1. Three Stages of SF History: Outer Space, Inner Space, and Cyberspace

The history of science fiction begins in fairly straightforward fashion. The forerunner of the genre was Frankenstein (1818), by the British novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, which served as inspiration for the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, France’s Jules Verne, and England’s H.G. Wells. In the early 20th century, Hugo Gernsback, an American engineer who had emigrated from Luxembourg, launched Amazing Stories, the first SF magazine, and established SF as a genre. Since 1953 the annual Hugo Award, which honors him as the “father of science fiction,” has been considered the ultimate quality-assurance label for contemporary SF works. Of course, if Gernsback was SF’s father, then Shelley, Poe, Verne and Wells must be considered its grandparents.

But how should we summarize the history of SF since then? It might be simplest to describe it as passing through three stages. The first, which extended from the 1920s through the “golden age” of SF in the 1950s, was dominated by stories about outer space. To get a quick sense of this stage, consider the triumvirate of writers most associated with its golden age: Isaac Asimov, who wrote the Foundation trilogy, Arthur C. Clarke of 2001: A Space Odyssey fame, and Robert A. Heinlein, author of Starship Troopers. SF in this period was truly “science fiction,” or perhaps more accurately “future-predictive fiction.” Figures like the legendary SF magazine editor John W. Campbell espoused an unquestioned faith in the process of extrapolation into the future from the data of the present.

In the 1960s SF entered a second, revolutionary stage known as the New Wave, fomented by British writers like J.G. Ballard, Brian Aldiss, and Michael Moorcock. Around this time the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in a dead heat in a space race launched by U.S. President Kennedy’s “New Frontier” manifesto. In response, Ballard et al., who were basically anti-Americanist in outlook, argued that what the world needed was an exploration not of outer but of “inner” space—i.e., the world of the subconscious. In Ballard’s The Crystal World (1966) and other works in his “catastrophe” tetralogy, he introduced elements of psychoanalytic theory, Dada/Surrealist poetics, countercultural thought, and the ideal of the “global village” envisioned by Marshall McLuhan and other media theorists. Ballard himself moved into the realm of “technological landscapes” in which technological space transforms into a new kind of Nature.

What is of interest here is that these New Wave writers redefined “SF” as standing for “speculative fiction,” a direction that three Americans collectively dubbed the “3Ds”—Thomas Disch, Samuel Delaney, and Philip K. Dick, author of the story on which the film Blade Runner was based—pursued to great acclaim. Not to be forgotten is the Polish writer Stanislaw Lem, whose masterworks Solaris (1961) and The Invincible (1964) initially appear outer space-oriented, but prove instead to be intense explorations of inner space. Because Lem’s portrayals of extraterrestrial intelligence consistently deviated from the anthropomorphic model, the Russian editions of his works were subjected to censorship. Nonetheless he persisted in delving into the inner space of Earthlings, albeit against a backdrop of alien planets. This was truly speculative fiction that has earned Lem accolades as a literary giant on a par with Kafka, Borges and Nabokov. The concept of the planet Solaris revolving around twin suns, which Lem came up with during the U.S.-Soviet Cold War, has something in common with the notion of the solarization of Jupiter that appears in Clarke’s 2010: Odyssey Two (1982) and Sakyo Komatsu’s Sayonara Jupiter (1983). In those works the concept is associated with dreams of an extraterrestrial utopia. More recently, however, that has morphed into the dystopian vision in Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (2008) of a planet suffering from the presence of not two, but three suns.

At first glance the New Wave of the 1960s may seem to resemble a resurgence of modernism. However, the New Wave movement embraced a considerable number of women writers. Feminists like Britain’s Pamela Zoline and America’s Ursula K. Le Guin, as well as Canada’s Judith Merril, who not only wrote stories but was also an ardent New Wave polemicist and anthologist, were stalwart exponents of SF as speculative fiction. We should also note that Le Guin’s Hugo-winning The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) explores androgyny, that SF writer Alice Bradley Sheldon employed the synonym James Tiptree Jr., and that the aforementioned Disch and Delaney were both gay—so within the context of inner space it may be said that “gender space” in particular came to the forefront in the 1970s.

The 1970s also saw the advent of the Internet and the personal computer. In 1984, the South Carolina-born Canadian writer William Gibson’s debut novel, Neuromancer, introduced a new setting based on these technologies, cyberspace (a term he coined), thereby launching the cyberpunk movement. Gibson’s friend Bruce Sterling assumed the role of de facto spokesman for the movement, whose participants included John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, Pat Cadigan, and Rudy Rucker. Through their active promotion of the genre through co-authorship and anthologies, they established cyberspace—a realm that was neither outer nor inner space—as a legitimate new frontier. Their post-cyberpunk heirs include the British writers Richard Calder and Ian McDonald beginning in the late 1980s, and Japanese writers Goro Masaki in the 1990s and Project Itoh in the 2000s. Leading 21st-century SF writers like Australia’s Greg Egan and the Chinese-American Ted Chiang may also be said to follow in their footsteps.

To be sure, members of Japan’s third generation of SF writers, such as Chohei Kanbayashi and Mariko Ohara, had already been producing work that was essentially cyberpunk in the early 1980s. If we consider the international recognition enjoyed by works like Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga Akira (1982–90) and the animated film Ghost in the Shell (1995) directed by Mamoru Oshii and based on the manga by Masamune Shirow, we might find in this simultaneous global outbreak the first stirrings of the Cool Japan trend that caught on in the 21st century. Another offshoot is biopunk, which adopts an ecocritical stance in response to the Anthropocene era of global warming. A pioneer in this genre is Paolo Bacigalupi’s Hugo-winning novel The Windup Girl (2009), which caused a stir with its exploration of the possibilities of building a habitat (set in the story in an inundated near-future Thailand) that runs on energy generated not by steam or electricity or nuclear power, but by manually-wound springs.　

2. News from the Frontier: From Terra Incognita to Terraforming

Looking back at the history of SF as we have summarized it here, we can see a pattern emerge, in which a prevailing frontier spirit spurs the exploration and development of diverse forms of “terra incognita” while also feeding back to contemporary civilization. Indeed, the man-made creature in Shelley’s Frankenstein vanishes in the then-unexplored Arctic, and the final scene in Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1837) takes place in the equally unknown Antarctic. The latter’s referencing of the theory of the Hollow Earth, which proposed the existence of an entrance to the planet’s interior at the South Pole, is significant for its influence on Jules Verne, as seen in his Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) and The Sphinx of Ice (1897). Poe himself got the idea from the Hollow-Earth tale Symzonia (1820), written by John Cleves Symmes Jr. under the pseudonym Captain Adam Seaborn. This book describes in great detail Symzonia, a peaceful kingdom of white people that exists at the center the Earth, free from war and illness because those who exhibit evil tendencies are banished to the surface, where they have run rampant. It is not hard to imagine how this utopian vision impressed Poe, who revered the white aristocratic society of the American South. Indeed, in its description of the lifestyle of the Symzonians, this book depicts a living environment that constitutes a direct critique of civilization on the planet’s surface.

Subsequently, and particularly just before and after the Civil War, the United States embarked on its Westward Expansion, spurred by the ideology of manifest destiny. By 1890 there were no more frontiers in North America. Still, the frontier spirit lived on.

Percival Lowell, an upper-class “Boston Brahmin” who had also spent time in Korea, arrived in Japan in 1883. His studies of the country yielded a book, The Soul of the Far East (1888), that influenced Lafcadio Hearn among others. His next obsession after Japan, however, was the canals of Mars, and his book Mars (1895) served as inspiration for The War of the Worlds (1898) by H.G. Wells, one of SF’s grandfathers. During his sojourns in Japan and elsewhere Lowell was a careful observer of the distinctive traits of people in the Far East. In the case of Mars, on the other hand, his belief in the existence of canals persuaded him that intelligent life existed there as well. In other words, the canals were proof of Mars as viable habitat.

Although Mars is only about half the size of the Earth, its surface area is nearly the same as that of the terrestrial continents. What is more, its rotation period of 24 hours, 37 minutes is virtually identical to the Earth’s. Granted, it takes Mars 1.88 times as long as the Earth to complete a revolution around the sun, making its seasons nearly twice the length of ours. All in all, however, Mars would be a nearly ideal destination for a migration of Earthlings—but by the same token, if Martians were compelled for some reason to abandon their planet, the Earth would be an ideal, and eminently colonizable, habitat for them too.

Wells’s portrayal of the Martians cemented the stereotype of aliens as invaders who looked like seafood—octopi, squid, shrimp, crabs. The turn of the century was accompanied by a succession of wars—the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese—in which Japan emerged victorious. These events further spurred a Western fascination with Japanese culture that took the form of Japonisme, even as apprehensions over a newly aggressive Asia sparked fears of the Yellow Peril. It was an era thus dominated by an exoticist blend of both admiration and fear of the Other. In any case, any fears of Martian invasion were put to rest by evidence obtained from the U.S. Mariner Mars probes launched between 1965 and 1973, and the Viking 1 and 2 landers in 1976, which indicated that the planet was devoid of seas or life, let alone canals.

Having dreamed of Mars for so long, though, the collective SF imagination is not about to stop going there. Works continue to proliferate that depict human efforts to make the planet habitable, using the latest knowledge to transform its environment into one like Earth’s. The American writer Jack Williamson first coined the word “terraforming” in 1942 to describe the process of terrestrializing a planet; since then contemporary SF giants like Clarke and Heinlein, and a bevy of other British and American writers like Greg Bear, Terry Bisson, Robert Forward, and Ian McDonald, have turned out terraforming-themed works. The apotheosis of this trend is the trilogy of Mars-SF masterworks by American writer Kim Stanley Robinson, Red Mars (1993), Green Mars (1994), and Blue Mars (1996).

3. The Monolith’s Prophecy: 2001 as a Microcosm of SF History

From this account it should be apparent that the outer-space orientation of SF’s first stage developed as a sort of blending of the Mars boom with turn-of-the-century Oriental exoticism. The inner-space orientation of the second stage gave birth to surrealistic renderings of end-of-the-world scenarios that seemed to critique the era of high economic growth and raised alarms over such ecological threats as nuclear testing and global warming. The cyberspace of the third stage in no time became the everyday reality of contemporary society, and its antiheroic computer hackers were the prototypes of today’s cyberterrorists.

Our reading of SF history suggests that the Clarke-Kubrick collaboration 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was released in 1968, a year before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, encapsulates the past, present, and future of that history in a single work. In this respect it can be linked to the history of habitat building as well.

The mysterious monolith that aliens placed before subhuman primates living on the Earth four million years ago (three million years in the novel) was a teaching tool, a catalyst for the evolution of the human species. But when a similar monolith is discovered on the Moon at the dawn of the 21st century, it emits a bizarre noise: this monolith is a communication tool for informing the aliens of the level attained by human civilization. Then, as the spaceship Discovery One approaches Jupiter (Saturn in the novel) with the supercomputer HAL 9000 on board, the computer goes berserk, the ship is cast adrift, and Captain Bowman encounters a huge third monolith near Jupiter, a “star gate” that sucks him into a kind of hyper-space-time that replicates the stars themselves and subjects Bowman to a hyper-evolution of his own.

I would like to draw your attention to the fact that the three monoliths correspond to the three stages of SF. The first monolith is a colonialist teaching device dispatched to foster the evolution of intelligent life in outer space. The second monolith is a communications device that serves as a medium for interconnection with the inner space of humanity. The third monolith is nothing if not cyberspace itself, a space capable of replicating the world, and analyzing and reconstructing human bio-information. The three stages of the monolith thus perfectly mirror the history of contemporary SF.

What is significant here is that Clarke configured aliens not as Wellsian imperialistic invaders but as “farmers in the fields of stars.” These aliens, who intervene to accelerate the evolution of intelligent life wherever they find it sprouting in the universe, had themselves abandoned their physical bodies to house their minds and thoughts in metal and plastic. Then, having discovered a way to store their knowledge in space and their thoughts in light, they transformed into pure energy and now traverse space freely as “lords of the galaxy.” This concept has inspired countless imaginings of humanity evolving into bodiless software that makes cyberspace its habitat—prime examples being Greg Egan’s Diaspora (1997) and the Wachowskis’ Matrix trilogy (1999–2003).

However, the one work that has most faithfully adopted Clarke’s notion of alien meddling in human evolution, not as a hubristic colonialist project but as a sort of farming, is the film Interstellar (2014) directed by Christopher Nolan. In a plotline that echoes Nobel Literature Prize-winning novelist John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath (1939), farmer Joseph Cooper leaves the Earth as a blight destroys all its crops, and searches outer space for an ideal planet to move to. But when he tries to return home via a wormhole, he winds up in a four-dimensional structure that somehow recalls Borges’s Library of Babel and seems to have been built by aliens, in which he transcends space and time. It turns out the builders of this monolith-like structure were not aliens but future humans. Cooper is rescued and awakes in “Cooper Station,” a utopian habitat in an O’Neill colony which his daughter, left behind by him on Earth but now an eminent scientist, has built in orbit around Saturn. He finds that the Cooper farm he left on Earth has also been reconstructed there.

In some respects this is a simple and straightforward narrative, but at the same time it is radical. Firstly, it introduces “aliens” who are not the Hollywood stereotype of malevolent invaders from another planet, but humans of the distant future who have overcome the confines of flesh and blood—post-humans if you will. Secondly, it suggests that humanity’s desire to explore outer space may itself be the result of the habitat-building undertaken by “farmers in the fields of stars.” There are many ways to view the work: as a critique of the traditional SF image of outer-space conquest, as a concept that points toward Habitat Building Mode 4, and as a vision that expands, from a critical perspective, on the issues raised by Clarke and Kubrick over half a century ago.

4. Conclusion: Hao Jingfang’s Folding Beijing

Finally, I would like to conclude by mentioning Folding Beijing (2016), the novella by the renowned Chinese SF author Hao Jingfang. This Hugo-winning masterpiece vividly describes the dynamics of a time-sharing system under which citizens of different class-based sectors of a city take turns using the same urban space. At a specific time of day, a designated class is rotated from underground to the surface while the class previously occupying the surface is rotated back underground. This work is, I am convinced, the most closely linked to a vision for habitats of any written today. The setting of the story is as follows:

What is especially intriguing about this relatively recent work is that it takes the aforementioned O’Neill colony concept of a habitat replicated in outer space and applies it to a terrestrial urban space. In this essay I have argued that the history of SF can be classified into three stages: outer space, inner space, and cyberspace. However, Folding Beijing represents a further stage of space-time, and as such it may offer clues toward the imagining of Habitat Building Mode 4.

Takayuki Tatsumi
Born in 1955. Professor of Literature at Keio University, researcher on American literature, and SF critic. His major works include Cyberpunk America (Keiso Shobo, 1988), Rhetoric of Contemporary Science Fiction (Iwanami Shoten, 1992), New Americanist Poetics (Seidosha, 1995), Metaphor Murders (Shohakusha, 2000), and American Sodom (Kenkyusha, 2001). He also edited and co-translated Cyborg Feminism (Treville, 1991).

（Translation by Alan Gleason）