The Bullseye Café is one of my regular habitats. It conveniently occupies part of the ground floor of the peculiar apartment house where I live. Due in no small part to the efforts of its proprietress, it boasts a surprisingly literate clientèle. I’ve made quite a few friends there, many of whom share my peculiar set of interests.
It was getting late, and three of us were seated around a table in a rear corner of the room. We nearly had the place to ourselves.
“Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein,” Pops answered thoughtfully. “Maybe a few current writers, too, if I’ve read one recently.”
Pops is one of my favorite people at the Bullseye. We don’t call him Pops to his face; he’d probably be offended. I’m not sure exactly how old he is—when asked, he claims to be 107—but I’d guess he’s in his late fifties or early sixties. He manages to remain reasonably spry and mentally sharp.
“Most people wouldn’t think of writers at all,” Van continued. “They think of Star Trek and Star Wars, maybe The Twilight Zone. When they say science fiction, they mean movies or TV.”
“An awful lot of Star Trek and Star Wars books have been published,” Pops observed between sips of coffee. “We’ve had an inundation of media spinoff books.”
“But the percentage of people reading them is tiny compared to the number watching movies and television,” Van said. “Do you ever listen to Coast to Coast—the late night radio program?”
“The paranormal kook show?” Pops asked.
“I’ve heard it,” I said. “I listen occasionally. Probably more often than I should, given how late it keeps me up.”
“Then you know what it’s like,” Van went on. “A very curious sort of show. It manages to combine UFO’s, crop circles, near-death experiences, bigfoot, and a host of other claptrap with probably the best science interviews I’ve ever heard. They’ll spend three hours interviewing top-of-the-line scientists about their specialties, and unlike all the political talk shows, they don’t jump in and interrupt every few seconds. They let the guests talk.”
“What’s your point?” Pops set down his cup and leaned back in his chair.
“One of their somewhat regular guests is Michio Kaku, a theoretical physicist. He’s written several books. I read Hyperspace a few years ago and it was quite interesting. He has a new book out that I want to read. However, both in his interviews and in his book, Kaku’s references are mostly to media science fiction, almost never to written science fiction. Since noticing that, I’ve started paying attention to media versus literary allusions.”
“And?”
“And it looks to me like literary allusions are becoming a thing of the past. Where someone might once have quoted Shakespeare or Dickens, or Hemingway or Steinbeck, they’ll now quote a movie or TV series.”
“Movies and TV aren't déclassé anymore,” Pops observed.
“Coast to Coast is an interesting program,” I said. “They do feature fiction writers as well. Ray Bradbury was a guest, and Dean Koontz, the suspense writer.” I paused for effect. “Lionel Fanthorpe is a regular.”
“The Lionel Fanthorpe?” Pops demanded. “The man reputed to be the world’s worst science fiction writer?”
“Himself. And he seems like a nice guy, whatever you may think of his writing or his odd Fortean beliefs,” I said. “But getting back to Van's point, quoting movies goes back quite a ways. It isn’t a recent phenomenon. Remember Reagan’s ‘Where we’re going, we don’t need roads’?”
“Some lines are too good not to quote,” Van admitted.
“I suppose Kaku is harking back to his first experiences with certain scientific or science fictional concepts. His formative encounters. Those were Star Trek or whatever,” Pops said.
“But shouldn’t those ideas be attributed to their correct sources, which would often be literary?” Van asked. “Warp drives and matter transporters must go back to at least the ’50s in the science fiction magazines, if not the ’30s.”
Pops shrugged. “Everyone can’t know everything. What really gets me is when someone cites the History Channel or Discovery Channel as an information source.”
“Here’s a more recent example,” Van continued. “During the hearings to confirm Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the supreme court, she mentioned that her interest in the law had been sparked by watching Perry Mason on television. I found the remark interesting and read several articles and commentaries about it online. It turns out a lot of lawyers of her generation were influenced by Mason. Most of the articles didn’t even mentioned Erle Stanley Gardner. How can a writer as phenomenally successful as Gardner be forgotten so easily? He wrote nearly a hundred Perry Mason novels and was the best selling author of all time for a number of years. And yet, no mention of him. . . .”
“Well,” I said, “while I’m sure there’s a lot of truth to what you say—that movies and TV have become the primary touchstones of our culture—that’s certainly not universally true. I just read Free by Chris Anderson and happened to notice the number of science fiction books and stories he mentioned—‘The Machine Stops,’ Arthur C. Clarke, Corey Doctorow, Orwell, and others.”
“I read something online about that book. How is it?” Van asked.
“Not bad. Pretty entertaining, actually, and I learned a few things. Anderson writes well. But actually I didn’t read it. I listened to the audio book. The author did the reading, and I was quite impressed with how professional he was.”
“Perhaps we should keep in mind that popular fiction actually has a pretty short history,” Pops said after a minute or two of silent thought. “It really only started in the 1800s, with the first universal education laws coming into effect.”
“Doesn’t that leave out things like Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe?” Van asked.
“I’m sure they were popular, but they predate the explosion of popular literature. That probably began with Walter Scott and the historical novel. Waverley was published in 1814, which would have been a bit early to profit from all the new readers. By the 1830s or so everyone was learning to read, even the shop girls and stable boys. The market for fiction must have expanded enormously as a result. Popular fiction really took flight with serial writers like Dickens and Dumas in the 1840s.”
“Scottish Chiefs by Jane Porter is generally considered the first historical novel,” I interjected, pleased to be able to offer a bit of erudite knowledge. “And Walter Scott was a friend of her family. Makes you wonder where he got the idea of fictionalizing history. I think you're right though, that Walter Scott probably was the first true bestselling author of popular literature. His books were enormously popular long after his death.”
“Yes. And of course the penny dreadfuls started around the 1830s,” Pops continued. “Advances in printing technology must have played a part too, making inexpensive editions possible. But the main thing was that people had limited home entertainment until the 1920s and radio. Either they sang and played their own instruments, or played games of some sort, or they read. No television. No radio. Fiction became the primary form of entertainment for perhaps five generations, say from 1830 to 1930. It managed to hang on until the mid twentieth century, when electronic entertainment went portable. Before then, books and magazines were the only entertainment you could easily take with you to the bathroom—or outhouse--or carry on the bus or train. First radio, then television, then video tape and video disks and computer games, and now computer websites, mp3 players, and Ipods all clamor for our free time, not just in the living room, but everywhere we go.
“I’m afraid written fiction may be fighting a losing battle,” he continued. “It really isn’t very surprising that the sort of literary fictional touchstones you mentioned should take second or even third place to those other forms of entertainment.”
Pops paused thoughtfully for a moment, then said, “Tell me, Van, what do you think of when I say ‘a western’? John Ford or Zane Grey?”
“John Wayne,” Van admitted with a rueful grin.
***************
Links of possible interest:
Coast to Coast radio program
The Scottish Chiefs by Jane Porter
“The Machine Stops” by E. M. Forster—online text
Erle Stanley Gardner at Wikipedia
Lionel_Fanthorpe at Wikipedia
Charles Fort at Wikipedia
Free: The Future of a Radical Price by Chris Anderson at Amazon
and Google BooksMichio Kaku website
Hyperspace: A Scientific Odyssey Through Parallel Universes, Time Warps, and the 10th Dimension by Michio Kaku
Physics of the Impossible: A Scientific Exploration into the World of Phasers, Force Fields, Teleportation, and Time Travel by Michio Kaku
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