Democracy and Science Fiction

by Joshua Fagan

On or about April 1978, the division between popular art and critically acclaimed art solidified. That is when Annie Hall defeated Star Wars at the Oscars and a chasm opened between “the kinds of movies that receive awards” and “the kinds of movies most people want to see.” This divide is not unique to film, and it of course preceded the 1970s, but 1978 nonetheless seems a watershed moment in the unnecessary divorce between critical acclaim and popularity. It is the kind of divorce that makes both sides resentful.

To the snobs, explosions and bombast cannot co-exist with quality. To the populists, a good narrative is an exciting plot happening to relatable, likeable characters, and nothing more. The idea that fiction, like politics, should be democratic, giving the people what they want, is a common idea that is nonetheless insidious. As the snobs in the early, pulp days of science fiction derided the genre as being low-quality pablum, an advocate for the genre might instinctively side against them. Yet the surrender to empty spectacle is anathema to the kind of thoughtful, introspective speculative fiction that a blockbuster-saturated world like ours deeply needs.

Nowhere is this divide between popularity and critical praise more evident than in the film industry, where more populist types readily blame the ratings decline of the Oscars on the dearth of popular films nominated. The Oscars, as tone-deaf as ever, attempted to assuage this decline back in 2018 by introducing an award for “Best Popular Film,” a condescending move that resulted in widespread backlash and the eventual cancelling of the category. The implication, as Stephanie Zacharek wrote bluntly at Time, is that the “Academy thinks the public is stupid.”

So is the public stupid? Are audiences dense, sentimentalist imbeciles who lack the capacity of appreciating great art? While stereotyping those who hold this opinion as septuagenarians dressed in musty tuxedos is simple, the truth is more nuanced. As acerbic journalist and noted snob H.L. Mencken wrote, “there is always a well-known solution” that is “neat, plausible, and wrong.” Menken disliked the common tendency toward facile reassurances and populist rhetoric, the desire to uphold decorum instead of honestly searching for truth. Menken famously covered the Scopes Monkey Trial, where failed presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan argued in favor of a Tennessee law banning the teaching of evolution. For the thunderously cosmopolitan Menken, Bryan was the embodiment of everything wrong with popular taste. Bryan offered only “theologic bilge” in response to scientific reasoning and broad-minded sophistication.

This opinion on the inadequacies of popular taste defined the general ideological-artistic current known as modernism. T.S. Eliot burrowed into a royalist, quasi-aristocratic contempt for the masses, and even the less emphatic Virginia Woolf published an essay that she rather playfully titled “Am I a Snob?” One of the defining characteristics of modernist literature is its conscious difficulty, its insistence on resisting superficial understanding and demanding deeper engagement. No one goes to Eliot’s “The Waste Land” or Woolf’s The Waves for a breezy beach-read.

The modernists faced the accusation that they made their books difficult to read in order to separate their “high art” from the taste of “the rabble,” but such a reading is rather narrow. They found in the modern age a fragmented world overwhelmed with superficial stimulations and obsessed with efficiency. For the modernists, what made art truly great was its capacity to create an oasis from the mechanistic routines of everyday life and see the hidden significances lingering beneath the surface. The plot of Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway involves a middle-aged woman proceeding through a rather uneventful routine as she prepares to host a dinner party, while the cavernous world of her psyche inundates her with interlocking streams of memories that surprise and unsettle her. Art that refuses the ease and efficiency prioritized by the commercial world could refresh and revitalize the senses. As Eliot once wrote, “the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

This modernist approach resulted in daring literature that foregrounded form to such an extent that no reader could extract a simplistic moral or message from them while ignoring the techniques and narrative strategies shaping the literature. As an approach, it succeeded artistically, recreating a sense of lost clarity and cohesion while doing so in a way that accepted the confusion and contradiction of a technologically saturated modern age. Yet it was not the only approach. Nor was it the most popular approach. Pulp magazines dominated the popular consciousness of the early twentieth century to the same extent as modernist masterpieces dominated its intellectual consciousness. These magazines, made with cheap paper and sold for cheap prices, carried the reputation of containing disposable and empty stories. They were made to be thrown away. Despite these inauspicious beginnings, two of the defining genres of the last hundred years emerged from them. The first was noir detective fiction. The second was science fiction as we now know it.

As noir writer Raymond Chandler once wrote, these stories had “unnecessarily gaudy covers, trashy titles and barely acceptable advertisements,” and in them “far too many people got killed and their death was celebrated with a rather too loving attention to detail.” Despite these defects, these novels captured what, to him, all the sophistication and elegantly rich writing of an Eliot or Woolf never could. Chandler, following in the tradition of Andrew Lang and other critics of intellectual refinement in literature, argued that subtlety and “elevated” subject matter were not the same as producing great literature. With a populist sneer, he opined against stories that are “jammed up with subordinate clauses, tricky punctuation, and hypothetical subjunctives.” Harrowing directness had a virtue that the opacity of the intellectuals lacked. Chandler was not anti-intellectual, and he readily admits the insight of writers like Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. These writers succeeded at conveying brilliant and philosophical narratives, but he argues that “literary” storytelling is not the only correct form of storytelling. Therefore, a novel could use conventional plots and artless writing and still manage to create the same unease and anxiety that Eliot creates with allusions to Indian mythology and Greek literature.

The easy response to snobs like Menken, which Chandler does not employ, is to imply that they are innately wrong because they are elitist. According to this perspective, people should simply like what they like without judgement. Such a perspective often dismisses those who demand more from art as being pretentious and wanting to view themselves as superior. The problem with this perspective is that there really is a difference between superficial works that blindly fulfill trite expectations and works that at least endeavor to defy the distractions of a commodified world, that create a heightened awareness to the impressions and contradictions that overwhelm easy reassurances. There really is a difference between making art and making empty entertainment. Art still exists in a market economy, of course, but it attempts to provide more than a few laughs and a few more senseless stimulations. Chandler never makes the facile argument that there is no difference between the worst pulp stories and the work of Dostoevsky. Rather, his argument is that the “high” artists do not entirely succeed at their motive. There is a harsh, stygian clarity that the detective novel captures that elaborately written stories about upper-class families do not. The same is true of the early sci-fi stories. While stories that a modern reader would classify as sci-fi are at least as old as Frankenstein, the term “science fiction” did not exist until the pulp era, nor did the process of grouping these kinds of stories together into a genre.

Most of these pulp stories have been rightly forgotten. They are questionable to a modern audience because of their outdated stereotypes and barely concealed lasciviousness about women. Their obsessive utopianism about technology and order verges on the vaguely fascist. Yet the real reason few of these stories survived is because their writing is simply not very good. They had names like Amazing Stories and Fantastic Adventures, and their plots and characters were no less generic. Now-forgotten names like Hugo Gernsback were the heroes and icons of this tawdry age of science fiction. The disappearance of these stories from the public consciousness reveals one major problem with giving the audience what it claims to want. Trends change, and fads fade. Eliot still matters because he wrote for eternity, because he captures particular shades of disorientation and tenderly cynical ennui that will never vanish.

Yet Raymond Chandler still matters too. Noir left an important legacy on the landscapes of both film and art. The early sci-fi pulps may have faded, but they helped start the careers of writers like Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, who would help sci-fi emerge as a respectable genre after World War II. Admittedly, the snobs were correct in their dread of a commodified world where literature and art have nothing to offer but more trite platitudes and exciting explosions. Still, the solution cannot be to blithely accept that popular fiction can only ever be saccharine and empty.

The vulgarly democratic idea that popularity and worth are the same deserves condemnation, but there are more productive options than simply rejecting the demos altogether, as Eliot does. Popular art, as writers from Shakespeare to Chandler prove, can appeal to both the sensorial desire for action and the intellectual desire for contemplation and depth. There is sadly no future in which a daring sci-fi film like Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris will ever attain the same widespread popularity as the next big-budget space opera, but Asimov and Bradbury are still read, as are later, brilliant writers like Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler. Stories that appeal to the curiosity and earnest skepticism of the general audience do not always succeed at outshining superficial clutter, but “not always” is not the same as “never.” Perhaps, as Mencken writes, the mainstream audience will disdain all aspects of an artwork except its “orthodoxy of doctrine, its platitudinousness, its usefulness as a moral tract,” but perhaps not. Artists can at least hope.

Joshua Fagan is a writer and critic currently residing in Scotland. His creative work has previously been published in venues including Daily Science Fiction, The Fantastic Other, and Star*Line. He is the author of the Amazon bestseller The Philosophy of Avatar, an extended study of Avatar: The Last Airbender in the context of the Western philosophical tradition. As an academic, his work focuses on the intersection of literature, myth, and technology in the aftermath of Darwin, and he has published a variety of articles on writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such as William Morris, H.G. Wells, and Robert Frost. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the literary speculative-fiction publication Orion’s Belt.