Ray Bradbury sat at a rented typewriter in the basement of a UCLA library to write “Fahrenheit 451,” his iconic 1953 science-fiction novel about a world in which books burned.
For Philip K. Dick, it was UC Berkeley’s main stacks that offered the historic World War II documents that fueled his 1962 “The Man in the High Castle.” Set in an alternate universe, in a post-World War II Japanese-occupied San Francisco, the book won a Hugo award and launched his career.
And Kim Stanley Robinson played in the orchards of Orange County as a boy, until the orange groves were plowed under for new crops of tract houses and a landscape reflected decades later in the dystopian sprawl of his 1988 novel “The Gold Coast.”
For a century or more, the Golden State has shined bright as a distant star in some far-off galaxy in the imaginations of science-fiction authors. Why have so many writers of speculative fiction found the inspiration here for tales of strange new worlds?
The author’s perspective
“California represented the future for American westwardness, the end of the frontier,” says Robinson, who now lives and writes in Davis. “Gold Rush, Hollywood, Silicon Valley — It’s always represented the future in some way.”
Northern California’s literary scene included writers such as Poul Anderson, Jack Vance and Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin lived much of her life in Portland, Oregon, but she grew up in Berkeley, the daughter of UC Berkeley anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber and author Theodora Kroeber, and returned often to the family’s Napa home.
“My generation, there’s a whole cohort of baby boomers in Southern California,” Robinson adds, ticking off names such as James P. Blaylock and Tim Powers, David Brin and Greg Bear.
“And Phil Dick was kind of on the edge of that,” he says. Robinson wrote his doctoral dissertation on the science-fiction luminary who grew up in the Bay Area. “He was both inside and outside the science-fiction community, because he had such a tumultuous personal life.”
Whether the landscape influences the work may be up for debate, but there’s no doubting the influence of the work on the culture.
“You know, (Robert A.) Heinlein, a horrible rightwinger, and Bradbury, this cheerful liberal, they’re like the yin and yang. And then you’ve got Dick and Le Guin,” Robinson says. “I think if you were to do a blind taste test and say, ‘Did this science fiction come from California or not?’ you couldn’t do it.”
But their work has created a significant part of the California literary tradition. “Try to look at California literature without science fiction,” he says. “If you don’t include science fiction, you’ve got a provincial and whiny anti-California literature, with some exceptions.”
The fan expert
Two years ago, Nick Smith, a Pasadena library technician, curated a “Dreaming the Universe: The Intersection of Science, Fiction & Southern California” exhibit at the Pasadena Museum of History. His observation: While the creators of science fiction are rightly lauded, the history of the sci-fi fandom here is also worth acknowledgment.
“I think that’s part of why this has been home to a lot of science fiction,” says Smith, who is the former president of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. Founded in 1934, it’s the oldest such fan group in the world, with a teenage Ray Bradbury one of its early members.
California appealed to science-fiction writers in the same way it appealed to anyone, Smith says. There were jobs to be had here, the promise of a better life and more opportunity or acceptance for people who might be discriminated against in other parts of the nation.
“Hollywood and television also contributed,” he says. “They provided a steady extra income for some of the writers.”
Harlan Ellison, for instance, not only edited and wrote science fiction, he worked on TV shows such as “Star Trek” and wrote screenplays. Curt Siodmak is a mostly forgotten sci-fi writer, Smith says, but his work lives on, thanks to his screenplay for the classic Universal horror movie “The Wolf Man.”
The science-and-tech worlds exemplified by Silicon Valley in the north or Jet Propulsion Laboratories and Caltech in the south also provided fertile ground for writers to exploit.
L. Sprague de Camp, who graduated from Caltech in 1930, is the first published science fiction alumnus of that institute, Smith mentions.
The community helped fuel itself, he says, “I mean, if you’re in Sheboygan, you’re not going to be able to reach out and find half a dozen other science-fiction writers.”
The Butler biographer
Octavia Butler, the Hugo and Nebula award-winning author and MacArthur Fellowship recipient, is the focus of Lynell George’s new book, “A Handful of Earth, a Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia Butler,” which focuses on Butler’s life and work as a writer.
Butler was inspired, for example, by Hollywood’s failure to do justice to science fiction, George says: “She saw this really bad movie, ‘Devil Girl From Mars,’ and she thought, ‘This is so bad, I can do better than this as a kid.’”
The landscapes and natural environment around her also influenced Butler’s thinking.
“She used to take walks a lot and observed the most minute changes: What was blooming, what wasn’t blooming, the effect of drought on her neighborhood,” George says. “She was looking at what was happening to the planet by walking through her neighborhood.”
Butler’s 1993 book, “Parable of the Sower,” and its 1998 sequel, “Parable of the Talents,” see her protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina, traveling from a dystopian Los Angeles in the 2020s to the fictional Earthseed religious community of Acorn in Northern California.
“It’s chaos,” George says of the world Butler created on the page decades ago now. “This summer, I was reading “Parable of the Talents’ to this backdrop of COVID, wildfires, pink skies and I kept thinking, ‘Yeah, this is the Southern California that Lauren was trying to flee, and now we’re in it.’
“So when people keep saying (Butler) was prescient and it’s eerie — and it is — she was really just paying attention.”
The sci-fi scholar
UC Irvine’s Jonathan Alexander, the chancellor’s professor of English, education and gender and sexuality studies, taught a course on “Star Trek” in the fall 2020 semester, which incidentally offered a hint of the important ties between California and science fiction.
“The headquarters for Star Fleet, the sort of scientific, pseudo-military branch, is San Francisco,” he says. “That’s definitely a sign that people associate California’s spirit with ‘boldly going,’ with exploration.”
Like Robinson, Alexander points to the promise California offered to people far from its mountains and shores.
“California, in the long-term American imagination, is a place where people could go to make a new life,” Alexander says. “It’s wrapped up in fantasies of westward American expansion, moving across the country throughout the 19th century to populate the newer territories. Even Oscar Wilde at one point said, ‘If people disappear, they wind up in San Francisco. It is a place where people go.”
With nuggets of gold, the riches of agriculture and the shiny lure of Hollywood fame, California offered the same kind of appeal that sent science-fiction writers’ characters and their rocket ships into uncharted universes.
“There’s an underbelly to that,” Alexander says, both of the settling of California and far off worlds. “Part of that expansion has also been the eradication of a lot of the indigenous people. It also has ecological issues, like water wars. It’s hard not to think about westward expansion as part of thinking about the future.”
Alexander mentions Robinson, Butler and Dick as three writers whose science fiction dove deeply into the fact and fiction of the Golden State, fueled not only by their individual interests but the influences of the people and industry around them.
“We’ve got dreams, high tech and amazing agriculture,” Alexander says. “It’s all of the recipe for a utopian civilization here. But then I think of something that’s not as often talked about: how remote California is. Where we live, in Southern California, you’re basically surrounded by desert. When I moved here, I realized I’m very far away from everywhere else.”
Like Mark Watney, the hero of Bay Area writer Andy Weir’s sci-fi novel “The Martian,” realizing your survival exists on a strange and difficult landscape, is something any resident of the state might recognize.
