The Four Gospels Of Sci-Fi

The “canon” of science fiction is in the news again in the wake of the recent Hugo awards, and since I’m nothing if not opinionated and I also want to load up my posting queue before diving into my next big project, this struck me as an apt topic to write on.

So settle back; we’re going to touch on the history of sci-fi, the influence of its old guard, how it pertains to religious literature, and perhaps even delve a little bit on Christianity itself at the end.

First off, a quick recap of Christian scripture for those who aren’t read up on the subject.  Vacation Bible School veterans can skip this part.

. . .

The foundational works in the Christian New Testament are the four gospels:  Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

The first three are referred to as the synoptic gospels because they tell basically the same story in the same beats, differing in style and detail, but essentially the same.

Mark is considered the oldest of the three and the primary source for Matthew and Luke (boy howdy! Am I ever streamlining a lot of Biblical scholarship here but bear with me; I’m doing this to make a point about sci-fi, not religion).

The common Christian reading of the three synoptic gospels are that Mark is the basic story, Matthew (because of its focus on Old Testament prophecies) was written with a Jewish audience in mind, Luke was written for gentiles.*

John is the gospel that sticks out.

To grossly oversimplify, the biggest difference is that the synoptic gospels mainly record what Jesus said and did, John focuses more on the who and why.

And that’s all we need to know at this moment…

. . .

The four gospels of sci-fi are Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and Bradbury.

(Before we go further, let us stipulate this applies only to those who came to the genre prior to Star Wars -- indeed, an argument can be made it only applies to those who were fans before Star Trek.)

Sci-fi’s synoptic gospels are the oeuvre of Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke; Ray Bradbury is the oddball.

I say they are the synoptic gospels because truth be told, you can only tell them apart by style, not content, certainly not by point of view.

If all three exchanged story ideas and plot outlines, the end results would be different only in tone and vocabulary, not theme or character.

Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke were all technically trained and worked professionally as engineers or chemists when not writing; Bradbury was a gosh-wow! fanboy.**

If Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and Bradbury are the gospels of sci-fi, their John the Baptist was another John:  John W. Campbell

Campbell is a problematic figure in sci-fi, so let’s just get him out of the way ASAP.

• He was a good but not outstanding writer, but when you write “Who Goes There?” (basis of the various film versions of The Thing From Another World) you’ve earned your place at the table.

• He was a visionary editor and under his helm Astounding / Analog set the gold standard for sci-fi for decades to come.

• He was a white supremacist of the paternalistic bent, and while on the one hand that’s better than being an outright hate monger, on the other it’s more insidious since it presupposes a correct worldview without challenging that assumption.

• He was a male chauvinist of the same stripe, not particularly open to female writers but willing to publish the occasional story with a female protagonist…written by a male.

• He was a crank who believed a bunch of goofball ideas, from psionics (ESP, telekinesis, etc.) to dowsing to the Dean Drive to the Hieronymus Machine (a device so wonderous that even a schematic drawing of it would work!).***

Campbell by all accounts was not a bad individual and the field is still replete with those who knew and loved him, but like the cranky patriarch**** who refuses to divulge the contents of their will, forcing everyone in the family to kowtow to them, Campbell’s position atop the highest paying / most prestigious market in science fiction shaped much of the genre around him.  (Full disclosure:  One of the greatest highlights in my writing career was finally placing a story in Analog after fifty years of trying!)

Writers would typically aim at Astounding / Analog first, and failing to sell there, the Campbell rejects would start a long, laborious trudge down the stairs to the cheaper markets.

This held true even in the 1950s when sci-fi magazines of a more literary bent (Fantasy & Science Fiction and Galaxy in the US, New Worlds in the UK) started attracting stories written for them, not Campbell hand-me-downs.

As Jeannette Ng observed in her acceptance speech for the 2019 John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer*****:  “Through his editorial control of Astounding Science Fiction, [Campbell] is responsible for setting a tone of science fiction that still haunts the genre to this day.  Sterile.  Male.  White.  Exalting in the ambitions of imperialists and colonisers, settlers and industrialists.”

Campbell’s absolute faith in science and technology to solve all our problems (including the ones created by science and technology) while ignoring the very real problems that plague humanity since time immemorial (lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride) coupled with his prime market position led to a genre that unquestionably accepted those settings as the only viable ones.

Campbell certainly held more direct sway over the writings of Heinlein and Asimov than he did Clarke, but Clarke’s earliest sci-fi sales were to Astounding and nothing he wrote in his first decade as a writing professional fell outside the big cushy box Campbell crafter for the genre.

And even though Heinlein and Asimov broke off for cushier writing gigs elsewhere (Heinlein in novels, Asimov mostly as a popular science promoter), they remained steadfastly loyal and respectful -- as did Clarke -- to the ends of their lives.

And on a personal, individual level, that’s a good thing -- we all need friends who will stick by us.

But Bradbury never got invited to the party.

Which is not to say he didn’t try to crack Astounding -- he did, on four occasions, two of them humorous short-shorts for the magazine’s “Probability Zero” feature, one run of the mill magic-shop-disguised-as-super-science-store tale sold in the middle of WWII when Campbell’s best writers were on active duty, and the last in 1950 when he was no longer Ray Bradbury, fanboy, but Ray Bradbury, Important American Writer!!! and Campbell published an excerpt from The Martian Chronicles.******

. . .

We’re going to take a sidebar here to discuss one of Al Ries’ immutable laws of branding.

Ries long observed there are only two models for any brand category:

1. A single dominant top brand with a distant second place competitor then a host of niche brands (Microsoft then Apple then everybody else)

2. Two big rivals fighting for first place with a competitor placing a distant third then a host of niche brands (Coke vs Pepsi with RC Cola trailing third then everybody else)

The way to break through in branding is not to waste time and effort trying to knock out a dominant brand but to create a new category to dominate!

That’s what Bradbury did in the late 1940s and early 1950s:  He stopped aping the default Campbell / Astounding style and began writing more lyrical / less techno-focused sci-fi.

Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke were no dummies and soon they too branched out more consciously to mainstream audiences.

But as successful as they were, none of them ever fully shook the influence Campbell weighed down upon them.

That is why telling people today they must read the old masters results in eyerolls.

Too often the old masters trafficked in cleverness, not as Faulkner observed “the human heart in conflict with itself.”

Heinlein managed to transcend the genre a few times, but finding the gems in his work requires a lot of effort.  

Clarke remains dry and antiseptic:  It speaks volumes that his best known character is HAL 9000.

And Asimov just isn’t that good in either concept or execution.  His Three Laws of Robotics demonstrates a failure of nerve and imagination:  Humans won’t build robots programmed not to harm humans because the first thing humans will make robots do is kill other human beings!

So there’s our canon:
Mostly irrelevant,
often impenetrable. 

The last author standing is the least technology oriented of the lot and Bradbury’s stories continue to work and delight because he doesn’t lecture on weights and measures but allows the reader to imagine along with him.

. . .

Okay, short Christian content now; if you came just for the sci-fi you can either stop reading or skip ahead to the footnotes.

Any field of human endeavor that does not constantly re-examine itself and challenge previous assumptions is doomed to irrelevance.

This does not mean established works need to be rejected out of hand, but we do need to ask what those works mean to us right now.

Truth is indeed timeless, but the package has a sell-by date and the contents do no one any good if they aren’t periodically taken down from the shelf and examined.

Modern Christianity -- in particular mainstream American protestantism -- has failed to closely examine the contents for quite some time.

While the field of sci-fi brims over with exciting new voices, we’re still straining to listen to the cracked / garbled / low fidelity wax cylinders of theologians long dead.

We need fewer Christians.  
We desperately need better Christians.

Instead of demanding those outside or struggling with the faith must read things the way we were taught to read them, understand them the way we were taught to understand them, follow along the way we were taught to follow along, perhaps we should show faith in the material and let those who will read and re-imagine the text in the light of their own experience a fair hearing.

The old canon in sci-fi fails today because it is too dated, too rooted in the mindset of a bygone era.  The exception -- Bradbury (he himself a Christian and it shows in his stories) -- stays vibrant and alive and appealing because he doesn’t tell us what to think, he walks with us as we discover things for ourselves.

© Buzz Dixon

*  Acts Of The Apostles is a sequel to Luke and while Jesus appears briefly in the beginning in almost a flashback fashion, that book focuses on what his disciples did afterwards.

** An interesting trait Bradbury shared with Harlan Ellison was that despite their fanboy origins, both were one helluva lot more savvy to the business of writing and publishing than anyone else in the genre, and both skillfully created public personas that served them well (Bradbury’s better than Ellison’s, granted) while they guided their careers through the treacherous shoals of gatekeepers and public fancies.  Bradbury has written of his fanboy epiphany when he asked himself if he was satisfied being a fan / autograph hound or if he really wanted to be a creator, and immediately began directing his career in a fashion that could only be described as ruthless were it not attached to such a charming gentleman.  Wannabees are urged to study his career and how he did it if they want to be truly remembered.

***  All well and good as fodder for sci-fi stories, not so good in reality.  As the movie They Might Be Giants states:  “[Don Quixote] carried it a bit too far.  He thought that every windmill was a giant.  That's insane.  But, thinking that they might be... well… all the best minds used to think the world was flat. — But, what if it isn't? — It might be round — and bread mold might be medicine.  If we never looked at things and thought of what they might be, why, we'd all still be out there in the tall grass with the apes.”

**** To stretch our Biblical analog to the breaking point, if Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, and Bradbury are the New Testament gospels and John W. Campbell is John the Baptist, then sci-fi’s Old Testament has patriarchs such as Swift, Verne, and Wells plus the matriarch Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, a major prophet in Hugo Gernsback, and a host of minor prophets in various pre-WWII niche media including comics.

*****  An acceptance speech which in turn won a 2020 Hugo for Best Related Work -- how cool is that?

******  Basically, Bradbury was perceptive enough to recognize he turned a creative corner in 1944 with “The Lake” and broadened his submission range to include far more prestigious slick magazines such as The American Mercury and Mademoiselle and Collier’s and The New Yorker and when tipped off that Warner Bros. planned to plagiarize “The Foghorn” as the basis for The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms he didn’t waste time or money suing but sweetly judo leveraged this to get his name prominently displayed on the movie posters as “Ray Bradbury…Saturday Evening Post” writer and then holy %#@& he was a Major American Writer!  I loved Ray, but his gosh-wow sweet exterior camouflaged one of the most brilliant strategists I’ve ever met.