Peter Johnson on Science Fiction

The editors of CS2 have a special place in our hearts for Peter Johnson. When we were trying to launch this ezine, Peter took a leap of faith and had us on his show, Bibliomania. With no assurances that CS2 would actually appear, Peter took a chance on us because he liked the idea of a liberal magazine that trafficked in ideas. If there’s one thing I know about Peter it’s that he’s an idea man. You, dear reader, are about to find that out. Peter’s no shrinking violet, and you’ll never have to ask him how he really feels about something. You’ll know, and you’ll know in no uncertain terms. He’s articulate, interesting, and not afraid to push the envelope. I knew from his show that Peter has a love affair with books. But when I found out he had a soft spot for science fiction, I knew we had to talk. The following is a record of that chat. This month in Part 1, Peter expounds on some of his theories of science fiction. In the July issue he will take you on a guided tour that separates the wheat from the chaff in science fiction. You couldn’t have a better tour guide.-Chuck

Chuck: I understand that many years ago you worked in a bookstore right here in Reading. Is this where you developed your interest in books and science fiction? Is this why you started your program Bibliomania 20 years ago?

Pete: Yes. I was an assistant manager at a book store in town. That was back in the days when I didn’t know how to slow down and speak normal human English. One of the reasons why I have a slightly more theatrical delivery and tend to overstate things is because I used to leave a lot of stuff out. People didn’t understand me. So originally on my program 20 years ago I was comic relief. When one guy left we made it a panel program. We had a bunch of different people talking about a bunch of different stuff depending on the whims of the guy who was the producer. When he moved to New York about 18 years ago, that was when I got control of the program. The program has grown and changed a bit since then. Basically, a lot of it now is me. It used to be I had a co-reviewer and we would talk about different materials. That’s one of the reasons why I like having other people on. Because the more other people talk about stuff I don’t talk about, the better the program is. So remember, anybody who’s interested in it should bring a book and an attitude and Bibliomania will be glad to have you.

Chuck: When is your show on?

Pete: It’s the fourth Monday of the month. 9:30-10:00pm. The call-in number is (610) 378-0426. The next show tentatively will feature two women from an organization called Years of Tears. It’s basically an organization which represents people who have survived folks who were killed by violence in Reading. It doesn’t happen as often as you think, because the media makes it sound worse than it is. But there are people who have had these family tragedies, and I want to give them their shot.

Chuck: What is the station?

Pete: The station is Berks Community Access Television BCTV. It’s channel 13 on your local cable, and unfortunately it’s no longer on Service Electric. They claim it’s because they went digital. I think it’s because we’re still one of the places where you can get public access. I am paranoid. I’m willing to admit it. The thing about it is public access stations in cities all across the country have gone away. When the big companies come in and buy up small cable channels, the first thing that goes is community access. One of the things that makes BCTV precious is, you find a producer of a program about things that mean something to you and you’re in. Like you. You came to me and I put you on the air, and it was a pleasure. Bob Millar talks about various different liberal ideas with Alternative News and Different Views that’s the name of his program. Talk to him. He’ll have you on. If you’re a hunter, if you fish, if you have strong opinions about reproductive rights, there’s a program for just about everyone on BCTV. As I said, it’s one of the few places where your voice still gets heard. The public airwaves were intended to be ours. Big corporations have bought a lot of them. But this is one of the few places where you can still get heard. I’m willing to bend the rules. As long as you’ve got a book and an attitude you can talk about anything.

Chuck: Did your love of books come from working in a bookstore?

Pete: My love of books started when I was a small child. My mom was an education major. She read to my brother and me a lot of different things. One that stands most clearly in mind though, was when she read us The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. She was in community college in the ’60’s when the two things you did was learn to play the guitar and you read Lord of the Rings. Well, she learned to play the guitar, badly. Love you, ma, but you weren’t good. And she read my brother and me The Lord of the Rings. That gave me my love of the written word. The house that I grew up in was stuffed full of books. Dad was collecting books because he thought World War III was going to come soon. He thought that on top of everything else, tools things that could rebuild civilization and books were going to be the cornerstone of it all. He read a science fiction novel, I’m 99% sure of this, called Parhams Freehold written by Robert Heinlein. It was about a family who survives a nuclear conflagration and rebuilds a little hip-pocket civilization using the things that were around the house: liquor, playing cards, sporting goods and books. They would trade anything to anybody for books. Books were used as capital. The idea was that the more knowledge you had, the better off you were. He collected a lot of science fiction. So many science fiction writers have been lauded for being right about things. That was because so many others were wrong. Science fiction was about people projecting. Trying to figure out what the future was going to be what was its shape? What was its color? Its texture? And the idea was a lot of people wrote for the pleasure of writing, but it was an extrapolation what would happen if? People know about Jules Verne and submarines. People know about H.G. Wells and the time machine. People don’t know about Rudyard Kipling and tanks. He wrote about the technology involved in tanking.

Chuck: Tell me, what is science fiction?

Pete: Science fiction is about the future. The projection. What it is is a scientific principle extrapolated into further or furthest permutation. The idea in many cases was what would a scientific advance do to human civilization? In the case of early science fiction writers, they thought that the development of nuclear energy would make war so thoroughly and utterly horrible that no one would ever consider doing it. In the case of transportation, Robert Heinlein wrote a novella called The Roads Must Roll which was about a new form of transportation that was run by the working classes but made the laboring classes, the middle classes and the upper classes free of any worry about getting from here to there. What happens when they went on strike? Science fiction can be about social issues. One of my favorite authors, Phillip K. Dick, writes about sociology. Human beings that we know, people we are friends with and we like, are put in weird and unusual situations. One of his better books, and yeah this is a little out of place but what the hell, Clans of the Alphane Moon what happens when a civilization is developed by the inmates of an insane asylum? What happens when they create a working functional society that works for them and what are considered normal people coming to rescue them. Science fiction is about the possibilities. All the things we can do, all the betterment we can make. Betterment for human beings. Betterment for any alien civilizations we may experience. Betterment of ourselves as human beings. That’s what’s important about it. That’s why it matters. The idea that the human animal is just that. An evolving creature it’s moving upward. I believe Mark Twain referred to the human species as “where the falling angel meets the rising ape”. Science fiction is about the ape continuing to rise. It’s about not needing the angel to get there. It’s about how we can make life worth living. I realize I have a tendency to go on at length about this, but basically I am a thwarted futurist. I wanted to be retired from asteroid mining by now. I wanted to be settled down on a little asteroid somewhere and maybe on Palace or Juno, which are two of the largest asteroid systems, and maybe be running a bar. Unfortunately, I’m not. Unfortunately the human species has been artificially blocked off somewhere around 1952. That gets into my other most important science fiction novel, you really can’t call it science fiction considering how right it is, 1984 by George Orwell. Anybody out there who’s reading this, read 1984 first and then get back to us. In all seriousness, had Orwell understood the power of broadcast television he would have burned the damn thing. And yes, I’m getting a little far afield here.

Chuck: Do you feel that science fiction has grown? Or has it seen its heyday?

Pete: Science fiction was murdered! Science fiction was growing. In the early ’80’s there was William Gibson, a man who wrote Neuromancer, Burning Chrome. They were depressing stories but he did carry the candle because he was extrapolating modern technology into a future day. Along the time that he started getting popular, a couple of things came in. There was what was known as cyber-steam, which was where you took the idea or concept and put it in the past. That was one nail in the coffin. One of the other nails in the coffin was when the dividing line between science fiction and fantasy in bookstores and libraries was gotten rid of. Where you would have things like The Sword of Shannara on the same shelf with Hyperion. Hyperion is a really advanced science fiction novel by a man named Dan Simmons. Sword of Shannara is a piece of crap written by a guy named Terry Brooks, I believe. I could be wrong on that. The point of the matter was when they stopped making a distinction, when that distinction was gotten rid of, that was when hobbits in space suits and dragons with computer implants became acceptable in the same phase. It’s one of the reasons why I get upset when flipping through the channels and there’s stuff about pixies and elves on the Sci-Fi Channel as well as UFO’s and ghosts on the Science Channel. It’s another way of bastardizing public thought.

Chuck: How do you account for what seems to me as a bookseller, that this fantasy stuff, which I agree with you is way inferior to the best of science fiction, far outsells modern-day science fiction? Why would that be?

Pete: Because there is this perception that science fiction is specifically for children. People seem to think that sci-fi, Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Gallactica the original, not the new one which is excellent, is all about kiddie stuff. And that this is even more fantastical than, let’s say, hobbits in space suits. The fantasy stuff is given a certain amount of credence because it shows up on network television, in big screen movies and is given a certain more adult focus. As soon as you take this sort of scientific extrapolation and say it’s only for kids, and this is specifically only in America I hope you realize that, because in other countries science fiction is still a respected genre. Adults in foreign countries are willing to say in public “I love this stuff”.

Chuck: You say science fiction is still a respected genre in these other countries. Was it ever a respected genre here?

Pete: I’d say its arc in all probability was the early to middle ’60’s. 2001 A Space Odyssey was pretty much its media apex. That’s when it hit it’s heights. That particular movie was followed shortly thereafter by a few others like Andromeda Strain where the science was the most important part and it supported the story. It may have been a fantasy story, but the science is what carried it. That is what was important. As soon as it started becoming bastardized okay, Star Wars was an exciting fun movie, but there were so many gaffes in it. There were so many things that were just plain wrong. The heyday of science fiction is when the science was accepted and respected. Unfortunately, part of the problem that we have in this country (I can go on at length about this), is that when science is bastardized and debased, when people accept pixies and fairies in the same way they accept space aliens, that is when you start dealing with backsliding. Moving away from trying to create a future to reliving the past. Which is always bad. The worship that we have for the past going on right now, this has been done to us on purpose. And yes, I realize we’re getting away from science fiction yet again. Peons believe in gods, deities, ghosts and pseudo-science. A free-thinking, forward-moving people think about science and believe in the possibilities of science. Free-thinking is important in any sort of free society. When your society is getting away from being free, that is when pseudo-science nonsense and fundamentalist religion B.S. are spoon-fed to the masses.

Chuck: You’ve spoken about how you dislike the grouping in of the fantasy and the blurring of the lines…

Pete: Yes.

Chuck: But I would like for you to speak within the science fiction area. Within all genres there is a lot of crap, some excellence.

Pete: Yes.

Chuck: What is it, in your mind, that makes a science fiction story or novel that will stand the test of time, as opposed to what the genre generally produces?

Pete: Good, strong science. Some of the best novels are written by scientists. For instance, now even though the Andromeda Strain was written by Michael Crichton, who was a surgeon, he used the nascent internet to put together an awful lot of that. He researched an awful lot of facts and put it together with a good story. The Andromeda Strain was the one about the extraterrestrial disease germ being scooped up by the American military to be used for a bio-weapon accidentally crashing in Arizona. The people who live in the town it crashed in open the probe and start dying in interesting and bizarre ways. Excellent story. One that stayed in my mind for a long time. Because in the book and the film the original film not the one coming out from A&E they use a lot of real legitimate science. Arthur Clarke, who didn’t invent the communications satellite, had a lot to do with plotting orbital variations and how to insert satellites in orbit. He wrote a lot of very good science fiction. He utilized the science of the time. Things that stand the test of time are invariably things that eventually wind up becoming. For instance, Jules Verne and the submarine, H.G. Wells and some of his societal conventions and ideas. The Time Machine, whereas we’re not going to come up with a time machine anytime soon, but his concept of the future with the division between laboring classes and the elite classes was very much right on the money, even for today. Larry Niven, who’s one of my favorite authors, was a mathematician. When he wrote about things that he knew about, they were right on the money. He also was a gifted storyteller. But his science holds. And that’s one of the things that was the important part of real science fiction. People call it hard science fiction. The idea that the science is always legitimate.

Chuck: Is one of the problems then with science fiction and finding a good body of excellent writing that people who are really great with the science are very rarely great writers?

Pete: Not really. What really hurts is that the publishers don’t want it any more. The publishers want product. When a book was a labor of love, it was a work of art. Blood, sweat, toil and tears. Like a baby. Very much like a baby. Something that you slave over, care about, work on and try to do the best you can. What they’re looking for in publishing these days is product. They’d rather have a hack who could produce two books a year than an author who could produce five great books in his lifetime. There’s an author I’m fond of by the name of Hal Clement. Now some of his stuff is pretty dry and boring. But one of the ones Mission of Gravity is very, very, well-written and very heavy on the science. I don’t think it would get published these days because it required the reader to have a certain knowledge and affection for science and be able to follow some of the concepts as they’re placed in front of them in the book. And that’s the thing. When you bastardize the level of knowledge, when you take away the joy of knowledge and learning, it makes it so much easier to make this stuff go away. It also makes your civil populace that much more manipulatable. And manipulation has a lot to do with sales these days.

Chuck: The Library of America received a tremendous Ford Foundation Grant in the 80’s

Pete: Yes.

Chuck: and has been publishing works to keep American writers of great merit in perpetual print. In nice editions, I might add. To my knowledge, the last time I looked, there was only Ray Bradbury and Philip K. Dick representing science fiction. Why do you think that this is all The Library of America would find merit worthy at this point?

Pete: It would sound very much as if they base their predictions on sales and popularity. It’s interesting, though, because of the two that you mention, at least one, Ray Bradbury, is very definitely fantasy. He writes about Mars, he writes about rockets, but his delirious use of metaphor loses track of the story. Interestingly enough, they also chose Phillip K. Dick. Now the question before the court is is it all of Philip K. Dick’s titles or is it just a selected few?

Chuck: They will publish all his titles. So far they’ve published two volumes, I believe, and they’re going to publish everything.

Pete: Excellent. Because his short stories are little snapshots of his days, his times, focused through his paranoia. The thing about Dick is, his science is predicated on the science of sociology. He took a lot of things for granted we were going to meet aliens, we were going to have nuclear wars, we were going to have mutants in our gene pool, there were going to be technological inventions and innovations, but the sociology, the interaction of the peoples Clans of the Alphane Moon was true genius. So, whereas Bradbury was beautiful, flowery, literary writing that has internal merit in the fact that it does create beautiful imagery, Dick on the other hand is important because he actually did manage to see a little further into the future. Here’s an interesting little tidbit for you the movie Total Recall was made from a 10 page short story of his called We Can Remember It For You Wholesale. The main character in his story was not named Quaid, the man’s name was Dan Quayle. And Dan Quayle ends up saving the United States. Admittedly Dan Quayle didn’t. One of the other more important stories that he wrote was The Penultimate Truth. The Penultimate Truth was written the year I was three. He forecasts the idea of cable television being used as a weapon against the American people. The concept is that there’s a war coming. We know it’s going to happen so the government organizes these huge anti-bacterial and anti-radiological tanks underground. People are herded up and herded into them so they will be protected from World War III. Fifteen years later they’re still down there. Every week they’re sent a message from the protector of the people, Dilbert Yancy. The only drawback is that the war lasted about a week. The people who stayed up top to run it are using the protector of the people, who is actually an android, to send false information to the American people to keep them down below. They are down below building robots to fight the war and sending the robots up. The robots are being used as slave labor. Obviously, the plot complications in addition to the story may not be germane, but the idea of cable television being used as a weapon against the people is right on the money. For instance, Al Gore’s vote count in Florida. Everybody predicted it was a slam-dunk. Fox News started screaming that there was something wrong. All the other networks picked it up. If Fox News hadn’t said that there was something wrong, Al Gore would have been a slam-dunk. Cable television news was a weapon. Dick predicted the idea that science fiction writers were capable of seeing a little further into the future. The idea is still fairly sound. The more projections you have into the future, the more likely someone’s going to be right.

Chuck: So, getting back to the literary establishment. Have they accepted science fiction as literature?

Peter: The problem with that is that it has been so pigeon-holed in this country. Did you know that there’s a writer from Reading named Chris Hinz who wrote a trilogy. Starting with the book Liege Killer which has been translated into every language that there’s been printing presses to print. Chances are nobody knows about him here in town except science fiction fans. His books were excellent. In this country, with the literati and with the media in general, science fiction is not a respected genre because you have to follow the money. Once again, this gets into some of my theories. But the idea is, fantasy, stream-of-consciousness main stream fiction can be upbeat, it can be depressing, but nine times out of ten it’s fluff. It can be very well-written fluff, but it’s fluff. In science fiction there is a gentleman named Theodore Sturgeon who writes short stories. And Sturgeon’s law is is that 99% of everything is crap. But that 1% is gold. Well, the problem with the American literati is that they’ve been exposed to too much of the 99%. They’ve been exposed to too much crap.

Chuck: The same thing has happened with the horror genre?

Pete: Precisely correct. Blood and guts and veins in your teeth is easy. Creating a real sense of chill, of fear, that deep worry about ones own soul, that’s hard to come by.

Chuck: Let’s go to one of your theories that I think you’ve indicated in one of your answers already. You said that you thought that science fiction died in 1984?

Pete: Murdered.

Chuck: Was murdered?

Pete: Yes.

Chuck: Explain your thinking. What led you to come to that conclusion?

Pete: Why it happened? Because there are forces in this country of neo-aristocracy. The aristocrats in France led lives of unbelievable opulence while the laboring classes of working people suffered. To create a situation where that is acceptable you need people who don’t look forward but who look back. You have people who are schooled in the idea that their faith will give them solace and that things will not get better until they die. Until they die they have to put up with all the bad things. The idea is that neo-aristocracy moved into positions of power with the rise of Ronald Reagan. Ronald Reagan was a sweet man. When he was nominated he was in the early stages of Alzheimers. The cheese was slipping off his cracker when he was nominated. The point was that all the people behind him and the media behind him, (and anyone who thinks we have a liberal media in this country is living in a fool’s paradise), made it such that the underpinnings of a neo-aristocracy the spoon feeding of idiocy, nonsense, pseudo-science and fundamental religion could be accomplished using all media outlets. That includes books as well. The reason for getting rid of the dividing line between fantasy and science fiction was because then they would have equal footing. One of the reasons we no longer look to the future as an opportunity for freedom and a place where things could go differently and better, to a battleground looking to the past and fighting different battles. All of this was a way of taking a genre that was originally intended to craft and sculpt and create a future and turning it into a way of making all of the idiocies of the past more acceptable for our future. Killing each other is a stupid way of making decisions. It just is. Killing each other over resources is stupid. It just is. But if you look at some of the science fiction that came out after 1984, nine times out of ten it puts those same kind of conflicts in a futuristic tense. And that’s one of the reasons why it was done.

Chuck: Let’s switch gears. Sometimes I get that rare experience where a book just brings total joy. You’re happy for the rest of the day, maybe a week.

Pete: Yes.

Chuck: Which science fiction books did that for you?

Pete: Something that just gave joy?

Chuck: Yeah. It doesn’t have to be the best one, but just something that lifts you. Remember when we were talking about Clive Barker’s stories…

Pete: That gave that wonderful cold chill…

Chuck: Yeah.

Pete: Okay, some of the things that cause joy. Ringworld by Larry Niven. Basically that’s a future you’d want to live in. It’s a future where everyone’s comfortable, everyone’s happy, and you stand a chance of being able to deal with aliens on a regular basis. Do business with them and sit down and have a drink with them. Some of his other stuff are these tales from The Draco Tavern about an extra-terrestrial bar. Those give a certain feeling of joy. And joy is the right word for it because this is something you would love to have happen and experience for yourself. Dealing with alien minds in a comfortable and convivial context. Oddly enough, one of the other ones that gave me a wonderful feeling and a pride in accomplishment was The Andromeda Strain. In the end the humans do manage to figure out what the deal is, and we do manage to save humanity. Admittedly, we have to make certain changes in the way we live our lives, but in the end we do triumph. There, we are not triumphing against a physical enemy that’s trying to shoot us with something. We’re not triumphing over an enemy that’s trying to take away our stuff. We’re triumphing through the use of our mind and intellect. That one always gives me a thrill. When the good guy wins because he’s got brains and not because he has fists. By the way, that took a moment of thought because that was a nice left-handed question.

Next Month

Tune in next month when Pete discusses individual authors and their pros and cons in part two of The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be. If you ever wondered where to start with science fiction, how to separate the 90% that’s crap from the 10% that’s classic then you’ll want to tune in next issue as Pete separates the wheat from the chafe. Don’t miss it in July’s CS2!

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