CHAPTER 5

Revolutionary Revaluation of Literature

Arts and entertainment are highly valuable industries that also serve many humane functions, such as encouraging introspection about ethical questions, the relations humans have with each other, and the wider meaning of an individual life. For the past several centuries, even as publication technologies evolved substantially, there has persisted a distinction between the “high culture” supported by wealthy donors and taught in university humanities courses, and popular culture sold to the supposedly unsophisticated “masses.” This distinction may be obsolete, as well as invidious, but it points to a currently crucial fact: much “high culture,” such as the plays of Shakespeare and the novels of Dickens, is currently in the public domain, while distribution of “pop culture” products is restricted by intellectual property rights. Should copyrights be eternal or cease to exist? Is it possible to imagine a best-selling mystery concerning a murderer sinisterly named Graves, who kills authors, because “writing down of words is considered to be too sacred an act to be profaned by ordinary every-day uses?”1 I must admit having plagiarized that idea from a novel by Robert Graves, but why should anybody write new fiction, when the classics of literature are far too extensive for anyone to complete reading in a lifetime? Conversely, why should college professors teach classes about the literature of the past, when millions of works of fiction are published online each year? Dan Cohen, the vice provost for information collaboration at Northeastern University, reports: “University libraries around the world are seeing precipitous declines in the use of the books on their shelves.”2 The profession of writing and the industry of literature publishing may always have been in constant turmoil, but the obsolescence of the printing press will have great implications for their futures.

The Semiprofessional Tradition in Literature

The uncertain states of literature creation and cultivation illustrate the problematic status of culture in modern economies. Should writing be limited to a small fraction of the population who are professionals in this craft? Or is story-telling a talent shared by many people, such that like other arts it should be decommercialized? In recent centuries, mass publication of literature has become a major industry and the precursor to technology-based artforms such as movies and multiplayer online role-playing games. Yet many of the most famous authors were unable to earn a living in that line of work. Emily Brontë was not a professional author when she penned Wuthering Heights, and Jane Austen’s struggle to earn meager income by writing six novels is well known, but their difficult situations were not limited to English female writers of two centuries ago.3 A trio of socially connected fantasy-horror geniuses of the 1930s illustrate the morbid turns of fate.

The Wikipedia page for H.P. Lovecraft, which was viewed 5,896,141 times from July 1, 2015, through April 11, 2019, reports: “He was virtually unknown during his lifetime and published only in pulp magazines before he died in poverty, but he is now regarded as one of the most significant 20th-century authors of horror and weird fiction.”4 Robert E. Howard, author of the Conan stories, committed suicide at the age of 30, and “His greatest success occurred after his death.”5 That success consisted not merely in the reprinting of the stories he wrote about Conan the Barbarian, but the continuation of the mythos by other writers, successful movies in which his character was played by the actual future governor of California, successful computer games, and 887,665 pageviews. A. Merritt, with only 53,411 pageviews, is less well known today, but he “made $25,000 per year by 1919, and at the end of his life was earning $100,000 yearly—exceptional sums for the period.”6 But Merritt made his living as a very successful journalist and editor, not for the high quality of his fiction writing. Personally, I consider his 1924 novel The Ship of Ishtar to be a great work of literature, rich in metaphor and philosophy as well as action, and I added the page about it to Wikipedia, but it gained only 9,889 pageviews during the same recent period.7

An entire book could be filled with similar examples, but as a general rule most authors of literature begin as amateurs, survive as semiprofessionals, and only a few really gain fame and wealth through their writing. Today the role-model is J.K. Rowling, as suggested by her 13,361,958 pageviews, author of the Harry Potter fantasy series on which many successful movies have been made:

Rowling has lived a “rags to riches” life story, in which she progressed from living on state benefits to being the world’s first billionaire author. She lost her billionaire status after giving away much of her earnings to charity, but remains one of the wealthiest people in the world.8

As it happens, I have published one novel, earning exactly $2,000 from it, and four other members of my immediate family have published novels, thus providing a participant observation basis for research using less personal methods. The birth of Internet, and automatic methods for printing paper books, may be changing the economic context for literature, but we cannot yet be sure in which ways, given the chaotic experience of authors of the past.

A more systematic basis for looking forward can be gained by looking backward at the most influential periodical of the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction, a magazine founded in 1930 as Astounding Stories of Super-Science but surviving today as Analog Science Fiction and Fact. Primarily remembered as Astounding Science Fiction, it was the core of the SF subculture of authors, readers, and author-readers in the period 1937 to 1971 under the editorship of John W. Campbell, Jr.9 Each issue of the magazine began with an editorial, included a nonfiction article on a topic relevant to science fiction, and ended with a section of letters from readers, but the main content was stories and serialized novels. I published six articles in Analog myself, three of them around the year 1980 and three around 2000.10 Campbell’s editorial in the April 1938 issue proclaimed:

A magazine is not an autocracy, as readers tend to believe, ruled arbitrarily by an editor’s opinions. It is a democracy by the readers’ votes, the editor serving as election board official. The authors are the candidates, their style and stories their platform.

With these words he defined the function of a monthly reader poll called the Analytical Laboratory that ran from March 1938 through October 1976. Each “AnLab” summarized readers’ ratings of the stories from a previous issue, thus a precursor of modern recommender systems.

The data for 464 issues covering about 2,500 fiction items provided popularity ranking for a vast number of authors, 53 of whom had published at least 10 items—short stories, novelettes, or installments of serialized novels. Here, Table 5.1 summarizes the data for the 13 highest ranking authors, stopping with Isaac Asimov, perhaps the best known of the 53 today. AnLab listed the authors and story titles from the given recent issue in descending order, beginning with the story in first place, but also reporting a points score that Campbell calculated from the sets of rankings in the letters he received from readers. In a factual science article published in the 50th anniversary issue of the magazine, I reported statistical methods for combining the place and points scores from issues that contained different numbers of fiction items.11 Those two forms of reader ratings are given in Table 5.1, recalibrated in terms of a scale from 1 (best—a hypothetical author whose works would always be rated better than works by other authors) to 1,000 (worst).

Table 5.1 Reader ratings of authors from the analytical laboratory

Author’s name	Stories rated	Mean date	Reader ratings		Wikipedia pageviews
			Place	Points
Anson MacDonald	10	1941	210	98
Robert A. Heinlein	25	1947	228	145	1,723,155
E.E. “Doc” Smith	13	1944	244	190	116,702
Jerry Pournelle	11	1973	280	265	295,654
A.E. van Vogt	59	1944	348	298	185,943
Harry Harrison	32	1966	321	316	206,796
Lawrence O’Donnell	11	1947	330	323
Frank Herbert	28	1963	381	329	811,656
Poul Anderson	67	1960	348	332	272,777
Hal Clement	29	1953	315	340	45,657
Jack Williamson	19	1944	348	343	78,634
Clifford D. Simak	39	1949	356	350	134,719
Isaac Asimov	45	1950	391	351	4,266,782

The table appears to list 13 authors, but in a sense there are only 11, but perhaps really 13. Anson MacDonald was a penname used by Robert A. Heinlein, and Anson was his full middle name. Lawrence O’Donnell was also a penname, but for a married couple, Henry Kuttner and C.L. (Catherine Lucille) Moore. The table includes Wikipedia pageviews from July 1, 2015, through April 10, 2019, indicating that Heinlein and Asimov have remained popular, along with Frank Herbert who wrote the Dune series of novels that developed into a popular multimedia subculture. The fact that Lawrence O’Donnell did not exist might not prevent him from having a Wikipedia page, because there is one for a different penname used by the same couple, Lewis Padgett which had 19,694 pageviews, and the individual members of the couple have pages, Henry Kuttner with 77,770 pageviews and C.L. Moore with 68,911.

Wikipedia correctly reports that Heinlein was considered the “dean of science fiction writers” and a leader in the hard-science SF tradition that expected authors to provide cogent technical explanations for any unusual phenomena and to explore possible future technologies. Yet, Wikipedia also notes: “His work sometimes had controversial aspects, such as plural marriage in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, militarism in Starship Troopers and technologically competent women characters that were strong and independent, yet often stereotypically feminine.”12 Actually, as I read his works they all had politically controversial aspects, sometimes right-wing, sometimes authoritarian, sometimes libertarian, sometimes anarchist, sometimes radical but difficult to define. Indeed, he explored many different ways in which a community of people could organize themselves, even as he was also exploring the implications of spaceflight and related technologies. Today, Heinlein’s thinking can be explored by joining Facebook groups that discuss his works, such as:

Heinlein Forum (2,356 members): “For fans of Robert A. Heinlein, the first Grand Master of Science Fiction. Little is off topic, but no copyright infringement allowed or encouraged. Specialization is for Insects.”

Heinleiners (1,135 members): “A community where people with Robert Heinlein in common can discuss whatever the hell they choose... who will take responsibility for their own feelings, and who LIKE intelligent discussion, especially with people who disagree with them. Like the original RAH.”

Apostles of Heinlein (748 members): “This group was begun as a place of joy and sharing; it is for people to discuss All Things Heinlein: the ideas, inventions, and social structures Heinlein created in his works, both fiction and non-fiction. This is what has brought us all together here.”

Heinlein was a rare example of financial success in writing, but most of the others on the list were part-time authors. E.E. Smith is considered the father of space opera, “a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes space warfare, melodramatic adventure, interplanetary battles, chivalric romance, and risk-taking.”13 The Star Wars saga is the most familiar example of space opera, a term derived from analogy with soap opera and more directly the Wild West stories called horse opera. Yet Smith’s main source of income was his prosaic work as a “food engineer (specializing in doughnut and pastry mixes).”14 Rather more integrated in his work, Jerry Pournelle held a number of responsible positions in the aerospace industry.15

A.E. van Vogt illustrates the connection between a genre of literature and a set of radical intellectual movements that seek to apply the same imagination to the real world. He was

always interested in the idea of all-encompassing systems of knowledge (akin to modern meta-systems)—the characters in his very first story used a system called “Nexialism” to analyze the alien’s behavior. Around this time, he became particularly interested in the general semantics of Alfred Korzybski. He subsequently wrote a novel merging these overarching themes, The World of Ā, originally serialized in Astounding in 1945. Ā (often rendered as Null-A), or non-Aristotelian logic, refers to the capacity for, and practice of, using intuitive, inductive reasoning (compare fuzzy logic), rather than reflexive, or conditioned, deductive reasoning.16

A sense of the radical ambitions of the General Semantics movement can be gleaned from the titles of Korzybski’s two main publications, Manhood of Humanity and Science and Sanity.17 For a while van Vogt partnered with another Astounding author, L.R. Hubbard, in setting up an unconventional psychotherapy movement, Dianetics, which Hubbard later transformed into the religion named Scientology.18 Hubbard first announced Dianetics in a nonfiction article in Astounding; as a fiction author, he was in 30th place among the 53 prolific AnLab authors, stressing action and psychology in his stories, rather than technical accuracy. In stark contrast, Hal Clement was a teacher of chemistry and astronomy at Milton Academy, a conventional Massachusetts boarding school, and wrote technically careful novels about the environments of realistic but exotic planets.19

Rather than summarize how the other authors found various ways to support their writing, we should conclude this section with consideration of Isaac Asimov. Like Clement, he taught science in Massachusetts, specifically being a professor of biochemistry at Boston University.20 Much of his significant financial success as an author came from his prolific writing of factual science books and articles aimed at the general public. Two profound but not necessarily unique ideas provided powerful intellectual focus for much of his influential fiction: (1) The Foundation and (2) the three laws of robotics. The Wikipedia article for Asimov’s Foundation received 2,140,800 pageviews and offers a correct summary:

The premise of the series is that the mathematician Hari Seldon spent his life developing a branch of mathematics known as psychohistory, a concept of mathematical sociology. Using the laws of mass action, it can predict the future, but only on a large scale. Seldon foresees the imminent fall of the Galactic Empire, which encompasses the entire Milky Way, and a dark age lasting 30,000 years before a second great empire arises. Seldon’s calculations also show there is a way to limit this interregnum to just one thousand years. To ensure the more favorable outcome and reduce human misery during the intervening period, Seldon creates the Foundation—a group of talented artisans and engineers positioned at the twinned extreme ends of the galaxy—to preserve and expand on humanity’s collective knowledge, and thus become the foundation for the accelerated resurgence of this new galactic empire.21

Asimov reported that his idea came from reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon, but at the time he wrote his original Foundation trilogy in the 1940s, several influential intellectuals had written about the possibility that our own civilization like ancient Rome might soon collapse. Notable among them were Oswald Spengler and Pitirim Sorokin, but also Jacob Moreno who argued in 1934 that some new form of sociology might prevent this disaster.22 In the New World Order after the fall of the Soviet Union, optimism held sway for a couple of decades in our real world, but today we have renewed concern that civilization may be inching toward its demise. Where is Hari Seldon when we need him? Also today, there is much discussion of the pros and cons of artificial intelligence, and renewed interest in the three laws of robotics that Asimov offered:

1. 1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. 2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. 3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.23

Originally published in Astounding in a 1942 story named “Runaround,” and most prominently republished in Asimov’s 1950 anthology, I, Robot, the laws were presented as somewhat problematic.24 Much of Asimov’s extensive robot fiction concerns situations in which algorithms come into conflict, either with each other or with the surrounding real world, and often considering the algorithms that govern human rather than robot behavior. Today, major computer science organizations promulgate recently improved systems of ethics, but they may be ineffective in ways that Asimov could have used as the basis of many new stories. Most obviously, in the application of elaborate systems in a complex world, how can algorithms predict what actions may cause harm, and to what extent? The literature of past centuries can illuminate today’s issues, not by answering questions but by raising them. In 2019, the National Science Foundation partnered with the Amazon corporation “to jointly support computational research focused on fairness in AI, with the goal of contributing to trustworthy AI systems that are readily accepted and deployed to tackle grand challenges facing society.”25 Yet the local newspaper in Amazon’s home city raised questions about the company’s objectivity, and we may well imagine Asimov writing a fascinating novel about a corporation that seeks to impose ethics algorithms on society that will serve its own interests.26

A Local Science Fiction Fandom

A sense of how we can study a subculture through its people rather than its products can be gained by looking on Facebook, starting with a group representing one of the most established science fiction clubs, the New England Science Fiction Association, familiarly known as NESFA, pronounced “NESS-fuh.” Science fiction fans originally assembled around the magazines, which included letter-to-the-editor sections and encouraged social networks to emerge. Indeed, participants tended to be comfortable with the term “fan,” despite the implication that fans are fanatics who overvalue the object of their admiration. They used the term in unusual ways, for example, giving fan the plural fen rather than fans, analogous with man and men. A controversial proverb emerged: “Fans are slans.” This makes sense only to fen who loved the 1946 novel Slan by A.E. van Vogt, the early activist in the Dianetics movement that was a predecessor of Scientology which aims to transcend traditional human limitations. Wikipedia explains:

Slans are evolved humans, named after their alleged creator, Samuel Lann. They have the psychic abilities to read minds and are super-intelligent. They possess near limitless stamina, “nerves of steel,” and superior strength and speed. When Slans are ill or seriously injured, they go into a healing trance automatically.27

Fans called their community fandom.

A decisive step in the development of fandom was the first Worldcon—World Science Fiction Convention—where 200 fans and authors gathered in the future-oriented 1939 World’s Fair in New York.28 Already, factions battled over the definition of science fiction, and a group of authors with left-wing utopian aspirations called The Futurians was excluded from participation.29 Since then, fandom has tended to avoid political activism, even though a good fraction of the literature is either critical of current social institutions or explicitly utopian in suggesting radical alternatives.

A regional convention was held in Boston in 1941, named Boskone when we might have expected Boscon: “The name is a reference to the classic Lensman series by E. E. Smith, in which ‘Boskone’ is a council of villains, and also a name for their civilization.”30 It was organized by a short-lived group, ended with the 1945 meeting, then was revived in 1965 by the equally short-lived Boston Science Fiction Society. Around 1950, students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology founded the MIT Science Fiction Society which influenced several cultural developments over the years and currently operates a huge SF library. Members were instrumental in founding the Boston Science Fiction Society which included nonstudents and then its successor NESFA in 1967.31 A more detailed history that includes information about many of the specific authors and fans involved in these groups can be found on a specialized wiki named Fancyclopedia.32

In 1973, 74 members of NESFA were kind enough to complete a questionnaire that was a pilot study for the research I did at the 1978 Worldcon.33 On December 23, 2018, I found that 601 identifiable people belonged to its Facebook group and explored what other groups in the general science fiction subculture they tended to belong to. Again, interlock analysis can help us see the social structure of a subculture, and this one proves to be diffuse, with a very wide range of connection strengths. Table 5.2 gives the results, based on “scraping” the membership and admin (administrator) lists from 13 groups and assembling them in a spreadsheet. All of them are public groups, for which the membership lists are visible to anyone. Facebook has two other kinds of groups. The membership lists and even postings for closed groups may not be seen without joining the group, and secret groups cannot even be discovered in a search. Of the 601 NESFA members, 35 belong to at least 4 of the other groups, and the average is 1.26. The table arranges the groups in descending order of their interlock percentage with NESFA.

Table 5.2 A linked set of science fiction Facebook groups

Group	Founded	Admins	Members	NESFAns	Links
New England Science Fiction Association	2008	11	601	601	100.0%
Boskone	2008	8	905	256	42.6%
Fans of Arisia (Unofficial)	2008	3	1,735	150	25.0%
Analog Science Fiction and Fact Magazine Fan Club	2009	1	3,626	103	17.1%
Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors	2008	2	8,384	59	9.8%
ASIMOV’S Science Fiction	2012	3	2,901	44	7.3%
The Harlan Ellison Facebook Fan Club	2007	3	2,797	38	6.3%
Science Fiction Book Club	2010	3	4,674	32	5.3%
Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society	2007	5	1,365	24	4.0%
ERBzine	2012	1	4,665	23	3.8%
Tom Corbett, Space Cadet	2015	2	1,122	12	2.0%
The Dune Saga	2007	6	9,795	9	1.5%
Heinleiners	2016	2	914	6	1.0%

Since 1968, Boskone has been organized by NESFA, so it makes sense that many members of the Facebook group for NESFA also belong to the one for Boskone: 256 of 601 or 42.6 percent.34 Since 1990, another SF con has been held annually in the Boston area, named Arisia.35 Wikipedia tells the world how it relates to Boskone:

Arisia is a Boston-area, volunteer run science fiction convention, named for a planet in the Lensman novels by E. E. “Doc” Smith. The name was chosen in response to an older Boston-area con, Boskone, which took the typical ending for a convention—con—and then altered the spelling to match the name of an organization in the Lensmen books.36

The Facebook page for the Analog Science Fiction and Fact Magazine Fan Club describes the magazine that is its focus:

Astounding/Analog (often all-encompassingly just called ASF) is often considered the magazine where science fiction grew up. When editor John W. Campbell took over in 1938, he brought to Astounding an unprecedented insistence on placing equal emphasis on both words of “science fiction.” No longer satisfied with gadgetry and action per se, Campbell demanded that his writers try to think out how science and technology might really develop in the future—and, most importantly, how those changes would affect the lives of human beings. The new sophistication soon made Astounding the undisputed leader in the field, and Campbell began to think the old title was too “sensational” to reflect what the magazine was actually doing. He chose “Analog” in part because he thought of each story as an “analog simulation” of a possible future, and in part because of the close analogy he saw between the imagined science in the stories he was publishing and the real science being done in laboratories around the world.37

While correct, this paragraph does not emphasize the fact that Campbell and some of his authors hoped that some controversial theories might prove to be true, thus expanding the definition of science to cover what was often disparaged as pseudoscience. Both Slan and The World of Null-A were originally published in Astounding Science-Fiction, and L. Ron Hubbard published supposedly factual science articles there to promote Dianetics in 1950 and 1951, prior to expanding this psychotherapy into the religion of Scientology. In 1956 Campbell himself published about psionics, the development of electronic devices to detect paranormal phenomena such as telepathy. A theme lurking in all chapters of this book is the question of how far science can and should be developed.38

The Facebook group Science Fiction and Fantasy Authors is one of a large set of groups that primarily serve people who want to become authors in a particular genre and are sharing hopes and advice. Of its 8,384 identifiable members, 59 also belong to the NESFA group, which is 9.8 percent of NESFA but only 0.7 percent of SFFA. Its self-description says it is:

A group of fiction writers focused on discussing the genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy and springboarding the genres into mainstream literature. This group is open for anyone who loves the genres of Science Fiction and Fantasy. We welcome readers, writers, viewers and all lovers of the genres... If we work hard to discuss the genres and build this site I believe we will all become better writers. Better writers mean more Great Science Fiction and Fantasy stories. Good luck all.39

Reading what members have posted reveals them to be thoughtful, creative, and willing to share ideas, but also facing the difficult challenge of how to publish their fiction in a way that is rewarding, whether in monetary terms or at least in social recognition of their work. A common topic is self-publishing, including the computer-based print on demand method, contrasted with finding a commercial publisher that is both reliable and willing to publish a novel by a new author.

The messages posted by members are naturally arranged in chronological order, with the newest message at the top. An alternative is to enter a search term into the Facebook group’s discussion, such as lulu, which is the name of a company that offers self-publishing services, with this vision: “Lulu offers you the expertise, independence and flexibility to create, buy and share what you love with the world. We are passionate about providing a remarkable experience for you to tell stories, share knowledge and fulfill your creative potential.”40 Searching for “lulu” immediately suggested other search terms, because many of the messages compared different self-publishing alternatives: “I created a lulu account to see what I could do about getting books in print at a lower cost than createspace.” “I’m thinking of switching to LULU Publishing. Has anyone worked with them before? What are your impressions? I just don’t like Kindle Direct Publishing. They are too big and it’s really hard to get support.” “As of today... my 90 day exclusive ebook distro with Amazon’s KDP Select ended, so I jumped right into Lulu and already have the ebook version on Lulu’s sales site and am pending approval for Nook and the Apple market.” “Any idea which is best method to get into paperback? Lulu or Amazon? Need to link up paperback distribution and kindle, and other formats... bit of a loss. Next book will be self published.”

The other rows of Table 5.2 concern groups related to a variety of aspects of the wider science fiction subculture. ASIMOV’S Science Fiction is comparable to the Analog group, connecting to a magazine published since 1977 and symbolically oriented toward fiction like that written by Isaac Asimov. The Harlan Ellison Facebook Fan Club is “a group for people on Facebook who are fans and friends of award winning author, screenwriter, media and social critic, and Grand Master in multiple literary fields, Harlan Ellison (1934–2018).”41 The Science Fiction Book Club observes: “In the old days, book clubs were informal gatherings where people got together to discuss a common book they were reading. With the advent of the Internet, it’s possible to discuss books online.”42 Comparable to NESFA, the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society, “founded October 27, 1934, is this world’s oldest continuously-active science-fiction and fantasy club.”43

Probably the most extensive nonprofit organization dedicated to the work of an individual American SF writer is the multidecade, multiform fandom currently represented by ERBzine, the “Official Edgar Rice Burroughs Tribute and Weekly Webzine Site Since 1996 ~ 15,000 Web Pages in Archive.”44 It connects to an older manifestation:

The Burroughs Bibliophiles is a nonprofit 501c(3) literary society devoted to studying and promoting interest in the works, creations, and life of Edgar Rice Burroughs, including the globally popular icon, Tarzan®. The Burroughs Bibliophiles was founded on 4 Sep 1960 and adopted “The Burroughs Bulletin” journal, the only such publication personally approved by Edgar Rice Burroughs.45

The Bulletin had been founded in 1947, originally as a mimeographed fanzine, the standard SF term for fan magazine.46 The Dune Saga concerns the series of novels, almost like a 1960s’ variant of the Mars novels by Burroughs, by Frank Herbert and successor authors, that was first published in Analog, while as we already saw Heinleiners concerns Robert A. Heinlein who also published in Analog, but mainly in the 1940s.

The Tom Corbett, Space Cadet group is dedicated to a children’s television program of the same name that ran from 1950 through 1955. As Wikipedia documents, two of the actors that played main characters became prolific authors, Frankie Thomas who was the eponymous Tom Corbett, and Jan Merlin who played his cranky radio operator, Roger Manning.47 The origins of the show are complex:

Joseph Greene of Grosset & Dunlap developed Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, inspired by the Robert A. Heinlein novel Space Cadet (1948) but based on his own prior work. Greene had submitted a radio script for “Tom Ranger” and the “Space Cadets” on January 16, 1946, but it remained unperformed when Heinlein’s novel was published.48

A website named Solar Guard that launched in 1996 has preserved the history of this classic TV sci-fi series as well as Space Patrol that was first broadcast six months before Tom Corbett.49 The main actor in Space Patrol, Ed Kemmer, had been a fighter pilot during the Second World War, was shot down over France, and held in a prisoner of war camp for nearly a year.50 Thus, in reality he was very much like the science fiction character that he played, and his life story suggests that both Tom Corbett and Space Patrol were in part inspired by technological advances in the real-world conflict that raged immediately before television became a popular culture medium.

The example of Ed Kemmer, a man who actually lived for a time in a technological context like the one he later role-played in a fictional TV series, reminds us that the relationship between culture and truth is complex. It may be true that members of culture X believe statement Y to be true, but objectively Y is false. Statistical studies of a society may find that belief Y has a moderately strong positive correlation with belief Z, but that may result because a large subculture associates Y positively with Z, while a smaller subculture associates Y negatively with Z. Or, a small correlation may result simply because the data collection method is flawed, and considerable noise hides the power of a strong correlation. In a remarkably detailed summary of extensive research literature, Alexandra Olteanu, Carlos Castillo, Fernando Diaz, and Emre Kiciman have documented a huge array of problems using statistical methods to analyze data concerning online social media.51 They do not prove that such research is useless, merely that both the phenomena under study, and the research methods, are complex and must not be misunderstood as providing clear and definitive results.

The perspective taken by this book is that statistical research methods have many applications, and rigorous testing of precisely defined formal hypotheses is only one of them. Anomalies may be interesting discoveries rather than research flaws. The human brain evolved under environmental and social conditions that are very different from those experienced by people today. Sociologist Satoshi Kanazawa has made this point in the Savanna Principle, named after the complex East African ecosystem that combined woodland and grassland where humanity evolved, which he has expressed in two different ways:

1. 1. A hypothesis about human behavior fails to the extent that its scope conditions and assumptions are inconsistent with what existed in the ancestral environment.52
2. 2. The human brain has difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment.53

Online social media are very different from our historical homeland, and one consequence is that users may invest it with a great variety of meanings, rendering it a suitable environment for a diversity of subcultures. In a sense, traditional cultural anthropology was respectfully seeking to understand exotic cultures from the standpoint of 20th-century European culture, as a corrective for colonialism but also an extension of it. We may today seek to think beyond our own cultural limits, but research like this book will inevitably have some of the quality of intellectual tourism in which members of one culture visit another culture and seek to understand it. Quantitative research methods can be very useful for providing a set of wider and deeper perspectives that go beyond merely looking out the window of a tour bus, as well as mapping both the internal structure of a culture and its connections to neighboring cultures. Thus here we will tend to use statistics as tools for description rather than hypothesis-testing, although one result will be many new hypotheses that have some empirical confirmation, within the particular cultural context.

Online Fan Fiction

Fandoms are subcultures that not only allow members of an audience to share their enthusiasm for a genre or franchise, but also communities that can support their own members’ creative activities. As of April 14, 2019, the online amateur literature digital library, Archive of Our Own, contained 32 stories that mention Asimov’s three laws of robotics.54 This was a tiny fraction of the approximately 4,714,000 works accessible through the site, and some of the 32 mentioned robots only in passing. But some of them would be of value to a cultural scientist who was seeking to map the heritage of the three laws. A story by Zaylo titled “IRobot” quotes the three laws in its summary, along with this:

Based on the song “IRobot” By Jon Bellion, Keith is a robot created by the company Widget, made to serve humankind as slaves and assistants. Widgets are made to be emotionless, but Keith is different, and his feeling will drag him through love and heartbreak as he learns how to be a human.

Jon Bellion is a real life “rapper, singer, songwriter and record producer” whose Wikipedia article has 1,813,246 pageviews.55 His song “iRobot” is a lament from an apparently rejected lover who has been stripped of his humanity and now requires only “circuits and wires”:

I am a robot, thoughtless and empty

Don’t know who sent me, don’t know who made me

Electric robot, everything’s gray now

Numb to the pain now, I knew what love was...56

Conceptualizing humanity as possessing transcendent feelings, rather than mechanistically governed by algorithms, is certainly not a new idea. We see it in the 1816 short story “The Sandman” by E.T.A. Hoffmann about love for a clockwork woman that was retold in the ballet Coppélia by Léo Delibes and the opera Les Contes d’Hoffmann by Jacques Offenbach.57 The word robot was introduced into literature in the 1920 play R. U. R. by Karel Čapek, in which it served as a political metaphor for the dehumanization of the working class, a theme also central to the 1927 movie Metropolis.58 The 1900 novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum includes the Tin Woodman, a worker who had lost most of his humanity to the point of rusting solid. Dorothy cures his paralysis technologically by oiling his joints, and he asks: “Do you suppose Oz could give me a heart?” She replies, “Why, I guess so... it would be as easy as to give the Scarecrow brains.”59 Perhaps ironically, the title “I, Robot” was not original with Asimov, but used in 1939 by the first in a series of popular science fiction stories by Eando Binder about Adam Link, a robot that seeks to become human. The author was not exactly a person, also, being the collaboration between two brothers, Earl Andrew Binder and Otto Oscar Binder (Eando Binder = E and O Binder). In summarizing the Adam Link stories in an earlier publication, I described their beginning:

this metal humanoid with a sponge iridium brain is falsely accused of murdering his creator, Dr. Link. Despite his habit of saving humans from drowning, fires, and auto accidents, he is not exonerated until the third story in the series. Adam Link is strong, intelligent, and especially sensitive. He frequently broods about the sad fate of Frankenstein’s monster. People fear Adam at first and later poke fun at him. Continually, he must assert that robots, too, are human. Why, he wonders, cannot people realize, “as Dr. Link once stated, that the body, human or otherwise, is only part of the environment of the mind?”60

This debate can be conceptualized as fundamental questions in either cognitive science or cultural science. Can emotions be classified rigorously as distinct categories of cognition? Can the distinction between feeling and thinking be mapped onto different parts of the brain, or are they the contrast between chemical and electronic processes? Is the distinction between human and robot equivalent to the distinction Pitirim Sorokin proposed for cultural science between sensate and ideational culture?
Or is it the dimension of variation between multiculturalism and
totalitarianism? Other sections of this book gingerly address limited aspects of these cosmic questions, but they certainly cannot be definitively answered here.

However, a television franchise with some of the quality of Asimov’s writing has repeatedly compared humans and robots that represent a diversity of emotional and mental archetypes: Doctor Who. Things were never exactly what they seem, in the world of the Good Doctor, as illustrated by the fact that his spaceship, named the Tardis, was the size and appearance of a police telephone booth. Today, a wiki named Tardis illustrates how it could be bigger on the inside than the outside by containing fully 71,380 articles. One concerns robots called K9,

the designation given to a series of intelligent, dog-like robots who served as companions of Professor Marius, the Fourth Doctor, Leela, Romana, the Mistress, Sarah Jane Smith, Luke Smith, Starkey, and the Tenth Doctor. K9 Mark I, II, III, and IV addressed whoever was directing them as “Master” or “Mistress” depending upon gender, and used the formal “affirmative” and “negative” rather than “yes” and “no”. They were programmed to be both loyal and logical, with a penchant for taking orders literally, almost to a fault.61

So K9 robots were adorable pets, rather than dangerous monsters, in contrast to the robotoid Cybermen and Daleks who were mechanized derivations of biological “people.”

Doctor Who is a British television series that began in 1963 and that I first watched when I visited in 1965. Wikipedia offers many pages about it, including one for each of the 13 manifestations of the doctor played by different actors over the years:

The programme depicts the adventures of a Time Lord called “the Doctor,” an extraterrestrial being, to all appearances human, from the planet Gallifrey. The Doctor explores the universe... Accompanied by a number of companions, the Doctor combats a variety of foes while working to save civilisations and help people in need.62

Seeking a diversity of viewpoints on canine robots, one can visit the online fan literature digital library, Archive of Our Own, go to the 53,077 stories, chapters, and other works of literature in the Doctor Who section, on May 4, 2019, and tell the search engine to list all the stories and other works that include “K9,” getting these hits: K9 (106), Sarah Jane Smith (79), K9 (Doctor Who) (66), Jack Harkness (54), Fourth Doctor (52), Rose Tyler (51), Tenth Doctor (50), Romana II (Doctor Who) (48), Mickey Smith (38), Martha Jones (33).63 Apparently, 52 stories about the Fourth Doctor include K9, as do 50 about the Tenth Doctor and 79 about one of the Doctor’s favorite companions, Sarah Jane Smith. The fact that the list includes the circular reference “K9 (Doctor Who)” illustrates that the classification system is complex, and very extensive data preparation work may be required prior to serious study. Table 5.3 is less rigorous, offering an approximate count of the numbers of stories about each of the 13 Doctors and their most popular companions.

Table 5.3 Amateur literature featuring the 13 Doctors with their companions

Doctors 1–13		1st frequent companion		2nd frequent companion		3rd frequent companion
Period	Works	Name	Works	Name	Works	Name	Works
1. 1963–66	542	Susan Foreman	211	Ian Chesterton	121	Barbara Wright	116
2. 1966–69	675	Jamie McCrimmon	490	Zoe Heriot	193	Victoria Waterfield	107
3. 1970–74	726	Jo Grant	247	Sarah Jane Smith	123	Liz Shaw	55
4. 1974–81	735	Sarah Jane Smith	307	Romana	173	Harry Sullivan	99
5. 1982–84	806	Tegan Jovanka	253	Nyssa of Traken	228	Vislor Turlough	183
6. 1984–86	479	Peri Brown	174	Evelyn Smythe	53	Melanie Bush	50
7. 1987–89	506	Ace McShane	275	Melanie Bush	36	Bernice Summerfield	22
8. 1996	1,185	Rose Tyler	267	Grace Holloway	85	Chang Lee	12
9. 2005	4,208	Rose Tyler	3,298	Jack Harkness	1,495	Adam Mitchell	43
10. 2005–10	13,089	Rose Tyler	8,925	Jack Harkness	2,809	Donna Noble	2,767
11. 2010–13	9,130	River Song	3,596	Amy Pond	3,245	Rory Williams	2,543
12. 2014–17	5,571	Clara Oswald	3,198	River Song	878	Bill Potts	493
13. 2018–	2,270	Yasmin Khan	1,430	Ryan Sinclair	942	Graham O’Brien	924