Dreaming, more dream than occurrence, only dream in fact like Kimball Kinnison and the Martian Odyssey, those long twilight afternoons in the late 1960s with Revolution on the office Muzak and the furious fee man doing heroin in the men's room, taking a break in mid-report to share supplies and anecdotes. Mailer and Gerald Green and Harry Kemelman prancing through the offices, Alfred Chester, not important enough to be permitted to see Scott, breaking past the receptionist in a run and scrambling into Scott's office where (when they were invited in ten minutes later) staff found the bald expatriate from Brooklyn and a sunny if very tense Scott Meredith giggling over glasses of wine.
The writer who felt G. P. Putnam had destroyed his work, calling Scott (not getting through, of course, so settling for me) to say, "Just want to tell you that I'm coming into the city with a gun to kill Walter Minton. You tell that bearded fuck he better watch out for me." The fee man who locked himself into a cubicle in the toilet, denuded himself and grimly masturbated several times a day, "because I can't stand reading this shit anymore and writing them as if they were sane. As if I were sane." As if he were sane.
Finally: in the funeral home on Long Island on Valentine's Day, 1993, I sat half an hour before the funeral in the chapel with the closed coffin. Scott's other book, George S. Kaufman and His Friends, had been published to moderate success in 1974; he had spent years on it (a semi-sequel, Louis B. Mayer and His Enemies, was contracted by Doubleday but never delivered), and it was the spirit of Kaufman which I felt in that room.
"Goddamn," I thought, echoing one of Kaufman's most famous lines, spoken about a bridge partner who had left for the men's room. "For the first time, I know exactly what the son of a bitch is doing." "I know what you're doing, finally," I said to the occupant of the box, but of course this was, properly speaking, not so. None of us ever know what the others, particularly the dead, are doing.
I had another thought looking at that box, a thought I had had looking at my Uncle Herbert on his deathbed and at a fetching sprite of a parakeet lying after long agony on the floor of her cage . . . I had never realized that they were so small. He was so much smaller in that box than I remembered, no longer subject but object, and as I looked at the impermeable service it was as if, receding, he had already gone. "He won't grow in memory, he will only diminish," I had thought in my times of fury at Scott, but now it was not anger but sadness which overtook.
Gone. All gone. Those months of swift atomization lay ahead but they already seemed in the bleak light to have occurred and it was not Scott nor his body nor his agency but only the.shriveled memory which I confronted. And soon that to be extinguished: the Queens Science Fiction League, First Fandom, the Futurians. The Great Globe Itself.
Gone. Gone as the Great Society, as Shawn's New Yorker, as the Algonquin Round Table and George S. Kaufman's Broadway. Gone as Tailgunner Joe and Joseph Welch and the hearings and Douglas MacArthur and all of the other faded old soldiers. Gone like Gernsback's Science Club and Tremaine's Thought Variants. Gone like Gnome and Shasta and FPCI.
And only I to tell the tale? Certainly not. But perhaps only I on this distant precipice at such great distance to make it worth the telling.
What say, folks? Light the pyre, hold it high, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of Kings. The long day has closed; the Captains and the Kings depart.
But the Word and those who, living, die through it remain.
—for Ben Cheever and Gordon Van Gelder
Some Reflections on Freud, Fantasy & the Jewish Condition
1. Freud had ideas, he was ceaselessly in pursuit of himself. Up and down the corridors of retrospection and memory did Freud stomp, beard flying to and fro, cigar ("sometimes it is merely a cigar") poised at the ready, a detective of motive, seeking the endless, unreeling self concealed behind this will and that to think of him, even at this great remove of time (he has been dead as long as I have been alive) is to be seized by respect for the man, to consider with awe yet again what he was able to do. Saddled with the arc of the century, given unhappy, grumbling, overheated Viennese with whom to deal, granted his own philology and constraint, Freud had to generalize from the most unpromising material yet there he is, towering over our century just yet and dead for a considerable part of it. How winning his smile, how dashing his tact, how moving his tears! His grief is our grief and abandoned by him, we must forage—as did Freud himself—for little nuggets of insights hidden behind the arras of identity. Oh, why did thou ask such questions, Freud, only to deny us and depart? These are the fundamental questions, our ontology recapitulates your philology, we are not to be put off by easy or even intricate excuses.
2. Chagall's flying cows, flying rabbis, arched and floating houses, scheming Jews, wounded cattle reminds us of the open and wounded places of ourselves, those places toward which Freud, Sherlock Holmes of the underground has stalked. Chagall's visions are mild, Freud's are pointed. Freud makes us assassins whereas Chagall knows that we merely want a meal, a minyan, a place to put our shoes, but they emerge from the same secret places where our desires and our dreams can be said to mingle. Like Dali, like Picasso, Chagall became very old and sinister in his age, in the possession of those cells which made him an icon but he never lurched into self-parody or repetition; Chagall was parody from the outset . . . representational of that which could barely be defined and a huge laugh for anyone in the shtetl who thought that God was watching or thought that God was not watching or took God as a wounded cow. Together and at rest now, Freud and Chagall conspire against us, the one with bleak and shrouded visions, the other with a merciless abstruseness that always, always fold back but in the morning it is Chagall's village, not Freud's caverns which claims us as we go off into the mild light, seeking a gentle and perceptive cow who will fill out the minyan of our desire.
3. Chagall's murals dominate the Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center; when the house opened in 1965 they were controversial, a scandal to some, large, slashed with color, naive, somehow reductive the analysts said, of the really intricate and always secular phenomena which were taking place in the house. But Chagall knew better: Berg's Lulu was on that stage and indeed it was Barber's Antony and Cleopatra which opened the Metropolitan: what matter if the Barber failed and Lulu, in its truncated state, needed the composer's widow to die so that the bitter, adulterous yearnings of its unknown third act could be revealed? Chagall's concern was never with repertoire, his grieving or elated peasants, his Cossacks twirling on the red points of silky shoes, his commissars and duchesses rushing into the central hall knew better than any of their witnesses how deeply symptomatic they were, not cause but outcome, not representation but at the center.
4. Freud and Chagall chatting about the role of fantasy in the Jewish psyche and literature, two old Jews walking together around a pond, enjoying the sunset in these last, smudged vestiges of their life before they move into their separate and ever so perfectly fitting purgatoria. "Time is a river without banks," Chagall points out, "it overflows, it catches us by surprise, it catches us with our pants down to the ankles doing unspeakable or merely embarrassing things in the chamber and it says, 'caught you out, boy, ho there!' Time is that medium in which, all fish, we swim; the aquaria itself is the universe, or don't you think that this is the case Sigmund?" Freud shrugs; he is not elfin or fey in the way that he takes Chagall to be but he is not devoid of humor himself. Largely he is confused, the century has gotten away from him, his disciples have gotten away from him, here he gave all these principles and devotions and what have they done with it? The rubble of the century is evidence of their misdirection, he thinks. "I don't really know, Marc," he says, "it's hard to understand; guilt, guilt is the medium in which we swim, though, this is what we think. And then fantasy is the means by which we try to extract ourselves from our guilt, even if we are not Jews which as a matter of fact most of us are. Jews are the paradigm of the century." Freud is an earnest man, in his school days he was the kind who always answered the questions first, reflected later if at all, tried to keep up with his studies, tried to present a solemn and devoted mask to his instructors. Asked to devolve upon fantasy and the Jewish psyche he means to stick to the subject, even if Chagall cannot. "It wasn't easy," Freud says. He points up at the sky which looks remarkably like a Chagall landscape, smokestacks in the high distance. "Do you see what I mean?"
Chagall looks up with him, looks away, skips along in a rapid hobble which meets but does not mesh with Freud's pace. "You take all of this too seriously," he says. "Think of it as a joke, as a burlesque, a giant hand reaching within and tearing things away, leaving us with the necessities which are the quotient of our existence. Quotidia? Either way, that is the only fashion to consider this; we make pictures and dance." Chagall gives Freud an idle kick in the calf, not enough to hurt him, antic resolve, really, but it is enough to infuriate Freud who has always felt that dignity was at the center of his persona and that without that dignity he would be what he most feared as a quotidian result: a defenseless Jew in an overcoat, a bearded Jew with a cigar, a clown in a shiny suit constructing parables to explain away his useless and towering pain. Freud, thus enraged, turns on Chagall to swat him, to beat him, to show this gamboling artist that his persona cannot be dealt with so cheaply, so egregiously but as he reaches toward Chagall it is as if he sees him for the first time, sees the features unfold to grant him the quivering, open heart of Marc Chagall, an artist so close to the spiritual needs of the average Jew that he can only mock them and Freud backs away then, quite flabbergast, his hand trembling. "Jewish fantasy and psychoanalysis and tradition and the Judaic promise, they are all the same," he says. "There are no differences, no barriers. The only barriers are those we erect." So saying, Freud begins to giggle, it is a relieved giggle yet one with tones of hysteria within and around it and as, with some detachment the head of the Freudian school considers himself, he begins to realize the truly ominous indications of his condition. Chagall fans himself, waves to something in the sky, beams upon Freud. They seem to have reached some kind of impasse. Or perhaps it is a breakthrough.
5. We think of Freud—"we" not being Chagall now, Chagall has gone home, he has gone away, he has gone to that place where Bracque and Picasso and lecherous little Modigliani play at banco and consider their prospects in the eternal, never-ending high stakes posterity game—at an earlier stage, Freud in the throes of his practice at the turn of the century, exposed to the hysterical anguish of superheated and lonely females. This one says she has been f- by her father, another claims to have suffered an uncle's hand upon her genitals when she was eight, a third, a fourth, a fifth report half-remembered tangled memories of illicit connections of all sorts. Thinking of Freud, considering his agony and his angst as he hears these confessions, we must feel some sympathy for him; it is not easy to face the fact that so many of these women have been misused, misused in childhood by trusted male relatives, have had their genitals and their most private thoughts violated. If this is true, and Freud's initial impulse is to accept the revelations, then humanity is unspeakable; if his mild, troubled Viennese are capable of such horrid indiscretion and calumny, then what will be said of the masses when, some three or four decades in the future, they really become inflamed?
Concerned with this, concerned with his own fantasies which for all we know might be composed of lecherous desire for these women (one thing that Freud has come to admit of his own school of therapy is that it is an interesting way to meet otherwise inaccessible women on the most riotous and glaring of terms), concerned with the proprieties of his situation and the century, Freud comes to a decision. This cannot be. The women cannot be telling the truth; their hysteria and superheated mode is indeed the product of agitation but the agitation comes not from sexual misuse or violation but from the desire for it. They must, his new patients, have inveigled this pattern of behavior to define impulses which otherwise would have been unacceptable. Accordingly, Freud recants. He recants upon his earlier testimony, his earlier apprehensions, writes his friend Fleiss a letter, several letters, pointing out the revisions in his thinking. "It is fantasy," Freud writes, "it is an aspect of their neurosis, it is a disease, a sickness." He feels great security in saying this. After all, it is a neurotic century, a century of fantasy. In the years to come, the most unspeakable desires and inner needs will be played out with smokestacks upon the canvas of the century. Like Chagall, the technicians will make the cows fly, the rivers overflow, but they will do it with machinery, with the gleaming arc of technology, not with the gentler works of pastels or oils against wood.
"It is a century of fantasy," Freud says quietly, turning to look for our assent in the small room devoted to his ponderings and writing. He has come in these recent years to imagine the presence of auditors in the room who bear witness and will comment to those outside about his condition and he considers this a dream so benign, so devoid of actual menace or dysfunctional aspect that he permits himself this dialogue without embarrassment. How pleased he would be to know that what he imagines is actually true and that we have come, decades and decades later, toward the end of the century, to consider him in exactly this way! "To understand is to forgive," Freud murmurs, "this is the core of my philosophy," and who is to say that he is wrong? Understanding nothing, knowing nothing, we have been poised for disaster for years and years, the rubble of our potential is all around us: surely we can find it within ourselves to pity Freud. Surely it was not his fault that he determined the women were engaged in fantasy; he had the advantage of firsthand interviews, contact, affect, in a way which we never will. Considering him in this way, permitting ourselves for the first time to unstop the gush of affection from our Jewish souls for our Jewish forebear, which of us is so stiff-necked as not to relent, as not to say, "You were innocent; you confronted the darkness with the innocence you had and then sprung it upon the world!" Which of us cannot say this? Not that there are so very many of us in the room, of course, there are only a very few permitted such perilous connection.
6. "I would like to add a few words about fantasy, Judaism, Freud and the human condition," Alban Berg says. He is the small man, the adulterous (in mind if not deed) composer who set the Wedekind plays to music, then died in 1935 at the age of 50, just in time to bring the Second Viennese school to a definitive, premature end. "In my opinion, my humble opinion," Berg says, making a point (as do all arrogant men) of his humility, "the three of them must be regarded as the same, as a synchronicity. It is a Jewish century, a Freudian century, a fantasy century. Consider Lulu, all of these factors take part in her single-minded arc toward the sewer and at the end she is done in by Jack the Ripper. I don't even want to talk about Wozzeck but any soldier who can drown in a pool with a foot of water is an unhappy, a disconcerting symbol, wouldn't you think?" The final act of Lulu, supposedly, contains musical anagrams and duedocacophonic statements of Berg's lust for a younger woman; the widow Berg, no musician but possibly with a keener eye than ear, suppressed the last act throughout her lifetime. None of this, however, seems to have much bearing upon Berg's demeanor which is grim. "I will tell you about fantasy," he says, "fantasy is as terrible if it is explored as if unexplored; once it exists in sufficient color to be apprehended, it will change everything whether you acknowledge it or not!" Thinking of Freud's hysterical women as we must, struck by the force of Berg's argument, we can only nod. "I tell you, in the 20th century, just as in the historical Jewish condition, if something can happen, then it has already happened, will happen, over and over again, consider the third act of that wretched opera," Berg says and laughs and laughs and begins to dissolve in front of us. Curiously insubstantial, unlike the earthy and corporeal Freud, unlike the elfin and jolly Chagall, the sullen and distracted Berg begins to disassemble before our eyes leaving us soon enough, perhaps even sooner than that, with nothing to look upon but the manuscript score of Lulu and somewhere beyond that in the smoky, lowering haze, an image of Chagall's cows, now dancing with one another above orange rooftops which leak softer steam into the grey and desperate smoke which seems to close in upon us, if only momentarily.
7. So, standing outside the Metropolitan Opera House, using the central fountain as backdrop while tourists industriously take our picture (they attended to the rumors that all of us, Berg, Freud, Chagall, and the committee to honor them would be at the performance of Lulu tonight and would assemble at the plaza for a quick photo opportunity before dispersing to our separate parts of the opera house), we feel for the first time in this long and difficult odyssey through all the 48 agonizing years since Freud left us that we may have attained a little perspective. "Replacement, it is always a matter of replacement, that is right, isn't it?" we say. Freud lifts his cigar in a pleasant wave. "We can hope to replace the sinister with the less sinister, the benign with the cheerful, that is all, right?" "Exactly," Chagall says, leaping to a perch beside the fountain, putting his hand on his heart. "Exactly, precisely that is right." Berg shrugs; he was always a moody sort and the true sense of the assemblage has, once again, left him. Nonetheless he does not protest. "Time, time, a river without banks," Chagall says merrily and flipflops into the fountain, a porpoise he emerges from the fountain whiskers agleam, flippers poised at great flight and departs from us, moving at great height, increasing velocity toward the top of the Metropolitan Opera. Freud extends a hand; we reach forward to grasp it. Some kind of accommodation seems at the offing. Freud points to Chagall, twinkling above us in the sky. "We have converted human misery into ordinary unhappiness," he says. And so, in this millennial century, will all of you.
I: Not I
This is the second opening for this essay. The first, a discarded draft which now reposes on grey carpeting somewhere to the near left, went like this:
"First person, the protagonist (or involved principal) as narrator, should be the ideal form for science fiction—since it would impart an effect of naturalness and immediacy to the alien landscape, inner and outer, which is the premise of the form—but oddly it is not, although exceptional stories written in the first person, many of which are in this book, grace the category, the main thrust of science fiction through its fifty-four years as a discrete subgenre of American literature has been carried in the more conventional third person which—"
Which what? This might play in the provinces but it will not play in this book. For the fact is that the discarded opening is a false premise; a great deal of important work, perhaps even a disproportionate amount, has been done in American science fiction in the first person. Isaac Asimov notes in his introduction that he has almost never worked in the form; "The Red Queen's Race" (his best story of the forties, for my money, just as The Dead Past—a novella—was his best of the fifties) is his only published exhibit in the form, but Isaac is the exception and an inordinate number of examples-in-proof abound of which I would cite only a few and in somewhat random order: Robert Heinlein's last three novels have been first-person, Theodore Sturgeon's Baby Is Three (the brilliant novella centering More Than Human) is first-person, Tom Sherred's "E for Effort," surely the finest story to appear in 1947, was first-person. So is Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside (1972) and Shadrach in the Furnace, my own Beyond Apollo (1972), Arthur C. Clarke's Hugo Award-winning "The Star," Lester del Rey's "Helen O'Loy," Mark Clifton's "What Have I done?" Thomas M. Disch's novel Camp Concentration (1967), Samuel R. Delany's famous short story "Aye and Gomorrah" . . .
It is an imposing list. Proportionate to the body of first-rate work in the genre, science fiction has probably employed the first person more successfully than the American literary novel or any branch of American commercial fiction. With all due respect to Isaac Asimov—who is one of the five living writers who center this form—he is the exception; his reluctance to use or struggle with the first-person format is atypical, and this afterword cannot deplore underutilization but only celebrate plenitude . . . and venture, cautiously, into personal terrain.
I have written a great deal in the first person. The bibliographers are welcome to take a look at this, I cannot, but at a fast estimate close to fifty percent of my twenty-five science fiction novels and approximately two hundred short stories have been written in that fashion. First person has always come easily to me; my first published science fiction story ("We're Coming Through the Windows," 1967) used it (in epistolary format) and Beyond Apollo, my best-known if not best novel, is written in alternate first- and third-person by its schizoid protagonist. Tactics of Conquest (the novel which was inflated madly from the short story "Closed Sicilian") and The Men Inside are first-person; so is Revelations and my own favorite novel, Underlay. I like the form; as a failed playwright (Schubert Foundation Fellow, Syracuse University 1964/5, you could look it up) I enjoy the way it can burrow into a protagonist, get inside him, adapt his voice, work against authorial weaknesses or pomposity.
First person has another valuable function, at least, to a writer like myself, and I am about, for any would-be novelists in the gallery, to reveal for the first time ever a Trade Secret: first person enables a writer to disguise gaps in research, knowledge, experience or apprehension because he can build his own limitations into the voice of the character and make them an essential part of that persona. Never knowing a hell of a lot about hard technology, the actual appearance of the surface of Mercury, or the intricacies of the three-stage rocket, I used over and over again characters who were either similarly unfamiliar with the material or who once having been familiar were losing control, going over the edge, and their ignorance thus became—witness Beyond Apollo—a metaphor for their psychic breakdown and that of their culture. First person is a technique surely created for old maneuverers like your faithful undersigned: applied skillfully, it can convert weaknesses to strengths. Don't blame me, folks, the captain was the one going insane. I may know a hydraulic valve from a hole in the ground but the captain has gone over the edge; he can barely segregate the hawks from the handsaws. All a narrative device: take it up with the captain. (I feel safe in disclosing my trade secret now; it is many years since my period of peak efficiency, in the first place, and in the second, too many people have Caught On. I think my own major contribution to science fiction may have been to teach a flock of new writers that you can write science fiction not only without technological knowledge, but without even deference to it . . . one can wallow in one's own ignorance. Several critics have raised this point about my own work, and they may even be right. Still, it is better to wallow in ignorance than to shadow-box with knowledge, as the bishop said to the widow.)
First person—to continue this technical discussion a little—has certain built-in traps, to be sure. The voice can become too idiosyncratic; circling in upon itself, it can lose account of extrinsic circumstance or relationships (Ring Lardner, a magnificent writer, was not magnificent all of the time, and many of his first-person stories show this weakness). Characterization, particularly of the narrator, cannot be trusted because of the idiosyncratic voice; physical description of the narrator—barring the Mirror Device and similar scams—is impossible. And the fact that the narrator is himself alive to tell the tale makes the use of the first person almost impossible in a suspense format where the very life of the narrator is suggested to hang in balance. Furthermore, unless one is using a diary format (such as in Camp Concentration or the famous Daniel Keyes Flowers for Algernon), which is a tricky technique for all but the most sophisticated of us, true characteriological change is impossible to depict in the first person; the narrator is fully developed at the outset of the story as the result of the events of the story; he cannot be perceived to be changing during the narrative span itself, and since change is one of the key aspects of fiction the first-person writer is stripping himself of advantage at the outset.
(It is this absence of change which so many reviewers through the years have pointed out is the one flaw in the Pohl/Kornbluth Space Merchants—the narrator has presumably matured as the result of the events of the story, yet the callow fool who narrates the opening half must have that voice or there is no credible conflict-and-development.)
Still. There are two more masterpieces or near-masterpieces for the roster: The Space Merchants and Flowers for Algernon. No, science fiction has had no paucity of important material in the form. And as technology becomes more confusing, misunderstandings more complex, the failure of resolution more characteristic of the last years of this century, the first person is likely to remain a central facet of the genre, if not to literally overtake third person for those works written at the diving, at the cutting edge.
I hope to play some small part in those works and years which lie ahead, and I point out to readers faithful and unfaithful alike my sullen and stolid consistence and discipline: this afterword is itself in the first-person. Even though, more and more, ah doctor!, my own life seems to be lived in the third.
On Decadence
Self-plagiarism or appropriation not yet being listed as a crime on the ballots of any of the fifty states, a passage from a story introduction in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg (Pocket Books, 1976):
(I am not happy with this book. It was issued with this dangerous title far too early in a career and rather than serving as a summary or a selection amounts to a compilation of the most recent, uncollected work. Some of it is all right and some of it is not but the title is presumptuous and most of the introductory matter is so callow, self-satisfied or pejorative in a loathsome and essentially unfinished manner that years and years ago I decided that if there was any real value in this work, others would have to seek it; I would have to find other markers on the tendentious little journey to oblivion. This particular story introduction however is less callow than some and serves a point)
. . . Granted that S-F and S-F writing sit upon paranoid, megalomaniacal, solipsistic visions: do these visions have literal truth or are they merely neurotic and in extreme cases psychotic? Can they be taken seriously as serious probings of possible futures . . . or adolescents at heart? Well, are they? The . . . critical spike upon which category science fiction has been impaled by literary critics (those who deign to observe us at all) has been precisely this, that we are writing grandiose versions of the fantasies of disturbed juveniles and thereafter are not subject to the serious questions of form and content with which realistic/surrealistic modern . . . literature can be probed.
It can and has been pointed out in reply that the question of audience motivations or psychic symbols must be less important than the question of veracity . . . that is, these plots bear the seeds of some potential and literal truth . . . but still left is that matter of literacy and technique and most science fiction falls so far from accepted standards here that the temptation to just call the whole thing neuroses is, perhaps, overwhelming. Have hardly resisted it myself.
This is the issue, the duality upon which Engines of the Night (1982) was impaled and it is of course the central conflict which energizes almost all of the fiction as well; Engines of the Night represents in retrospect an increasingly desperate and unsuccessful attempt to find some fusion of these points of view. Yes, the rocket ships have a marvelously phallic and copulative appearance but this is the optimum path for space flight and we landed on the Moon. Yes, fantasies of alien invasion and torment are common psychotic or hallucinatory symptoms . . . but there are, almost by definition, aliens and the question of contact is one which must be confronted with some rigor because without a working model, a paradigm of such contact, we are as upon Vespucci's shores, awaiting the hammer of the far civilizations. Yes, dreams in three dimensions are hallucinatory or a kind of wish fulfillment but then there is the matter of the holograph. Much of this material can be objectified and all of it deals with what is perhaps the fundamental issue of the century in which technology has overtaken, how that technology, guided or unguided, directly or as unsought intention, will reshape the circumstances within which it operates, the way that we regard technology. This is serious material and it is not to be dismissed; it was dismissed by the central stream of American philosophy and political concerns for most of the decades of this century and part of the situation we face, a most explosive and dangerous situation, has come about because of that very diversion of concern. It is a central schism, a division which has always existed at the center of science fiction itself. Are we trying to objectify and mitigate a future or are we trying to sell copies of books and magazines and keep our audience—over half of which is chronologically under 18—happy and entertained? Are we trying to deal with the real consequences and patterning of technology or are we brainstorming, working out cryptograms, chess problems and table-top universe for the converted or those we are trying to convert? When we come at last quivering to the Queen of the Night on far Centaurus, address the new and stricken yearnings of our spacebound and transmogrified selves, are we really going to do it or are we considering the magazine codes and current needs of Berkley Books? These are questions which wracked the writers, the editors, the readers too; those who were cynical enough to regard the issue of patterning simply as a device of salability were perhaps better shielded, pace Garrett, pace Winston K. Marks, from the dilemma than other but none of us, even in Rocket Stories or Bouregy Books were untouched by those questions, all of us in one way or the other remained irresolute. It was a field emerging from mass market pulp entertainment which from the outset was caught by issues of the gravest kind, issues which intersected the arc of the century. Such might have been true of the mystery as well—all of those traps and puzzles, all those bearded detectives with their little gray cells, all those punctured and bloated bodies, ah that other intersection of tragedy and cryptogram subsumed so often in cleverness!—but the mystery never had the missionary impulse at its core; one reads science fiction implicitly believing that going to Venus was a good thing or at least not necessarily a bad thing, that going to Venus was a task worthiest of the highest application. That kind of ostensible valuation of murder, say, was never at the surface (and only rarely in the subtext) of the mystery.
So science fiction, that random kind of escapist tool, found itself pilloried on that arc of the century, harnessed willingly or unwillingly to a progression from the assembly line to the crematoria to the V-2 to the Apollo projects, to DNA and gene mapping, to the harvesting of cancer cells and the flyby Jupiter probes; this exercise of the cryptologist or the pulp fictioneer was tied, however unwillingly, to the remarkable and uncontrollable events and machinery which changed everything. At the time I wrote Engines of the Night I felt that it was essential that this duality, still insufficiently recognized, be examined and driven toward some kind of resolved state however equivocal, only in that way would the genre achieve its destiny. (What that "destiny" was I was not quite sure, higher rates for certain, perhaps better housing quarters, even a kind word from the Hudson Review. I was very much occupied with destiny as I turned 40; it seemed the proper place to be, the reasonable task of a forward-looking not-so-young fellow on the tremulous eve of his deterioration. Now I am far less concerned with destiny, finding it only another version of the "You've got to make some important decisions about your life" which was parental edict in my time and probably is today. "Make something of your life" becomes of course merely another value-free receptacle for a cycle of alternatives, surely Nixon and Kissinger and J.R. Haldeman made something of their lives, certainly Goering's or Himmler's relatives must have been proud. Destiny like goal-directed behavior may be far more trouble than whatever it is worth.)
