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