(Re)inventing Science Fiction: ‘Idea’ as ‘Hero’

Kingsley Amis, in the course of New Maps of Hell, identifies ‘idea’ as typically occupying the place in science fiction that plot has in the ‘whodunit’: the place of ‘hero.’ As his subsequent remarks indicate, he does not mean his metaphoric ‘hero’ to refer to ideas in the abstract, and still less does he mean to say that science fiction has some special affinity for ideas in that sense. He intends his formula to apply only to what H. G. Wells calls the fantastic invention. Nevertheless, the literal idea of (or for) a sciencefiction story, in so far as it heroically displaces the protagonist of the traditional novel, almost inevitably directs the attention which immediately focuses on it toward ideas of another sort in or behind the fiction: toward the relatively abstract ideas that it vehiculates or that otherwise attach to its fictive substance.

This process is nowhere more patent than in the science fiction of Olaf Stapledon. Indeed, it is true to say in retrospect that his example, particularly in Last and First Men (1930), Odd John (1935), Star Maker (1937), and Sirius (1944), confirms a generic vocation for dealing in abstract ideas which perhaps first becomes unmistakable in the science fiction of H. G. Wells. Nor can it come as a surprise that someone trained in philosophy and psychology and turning to fiction after having published A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929) should have continued, as Stapledon did, to write books wherein ideas of the abstract kind figure prominently.

What is surprising about all this has to do with the evidence suggesting that Stapledon never thought of any of his books as science fiction. He appears to have had only a scant acquaintance with the genre, and almost none at all with authors in it of his bent, until the mid-1930s at least.