Rudyard Kipling Invented SF!
<p>Ever had a moment when somebody else drops an insight on you, and you feel<br />
totally stupid because you had all the facts and all the motivation to generate<br />
it yourself, it was about something you&#8217;re expert at, but you<br />
just&#8230;didn&#8217;t&#8230;see&#8230;it?  And you should have, and you&#8217;re damn annoyed with<br />
yourself for missing it?</p>
<p><span id="more-234"></span></p>
<p>This happened to me recently.  I gave permission for the newletter<br />
of the <a href='http://www.lfs.org/awards.htm'>Libertarian Futurist<br />
Society</a> to print my essay <a href='http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/sf-history.html'>A Political<br />
History of SF</a> In it, I wrote:</p>
<blockquote><p>
Heinlein was the first of Campbell&#8217;s discoveries and, in the end, the<br />
greatest. It was Heinlein who invented the technique of description by<br />
indirection &mdash; the art of describing his future worlds not<br />
through lumps of exposition but by presenting it through the eyes of<br />
his characters, subtly leading the reader to fill in by deduction<br />
large swathes of background that a lesser author would have drawn in<br />
detail.
</p></blockquote>
<p>This is pretty much the standard account by historians of the<br />
field.  One William H. Stoddard wrote the newsletter editor as<br />
follows.  He agrees that Heinlein introduced indirect exposition into<br />
SF, but observes:</p>
<blockquote><p>
In fact, that technique had already been used, several decades<br />
before, in Rudyard Kipling&#8217;s two science fiction stories, &#8220;With the<br />
Night Mail&#8221; and &#8220;As Easy as A.B.C.&#8221;
</p></blockquote>
<p>Mr. Stoddard goes on to note that Heinlein wrote a number<br />
of Kipling tributes into his own work, most notably in the early scenes of<br />
<cite>Citizen of the Galaxy</cite> (1957), and to speculate plausibly on<br />
Kipling&#8217;s influence on Heinlein.</p>
<p>This is the point at which I slapped my forehead and swore.  For,<br />
indeed, I know <cite>With the Night Mail</cite> well, have reread it<br />
many times, and have described it to friends as an important work of<br />
early proto-SF.  I had noticed before that the story prefigures modern<br />
Campbellian and hard SF very exactly in its concerns, its narrative<br />
tone, and its management of information about the imagined future.<br />
And that it could have been written by Heinlein if he had been more than<br />
a child of five in that year; I <em>knew</em> this.  But&#8230;.grrr&#8230;.I<br />
missed the implications.</p>
<p>You see, I had a perspective problem; my eyes were too modern.  I<br />
am so used to reading the idiom of hard SF in our time that until<br />
William Stoddard pointed it out, I was unable to see quite how unique<br />
and pathbreaking <cite>With the Night Mail</cite> had been in its<br />
time.  Once Stoddard woke me up to this point, I immediately realized<br />
that the story was not, as I had previously thought, merely a sort of<br />
historical curio thrown off on the way to modern genre SF, but almost<br />
certainly one of the key steps without which modern genre SF as we<br />
know it would never have existed!</p>
<p>In researching the matter, I discovered an excellent essay by<br />
long-time fan Fred Lerner, <a href='http://www.kipling.org.uk/facts_scifi.htm'>A Master of our Art:<br />
Rudyard Kipling considered as a Science Fiction writer</a> which<br />
develops this case in detail.  Again, little in it was factually new<br />
to me; the biggest surprise is the report that John W. Campbell<br />
regarded Kipling as &#8220;the first modern science fiction writer&#8221;.  But<br />
Lerner draws together well-known facts into a new shape, arguing<br />
effectively that both Campbell (the theorist of modern SF) and<br />
Heinlein (its first great practitioner) both saw themselves as<br />
explorers in a direction first set by Rudyard Kipling.</p>
<p>Having considered the matter, I think the sharpest insight in<br />
Lerner&#8217;s essay is his proposition that Kipling invented the technique<br />
of exposition by indirection while writing his India stories; and that<br />
it is in <em>Kim</em> (1901) &mdash; that great, warm, wonderful,<br />
sprawling, picaresque novel of the Raj and the Great Game &mdash; that<br />
the technique found expression in a form barely distinguishable from the SFnal<br />
use Heinlein and those who followed him would put it to forty years<br />
later.  As Lerner himself puts it:</p>
<blockquote><p>
Kipling had learned this trick in India. His original Anglo-Indian<br />
readership knew the customs and institutions and landscapes of British<br />
India at first hand. But when he began writing for a wider British and<br />
American audience, he had to provide his new readers with enough<br />
information for them to understand what was going on. In his earliest<br />
stories and verse he made liberal use of footnotes, but he evolved<br />
more subtle methods as his talent matured. A combination of outright<br />
exposition, sparingly used, and contextual clues, generously sprinkled<br />
through the narrative, offered the needed background. In Kim and other<br />
stories of India he uses King James English to indicate that<br />
characters are speaking in Hindustani; this is never explained, but it<br />
gets the message across subliminally.
</p></blockquote>
<p>The point to keep bearing in mind (one that I think Lerner doesn&#8217;t<br />
emphasize enough) is that this <em>had never been done before</em>.<br />
There is no such subtlety in the contemporary proto-SF of H.G. Wells<br />
(mostly between 1894 and 1907) and Jules Verne (between 1863 and<br />
1905).  These authors rely on expository lumps almost as heavily as<br />
did pre-Campbellian genre SF in the 1910s and 1920s &mdash; and for<br />
precisely that reason, they seem far more dated than <cite>Kim</cite><br />
or <cite>With the Night Mail</cite> do to an SF fan reading today.</p>
<p>My title exaggerates a little; Kipling did not single-handedly<br />
invent modern SF.  But I think we may safely credit him with inventing<br />
the style of exposition that was to become modern SF&#8217;s most important<br />
device for managing and conveying information about imaginary futures<br />
and otherwheres.  In doing so, he exerted an influence on the style, tone,<br />
and even content of SF that remains pervasive.</p>
<p>Once we understand this, there are some apparently accidental<br />
features of the genre that make a great deal more sense.  One is the<br />
degree to which SF and SF-influenced fantasy, essentially alone among<br />
modern genres, carry forward a tradition of high-quality<br />
moral-didactic children&#8217;s fiction that can be read with pleasure by<br />
adults.  Robert Heinlein&#8217;s juveniles and even J.K. Rowling&#8217;s<br />
<cite>Harry Potter</cite> sequence are not just coincidentally like<br />
the Kipling of <cite>Kim</cite><cite>, </cite><cite>Stalky &amp; Co.</cite> and<br />
<cite>The Jungle Book</cite> &mdash; they are organically derived from<br />
his work through the technique of indirect exposition.</p>
<p>Another is the persistence of military SF.  The similarity between<br />
Kipling&#8217;s prose and verse about the North-West Frontier and genre SF&#8217;s<br />
frequent celebrations of the military ethos in exotic surroundings is<br />
hardly accidental either.  These stories too, are all about indirect<br />
exposition &mdash; immersing the reader in a strange and challenging<br />
environment, not by telling but by showing. As I have discussed <a href='http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=47'>elsewhere</a>, military SF tends<br />
to have as important subtext an examination of the soldier&#8217;s proper<br />
relationship to his society &mdash; much as do Kipling&#8217;s barrack-room<br />
ballads.</p>
<p>Lurking behind both these features is SF&#8217;s abiding concern with<br />
morality, right living, and humans&#8217; place in the cosmos. Now of course<br />
all literature touches these concerns; but part of the SF tradition is<br />
a tendency to do so in ways that emphasize politics and psychology<br />
rather less, and the inexorableness of natural law rather more.</p>
<p>The archetypal example of this emphasis is Tom Godwin&#8217;s classic<br />
<cite>The Cold Equations</cite> (1954), in which an innocent and likeable<br />
girl stows away on a spaceship and must die &mdash; must, in fact, be<br />
killed &mdash; because she overstrains the capacity of<br />
the vessel, which is delivering supplies vitally needed to prevent<br />
mass death.</p>
<p>What is this, really, but Rudyard Kipling&#8217;s <a href='http://godscopybook.blogs.com/poem.html'>Gods of the Copybook<br />
Headings</a> (1916) in the idiom of the Space Age?  Perhaps Kipling&#8217;s<br />
most lasting legacy in the <em>content</em> of SF is his insistence<br />
(one expressed hardly ever, if at all, in literary genres other than<br />
SF) that human feeling and social construction cannot override natural<br />
law; that a tough-minded grasp of the way the universe actually works<br />
is both possible and necessary.</p>
