I want to make it clear on December 6, 1975: I love this field. My debt to it is incalculable. What has happened to writers like myself, Silverberg, Ballard, Disch, is not the fault of the category itself (which allowed us to go as far as we wanted artistically for a while) or necessarily even the audience. The fault, as in most other aspects of America, is in what has happened to squeeze diversity from our culture in the last five years. I was either twenty years too late or twenty years too early for this kind of work: even so—didn't I?—I got the work done.
And some of it, dammit, will live.
Part Two Breakfast in the Ruins: Science Fiction in the Last Millenium
Part I: Meditations
Introduction to Part One: Meditations
In the twenty-five years since the delivery of Engines of the Night there was a fair amount of commentary scattered through the markets. Columns for Pulphouse Magazine in the 1990s, two essays for Amazing Stories, an essay on Freud & Fantasy for the Baltimore Jewish Times of all places, an essay on J.G. Ballard probably comprise the best of this work. In the essays on Freud and Ballard, in the Pulphouse essay on PITFCS (the last of my columns for this market) the writer can clearly be seen writing over his head; many of the essays in Engines had more clarity but those late 1980s and 1990s essays came closer than anything I ever wrote to approximating in their completion what I had hoped at inception . . . I was writing to 90% of my intention there, an unusual state for any of us. (There are a few short stories in the 1990s of which I would say the same.)
In 1992 I had, with the exception of a few introductions and a couple book review columns, done no critical writing since publication by Doubleday of Engines of the Night in 1982. it was my feeling that that epiphanic work derived much if not all of its power from a contract implicit at the heart of darkness: there would be no Sons of the Engines of the Night. The book was terminal in its vision and statement; it was the finality infusing those essays which gave the work credibility, I felt, and I resisted for many years both vagrant requests and my own compulsions to attempt new critical work. "Once a philosopher, twice a pervert," said Mallarme, as quoted by Norman Mailer in Advertisements for Myself. (I know almost nothing of the decadent Mallarme, a contemporary and countryman of Claude Debussy; he was the author of the poem upon which Debussy's famous Afternoon of a Faun was based and I somehow connect him to the libretto of Pelleas and Melisande but in the tradition of science fiction writers from the dear old field's inception, I am reluctant to take the tottering steps to the bookcase or record shelf and verify this) and that seemed a reasonable position. In the decade intervening I did not abandon fiction, even at the bottom of inspiration, and there were for or five short stories a year and through this bleak time I did in fact accumulate perhaps fifty or sixty short stories and the 1985 novel The Remaking of Sigmund Freud.
I abandoned critical essays and reviewing not because I felt I had nothing to say—I had plenty to say, at least to myself, and there is absolutely no silencing that raving, chattering internal voice, that thread of consciousness and disputation which rambles on and on and turns some writers into alcoholics and almost all of them into obsessives of one sort or the other—but because I felt that I had said enough and the integrity of Engines of the Night seemed to hinge upon reasonable silence. I changed my mind after all that time, but only tentatively and cautiously; a lot has happened in the '80s and there were many things to say but it was possible that this was no longer my métier or that I had, all unbeknownst to myself, lost contemporaneity and was no longer riding the high curve. I decided that the editor would, if that were the case, make his reaction known and so would that fraction of the readership which followed this stuff; in the interim, and with even more humility than that which I cited in the introduction to Engines, I was going to find out if I had anything still useful to say and, conversely, if the field was still addressing my own concerns. My Pulphouse essays were a careful, troubled exercise, then. If writing science fiction for publication for a quarter of a century will not induce humility, nothing will.
(Well, this is not quite so. My problem with hyperbole persists. I can think of several activities which might similarly induce a great deal of humility. Playing second violin in a bad community orchestra, for instance. If Heinlein had played bad second violin, he, I once wrote to Kirk Polking, he would have been incapable of his last five novels. Being a non-fraternity student at the Syracuse University of the 1950s while carrying around a large and formless, an inexpressible and a gigantic pained lust for the maedchen of Sigma Delta Tau or Iota Alpha Pi sororities will induce humility. Being a liberal Democrat in the nineties will induce humility. Going into a barbershop anywhere and asking for a haircut and a trim will induce more than that; Jason would have tossed the Golden Fleece before undergoing such an experience. We will try not to blame all of our failings on science fiction or vice-versa.)
If, after the collapse of Pulphouse in 1993 I had found another regular platform there might have been a few more at this level but no regrets; these essays said what I wanted and on the matter of science fiction at least, there is very little to be said beyond that essay on PITFCS.
Science fiction like Marx' conception of history: that dream from which we cannot awaken. Well, Marx defined history as nightmare. I wouldn't be that melodramatic.
On Engines Again
This exchange outside the student/faculty cafeteria at the University of Kansas, Lawrence, 7/22/89:
Bruce Sterling: Fifty years old and still writing! That would be horrible! When I'm fifty I hope I won't be still writing and involved in all this shit. I'd rather be dead than that pathetic.
Barry N. Malzberg: Oh, come on, Bruce. I'm fifty years old, well, I'll be fifty on Monday and I'm still writing or at least trying to write and I'm not pathetic.
Bruce Sterling: Oh, Barry, you're pathetic all right. You just haven't accepted it yet.
Postscript: 6/22/92: Well, we'll see, Bruce. We'll keep an eye on the situation. The obvious Yogi Berraism—It's not over until it's over—is not the one I'd bring out, though.
It sure do get late early around here, doesn't it?
* * *
Thomas M. Disch (b. Groundhog Day, 1940) didn't like Engines of the Night (Doubleday, 1982) at all, and his review of the book in the 3/82 issue of Twilight Zone, powerfully unpleasant and contemptuous, made me feel like Dempsey must have when Luis Firpo, the Wild Bull of the Pampas, lurched across the ring and knocked him down with the first punch, then went on within a span of less than two minutes, to knock the champ, the Manassa Mauler hisself, clear out of the ring. Where did this come from? What's going on here? I sure wasn't set for that. A year and a half later, at Omni's fifth anniversary party, Disch—whose Camp Concentration, Asian Shore and 334, I note for the record, I revere; surely Camp Concentration is the best novel to come out of genre science fiction in the 1960s—took the time and trouble to explain his problems with the book of essays. "You look for defeat, you look for disaster," he said, "You come to the subject of science fiction with a burden of despair and cynicism and then you scout around for confirming examples, load the evidence so that you can make the same point over and again. First the verdict, then the trial. It's a harrowing, self-destructive exercise, a closed loop, and it's as repetitious as hell, utterly reductive."
I suppose so. I suppose I regarded science fiction reductively, noted examples of what I took to be its small or larger damages or disasters, often confused the issues of transcendence and banality, got hung up on process and found the space angels, the true quill, the echoes of transubstantiation harder and harder to find. But it was for me, as I came to think I understood our genre in the late seventies, the stink of defeat, of penury, isolation, alienation and hopelessness which seemed to cling to the lives of most science fiction writers and their outcome. One could of course cite the middle-class, clean-living exceptions, the sensible citizens who had managed to make some kind of career writing for the field full or part-time with lives no more disastrous or disgusting than those of insurance agents or middle level civil servants, but these people seemed atypical. Surveying the lives of most of the science fiction crowd throughout the arc of the field up until about 1977 (when I was busily or not so busily framing my world view) one could intimate the swamp of those lives: the furnished rooms, stick furniture, shattered marriages, abandoned children, brutalized relationships, all of it brought to greater intensity by the grandiosity of the writings and the convention circuit—the rotating mind- and body-fuck which seemed to be the paradigm of so many of these lives and connections, most of it grubby, all of it inimical to that very issue of transcendence which was supposed to have brought people into the room to begin.
Disch attacked me in the review as well for failing to name anyone in the negative. Talking in vast, gasping generalities about the swamp and the pity of it all, I would save specificities for praise, he complained, single out no one for anything other than approbation, condemn the regrettable and disastrous to synoptic generalization. Not a bad point, but what would have been the use? I might have felt that X's work was contemptible, that Y, a wretched charlatan, had been working on reputation and adulterous lurches for years, that Z was perhaps certifiably insane and certainly out of control in debased work (and ever more successful because the comic books of that sprawl ignited lust in the hearts of fans). I might have felt strongly about the fraudulence of A's career, the sexual connivance and manipulativeness of B who would risk all, it was said, for the sake of love, but would never take a check; I might have had plenty to say about D who had started out promisingly but had turned into a writer of dreadful series books, twenty or thirty of them indistinguishable and refractory of a self-contempt as embracing as it was intimidating. But to what end? What would it have gotten me? It seemed that if the essential point was made, albeit through generalizations, that specifics could only appear to be a kind of brutal score-settling and besides no one, least of all your tremulous correspondent at the age of forty and facing the apparent end of his career, wants or needs to be hated. So I let it go, brought out names only for positive citation, assaulted the anonymous or the agglomerate with the sins of science fiction, with the damages of a weird and eviscerated promise. I did not particularly spare myself but that of course does not count. (As Dr. Johnson noted that words spoken in eulogy or in the throes of love should never make a man accountable.) Faced for the second time with the issue, with the choices, perhaps I would not have done the book at all or then again perhaps I would have gone what we used to call in Watson Dormitory in Syracuse University in 1957 (what a splendid undergraduate career!) "All the Way." Who, ultimately, is to say?
But the perception—names cited or otherwise—seemed reasonable, this had been from the start a disreputable kind of writing perpetrated by people, many of whom felt themselves already on the borders of the literary if not the socioeconomic mean and who were then pushed ever further by the nature of the literature and by the social structure which, because of the ineffable, essentially undefinable nature of the genre (again, I refer to the third essay in this series), came between them and what, perhaps, they had wanted to do.
* * *
This intimation, that science fiction if not fantasy (which was a different genre eventually welded to science fiction by the exigencies of the market beginning in the mid-sixties and rendering the writers and the work interchangeable in the mass-market outlets and in the social interstices of the community) was founded upon penury, isolation, damage and failure was not purged by Engines of the Night but remained, even as I tried to make some adjustments or accommodations which would enable me to recognize this yet not discredit the best work which had been done and was continually being done if only occasionally, and my own attempts to contribute the best of which I was capable. The splice, eventually, seemed impossible, the grandiosity, even megalomania of science fiction and the personal disasters of most of its practitioners would yield to no systems theory. "My problems are irresolute, there is no peace," the protagonist of some novel I had read in the early sixties (and have now forgotten, this was the one about the guy who had decided he would give himself a year to experience life and if he felt no better at the end would kill himself, he went off to Europe and had lots of sex which in the early sixties certainly seemed the solution to anything for a lot of us, and as I recall did not kill himself but became a happily humping expatriate) and this became my mantra, recited here and there in the anterooms of science fiction conventions or commuting in an otherwise empty Chevrolet on the West Side highway. "It doesn't matter, it doesn't matter," I mumbled like Ruthven, "everything is irresolute, there is no solution." If it did not work, it didn't exactly fail to work either, it was a means of getting from there to here. The Michael Ashley/Marshal Tym History of the Science Fiction Magazines (Greenwood Press, Connecticut, 1985) was further input to the mantra.
This remarkable work—Silverberg said it was the finest piece of scholarship ever to have been done on the field and I agreed with him from the outset—contains essays on every science fiction magazine and original anthology series in the English language since the inception of the form; it also takes in (although not as inclusively) foreign-language publications and the semi-professional press. Long essays on the magazines, even the one- or four-issue productions like the original Cosmos or Vanguard are completed by detailed bibliographical data and what emerges from this astonishing book, as valuable now as it was then because it offers the impression of closure which scholarship of quality always must, is how much the history of our little genre is a history of failure, it is failure which has humped us from here to now and into the future . . . most of those magazines the detritus of little publishers with small ideas and negligible budgets, even the more substantial magazines victimized by the exigencies of distribution and a shallow audience and forced to pull back, change their names, change from monthly to bimonthly to quarterlies, shift editors, shift format, go toward flying saucers or to a sexed-up format. Astounding/Analog was, after Street & Smith started it anew after Clayton, always backed by substantial publishers (and to this day) and Fantasy & Science Fiction was conservatively but carefully funded but of the other magazines there was nothing comparable . . . most of them staggered along, paid what they could, strung along the contributors when they couldn't and all of them—except for Analog, Fantasy & Science Fiction and Asimov's on whom the books remained open in 1985, eight years after inception—died. (Amazing did not to this day die but endured decades of spasms and throes and was on the borders of extinction almost continuously since the early 1950s.) Galaxy's Cheyne-Stokes lasted a full horrible decade after the acquisition by UPD, Vanguard went in a glimmering, Rocket and Space Stories hung on for four issues or six or eight but all of these magazines were essentially going South from the time they were born and they gasped or scuttled their way from the marginal to the failure with only occasional glimpses of light. Meanwhile, exceptional work was being done. Even the soundly based magazines, and there were at any given time through all the decades only three or four of them, had to exist in a gray abscess of whimsical distribution and the endured and hoped-for patience of the publishers and what was being published, remarkable as some of it was, became only a means of moving from one failure, crisis or circulatory threat to the next; there were odd remissions now and then and periods of optimism but always Vertex and Venture and Vanguard and Cosmos (in both versions from two publishers a quarter of a century apart) and Gamma and Imagination and Planet Stories staggered along, paying at the most four cents a word and surviving on the same indulgence and whim which soon enough or later were going to do them in. Science fiction was a magazine field all the way through the late sixties, it was the magazines which originated most of the important material and almost all of the writers and were the paradigm of the genre, and the magazines were marginal at best, desperate at the worst. The narrow market, the penury, the instability and uncertainty of the enterprise must have refracted powerfully into the penurious, unstable and uncertain lives of the writers; if this did not create those lives, it certainly shaped them and most of the time not for the better. Like Judaism or sex (it would take a Maimonides to offer the thesis that they were interchangeable and to then prove it; come to think of it Mark Chagall and Sigmund Freud have already tested the validity of that insight) science fiction becomes the accumulation of all forces within and without which come to bear upon its practitioners.
This being the case, then, and in conclusion, Disch: does God dictate which Jew may or may not be part of the minyan?
Does a gentleman give names and details?
You'll be 50 in 2003, Bruce. We'll discuss matters then.
Atomic Power
Years ago—between the time I delivered Engines of the Night and wrote seven "From the Heart's Basement" columns for Pulphouse—my mind was full of odd and original ideas; throbbed and pulsated like one of A. E. van Vogt's Weapon Makers, with paradox and possibility. Science fiction as the middle class revenge on working class fascism, science fiction not as sexual sublimation but as sexual archetype, science fiction as profoundly anti-technological at its heart, Horace Gold as a figurehead for anti-Freudians trying to prove the Master's obsessions ridiculous, and so on. Some of those ideas I attempted to develop, others I repressed, some were the focus of obsession, some (like shattering the divisions amongst all genres everywhere) caused me to pulse, however occasionally, with Zionist zeal.
Ideas, like little animals, clawed at me, ideas like termites in the mind's decaying mansion scuttled away. I had, perhaps, forgotten Jack Woodford's important dictum, which I paraphrase: "Early in his career, the new writer is seized by odd and interesting ideas which he has never seen in print and which he therefore thinks will find a ready and eager market. Unfortunately, the newcomer has not yet understood that these ideas are not absent from print because they are original. They are absent because they are taboo." Also, I confused the public interest in the convolutions of obsession with my own, not a rare error among Sacristans, censors, or the B'nai Brith's Anti-Defamation League but a dangerous one for me.
Fortunately enough, Engines of the Night fell out of print in both of its editions, Pulphouse decided that death probably was, as Jesus said, laden with more possibilities than life and I embraced the medical and emotional distractions of middle-age ever more fervently. My mind, once so occupied by so much, seemed to be reduced to the binary—yes/no, in/out, up/down, life/death, cough/release, done/undone—and contracted, when it considered issues of speculation at all, to one idea which was perhaps the frozen, miniaturized summation of them all: the field of speculative fiction as wholly atomized. No more center, no common language, no shared history or lexicon. Once, single-track convention programming and paperback publishing programs of four titles a month had created a concentration of dialogue, reference, and understanding; now Star Trek and Star Wars and the Internet, costume fandom and masquerade fandom and weapons fandom have all become symptomatology of a field which has been blown apart. No real backlist, no accessibility of shared history, no interest in fact in that history. Clifford D. Simak out of print, Theodore Sturgeon (almost entirely) out of print, Frank Belknap Long, van Vogt, Winston K. Marks, Wyman Guin, Judith Merrill anthologies, almost all of it gone. Frontlist has become 80% fantasy and/or media-related science fiction. The raft of awards—Tiptree, Nebula, Hugo; Locus, Science Fiction Chronicle, Compton Crook; John W. Campbell, John W. Campbell Memorial, Theodore Sturgeon Memorial; British Science Fiction, Ditmar, Aurora; First Fandom Hall of Fame, Forrest J. Ackerman Big Heart, Homer—all signifying not so much judgment as confusion, a series of attempts to impose a new set of standards because the old standards failed to work for this group or that. Science fiction taught in universities, 750 science fiction conventions a year, Millennial Women, Callahan's Saloon, Isaac's World, Isaac's Robots, and an audience, 50% of whom could not name a short story or novel by John W. Campbell and might be pressed to say who the hell Campbell was. I realize that I am, perhaps, raving.
I also realize that the concept of atomization, of fragmentation, of utter separation from any kind of common history (assuming that there is a real common history as opposed to a series of jokes, references—Courtney's Boat, Degler's Tour, Fans are Slans, Room 770—which in the tradition of catch-phrases obliterate rather than encourage communication) is hardly confined to science fiction; everything is atomized: post-expansion baseball, the international trading markets, singles bars of all persuasions, film festivals. So much of this may be thinking which simulates thinking, the substitution of one definition or perception for another, the reinvestigation of the familiar through another lens. It's an old trick—"turn things upside down, let's look at wealth as poverty for instance," Galaxy editor Horace Gold said in 1953, trying to get any one of a bunch of writers to attempt what eventually became Frederik Pohl's poisonous classic story, "The Midas Plague" (April 1954, Galaxy)—and when applied mechanically leads only to the glib extinguishment of real consideration.
Still, think of The Truman Show. If the community and history of science fiction were not scattered through a thousand Tolkien retreads, a hundred and fifty Star Trek and X-Files knockoffs, would this cold and hermetic little film based upon a familiar and traditional science fiction idea (Robert Sheckley's Prize of Peril, Philip K. Dick's Time Out of Joint, Michaelmas by A. J. Budrys, Fred Pohl's "The Tunnel Under the World") have had its apparent impact? We are perhaps in a circumstance now where not only 98% of the audience for this film is unaware that it is science fiction, more than 90% of people claiming knowledge of the genre might not be aware of this either.
All right: let's imagine a circumstance in which The Truman Show is generally perceived as science fiction and is the subject of a large panel at the Bucconeer World SF Convention in Baltimore in August 1998. Here are Budrys, Pohl and Sheckley modestly accepting their Big Heart Forrest Ackerman Awards for prescience and contribution to derivative outcome. Better? Worse? All the same? In the heart's basement it is always the same, of course, but decor was supposed to count.
Or another of those odd and wonderful ideas of old times: perhaps poor old science fiction was created to engage the very process which took it apart.
Born to fall apart, born to run. Born to gleaming peril in the asepsis of this new and shining time.
Tripping with the Alchemist
As we began so must we end. As we die with the living, deep tip of the Hatlo Hat to Thomas Stearns Eliot and a wink to our own honorable Robert Silverberg, so we are born with the dead. (Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, by the way: April 1974 issue.) Let us see if we can manage that ever-interesting phenomenon.
