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Southern Star, v. 1, issue 2, June 1941
Page 15
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ARTICLE by MILTY - Washington - - Article- There was once a guy who got sore everytime people spoke about science fiction being escape literature. Read science fiction merely for relaxation and dreaming? he said. Foolishness. There is nothing more invigorating and stimulating to doing things than science fiction. Then this fellowed studied a little psychology, and he found some wonderful things in the psychology book. It was a wonderful book for it told things that were perfectly obvious, bit it put them down in a marvelously clear fashion, and scrutinized them from angles that he might not have thought of before. So he learned the difference between sensation and perception. Sensation is just feeling things, like you see a white square against a darker background. But perception means relating the seeing to some previously learned experience, so that when you have perception, you see a piece of paper on a dark table. And everybody has a different background of experience, so nobody perceives things in exactly the same light. So that when you say "socialism" to one person he lifts up his hands in horror and says: UnAmerican. Destruction of human rights of individuality. While another guy with a different background, perhaps a guy who has worked in a factory, says: Lovely stuff. The guy who does the work gets the profits out of it, not the guy who owns the stock. So one guy says science fiction is escape literature, and another guy says no it's not. Let's try to see why, and I hope I start a fight. The two guys are different. That's the first thing. One of these guys I can describe, because that's me. The other I have to figure out. They both started out with dreaming. They both saw big clouds in the sky and wanted to have them. There were three main things they might have seen, to judge from aamemory of the outstandin types of stories. They saw a rise in the powers of science, symbolized by the interplanetary flight. They saw a world that was better in all ways. Or perhaps they saw an ominous warning that the world was not going to be better because of the powers of evil that would triumph over the powers of good. In the last case they saw that to make the world good would require a mighty struggle against that evil. So the two guys dreamt and wanted and hoped. They started becoming One of them got stuck. For some reason he never could become a scientist, so he became a shirt salesman, but he still dreamed, and that is as far as he got. So science fiction was dreams to him. Pleasant dreams. Dreams that he could never do anything about except wait for somebody else to make true. The other guy was different. He dreamt, too, but the dreams meant something different. For he was going to be one of those people in the stories; a scientist. To him it was not ridiculous that Richard Seaton, a government chemist engaged in the analysis of platinum group metals suddenly turned out to have an incredible knowledge of mathematical physics. He said, oh, hell, I wish I could know that much. Another guy, another dreamer, might have stopped there. But this guy had the driving force to actually go out and read books and learn that stuff. Science fiction was not escape literature to him. It was a stimulous to become as good as any of the superior heroes he read about. For his was a jealous and conceited nature. Nobody in the world should know mre than he. The science fiction was not the push. The push had to come from
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ARTICLE by MILTY - Washington - - Article- There was once a guy who got sore everytime people spoke about science fiction being escape literature. Read science fiction merely for relaxation and dreaming? he said. Foolishness. There is nothing more invigorating and stimulating to doing things than science fiction. Then this fellowed studied a little psychology, and he found some wonderful things in the psychology book. It was a wonderful book for it told things that were perfectly obvious, bit it put them down in a marvelously clear fashion, and scrutinized them from angles that he might not have thought of before. So he learned the difference between sensation and perception. Sensation is just feeling things, like you see a white square against a darker background. But perception means relating the seeing to some previously learned experience, so that when you have perception, you see a piece of paper on a dark table. And everybody has a different background of experience, so nobody perceives things in exactly the same light. So that when you say "socialism" to one person he lifts up his hands in horror and says: UnAmerican. Destruction of human rights of individuality. While another guy with a different background, perhaps a guy who has worked in a factory, says: Lovely stuff. The guy who does the work gets the profits out of it, not the guy who owns the stock. So one guy says science fiction is escape literature, and another guy says no it's not. Let's try to see why, and I hope I start a fight. The two guys are different. That's the first thing. One of these guys I can describe, because that's me. The other I have to figure out. They both started out with dreaming. They both saw big clouds in the sky and wanted to have them. There were three main things they might have seen, to judge from aamemory of the outstandin types of stories. They saw a rise in the powers of science, symbolized by the interplanetary flight. They saw a world that was better in all ways. Or perhaps they saw an ominous warning that the world was not going to be better because of the powers of evil that would triumph over the powers of good. In the last case they saw that to make the world good would require a mighty struggle against that evil. So the two guys dreamt and wanted and hoped. They started becoming One of them got stuck. For some reason he never could become a scientist, so he became a shirt salesman, but he still dreamed, and that is as far as he got. So science fiction was dreams to him. Pleasant dreams. Dreams that he could never do anything about except wait for somebody else to make true. The other guy was different. He dreamt, too, but the dreams meant something different. For he was going to be one of those people in the stories; a scientist. To him it was not ridiculous that Richard Seaton, a government chemist engaged in the analysis of platinum group metals suddenly turned out to have an incredible knowledge of mathematical physics. He said, oh, hell, I wish I could know that much. Another guy, another dreamer, might have stopped there. But this guy had the driving force to actually go out and read books and learn that stuff. Science fiction was not escape literature to him. It was a stimulous to become as good as any of the superior heroes he read about. For his was a jealous and conceited nature. Nobody in the world should know mre than he. The science fiction was not the push. The push had to come from
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