generally aiming at leaving the reader feeling icky. That if you are reading his work and not feeling icky, the problem is that your thinking has bought into the genre conventions so fully that you overlook their subversion.
I think Gaiman fully grasps this aspect of Moore's work, and identifies with it, while recognizing that a lot of the audience was that bought into the genre conventions. For him the fact that fans continued to buy into the genre conventions in spite of all contrary evidence was an opportunity to exploit. (This is a feeling more than anything - I need to do more work to explicate in in his work.)
Morrison is a fan who buys into all the generic conventions, regardless of how fully they are subverted. Superheroes just are better, more hopeful beings than the characters of any other form of narrative.
I think my pick for "doesn't like women, is not sexist" would be somebody like MR James who prefers to inhabit a world in which women basically do not exist. When they do exist they're kind of annoying but mostly it's like: "what if they just weren't around?"
Maybe P.G. Wodehouse?
oh that's a good one
CS Lewis has been on both sides of this divide, pre and post Joy Davidman
nobody asked but Richard Yates would be a "misogynist who can hang" for me. Tolstoy a misogynist who cannot hang for the most part, though Anna Karenina is of course an exception.