That however does not seem to have happened in the interim; in the decade since Engines of the Night was published the irresolution has if anything only been exacerbated by the onrushing and increasingly complex technology balanced off by a mass market driven by seemingly inevitable late-capitalistic forces toward an ever-expanding and therefore simplistic audience and market base. Modern commercial fantasy can be interpreted as one response to the irresolution; the manner in which elves, dragons, thieves worlds and the underlords have overtaken and pushed science fiction (and in some interesting cases have been joined to it) can be considered a way of dealing with the problem simply by eluding the matter. The so-called cyberpunk movement (do not like this term; grates me almost as much as "sci-fi") is another form of response; those drugged-out, wired-up hipsters and messengers of the near-future are surrogates for a part of a generation which would find it easier to become machines than to truly apprehend them; the grunged-out world of Gibson and his imitators may be a fair approximation of times to shortly come (or times extant as lived by a crucial part of the college-age population) but they are also clear responses of those who find themselves powerless to the concept of living in a powerful and cruelly remote state . . . one can assume the wires of technology and become the state, each of us a nation in close conjunction to the boards and wires of transcendence. So the cyberpunk stories (which are already beginning to look thinly dated as the attention of the audience slips) simultaneously refract and direct response to the old Marxian alienation effect: deprived of any real connection to the consequences of our action, deprived in fact of any awareness of those consequences, we can elect in Neuromancer or Mona Lisa Overdrive to become those consequences, to utterly short-circuit the loop. Divination becomes prophecy becomes enactment becomes aftershock, all without any real necessity for crossing the boundaries, all within the closed and rocketing loop of feedback technology. If the cyberpunk movement had no other effect (and it did, consequences upon televisions, film and MTV are already notable) it made narcissism a true and functional value and managed to link that narcissism to the continuing skein of the field, find antecedents in the bulkier computer and cyborg devices of the '40s and '50s (Kuttner's terrifying Ghost in 1945 prefigures some of this) and drag the work toward a context which was found identifiable by a lot of people who were not otherwise writing science fiction. That is one form of irresolution masquerading as resolve; another would be the explosion of alternate histories, alternate worlds, alternate historical placements (Pergolesi in the 20th century, Arturo Toscanini managing the 1927 Yankees, an immoral, drowning Robert Kennedy comes to terms with Proxima Centauri) within the last half decade. The alternate history, parallel circumstance has been a stream of science fiction for a long time—Bring the Jubilee, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court for heaven's sake, The Man in the High Castle, Of Time and Third Avenue, Sidewise in Time, The Other Celia and so on and on—but in the 1980s this subgenre of a subgenre multiplied wildly, the wild alternate histories of Howard Waldrop (Eisenhower as a rock performer, Elvis as a politician) became the most paradigmatic example of a form which has leached through all of the longer and shorter forms and has become the basis of a number of anthologies. From what does this "famous person story" (Ellen Datlow's term) proceed? Possibly from the modern perception of the utterly arbitrary and mechanistic nature of destiny and circumstances, possibly from late-century, post-technological futility, a sense that the scholars in their solemn pursuit of sequentiality and consequence have always misled us, possibly from an untethering from our own history. But even as the famous person story was perhaps spurred by existential angst, an utter sense of disconnection, so it serves more objective and hortatory purposes . . . for if history can be arranged and reconstructed, if time and the river can be so juggled, reversed or manipulated, what of serious refraction of modern physics, of the Heisenberg Principal, of the theories of plasma physics? The famous person story not only refracts but makes manipulable the most rarefied concepts at the far edge of science. All inadvertently, perhaps, but most of the right and wrong guesses alike in the 1940s Astounding were similarly inadvertent.
Certainly, that irresolution is at the heart of science fiction. (So the title essay in Engines of the Night at last reluctantly concluded.) But must it lurk ungainly and constant at the heart of the writer, must it knife and probe the far edges toward the dawn: is there, as Ruthven muttered looking at his foreign editions at 4 a.m., wheeling his dusty car towards the state border, no peace? Is this it forever, this constancy, this inconstancy? Oh the murmurous jungle of the heart; the unknown tangle of motive, the lunge and clot of ancient blood.
Cliftonized
Here is Mark Clifton in 1952, writing passionate letters to Judith Merril in which science fiction—he perceives—is the necessary vehicle for transcendence, a means of selling humanism to the vast and shapeless masses so that they will reach a kind of spiritual holy place. Certainly, humanity is a fairly pathetic specimen but this new literature—a literature so new that it has neither lexicon nor critical formulation—will change in a generation or two the fundamental nature of society and its consequences.
And here is Mark Clifton in 1957, the Hugo has come and gone and so has his patience and most remnants of his health; he is writing Judith Merril once again and this time it is about the fen, that is what he calls them, "the fen . . . those disgusting, gullible creatures who ran after this person at the LASFS meeting as if he were some kind of god . . . oh, Judith, I thought that so much could be asked of them and it turns out that all they want are follies and amusements," Here is Jim Baen on Freund's Pacifica radio program, Hour of the Wolf, in the early morning hours in March, 1975, the new editor of Galaxy, Worlds of If having been dropped by the publishers right down the old abyss, is saying, "Actually, I'd rather not gossip about science fiction, I'd talk instead about the things science fiction is about—the important, scientific stuff, you know." And here is Baen not an hour later, "But I don't know if I should say any more about the killing of Worlds of If. My wicked masters may be listening. Meet me at Lunacon and I'll tell you more about it then." Why then, I wondered, then and now, looking through the Clifton correspondence with Martin Greenberg so many years ago or listening to Hour of the Wolf years before that . . . why do people involved in science fiction start out, most of them, thinking about time travel and cosmology, black holes and the cosmic sink, the anarchy of the dinosaurs or the origin of the asteroid belt . . . and soon enough begin to fixate upon affairs, editors, word rates, old betrayals, convention scandals, editorial relations, the history of Big Name Fans, the outlines of Courtney's Boat and the Wollheim-Futurian split in the late 1930s? People may—at least some of them the serious people like you and me—start with the content of the literature itself, its convexity and resource but ultimately it is not science fiction with which the writers editors, fans, or even the readers grapple. It is the sociology, the network, the community or the appurtenances of science fiction. We dreamed of Black Holes, the romanticist might say, and you gave us Gilda, the Whore of Mensa. We strove for an explanation of the Big Bang and we found the Big Bang, all right, and several little ones at the legendary World Con of 195-. And so on and on, toss the professionals into a SFWA meeting and they will talk about word rates and the abomination of publishers, toss the professionals and fans into a single room and they will discuss—and sometimes commit—plunder.
Truly, the last place one would seek the true matter and content of science fiction would be a SFWA meeting or a convention. Pete Hamill had an essay in the New York Post in 1974, he had shown up at something called Empiri con for a few hours in October and went away talking about all those fine young and old people "who still paused outside the hotel to look up at the stars." Dean Koontz and I giggled about that. "Look up at the stars," Dean said, "they're looking up to see if fans are flashing from the fifteenth floor."
Why is this? Like most of the nonfiction which is linear (fiction is a different thing, it is impacted and tends to emerge sub-articulately and all at once if at all), this essay wrote itself out partway as I strolled and romped the encroaching streets of the pleasingly and increasingly naked city in early heat in June: one could make parallels of a kind between science fiction and Judaism. Temple membership, the Temple Brotherhood, that kind of thing. You join Secret Synagogue in Suburbland in the early seventies or at least I did in the wistful and vagrant hope that one might be able to come to terms with Jonah, Zephaniah, Talmud, Midrash, the legends of the 36 Just or the significance of secularization in an age when the diaspora (which had been the heart of Judaism since the destruction of the Second Temple) was becoming disreputable in the light of Zionism and the Israeli laws of return. One showed up at Secret Synagogue eager or at least willing to grapple with issues of this nature and was right away taken up by the scandal of the religious school run by an incompetent, the scandal of the vituperative and homosexual-hating Rabbi, the taunting Rabbi who talked mockingly of assimilationist Jews from the podium while at the same time maneuvering his salary and expense account demands through the board. One became bemused by the quarrels amongst the laity of the Brotherhood, the succession of incompetent cantors, the various miseries associated with the building fund or the power struggles amongst the Presidency. Eventually one succumbed to the realization that all else was illusion, the fires of the temple breathed the pure screed. As T.S. Eliot put it, "The spirit killeth, but the letter giveth life." This temple would be the last place a thinking or an unthinking Jew would want to approach in the era of the harassed and broken diaspora.
That was the essay as it unreeled and hence the conclusions: science fiction and Judaism. One might have, at least some of us, at one time been occupied with the pure writ, ultimately however it came to costume parties, the world masquerade and the depredations of publishers. Why this confluence? Could it be that neither science fiction nor Judaism had ever achieved a satisfactory definition? Could it be then that in the consequences of a lack of definition, the worldly would eventually flood in to occupy what the spirit could not? Is Judaism a sect, a religion, a cultural group, a way of life, a series of assumptions? Is "Jew" to be defined as that which an anti-Semite would hate? Can the son of one Jewish parent be a Jew? Must the decision turn upon the sex of the parent? Similarly, then, what is science fiction? (No one really knows; no one can agree. Fair enough to say that if it's published in a science fiction magazine it is science fiction unless it's fantasy of course but if it isn't it might be science fiction as well. Absence of proof is not proof of absence as the wise Charles Platt has pointed out.) If we cannot achieve, sixty-six years after Gernsback exercised his first option, any satisfactory definition of the material, then how can we stave the invasion of the fan contingent, the incursion of the costumed and the adulterous?
Like the ten lost tribes of Israel (who are variously claimed as American Indians, Indians, blacks, Muslims, Chinese, or Jews), the lost tribes of science fiction will wander on the desert, complaining about the sandstorms and the insulting digestion of camels, unable in their lack of clear origin, destination or affinity, to be occupied by their history. Or so the column unreeled along with various strands of less metaphysical woe and contemplation on the streets of the city which never sleeps, but to no clear conclusion. What then? Define Judaism so that we can restore the demolished temple? Find a consensus Jewry so that a true brotherhood may reign? Nail down some working definition of science fiction in the purposes of sercon fandom? Anywhere one turned, the collapse to banality. One can—I think that this is a summary statement—read this stuff or one can live it and sometimes one can do both but it is too much to ask for any kind of fusion. Thinking of science, we found the fiction. Becoming, as always, what we beheld.
My friend X, mentor and advisor of many years' standing and responsible for almost everything I have learned since I finished Engines of the Night almost a dozen years ago now (which is to say that thanks to the influence of X and almost never before, I have become practical and sensible) has suggested that it is time, perhaps, that I become more specific. "I mean, all this stuff you're writing about sounds very interesting, but you should get down to cases, make some definite judgments. It's time for that, don't you think?"
Well, I don't know if I really think at all, but the point is perhaps well taken and so, here are some specifics. (I had thought that the essays on Tiptree and Asimov were targeted enough but it takes no great wisdom to point out that writing about the dead not only has produced the greatest music in the Western repertoire, but it is also excitingly safe.) If publisher, magazine, and this writer last a while, I propose that there will be more:
1) Patricia Cadigan's "Dispatches from the Revolution," a novelette published in Asimov's Magazine in 1991 and in the Mike Resnick edited Alternate Presidents in January, 1992, is probably the best story to have appeared within the confines of our field in many, many years: Cadigan's visibility, praise and recognition are significantly associated with her perceived alliance to Gibson, Sterling, et. al. but I know the secret which perhaps even she does not; she is a realist and humanist who knows more than a few tricks, that is all, and as her work moves from implants and codifying devices toward simpler and more jangling terrors it will continue to evolve. "Dispatches from the Revolution" is probably the best story about the metaphysics of the 1960s in this country to date.
2) Karen Joy Fowler is an extraordinary writer, better in the short story than the novel (although Sarah Canary, an historical novel has, as they say, lots of promise and a genuine comic vision) who is so far ahead of most of the rest of us that she is still awaiting a consensus and a critical lexicon which will be able to come to terms with her work. Just as Beethoven's last quartets were literally indescribable at the time they were first performed (mid-1820s), just as Moby Dick sank in the same manner as most of Ahab's crew when first published, so Fowler's short stories, although praised and anthologized, have not been fully encountered because they are at such a distance from evolved criticism. I would envision her work prevailing but hope that this is not Emily Dickinson's way of prevailing which I discuss.
3) This period in science fiction is reminiscent of the 1950s in one significant way: we have any number of crack short story writers, really brilliant, first-rate short story and novelette writers who either cannot do novels at all or can barely approach even their weaker short work in novel form. The strange inability of almost all the acknowledged first-rank science fiction writers of four decades ago to bring their novels anywhere to the standard of their best short stories is well known and generally accepted; the only exceptions were Alfred Bester, Phil Dick, and (perhaps) Pohl & Kornbluth collaboratively (but never individually). The gap between the novels and short stories of many of these writers was appalling and many of them (William Tenn notably, his first novel appeared in 1968, years and years after he had otherwise stopped writing and was virtually the last work he published) did not attempt or at least sell novels at all. The gap is not as great nor the situation as dramatic as it was then, but the overall shape of circumstances is the same.
It wasn't true of the sixties and seventies, in the early eighties many writers such as Gibson were making their reputation as novelists and doing short stories only incidentally. It seems to be true now and the reasons for this could be explored at length but I don't think that such discussion would be valid. It's a historical anomaly, a chance-game, a quirk of the times, that's all, and there will soon enough be strong novelists and indifferent short story writers again. And many of the present short story writers may grasp at length the exigencies of the novel. But it has left us for the moment in a rather perilous condition: fantasy continues to skew the field and one of the reasons is that there has been little strong science fiction to contravene.
4) In the least graceful years of recent history 1983 and 1984, say, I would go around mumbling that the whole cyberpunk thing was a scam; old fellas like me knew the real truth, the kids were just recycling old stuff for fun and profit for an ignorant young audience. Actually, Walter Miller, Jr., in "Izzard and the Membrane" (ASF, 5/51) with its people converted into impulses in the computer and running around inside that machine, their impulses and passions turned into binary twitches, were the computer cowboys of Gibson's holograph. Nothing, nothing new. Everything old was new again. First fandom forever. But I no longer believe this and raise this only as a pennant of fallibility; my judgments should be questioned and never are so passionately as by your woe-bedraggled but ever hopeful correspondent.
Over the Waves
I read the collected proceedings of the Institute for Twenty-First Century Studies (Advent; 12/92) and fell into a thin and riotous doze; in that unhappy slumber I dreamed that it was the 1950s again and here I was boxed within them, not the rather feckless youth I had been but a science fiction writer, contemporary of Knight and Blish and Sheckley and Gold, high and low priests of the Reconstruction, going to the parties in Stuyvesant Town, writing letters to my peers, very few of whom answered, working away on resculpting the face of the form so that it would lead us all through this post-technological, repressed, form-is-the-opposite-of-function era we called the present time toward some glittering and transcendent millennium. Crusaders we were in the fifties, we science fiction writers, and even though the pay was difficult and the outcome random we felt ourselves to be in the service of some larger if not final purpose. Oh, how we grumbled under the strictures of editorial fiat, ah how we resented the unbelieving and retrograde litterateurs who regarded us as a sub-species! But we were comforted by our design, by the surface of our work, by the assurance of our purposes, by the whispers of Judith Merril who reminded us that the world, all of the world was science fiction and would come to our tangled and sullen land with gifts and praise, by the songs and dances of Anthony Boucher and his film and theater reviewer, Arthur Jean Cox, who knew that all of it, not just the pieces of earth which Merril regarded, was science fiction. Lil Abner was a study of genetics, the Army McCarthy hearings were a Fred Pohl/Cyril Kornbluth serial on the Galloots and the Gradarians struggling in Bubble Land for advanced credits or a new monetary system. All was pale and yet fierce in this reconstructed era and somewhere on its borders, neither quite a science fiction writer (I had too much trouble with the obdurate and ideology-driven editors to sell the good magazines, too much contempt for Palmer or even Larry Shaw to be able to sell the lesser magazines, too little patience to rewrite for Gold and Campbell, too much arrogance to believe that my real place was with Raymond Scott; I was barely able to manage three or four sales a year and my was I bitter!) nor quite a distant observer (I took all of this personally and felt great implication in the struggles to raise standard, much envy for the parties in Stuyvesant Town to which I was never invited, much fear of my colleagues in the English department who if they found out my true ambitions and sullen exercises would make sure that I never received tenure) I hung around like a freelance photographer, like some Weejee of the spirit, taking little pictures and impressionistic recursions from what I could glimpse of the tumult. Which sometimes looked to me like a Breughel landscape and at others something like Prokofiev's Field of the Dead to which the soprano in Alexander Nevsky comes without hilarity.
I dreamed that it was the fifties and that, characteristically, I was neither there nor not-there but stuck in this or that frieze of ambivalent posture watching all of it unravel before me, heading toward the great newsstand crackup of 1958 and the disastrous collapse of markets which by 1959 had put not only the writers but the genre itself out of business; I dreamed that I was there when Cogswell cranked up the English department mimeo at Ball State University and sent out the first of his broadsheets, asking for commentary and enough of a monetary contribution to keep the mimeograph in ink and stencils for another issue. "The only reason you're starting all of this now," I said to Cogswell who at that time was a fetching 41, not wearing the Brigadier's uniform which he affected at conventions but an assistant professor's tweed with white buck shoes, "is that the American News Company pulled the plug and you don't think that you have any markets left so you've decided to become a commentator and make historians of the others. If you felt the thing wasn't dead you wouldn't get near this. The trouble is," I added, with a winning smile, "the only factor which seems to energize genre writers is the imminence of their genre's death, then they turn into philosophers, decide that they have nothing to lose any more and, letting out all of their resentment in small puffs and intimations of defeat which can fill the hotel rooms or the barrooms with the gaseous sounds of their disgust, alcohol, and imminence, make philosophers of us all, or haven't you noticed?" and this little onslaught of temper or introspection did not, I dreamed, so much infuriate Cogswell as it bemused him, caused his gaze to turn inward as faster and faster he cranked the mimeograph for the initial issue of PITFCS which in continuous run would last only a few years but which seemed to have that unusual capacity—latecomer to the demise of the genre, I had a standard of comparison a decade or two later—shared with Richard Geis's Science Fiction Review or Psychotic to bring out absolutely the worst in all of its correspondents; grand masters and eminences, voyeurs and critics alike would turn into babble fools in Geis's merciless exposure and so PITFCS, lurching through the chronology and the three thousand word letters of people far less bemused and even angrier than Cogswell, turned science fiction writers to and beyond themselves in ways which would have been provocative if they had not, at the center, been so calculated and so immersed now in the self-loathing which (one could come to understand) could masquerade as loathing.
But that dialogue with Cogswell was not to continue; he was too busy with his mimeograph and with his conception of a science fiction which would be best summed by the word more: more drink, more conventions, more women (who were increasingly manifest in that tender generation), more humiliation, more magazines, more rocketships, more temerity, more inflamed discussion and the self-loathing disguised as loathing and I was busy as well in this dream with what seemed quite suddenly to be an agenda: I wanted to talk to every science fiction writer of some prominence. Kuttner and Kornbluth were unavailable to me; they had died in 1958, synchronous with the newsstand disasters and a year before PITFCS, and it is doubtful that they would have wanted to get into discussion with someone as simultaneously frivolous and angry as myself; Budrys was in a sulk—it was too late, he wanted me to know, to take any kind of interest; the time to talk with him was during the period in which he had been forming his conception of a politicized science fiction which would hide diatribe within the corpus of his alienated protagonists. Marion Zimmer Bradley did not want to speak with me; she felt that my interest was both morbid and feigned, an odd concatenation of qualities; and Zenna Henderson and Mildred Clingerman were in various kinds of career crisis and could not be reached. My plan, having been dismissed by Cogswell, was to go into the world and for spite engage all of his contributors (and some who would not deal with him) in dialogue even more penetrating or self-revealing than what they had put into his magazine but this inclusivity proved early enough to be impossible; as all who engage in wanderjahr or sexual activities must learn early or late I had to make the particular do the work of the general, had to narrow the focus so that by implication I could find an enlarged focus and so, like my sullen Ruthven in a story which I was not to write for more than twenty years (and in fact in this new dream I was not a writer at all but a kind of conduit, a camera as the late John van Druten had pointed out, an uninflected observer of circumstance and persons on whom in some overarching way I had no opinion at all) I found myself in some kind of reconverted industrial area in Redondo Beach, California, discursing science fiction and affairs of the heart with that heart attack victim, Mark Clifton, who had watched his reputation and audience implode in the late fifties and who, only a few years from his death at fifty-seven, was neither glad to see me nor cheered by the landscape of Redondo Beach which he found a poor memorial to the worst instincts of the modern, classless man, seeking some kind of identity or appurtenance in a world without history. Because I thought it was a medium for social change, Mark Clifton said, because I thought perhaps it was the only medium for social change that the politicians or the bureaucrats hadn't seized or polluted, that it was possible to sneak through the kind of attitude or ideology that might actually change people, that is if you hid it inside a plot or some kind of humor.
What did I know? Mark Clifton said after the tiniest of pauses, his postcardiac's eyes flicking through time and space with that clear perception of certain cohesive forces which at any moment could vault him straight out of his skin and into something which only in his less tense moments could he think of as "eternity," I was forty-six years old, I had read a little of it, spent most of my time in industrial psychology trying to make new men out of old men who could not bear to understand their situation, who, if they had truly understood what the corporation had done to them would have lit the fires. It was my job to keep them suppressed, to fight that epiphany, to lead them to some kind of personal adjustments rather than realizing that the system itself was what had driven them into snarling corners of themselves; of course that was a rotten thing to do, why do you think I got a heart attack so young, and I thought that writing science fiction would be a good way to redress the balance as we said in our corporate reports, set people straight, set them to concentrate upon the system's corruption rather than their own inadequacies. Well, it seemed like a reasonable idea.
It all seemed like a reasonable idea, Mark Clifton said. I had not said anything at all during this monologue, latter knowledge having deserted me (or perhaps had not come to visit), the microphone extended, the spools of the old tape recorders quite a modern thing in the early sixties turning slowly and Mark Clifton looking out at the California sunset, his eyes glimmering now with hurt or it might have only been refracted sun, but how was I to know what it was really like? I had only seen it from the outside you know, reading those magazines, then I was publishing these stories and I still didn't know but when I won that Hugo, when I started going to conventions beginning with Cleveland in 1955 when I met Judith for all the good it does us, when I really began to understand what it was like it was too late, I was far gone and my work such as it is had been folded into millions of magazines consigned like Lenin's enemies to the dustbin of history; it had all been put down some kind of rathole or to use the rhetoric of the time some kind of warp drive at two and three cents a word and what had I been given? first fandom, second fandom, secret masters of fandom, grand masters of fandom, word rates, editors, masquerades, costume balls, mimeographs, Francis T. Laney, Jr., Forrest J. Ackerman, John Campbell, Horace Gold, all of them the same, all of it part of a machinery meant to turn my purposes into next month's issue, last year's mimeograph and to the rest of them which meant all of the world except for science fiction itself it was just a bunch of dumb stuff for kids, something like comics but perhaps not quite as damaging according to Dr. Wertham. But it was pretty late to learn that and too late to do anything about it, Mark Clifton said and then became silent as the two of us watched the sun slowly ink its dazzle like a hectograph into the western sky, then plunge like an APA mailing into the extinction of the sea. In the dream I waited for Mark Clifton to say more, surely if I were to only attend, wait him out, he would emerge with some aphorism, some kind of summary of his life and his period which would approach in wisdom the statements in his letters that "Galaxy was a magazine edited by a man who fears and hates science" or "Boucher and his publication emit a stink of wine and decadence" but those insights, it seemed, had all been part of an earlier, a more patient or at least a less resigned Clifton. As was the case with so many of us, knowledge had become disillusion, was in fact synonymous with disillusion and disillusion had led to silence and so, after a while, I put away the equipment and left Clifton.
In the way that dreams often manifest, perception of chronology seemed to change; instead of moving slowly through the cluttered offices at Ball State University or the hideous, multicolored playroom in which Clifton had seemingly elected to spend his post-Astounding years I now moved with speed and force, the speed and force of a bullet or perhaps a group of science fiction writers early in the morning at a convention when in search of alcohol or some kind of closure; here I was addressing a meeting of First Fandom at the world convention in Pittsburgh in 1962. "You cannot go on this way," I said to them, "you cannot make it a private place for private affairs or reference; this will lead to decadence and lunacy and when Star Trek, when Star Wars come along in just a little while now they will take it all away from you"; here I am addressing the Cleveland world convention in 1966 in those few empty moments before the Hugo ceremonies, (Isaac Asimov will be anointed author of world's best series) before the premiere of Star Trek. "It's already happened to you," I am saying to a yawning, scattered audience as secret masters pull down the hotel walls and reveal a larger space, "Lord of the Rings was published last year and before any of you have come to understand what has happened, the imitators and the elves and dwarves are going to wipe you out, leaving you competing with one another to see who will be the last to leave the room"; here I am at a variety of meetings or academic conferences which occur over a period of years or perhaps it is months which I mean to say. In some of them I am pleading, in others ranting, in a few of them I am making indecent sexual proposals or confessions but in all of them I am brandishing the latest issue of PITFCS available to me, dragged up the line and sequestered for just this moment, "Here it is," I am shouting, "here it is, an attempt to define what is going on here and the game was already over, by the time you begin to notice what you are doing or want to shape it you've already stopped doing it" and at last I am dragged from that dream or the dream taken from me, it is 1994 or whatever the hell it is and PITFCS, sprouted or doubted into the SFWA has been gone for decades, Cogswell is dead, Bretnor is dead, Clifton is dead, Merril is in Canada, Marion Zimmer Bradley is a queen of darkness and light and I am still haplessly and helplessly, no less than Ruthven or my miserable lesser principals, trying to make some sense of it. There is no sense of it. I dream that I take this declaration in its luminescence and squalor to my wife and say, "Here, here, you make something of this" and in the sacristy and suddenness of the later quiet I see borne back from her all that was mine to give, then take, then lose, then know in the sheer and sudden darkness of the counting room.
"It means something but I'm not sure what," I dream she says. "Maybe you can't say what it means."
"You've defined science fiction," I say. Or dream I say. And awaken or dive into further light; the record on this—as so much else, ah doctor!—remains unclear.
Thus Our Words Unspoken
It was always a taboo-laden category, a genre with its little mines and traps laid from end to end, the field of science fiction a difficult and potentially disastrous campaign for point man and platoon. Under the circumstances, the achievements of the editors and writers were remarkable; there were the magazine codes with which to contend from the beginning, and then Fred Wertham's assault upon the comics (Wertham the professor-psychologist who testified frequently to Congress) which brought about the Comics Code. This had implications for all kinds of mass-market fiction perceived as appealing to a significantly juvenile audience. Beyond this were the editorial whims, conscious perversities and demands; John W. Campbell would not permit aliens to be smarter than humans or allow any questioning of capitalism or virginity into Astounding; Horace L. Gold took out all sexual references which he could find (sometimes, as in Asimov's 1951 "Hostess," the writers either outsmarted or dared him) and was fond of saying in rejection notices that "I run a family magazine here," even though the pictures of Vicki, the French model on the back cover of the early 1951 issues of Galaxy, had caused vast expressions of horror from mothers of science-fiction-reading boys everywhere.
Then there is the background of Daniel Keyes's "Flowers for Algernon" as recalled by Robert P. Mills. In 1958 Mills and Keyes occasionally took the same train from Grand Central to the northern suburbs, and when Mills was named editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction he asked Keyes if he would write a story. "Well, I have this story," Keyes said. "It's about this imbecile who becomes a volunteer for research into raising human intelligence and becomes a genius but then the experiment fails and he becomes an imbecile again. It's a parable of knowledge, you see."
Mills said, "That sounds interesting; let me take a look at it." So Keyes took the story out of a bottom desk drawer and gave it to Mills, and Mills said on the next shared train home, "I think you've really got something there, but I have a few suggestions."
Keyes broke into tears and seized Mills by the lapels. "Please," he said, "oh please, please don't tell me that I have to drop the part where Charlie becomes an imbecile again. Don't tell me that I have to have a happy ending and he stays a genius."
"Well, no," Mills said, "I wasn't thinking of that at all. I did think that maybe—"
"Because," Keyes said emotionally, still clutching Mills, "that's what Horace wanted. Horace said he would buy it for Galaxy only if Charlie didn't become stupid again, that he couldn't publish such a depressing story and I can't, I simply can't make myself do that—"
"Oh, no," Mills said hurriedly and went on to say that his suggestions had to do with a subplot in which maybe Charlie had a girl teacher and he and the teacher kind of fell in love after Charlie got smart. Keyes said that he certainly could understand that something like this would improve the story and in due course it was revised and published and the rest you know about.
But this is, to get back to the central and originating point here, a genre so laden with constraints, demands and prejudices of a historical nature that it is very difficult to believe that, in this present era or beyond, science fiction is not still laden and will not continue to be laden with traps, that insistent as editors are upon their liberation from those constraints, as careless as the writers might say they are of the need to slant or control their work, these problems and limitations remain to control limits and to incite within writers and editors alike that self-censor, which, it has been pointed out, is the most effective censor of all since it can cut off exposure not upon completion but upon inception; those flowers not blushing unseen in the desert air and winds and gravity of editorial response but simply not produced at all.
At a panel discussion at the undistinguished convention sponsored in 1989 by Columbia University's science fiction club, the issue was raised and Ellen Datlow of Omni said, "It's not like that any more; there are no taboos left."
Which, I said, was patently ridiculous. "Of course there are taboos," I said. "In fact, I can come up with ten story ideas in the next fifteen minutes that I know neither you nor any science fiction editor past or present will possibly consider on the basis of their content alone."
"Well," she said after a very long pause (not as long as Jack Benny's pause in that famous radio encounter with the thief in the back alley who said, "Your money or your life"*), "there are some taboos left."
Which there surely are. Here in 1992, in the free market, 66 years after the origin of genre science fiction, 47 years after the effective use of the atom bomb on people, one year short of the 40th anniversary of Playboy, and 19 years after the conclusion of our role in the festivities in Vietnam, are some story premises, conceptions or progressions which could not possibly be sold, regardless of the skill, the fame, the propinquity or the disingenuousness of the writer:
1) XENOPHOBIA. Fear and hatred of the alien being or terrain is an important survival trait; it has persisted in humanity throughout all of the millennia in the forms of prejudice, bigotry, nativism, jingoism, hatred of foreigners or persecution of the immigrant because ultimately it is a part of a species survival mechanism.
If the aliens come or if we meet them somewhere on the other side of the Centauris, they are likely to be malevolent, they will be at least as interested in oppressing us as in getting along; certainly in all the myriad possibilities of human-alien encounter there will be alien details whose plans are sheerly destructive. Under those circumstances, obviously, xenophobia will be a mechanism of survival and protection, and to breed xenophobia out of humanity by genetic manipulation or (more likely) through acculturation may be a form of species suicide. One can envision a time not too far from now or perhaps very far from now in which xenophobia and all of its manifestations will have become so repellent and shameful as to have virtually disappeared; then with alien contact either inaugurated or imminent, it may occur—perhaps before a disaster, perhaps only after—that xenophobia has gotten a bad press for all of the generations and that any hope for species survival and proper engagement outside our own planet may depend upon inculcating within the present and future generations of travelers (or those on Earth if the alien contact occurs here) all of those traits which the "progressive" elements have shown us are hateful, inhumane, anti-life or utterly destructive. Schools of bigotry? Practice lynchings of simulated aliens? Search for aliens or alien traits which may be particularly dangerous, a modus operandi for identifying difference and the propitiation of malice?
