(It is the template which is the problem here. Make the product matter transmitters rather than novels and you might sell this. To a friend. For a consideration.)
—1980: New Jersey
Come Fool, Follify
The editor and I were talking about large science fiction conventions. Editors and writers, fans and mistresses who have hated one another, some of them for forty years, come by the thousands and dwell in the same space for three days. Old passions, old griefs; it must be understood that envy and recrimination in science fiction are higher per capita than anywhere except, possibly, the reform wing of the New York Democratic Party. "It doesn't mean anything, though," the editor said calmly, "if these people were really serious, they'd kill each other."
The capsulization of science fiction. In print and behind one another's backs we33 will revile, condemn, curse, and whisper scurrilities of the most urgent sort: face to face we are mild and reasonable individuals. Old enemies buy one another fresh drinks; new lovers and old whisper confidences in the corners. Publishers of venomous fanzines will ask writers for autographs. As the editor said, if we were serious, we would almost certainly kill but the key to science fiction—perhaps for all I know the key to the Ultimate Mystery—is that it is not a serious field at all. In its gnarled little heart it is, in fact, frivolous.
The nature of the form counsels frivolity. Consider the reader's slack-jawed wonder: faster-than-light travel, haunting sea beasts on the Jovian plain, mutiny on the Antares bypass, alternate and mysterious worlds in which dragons can fly and understand Elizabethan English . . . and then it is time for dinner, the chemistry assignment or the subway transfer. Escape reading, you know. If the reader were to really deal with this material on the level apparently offered, he would be quite unable to make the changes: how can one carry on even the gestures of one's life if one is rocketing over Jupiter astride a sea beast? One reads science fiction—even at the age of eight one had better read it this way—in contract; just kidding you know. Not to be taken straight. The same failsafe factor seems to operate within the science fiction reader34 as within the American consumer; no one really believes all those ads, you know. One could go quite insane if one accepted the vision of America squeezed through the interstices of automobile, deodorant, or cosmetic commercials. Everyone over the age of two (might it be one?) in the United States knows that ads are . . . well, just ads. As science fiction is just science fiction.
Simil, the writer. Four cents a word, maybe five, portions and outlines, magazine rates, editors, special intergalactic issues, put an 8 1/2 X 11 in the machine and let it go. Whoops! and a flight to Mars. Whee! and an invasion of the capitol by the hired assassins of Merm. Whap! and a parallel universe in which time runs contrawise rather than causally. And how much of this can I get done before dinner, and is New Dimensions paying on acceptance these days? The first fine exhilaration of youth becomes, with any kind of persistence at all, the routine of middle age; if it did not, if one began to dwell in these universes, take the Merm seriously, incur a deep sense of obligation to imbue the imagined circumstance with the consequence that one knows in the real—35
The effects of writing science fiction in quantity and over a period of time have been amply discussed, the carryover is not insignificant and the damages are evident. One does, as a science fiction writer, tend to hate a little more richly, cleave a little more tightly, recriminate somewhat more sensationally . . . but only up to a point and quickly beyond that lassitude sets in. It is one thing to despise the old colleague who stole your plot idea from a forgotten Ace Double and got it into hardcover; it is another thing to plot against the wretched editor who bought that book and rejected your own while also making love to your ex-mistress and blackening your name around town; it is another to come up against the swine in the hotel bar36 and deal with the situation. A handclasp will suffice and a word of cheer; after all, the son of a bitch may be back in the market someday. Your old colleague who is somewhere upstairs drunkenly fornicating with your ex-wife has been doing this kind of thing since 1953 and you are only one of his victims—he's done more to others, and besides if you recall, you did the same thing to him when you swiped that Worlds of If short story idea, a really lovely pivot for your own 1964 Pyramid novel. Who knows what he might be saying about you? Besides, the old bastard is consultant now for a medium-sized paperback firm and your agent has some portions and outlines on offer; he might even buy them. Then again, he might not. It depends upon who is on his good side in the next month or so and this convention is certainly no time to throw down the gauntlet. Is it? Let's be reasonable now. Besides, a scene would only make the future more difficult; there's no end to this, you see, for a lifetime he and you and the editor (at least until the editor is fired) are going to be showing up at these things and a Philadelphia riot would only lead to a coda in Boston, a recapitulation in St. Louis, a scherzo and variations in London two years from now.
Better to take your losses and live with them. You do—one does, after all—have to deal with these people for the duration; they have been around. All of you have been around since 1953; why should anything change now? Or next week? You take your losses, you stick the editor with the bill, you look for a new mistress or a now unembittered older one. You go through the weekend and you go home, wherever that may be. If you were serious, yes, you might kill the bastards but then again, if they were serious, they would kill you, right? Every loss a gain; every action a reaction, the great mid-century vision of the middle class and science fiction is nothing—anyone who ponders this for five minutes will see it clearly—if it is not a middle-class phenomenon.
—1980: New Jersey
The Engines of the Night
Science fiction is the only branch of literature whose poorer examples are almost invariably used by critics outside the form to attack all of it. A lousy western is a lousy western, a seriously intentioned novel that falls apart is a disaster . . . but a science fiction novel that fails illuminates the inadequacy of the genre, the hollowness of the fantastic vision, the banality of the sci-fi writer . . . this phenomenon is as old as the American genre itself (in fact for the first quarter century post-Gernsback, outside media would not even review science fiction), and as fresh as the latest rotten book.
Not so long ago, a weak and overextended bildungsroman by a newer writer was attacked spitefully in a publication called The Soho Weekly News; Jonathan Rosenbaum used the first two-thirds of the review to vilify and the rest to conclude that sci-fi writers could not deal with contemporary reality because they apotheosized machinery over mortality, stripped humanity in their fiction of dignity and drained it of the capacity to feel. In so saying, Rosenbaum was not only indicating complete ignorance of most of the serious work done in science fiction since the early 1950s but was patently using a novel by a young writer of indifferent reputation (and no particular standing within the field) to vilify the genre.
The unhappy case is typical. Kingsley Amis wrote a quatrain about it once upon a time. In a 1972 book of literary essays, Rediscoveries, devoted to the favorite lost novels of writers of reputation, Walker Percy, in cautiously praising Walter Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz (a novel which has never been "lost" to science fiction but which has been continuously in print since its first appearance in 1959), took the most elaborate pains to point out that although the novel had the trappings of "pop sci-fi" it had a more serious undercurrent, that elements of mysticism and religious ambivalence verging on apostasy (subjects close to Percy's own artistic sensibility) were handled in a fashion more complex than was usually the case in science fiction . . . and that the novel might actually reward study by serious readers who would otherwise find science fiction of little interest. It was almost as if Percy had to balance off his enthrallment with Canticle against a real fear that unrestricted praise, read in the wrong quarters, could threaten his credentials as a "serious" writer. Never has so trembling a testimony been given a novel. (Reminiscent of the eulogy hesitantly offered for the Meanest Man in Town, "well," the minister said after a long, awkward pause, "he never missed a spittoon.") And in a review of my own Guernica Night some years back Joyce Carol Gates took pains to make clear that the novel's concerns were, um, spiritual and metaphysical and that its virtues came from it being unlike the science fiction to which she was accustomed.
Science fiction, as I say, stands alone in literature as being forced to judgment by its weaker examples, denied in praise of its best. Outside of literature there are other examples: the question of racial prejudice, for instance, parallels the member of the minority must "be a good example of his race" and in so doing exhibits virtues which make him "not really like the rest of them at all" and the bad example sets the standard—"they're all like that." Modern music is like this: infrequent performances of it by the major orchestras as part of the subscription program often lead to venomous critical attacks upon the entire specter of the dissonant or atonal (Pierre Boulez might have been pressed off the podium of the New York Philharmonic for programming so much of that crazy modern junk), and contemporary painters, sculptors, or avant-garde directors of stage or film know exactly what I mean. Every weak example of the form is there to be used to pillory all of it. "Modern music," "modern art," "modern dance" become as indistinguishable for the infuriated critic (and by implication his audience) as does, pity its shriveled heart, "science fiction."
Is it because the genre is dangerous and threatening, implies a statement and view of the world which is unbearable for the unaccustomed? Alice Sheldon (James Tiptree, Jr.) theorizes so in an essay—afterword to her story "Her Smoke Rose Up Forever" some years ago; postwar science fiction raised the possibility that our fate was uncontrollable and the machines were going to blow us out of existence, and the middle class as represented by the critics fled this insight, Oh please, oh please tell us that it is our swimming pools and martinis and mistresses and angst which make us so unhappy, not radioactive dust or the mad engines. After one brief, terrified look at genre science fiction in the early postwar period, the middle class flung it into furthest darkness and dived into the swimming pools of O'Hara's or Cheever's suburbs, the forests of Truman Capote or Eudora Welty's night: they wanted no part of the possibility that technology had appropriated the sense or the control within their lives. But still within is that fear of the nihilistic aspect of science fiction to which they were briefly exposed, a nihilism—which like that of modern art, modern music, street theater or mime—suggests that none of the devices of preventative maintenance (adultery, alcohol, industry, prayer) really matter much at all.
Which means that our worst examples (or even our mediocrities) will be used over and again as a club to beat away the form; that our best will be ignored and that all of it will be denied.
Ah but still. Still, oh still. Still Kazin, Broyard, Epstein, Podhoretz, and Howe: grinding away slowly in the center of all purpose, taking us to the millennium: the engines of the night.
—1980: New Jersey
Con Sordino
I don't know if science fiction was ever the literature of revelation and deliverance they promised us (that is another essay in another time), but the cutting edge of the eighties is action-packed as they say and without a detectable position. Lords and Snow Queens voyage in pursuit of the lost castle, while on the other side of the planet sexes and social roles are surgically implanted; the hotline keeps communications with the universe at a low-key level while the voyagers can stop in Callahan's franchises along the way, swap a few drinks and lies; out there on the further world snake charmers practice a romantic kind of medicine and so on. It is a distance from the drowned landscapes and bombed-out craters of the late sixties, the gleaming machines and obliterated souls; even the Asimovian protagonists of a decade ago had nervous tics and a sullen intimation that matters, despite technological access, were not working terribly well, but the Snow Queen and Valentine have no such problem. Matters still work, sexes can be traded in like wardrobes and time and again the Magic Snake, rising, enacts its will. "The cutting edge of the future is reasonable, not despairing," I wrote about a year ago, but that does not quite make the case either. "The cutting edge of the future is the non-voting electorate," might have been a little better or like one of those voters swooped upon outside the polls who, even for the sake of television, will make no statement whatsoever. "Secret ballot, chief," these voters say, pushing the equipment aside, "none of your goddamned business. Leave me alone."
Not necessarily without merit. Two decades of opinion have, after all, led us to the edge of the pit where, blinking, we decided we did not like the contents very much at all; it may indeed be time, as a certain uncommunicative voter told us a while ago, to lower our voices a little. All of us. In the forties, the cutting edge of science fiction indicated that either technology would take over the world or do it in; the fifties had the same opinion of the technicians, the sixties did not, for the most part, want to have much to do with technology altogether37 and the seventies reacted to the quarreling voice of history by declaring a pox on all of them. Generalizations all, but consolidation is the key; the eighties of Lords and Queens, Hotlines and Snakes prefer to assume that the argument is settled, the landscape itself being evidence of how it was won, and to deal with the materiel itself. "He's published half a million words," someone I know said of a major figure of the late seventies, "and I don't know how he feels about a single thing; I don't know what his position is. This is not good writing or important writing."
I am not sure of this. J. D. Salinger, for instance, has published upward (barely) of half a million words and is a major figure still and might well take the same comment (we know how his characters feel but not he); one of the definitions of a certain kind of art might be that it is refractive or expressive, not demonstrative. The more interesting question—or at least the one that I would like to raise in this context—is as to how much the Unvoicing of the eighties might be ascribed to evolution (or devolution) of the genre itself; how much could be said to be imposed from without by sheer editorial or market forces.
Certainly forties science fiction can be seen as a reaction to or against the vision of a single man, John W. Campbell; in the fifties H. L. Gold, Fred Pohl, Anthony Boucher and a few others began to solicit stories and propound a science fiction of satire and of doom, and in the sixties Michael Moorcock and Harlan Ellison, by pressuring for and proclaiming a literature of catastrophe, got a great deal of it. Ponderous, detached social forces, the apparent inevitability of history, can be seen in another context as coming from the cynical, short-term decisions of a small, powerful cabal; this is what Emma Rothschild wrote (of the auto industry, suburban sprawl, and the death of the cities) in Paradise Lost. Science fiction is an insular field; there has never been a point in its history in America where one powerfully placed editor could not, within a short time and for the short term, wreak change simply through using his power to buy one kind of story and reject another. The group of editors who have moved to the center of science fiction publishing in the period beginning in 1975 (science fiction is no longer a magazine field, a point which I trust does not have to be argued here) have imposed, collectively and individually, their vision upon science fiction, and the eighties cutting edge may be sheer reaction. Writers—more now than ever—must go where the market is or they go nowhere at all.
Who are these editors? Most of them (not all) have little reading background in science fiction prior to their assumption of their posts, none of them have ever written it. (The central editors of previous decades were all writers or people who had at least attempted to write in the field.) They have a scant background in the field and for many of them (again, not all) science fiction editing is a way station, an apprentice position on the way to editing something, anything, other than science fiction. Many regard the field if they regard it at all as a kind of minor league of American literature; the players may be trapped on the buses and in unhealed locker rooms, most of them, but the coaches and managers whose future is not as closely linked to their skills can hope to move on. One way to move on is to win the pennant of course but that is risky and often impossible on a low team budget; a more assured way is not to make trouble.
Not to make trouble. Conglomeratization, the fact that these editors work for minor implements of publishing companies which are in themselves merely minor, if highly visible, parts of the conglomerates is a point that has been made often and by others than myself; the Conglomeratization of publishing has had and will probably continue to have a numbing effect upon most work that does not fit neatly into the balance sheet, "literary" work, that is to say, or work of political or social controversy. But it is less a question here of censorship than of self-censorship; given only a marginal understanding of science fiction and only a superficial grasp of its history (to most contemporary science fiction editors "modern" science fiction began with Harlan Ellison, and they have only the most superficial acquaintance with the work of the forties, fifties, and even nineteen-sixties), these editors tend to publish what looks like science fiction and their view is necessarily parochial and, granted the nature of Conglomeratization, not without fear. "Most science fiction editors seem mostly to seek the assurance that they are doing nothing wrong," Samuel R. Delany writes in The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction, "and since I cannot grant them this assurance I stay away from most of them."
The nature of professionalism is adaptation and there is no gainsaying that a clever and talented writer can produce work of consequence even under the greatest of strictures. (One need only to reflect for a moment upon the career of Gogol or Günter Grass.) Still it is all very wearying and energy that might be expended in other directions is simply to be applied more lucratively in the detail work; Castles and Queens and Hotlines can be depicted lovingly; snakes (outside of the Book of Genesis) are not political. One must go where the market is; in previous decades it was possible for a certain kind of science fiction writer to create a market but science fiction was then something of an outlaw. Now it is a minor subdivision of Pillage & Homogenize, Inc., presided over in almost all cases by the same group of people.
One could find all of this reasonably discouraging and perhaps I do but Queens and Castles are reaching an audience much larger than all of the work of the previous thirty years in toto and audiences are not contemptible to any of us; never were. That all of the Queens and Castles reek of fantasy, that the lines between science fiction and fantasy are being rapidly obliterated and that the cutting edge is moving away from science fiction as it evolved for half a century is more distressing, but that is the topic for another screed in a different time; it is the fibrillating heart of science fiction itself to which I would like to administer CPR had I but the wit, the cunning, and the cool refusal to panic.
—1981: New Jersey
Corridors
Ruthven used to have plans. Big plans: turn the category around, arrest the decline of science fiction into stereotype and cant, open up the category to new vistas and so on. So forth. Now, however, he is at fifty-four merely trying to hold on; he takes this retraction of ambition, understanding of his condition as the only significant change in his inner life over two decades. The rest of it—inner and outer too—has been replication, disaster, pain, recrimination, self-pity, and the like: Ruthven thinks of these old partners of the law firm of his life as brothers. At least, thanks to Replication & Disaster, he has a brief for the game. He knows what he is and what has to be done, and most of the time he can sleep through the night, unlike that period during his forties when 4 A.M. more often than not would see him awake and drinking whiskey, staring at his out-of-print editions in many languages.
The series has helped. Ruthven has at last achieved a modicum of fame in science fiction and for the first time—he would not have believed this ever possible—some financial security. Based originally upon a short novel written for Astounding in late 1963, which he padded for quick paperback the next year, The Sorcerer has proven the capstone of his career. Five or six novels written subsequently at low advances for the same firm went nowhere but: the editor was fired, the firm collapsed, releasing all rights, the editor got divorced, married a subsidiary rights director, got a consultant job with her firm, divorced her, went to a major paperback house as science fiction chief and through a continuing series of coincidences known to those who (unlike Ruthven) always seemed to come out a little ahead commissioned three new Sorcerers from Ruthven on fast deadline to build up cachet with the salesmen. They all had hung out at the Hydra Club together, anyway. Contracts were signed, the first of the three new Sorcerers (written, all of them in ten weeks) sold 150,000 copies, the second was picked up as an alternate by a demented Literary Guild, and the third was leased to hardcover. Ruthven's new, high-priced agent negotiated a contract for five more Sorcerers for $100,000.
Within the recent half decade, Ruthven has at last made money from science fiction. One of the novels was a Hugo finalist, another was filmed. He has been twice final balloted for a Gandalf. Some of his older novels have been reprinted. Ruthven is now one of the ten most successful science fiction writers: he paid taxes on $79,000 last year. In his first two decades in this field, writing frantically and passing through a succession of dead-end jobs, Ruthven did not make $79,000.
It would be easier for him, he thinks, if he could take his success seriously or at least obtain some peace, but of this he has none. Part of it has to do with his recent insight that he is merely hanging on, that the ultimate outcome of ultimate struggle for any writer in America not hopelessly self-deluded is to hang on; another part has to do with what Ruthven likes to think of as the accumulated damages and injuries sustained by the writing of seventy-three novels. Like a fighter long gone from the ring, the forgotten left hooks taken under the lights in all of the quick-money bouts have caught up with him and stunned his brain. Ruthven hears the music of combat as he never did when it was going on. He has lost the contents of most of these books and even some of their titles but the pain lingers. This is self-dramatization, of course, and Ruthven has enough ironic distance to know it. No writer was ever killed by a book.
Nonetheless, he hears the music, feels the dull knives in his kidneys and occipital regions at night; Ruthven also knows that he has done nothing of worth in a long time. The Sorcerer is a fraud; he is far below the aspirations and intent of his earlier work, no matter how flawed that was. Most of these new books have been written reflexively under the purposeful influence of scotch and none of them possesses real quality. Even literacy. He has never been interested in these books. Ruthven is too far beyond self-delusion to think that the decline of his artistic gifts, the collapse of his promise, means anything either. Nothing means anything except holding on as he now knows. Nonetheless, he used to feel that the quality of work made some difference. Didn't he? Like the old damages of the forgotten books he feels the pain at odd hours.
He is not disgraced, of this he is fairly sure, but he is disappointed. If he had known that it would end this way, perhaps he would not have expended quite so much on those earlier books. The Sorcerer might have had a little more energy; at least he could have put some color in the backgrounds.
Ruthven is married to Sandra, his first and only wife. The marriage has lasted through thirty-one years and two daughters, one divorced, one divorced and remarried, both far from his home in the Southeast. At times Ruthven considers his marriage with astonishment: he does not quite know how he has been able to stay married so long granted the damages of his career, the distractions, the deadening, the slow and terrible resentment which has built within him over almost three decades of commercial writing. At other times, however, he feels that his marriage is the only aspect of his life (aside from science fiction itself) which has a unifying consistency. And only death will end it.
He accepts that now. Ruthven is aware of the lives of all his colleagues: the divorces, multiple marriages, disastrous affairs, two- and three-timing, bed-hopping at conventions; the few continuing marriages seem to be cover or mausoleum . . . but after considering his few alternatives Ruthven has nonetheless stayed married and the more active outrage of the earlier decades has receded. It all comes back to his insight: nothing matters. Hang on. If nothing makes any difference, then it is easier to stay with Sandra by far. Also, she has a position of her own; it cannot have been marriage to a science fiction writer which enticed her when they met so long ago. She has taken that and its outcome with moderate good cheer and has given him less trouble, he supposes, than she might. He has not shoved the adulteries and recrimination in her face but surely she knows of them; she is not stupid. And she is now married to $79,000 a year, which is not inconsiderable. At least this is all Ruthven's way of rationalizing the fact that he has had (he knows now) so much less from this marriage than he might have, the fact that being a writer has done irreparable damage to both of them. And the children. He dwells on this less than previously. His marriage, Ruthven thinks, is like science fiction writing itself: if there was a time to get out, that time is past and now he would be worse off anywhere else. Who would read him? Where would he sell? What else could he do?
Unlike many of his colleagues, Ruthven had never had ambitions outside the field. Most of them had had literary pretensions, at least had wanted to reach wider audiences, but Ruthven had never wanted anything else. To reproduce, first for his own pleasure and then for money, the stories of the forties Astounding which moved him seemed to be a sensible ambition. Later of course he did get serious about the category, wanting to make it anew and etc. . . . but that was later. Much later. It seemed a noble thing in the fifties to want to be a science fiction writer and his career has given him all that he could have hoped for at fourteen. Or twenty-four.
He has seen what their larger hopes have done to so many of his peers who started out with him in the fifties, men of large gifts who in many cases had been blocked in every way in their attempts to leave science fiction, some becoming quite embittered, even dying for grief or spite, others accepting their condition at last only at the cost of self-hatred. Ruthven knows their despair, their self-loathing. The effects of his own seventy-three novels have set in, and of course there was a time when he took science fiction almost as seriously as the most serious . . . but that was later, he keeps on reminding himself, after breaking in, after publication in the better magazines, after dealing with the audience directly and learning (as he should have always known) that they were mostly a bunch of kids. His problems had come later but his colleagues, so many of them, had been ambitious from the start, which made matters more difficult for them.
