That possibility was style-oriented, science fiction built upon configuration and mood. No other writer was doing this. Heinlein was certainly the most important figure of the decade, Asimov probably the most imaginative, van Vogt the most characteristic and crazily inventive, the Kuttners the most polished and adroit . . . but all of these writers were replaceable. There were others who were doing what Heinlein was doing if not nearly so well, similarly Asimov. Their style, their approach to science fiction as an extrapolative medium impressing circumstance upon character, was expression of Campbell's vision. The Kuttners were better than good but their depth exceeded breadth and The New Yorker, for instance, was full of fine writers (some of whom, like John Collier and Robert Coates, had clearly influenced them). Van Vogt was more sui generis, but L. Ron Hubbard knew a few things about the paranoid plot.
If any of these writers had been lifted out of the science fiction of the forties, the forties would have been an inestimably poorer decade . . . but the history of modern science fiction, less their own contribution, would be essentially the same. Even Heinlein's work, hardly as skillfully, would have been done eventually.
But Sturgeon's contribution was unique. In his use of style, internalization, and quirky characterization he was keeping the door open for everything that happened after 1950 when the Gold, Boucher, and fifties perspective became the alternative that dominated the field. If Sturgeon had not been around through his decade to hold the flag for this kind of science fiction, had not established that the literature could be style-oriented, it is possible that the fifties perspective would not have developed; the editors and potential audience might have been there but no basis would have existed upon which writers within the field could build.
Science fiction without Sturgeon might have been a science fiction without Galaxy, Walter Miller, Jr., Brian Aldiss, Damon Knight, the original anthology market or Dying Inside. And other things. Without Heinlein, Asimov, van Vogt, Hubbard, or de Camp the medium would have been the poorer, but without Sturgeon it might by the middle of the fifties have played itself out in extrapolative gimmickry and arcana and not have existed at all.
At least it is something to think about, just as it is to think about what might have happened if Campbell had not been persuaded that Theodore Sturgeon wrote science fiction at all. Just as it is to think about what might have been if Sturgeon—who had serious literary ambitions and wanted to publish in the quarterlies and mass magazines—had not failed in his field of first intention and had had to settle for science fiction. Asimov, Heinlein, del Rey never wanted to write anything else. Sturgeon found his text after the fact. What he wrote reflected this. It made the field first attractive and then possible for many of us.
* * *
The fiction writer, locked up with the sound of his own voice, the science fiction writer locked up with the sound of his own voice propagating megalomaniacal or solipsistic visions imposed upon his persona, the full-time science fiction writer who professionally does little else . . . contrast these visions with the alienation, isolation, anonymity and impotence which constitute the condition of the American writer—
Taking it all on balance it can be well understood why alcoholism, divorce, depression, fragmentation, and a rich history of lunacy characterize science fiction writers and why it was Alfred Bester's considered opinion in the early fifties, after meeting the crowd for the first time, that all of them were brilliant and all of them had a screw loose someplace. (Bester, who wrote radio and television scripts at the time, considered himself at least nominally representative of the Outside World.)
But one does not want to prejudice the case. There is another side and another opinion. John W. Campbell, who must have thought about this too in his time, put it this way to one of his writers in the forties: "People who read science fiction are crazy. We all know about that. And science fiction writers are even crazier. But when you talk about science fiction editors, well—"
A long Campbellian sigh.
Silence.
—1980: New Jersey
Give Me That Old-Time Religion
Science fiction does not—perhaps it cannot—depict the future. What it does, as A. J. Budrys pointed out back in 1969, is to offer sentimentalized versions of the past or brutalized versions of the present transmuted into a template of the familiar. The future cannot by definition be portrayed; it will require a terminology and ethos which do not exist. Perhaps true science fiction, an accurate foreshadowing of the future if such a thing were at all possible, would be incomprehensible. It is important to point out, however, that as futurologists not only our devices but our credentials are miserable.
It is true—a notorious example—that as late as 1967, no science fiction writer had understood that the landing on the moon would be tied into the media and that it would be observed by several hundred million people including that long-distance station-to-station caller, Richard M. Nixon. None of us. The closest any came was Richard Wilson in a short-short story, "Harry Protagonist, Brain-Drainer," in a 1965 issue of Galaxy, which speculated that the first landing on Mars, witnessed by most of the population of this planet on Intermedia, would expose the astronauts to the hypnotic and mind-shattering powers of the Secret Martians, who would turn the minds of most of us to jelly.
Not such bad thinking for fifteen hundred words, this story, and handled with Wilson's customary lucidity and elan (he is a charter member of the science fiction club larger than Hydra and even more filled with bitterness: Underrated Writers, Inc.), but it had very little to do with the conditions that NASA and the networks were jointly evolving, and the question of mass audience was strictly for the subplot, a means of setting up the satiric point. Wilson takes the NASA-CBS I Saw It Coming Award but only by default, and since the award pays only in honor (of which NASA and CBS have offered us little), Wilson will have to be content with his membership in the club and 1969 Nebula for "Mother to the World."
For the rest of us—Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Anderson, and the sixties visionaries too, the movers and shakers who were attempting to write Street (as opposed to Street & Smith) Science Fiction—no honor whatsoever and no excuse. That a genre built upon visionary format whose claim to public attention through the early decades had been based upon its precognitive value should have utterly failed to glimpse the second or third most significant social event of the decade is—one puts on one's tattered prophet's robes—quite disgraceful.
Pointless to blame the readership. The readership may not be interested in the visionary, the dangerous, the threatening, or the difficult, that is true, but their expectations have been formed by what has been given them. Great writers make great audiences. The solemn truth is that as NASA and the networks conspired to reduce the most awesome events of the twentieth century to pap between advertisements and other divertissements, most of us were in the boondocks, slaving away on our portions and outlines and our little short stories, trying to figure out what new variation of Eric Frank Russell we could sneak by Campbell, what turn on a 1947 plot by van Vogt out of a 1956 novel by Phil Dick might work this one last time for Fred Pohl's Galaxy. While we slogged on through the mud of the sixties, bombs bursting in air, recycling the recyclable for one thousand dollars in front money, the liars and technicians were working ably to convert the holy into garbage and a damned good job they (and we) made of it too. The liars and the technicians put the space program out of business by the mid-seventies. Perhaps it might have been different if we had stayed on the job . . . but then again we all know that science fiction has almost nothing to do with the future so why feel guilty? I don't. And "Harry Protagonist, Brain-Drainer" is still around somewhere for proof that we had a handle on it, so there.
No guilt at all. I was just one of the boys.
—1980: New Jersey
SF Forever
I have little idea what the science fiction of the eighties will be like—as we live through, it will seem to be very much like the science fiction of the year just before—but I have a pretty good grasp of the somber nineties. Here is how it will be: mass-market science fiction will edge toward fantasy. Fully 75 percent of novels published under the label will be what we would have defined five years ago as fantastic; some of these books will do extraordinarily well and others will not but there will be little to choose qualitatively. The books that will do well simply will have larger print orders and publicity, which may in certain cases go to television or movie theaters. Series books or novels set against a common background will predominate and writers will (with one another's consent and cooperation) use one another's backgrounds freely. Some series will originate with publishers who will farm them out to various writers and pay flat fees, hold the copyrights. "Hard" or technologically rigorous work will occupy the same small corner of the market that "literary" science fiction does now.
"Literary" science fiction and many backlists will be in the hands of the specialty publishers whose present-day precursors will in the nineties be as influential as medium-sized paperback firms are now. The specialty publishers will range from one-person operations not unreminiscent of the Gnome or Shasta of the fifties to large and well-staffed organizations that will be subdivisions of conglomerate divisions; the arm for "serious" literature. These specialty publishers in the aggregate will be responsible for hundreds of books a year—the major publishers, amongst them, will do only forty or fifty—and sales will range from a few hundred to a few hundred thousand. All of the larger specialties will have experimented with trade and mass-market paperbacks and will now and then do well enough to bring a title to the attention of the majors, who will do a big edition.
The audience for written science fiction—a hard base of half a million with another two or three million who can be brought in for an occasional title—will remain stubbornly, inflexibly unchanged. This constant will be the barrier against which the specialists will time and again collide and which will cause the weaker publishers to fail since the audience will, once again, be unable to expand with expanded titles.
There will be about as much work of quality as always but none of it will come from the mass-market publishers.
The magazines and the science fiction short story will have little role in the market. The few magazines will serialize some mass-market novels and give some new writers a marginal audience for their first attempts. These two or three magazines will all be owned by the same conglomerate, will be under the same editorship, and will pay approximately the word rates which prevailed in the nineteen-fifties.
—1980: New Jersey
What I Won't Do Next Summer, I Guess
Here are a selection of plot ideas guaranteed unsaleable in the science fiction market of yesterday, today, and any variant of tomorrow. Sorry to bring this up again, folks, but the end is nigh and one must have a unity of vision:
An intelligent culture on a far planet is not carbon-based but perhaps silicone- or silver-based. There is no "organic" deterioration after death and therefore these creatures make no distinction between the living and the dead. The dead remain in residence, are fornicated with, talked to, manipulated, used as the subjects of advertisements, given responsibilities (obviously met poorly; they are shiftless) for work, child care, and so on.
The dead are obviously less efficient at most of these tasks than the living but they are humored and tolerated as the senile or extremely aged are in our own culture, and because they do not register organic collapse, their presence is not actively unpleasant. In fact, it is kind of reassuring. As well as possible the inhabitants of this culture put a good self-denying face on the inadequacies of the dead just as Victorians would cover up for batty, incontinent relatives on their premises.
A group of missionaries from a carbon-based culture land on this planet, survey the situation, and are of course horrified. Gently but very firmly they teach the natives the difference between the "dead" and the "living" and the necessity to "bury" and "put away the memory of the dead.
Slowly their message works its way through the culture and slowly the natives reach an understanding of the difference between "life" and "death."
Needless to say they are filled with spiritual terror when they realize that the dead are quite different from them and that this difference has to do with the extinction of consciousness. The culture in the face of death's apprehension goes mad, becomes dysfunctional, the natives turn upon the missionaries and kill them and then begin to slaughter one another. The only way to control death, they surmise, is to administer it themselves. (If "death" is a conscious, perpetrated condition rather than an unhappy inevitability, it can be manipulated, threatened, offered, or denied.) The culture becomes a charnel house; it becomes centered around the rituals and ordeals of murder.
It does not last much longer.
* * *
A Messianic figure in an alternate or future civilization is homosexual and preaches that only through conversion to homosexuality can the present human condition change and the time of Revelation and Reconstruction begin.
The reason for this is practical: universal homosexuality will cancel procreation and bring the ongoing generations to a halt, ending humanity within about a century. This Messiah has prophetic conviction and textual justification; he overcomes all of the manifold social resistance and brings about that era which soon enough will bring to fruition all of the prophecies mysteriously locked within the Book of Daniel.
* * *
A science fiction editor who hates the field and is incapable of understanding it rejects every promising writer and idea which is presented, preferring to deal with a tight circle of friends, who in return for the editor's contracting for debased material, offer kickbacks. The relative success of the line and the kickbacks enable the editor to amass a sufficient amount of money to become a publisher, where he continues his policies successfully until his house sets the standard for all science fiction. He is finally undone by his success: expansion means that he must hire staff editors, the editors merrily interpose themselves between the publisher and the writers and they conduct their business exactly as the publisher does, which is to say that they buy from friends and take kickbacks. Unfortunately, several of the manuscripts that slip through are of sufficient originality and technical facility to sell badly. The publisher loses his commanding edge in the market; by the time he fires his staff and seizes control, it is too late, his imprint has lost its reliability and predictability for the audience, and before he can sell to a conglomerate he goes bankrupt. His third wife takes their remaining assets and leaves him. He contracts boils.
