The Indefinable and Yet Desired in Science Fiction
Wonderfulness is the topic of this week’s Rocketeer podcast. The idea comes from a 1956 editorial essay by Robert Lowndes in Science Fiction Quarterly.
By preliminary post podcast comments on Substack, I observe that folks today don’t understand this idea. It’s not the sense of wonder, which we still have. It’s the sense in a story that makes us feel as if we’ve leaped free of our (metaphorical) atmosphere and sailed away to an entirely new reality, realm, or world. In other words, wonderfulness is the experience of temporary total displacement — of leaving one reality so completely that the world you departed ceases to exist while the story holds you. And we forget what we’ve left behind while we’re out there, not because we’re escaping or running away from. Instead, we’re running away to. Readers of contemporary fantasy believe that they are escaping in story, but it is another case of running away. I offer no judgment about this.
Lowndes’ Essay About Wonderfulness
Lowndes’ own essay shows that wonderfulness was something experienced even amid threatening or terrible possibilities. He gave examples like atomic doomsday, universal tyranny, and societal collapse, which feel eerily familiar to our modern social-media feeds. He distinguished the feeling of wonderfulness from anxious speculation about the universe: the characters may be ordinary men, even idealized or ridiculous, but they are always engaged, capable, and not victims of a universe too vast for them.
Lowndes mentions Burroughs’ Barsoom books and John Carter of Mars as a series exemplifying the quality of wonderfulness. For me, another he doesn’t mention is J. U. Giesy’s Palos of the Dog Star Pack series from about the same time period. The story is a well-written adventure that crosses over into the realm of the mystical without being preachy or horror. It is adventure, epic in scale, but allows for the feeling of something much larger around you than the ordinary.
Social media is full of constraining ideas. It’s full of fear and “black-pilling.” Some folks are determined to steer conversations along narrow channels that make them feel supported and comfortable. A small fraction of posts or videos, however, attempt to expand the imaginative horizon. Modern fiction is rarely expansive in the Lowndes sense, and the flood of doom-centered content online often mirrors the anxious wonders he warned against. Wonderfulness, by contrast, engages the imagination without letting fear dominate the horizon.
Have we lost the sense of wonderfulness in our stories? I think we have. Can we rediscover it? As a pulp archaeologist I absolutely believe we can. Wonderfulness is recoverable; it is a conscious imaginative capacity, not nostalgia. And I will do my part to make it so. What about you?