It can often happen, as it has for me, that you run out of books by your favorite sci-fi author of the moment, and feel bereft, knowing that so-and-so is such a difficult act to follow. May I make a suggestion: why not take a break and immerse yourself in the study of American history?
I’m not merely making the easy point, that of course modern America is very much science fiction come true; that can be said of the whole world. Now we live in what for the classic authors of CF is The Future. Has arrived. Astronauts may not have reached Mars yet, but our own wired world is strange and exciting enough.
Rather, I am making a different point, one that applies only to American history.
Every great country, perhaps, has its own ghost. Mine, Great Britain, has what Kipling perfectly expressed in “Puck’s Song”:
See you our quiet oak woods,
And the terrible ditch next to it?
Oh, that’s where the saxons broke,
The day Harold died!
…its nine stanzas evoke that emotion that anyone can feel as they explore the layers of time in this ancient land, haunted by history, its origins shrouded in mystery.
The United States (by which I primarily mean the US) is completely different. Its origins are conscious, self-aware, documented. What, then, is America’s special ghost?
For me, the fascination of American history ultimately rests on the fact that it is the land from which so many great science fiction authors come, that its character breathes through many of its great stories, and that its incredibly fast rise to power and the diversity and depth of lore – imagine having enough to stoke a civil war just 254 years after colonization – is like a science fiction story in itself. And every day more of this material (the history of the United States) is being produced in that enormous laboratory called the United States.
One can have fun idly fiddling with the figures. If we take the 1890 census as the point at which we can consider the US settled, that means that I, for example, was born 64 years after the people invaded it. It has already been 117 years since that established era. So I have witnessed an almost 100% increase in story production for the entire continent. I can hopefully see 117 turn into 150 or so. God knows what the shape of things will be by 2040. Let’s talk about the University of Life: we are all living in the futuristic computer game of Life.
From a purely historical point of view, it is especially fascinating to study how a new country gradually acquires something of the character of an old one. Traditions are formed, and their origins, in America, are not hidden. Layered form; anniversaries arrive, and anniversaries of anniversaries. Now we can compare the Atlanta of 1860 from gone With the Wind with the 1990s Atlanta of a whole man. Science fiction authors put their stamp on places and times; Clark Ashton Smith’s 1930s California; Clifford Simak’s 1960s Grant County, Wisconsin.
Science fiction, by association, spills over into the mind to absorb the story and thus all of life. we’re living it. I’ve never been to the US yet, but thanks to SF, I feel like it’s a part of me.
