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  • Science Fiction and the Adolescent
  • Thomas J. Roberts (bio)

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards."

Through the Looking Glass

"The phases of being a science-fiction reader can be traced and charted," says Donald A. Wollheim in The Universe Makers. "So many read it for one year, so many for two, so many for life. For instance, reading it exclusively can be as compulsive as a narcotic for a period of an intelligent teen-ager's life. The length of time as I see it—and I have seen and talked with and corresponded with hundreds and hundreds of such readers in my lifetime—is about four or five years of the most intense reading—usually exclusive, all other literature being shoved aside. After that a falling off, rather rapid (often due to college entry or military life or the hard stuff of getting a job for the first time). There is, I suspect, something like an 80 percent turnover in the mass of readers of science fiction every five years."

Science fiction has many shapes. It is a mode, not a genre, which is to say that its traditions and content vary with the media in which it appears. The science fiction television series (Star Trek) is governed by different conditions than the feature film (2001: A Space Odyssey). Just as science fiction radio (X-One) is beginning to fade from human memory, a new oral tradition is beginning to emerge on records with The Firesign Theatre's Don't Crush That Dwarf and I Think We're All Bozos on This Bus. Even the lowly comic strip (Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon) is actually rather different from both the old comic books and the new underground comics (Planet Stories; Fantagor). But it is science fiction prose—by far the most sophisticated and demanding of all these genres—that is capturing that adolescent reader. We seriously underestimate him if we suppose we understand science fiction prose merely because we have watched The Creature from the Black Lagoon and read Flash Gordon when we were younger. It would be like supposing we know Moby-Dick because we have seen John Huston's film. The science fiction film may be lovable but it is stupid. Science fiction prose is often clumsily written but it is intelligent.

It may surprise some nonreaders to learn that within science fiction prose itself there is a tangle of conflicting traditions. Samuel J. Lundwall, in his study, Science Fiction, identifies five strands: pure adventure (e.g., Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Moons of Mars); horror (the stories of H. P. Lovecraft); sword and sorcery (Tolkien, Lord of the Rings); social satire (Huxley's Brave New World; Pohl and Kornbluth's Gravy Planet); scientific speculation (Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity); and literary experiment (Harlan Ellison's anthology Dangerous Visions). One of the leading magazines makes this mixture of subgenres explicit; [End Page 87] it calls itself The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. The truth is that a large part of science fiction is not about science at all; it is about the supernatural. And much of the rest of it is either covertly or quite openly doubtful about scientific values: we all think of Ray Bradbury as a writer of science fiction but he knows very little about modern science and is blatantly antagonistic to it. The adolescent who likes Isaac Asimov's stories about robots (Caves of Steel; I, Robot) probably also likes Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. In some of the best stories, magic and science are deliberately intertwined. There is nothing quite like Jack Vance's Dying Earth and Roger Zelazny's Jack of Shadows in the motion picture, or in any of the classic literary genres. Science fiction stories are often simple, but the genre itself is not simple.

Finally, some science fiction is written for adults and some for adolescents. This is so well recogmzed by readers of the genre that Luna Monthly, which is devoted to news about science fiction, has a special section of reviews titled "Lilliputia." There are some good novels which only the exceptional adolescent will find absorbing: Stapledon' s Last...

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